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There’s a time-honored tradition of sitcom stars (Mystery Team features Community’s Donald Glover, Parks and Recreation’s Aubrey Plaza, and 30 Rock’s John Lutz and Kevin Brown) making feature films to emphasize the stuff they can’t do on TV. Mystery Team delivers on that score: it’s not for anyone too squeamish about assorted bodily functions, or anyone offended by salty language. There’s also a tradition of padded-out recapitulation of the gags they’re best known for and general lameness. Mystery Team almost completely* avoids this trap, thanks to its unusually large but generally sharp and off-kilter writing team, which includes leads Glover, D.C. Pierson, and Dominic Dierkes, as well as director Dan Eckman and producer Meggie McFadden. (Large chunks of the crew also worked on the 2006 short “Checkout,” which I now want to see, and studying the credits gives the impression that this is more a case of a few names helping friends to get their film made than sitcommers trying to transition to box office stardom).

Mystery Team strikes me as the inverse of Rian Johnson’s terrific Brick. Brick applied noir detective tropes, plot elements and mood to a story set in a high school; Mystery Team applies “Hardy Boys” or even Scooby Doo-styled high school elements to an adult detective story. In both films the two modes collide with startling results. Mystery Team plunges its hapless naifs into an encounter with the town off-the-rails drug dealer and a strip club of positively Lynchian nightmarishness, but what elevates it to near genius is that the adult plot operates almost completely under the narrative logic of the juvenile mystery. It also doesn’t hurt that the three leads demonstrate good comic timing and a believable chemistry. Glover is better than the hit-and-miss Community might lead you to expect; Pierson and Dierkes are even stronger.

* There’s an introductory segment before the title sequence that felt dreadfully forced — lots of beats on that were clearly supposed to be laughs, but fell flat for me. It’s possible that it took me a few minutes to calibrate my expectations to the film’s internal logic, but I think the intro was just bad.

Dear Senator-Elect Brown,

I am writing to urge you to reconsider your support of the pending health care reform legislation.

My experience has afforded me some insights which you might find useful in considering this matter.

First, I’ve experienced directly how badly our current system fails us. I went several years without the benefit of regular health care. As a freelancer, I made too much money to qualify for medical assistance programs, but too little to afford insurance payments. I am fortunate that in that time I did not suffer serious injuries, and that I did not have chronic illnesses which worsened.

Shortly after moving to Massachusetts I took a full-time job with health benefits. Last year, I took a tumble and broke my arm. I was treated in the emergency room and released; about a week later I had completely routine outpatient surgery with no complications. I wasn’t even admitted to the hospital.

The total bill for my care was more than the sticker price of many new cars. It could literally have formed the down payment of many homes. I can scarcely imagine the consequences for me if I’d suffered this injury without insurance. It might have bankrupted me. Without adequate medical care, the injury might have permanently impacted my ability to work.

There is something very wrong with this picture. It’s not right that prohibitive insurance costs place regular preventive medical care out of the reach of so many Americans. It’s not right that the price of an everyday injury could push someone over the brink of bankruptcy.

My second insight comes from my work in the software industry. I hear many people expressing concern that that healthcare reform is important, but this is not “the right plan.” I think this is misguided, even harmful. Making healthcare better for all is a very complex challenge. In the software industry we understand that extremely complex problems can’t always be solved exactly on this first iteration. We know that “perfect is the enemy of good.” We try to ship something good, then make it better. We also know that when a critical problem is discovered, we sometimes need to push an emergency fix to market as soon as possible.

That’s the situation America finds itself in. We need an emergency fix as soon as possible. The current package isn’t the best of all possible health care reform initiatives, but it has one enormous advantage over any other plan: it’s been through negotiation and debate, and it’s much closer to being “shippable” than anything else could be.

Although my insights come from the software industry, if you think about it, legislation is software. One of the aspects of the Founding Fathers’ genius is that they gave our nation the tools to modify its laws, even The Constitution, as required by changing conditions. If we pass this package and it doesn’t always work exactly as its authors intended — which is likely — then it can be amended to correct its deficiencies. If it somehow makes the situation worse for a majority of our citizens, it can be repealed outright.

If we do nothing, or if we derail the current effort in favor of other legislation that will take years more to work its way through the system, we face these certainties: Illnesses that could easily be prevented will keep children out of school and adults out of work for days they don’t need to miss. Treatable illnesses will worsen and become chronic, reducing quality of life and vastly increasing the expense of managing them. People will die when they don’t need to.

How can America accept this choice, the do-nothing status quo?

How could you justify acting to prolong it?

Thank you for your time and attention.

Sincerely,

Doug Mayo-Wells

Two we caught recently –

Bigger, Stronger, Faster
Surprising, thought-provoking documentary about anabolic steroids and other performance enhancers, in and out of pro sports, from a medical, ethical, and personal perspective — director/narrator/co-writer Chris Bell is himself a former professional wrestler, but his instincts for engaging storytelling and incisive interviewing both seem sharp. (His structural approach and interview style both reminded me of Michael Moore, only much less obnoxious.)

Man on Wire
The story of the genially crazy, undeniably talented wire walker Philippe Petit simply must be seen to be believed. The world is lucky that he ran with groups of student film makers, among others, so there’s a surprising amount of footage of people engaging in actual criminal conspiracy, as well as Petit’s breath-taking performances.

. . .in time to contribute at least a little something:
Do It Again: One Man’s Quest to Reunite the Kinks.

Sounds like a very interesting project — hope it gets finished, is accepted into some festivals, lands a distribution deal and plays somewhere I can catch it, and ultimately gets a DVD release I can get my hands on.

I was thinking the other day how, considering what a dilettante I am as a musician, I’ve played an unreasonable number of really awesome shows. The Kinks tribute night at the late lamented Abbey Lounge was definitely among those highlights. (I remember the morning I found out we were on the bill — I literally couldn’t sit still for an hour or more.)

With the screening of Welcome to Academia at the Brattle we got a survey from the film-makers full of stock intro-course questions, like “Which character did you find easiest to relate to? Why?”*

It was so hard to be constructive.

Kirk Davis and Elzbieta Szoka seem to have concocted their dark comedy** of sexual and power dynamics in a small liberal arts college in ignorance of the fact that every single white male mid-life crisis victim employed by a small liberal arts college has written at least one novel on the same topic, a great many of which have actually been published. Not only does Davis and Szoka’s script perpetuate many treadworn clichés of the academic politics novel***, but it’s also marred by clunky and unconvincing dialogue. It suggests to me that while the authors might have observed some of the power struggles while they were matriculated somewhere or other, they didn’t really understand enough of what they saw to write about it from the faculty member’s perspective.

Generally, I think novelists and film-makers are expected to improve over time.*** I’m certainly more lenient when I review a debut novel. But a debut novel requires far less effort to bring forth than a debut film. In many cases only the author and a handful of editors need to buy in to the delusion, whereas even an independent film like Welcome to Academia has a substantial cast and crew.

A film is also far less mutable. Plenty of authors have substantially revised early novels, or labored to keep them out of print. With film — assuming the expense of re-shooting is out-of-the-question — the creators are limited to reworking whatever wound up in the cameras.

So if you had all the film stock from Welcome to Academia sitting in front of you, and a modest editing budget, how could you make a good movie from it? My idea (sparked by a comment in the post-screening discussion; I can’t take full credit) would be to rip-off Guy Maddin’s Careful: convert the stock to black & white or sepia, digitally introduce scratches. Make the soundtrack crackly. Ditch all the current music and go for orchestral melodrama. Interpose title cards between the scenes. By emulating the feel of early talkies, I think you could make a virtue of the already stagey performances, and make the audience more forgiving of the cartoonish, shallow characterizations.

Two notes:

• Even though I haven’t enjoyed all of the films I’ve seen during the current Eye Opener series, I’ve really enjoyed the series itself. The lively discussions afterward make for a fun experience even (or maybe especially) if the film itself is lacking, and I’m definitely looking forward to more Eye Openers.
• Neither my wonderful fiancée nor I will write about last week’s screening of The New Year Parade, because we didn’t get to see it, because we were waiting for a roofing contractor who never called to say he wouldn’t show (and incidentally, introduced a leak where there had been none before).

* paraphrased, because I turned my survey in like a good do-bee.

** I think they were shooting for “satire,” but it’s not barbed enough to qualify.

*** the women’s studies professor is the most offensive, even if The Wire’s Callie Thorne turns in the film’s best performance in the role.

**** the people with exactly one good novel in them are not actually novelists. But contrast with rock music, where more proficiency does not necessarily imply more artistically successful and some acts struggle throughout their career to recapture the authenticity of their earliest recordings.

I didn’t make it to the opening ceremonies of the newly-renovated Cambridge Main Library but I did join the slightly dazed after-work throng milling around the spacious and welcoming environment toward the end of the library’s first full day. (I left with 6 books, which seemed to make me a bit of a lightweight.) The library is on Broadway right at the end of Trowbridge St., on MBTA route 68 (not to mention my home bike commute, yay) and it’s not too much of a schlep from Harvard Square. Oh, and ZOMG ample bike parking!

Two more from the Fall 2009 Eye-Opener at The Brattle (. . . and my wonderful fiancée already ably covered American Casino, our most recent screening.)

I didn’t hate Summerhood, Jacob Medjuck’s distillation of summer camp experiences, and I didn’t think it was terrible, but so many aspects of it were seriously flawed that it’s difficult to describe it without feeling a bit mean. Most critically, I think Summerhood needs to better define its audience. If it’s intended for an audience the same age as its characters, then the sexual references need to be toned down and/or the stated age of the characters needs to be increased at least 2 or 3 years. I get the sense that writer/co-director/co-star Jacob Medjuck was uninterested in taking the film in a creepy/squirmy Todd Solondz sort of direction, which is certainly fine, but if the film is intended for adult audiences, the script needs to be more subtle and the characters need to be more fully realized to avoid cliché.

The script has major structural problems. The character Fetus is represented both by the actor Lucian Maisal and by voiceover narration looking back from an indeterminate future (John Cusack provides the latter, in a delivery that I found hard not to compare unfavorably to Jean Shepherd in A Christmas Story). Most of the dialogue is naturalistic, but sometimes the characters will step out of their kid selves to make pronouncements like “regret causes cancer.” I found this jarring and arguably one distancing device too many.

The film has several plot threads vying for the viewer’s attention — there’s really no single central plot arc. The various conflicts resolve serially, so the final quarter of the film is full of what feel like ending beats — and as a result it winds up feeling much longer than its modest 96 minutes. And there are ill-explained plot points so arbitrary and unlikely-seeming (mysterious regulations about when campers can cross a bridge; a day when the camp counselors abdicate and leave the oldest kids in charge of the camp) that I suspect they were drawn from Medjuck’s real-life experience — which doesn’t mean that the script doesn’t need to better justify or explain them.

The film is also plagued with technical sound problems that make some of the dialogue nearly unintelligible. I couldn’t help but feel that the money spent on the fancy digital composite title sequence would have better been applied to some ADR.

There were some definite positives. The kids are mostly good in their roles, and Joe Flaherty is fun in a small part as the camp director. If the script sometimes lapses into preachiness, it also has lots of natural feeling dialogue and some funny moments. And Medjuck managed to get his film made in the first place, which demonstrates considerable drive. Hopefully this is the film everyone is looking at in a dozen years or so, looking for early signs of his later artistic brilliance.

I have a very different problem describing The Good Solider. I expected it to be an endurance contest, and was shocked by how much I liked it and how moving I found it. The Good Solider is a conventionally structured documentary (predominantly talking heads and archival footage) that examines what it means to be a “good soldier” from the perspective of five veterans from four different wars — from the second World War through the current Iraq conflict. The question “what makes a good soldier?” is answered implicitly rather than asked literally, and maybe one reason I wound up liking the film so much is that it’s ambiguous what the titular “good” means — “effective,” “moral,” or something else entirely. The editing of the interview clips and the historical footage seemed accomplished with uncommon delicacy. Mostly I think it’s effective because the stories of the five interviewees are so unexpectedly compelling (and in a very gradual reveal, united by an unexpected commonality). The Vietnam conflict is represented by two veterans, and the Korean by none; I wondered if there might possibly have been a Korean War veteran whose story (and film presence) was less involving. With a slim running time of 80 minutes The Good Soldier seems likely bound for cable at some point (although for those in the Boston area, The Brattle has a special Veteran’s Day engagement coming up). Either way, I recommend it, even — or especially — if it sounds like a film you wouldn’t be interested in.

It’s really hard to talk about Paranormal Activity without spoilers, but I’ll do my best. It has a somewhat different trick from Blair Witch Project, but like the earlier film it is a one-trick pony; it has some of the same strengths, but suffers from all of the same flaws. It depends on surprise for a lot of its scare value, but its structure telegraphs its surprises in advance. (While watching it, I kept having “wouldn’t it be scary if. . .” thoughts, most of which had to do with the film deviating from the formal narrative structure it established. But basically, if I’m thinking of ways to make a horror film scarier while watching it, it’s failed for me.) And as with Blair Witch Project, I found the characters’ reactions fundamentally implausible — they are completely lacking in a near-universal response to horrific situations in the real world.

On the bright side, I applaud any horror film that eschews gore and avoids sexism. Micah Sloat and Katie Featherstone’s performances are excellent; the script feels like it could have been totally improvised, which is praise in the context of the film’s pseudo-documentary approach. It’s also potentially interesting to look at the movie as an extended metaphor for differing male and female communication dynamics: Micah insists on trying to solve the problem, but that’s not Katie’s goal. (I think Micah’s character would have been more believable, if no less unsympathetic, if greed had been more clearly established as a motive for his behavior.) Finally, I have to respect a film that gets broad distribution, and looks like it was shot with a minimal budget — the economy of all aspects of the production is astounding.