Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
9:30 AM |
Seeing Richard Brody Typing on an External Keyboard
I’m watching Marshall Curry’s documentary, The New Yorker at 100, and I see film critic Richard Brody working on an external keyboard because his MacAir keyboard has stopped working. I felt this, hahaha.
The allure of the documentary short is its journalistic fervor demonstrated in brevity. I’ve always preferred nonfiction as a genre to enjoy—these days, the books I read are mostly nonfiction titles [I am drawn towards subjects involving history and the arts, and sometimes biographies], and the films I gravitate to the most are documentaries. And so, when a nonfiction film does its job in a short running time, I consider that a huge win: I learn of true things with societal import, and I did it without whiling away precious time I do not really have given a busy life.
This is why I keep track of documentary short subject films considered annually by the Academy Awards—especially through the short list it puts out in December of every year, which culls into fifteen titles from a list of possible hundreds. This is helpful because one cannot really track and see all the documentary shorts that get produced every year. Who has the time? Fifteen is manageable. I am aware that there are many superior documentary shorts that may be overlooked every year—which is unfortunate, but that is how the system works, and again, fifteen titles are manageable.
For this year, the Oscars nominated the following documentary shorts: Incident [d. Bill Morrison], I Am Ready, Warden [d. Smriti Mundhra], The Only Girl in the Orchestra [d. Molly O’Brien], Death by Numbers [d. Kim A. Snyder], and Instruments of a Beating Heart [d. Ema Ryan Yamazaki].
I have seen all the shortlisted documentary shorts, except for two. Of all the nominated titles, I have yet to see Death by Numbers, which has earned a reputation of late as being a “white whale.” It is about the aftermath of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, and follows the advocacy of one survivor. The film has been rated highly, with one Letterbxd reviewer commenting: “I appreciate the focus on the micro rather than the macro. This isn't an overview or statement on school shootings, but a look at how one person is impacted immediately and going forward.” This sounds like an endorsement, so I will probably like this film.
Among the unnominated films in the short list, I have yet to see Once Upon a Time in Ukraine by Betsy West, a filmmaker whose past documentaries [often in tandem with Julia Cohen] I have enjoyed immensely, including RBG [a 2019 film about the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg which was nominated for Best Documentary in its year] and Julia [a 2021 about Julia Childs]. Would I have enjoyed Once Upon a Time in Ukraine if I had seen it? Most probably, given the director—although I am naturally wary [or perhaps weary?] of war documentaries.
There are three films which I found quite surprising for missing the nomination, simply because they are so powerfully made, with subjects I would have thought would resonate the most with regular Oscar voters. Then again, they also did not nominate Rashida Jones and Will McCormack’s A Swim Lesson, given that one of its directors is a popular actress and the daughter of Quincy Jones, and that its conceit is closely tailored after My Octopus Teacher, a 2020 documentary short which won its category in its Oscar year—but instead of an octopus, the helpful purveyor of life lessons is a Beverly Hills swimming teacher. [I rather prefer the aquatic animal.]
But Hannah Rafkin’s Keeper is a beautiful, essential, emphatic, and restrained work, about a United Nations staffer in New York who moonlights as an urban beekeeper, and who perseveres in his calling despite a bee allergy and a bout of cancer. [It is also a story of the beekeeper’s daughter, a brilliant young woman who deftly balances college life with beekeeping and taking care of her ailing father.] It always pains me to see that bad things [i.e., cancer] can happen to good people, but otherwise it is a hopeful story about a beautiful family, and what they do—beekeeping in a big city—is awesome. It is, however, not nominated for the Oscars this year. Watch it anyway.
Chasing Roo by Skye Fitzgerald [who has been nominated in this category before, with the powerful Hunger Ward], is also another must-watch. It is a deftly handled piece—about wildlife rescue experts in Australia devoting their lives to saving kangaroos, in tension with professional hunters seeking to harvest them for meat—and the film surprises for its balance between tenderness and visceral carnage, and also surprises for its observant humanity. Its score and sound design are also vital aesthetic choices. It doesn’t shy away from showing us the non-tender parts [those dogs attacking that hog and the various scenes of hunting and killing kangaroos will have animal rights activists up in arms], which could be graphic, but I think they are necessary to prove the film’s point. It is, however, not nominated for the Oscars this year. Watch it anyway.
Nadia Gill and Dominic Gill’s Planetwalker is a poignant portrait of John Francis, who is popularly known with the titular moniker. In 1971, he witnessed an oil tanker collision in the San Francisco Bay, and the sight of dead birds on the shoreline, harmed by the oil spill, caused him to give up motorized transport and began walking everywhere. He took another radical move, and vowed not to speak, convinced that listening rather than talking adding fuel to the fire of any issue. This did not stop him from earning graduate credentials, and even becoming a college professor. He didn’t talk and he didn’t use motorized vehicles, but he taught using the simplest hand signals and walked everywhere, even to various parts of the globe which would invite him to “talk” about his environmental advocacy. It is a stirring portrait of a committed man and a gentle soul. It is, however, not nominated for the Oscars this year. Watch it anyway.
The rest of the unnominated films are powerful in their own right, but are flawed in many ways—but that does not stop some films from achieving greatness. I’m not sure these are great, but they are fascinating portraits. Kimberly Reed’s Seat 31 follows Zooey Zephyr, who was expelled from the House of Representatives in Montana for rebuking its members on a prospective bill banning transgender medical care. She later made a nearby bench her “office.” The film follows her struggles, and her triumphs, but is most powerful when it showcases the hate she confronts from the most ordinary of people—like a tribe of housewives taking over her bench, just to piss her off. The film feels necessary, and while it did resonate, I found its subject matter a little too performative for comfort. But I guess you have to be that to be in politics and wanting change. I understand why it was nominated.
Jenifer McShane’s The Quilters—about a group of inmates who turn to quilt-making as a form of rehabilitation—makes for good double screening with Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing [2024], which is also about art-pursuing inmates, this time revolving around theatre, and has produced an Oscar hopeful in Colman Domingo, who is now nominated for Best Actor for the movie. I like how observant The Quilters was, and how appropriately paced. It feels plain, however, and ultimately does not rise to memorable. I understand why it was not nominated.
Julio Palacio’s Makayla’s Voice: A Letter to the World is about a teenage girl with non-verbal autism, whom the film depicts as someone who “unlocks a joyous world of self-expression as she shares her voice for the first time using a letter board.” That assertion, however—about the effectivity of letter boards as communication medium for those with autism—has proven controversial. And the film did not really move me. I understand why it was not nominated.
Jacqueline Baylon’s Until He’s Back is about a Moroccan father who has learned that his son has died in an attempt to get to Spain as a refugee. He embarks on the difficult task to bring his son’s remains back home—and faces a complicated process of repatriation. The film is important—but to be honest, as soon as I finished watching it, I forgot all about it, which meant it had no resonance. I understand why it was not nominated.
Ömer Sami’s Eternal Father is a strange one. It is about a father and his family—all migrants in Denmark—who have to contend with the fact that the patriarch is intent on defying death, through cryonics. It is interesting when it gets into the family dynamics, but the film lacks any real depth about cryonics itself—Is it a science or a pseudoscience? Is it an inherently capitalist scam that banks on our fear of death and illness? Why is this family giving this man a pass with this hairbrained scheme to live forever? We don’t really get any answers. I understand why it was not nominated.
Of the nominated films, the one that I enjoyed very much without liking its subject at all was Yamazaki’s Instruments of a Beating Heart. It is a simple film about a very young girl in an elementary school in Japan, who is single-minded in her quest to be part of an orchestra who has just been tasked to provide a musical number welcoming new students to the school. Reading through some of the comments about the film, I was astounded by quite a number who voiced such tender concern for the protagonist, Ayame. They cared when she cried. They cared when she bungled her audition to play an instrument. They cared when she was given a bit of a dressing down by her music teacher. And I was like—what is everybody talking about? That girl needed to be taken down a notch, because she is going to grow up like a Japanese versionof Tracy Flick. She is an annoying and assuming kid who does not do well at her tasks, and cries all throughout the film because she doesn’t get what she wants. Then when she gets another chance, and still does badly, she is always late and never practices, and then when gets reprimanded, she cries crocodile tears. As far as I’m concerned that music teacher said what needed to be said. [And the boy Haruka also totally deserved that spot, and I’m with Ide all the way.] I understand why the film is nominated.
I loved Bill Morrison’s Incident—although “loved” might be the wrong word that describes my respect for this short documentary. It is a feat of assemblage, piecing together all sorts of surveillance footage around the incident of a black man shot to death by police. What you see ultimately convinces you about how rigged the system is with regards racial profiling, and the easy escape of denial policemen resort to when they bow to their murderous instincts. I understand why the film is nominated.
I also loved Molly O’Brien’s The Only Girl in the Orchestra, because it is a profile about a talented musician who is playfully wary about being profiled—but is game enough to let the cameras get a peek into her storied life anyway. The thing is, double bassist Orin O’Brien deserves this attention because her life as a member of New York Philarmonic has been truly trailblazing. She was hired by Leonard Bernstein in 1966 as the first female musician in the orchestra, and became the focus of much media interest and fascination because of that. She is now retired, and in her late 80s—but insists no fuss should be made about her, preferring instead to put a spotlight on her family, her students, her friends, and her colleagues. Which makes her doubly worthy of a documentary. I understand why the film is nominated.
Then there is Smriti Mundhra’s I Am Ready, Warden, which follows the last days in a Texas death row for inmate John Henry Ramirez, who robbed a convenience store when he was a young man, and killing its attendant in the process by riddling him with bullets. He soon fled to Mexico, stayed there for many years, but was eventually arrested and sent back to the U.S. to face prosecution, eventually landing him with capital punishment. But the real story is about his “rehabilitation,” and how he would soon seek out forgiveness from the son of the man he killed, and also demonstrably mending his life by becoming a “Christian.” That turn towards the evangelical in the middle was what left me in a lurch, because it left such a bad taste in the mouth—making the entire thing sound like Evangelical Christian propaganda. What a scam. This is probably the worst film in the whole Oscars shortlist for documentary shorts. I don’t understand why the film is nominated.
Here is my ranking of all the documentary short films, including the unnominated titles:
[1] Keeper
[2] Incident
[3] Chasing Roo
[4] The Only Girl in the Orchestra
[5] Planetwalker
[6] Instruments of a Beating Heart
[7] Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr
[8] Makayla’s Voice: A Letter to the World
[9] The Quilters
[10] Eternal Father
[11] Until He’s Back
[12] A Swim Lesson
[13] I Am Ready, Warden
Unseen by me:
[14] Death by Numbers
[15] Once Upon a Time in Ukraine
Currently watching a documentary on Charles and Ray Eames — artists and designers after my own heart. They believed that all art connects, and in their case, architecture and design, film and photography, and painting in particular. I love that they were mavericks. I love that they started their career with a failure [i.e., the famous Eames chair was notorious for starting out to be a literal award-winning failure of a chair — they could not find a way to manufacture it, until they actually did]. I love that they did film. My favorites are still Powers of Ten [1977] and Day of the Dead [1957] and Symmetry [1961], because these short films are so beyond what you would expect Eames to do.
1:42 PM |
Halfway Through Documentary Now! Season 4
Finally, an episode of Documentary Now! S4 that I’m really digging! I have loved the mockumentary series since it began in 2015, but I didn’t really the dig the first two instalments of this season, despite loving the original documentaries they were based on.
“Soldier of Illusion, Parts 1 and 2” [a riff on Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Into the Abyss, and My Best Fiend] is ingenious enough in its juxtaposing a crazy story involving a German director shooting a documentary on the indigenous people of the Ural Mountains while simultaneously filming a sitcom pilot—but the original conceit, involving the mad logistics of Herzog filming the actual moving of an entire ship over steep, dangerous land from one river system to another in the Amazon for Fitzcarraldo proves even crazier. The ridiculousness of the riff basically pales in comparison. “Two Hairdressers in Bagglyport” [a riff on Philippa Lowthorpe’s Three Salons at the Seaside with bits of R. J. Cutler’s The September Issue thrown in] is more successful, and also more faithful to the original British documentary—but infusing it with Anna Wintour-style hijinks felt forced. The September Issue deserves a fuller riff than just being a source of a plot point. Doing it like this deprives us of a much-needed Documentary Now! take on Grace Coddington, which is a shame.
But I love “How They Throw Rocks,” a riff on Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings, the documentary on the legendary boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. I love how they transposed boxing into an allegedly Welsh “sport” of brutal rock-throwing. They got the riffs just right, from Ali's bigger-than-life persona, to Ali’s “rope-a-dope” technique that brought down a stronger foe [riffed into this episode’s “turtling”].
I hope the rest of the season will be as irreverent, callback-y, and funny as this episode.
Bruce Weber’s Let's Get Lost [1988], his searing look into the life and music of jazz legend Chet Baker, is the saddest, the most beautiful documentary I’ve seen on a musician. The black and white photography is gorgeous — you can’t expect anything less from the director who's also a famously brilliant. The music is evocative and gets under your skin — a jazz soundtrack to die for. [I kept playing “Imagination” on the OST on repeat because it was just astonishing.] And the subject himself oozes with talent, charisma, and mystery — you can’t help but fall hard for this beautiful asshole of a genius. This film has been on my queue list for months. Why did I wait?
11:08 PM |
Groovin' Gary or Beaver Kid is a Good Drag Name
How do you do drag in freakin’ Salt Lake City, Utah in freakin’ 1979?
If you’re Richard LaVon Griffiths, you pretend to just have a deep and abiding love for Olivia Newton-John — but insist you’re not gay. But in the first few minutes alone, when filmmaker Trent Harris accidentally bumped into the likeable young man in a parking lot doing his bit, you could feel the overtness of his male performativity. [All gay boys, who have been forced to act a certain way so as to be invisible in a heteronormative world, know the gestures, the cadence in the way of talking, the masculine air you have to project just to make everyone around you will believe you’re not “one of them.”]
I’m watching The Beaver Trilogy [2001] now and I feel sad for its subject. It's truly a remarkable film whose conceit reminds me of Liane Brandon’s Betty Tells Her Story (1971), where the repetition of the narrative adds a deeper emotional context to the story being told. The documentary is a hybrid work of real life and dramatization, each layer of which actually adds to what you know of the subject, which will only break your heart as each segment unfolds. The first part, “The Beaver Kid,” was shot in 1979 and contains that original footage of the director meeting Griffiths [known as Gary by friends] in the parking lot, and then shooting him as he performs his “Olivia Newtwon-Dawn” act in a Beaver, Utah club. The second part, “The Beaver Kid 2,” shot in 1981, is a dramatization of that first part, with Sean Penn in the role of Griffiths — but a dramatization that gives us a bigger context of that meeting and that drag show, the things we didn't get to see when the camera wasn't rolling, and the sad aftermath of that drag act. [There is a suicide attempt after the club owner tells him he has just made a fool of himself.] And the third part, “The Orkly Kid,” shot in 1984, sees Crispin Glover reprising Penn's role, in a production that's obviously more professionally executed than the first two, complete with new supporting characters, bigger context, and new plot twists.
Your heart genuinely aches for this young man who truly just wants to do his thing, get on television any which way, and perhaps become famous — and you can appreciate his striving to make his mark in a world that's obviously not friendly to his idea of life or entertainment. When we learn for example that he had to go to a funeral parlor to be made up to look like Olivia Newton-John right before the show, your heart just breaks. When we see people laugh at him, including the director himself, your heart breaks even more. When you see the intense backlash he faced after the entire town saw him perform in drag, the remaining shards of your heart shatters even more.
I truly wish “Groovin' Gary” lived in a time like now where everyone’s crazy for RuPaul's Drag Race. [Gary died in 2 February 2009 — ironically the day the first episode of RPDR aired.]
The filmmakers behind 11,103 have been making this film for a long time, and my family is honored to have been part of this project, although we’re not in the final cut. (We will be in a separate feature.) The film features survivor stories of state-sponsored violence during the martial law years of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and our contribution is our family's story. It will premiere in the U.S. on the 50th anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law in the Philippines, September 17, in Redwood City.
Congratulations, Mike Alcazaren and Jeannette Ifurung!
Unfinished business is my one constant haunting spectre, and there's no denying its place as motivation in ghost stories. When I heard of the death of director Michael Apted [1941-2021] today, the immediate thought that came to me was: "What happens now to the Up documentary series?" And a genuine restless concern stirred me to a molehill of anxiety. Apted has made some outstanding films -- notably Agatha [1979], Coal Miner's Daughter [1980], Gorillas in the Mist [1988], Class Action [1991], Thunderheart [1992], Moving the Mountain [1994], Nell [1994], and The World is Not Enough [1999] -- but his reputation as filmmaker lies in one of the grandest [and until now, continuous] undertaking in cinema: the 'Up' documentary series, which film critic Roger Ebert once called the "noblest project in cinema history." Ebert wrote: "Every seven years, the British director Michael Apted revisits a group of people whose lives he has been chronicling since they were children. As he chats with them about how things are going, his films penetrate to the central mystery of life, asking the same questions that Wim Wenders poses in Wings of Desire: Why am I me and why not you? Why am I here and why not there? / They also strike me as an inspired, even noble, use of the film medium. No other art form can capture so well the look in an eye, the feeling in an expression, the thoughts that go unspoken between the words. To look at these films, as I have every seven years, is to meditate on the astonishing fact that man is the only animal that knows it lives in time." What's astonishing was that it wasn't even Apted's project to begin with. Seven Up, the first film of the series, was released on Granada Television in 1964, and was directed by Paul Almond, with Apted serving as researcher. When the second installation, 7 Plus Seven, came seven years later, Apted was at the helm, and he'd been following most of them ever since. 63 Up, the latest film in the series, was only released in 2019, and I ranked it tenth in my Top 60 Films of that year. There will be no 70 Up, which is sad. With our loss of Apted is our equal loss in cinema culture.
Further tributes:
The New York Times: Michael Apted, Versatile Director Known for ‘Up’ Series, Dies at 79. The Guardian: Michael Apted, 1941-2021: tributes paid to ‘visionary’ director of Up series. Variety: Michael Apted, Director of ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ and ‘Up’ Series of Documentaries, Dies at 79. The Hollywood Reporter: Michael Apted, 'Coal Miner's Daughter' Director and 'Seven Up' Documentarian, Dies at 79. Rolling Stone: Michael Apted, ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ and ‘Up’ Series Director, Dead at 79.
1:52 PM |
"Look at the Root Cause, We Can't Be Doing Cleanups All Our Lives."
My sobering choice quote from Deia Schlosberg's The Story of Plastic (2020): "Day in, day out, there's cleaning operations going on. It's unending. You can do cleanups and the problem will not go away. You have to look at the root cause, we can't be doing cleanups all our lives."
The documentary is screening for free until July 30. Here's the link.
[85th of 100]. I never thought of including documentaries in this list, because that felt like another list deserving of its own spotlight. Truth to tell, my favorite documentaries number beyond a hundred, and I actually do have a stronger preference for non-fiction. I thought that including this tradition of cinema in this list might eclipse narrative film altogether -- but nearing the tail-end of this endeavour, I've realized what a taxing, if also rewarding, exercise this has been, and I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to do the same for documentary films. And so I am placed in the most excruciating of positions: to choose just one favorite among the many. I could go the classic route and choose Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat or Nanook of the North or Man With a Movie Camera. Or I could go for the iconic and choose Grey Gardens or Woodstock or Salesman or the Up Series. Or I could go to the poetic and choose Baraka or Nostalgia for the Light or Microcosmos or Aquarela or Last and First Men or Honeyland. Or I could go for the strange and choose The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On or Gates of Heaven or Catfish. Or I could go for the historical and choose Last Days of Vietnam or The Act of Killing or The Kingmaker or Batas Militar or The Missing Picture or Night & Fog or Shoah. Or I could go for the scientific and choose A Brief History of Time or Aliens of the Deep. Or I could go for personal chronicles of uncommon or disrupted lives and choose As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty or Sunday Beauty Queen or Capturing the Friedmans or Stories We Tell or Three Identical Strangers. Or I could go for hero-making biographies such as Citizen Jane: Battle for the City or RBG or I Am Not Your Negro. Or I could go for the observational and choose At Berkeley or Ex Libris: The New York Public Library. Or I could go for the controversial and go for Olympia or Mondo Cane or The Thin Blue Line or Roger & Me or Deliver Us From Evil or Jesus Camp or An Inconvenient Truth or Waltz With Bashir or Hail, Satan? or The Terrorists or The Aristocrats or The Cove or Super Size Me. Or I could go for the delightful and choose Spellbound or Wordplay or Kedi or March of the Penguins. Or I could go for the suspenseful and choose Free Solo. Or I could go for the intellectual and choose Derrida or Public Speaking or Regarding Susan Sontag. I love films about gay concerns, and I could choose The Celluloid Closet or Paris is Burning or Before Stonewall or The Times of Harvey Milk or Tickled or The Case Against 8. I love films about artists in pursuit of their craft, and I could easily go for Jiro Dreams of Sushi or Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse or City of Gold or Exit Through the Gift Shop or Style Wars or Helvetica or De Palma or Everything is Copy: Nora Ephron, Scripted and Unscripted or Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold or What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael or Waking Sleeping Beauty or Seymour: An Introduction or Cutie and the Boxer or Hitchcock/Truffaut or The Price of Everything or Shirkers or Unzipped or Madonna: Truth or Dare or Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry or Spielberg or Six by Sondheim or Ballet 422 or Pina or Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel or Jodorowky's Dune or Man on Wire or Becoming Mike Nichols or The Kid Stays in the Picture or Mori: The Artists Habitat or Bill Cunningham New York or The First Monday in May or Finding Vivian Maier or The Decline of Western Civilization or The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness or Tim's Vermeer or Faces, Places or Filmworker or Crumb. Do you see what I mean? It's an impossibility, so I'll choose something that I've found myself perpetually delighted by even in repetition -- and if you've noticed, I have a particular weakness for documentaries about artistry and creatives. And I've chosen the 2009 documentary by R.J. Cutler about the making of Vogue Magazine's heftiest, and most sought after, monthly issue. I love the film because it is ostensibly a work documentary following American Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour -- clearly her personal response to The Devil Wears Prada, the fictional expose, in book and subsequent film adaptation, that dared bear her alleged workplace toxicity. But in following their subject around as she goes through the grind of finishing the most demanding issue of the year, the film finds itself becoming a treatise about staying true to one's artistic vision under the heels of pedestrian and commercial concerns. It makes that turn when it discovers editor Grace Coddington, the perfect foil to Wintour and her struggles to juggle the demands of the bottomline, editing just enough of the artistry to populate the meager page counts with, and staying right ahead or on top of the cutting edge of fashion's many dicta. It is clearly not an enviable job, and I can understand the icy stance Wintour puts on, perhaps as shield to the hard editorial decisions she has to make. But this also makes out Coddington as the free-spirit art director, always fighting for more pages for her truly remarkable fashion photos, and always trying to subvert the fashion world's expectations. [On hearing that Wintour has ordered the pot belly of the film's cameraman -- who was used as minor subject in one of the magazine's approved photo shoots -- be airbrushed, Coddington quickly calls the art department for it to refrain from doing so. "We need this to be realistic," she tells the camera.] That push and pull between Wintour and Coddington is all the more interesting because it is not really antagonistic, but more of a strange kind of complementary. As Coddington would confess to the camera: "She knows how to push me, and I know how to push her." The film also has a special allure for me because it is also a story of journalism -- magazine-making is a very special niche -- and it has allowed me a sobering look into the hard work of creating those glossy pages. It informs me above all that the primary qualification of a good editor is really singular vision-keeping. I once worked for an editor who was too timid, and lacked a strong editorial voice: her way of managing her staff was to take in everyone's suggestions and ideas without really processing if they worked together. The resulting publication was a terrible hodgepodge that defied description. This film taught me the fine balance between editorial firmness and artistic flight. What's the film?
Nick Deocampo's seminal short documentary Oliver is now on YouTube! The film follows a female impersonator who supports his family by performing in Manila's gay bars during the Marcos dictatorship.
Saw this in my film class in the late 1990s, and I've always wanted a copy -- because it gives new meaning to the word "Spider-Man." [Note: NSFW]
3:00 PM |
Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Subject, 2019
With Bong Jon-hoo's Parasite and Seung-jun Yi's In the Absence, we truly see a Korean ascendance in world cinema -- and both have so much alike, to be honest, including their unsparing critique of contemporary Korean society. In this documentary short, we navigate through that via the ineptness that attended the botched rescue of the ferry MV Sewol, which sank off the coast of South Korea in 2014, killing hundreds of passengers, mostly high school students in a field trip. It's a gripping and unsettling fly-on-the-wall documentary, and we are made to witness the hours tick by as the ship sinks slowly, while its passengers patiently await rescue, to their deaths.
I don't want to say much about Kristine Samuelson and John Haptas' Life Overtakes Me, except that in this documentary, about refugee kids in Sweden falling into a form of sleeping sickness bordering on coma triggered by PTSD over their plight, something feels and smells fishy.
Perhaps the most feeling-precious of this year's bunch of documentary short subject nominees is Laura Nix's Walk Run Cha-Cha, a love story about Vietnamese refugees re-bonding over ballroom dancing in New York in their senior years. You see, they used to be lovers in Vietnam, but were soon separated by the vagaries of war. Meeting once more in America, they try to rekindle their romance by dancing. Awwww. It's cute, but it's shallow -- and not even the sentimental production number at the end can truly save this film.
Carol Dysinger's Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl) is your standard "people in perilous places" documentary, and while its narrative arc and subject matter -- about a school that pains to teach Afghan girls basic school subjects, plus skateboarding -- no longer surprise us, it doesn't disappoint in putting heart to the heroism it depicts.
In Sami Khan and Smriti Mundhra's St. Louis Superman, we see a strange hybrid of black lives, politics, and rapping. It mostly works, and I like it, but this film was not made for me.
VERDICT: In order of preference, Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl) > In the Absence > St. Louis Superman > Walk Run Cha-Cha > Life Overtakes Me
1:42 AM |
Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Subject Films
Let's do the Documentary Short Subject nominees for the Oscars, shall we?
Marshall Curry's Oscar-nominated documentary short A Night at the Garden (2018) is a Trump rally held in 1939, when the Madison Square Garden in New York played host to 20,000 Americans who were demonstrating their Nazi ideals. This was only a year before the U.S. entered World War II. Observe the similarities. It's chilling. It's archival documentary that speaks so much of the present that its very simplicity is its power.
I don't like watching end-of-life-at-the-hospital drama, but Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Oscar-nominated documentary short End Game (2018) manages to not just shed light on the plight and pluck of people suffering from terminal illness in a hospice... But it does this with keen, gentle, observant eyes, totally interested in all high and lows of palliative care. But I have always adored the work of Epstein and Friedman, who have mostly charted the queerness of popular culture. Here, Epstein and Friedman explore a topic almost tangential to their ouevre, but they do it so well, and so full-heartedly, you can't look away.
Ed Perkins' Oscar-nominated documentary short Black Sheep (2018) is compelling enough in its story about a black kid in 90s London trying to escape racism by whitening his skin and donning blue contact lenses in order to become "friends" with his racist neighbors.
Skye Fitzgerald's Oscar-nominated documentary short Lifeboat (2018) should be memorable, but it's not. It is a chronicle of efforts by activists to save refugees from the treacherous waters and the rickety boats they have set their hopes for better lives on... The subject matter should be compelling enough to follow -- but nothing sticks in this cinematic effort to give face to this very current humanitarian struggle. I couldn't remember a single frame a day after I watched this short film.
It took a long time for Netflix to release on its platform the Oscar-nominated documentary short Period. End of Sentence (2018), Rayka Zehtabchi's attempt to follow a charitable effort to provide cheap sanitary napkins to poor girls in India who needed them most. It has particular importance in a society where the mention of "menstruation" is still a perplexing taboo. It's really a feminist call to arms, using an unlikely object as lens. But the wait proved disappointing, because the film does not live up to expectations as pathbreaking social documentary. Its message feels forced. This film, noteworthy its subject matter may be, has no nuance, has no discernible difference from mere NGO pitch presentation. Also, there's a whiff of Orientalism here I can't quite shake.
VERDICT: In order of preference, End Game > A Night in the Garden > Black Sheep > Period. End of Sentence > Lifeboat.
Can the Oscars scrap one of the last three and replace it with Charlie Tyrell's brilliant My Dead Dad's Porno Tapes (2018)? Why is the Academy so standoffish when it comes to finely etched domestic explorations like this and Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell (2012)?
This is Margalit Fox, staff writer for The New York Times, who writes obits for the paper. She is my favorite talking head in Vanessa Gould's documentary Obit (2016), her feature film debut on obituary writing.
[Aside #1: Gould first impressed me with her short subject documentary Between the Folds, which was about the art of paper-folding, an engrossing film.]
[Aside #2: I love the obituaries of the New York Times; have been a fan of the section for years. They're such compelling essays, and I always seek them out when a favorite person of mine -- a writer, an actor, etc. -- dies.]
I love Fox in the film because she gives the most rounded insights, like: "It's counterintuitive, perhaps, but obituaries have next to nothing to do with death and absolutely everything to do with life." How do you make a documentary about death fun and compelling? Gould found a way: celebrate life.
The Center Will Not Hold (2017), Griffin Dunne's fascinating new documentary on the writer Joan Didion, begins with her voice-over, reading from the preface of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968): "I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder." I felt this kind of paralysis early this year -- but I think most writers do. I'm glad for this film; it is a fascinating portrait of an important literary voice. Who has read "Goodbye to All That" [read here] and not been astounded by that sheer command of language?
When Babyruth Villarama’s Sunday Beauty Queen (2016) [trailer here] was announced Best Picture of the lot of eight at the tail-end of the 2016 Metro Manila Film Festival, I thought without hesitation: “Good for the MMFF. The film deserves the honor.”
There is something immensely satisfying in the acknowledgment of that accolade — like it was something long-time in coming — given how its inclusion in the 2016 slate created so much furor among industry people, most of whom found it being a documentary an irritating aberration that should have been grounds for exclusion.
It does mark a first in that regard: in the history of the festival, which was founded as the Metropolitan Film Festival in 1975, no documentary has ever been considered as a contender. That Sunday Beauty Queen won felt like history coming full circle all at once. That it also won considering that it was the one film in the whole festival that struggled the most in getting itself seen — only a few theaters outside of Manila dared screen it — felt like divine justice for those who had been championing it, who believed in its merits and the importance of its story.
For me, it felt like a decade-long corrective: its win comes exactly ten years after Enteng Kabisote 3: Okay Ka Fairy Ko ... The Legend Goes On and On and On was proclaimed Best Picture in 2006, the festival’s most embarrassing low point. Its win is a mark for great change still to come; it is also a clarion call for battles still to be waged ahead. (But of course. Bad taste does take time to overhaul, and it does have its own high priests. Consider, for example, the Manny Castañeda debacle.)
But here I speak too much of the film in the context of the MMFF’s long troubled history. Does it work as a film, and is it any good? It took me a long time to write this review. I saw the film four days ago, and I felt I had to allow it to settle in my head. Not that it was too complex to understand, or even too cerebral to feel: in these two considerations, Sunday Beauty Queen wins by being a film that is easily digestible and also easily felt. There are scenes aplenty in the film that provoke instant welling up of tears — the scene of someone talking about counting airplanes through the kitchen window, the telephone conversation about someone’s unexpected death, the scene at the halfway house.
And the structure of the story is easy enough to comprehend — Ms. Villarama’s camera simply follows several Filipina domestic helpers in Hong Kong as they struggle for six days of every week to manage the households of their “amos,” some under the scrutiny of cruel employers, and then on Sunday, on their day-off, they prepare to join an annual beauty pageant.
I think the film successfully sells itself as a very human story by allowing its cameras to linger and explore with so much intimacy the lives of the people whose stories we are following. After the film’s immediate opening at one edition of the annual beauty pageant — after the beautiful gowns have been paraded and after the crown and sash have been awarded — we are immediately plunged into the women’s every day reality. In the chaos of Hong Kong traffic, they transform to become the reverse of the Cinderella story: they trek back to the condominiums and apartment buildings of their employers, trying so hard to beat curfew, and in the next six days we see them toil with mop, broomstick, vacuum cleaner, and apron.
Often the film takes us deeper into the dirt-cleaning and babysitting by allowing its subjects to address us through talking head interviews, where they are allowed to explain, to reminisce, to ponder their place in the story of the country they have left behind. Why am I here and why am I not home? Why am I taking care of other people’s children while I have to make myself contented by watching my own child’s graduation through Skype? Why have I allowed myself this debasement by sleeping on the kitchen floor?
Their stories become a reflection of our nation’s frailties and broken promises. We know these stories exist; and yet to be confronted with stark images of these stories in the sweep of cinematic largeness is to feel cowed, and to feel crushed by our country’s seeming indifference. The film thrusts us into an identification with these people in a way we probably have never felt before, simply because cinema is powerful that way: thus their pain becomes our pain, their joys our joys.
And yet while the film does consider the darkness that often blots many domestic helpers’ lives in foreign places (getting abused by cruel employers, getting fired in the middle of the night, feeling the rush about having to get employment within 14 days at the risk of deportation, and so on and so forth), it also becomes a celebration of the hardy lives of these OFWs, and the film rightly marvels at their capacity to stage a “carnival” even in stark circumstances. That’s the Filipino spirit, I think, illustrated so well.
Ms. Villarama chooses to frame their stories in the simple framework of its witty tagline, “Kayod mula Lunes hanggang Sabado, at rampa ‘pag Linggo” (“Work hard from Monday to Saturday, do the catwalk on Sunday”) which I think is ingenious, considering the complexities of these real-life stories, a lot of which are left out in the name of narrative consistency.
Then again, one documentary is really not enough to contain everything, and so this is an editorial decision I can accept even if I feel it could have more in following, just enough, the hidden depths of the tangential issues it does present. For example, why is the Philippine Consulate generally unhelpful in addressing the plight of many domestic helpers in need of assistance? Why is the lesbian angle that is so tantalisingly proffered by the film not really explored? We are never given more than a promising mention of consular indifference, or a teasing shot of two women walking away.
One can explain these away by understanding that the filmmakers may not have wanted it to be too serious in weighing political and gender issues, which might distract from the simpler story of “struggle plus beauty pageants” — but I’m not so sure. One pointed way the film reminds us of a very political problem is by introducing its principals by full names, the number of years of their stay as DHs in Hong Kong, and the most damning of all, the college degrees they have earned back in the Philippines. It is saying our country has done great disservice to its people, reducing college degrees to nothing more than an aberration in a resume destined for servitude. This is never really explored as a problem, only limned at.
Some friends have also likened the film’s structure as being too much like a typical episode of Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho. “I’ve seen BBC documentaries that have tackled these issues better,” says one.
I don’t really agree with that — but I do think it could have borrowed a cue or two from Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning, that great 1991 documentary about Harlem balls staged by gay black men in the very fringes of society’s margins. In that film, their “pageants,” their “voguing” competitions, their practice of “shading” are explained as expressions of a subcultural outrage, as aspirational efforts to counter the fact of their dreams being denied in the reality outside of these balls. Sunday Beauty Queen hints at that promise — it did ask the character of Daddy Leo why he organizes these pageants, and he merely replies with a playful, "Wala lang, feel ko lang" — but proceeds more or less to go the route of regular “poverty porn” storylines without the slums.
But I do think I am expecting a bit too much of Sunday Beauty Queen — and I think I am because the film is so very well-made it could have stood a bit more complexity. Nonetheless, I laughed, I cried, and in the end, I wanted to hug all domestic helpers from Hong Kong coming home for Christmas.
Every year since 2010, I've devoted the month of October to watching horror movies of all kinds, from slasher films to psychological thrillers to haunted house movies, from the classic to the contemporary. (Except torture porn. I draw the line there.) This year, I've decided to do "Women in Peril" as a theme. It is an intirguing subgenre of horror, and I intend to catch a full range of its varieties. I'll try to stay away from the "final girl" trope, however. So, no Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween for me. If you have any suggestions, drop me a line in the comments.
[5] Here is a documentary that runs like an unconventional horror movie of the true crime variety -- with a coda in the end that horrifies and curdles the senses for its depiction of the desperate reach we sometimes have to do to grasp the “closure” we think we deserve. It springs from a murder that has now become almost mythological -- partly sociological parable and partly urban legend.
In 1964, a young woman by the name of Kitty Genovese came home from her work as manager in a neighbourhood bar in Queens, New York when she was accosted by a man named Winston Moseley. She is our woman in peril for this series. Moseley knifed her in the open air, along the quiet sidewalk only a corner way from her apartment. Her terrified screams for help alerted several people in the neighbourhood, and she frightened her assailant just enough that he immediately walked away. Bloodied, she carried on slowly towards the front door of her apartment building -- only to find that the assailant had come back to rape her and finally finish her off. According to the newspaper accounts at that time, with the venerable New York Times leading the charge in reporting, about 38 people heard her scream and watched her die, and did nothing, most of them reporting later on the same mantra: “I didn’t want to get involved.”
The news story proved a sensation, spurred people into action, and seized the wider cultural imagination: it has since given birth to the term “bystander syndrome,” which describes the apathy of people in stopping a crime they’re witnessing, and also allowed the installation of the 911 system of calling the police.
But James D. Solomon’s The Witness (2015) is more than just mere true crime sensational retelling. For me, at its basic level, the film is a thorough and powerful examination of the subconscious biases we bring and even nurture in order to tell the stories we need to tell. Its title then is a perfect capsule of its [unintended?] theme: we are only witnesses to the truth we are comfortable with, and from that springs our versions of the tale.
Ostensibly, the documentary follows the investigations of Kitty Genovese’s younger brother Bill, who was closest to his sister and was a very young boy when she was murdered. Now much older, legless, and ambling around in a wheelchair, he feels a consuming need to find out what exactly happened that fateful night on March 13, 1964. Did 38 people really turn away as his sister was being assaulted? What explains this psychologically? All his life, this murder and this knowledge of what was now being called “bystander syndrome” have singularly defined every choice he has made -- including signing up for the Marines at the height of the Vietnam War. In a culture where young men like him were finding ways to shirk from the war, he had volunteered -- because he didn’t want to become one of those “38.”
And yet the questions remained, and his family was not much help either: Kitty’s death also murdered her memory within the family itself, with most of its members having since refused to talk about her, preferring instead the comfortable silence. Perfectly understandable, given that the murder totally devastated everyone, leading soon to the deaths by stroke of Kitty’s mother and then father. As a much-younger niece recounts in the film: “I first read about the story in my high school class. I was deep into reading it when I finally realised it was actually about my aunt.”
Thus begins Bill’s decades-long investigation: first, he pursued leads and compiled the names of the 38 witnesses, and interviewed those willing to meet with him. Many of them had since died, complicating the filling out of the narrative, but for some of those who are still alive, a significant detail soon comes out from their telling of what they remember: some of the witnesses actually did try to help, and some actually called the police.
The first version of the story then is the newspaper version, as well as the prosecutor’s version: that 38 saw and did not help.
But now a second version comes out: only a very few of the 38 saw the assault, most only heard screams, and almost all did not know a murder was being committed.
Bill tracks down the legendary journalist Abe Rosenthal, who was City Editor of the Times who had given the green light to publish what was now clearly erroneous reporting. The third version of the story now emerges. In hindsight, for Rosenthal, the details of the report were flawed and not entirely factual, but he insists on the “power” of the story: it is now a story discussed in classes, in books, in films. Its implications have become important sociological theory which has in turn done much good, including the implementation of 911 and the better policing of tough neighbourhoods.
But for other critics, there is a fourth version of the story, a shadow narrative of Rosenthal’s insistent one: Kitty’s murder and the 38 have became a metaphor for “big city indifference,” for the soullessness of metropolitan living. It transformed New York into a dangerous place of the imagination.
The inconsistencies in the original reporting leads Bill to find out that his sister was not a “bar maid” as reported, but actually the bar manager -- and then he stumbles on Kitty’s secret life as a lesbian. He tracks down an old lover, and from her he gets his fifth version of the story: about young women in the closet in 1960s America, and the perils of having to identify the body of a murdered secret lover.
Further in his investigation, Bill finds his interest slowly leading to the murderer himself. Upon arrest on an unrelated case of robbery, Winston Moseley had confessed to police about an earlier murder of another woman, and later on also the murder of Kitty Genovese, which was brought about apparently by another psychopathic hankering to randomly kill another woman. That’s the sixth version of the story: the original confession of the killer.
The seventh version came some years later: in an earlier bid for parole [since denied], Moseley wrote an editorial for the Times where he proclaimed himself reformed, and now ready to become “an asset to society.” This is no longer the story of Kitty Genovese but the story of a poor man who had lost his way, and now was ready to make amends to the world.
Bill approaches prison authorities to arrange a meeting with the convicted murderer. Later on he learns that Moseley has denied the request, feeling that the media has already “exploited” him much too much for a good number of years; being filmed in conversation for a documentary with the brother of the woman he had killed was not something he wanted to do.
Undaunted, Bill seeks out Moseley’s grown-up son, now apparently a minister. The conversation that happens is fraught with tension, and here an eighth version of the story comes out: the son obliquely accuses Bill Genovese of belonging to an Italian crime family [not true], and tells him that his father Winston had suggested that Kitty had been killed because she had verbally attacked him, calling him racist epithets, and he had snapped.
Later, learning that Bill had talked to his son, Winston finally writes him from prison, and in the letter, a ninth version of the story comes out: Winston now claims he never killed Kitty, that he was just the getaway driver for the true murderer who had warned him never to tell the real story.
Bill Genovese responds with what for me is the truest line in the documentary: “It’s kind of like the human condition,” he wearily tells his wife who read the letter with him. “One believes their own bullshit in evolving stories.”
Now fully cognisant of the fact that he can never really truly get to the truth, he turns to one device that makes the film a perfect real-life turn for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: he stages a “reenactment” of the crime in the very neighbourhood his sister was killed. He requests a friend, a young woman, to go to the Kew Gardens neighbourhood with him, and in the exact locations of the unfolding of that 1964 murder, he instructs her to do the exact same screams.
From the opposite side of the road, Bill becomes the titular witness -- the young woman follows Kitty’s haunted footsteps, how she had walked from the nearby parking lot where Kitty had parked her car, on to the sidewalk where she first encountered the shadowy form of Winston Moseley, on to the first screams she made upon being knifed, on to the pained walk she struggled through as she sought her apartment building door after the assailant had run away, on to the second screams she made when she found out he had come back to finish her off. The screams curdle as the night wears on.
Are we witnessing catharsis for Bill? Did the reenactment give him the closure he needed? The tenth and final version of the story, after all, is the personal legacy of that night, and it involved him: in not wanting to become one of the “38,” he had gone to Vietnam, and in the middle of the hell of that senseless war, he became seriously injured and he lost his legs.
In the end, he confesses to the futility of his obsession to find out the truth of that night. There is no truth, only versions of the “truth,” and every witness has a bias to skew it for a story that best fits them.
And so, in the light of the tumult in our ongoing political tribulation that seems to have no end, we must remember that we have accused everyone of bias -- particularly the media. Is media biased? Of course it is; to tell a good story it can sell. But then so is everyone, including you. We all trumpet the story we want to hear because we love the smell of our own bullshit.
And everything in the world, in fact, is bullshit.
I can't sleep. Currently watching 13th, Ava Duvernay's new documentary on the problem and phenomenon of mass incarceration happening right now in America. But it's not just about that: it's a powerfully made thesis about race, the unfortunate legacy of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, modern slavery, crime-mongering as political strategy, media manipulation, insidious corporate lobbying, the commercialization of prison, and guess what -- the use of the "war on drugs" as a political tool. Apparently Nixon invented that rhetoric, and Reagan made it literal, and Clinton actually aggravated it -- and thirty years later, many of the supporters of that "war" (even Republican stalwart Newt Gingrich!) are saying that the "war" did not work, and that it was in fact a lie. F*q this sh*t, I can't sleep.
Surrounded myself with good art today -- good music [The Bolipata Trio, Philip Glass], good books [Tony Kushner's Angels in America, parts of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, parts of Michael Cunningham's The Hours], good films [Joe Wright's 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Mike Nichol's 2003 adaptation of Kushner's play], even watched both the documentary The Rape of Europa (2006) and George Clooney's The Monuments Men [an underwhelming, if well-meaning, 2014 film based on a fantastic 2007 book by Robert M. Edsel, which I read last year] to see a bunch of good people racing against time to save thousands of priceless Western art from the machinations of Hitler and the destruction of war. It made the world infinitely better, bearable, at least for the day. This line from the fictional Frank Stokes in Clooney's film underlined for me why art mattered, and why it needed saving, especially in a time of great crises: "You can wipe out an entire generation, you can burn their homes to the ground and somehow they'll still find their way back. But if you destroy their history, you destroy their achievements and it's as if they never existed. That's what Hitler wants and that's exactly what we are fighting for."
I didn't think of watching David Thorpe's 2014 documentary, Do I Sound Gay?, when it first made the rounds of internet water coolers, and I must admit the reluctance must have come from a certain unease. The film famously explored the "existence and accuracy of stereotypes about the speech patterns of gay men, and the ways in which one's degree of conformity to the stereotype can contribute to internalised homophobia," but the whole premise felt like one of those ultimate "tests" friends do among themselves to find out whether someone's gay or not: ask them to look at their fingers or ask them to look at the soles of their, and the manner by which they do so becomes the absolute determiner of their gayness or straightness. Looking at one's fingers all stretched out with palm turned down, or looking at one's sole with the knee bent backward? Boom! Gay! Looking at one's finger's palm turned up with all fingers curved to a semi-fist, or looking at one's sole knee bent frontwards? Boom! Straight! It felt silly, and to me it harkened back to a dark time when doctors would measure skulls and what-not in their endless quest to find an anatomical clue to homosexuality. Voice invariably is part of human anatomy: its depth and sound is determined by the very shape of our nasal and oral passages, the folds the tongue makes. I had always figured -- in the incredulity of political correctness -- that voice has no determination in one's gayness. It just cannot.
Or was I wrong?
I have many gay friends, and many of them do sound a certain way: nasal and high-pitched and, dare I say it, effeminate. And yet I don't sound this way, at all, nor do many of my other gay friends. What gives?
Thorpe's documentary turns out to be thoughtful -- although he does demonstrate fro the get-go that his investigation into the gay-sounding voice came from a moment of sheer revulsion being trapped in a train filled with other gay men, and their nasality and intonation got to him, and finally made him burst into asking: "Why do we sound this way?" It is to his credit that he does find the answer to the question -- by way of speech therapy, an investigation of personal history, a thorough consideration of popular culture that involves the cultural stereotype of the "pansy," plus an eye-popping realisation about the well-inunciated villains of Disney movies -- and finds a way to reconcile with his "voice."
9:30 AM |
Seeing Richard Brody Typing on an External Keyboard
