reggie Blog

I saw this one at the AFI Dallas festival..The story of a young guy who has a very bad family environment, a medical condition and an attitude toward football, all of which serve to alienate him from his surroundings.  He works at a gas station and helps out at an old movie theater.  He tries to keep the bills paid at home, where he lives with his mother, but he doesn’t always succeed.  Stephen Berra, a pro skateboarder writes and directs, and from what he said after the movie, you’ll be seeing more of his work.  Mark Webber (Jesus’ Son, Broken Flowers) stars with Zooey Deschanel (Trillian in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) Harry Dean Stanton and Bill Paxton.  Webber is very real and sympathetic and Zooey does a good job as the almost angelic and quite strange Frances.  A moving, intimate film.

The making of this film was the subject of a class at Baylor University in Waco. This probably would have been a great class to be part of and the film looks very good for a school project. Unfortunately, I don't think there was a great film to be made from this script. There were some very funny bits, but just not enough of them to stretch out for a whole movie. It's a mockumentary about a man who thinks he's a messiah. Not THE Messiah, he thinks he's just here for the residents of his home town.

The art direction added some funny touches. The characters ate from packages labeled Generic Cheese Snacks and Vomit Plopps. I liked the Warhol-styled Jesus poster on the messiah's wall- it was like the four different-colored Marilyns.

The director, a professor at Baylor, was at the screening and mentioned that the relationship between the messiah and his brother is similar to that of the main characters in American Movie, a real documentary and a better film that this one.

I grew up disliking the popular arts that my parent’s generation enjoyed.  Country music and western movies were stupid.  They were made by stupid people- the same people who allowed and supported the Vietnam war, the same people who didn’t care that we were going to destroy the planet either with bombs or pollution, the same people who oppressed Americans who looked or acted differently from them.  The same people who wanted to send me off to war for no good reason.

 

The art that I enjoyed was, I thought, new and different- a break from tradition, owing little to what came before.  It was made by people like Bob Dylan, Martin Scorsese, and Stanley Kubrick.  But later I learned that Dylan borrowed heavily from old folk and blues songs in his lyrics and that he was an admirer of country singers like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash.  And that Martin Scorsese loved John Ford and The Searchers.

 

I won’t go into all the reasons why this movie is great art, at least not right now.  But I will point out that Travis Bickle, “God’s lonely man” in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, is descended directly from John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards character in The Searchers.  And when The Joker, the narrator in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, meets the marine called Animal Mother, the scene is almost a copy of the meeting between Ethan and the Comanche called Scar.

 

So it turns out that the artists I enjoyed were standing on the shoulders of artists that I had shunned.  And people my age are not that much different from the generations that came before.  Again, young people are going off to a war that was begun for no good reason.  We are destroying the planet still, although we have avoided World War III, so far.  The allure of some art from my parent’s time is obvious and some of it takes a little study.

 

For a richer understanding of the movie and what people see in it, I suggest you rent the “bonus disk”, which is available on Netflix.  Or go to www.rottentomatoes.com, where it gets a 97% positive rating, and read some reviews.