Ibid (2008, Director: Russell Friedenberg): Billed as a sort of road movie about two escaped mental patients on a quest from God to write “new commandments” before the world ends, Ibid is actually a mess of styles and techniques that thinks it’s being clever. As a first feature, the film could be forgiven for the borrowings from other directors and other decades. But when it becomes self-referential (are the two escapees simply acting in a play?), it loses any narrative thread completely and we end up literally wandering in the desert with a cast of crazy people.
Ibid reminded me quite a bit of Roger Corman’s Gas-s-s-s! (review), only more pretentious and mystifying. I saw this with two friends and all three of us fell asleep for at least part of the film.
Joy Division (2007, Director: Grant Gee): I wanted to catch this back at TIFF in September, but saw Anton Corbijn’s Control (review) instead. The two films essentially complete each other, and seeing this after Corbijn’s dramatic film made me appreciate how closely that film hewed to the facts. And seeing footage of Ian Curtis performing made Sam Riley’s performance that much more eerily compelling in retrospect.
Gee fashions his film around the image of the changing city of Manchester. He points out explicitly how many of the landmarks in the life of the band no longer exist. Sadly, this also applies to the people themselves. Manager Rob Gretton and engineer Martin Hannett are no longer with us, nor is radio DJ and supporter John Peel. Most poignantly, Tony Wilson, who appears in the film, died in August 2007. The images of transformation describe the career of Joy Division especially well; after the suicide of Ian Curtis, the three remaining members decided to change their name to New Order and keep going. Just as Manchester rose from the rubble of its industrial past, New Order became one of the most successful British groups of the 80s and 90s. It started so much more inauspiciously.
Inspired by the punk of the Sex Pistols, Joy Division (originally called Warsaw) formed in 1977 and quickly gelled around the magnetic figure of Ian Curtis. The film brings together lots of old performance footage in addition to interviews with the surviving band members. Especially welcome is the contribution of Annik Honoré, Curtis’ Belgian girlfriend, who still seems deeply affected by his death. She is still incredibly beautiful and embodies the sophistication that made some of the other band members a bit nervous.
Gee also spices up some audio-only interviews with motion graphics and otherwise mixes up his methods to keep the audience interested. It was understandable but still disappointing that Deborah Curtis’ (Ian’s widow) wasn’t featured, though there were a few written quotations featured on-screen (from her biography Touching From A Distance, I assume).
It’s particularly fitting for me to be reviewing a film about a great band in the middle of a music festival where more than 1,500 bands are playing in the space of a week. Among so many hard-working and talented musicians, this film makes the achievement of four working-class lads from Manchester that much more impressive. Gee’s film has given me a better appreciation of the band, and of Corbijn’s film in particular. They should be sold as a set, I think.
Editor’s Note: I’ve decided to begin posting my reviews of films screening at SXSW early, hopefully helping anyone attending make some decisions about what to see. Medicine for Melancholy is screening on Sunday March 9 at 2:30pm, Tuesday March 11 at 5:00pm and Wednesday March 12 at 2:30pm. All screenings are at the Alamo Ritz 2.
Medicine for Melancholy (2008, Director: Barry Jenkins): When gorgeous Jo (Tracey Heggins) and goofy Micah (Wyatt Cenac) wake up in the same bed after a party, she’s annoyed and embarrassed. He’s curious, maybe a little infatuated. After a very awkward breakfast and a shared cab, they go their separate ways. But Micah finds Jo’s purse in the cab and sets out to return it. Gradually, Jo thaws out and they decide to spend the day together. I haven’t yet mentioned that both Jo and Micah are black, and maybe the only black people in their circle of indie hipster friends. Though it’s not explained, it might be the reason they ended up in bed after the drunken night before.
To Micah, being black in San Francisco matters. A lot. He takes Jo to the Museum of the African Diaspora for a bit of black history. Unfortunately, this is where Medicine for Melancholy begins to taste a little bit too much like medicine. Micah’s concerns revolve around the scarcity of black people in San Francisco, as well as the rapid gentrification of neighbourhoods, forcing the poor and middle class out of the city to the East Bay. Not only does he talk about this a lot, we even get to eavesdrop on a meeting of a housing rights group, which made me feel like the director had slipped a documentary short into the middle of the film.
As we follow the young couple around on the “day after” their one-night stand, we see that Micah is definitely looking for more, while Jo seems content to stay with her rich white boyfriend. The issues involved in their reasons were the most interesting part of the film. As Micah explains, black people make up only 7% of the population of San Francisco, and being into indie rock puts both of them into an even tinier group. For Micah, this means they should be together, while Jo reacts angrily to that assumption. By the end of the film, their relationship is left unresolved, but both of them are still thinking.
Medicine for Melancholy is beautifully shot in a desaturated colour palette, making it unique and even painterly to look at. Director Barry Jenkins also wrote the script, and worked with a tiny crew, but the results on the screen are polished in a way that few indie films I’ve seen can achieve. Bonus points for a great soundtrack that includes a couple of songs from Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.
The few false notes in Jo and Micah’s relationship are probably unavoidable when working with such a tight time constraint (the film covers just 24 hours). That being said, I wish the script had followed the “show, don’t tell” advice that my creative writing teacher used to hammer into my head.
Autism: The Musical (2007, Director: Tricia Regan): Winner of a slew of audience awards at recent festivals, Tricia Regan’s film sheds light on the mysterious world of the autistic child. Autism is now diagnosed in one child in every 150, and comparatively little research has been conducted into understanding it. Serendipitously, there is an interesting article in this month’s issue of Wired magazine, which postulates that instead of treating it as a disease to be cured, we should be trying to understand autism as just a different type of thinking. This documentary might actually help that process. We meet five different children, and their parents, who help us understand the challenges, but also the potential, of being autistic. At the centre of the film is Elaine Hall, mother of Neal and the creator of The Miracle Project, an organization dedicated to arts education for autistic kids. Elaine gathers a group of children each year with the goal of putting on a musical performance. She adopted her son Neal from Russia, and after he was diagnosed as autistic, her marriage broke up. Neal is perhaps the most affected by his condition, prone to tantrums and unable to speak. But Elaine is energetic and positive and at the first meeting, Regan’s camera pans around the room to encompass the curious kids, but more tellingly, the suspicious (and exhausted) faces of the parents.
The film follows a fairly standard chronological timeline, with titles informing us how close we are to opening night. Along the way, we take detours into each featured child’s story, along with the story of their parents. I found each one incredibly moving, and was pleasantly surprised at the complete transparency and gut-wrenching honesty of the parents. Lexi’s parents split up during the course of filming, and her mother’s brutally frank admissions broke my heart. And Adam’s parents, though still together, are having problems that his father admits are partly a result of his wife’s “monomania” in caring for Adam. I think that these people have had their idea of a perfect life turned so completely upside down by their children that they have no masks anymore. It was refreshing and heartbreaking at the same time. As in Lexi’s mom’s wish that Lexi die before she does. With the difficulty of finding schools and caregivers who understand autism, it seemed a reasonable position.
From the children there are several amazing moments of clarity, but the most piercing came from Wyatt, who wondered why all the kids at the Miracle Project were in “their own little worlds” before admitting that he too spent too much time in his own world, mostly because with no one around to talk to, he became lonely in the real one.
The director admitted in her Q&A that she was brought in to direct by the mother of Henry, one of the featured kids (and the only one to have Asperger’s Syndrome, a milder form of autism), who had envisioned making a film to reach out beyond the “autism community” in order to help people understand and to do something. Autism doesn’t attract the resources that childhood diseases like diabetes do, and dealing with it isn’t so straightforward. Like the deaf community, there is a growing “culture of autism” (represented by people like Amanda Baggs cited in the Wired article) who don’t think autism is a disease that needs a cure at all. On the other side are parents of children like the ones in this film, who just want some help. As the number of kids with autism grows, and they grow older and require more specialized care, the educational system will need to adapt. And so will the culture at large.
The finale is as big and emotional as we might expect. But since we’ve gotten to know the performers over the previous hour, we know the show is not going to be flawless. Instead, the creative anarchy that seems to be part and parcel of autism made the performance, and the entire film itself, that much more inspiring.
Here is the Q&A with director Tricia Regan from after the screening (it gets louder after the first few seconds and then louder still at around the 0:40 mark, so don’t turn up your volume right away):
Editor’s Note: I’ve decided to begin posting my reviews of films screening at SXSW early, hopefully helping anyone attending make some decisions about what to see. We Are Wizards is screening on Saturday March 8 at 1:45pm in the Austin Convention Center. It also screens Tuesday March 11 at 11:00am and Friday March 14 at 1:45pm at the Paramount.
We Are Wizards (2008, Director: Josh Koury): I’ll have to start with somewhat of a disclaimer. I am not a wizard, by which I mean to say that I am not one of the obsessive fans of Harry Potter who inhabit this film. That being said, I was expecting something a bit more wide-ranging from the description of the film on the SXSW web site: “An entertaining and comprehensive portrait of the passionate culture of Harry Potter fans.” Instead Josh Koury follows a few of the odder fans of the books and films, with a special focus on bands inspired by the world of Harry and his friends. “Wizard rock” is an admittedly narrow subculture, and most of these bands are simply not very good. Some, like the two brothers who make up Harry and the Potters, don’t seem to take themselves too seriously, but many of the others seem a bit delusional. I found the Hungarian Horntails especially worthy of a few wizard curses of my own. Consisting of 8-year-old Darious and his younger brother Holden, the band screech “punk” songs like “Which Witch is Which” and “Kill the Basilisk”. Though I’m delighted the boys have a creative outlet, I found their parents’ adulation disturbing, and suspect that dragging their kids all over the country to play “wizard rock” seems tied in to fulfilling their own musical ambitions.
Another major subject of the film is cartoonist Brad Neely, who gained notoriety by recording his own fan commentary for the first Harry Potter film. Unfortunately, he spoke it in a really annoying voice, which he also uses throughout the film. Yet another unsympathetic subject is Carol Matriciana, a Christian woman who is opposed to the books and films because she believes they promote witchcraft. But just like every one of the fans, she’s used Harry Potter to gain some attention and to add some meaning to her life.
Perhaps the sanest of the fans featured is Heather Lawver, who also happens to be the sister of a friend of mine. Heather began a fan site while in her teens and promptly received a threatening letter from Warner Brothers, the studio behind the Harry Potter films. Undeterred, Heather started a grassroots boycott of all Harry Potter merchandise except the books (her beef was with Warner Brothers, not J.K. Rowling). Through this process, she not only learned to express herself creatively and connect to other fans, but she learned lots of legal stuff as well as the skills needed to be a political activist. Bizarrely, though, the filmmakers end Heather’s story by showing her looking at Ferraris and explaining that she’s not really into Harry Potter anymore, but wants to become a race car driver. I found that directorial choice odd.
There are a few other “talking heads” in the film, including Henry Jenkins, Co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, who will be a keynote speaker at this year’s SXSW Interactive conference. Overall, though, this is not a standard talking head documentary, but more of a film for fans by fans. I thought it a little too narrowly-focused and found far too many of the subjects unsympathetic, even annoying. But what do I know, right? I’m a Muggle.
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