Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

Trouble the Water  (2008)

Kim Roberts happened to buy a $20 video camera just days before Hurricane Katrina hit her home city of New Orleans. The day before the storm hit, explaining why she was using the camera to record everything in sight, Kim was already talking apocalypse: “I’m showing the world that we still had a world, before the storm come,” she said, from behind the lens. “It’s like the Lord is upset, angry with New Orleans. And I don’t blame him.”

Roberts’ amateur video footage of her neighborhood shot before, during and after the storm is sprinkled throughout Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s documentary Trouble the Water, which just won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The footage itself has been billed as “harrowing,” but in practice most of it is too muddy and unfocused (literally on both counts) to make much of an impact. That said, the professionally shot material, of Roberts and her husband’s struggle to rebuild their lives after the storm, tells as powerful a story about the New Orleans diaspora as I’ve seen on film, from an angle unfamiliar. It plays out like a love story, with the Roberts’ turning their backs on their city in times of crisis, only to realize that their hearts are there after all.

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Under discussion:

Magnolia  (1999)

I thought it was interesting that BuzzFeed posted an unaltered clip from Magnolia as #2 on their list of the 16 Best Tom Cruise Parody Videos. The implication being that Paul Thomas Anderson managed to rope Cruise himself into a meta-parody, years before most of the culture would come around to seeing fervent Scientologist/couch jumper/actor as the easiest of targets.

Certainly, there’s a sort of masturbatory preening and Master of the Universe delusion to Cruise’s Magnolia character that seems to come up again in the famed Scientology video (which most of the other clips on the BuzzFeed page directly spoof), but that aspect of Cruise’s persona has only really blossomed in the past few years. Paul Thomas Anderson could very well be a genius, but if he were psychic, I don’t think he ever would have made Magnolia in the first place. The more interesting idea is not that Cruise was parodying himself in Magnolia, but that he’s become a parody of a character that he played nine years ago, which at the time was considered a huge departure from his All-American slickster hero.

In case you missed it, Paul, Kevin and I examined the evolution of Cruise’s career in this episode of FilmCouch.

Under discussion:

Dance Party, USA  (2006)

Quiet City  (2007)

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Benten Films‘ second superbly-packaged DVD set (they previously released Joe Swamberg’s LOL) hits stores today. The set includes two films directed by Aaron Katz: Dance Party, USA, a kind of correction to Larry Clark’s KIDS, set in Portland and starring exquisitely natural local teens; and the Independent Spirit Award-nominated Quiet City, which I previously reviewed here. Both films are about a young boy and girl who venture out into urban spaces looking for an authentic experience. What sets them apart from traditional coming-of-age stories is, in part, the patience Katz shows in allowing his characters to take the time to settle into a tentative trust together. The films are both languid and totally economical; in terms of action, virtually nothing “happens,” and yet if there’s any fat to cut on either, I can’t find it.

In Dance Party, we follow Gus, a teenage lothario whose sexual exploits seem rooted in a need to have a kernel of truth on which to base the elaborate stories with which he regales his friend/protege Bill, to a Fourth of July house party. Within minutes, Gus has talked a previously unknown girl into bed, but when that’s over??????Katz cuts straight from the initiation of the flirtation to Gus rolling off the unnamed female like a cold wave??????he still needs someone to talk to.

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