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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.

Good golly, it’s been a while.

My wonderful girlfriend and I are attending the current Eye-Opener series at The Brattle. We’ve been to 2 screenings so far.

I appreciate Voy a explotar (I’m Going to Explode) a little more after thinking about it post-screening, which is not to say I enjoyed it, or that I thought it was particularly good. Its basic trick is to take a Bonnie & Clyde-style couple on a crime spree story, and scale it to the dimensions of lifelike adolescent angst — instead of say, robbing a bank, Román and Maru purloin food from Maru’s family’s apartment; their hideout is their own roof. Instead of Hollywood-style slick editing and sophisticated post-production, writer/director Gerardo Naranjo renders his story with a naturalism that approaches Dogme 95 standards (sometimes so much so that it’s a little hard to follow the murkier sequences). Unfortunately, though, Naranjo honors the structural conventions of the crime-spree flick, so the audience knows more-or-less what’s coming (if not exactly how it comes about). The unsatisfying conclusion took me so far out of the film that I was distracted by odd choices in subtitling. On the other hand, somewhere in the middle I was emotionally involved enough to be annoyed by the choices made by the character Román as much as by the screenwriter, so there is that.

I thought Good Hair was terrific. It’s exactly what I hope for in a preview film series: something I might not have sought out on my own, and that expands my world a little bit. It’s a documentary about the meaning and means of “Good Hair.” The film was sparked, narrator Chris Rock says, by his daughter asking him why she doesn’t have good hair. The question is deceptively simple, but answering it takes a whole movie. In the black community, it turns out, “good hair,” is very high-maintenance, usually straightened, to make it more like white hair. (Several interviewees independently assert that relaxing their hair makes white people more relaxed and enables them to get better jobs.) The film is roughly divided into two acts, one about hair relaxer and one about hair weaves; interleaved throughout is coverage of an Atlanta stylists competition. The interviewees range from Maya Angelou to reality show stars, with plenty of man- and woman-on-the street footage as well. It’s entertaining to watch (often laugh out loud funny) and thought-provoking during and after the film — because when you really think about it, a lot of what goes into “good hair” is pretty horrific.

Speaking of my wonderful girlfriend, The Brattle, and horrific, when my wonderful girlfriend is out of town I often take in a horror movie or two, because I like them better than she does. Usually I’m disappointed. This time I picked Jennifer’s Body, entirely because The Brattle had recently recommended a roll-your-own double feature: they suggested seeing Jennifer’s Body in a first-run theatre, then their screening of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell. It stuck in my head because a) I love the Hole song “Violet,” (the one with “Jennifer’s body” in a refrain), and b) I’d seen a preview for Jennifer’s Body and that made it look completely generic. So why was The Brattle recommending it, and, if memory serves, either actually using the word “feminist,” or at least phrases that left that impression, like “smart, tough women”? I didn’t even realize until the credits rolled that the Diablo Cody was the screenwriter. I would have put that upfront in the voiceover: “an intelligent, funny horror movie from the writer of Juno.”

Anyway, Jennifer’s Body is pretty awesome. It evoked Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Heathers, and Ginger Snaps, and something gleefully trashy, like one of those WB teen soaps (with f-bombs) but established its own identity. It’s a metatextual movie — it probably helps to have seen some dreadful cookie-cutter horror flicks to understand how Jennifer’s Body inverts the sexist genre conventions. Where girls in 80’s slasher flicks were punished for their sexuality, Jennifer and her BFF Needy are rewarded for it (although not necessarily for every choice in how to explore it). Ultimately Jennifer’s Body ends on a “fish needs a bicycle”ish note. (Lest you think it’s all highbrow, there’s also plenty of footage of Megan Fox acting slutty and talking sluttier.) The two other people in the theatre hated it — in the lobby they were talking about almost walking out. I think I am pretty much going to love any movie in which the real villains are a color-by-numbers Autotuned emo band who think a pact with Satan is the best route to chart success (”Do you know how hard it is to make it as an indie band these days? There are so many of us, and we’re all so cute and it’s like if you don’t get on Letterman or some retarded soundtrack, you’re screwed, okay?” is how singer Nicolai defends himself, and when one of his sidemen threatens to get cold feet he asks if want to be a nobody, “or rich and famous . . . like the dude from Maroon 5.”)

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.