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what got me

The end of a strut that holds the fender on wrapped around a spoke.

totalled

The bend of the front tube is obvious, but of course you can’t bend just one side of a triangle. Toward the left you can see that the top tube is actually somewhat flattened — its cross section changed.

From above you can see how the top tube curved and started to shear away from the head tube.

I still don’t understand the physics of the accident. If it happened where I think it did, I wouldn’t have been going very fast at all — under 10 mph — and the eyewitnesses say that neither I nor the bike were struck by other vehicles. So as far as I can tell, the bike crumpled under an impact that I don’t think should have crumpled it. (So much for spending extra for a steel frame.)

Days until I’m allowed to ride a bike again: 75.

Solo bike accident last Friday left me with a broken wrist, so updates may be (even more) infrequent for a little bit. I am so, so glad I was wearing a helmet, I really hope you do too if you ride. And I am enormously grateful to the person or persons unknown who called 911 on my behalf.

Stingray Sam is the new space-western/musical from Cory McAbee of The American Astronaut fame. It compromises 6 10-minute episodes. Each mixes John Borruso’s surreal and colorful collages and expository narration by David Hyde Pierce with live-action black & white footage of Stingray Sam (McAbee), his partner The Quasar Kid (Crugie) and their friends and enemies. Each episode also includes a song by McAbee’s band (née Billy Nayer Show, rechristened American Astronaut).

McAbee might not find this a flattering comparison, but in addition to the obvious references (Flash Gordon serials, et al) Stingray Sam reminded me of Tim Heidecker and Eric Warehim’s Tom Goes to the Mayor. It’s not nearly as gross as the Adult Swim offering, but both are so over-the-top silly upfront that you could almost miss the underlying social criticism. And both deftly use awkward pauses as a comedic tool, as when bystanders react to Stingray Sam and the Quasar Kid’s hyper-elaborate secret handshake.

I though it was nifty keen, although the theme song is now stuck in my head (after hearing it six times) in a not-entirely-pleasant way. But really, how could I fail to like a movie in which someone chugs green olives beer-bong style?

* * *

Stingray Sam was the last of the half dozen Independent Film Festival Boston 2009 screenings I was able to catch. The 6 I saw made me wish I’d been able to see more; it seemed like a very strong set of offerings.

2009 is the first year I saw this many films at IFFBoston (maybe it’s taken me a while to transfer my loyalty from Filmfest DC?) and I think it was the friendliest film festival I’ve ever attended. I enjoyed several substantive conversations with total strangers comparing notes on what we had seen, and my list of films to keep an eye out for has only grown as a result.

The Higher Force (Stóra planið) is certainly not your typical gangster movie. David (Pétur Jóhann Sigfússon) is a singularly feckless hoodlum in a gang ineptly led by Magnus (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson). David would really rather be a poet, and he’s haunted by an old secret. His new landlord Harald (Eggert Þorleifsson) claims to be a crime figure himself — but maybe he’s really just a schoolteacher. Then again, maybe he’s connected to the darkness in David’s past.

The Higher Force shows refreshing disregard for genre conventions. Some of it plays out as you might expect, but director Olaf de Fleur Johannesson, novelist Thor Thorsteinsson (and a surprisingly large array of co-scenarists and script consultants) throw a goodly number of curve balls. Mostly this is very gentle as gangster films go, with very funny performances from Pétur Jóhann Sigfússon and the other members of his crew. But the light tone sometimes shifts abruptly.

The Sopranos‘ Micheal Imperioli appears in a small part. I’m just guessing, but I wonder if he might have taken the role partly because the presence of his name on the project might help this unusual and charming film reach a wider audience. Even if that played no part in his motivation, I hope it has that effect.

Best Worst Movie is instantly on my shortlist for year’s best movie. It’s the story of a low budget horror flick (Troll 2) that became a cult phenomenon, and how the cast and crew react to this after nearly 20 years. Lead man George Hardy is tremendously engaging. He radiates an almost supernatural level of good-humor and somehow manages to simultaneously revel in the attention and be a little abashed by it — a weirdly charming balance. Tracking down the cast in the present day offers surprises both funny and poignant. Interviews with Troll 2 director Claudio Fragasso make one of the magic ingredients clear: Like Ed Wood Jr., Fragasso was trying to make a good movie, not a bad one. He and screenwriter/wife Rossella Drudi were grappling with important subjects like the importance of family and the rising sourge of vegetarianism. Like Paul Verhoeven with Showgirls, Fragasso doesn’t seem to think he did make a bad movie, and finds the attention now being paid to his film distinctly bittersweet.

The film is the authorial and directorial debut of Troll 2’s child star, Michael Stephenson. It also seems to be the first editing credit for Andrew Matthews. I find both of these facts hard to believe. Of the three documentaries I saw at IFFBoston 2009, this was by far the most sure-footed. I hardly have any constructive criticism — I thought the pacing was spot on, the running time was just about perfect, and the narrative flow was natural and unforced. In the Q&A after the screening, Stephenson talked about shaping the movie from 500 hours of raw footage. He discussed his craft like a guy who’s been making great documentaries for years (and basically made me impatient to explore the deleted scenes when Best Worst Movie is released on DVD.

I’ve only been ably to take in a tiny fraction of this year’s IFFBoston offerings — but from what I’ve seen, I’m hoping Best Worst Movie wins an audience choice award.

Note: It’s certainly not necessary to have seen Troll 2 to enjoy Best Worst Movie . . . but be prepared to want desperately to see it afterwards.

I Need that Record! seems to arise from the best D.I.Y. tradition. Director/cinematographer/editor/producer Brendan Toller got fired up about the death of some of his favorite independent record stores. So he made a movie about it. (Ace cut-out-style animations from Matt Newman prevent it from being strictly a one-man show, and add welcome visual variety.) He interviewed staff from stores that closed. He got several of the usual punk documentary interview subjects (Thurston Moore, Glenn Branca, Legs McNeil, Ian MacKaye, Mike Watt. . .) to do more-or-less their standard interviews (I love those guys, but if you’ve seen as many punk documentaries as I have, what they offer here is a brief and pleasant, but certainly not revelatory visit with old friends). But Toller scores a few real coups. Mike Dreese, CEO of Newbury Comics, the Boston-based local music and alt.culture chain that has survived where HMV, Tower, etc. failed, is just jaw-droppingly candid. (Bloodshot Record’s Rob Miller also pulls no punches — but he doesn’t have to buy product from anybody he demonizes.) Lenny Kaye tells an anecdote about how an indie muisc store was integral to the formation of the Patti Smith Group that I’d never heard. Noam Chomsky offers more-or-less one of his standard anti-corporate shticks — comparing the death of the indie music store to the rise of the supermarket — but it’s the first time I can recall seeing him in a punk movie.

I Need that Record! has a very clear agenda, and makes no pretense to presenting alternate viewpoints. Although I agree with Toller about 99.5%, I thought it skirted the edge of “preachy.” It also maybe tried to cram in a little too much music-biz-related content. The rise of the big box store and the advent of internet downloading hurt indie stores directly, and get deserved screen time. The Telecommunications Act and the resultant media consolidation by (mostly) Clear Channel certainly made a ghastly homogenized mess of radio, and it’s now next-to-impossible for a band to have success through regional commercial airplay — but I think it’s arguable how much that directly hurt indie stores that mostly sold music that hardly got commercial airplay even before Clear Channel’s Borg Assimilation. I’ve heard claims that RIAA/Big 4 tactics like larding CDs with spyware and suing filesharers have actually pushed people away from corporate music product and toward indie labels, which presumably isn’t a negative for stores that mostly carry indie releases. One topic I was surprised that Toller didn’t address was corporate attempts to undermine first-sale doctrine, the principle which allows the sale of used recordings — which has been under near-continual legal attack since the mid 1980s.

But these are quibbles. Toller’s film has a tremendous amount of heart, and I hope it will inspire some folks to support the indie music stores they have left. It certainly made me sad for the indie stores gone from own life.

One last note: The title I Need that Record! made me think this was going to be a film about music collectors, like Alan Zweig’s terrific and horribly-underexposed Vinyl. It’s really more like “I Need (a place to hang out and hear) that record.” But the song of the same name that plays under the opening credits is purely awesome. Some research on the Internets suggests that it’s by The Tweeds, and, well . . . I need that record!

Dave Gargani’s deep affection for the 50’s sci-fi flicks around which his documentary orbits is obvious, and sometimes infectious. (It certainly made me want to watch Forbidden Planet again sometime soon). His enthusiasm in the Q&A after the screening made me like his film a little better.

But Gargani’s love of the source material clearly wouldn’t be sufficient to carry a whole feature, so he analyses the relationship of 50’s sci-fi movies to the culture in general, and the role and perception of science in particular. He finds some talking heads to back up his conclusions, which include some moderately baked notions current societal valuations of science, and how they might be impacted by cinematic portrayals.

I have two main problems with this. The big one is that, as far as I’m concerned, the conclusions he draws can be supported only by excluding an awful lot of 50’s sci-fi movies (or a lot of awful 50’s sci-movies, take your pick). Gargani’s thesis is that scientists were heroic figures in these films, and that they inspired the generation of real scientists behind the Apollo program.

I have no doubt that plenty of real scientists were inspired by “that Buck Rogers stuff.” But I have to quibble with the assertion that 50s’ sci-fi movies were predominantly pro-science. Many of these films had a strong current of “things man was not meant to know” in which the pursuit of scientific knowledge was inherently problematic. A lot them dealt (both metaphorically and explicitly) with the consequences of the Pandora’s box opened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Certainly some of the lantern-jawed protagonists were themselves men of science, but many of them also triumphed in spite of “those eggheads.” Even Forbidden Planet, the film that provides Gargani’s title, follows this template: scientist Dr. Morbius gets into deep trouble; the no-nonsense Commander J.J. Adams has to get his crew out of it.

The second big problem is that Gargani’s talking heads aren’t all that interesting (or that Gargani hasn’t yet figured out how to make his talking heads interesting — after all, this is his first feature film). There are moments that show definite promise — Dr. Leroy Dubeck is pretty creepy when he talks in wishful terms about how the threat of an “extinction level event” a few decades in the future could galvanize a scientific renaissance. (His doomsday scenario of choice is the big meteorite on a collision course with Earth; he seems ironically and blissfully ignorant that we may already be facing a home-grown “extinction level event” within the next several decades.) Likewise, there’s something weird about cross-cutting between interviews of NASA engineer Homer Hickam and scenes from the movie (October Sky) based on his book Rocket Boys that dramatize the same events he is discussing. But Gargani doesn’t embrace the opportunities to deviate from safe documentary structures. He takes his subjects at face value, and, I think, treats them a little too respectfully.

I’m going to try to do capsule reviews of all the films I see as part of Independent Film Festival Boston. Here’s the first.

The bad news: the first 15 seconds of (500) Days of Summer convinced me I was going to hate it.

The good news: I was wrong.

That first quarter minute includes a title card that at least verges on misogyny (and which unfortunately drew a big laugh from the crowd at my screening). Fortunately, the hateful outburst is inconsistent with the tone of the actual film — it almost suggest that screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, or possibly director Marc Webb, haven’t actually achieved the epiphany that their male protagonist has. The opening also includes voiceover narration from an omniscient viewpoint with a wealth of specific, often numeric detail. I thought this device worked fine in Amelie and Magnolia; it’s annoyed me in everything else since.

The most apt comparison for (500) Days of Summer is probably Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — it also portrays the lifecycle of a relationship with its chronology in a blender set to frappé — minus the sci-fi elements, plus a few surprises, including some awesome sight gags I will leave to other reviewers to spoil.

The film’s time jumps are indicated by title cards with a picture of a tree in varying states of clorophyllitude and a number between 1 and 500. There are a lot of these, and the viewer might be forgiven for losing track of whether a given number is pre-breakup or post-breakup. But leads Joseph Gordon-Levitt (from the terrific high-school noir Brick) and Zooey Deschanel are up to the challenge; the way they react to one another grounds the chronology as effectively (if less precisely) than the title cards. They’re so convincing being moony-eyed that their reactions in the late stages of their affair are almost shocking.

The dialogue between the principals actually stands up pretty well to the Kaufman comparison: there’s enough quirky personal detail that Gordon-Levvitt’s Tom and Deschanel’s Summer feel like people, not archetypes, but there’s enough universality that sometimes I felt like I was watching my own biopic.

I wonder if the intermittent narration was grafted on after-the-fact to appease test audiences who were confused by the film’s failure to follow the standard RomCom story arc. I wonder if there’s any chance critical response could convince the studio to reverse the decision, because I think the absence of the voiceover would strengthen the picture. So would ditching the puerile opening title. Also, the very last line of dialogue? Lame.

Most of what was in between, though, was pretty darn good, with a few spikes of greatness. On balance, definitely recommended.