Karina on SpoutBlog

This post was originally published in July 2008, in accordance with the New York and Self-Involvement blogathons. Ghostbusters was recently released on Blu-ray in honor of the 25th anniversary of the film’s premiere.

When I heard that the New York in the Movies Blogathon and the Self-Involvement Blogathon were happening around the same time, I got it into my head that there was one film I could write about that could legitimately fit on the nexus of both. Sure, there are “better” New York films––Manhattan, obvs, or even Metropolitan; there are films that would allow me to more deeply discuss my personal life, as the Culture Snob puts it, as it’s “filtered through movies.” But there’s no movie in any category or canon that allows me to talk about how my relationship to the city I live in has been filtered through movies since long before I lived here, quite like Ghostbusters. A close reading of the film, the way it depicts New York, and what that has to do with me, follows after the jump. The entire film is now available for streaming, but not embedding, on Hulu.

I should note from the outset that I’m too close to Ghostbusters to know whether or not it’s an empirically “good film.” But I do know it’s empirically fun to watch, and there are definitely aspects of its construction that are, at the very least, novel for its genre. It’s essentially a horror comedy made like a musical, the kind that was, in 1984, at least twenty years out of date.

“Listen!” says Ray early in the film. “Do you smell something?” This is classic screwball dialogue, delivered in a style that’s more sing-song than realistically conversational. A couple of scenes later, Venkmam actually seems to be singing along to the orchestral score when he grabs his fifth of whiskey, puts an arm around Ray and consoles him: “Call it fate/call it luck/call it kar-maaaaa/I believe/That everything happens/For a reason!” And as Ray grabs the bottle and starts rationalizing about their “ectocontainment system,” Venkman dances in place. Later, when he catches his first glimpse of Sigourney Weaver’s Dana Barrett, he’ll do a leap over a short fence; I swear Ivan Reitman stole it from Gene Kelly.

We first meet the Ghostbusters at the psych building of an unnamed university (it looks less like NYU than Columbia). The door to the parapsychology office is emblazoned with blood red graffiti: “Venkman, Burn in Hell”––giving lie to his later insistence, “But the kids love us!” And why *would* they love him? This is a guy who falsifies his experiments in order to give nerdy boys––prototypes for himself and his friends, really––electric shocks, whilst convincing superhot girls that they have psychic powers in hopes that it’ll spread their legs. He’s a gleeful, obvious sadist. And yet there’s something charming about his complete disregard for morality––he got into an an obscure corner of academia for the chicks!

From a very young age, I subconsciously understood that Ghostbusters is not really about the supernatural threat against Manhattan––it’s about this guy conquering the supernatural threat against Manhattan. It’s a Reagan-era Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which the guy most able to think for himself is impervious to the threat. Except, that as scripted by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, and played by Bill Murray, this anti-hero would look like a villain if not for his fluid, inexplicable charisma. (Note that the unlovable loser as savior archetype will be recycled in future sci fi action comedies ad infinitum; Affleck and Willis aside, Armageddon is about a whole crew of Venkmans saving the world. Scary stuff.)

A good first third of the film is an extended walk-and-talk, shot on real locations in NYC. There’s something almost Godardian (or, at least, Breathless-ian) about this; you can feel the “real” city’s energy on the margins of Reitman’s deeply nostalgic mish-mash of incongruous old Hollywood genres, even though, as the most expensive comedy ever made up to that point, the production was surely crowd controlled within an inch of its life. Still, this is a film with a deep love for a New York on a never-again brink: the anarcholibertarian spirit of the rough days of the 1970s lingered, but by 1984, everyone had money. What’s more libertarian than a redneck reticence to be ruled, backed up with a full bank account?

That reading gives Murray’s first great line in the film extra meaning. Giving the ghost-stunned librarian a basic psychlogical quiz, he asks the menopause-aged woman if she’s currently menstruating. The Eric Blore clone who apparently runs the joint scrunches his face in horror over the very idea of a functional female anatomy. “What has that got to do with it?” he groans. Murray tilts his head up to the man just slightly, as he’s going to whisper. He doesn’t. “Back off man,” he says. “I’m a scientist.” It’s a threat. It’s a Dirty Harry moment––a “Do you feel lucky, punk?” for science nerds who happen to also aspire to badassness. Ghostbusters is a movie about the scum of the earth re-setting nature’s rules, and in order to do anything like set it back, the traditional power brokers have to rely on these nerds, these scientists who are too punk rock for the academy––partially because they speak the scum of the earth’s language, but partially because they’ve got nothing left to lose.

Which isn’t to say that our boys in grey (as Casey Kasem refers to them during the “rise to fame” montage) aren’t fighting for the New Manhattan. Venkman even shape-shifts into the power-tied 80s capitalist ideal just long enough to goad Ray into financing their venture (”You’re not gonna lose the house–EVERYONE has three mortgages nowadays!”) They move into an abandoned firehouse in Tribeca, a building which Egon insists “should be condemned.” “The neighborhood is like a demilitarized zone,” he warns. Cut to Dana Barrett’s luxe apartment overlooking Central Park West, which we soon learn is ground zero for the city’s supernatural invasion.

The city’s real estate heirarchy is thus upended: still-scary downtown is a safe haven from the horrors of the high-rent district. In 1984, the city was in the first throes of the gentrification that, two decades later, has rendered the Lower East Side and the Upper East Side virtually indistinguishable. Paranormal blight is a Dorian Grey thing, the manifestation of repressed wrongs. Above all else, the Ghostbusters are laying the ground work for the city to self-homogenize, one borough at a time.

The narrative’s only joke about this is a minor one: that when the dead rise from the grave, they’ll inhabit the shells of wannabe old-money co-opers, who will then become indistinguishable from the homeless insane which their penthouses were supposed to protect them from. (I never realized until this viewing that Rick Moranis becomes possessed by the giant dog in the garden outside Tavern on the Green. No wonder I’ve always felt so fucking uncomfortable at those NYFF opening night parties.)

Ghostbusters makes it clear that evil is baked in to the city’s foundations, and like all gentrifiers, the Ghostbusters’ sanitation involves the erasure of history. The boys aren’t sure how to proceed with Dana, their first client, but the first thing that comes to Ray’s mind is to go to the hall of records and see if the building itself “has a history of psychic turbulence.” It, uh, does, and ultimately it’s demolished and rebuilt. Ghostbusters plays on an entire city’s anxieties that, as renters, our spaces don’t belong to us, that there’s a history to our homes that we’ll never know, and probably shouldn’t know. And anyone who’s ever had a roach problem won’t see Dana’s reaction when she finds an unwelcome visitor in her kitchen to be anything unfamiliar.

And like the unwelcome roommates crowding under fridges from the Battery to the Bronx, the threat in Ghostbusters is only scary because it’s so mundane. When the boys move down to scene of the library crime, they find a stack of books on the floor, extending upwards a couple of feet above their heads. The grand majority of mischiefs caused by ghosts in this film are completely everyday, and that’s why it works within the film’s shot-on-location realism––the easiest way to get a cynical audience to accept the fantastic is to make it unspectacular. The ghosts in Ghostbusters don’t kill––they don’t even make an attempt at violence until very close to the end of the film––they are very literally nothing but spectres, and the only threat they pose is a mostly psychological hindrance to everyday order.

Every time I watch it as an adult, I try to tap into what appealed to me about the film as a kid. What did I get, at 5 years old, out of a montage of the boys appearing on the covers of Omni and Atlantic Monthly? Most of the dialogue surely went over my head until I was in my teens. I’m not even talking about the subtle economic/social/moral/religious/and racial subtexts––what did I think was going on when Ray clearly gets a blow job from a poltergeist? How about when Dana, possessed by Zoul, lies under Peter and says, ” I want you inside me?” Was that double entendre unwound/negated completely by the next line––”Sounds like you got at least two people in there already”––or did I always know, subconsciously, that it wasn’t that simple? To watch this film is to necessarily grapple with how it warped my young mind, which is the height of self-involvement.

Zack Godshall’s Low and Behold, which has been somewhat missing in action since premiering at Sundance 2007, screens tonight at Anthology Film Archives in New York before coming to DVD via Carnivalesque in November. Starring eventual Alexander the Last dreamboat Barlow Jacobs, who also co-wrote and produced, it’s a drama/documentary hybrid feature set in just-post-Katrina New Orleans that doesn’t always hold up in terms of narrative, but is always interesting in the frission between fact and embellishment. As I wrote when I saw it at Sundance:

Director Zach Godshall and co-writer/producer/star Barlow Jacobs incorporate documentary footage into a fictional tale of insurance adjusters in the devastated city. Jacobs plays Turner Stull, a blank-eyed young white guy who moves down to NOLA to evaluate storm damage under the tutelage of his carpetbagging uncle. Forced to traverse an unfamiliar city in which simple signposts and landmarks have been erased, making a living by delivering bad news to a seemingly endless stream of justifiably angry folks, Turner strikes up an uneasy friendship with an enigmatic black man named Nixon. This unlikely pair spends the bulk of the film driving around, attending to Turner’s insurance appointments and searching for Nixon’s lost dog. Their convergent quests may be a little too convenient, yet the set-up works. The actors, particularly Robert Longstreet as Turner’s uncle, are continuously engrossing, and the survivor interviews never fail to astound. Though less interested in mounting an investigation or assigning blame, Low and Behold is just as affecting as Spike Lee’s Where The Levees Broke–sometimes more so.

Low and Behold is the second feature on a bill that starts at 6pm. More info here.

Virtually since the production of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies was announced, various parties have expressed concern that the video fetishism of Collateral and Miami Vice would make a less than appropriate presentation format for a glammy gangster piece set in the 1930s. If *only* Public Enemies looked more like Miami Vice — if only Mann had brought back cinematographer Dion Beebe for a third consecutive collaboration/experiment in pushing the limits of what high quality digital video can do. Lensed by The Insider cinematographer Dante Spinotti, Public Enemies is a drab looking film, its shaky-cam aesthetic coming off as less considered — and far less explicable — than that of any number of indie dramas employing similar run-and-gun techniques on a millionth of this film’s budget. Add in a wildly uneven performance style, an unnecessarily attenuated running time and a sound mix that’s problematically muddy even after evidently excessive after-the-fact dubbing, and the result is a severely miscalculated marriage of style to subject. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Public Enemies is essentially a really expensive mumblecore film with ADR and guns — and the M-word comparison is not merited solely by its conspicuous form. It’s also a film in which the world of work and general era-appropriate social consciousness is conquered by an emphasis on love. And that, in the end, may be the only thing Public Enemies does right.

Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger, the Robin Hood of Depression America, on the lam from a fledgling FBI led from a desk by J. Edgar Hoover (an unrecognizable Billy Crudup) and on the ground by Agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale, on growling Batman autopilot). Dillinger meets a girl named Billie (Marion Cotillard) in a Chicago nightclub and decides, on the spot, that she’s going to be his girl; she resists a bit but he’s kind of a bully, and she kind of likes it, so soon they’re having epic, virtually abstract sex. Then there’s a bunch of shooting and running around — half the time, I couldn’t figure out what was going on, partially because I could barely see it, partially because I could scarcely understand the dialogue, much of it mumbled and/or drowned in score — but eventually Billie ends up in jail. She won’t snitch on “my man Johnny.”  Spoiler alert: Batman finds him anyway.

Depp interprets Dillinger as a nattily-dressed gentleman murderer/celebrity thief with a fraction of the winking zeal he brought to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. If those films stand as examples of how rote genre exercises are sometimes the best vehicles for balls-to-the-wall star power, Public Enemies has the inverse problem: the style and structure of the film mutes its megastar, reducing him to an image mostly devoid of personality. This is not necessarily an unexpected direction for Mann: Miami Vice, though arguably more inspired by the music video-as-emotional-placeholder ethos of the original TV series, featured two lead performances that worked on a purely visual level … in large part because Colin Farrell and Gong Li were both tasked with linguistic challenges that they could not meet. Casting women who cannot speak English intelligibly seems to be a growing trademark of Michael Mann films: in Enemies, Cotillard tries out a handful of accents, none of them convincing for an American coat check girl circa 1933. Increasingly, Mann seems to be making movies that might be better off silent.
As far as I could tell, Public Enemies tells us that there’s a Depression going on in two ways: with very occasional visual reminders, such as an image of a hobo slumped in front of a palatial bank that Dillinger is about to rob, and with a title on the screen. Otherwise, this is pure 1930s movie escapism, which would be fine if Spinotti’s camera was up to the task of capturing the contrast between the glitzy dance halls where Dillinger plays and the scrappy climes in which he hides. Instead, both poles are flattened out, and whatever tension could conceivably be milked from a story with a long-proscribed ending collapses in kind.
But there is one area in which Public Enemies nods to the gangster movies of old that does succeed. The gangster myth, especially as manifested in the 1930s flicks that reinforced the fame of someone like Dillinger in his own time, only works if the gangster and his lifestyle are linked to love and desire. Being sexy is not something that Johnny Depp has to work at; this is something that just requires Johnny Depp to show up. Though Cotillard is not convincing as a US Citizen, she would have to work much harder than she does to be unconvincing as a woman in love with Johnny Depp. The romance between Dillinger and Billie does what gangster romances are supposed to do: it humanizes the criminal and demonizes the cops and the feds who are trying to keep the lovers apart. The best moments in Public Enemies — a brutally violent interrogation scene in which Billie is humiliated in virtually every way short of rape, a scene where Dillinger takes a casual walk through the office of the men who are trying to jail him — have a kind of surreal quality, in which the boy and girl, embolded by a passion that’s making them crazy, are driven to test what they can get away with. It’s because of these moments that Public Enemies can’t be called a complete failure, or even a must-avoid. It’s not a bad film, it’s just badly made.

This piece was originally published in March during the AFI Dallas Film Festival. The Hurt Locker opens in select theaters today.

When I was finishing my BFA in the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 00s, Kathryn Bigelow was the school’s most famous filmmaker alum, despite the fact that she matriculated at SFAI as a painter (she studied filmmaking as a graduate student at Columbia after a stint in the Independent Study program at the Whitney Museum). The work of the woman who made Point Break and Strange Days wasn’t exactly part of the curriculum of the then fine art-focused (sometimes to a fault) Film program at SFAI, where Hollywood film was rarely considered worthy of scrutiny; those who did readily embrace her success as part of the school’s pedigree often named glass ceiling smashing as Bigelow’s greatest achievement — as if to say, “Yes, she makes mainly action and genre blockbusters with big name stars, but she’s a woman, so that makes her subversive.” The argument that Bigelow’s work is somehow subversive just because she has a vagina is not only ludicrous, but unnecessary, being that her films are actually subversive. Marked by moral ambiguity, insistently complicating easy distinctions between good and evil, using Bigelow’s patented point-of-view camera to implicate the viewer in the dark worlds and questionable choices of her subjects, her films literally subvert the viewer’s expectations dictated by genre.

And yet the “good for a girl” backhanded praise continues to dog her. At the Q & A after a screening of The Hurt Locker at AFI Dallas, moderator Gary Cogill commented that his favorite book about the Iraq war was written by a woman (The Long Road Home by Martha Raddatz) and then asked Bigelow a question that essentially amounted to, “Isn’t weird that The Hurt Locker is so good, since you’re a girl?” Bigelow deflected the question, but the issue came up again when an audience member who introduced herself as a member of Women in Film gushed that it’s “almost miraculous” that Bigelow has “embedded” herself in the making of “big boys movies.” This is when I decided it was time to leave; as i made my way out, I heard Bigelow respond that he choice of material is chiefly “instinctual” and not motivated by a desire to step where she supposedly doesn’t belong by virtue of chromosomal difference.

That the conversation surrounding Bigelow’s work seems to consistently get stuck in the mud of gender politics is all the more tragic in the case of The Hurt Locker, a film of such complex construction and complicated values that it should be able to sustain much deeper inquiry than what it feels like for a girl. If anything, it’s a film that bears the mark of a painter, full of deceptively beautiful imagery masking multiple layers of meaning.

The story of a three-man IED dismantling crew’s final month in rotation in Baghdad circa 2004, Locker is less a linear story than a character study threaded with increasingly hard-to-bear tension and punctuated, with no predictable rhythm, by bursts of violence and fire. The explosions in the film carry an unusual beauty, one which inspires its own tangle of questions. Since its Toronto premiere, there’s been much talk that The Hurt Locker is the first apolitical Iraq film; at the Q & A, Cogill praised it for “not trying to beat us to death with message”, to which writer Mark Boal responded, “Fact is, when you’re standing over a bomb, you might know about geo-global politics or the price of oil, but you’re not thinking about it.” But the audience may not be able to abandon such thoughts so easily, and Bigelow plays with this. She’s not afraid to fetishize lethal, politically motivated explosions, to invite us to take visual and even emotional pleasure in a screen filling with fire in a way that no film about this conflict has dared.

There’s a likely reason for other auteurs’ reticence: as a media event, 9/11 made the taking of pleasure in cinematic imagery of politically motivated destruction a tricky business. Shooting digitally with multiple cameras with virtually verite immediacy, Bigelow even seemingly reappropriates the “techniques” that mark the news network’s image blankets of disasters like 9/11: zooms, devastating slow motion, the jerk of a hand held camera finding its unexpected subject. Bigelow’s confidence that the audience is psychologically ready to enjoy imagery of bombs detonating in the context of our real life fight taken under the pretense of preventing another terrorist attack *is* a political statement, if not an ideological one. Its characters may not be thinking about politics within the space of their work, but The Hurt Locker is nothing if not a work of political engagement.

October Country, Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s debut documentary feature describing a year in the lives of four generations of Moshers living in a depressed upstate New York suburb, is a rare work of impressionistic nonfiction. Its patchwork of visual detail often reminded me of the photographs of Gregory Crewdson (whose work you might have seen on the cover of this Yo La Tengo album, or this Six Feet Under campaign). Crewdson’s work usually imbues suburban and domestic scenes with the aura of the supernatural; nothing actually horrific is visible in the frame, but the presence of something is always implied, out of frame, in the air. With their arresting images of smoked-clogged rooms and American flags convulsing in the wind, Mosher and Palmieri demonstrate a similar knack for lighting and framing the mundane to spin it towards the surreal, suggesting an invisible but not imperceptible force altering the proceedings. The style fits because the Moshers are essentially living a ghost story, with each member so haunted by past decisions that’ve lost control of the future.

The basics of the Mosher family story are largely outlined by Dottie, wife of PTSD-suffering veteran Don and mother of Donna. A survivor of a number of abusive relationships, Donna has two daughters: teenage Daneal, who is trying to protect her baby daughter Ruby from her own abusive ex-husband; and preteen Desi, whose father is in prison. Clearly, the women show a weakness, across generations, for shitty, shifty men — or, as Daneal puts it, “self-centered abusive motherfuckers with bad attitudes who think they’re better than everyone else.” As in Samantha Buck’s 21 Below, this seems to partially be a symptom of the community — there doesn’t seem to be a wealth of better options in Mohawk Valley for romantic and sexual partners — but the Mosher women are also very consciously trapped in rituals of learned behavior. Each woman speaks to the family curse. As Dottie laments, “Young girls today think it’s going to be different. They can’t comprehend the fact that you’ve been there, you’ve done that, and you don’t want that happening to them.” But all the while, she’s getting suckered by her charismatic criminal of a foster son. In this family, women take a leap of trust, and then they get hurt; rinse, repeat. The other female role model is Don’s sister, a Wiccan outcast who hangs out at the cemetery because, as she puts it, “Some of my best friends are ghosts.” This could be October Country’s tagline.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Halloween is a big deal in this house, and in fact, teh film spans a year from one edition of the holiday to the next. It’s through the first Halloween scene, when Desi spreads out her candy and her older sister (cradling her own infant) and grandmother partake that it becomes gut-twistingly apparent that the women in this family, even if forced to “grow up to fast”, age without fully maturing. As Daneal puts it later, as a mea culpa, “I’m still a kid, too. You can’t play mommie if you’re not grown up yet.”

A classical lower-middle-class lack of options is the setting and the defining limitation of the Mosher women’s lifestyle, but it’s not the only factor shaping the hopelessness of the lives. October Country speaks to the power of family as a determining characteristic, as a co-dependent force from which it takes a motivating desperation to escape. As a movie about the struggle to break the cycle, it makes sense that it could only be told with the perspective of a member of the family who did manage to leave the fold and live a life unscripted by circumstance and local ritual. Donal Mosher never appears on screen in October Country, to the apparent frustration of some viewers. I think the filmmakers make their presence felt, through their visual choices, the intimacy of the footage, and in what appears to be an isolated case of intervention.

Early in the film, Desi, often left to amuse herself with TV and video games in the absence of her single mom, watches footage just recorded by the filmmakers at a family gathering. Desi responds to footage as though it’s an ordinary home movie, which in a way it is, but this scene is also a kind of microcosm of October Country’s thesis query. A portrait of a family of women very consciously stuck in a cycle of self-limiting (if not self-destructive) behavior, the film and the family within it have their fingers crossed that Desi will be the first female Mosher to learn from the family’s mistakes. Maybe it could be as simple as literally watching it.

____________________

October Country won the US Feature grand prize at SilverDocs this week; it screens in competition at LAFF tonight.

I’ve seen five films in three days at the Los Angeles Film Festival, and every single one is, at least partially, about the break-up of a romantic relationship. Three of these films are in the Narrative Competition: Harmony & Me, Hollywood, je t’aime, and Wah Do Dem. It would be an interesting exercise to try to make the argument that this trend is a sign of the times, that (of course!) filmmakers are using the universal touchstone of romantic trauma as a key to understanding a wider world torn asunder. But break-up movies tend to resist obvious real-world relevance. These three films all exist in vague fantasy worlds where the defining difficulties of life in our contemporary world don’t exist, where our heroes — all of them men, two out of three pining over lost women and one haunted by an ex-boyfriend — are essentially unaware that anything exists but their own heartbreak, until that outside world barges in and demands their attention. This is as it should be — this is how break-up films work — but it does seem notable that a film festival would devote nearly half of their narrative competition to movies about white men moping. Hey, maybe this *is* realism! Let’s investigate.

Motivated by a free cruise that co-director Ben Chace won in a raffle and shot quasi-surreptitiously on a working luxury liner, Wah Do Dem pulls together an inspired mix of cultural references, mashing up the tropes of classic cruise movies and bad vacation flicks to the tune of stoney reggae. Sean Bones plays Max, a lanky Brooklynite who gets dumped by his girlfriend (Norah Jones), ends up taking their would-be romantic cruise vacation solo, and gets lost in a foreign land. At first sticking pretty faithfully to the lonelyheart movie playbook, Do Dem takes a sharp, unexpected narrative turn about halfway through, morphing from a movie about a boy on a boat looking to heal his broken heart into an almost-horror story about cultural difference and naivete. Traveling Americans don’t get much uglier than Max, with his joke plastic sunglasses, scoffing entitlement and general hipster affectation that threaten to spill over into Napoleon Dynamite territory. Bones turns the character into a caricature of contemporary post-collegiate practical incompetence, which is kind of a brilliant way to critique both American and hipster exceptionalism. It’s also kind of a problem, since there’s no one else in the film to care about. Kevin Bewersdorf shows up briefly as a mysterious stranger, offering hope that Wah Do Dem will turn into some kind of thriller at sea, but he soon disappears in a puff of gay panic.

Speaking of gay panic: strident commentary on homophobia in the film industry is the most annoying thing about Hollywood, je t’aime, an otherwise appealing comedy about a Frenchman who flees a broken relationship in Paris to indulge his dreams of California sunshine and stardom, only to be haunted by visions of the impossibly cute boy he left behind. This is a movie in which an aging drag queen counsels a wannabe actor with solemn warnings about where “Hollywood wants its faggots.” But it’s also a movie that creates a heightened but authentic-feeling portrait of a certain kind of Los Angeles life that’s scrubbed from most representations of the city: here, the streets are full of hookers who are neither pretty nor anatomical women and riding the bus is hard evidence that you’re marginalized. Unfolding with a fluid dream logic, je t’aime pulls off a magic act of translating the milieu of mid-90s Gregg Araki into a mostly sunny comedy with the sweep of a movie with budget exponentially larger. Dem and je t’aime both translate the feeling of being romantically unwanted into geographic displacement and otherness; both critique the cliches of their respective subgenres (one an Emotional Catharsis Through Exotic Roadtrip movie, the other Wacky Gay Romantic Comedy) while shamelessly indulging them.  It’s odd to see two films with very different trappings going through the same basic motion within 24 hours; it’s even odder to imagine a jury evaluating the two against one another.

In the context of this competition, Harmony & Me, about which I’ve already written, feels shockingly idiosyncratic in its comedic voice; up against the movie-movie gloss of Hollywood je t’aime and the confidently styled Do Dem, its indifference to aesthetics is unignorable. Still, I’ve now seen the movie three times, and every time I’ve laughed so hard that I’ve cried. If we’re grading on the ability to smear mascara, it wins.

On a panel discussion before its world premiere screening at SilverDocs last night, AJ Schnack used the phrase “Robert Altman-esque” to describe the construction of his new film, Convention. This is accurate as a reference to the stylistic tropes we classically think of when we think of Altman — shot by nine filmmaker/camerapersons, Convention tracks the interwoven stories of a number of semi-interrelated characters as they produce, participate in, protest, protect and/or report on the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver — but the film also shares what Roger Ebert, in his review of Nashville, refered to as Altman’s “humanism”, the way he “sees people with his camera in such a way as to enlarge our own experience.” The multiple cameras and the multi-faceted streams of vision that they bring to Convention accomplish two major feats in terms of altering the scale of perspective: they condense nearly an entire city’s goings-on during the biggest international event in its recent history into the managable microcosmic experiences of a few of its thoroughly “normal” citizens, while at the same time opening up spaces in the lives of strangers that the viewer can sink into, and thus sync up to a communal sense of Something Happening. It seems so simple, and yet it’s so rare that you actually find yourself in a theater, having a moment of collective transcendance that makes you think, “This is why movies exist.”

The cameras of Schnack and his filmmaking partners (including Oscar nominated documentarians Laura Poitras and Julia Reichert and True/False Film Festival director David Wilson) capture visiting politicians and other heavyweights only in passing, focusing instead on Denver locals with an instrumental role to play in the Convention ecosystem. Memorable characters include Katherine, a DNC city planner tasked to put on “the best convention ever” by Mayor John Hickenlooper (who is seen only sporadically, most memorably when recounting his philosophy of political salesmanship and when lending his scooter to plucky can-do assistant Chantal); Bill, a Cuban refugee-turned-deputy mayor; Allison, a bright young Denver Post reporter taken off the higher education beat and thrown into the choppy waters of Hillary Clinton supporters; Kevin, the designated liason between the city and various protest groups; and Mike and Barbara, two aged local lefties who seem to latch their passion on to any cause willing to make use of it.

Convention’s dramatic climax is built around the largest protest to go off during the week, a demonstration led by Iraq Veterans Against The War and joined by seemingly every penny-ante would-be agitator hanging out in Denver waiting for something to happen (the featured members of local groups Recreate ‘68 and Tent State are depicted as charmingly inept and out of touch). Interestingly, earlier in the film the poor economy is cited as a factor that might diminish the size of protests — the assumption is that people won’t be able to take off work, and if they’re out of work, they won’t be able to afford to travel — but of course the economy itself become a motivator for protest, with IVAW demanding not just an end to the war, but expanded benefits for those who’ve served. As the uniformed soldiers are mobilizing the masses outside the Pepsi Center behind their quest to present a letter to the Obama camp — and as riot police move in on horses to enforce control over the situation — inside the Pepsi Center the delegates are celebrating their just-wrapped roll call by obliviously dancing to “Love Train.”

Playing out without narration and only minimal expository on-screen titling, it’s this kind of shot-by-shot irony that contains the bulk of Convention’s extra-narrative commentary. Cut down by Schnack and Nathan Truesdell from 90 hours of footage shot by nine people to a 90 minute running time, it almost goes without saying Convention is a triumph of documentary editing. On a primary level, music plays a big role; the source cues alternate between sweep and march, and the cuts rhythmically follow. But Schnack and Truesdell’s cutting for subtext is more exciting. In a film full of characters that would be secondary in a standard political documentary, with juicy verbal asides and reaction shots that would merely another director’s piece here serving as the meat, the juxtapositions between sound and image (and from image to image) are always elegant, and sometimes almost subliminally provocative. Down to the fizzling type design of the subtitles that translate inaudible dialogue, the film’s craft is meticulous all around.

Though not really a political film, Convention is unabashedly pro-Obama, insofar as Obama is a symbol of hope and possibility. The final scenes, in which the then-candidate’s rousing nomination acceptance speech is interwoven with footage of Convention’s less-famous characters givin inspirational talks to one another, offer irresistible testament to Obama’s power to galvanize the masses behind the promise of self-creation and the potential of “normal” Americans to enact change. If Convention has a weakness, it’s that it never second-guesses that concept of hope or critiques its source, but instead rides it like a wave. In times this tough, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Free of the cynicism that has slowly crept back into political discourse since Obama’s inaurguration, Convention is a time capsule preserving a few brief moments of utopian collective confidence, a work of pure contemporary Americana that’s sorely needed.

“Why is it so hard to make a film about yourself?” asks Richard Rogers in Alexander Olchs’ The Windmill Movie. He shortly thereafter unwittingly answers his own question via another question: “Is there anything to say?” Opening today at Film Forum in New York, Windmill is a kind of personal documentary by proxy. After his teacher/mentor/collaborator Rogers died of cancer, Olchs was invited by Rogers’ widow, world-renowned photographer Susan Meiselas, to comb through the Harvard professor/documentarian’s vast archives of film and video, shot towards a hypothetical autobiographical movie that Rogers was never able to put together.
For Rogers, self-examination lead to a kind of tunnel-vision, embodied by an oft-seen image in Windmill of Rogers looking into the mirror from behind the camera. One of Windmill’s key ideas seems to be that the camera actually got in the way of Rogers’ ability to clearly see his own reflection. that, because of constant self-doubt as to whether he, as a white man born into money, had anything worthwhile to say, the apparatus through which he made his living filming other people couldn’t double as a tool through which to see himself. The service that Rogers provided to his subjects — of finding the truth in the raw material they offered up — Olchs attempts to perform by any means necessary for his lost friend.

Olchs is able to sync up some of Rogers’ material, much of it gorgeous color film footage inspired by his youth in the Hamptons, to audio recordings that Rogers also left behind. As we look at faded color 16mm images of green fields and and girls on bikes and girls on beaches and legs and smiles and girls and girls, Rogers’ voice explains that his formative sexual experiences happened on the beach, as a child amongst a gaggle of sunbathing wives left alone while their husbands worked in the city. “The summer is incredibly important. Incredibly important things happen in the summer,” he’s decided, and this will be the running thesis of his film. You believe him when he says that those summer hours aspent s the only male presence (and a purely voyeuristic one) in a female environment, the rest of his gender off securing the caste, were key to his “becoming a person.” As a man, he never lacked for sexual partners, but had much more trouble with his professional identity. Not only could he not finish the personal film, but his less-than-lucrative choice of filmmaking niche put him in general opposition to his monied family and the notion of masculinity, deeply tied to an ability to sustain a family’s lifestyle via professional contribution, that prevailed in his Hamptons spiritual home. More than once, Rogers laments not being able to add to the family fortune by being a banker, or at least “Steven Spielberg.” This is the strongest stuff in The Windmill Movie, the sections where Rogers’ non-existent self-portrait really seems to have been stitched into some kind of benevolent Frankenstein-like life.
Olchs’ bolder creative moves are less successful, but still often compelling. In an attempt to be fair to Rogers’ own interest in the idea of recreation of reality as the path to truth, Olchs chose to funnel the left-behind material into a documentary-fiction hybrid, with Wallace Shawn (ie: “Dick’s old friend Wally”, with whom Rogers went to prep school) performing Rogers in copies of scenes shot before his death. The material with Shawn is, surprisingly, the film’s weakest link; apparently a vestigial tail of an abandoned project in which Shawn would play Rogers and Cynthia Nixon would take the role of Susan Meiselas, there’s not enough of it left in the finished piece for what’s there to add up to anything, so when it is woven in, it’s a distraction. Olchs also scripted a narration from Rogers’ perspective, based on conversations with the older filmmaker’s friends and family and the diaries he left behind, which Olchs performs himself. This is a fascinatingly ballsy move (one wonders, did Olchs come up with phrases like “my thwarted sperm,” or was that an actual Rogersism?), one which works as an analogue to the sequences edited to Rogers’ left-behind recordings, but never matches the synchronous power of the late filmmaker’s images matched to his voice.
Ultimately, one gets swept up in the first soapy, then tragic melodrama of the life matter that overwhelmed Rogers’ desire/compulsion/ability to make art — his youthful bohemian sexuality aged into an inability to choose between potential life partners, the endless Hamptons summer of sun-and-booze-soaking soured into melanoma, then brain cancer — while still longing for a discreet “Where I’m From” statement of equal precision and beauty to Rogers’ late-60s short Quarry (which will screen before Olch’s feature at Film Forum). That key question posed early on — “Is there anything to say?” — is answered by Rogers’ own material with a frustrated “yes”; Olchs’ material plays up the tragedy that Rogers’ confidence in his own voice failed to metastasize quicker than cancer.