The Reeler on Spout

Under discussion:

The Education of Charlie Banks  (2007)

On a rainy Friday in New York, The Reeler met up with Fred Durst and Jesse Eisenberg, the respective director and star of the Tribeca premiere The Education of Charlie Banks. The pair discussed where Charlie Banks takes its New York cinema influences from as well as the cultural preconceptions that accompany the former Limp Bizkit frontman's feature filmmaking debut.

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Under discussion:

Suburban Girl  (2007)

Postcards From Tora Bora  (2007)

Live!  (2007)

A Guest of Life  (2007)

Heckler  (2007)

Lovesickness  (2007)

Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin in Suburban Girl

By Michelle Orange

After five days of complete Tribeca submersion, I have now jeopardized several friendships and developed a twitch in my left eye, all, it seems, to be the bearer of bad news about Suburban Girl, the adaptation of Melissa Bank's huge-selling The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. If you weren’t already gagging (via a spoon, ideally) on that title (why would they change it?), the sight of Sarah Michelle Gellar in various stages of clinchdom with Alec Baldwin just might do it. New York’s publishing industry is certainly ripe for its own Network (or perhaps more likely, Broadcast News), and this is just as certainly not it, though one could argue that it doesn’t aspire to be. The problem is it doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, and writer/director Marc Klein’s adaptation has taken most of the spark out of Bank's book, resulting in a tepid-to-smarmy chick flick.

Baldwin (in the Mr. Big school of New York high lifers) as Archie does his best to charm as mentor and lover to Gellar’s 24-year-old fledgling book editor, but the couple can’t overcome their soggy chemistry. Unlike Claire Danes’ mopey Shopgirl, Gellar’s editor is supposed to have her mind on her career, yet she hates her job and moves in with her raspy benefactor at the plot’s earliest convenience. Baldwin suffered some unkind jeering from the press screening jackals, but it is, sadly, a little rich to hear him talking about being a shitty father to (and leaving messages for) the daughter that will no longer speak to him. Suburban Girl more than meets the requisite gimme gimme girl movie quotient; I don’t know many associate editors who wear Christian Louboutin’s, but I guess they’re nice to look at, and New York is roughly sketched out in a host of visually flat clichés. Gooey chapter headings divide the film into episodes that find our young heroine coming of age via the guidance and foibles of a 50-year-old man. “A girl can’t grow up until she loses a father, and leaves an Archie,” Gellar says, by way of the standard “Let the River Run” epiphany. I’m sorry, but what a load of horseshit. No wonder it was a best seller.

Postcards from Tora Bora is a first person documentary that follows co-director Wazhmah Osman on her first trip home to Afghanistan since her family fled to America shortly after the Russian invasion in 1979. Osman’s voiceover is filled with keen observation about the relationship refugees have with their home country, and the complex business of returning from exile. The visuals, particularly the crude, child-like animations of bombs falling and the toddler Osman avenging her homeland (ostensibly conjuring the way a six-year-old might represent the conflict) are less successful, though the access Osman and her co-director Kelly Dolak get to ravaged Kabul, including a local prison, is depressingly impressive (a war museum houses ammunition from its decades worth of wars with various countries; it’s like an international house of land mines). The prison, however, is one where Osman’s own father was held captive and tortured for months during the Russian war, and upon his release he chose not to join his family in New York. The film begins to hit its stride about two-thirds of the way through, when Osman finally finds her father, a doctor and local hero, tending to one of his free medical clinics in Kabul. This man seems like the natural subject for Osman’s thoughtful but otherwise uneven documentary; estranged from his own family, he dedicated his life to the orphans of Afghanistan.

Lovesickness is billed as a “melancholy comedy.” I know this because I sought out the party line after sitting through this bewildering offering from Puerto Rican director Carlitos Ruiz Ruiz (and produced by Benecio del Toro). Combining three seemingly non-related story lines about love, betrayal, and obsession, Ruiz seems to be going for an eccentric, bittersweet humor that rarely finds its own level, both in general and in this film. Most successful is the love triangle set up when an elderly woman’s ex-husband comes crawling home after 30 years, only to find the mother of his children shacked up with her second husband, whom she also divorced -- 12 years ago. The two old men get in a pissing contest for Flora’s attention, and she is forced to reckon with her feelings for her wandering ex. Luis Guzman plays a cheating husband in the second story strand, who is found out by his wife on the way to her grandmother’s funeral. Attempts at “zany” humor in this scenario are more shrill than funny, though they look like a laugh riot compared to the third story, that of a lunk-headed mama’s boy who takes a bus hostage when the driver won’t agree to marry him on the spot. Lovesickness features editing that is well-paced but material that is not, and characters that, for the most part, are not given the opportunity to connect not only to each other, but to us.

Live! has more in common with recent docu-maybe-tery American Cannibal than I imagine star and producer Eva Mendes would like. It is also a behind-the-scenes satire of the television industry à la last month’s The TV Set. The question for me is whether anything new or cutting can be said about an industry that satirizes itself. Mendes sharpens her acrylics and tightens her skirts to play a reality TV producer pitching a game show wherein contestants play Russian Roulette, vying to (not) blow themselves away for millions of dollars. The whole process, from pitch to pilot, is being filmed by a documentary crew, who develop professional conflicts when they get involved in the production process. Too much of this film seems to be devoted to what amounts to scenes from the kind of reality shows I avoid at all cost. Mendes relies on some alpha dog tics (such as constantly stuffing her face) in playing the soulless big gun, but can’t freshen the essential staleness of the concept.

Michael Addis’s Heckler begins with promise, tapping into the fascination we have with the strange people who live to make us laugh exploited in Comedian and The Aristocrats. Using actor Jamie Kennedy as a lightning rod, Addis assembles a merry crew of pissed off comics to swap stories and philosophies about hecklers as democracy gone awry. There is some cogent insight into the actual and imagined functions of the heckler, and an entire culture’s mistaken belief that they have the right to never be “offended,” but all of this soon gives way to Kennedy’s ax with film critics, all of whom are lumped together with back-row hecklers, and all of whom he seeks to (tediously) confront for their blistering reviews of his film, Son of the Mask.

Even duller (if more nutritious) than watching Kennedy hijack what could have been a good documentary with his quivering ego is A Guest of Life, film composer Tibor Smezö’s instructive account of a Transylvanian explorer named Alexander Csoma de Korös’ journey into the Himalayas in the early nineteenth century. Some rather staid but colorful animation is varied with unexplained archival footage while PBS-style narration details what Alexander thought was a trip to find the origins of the Hungarian people but ended up being his discovery of Tibet and Buddhism as the world came to know it. As Scottish writer Rory Stewart chronicled his retracing of Babur’s medieval journey across Afghanistan in his book The Places in Between, Smezö seeks to recapture Alexander’s journey, step for step. Unfortunately the delicately groovy score is the liveliest thing this Life has going.

Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout:

Suburban Girl
Postcards from Tora Bora
Lovesickness
Live!
Heckler
A Guest of Life

Under discussion:

Doubletime  (2007)

A Walk Into the Sea  (2006)

Unstrung  (2007)

Sons of Sakhnin United  (2007)

The True Legend of Tony Vilar  (2007)

The Animated World of John Canemaker  Production Year

One of the jump rope powerhouses of Stephanie Johnes' Doubletime

By Michelle Orange

I seem to have tapped into a documentary-rich vein three days into my Tribeca tunneling, and three of them have a distinctly New York angle. A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory , joins the ever-increasing canon of Warholia, but only tangentially; director Esther Robinson has attempted to eke out the story around the 1966 disappearance (and apparent suicide) of her uncle Danny, a one-time Factory denizen.

Robinson gets access to a host of Factory personalities, some of whom may be remembered from their last (albeit fictional) appearance in February’s Edie Sedgwick bio-hazard, Factory Girl. The problem is that no one seems to recall the young man from Massachusetts, further proof of the solipsistic, craven opportunism fueling Warhol’s so-called family. What people like Brigid Berlin recall in detail is the emotional politics raging within Warhol’s inner circle, and the disaffection that led most people to seek out entry. The jewel in Robinson’s documentary is a cache of previously unseen films shot by Williams, a budding filmmaker at the time, and editor of the first Maysles brothers film. Williams is shown to have a luminous, idiosyncratic eye, and in reeling through them, along with poking into her family’s omerta on the subject, Robinson crafts a fittingly oblique tribute to her uncle.

Another disappeared personality is the subject of The True Legend of Tony Vilar, first time director Giuseppe Gagliardi’s sweet, sometimes enervating, bizarro documentary about the vanishing of a young Calabrian crooner. Tony Vilar left Italy in 1952 for Argentina, where he wound up becoming a famous singer before suddenly falling into obscurity. Italian musician Peppe Voltarelli plays a distant cousin of Vilar’s who is determined to track him down. Beginning in Buenos Aires in 2005, Peppe, with his outré wardrobe and shady sideburns, fits right in with the colorful locals; Gagliardi combines a series of obviously staged happenstance with archival footage of Vilar to form a sort of emigration picaresque.

Peppe finds a vibrant Italian community in Argentina, and when his search takes him to New York City, he is surprised by the staunch Italians populating the Bronx, Brooklyn and New Jersey. Most of the scenes of Peppe interacting with the locals are played for laughs, and the rambling re-enactments begin to bleed into actual musical numbers, with Peppe extolling the strange benefits of this globally extended Italian family. The journey and the destination lose sight of each other early on, but the film’s winking look at Italian stereotypes and the proud heritage of third and fourth generation Italian Americans develops a stand-alone charm.

While male American singers like Ray Charles and Johnny Cash are regularly feted with hagiographic biopics, female legends of the same period seem to have make due with capable and comprehensive documentaries. Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer is a pocket treasure of O’Day performance footage spanning over 60 years, almost up until her death last November. Co-directors Ian McCrudden and Robbie Cavolina have assembled a retrospective of the lauded jazz singer’s career, skimming along with her private life, including two husbands, a stint in jail and a 15-year heroin habit, all of which she reflects on with a canny wit. A girl singer who liked to dress like one of the dudes, extended clips of O’Day’s early performances bring her remarkable improvisation skills and exquisite phrasing to the fore. Clearly a personality of force and fortitude (who outlives a long heroin detour?), O’Day is often noted as the only white woman whose name is uttered in the same breath as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. But killing at the Apollo was no big deal for Chicago’s “jezebel of jazz.” That’s the kind of broad I’d love to see get the silver screen treatment, but McCrudden and Cavolina’s tribute is better than fine for now.

Harlem’s Apollo theatre is also the site of the climactic heart of Doubletime, Stephanie Johnes’ rope-jumping documentary. Nicely shot and brimming with the all-American elbow grease ethic epitomized by the much-imitated Spellbound, Doubletime looks at the evolution of double dutch and rope skipping as competitive sports. The interesting dynamic here is that of the mostly white kids from North Carolina, who have been invited to the international competition held at the Apollo each year for the first time. Double dutch is said to have originated in Harlem, a street activity for kids (mostly young black girls) born of a lack of recreation centers in the impoverished inner city. The fact that white kids from the burbs are now getting in on it as well is a source of worry for said white kids, but as they discover upon hitting New York for the competition, the ability of the Japanese to co-opt American culture and then serve it back to us better than we can do it ourselves will overshadow them almost completely. Johnes does a nice job of building the competitive tension (there are some really neat skipping tricks out there), and weaves in the deeply felt motivations of the coaches and surprisingly positive side effects of what most of us know as a schoolyard pastime.

Sports seem to be the repository for myriad sublimations in both Sons of Sakhnin, United and Unstrung, films about an Arab-Israeli soccer team and the American junior tennis circuit, respectively. Bnei Sakhnin is the only soccer team for the minority population of Arabs living in Israel, and when they won Israel’s State Cup, it seemed to be a breakthrough for the residents of the small town, though when the team attempts to keep its premier league status, competing against strictly Jewish teams from Nazareth and Tel Aviv, tensions inevitably break through. Director Christopher Browne seems to find the obvious focal point in Arab team captain (and Israeli national team member Abbas Suan, who bears the brunt of impassioned locals on both sides, but the film strays from him and the narrative’s powerful throughline (the potential of sports to heal and divide) is diluted.

Unstrung is a fairly straightforward “championship” doc along the lines of Doubletime, where several competitors are followed on their way to big cook off. Here teenaged boys with hopes of tennis stardom (and equally, it seems, Nike contracts) tweak and thwack their way to Kalamazoo 2006, and tennis stars like Andre Agassi, John McEnroe, Pete Sampras and Andy Roddick pop up with their takes on the state of tennis today and the (very small) likelihood that any of these kids will turn pro. That seems to be born out by the late appearance of Sam Querrey, a laid back string bean who, unlike the boys we have seen, doesn’t seem to be under crushing pressure from his parents, and is now the only one of the bunch with a top 100 seeding.

Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout:

A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory
The True Legend of Tony Vilar
Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer
Doubletime
Sons of Sakhnin, United
Unstrung