Drew Kerr

Hit So Hard

by Drew Kerr on April 12, 2012 · 0 comments

in Documentaries,Film Festivals

Hit So Hard
Limited the­at­rical release in select North American cities and avail­able through video-on-demand starting April 13th; sched­uled for DVD and Blu-ray release in June.

Hit So Hard (Director: P. David Ebersole): Screened a few weeks back as part of Toronto’s Canadian Music Week film pro­gram, Hit So Hard (sub­titled The Life & Near Death Story Of Patty Schemel) explores the former Hole drummer’s career and struggles with addic­tion, set par­tially against the back­drop of the rise and fall of the Seattle grunge scene. Director P. David Ebersole com­bines inter­views with Schemel filmed over a period of sev­eral years with archival footage, much of it shot by the drummer her­self. Ebersole also fea­tures extensive inter­views with Schemel’s former Hole band­mates Courtney Love (lead singer/guitarist), Melissa Auf der Maur (bassist), and Eric Erlandson (gui­tarist). The enter­taining inter­view seg­ments with the notori­ously unpre­dict­able Love show her at various points talking with her mouth full, sit­ting with her legs splayed over the arms of the chair she’s in, and gen­er­ally just coming across as a train wreck. These por­tions scream out for Love to get her own feature-length doc­u­mentary treatment.

Devout Hole fans will likely find much to enjoy in the wealth of behind-the-scenes footage of the band, most of which has never been seen before. For the rest of us, how­ever, it isn’t ter­ribly revealing, offering up the standard music visual doc­u­ment of mundane life in the recording studio and on the road in a variety of bus, back­stage, and hotel room set­tings (there’s also some decent live footage). One of the sub­jects Schemel’s video camera cap­tured is Kurt Cobain; she stayed at the res­id­ence he and Love shared for an extended period, and we see the Nirvana frontman in some private moments with his new­born daughter, as well as singing and playing an acoustic guitar during a brief snippet. These scenes aren’t par­tic­u­larly inter­esting and will only hold some value for Nirvana disciples.

Schemel joined Hole in 1992 and spent six years with the group, playing only on their lauded Live Through This album. The sec­tions dis­cussing the dif­fi­cult recording ses­sions for its fol­lowup, Celebrity Skin, are some of the film’s most inter­esting, as we find out that all of Schemel’s parts were replaced by a studio drummer (although she is cred­ited in the album’s liner notes). Despite bat­tling a drug addic­tion at the time, Schemel main­tains her playing was fine and that pro­ducer Michael Beinhorn played head games with her, ulti­mately turning the rest of the band against her (Beinhorn has a his­tory of dif­fi­culties working with drum­mers). Erlandson, Auf der Maur, and Love all agree that working with Beinhorn was an unpleasant exper­i­ence and now regret their decision not to show more sup­port for their band­mate, who even­tu­ally quit. At a question-and-answer ses­sion fol­lowing a Hit So Hard screening last year, Love said Beinhorn was “still a Nazi fuck” after curi­ously working with him again on Nobody’s Daughter, the 2010 Hole album that didn’t include Erlandson, Auf der Maur, or Schemel (read my review here). After leaving the band, Schemel des­cended fur­ther into drug addic­tion, unable to heed the cau­tionary tales of friends Cobain and ori­ginal Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff (who fatally over­dosed a couple of months after Cobain’s sui­cide). By the end of the 90s, Schemel’s heroin, crystal meth, and crack habits had left her home­less and turning tricks for drug money.

I found it inter­esting that whether by choice or not, Ebersole’s film doesn’t include any inter­views with either of the sur­viving mem­bers of Nirvana, nor anyone from the other two biggest 90s Seattle bands, Soundgarden or Pearl Jam. A small col­lec­tion of other 90s alt-rock con­tem­por­aries are inter­viewed, including Veruca Salt’s Nina Gordon, Luscious Jackson’s Kate Schellenbach, and Roddy Bottum from Faith No More and Imperial Teen. Ebersole also expands the doc’s focal point to probe the role of women drum­mers in rock his­tory, although the fact that two of the prin­cipals inter­viewed are the drum­mers from The Go-Go’s and The Bangles doesn’t add much musical cred­ib­ility to the dis­cus­sion, quite frankly. In my eyes, a glar­ingly obvious omis­sion to any dis­cus­sion of women in rock, par­tic­u­larly because they’re actu­ally from Seattle, are Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson. Through Schemel’s own exper­i­ence as a les­bian in the music industry, Ebersole also briefly explores the his­tory of gay women in rock and the adversity they’ve faced.

The documentary’s biggest neg­ative is that it fails to present a fully-formed pic­ture of the drummer’s post-Hole life. Schemel recounts calling Love for fin­an­cial help while home­less, but there’s no sense or indic­a­tion from the inter­views with Love, Erlandson, or Auf der Maur of whether or not any of them cur­rently have a rela­tion­ship with her. They all speak warmly and caringly of Schemel; Auf der Maur, in par­tic­ular, was quite close with her during their time in the band, and it would have been nice if Ebersole had defined this cru­cial ele­ment. One of the things I enjoyed about the movie was that it didn’t deliver a seen-it-before ending where Schemel makes a tri­umphant return to the music busi­ness. We see her sober, hap­pily mar­ried, and ful­filled with a new­found career in the dog care busi­ness. As Ebersole tells it, Schemel essen­tially aban­doned any ser­ious pur­suits in the music industry after get­ting her life straightened out, occa­sion­ally playing in a band with her brother and acting as a drum instructor/mentor to young women. Upon fur­ther research, how­ever, I found that the dir­ector egre­giously failed to include the facts that Schemel actu­ally recorded with Juliette And The Licks (the punk band fea­turing act­ress Juliette Lewis), toured with Imperial Teen, and col­lab­or­ated with Love a couple more times: in a short-lived band called Bastard and again on Love’s 2004 America’s Sweetheart solo album. On the latter, Schemel co-wrote five songs (incor­rectly listed as ten song­writing credits on the album’s Wikipedia page) and con­trib­uted drum tracks to the project.

Schemel’s story should make for a more com­pel­ling viewing exper­i­ence than Hit So Hard delivers. The highly like­able musician’s col­ourful and har­rowing tale make her a primo doc­u­mentary sub­ject, but the film’s incom­plete­ness under­mines the end result.

Official site of the film

Tagged as: #cmw2012, music

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This Must Be The Place

by Drew Kerr on March 2, 2012 · 0 comments

in Theatrical Release

This Must Be The Place
This Must Be The Place will receive a lim­ited the­at­rical release in the US through The Weinstein Company. Distribution and the­at­rical plans in Canada are unknown at the moment. Canadians may have to wait to see this one on DVD in a few months.

This Must Be The Place (Director: Paolo Sorrentino): Before I even knew a thing about this film, I knew I wanted to see it, based purely on the movie’s enti­cing poster. Sean Penn playing a char­acter obvi­ously inspired by The Cure’s Robert Smith? I’m so there. The film’s Italian dir­ector and co-writer, Paolo Sorrentino, came up with Penn’s “Cheyenne” char­acter after meeting Smith and being struck by the fact that the musi­cian, then in the 50ish age range, main­tained his onstage visual per­sona (fea­turing the big hair, heavy makeup, and black clothing) off­stage as well.

Penn, Sorrentino, and co-writer Umberto Contarello add fur­ther quirks to Cheyenne by making him occa­sion­ally wear granny-style glasses, walk with a stooped shuffle, and speak in a pinched, timid tone, while set­ting him up as a wealthy, faded American 80’s rock star retired in Ireland who is seem­ingly in a con­stant state of depres­sion. Notified that his father is dying back in the US, Cheyenne returns home, but arrives too late. While filling in some of the gaps from the thirty year estrange­ment in their rela­tion­ship, he dis­covers that his dad, a Holocaust sur­vivor, main­tained an interest in the SS officer who tor­tured him. This spurs Cheyenne to under­take a road trip in search of his dad’s tor­mentor, last thought to be living some­where in the US. Yes, this would cor­rectly be cat­egor­ized as a “high concept” movie.

Penn taking on risky roles isn’t any­thing new — he did it most recently in Milk and, of course, I Am Sam. I had mixed reac­tions to those per­form­ances, but he’s fant­astic here in a demanding role that, as per my ini­tial reac­tion, threatens to be con­sumed by the nov­elty of his character’s eccent­ri­cities. That, no dis­respect, Penn’s face looks every one of its 50 years only adds to the fas­cin­ating and sad sight of his aging goth char­acter caked in makeup, which Sorrentino takes advantage of by giving us mul­tiple shots of Penn’s mug in unflinching, extreme close-up. Cheyenne is a study in con­tra­dic­tion: his beha­viour mostly sug­gests a sub­dued and with­drawn damage case, yet he doesn’t shy away from meeting new people and enga­ging them in con­ver­sa­tions that pre­dict­ably take a turn for the weird. Call him a highly func­tioning recluse. The sup­porting cast includes excel­lent per­form­ances from Frances McDormand as Cheyenne’s long­time wife, Kerry Condon as wid­owed wait­ress, Judd Hirsch as a Nazi hunter, Harry Dean Stanton as a char­acter met during Cheyenne’s road trip (Stanton seems right at home in this strangle little film world), and rel­ative new­comer Eve Hewson as Cheyenne’s Dublin friend (Hewson also hap­pens to be Bono’s daughter).

Penn, who appears in almost every scene, may bring his acting A-game to This Must Be The Place, but that’s not enough to over­come the film’s often glaring defi­cien­cies. Quirkiness abounds in this movie; fre­quently, its pecu­li­ar­ities feel forced and serve little pur­pose, other than to seem­ingly up the weird­ness quo­tient. Example: one scene shows an eld­erly Native American man mys­ter­i­ously showing up as a pas­senger in Cheyenne’s vehicle and then soon exiting in a sim­il­arly head-scratching manner, with no explan­a­tion given. Any intended sym­bolism went over my head. Other scenes, such as the one where Cheyenne takes on some town locals in a game of ping pong, don’t add much to the story other than being “slice of life” vign­ettes, but they come at the expense of the movie’s pacing, which can be quite slow. Additionally, the ambiguous ending may dis­ap­point, plus the role of one of the film’s char­ac­ters (Olwen Fouere’s “Mary”) doesn’t quite feel fully developed.

Sorrentino, making his English-language debut after gar­nering wide acclaim for 2008’s Il Divo, impresses with a visu­ally com­pel­ling film. There’s some beau­tiful sweeping shots, as well as many that employ an odd, but inter­esting framing struc­ture. He also mines more unex­pected comedic moments than you would expect from the weighty topics the film tackles. Music, not sur­pris­ingly, also plays a big factor in the film, which takes its title from the Talking Heads song. The track shows up in numerous incarn­a­tions throughout, including one great art-rock set piece that fea­tures Talking Heads singer David Byrne per­forming it with his solo group, set to a visual art accom­pani­ment. Byrne also has a few lines of dia­logue and con­trib­uted ori­ginal music to the film’s soundtrack, which proves to be a fairly mixed bag of material.

Between Penn’s cap­tiv­ating por­trayal and the film’s short­com­ings, I’d char­ac­terize the ambi­tious This Must Be The Place as a fas­cin­ating mess, but one worth your time.

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The Last Gladiators

by Drew Kerr on November 2, 2011

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

The Last Gladiators

The Last Gladiators (Director: Alex Gibney): Filmmaker Alex Gibney is clearly a very busy man. The Last Gladiators, in which he exam­ines the world of National Hockey League pugil­ists, focus­sing in on the story of former Montreal Canadiens enforcer Chris “Knuckles” Nilan, is his tenth fea­ture film since 2005, an unusu­ally pro­lific output for a doc­u­ment­arian. And you can add in a couple of shorter seg­ments he con­trib­uted to some other col­lab­or­ative doc­u­mentary pro­jects during that period. Gibney has a track record for matching the quantity with quality, as his latest film proves, even if it’s a depar­ture from the kind of politically-charged topics he’s best known for, such as the down­fall of politi­cians (Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer and Casino Jack and the United States of Money), cor­porate mal­feas­ance (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and American mil­itary tor­ture (Taxi to the Dark Side, which won an Oscar in 2008 for best doc­u­mentary fea­ture). But as a lifelong hockey fan, Gibney, an American, saw rich source material in examining the sub­cul­ture of one of the most con­tro­ver­sial aspect of Canada’s game, with Nilan’s own intriguing story providing about 75% of the film’s content.

Retiring in 1992 after being plagued by injuries (he’s under­gone 26 sur­geries), Nilan’s most not­able achieve­ments from his 13 year NHL career are more than 3,000 pen­alty minutes, a Stanley Cup win with the Canadiens in 1986, and a selec­tion to Team USA for the 1987 Canada Cup series. After being drafted by Montreal, he played nine sea­sons for them before being traded to the New York Rangers and even­tu­ally his hometown Boston Bruins, before ending his career back with Montreal. Nilan’s pride and love for the Canadiens still runs deep and it seems as if he never got over the dev­ast­a­tion of being traded away from them. His troubled post-NHL his­tory, which proves to be the most sub­stantive part of the film, could make Nilan the poster child for pro ath­letes who struggle with their post-playing lives. A toxic com­bin­a­tion of sub­stance abuse (alcohol, pre­scrip­tion paink­illers, and heroin), employ­ment prob­lems (Nilan hated the insur­ance job he worked at), and legal troubles (including a 2009 arrest for shoplifting) des­troyed his rela­tion­ship with his wife and child and nearly killed him. Nilan, who has a very dark and intense side, may be a rough-around-the-edges char­acter, but he’s still a like­able one. Part of his appeal is his blunt hon­esty, open­ness, and a will­ing­ness to take full respons­ib­ility for his fail­ings. Interviews with his father who, like his son, pro­jects a hard-ass demeanour and speaks with that always-fascinating thick Boston accent, add real emo­tional depth to the film, as the senior Nilan holds little back in con­veying the pro­found heartache and shame he felt (and still feels) over his son’s struggles.

The non-Nilan por­tions of the film find Gibney tra­cing the evol­u­tion of the enforcer’s role in the game from its mid-70s heyday with the Philadelphia Flyers’ “Broad Street Bullies” through to its greatly dimin­ished need in the cur­rent game. Numerous inter­views with the most prom­inent fighters over the past couple of dec­ades provide insight into the enforcer mindset, with players like Marty McSorley, Tony Twist, Donald Brashear, and the late Bob Probert weighing in (Probert’s inter­views, con­ducted shortly before his death, are sad to watch). The scenes with Brashear are sad for a dif­ferent reason, as we see the former fan favourite playing in D-list hockey league games and still itching to drop his gloves.

The Last Gladiators is a timely piece in light of the recent deaths of three NHL enfor­cers that called into ques­tion the pos­sible link between their occu­pa­tions and its neg­ative residual effects on their lives. Nilan, who I heard give an inter­view on Toronto’s Prime Time Sports radio show the week before The Last Gladiators’ TIFF premiere, dis­counted the con­nec­tion. Nilan’s stance appar­ently escaped the atten­tion of TV’s Hockey Night in Canada neander­thal Don Cherry, who cri­ti­cized him and two other former fighters (also without basis) on the tele­cast for sup­porting the sup­posed theory.

Gibney, who began filming a gen­eral por­trait of hockey fighters, chose wisely in deciding to make Nilan the central sub­ject. The Last Gladiators is con­sist­ently grip­ping and only mis­fires when the dir­ector chooses some dis­ap­point­ingly obvious music on the soundtrack (Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild”) or engages in unne­ces­sary scene re-enactments to advance his nar­rative, drag­ging the doc­u­mentary into cheesy E! True Hollywood Story ter­ritory. Being a hockey fan isn’t even a neces­sary com­ponent in appre­ci­ating the film, as I haven’t given a toss about the NHL since the inept Toronto Maple Leafs killed my love for the game in the mid-90s.

Tagged as: #tiff11, hockey, sports

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From the Sky Down

by Drew Kerr on October 19, 2011

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

From the Sky Down

From the Sky Down (Director: Davis Guggenheim): When asked to choose the best two albums in U2’s cata­logue, most fans and music critics will pick 1987’s The Joshua Tree and 1991’s Achtung Baby. That the band’s strongest work is on albums that sound so rad­ic­ally dif­ferent from one another is, even two dec­ades later, fairly astounding, and points emphat­ic­ally to the group’s renowned dis­dain for cre­ative passivity. As frontman Bono has fam­ously said, Achtung Baby was “the sound of four men cut­ting down The Joshua Tree”, as U2 struggled to cope with super­stardom and needed to “go away and dream it all up again.” That hard-fought musical and per­sonal journey for the band forms the found­a­tion of From the Sky Down, dir­ected by Davis Guggenheim (best known for An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman). Guggenheim, who had pre­vi­ously dir­ected U2 gui­tarist The Edge in his under­seen 2008 film It Might Get Loud, was approached by the band to put together some sort of visual doc­u­ment to tie in with the upcoming 20th anniversary reissue of Achtung Baby.

From the Sky Down takes a sur­pris­ingly brief glimpse at the band’s overall his­tory and I was also some­what taken aback by the com­plete absence of any men­tion of what they might have up their sleeve for the future. No, the focus here is almost entirely on the late 80s-early 90s era of the group, a refreshing approach from a rock doc­u­mentary format that tra­di­tion­ally only offers a quickly moving bio­graph­ical sum­mary, with little allow­ance for a truly in-depth exam­in­a­tion of par­tic­ular periods or albums. Perhaps the band was inspired by The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, another high pro­file doc that decon­structed the making of a classic album from their friend and peer, Bruce Springsteen. From the Sky Down fea­tures extensive one-on-one inter­views with each member of the band (they’re rounded out by drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton) that provide a com­pre­hensive revis­iting of a period that began just after the band’s explo­sion in pop­ularity with the release of The Joshua Tree, through to the begin­ning of their land­mark Zoo TV Tour in 1992. Not sur­pris­ingly, the inter­views with the sharp-witted Bono are the most rev­el­atory and enter­taining. Special atten­tion is paid to 1988’s Rattle and Hum, the much-derided and mis­un­der­stood doc­u­mentary (with a com­panion album) that chron­icled U2’s bur­geoning interest in American roots music. Personally, I’m a huge fan of the film, but the band admits their mes­sage was mis­in­ter­preted and only rein­forced many people’s opinion of the Irish quartet as self-important and insuf­fer­able per­son­al­ities. Guggenheim makes good use of some pre­vi­ously unseen Rattle and Hum out­takes, including one that shows an irate Bono rip­ping on some incom­petent stage workers.

Achtung Baby’s dif­fi­cult recording ses­sions form the heart of the film, with addi­tional per­spective provided by the album’s pro­du­cers (Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno), engineer (Flood), and long­time pho­to­grapher (Anton Corbijn). Guggenheim recon­venes the group at Berlin’s Hansa Studios, where recording began, but where little res­ults were pro­duced due to cre­ative fric­tion and road­b­locks. Bono and The Edge wanted to take U2’s sound in a more elec­tronic, exper­i­mental dir­ec­tion, with which Mullen Jr. and Clayton couldn’t come to terms. The occa­sional anim­a­tion sequences that Guggenheim employs (accom­panied by band member voi­ceovers taken from their inter­views) are used to best effect here, with one sequence showing meta­phor­ical walls being erected between the four band­mates. The visual takes on even more sym­bolic meaning, con­sid­ering they were in the city during the fall of the Berlin Wall. The band digs out and reflects on old demos, and talks about their song­writing pro­cess, which fre­quently fea­tures Bono using gib­berish (dubbed “Bongolese”) in place of unwritten lyrics. Two songs get the most atten­tion: “Mysterious Ways” and “One.” The former, ori­gin­ally titled “Sick Puppy,” helped the band turn a corner from their cre­ative dif­fi­culties and even­tu­ally led to the cre­ation of “One,” which sprang from an idea used in the ori­ginal bridge in “Mysterious Ways.” The two tracks were the only ones from the album that were com­pleted in Berlin, with the rest fin­ished back home in Dublin.

Guggenheim’s decision to bookend the film with scenes from the group’s much-hyped appear­ance at this past summer’s Glastonbury Festival is only mod­er­ately effective, but he cap­tures some great footage of the band rehearsing various Achtung Baby songs in pre­par­a­tion for the big gig (one of the filming loc­a­tions is Winnipeg’s Burton Cummings Theatre, during a tour stop in the city this past spring). The standouts include a rough run-through of “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” which really jumped out of the speakers of the Ryerson Theatre’s sound system, and a rare solo vocal per­form­ance from The Edge of the album’s haunting closing song, “Love Is Blindness.” U2 has always been a band that has been quite pro­tective of their cre­ative pro­cess, and judging by the loose­ness and candour demon­strated by the band as we see them revisit old songs and exper­i­ment with arrange­ments (we see Bono yelling out upcoming chord changes to the rest of the group), it’s clear that Guggenheim was able to cul­tivate an intimate level of trust with his subjects.

Shot over the course of six months earlier this year and com­pleted just a week before its world premiere last month at TIFF, Guggenheim’s doc­u­mentary digs deep down into the inner work­ings of a band at a pivotal and tumul­tuous phase in their career. My only com­plaint about From the Sky Down would be that the dir­ector doesn’t quite dig deep enough when it comes to looking at the whole of Achtung Baby, an album that Bono says in the film “is the reason we’re still here now.” An inor­dinate amount of atten­tion is paid to the cre­ation of “Mysterious Ways” and “One” (which are important songs, to be sure), while other not­able tracks such as “The Fly,” “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” and “Until the End of the World” are included only as per­form­ances or over the soundtrack, with little or no detail or insight into their ori­gins. One of the album’s best songs, “Ultraviolet (Light My Way),” isn’t men­tioned at all, nor can I recall even hearing a snippet of it in the film. Despite this rel­at­ively minor neg­ative, From the Sky Down is loaded with pos­it­ives that make it essen­tial viewing for any U2 fan.

Tagged as: music, U2

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Comic-Con Episode Four: A Fan’s Hope

by Drew Kerr on October 6, 2011 · 2 comments

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

Comic-Con Episode Four: A Fan's Hope

Comic-Con Episode Four: A Fan’s Hope (Director: Morgan Spurlock): Considering the treasure trove of weird­ness and fas­cin­ating material that a massive event like San Diego’s annual Comic-Con offers up, it’s sur­prising the con­ven­tion hasn’t received the feature-length doc­u­mentary treat­ment until now. Director Morgan Spurlock’s Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope revolves around the 2010 con­ven­tion, exploring the evol­u­tion of Comic-Con from its origin as an event for hard­core comic book enthu­si­asts to one that now releg­ates the actual comic book aspect to the back­ground, with much more of an emphasis put on gen­eral pop cul­ture con­tent such as movies, TV, books, toys, and video games. Along with some of the film’s high pro­file pro­du­cers (Joss Whedon, Harry Knowles, and the unfail­ingly cheerful Stan Lee), numerous other celebs and artists like Frank Miller, Matt Groening, Seth Rogen, Kevin Smith, and Kenneth Branagh weigh in with their take on the con­ven­tion. The doc­u­mentary had a com­panion coffee table book released in July and is Spurlock’s second fea­ture this year after The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

Incorporated into the probing of the convention’s his­tory and rel­ev­ance are the indi­vidual stories of a handful of Comic-Con attendees. There’s the two ama­teur comic book artists looking for their big break into the busi­ness, who are willing to endure harsh cri­ti­cism of their port­fo­lios from pro­fes­sionals and the sting of rejec­tion. Then there’s the couple who met at the pre­vious year’s con­ven­tion, with the boy­friend hil­ari­ously attempting to break free from the clingy grip of his girl­friend in order to pick up the engage­ment ring (Lord Of The Rings themed, nat­ur­ally) he’ll present to her when he pro­poses during the con­ven­tion panel fea­turing Kevin Smith. Chuck, the crusty owner of America’s largest comics retailer, Mile High Comics, struggles with a decision to sell one of his ultra-rare issues to pay off some debts and gen­er­ally frets about how his sales at the con­ven­tion are going. Another man seeks the Holy Grail of toys for his col­lec­tion, a lim­ited edi­tion figure of Marvel Comics’ Galactus char­acter. Finally, there’s Holly, an aspiring cos­tume designer for whom a two minute appear­ance on stage at the Comic-Con mas­querade event is the biggest moment of the year. She and a small group of friends dress up as char­ac­ters from the Mass Effect video game.

Clearly, with so many examples of arrested devel­op­ment from these folks, there’s plenty of oppor­tunity for ridicule here. I mean, what’s not to laugh at in a scen­ario involving a grown mar­ried man who pur­sues a toy with unwavering con­vic­tion? Laughing at, and not with, these people is an inev­it­able by-product of such fan­at­ical beha­viour, but the viewer also can’t help but develop some level of respect for the pas­sion and focus the char­ac­ters demon­strate toward their obses­sions, des­pite the pum­mel­ling their indi­vidual levels of cool take. As a hard­core fan of U2 and Bruce Springsteen who has, on a number of occa­sions, spent any­where from twelve to six­teen hours at a time waiting in gen­eral admis­sion lineups at their con­certs and gotten puzzled looks from most people when I tell them about it, let me just say that on some level, I can relate to these Comic-Con eccentrics.

Despite the inter­esting sub­ject matter, Spurlock’s doc­u­mentary feels flat and just never achieves liftoff. He juggles a lot of dif­ferent storylines, but many of them lead to unful­filling con­clu­sions and to an uneven movie overall. I’ve seen nearly all of his pre­vious film and tele­vi­sion work and thor­oughly enjoyed every one, and Spurlock, like fellow doc­u­ment­arians Michael Moore and Nick Broomfield, has always taken an active onscreen and nar­rative role in his pro­jects. Here, the cha­ris­matic film­maker barely appears in the film and provides no nar­ra­tion. Perhaps there’s a con­nec­tion, per­haps not.

Tagged as: #tiff11, comics, geeks, nerds

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