Fashion films never go out of style, and now you can easily stream them to watch anytime you want. Tribeca Film Festival 2018 offered several films about art and artists, but perhaps the most compelling selection is the list of Fashion Films — three documentaries that profile fascinating characters from the fashion world. Here’s the list: Yellow is Forbidden, about Chinese designer Guo Pei, by director Pietra Brettkelly; The Gospel According to Andre, by director Kate Novack; and McQueen, by directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui. And there are more, too.
Recognition from Paris’s Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture is considered the apex of the fashion industry, and Chinese designer Guo Pei is determined to reach it. With a remarkable eye for detail and exquisite blending of visual art forms, veteran documentarian Pietra Brettkelly captures Guo’s drive, artistry and meticulous acumen, from the designer’s emergence on the international scene—when Rihanna wore her hand-embroidered canary yellow gown to the Met Gala in 2015—through her remarkable 2017 show “Legend,” presented at La Conciergerie, in Paris.
Yellow is Forbidden, at Tribeca 2018
Along the way, Brettkelly reveals the myriad opposing forces that confront Guo’s ambitions: those of Chinese tradition versus Western modernity; acceptance versus prejudice; and ensuring a thriving business versus pursuing more expensive and exclusive techniques. Most of all, she highlights the pressures that China’s economic rise places on its individual artisans. As Guo puts it, “I’m a designer, not a nation.” Nevertheless, Guo thrives amid these challenges, establishing herself as a singularly capable and uncompromising warrior for her art. With loving fidelity for Guo’s work, Brettkelly depicts both the process and the fashion itself, resulting in a timely examination of what it takes for an outsider to earn acclaim from one of the West’s most redoubtable institutions.
André Leon Talley—unmistakable in his regal stature, his fiercely original way with words, and his incomparable historical knowledge of couture, has been a fixture of the fashion world for more than 40 years. A mentee of the legendary editor Diana Vreeland, Talley called Vogue home for years: he served as news director; creative director; and finally, editor-at-large, until 2013. As he drifts effortlessly from the front row at fashion weeks across the globe to television appearances and New York Times assignments, one begins to wonder how such an original as Talley came to be.
André Leon Talley, in Gospel According to Andre
In Kate Novack’s film, the viewer is invited back to his childhood in Jim Crow-era North Carolina. His beloved grandmother, Bennie, raised him, schooling him in decorum, religion, and, unsurprisingly, clothes, sparking an early and powerful love for all things fashion. This led him to New York City, where he battled—and continues to battle—both racist and homophobic assumptions about black men in the industry. With great insight, Novack pulls back the curtain on this towering icon, revealing new and beautifully vulnerable moments with Talley—as well as endlessly hilarious ones—as he discusses his storied career and the women who helped him achieve it.
Gospel According to Andre is available for streaming on Hulu and Amazon Prime.
Beginning with his modest upbringing in London, Lee Alexander McQueen quickly ascended the ranks of the international fashion world. After graduating from Central Saint Martins and establishing his eponymous label, McQueen became head designer of Givenchy at age 27 and went on to win the British Fashion Awards’ prize for British Designer of the Year four times. His theatrical runway shows and daring designs existed on the cutting edge of ’90s fashion, while his controversial and confrontational work earned him equal attention from fans and detractors alike. At the same time, he also forged a friendship with the influential stylist Isabella Blow, cultivating an intimate relationship that would last until her death in 2007. As McQueen’s star rose, so did the pressure and accompanying anxiety to constantly strive for ever greater heights of genius.
McQueen, the documentary, at Tribeca
Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s documentary tells McQueen’s story through the testimonials from his closest friends and family. Featuring personal archives extending back to the earliest days of his career, as well as dynamic footage of his most boundary-pushing shows and creations, McQueen offers a vivid portrait of the tortured but inspired auteur’s work and persona.
McQueen is available for streaming on Amazon Prime.
Watch the trailer for McQueen below:
More
If you’re hungry for more, check out the fashion films from Tribeca 2017.
Zac Posen has become one the most recognizable faces in modern fashion, with his truly unique aesthetic style. He is a force to be reckoned with whose talent shone through as early as childhood. However, like any journey to great success, it hasn’t come without cost.
Follow the creation of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “China: Through the Looking Glass” exhibition, by curator Andrew Bolton. With unprecedented access, director Andrew Rossi captures the collision of high fashion and celebrity at the Met Gala and dives into the debate about whether fashion should be viewed as art.
First Monday in May is available for streaming on Amazon Prime.
H.G. Wells said, “We all have our time machines. Those that take us back are memories, and those that carry us forward are dreams.” The new documentary film, Our Time Machine, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival this year, manages to do both, and more. Using a kind of Chinese magic-realism, directors S. Leo Chiang and Yang Sun and editor Bob Lee, along with artist Maleonn, take the viewer to a world that not only interweaves dreams and memories, but also mixes transcendent allegory and deeply-rooted personal reality as part of one amazingly cohesive story, told with both power and grace. The extraordinary work of new director Yang Sun was acknowledged with the TFF Award for Best Cinematography in a Documentary.
Our Time Machine poster
Our Time Machine is a profound and poetic film that is achingly uplifting as it tells a universal tale of father and son, love and loss, and the exquisite sadness and joy of life – with puppets! If that seems like too many concepts or too grandiose an endeavor, I can only say that it likely would be in the hands of any other directors. But the deft artistry and grounded wisdom of these filmmakers treat life’s most abstract paradoxes in a way that feels like the life-blood of this movie is shot straight into your veins, as pure, essential truth.
It seems nearly impossible for an entirely factual documentary to be such a perfectly formed narrative tale. Can it also be a brilliant piece of poetry? It’s a rare thing, but here it is. Through an entirely unconventional use of mechanics (with a fresh take on puppetry and cinematography), these filmmakers have taken society’s collective pain and re-engineered it into beauty.
Shaken by news of his father’s dementia, Chinese artist Maleonn decides to build an intricately-designed time-machine puppet that will unite him and his father as it transports them to the memories his father has forgotten. If you don’t understand how puppetry can be a true art form, this film will show you. Originally conceived to be a collaborative theatrical project between father and son, an idea thwarted by the quickly advancing illness of his father, Maleonn must reimagine his production to be a parting gift to his father, and when even that fails due to his father’s inability to understand, Maleonn is left talking to the puppet he built, as if it were his own son: “Dear son, I want to try something impossible – to love another person. There is no practical purpose, because love is like art. There is no reason. We do it because we can’t help ourselves.”
Our Time Machine rehearsal photo by Maleonn
Maleonn follows in the artistic footsteps of his parents; his mother was an actress and his father, Ma Ke, was a long-time director of the Peking Opera Theater. Through the lens of a father-son relationship, Our Time Machine explores what it means to be an artist in China in the 20th century and today. From the condemnations of the Cultural Revolution to contemporary financial and social challenges of putting on a complex and wholly original hybrid art performance, directors S. Leo Chiang and Yang Sun probe the artistic impulse across generations. Mixing haunting imagery with real-life moments, Our Time Machine conveys the mystery and consolation of art against the ravages of time.
Maleonn in Our Time Machine
There are several puppets in the movie – both people and machines. In addition to the time machine puppet, there is an airplane, which the elderly-father puppet senses circling above him. Director Chiang explained to me that the plane is symbolic of a bird – a crane, and in China there is an ancient belief that when you die, you ride a crane to heaven. In the film, the father puppet repeatedly says he sees or hears an airplane coming, and the grown-son-puppet reassures him, “No, there is no plane.” Even if you don’t know about the Chinese crane metaphor, it is clear this plane represents the thing both father and son want to avoid – death. The time machine not only takes the father back to the lost memories in his past, it becomes the instrument that his son uses to avoid the future he fears for his father and himself. But will it work in real life?
Our Time Machine, Maleonn builds a large puppet
Helen Highly Analytical does not cry easily during movies. And I did not cry in this one. But it was quite a surprise to feel myself tear up when I was only speaking about this movie as I interviewed its filmmakers. I want so much to tell you, my readers, the pair of beautifully symmetrical repetitive sentences that frame this story, but I don’t want to cheat you of the experience of revelation that will come when you hear them in context. And it does feel like a genuine revelation.
Out Time Machine, “Son, can you float on water?”
As the Baby Boomer generation ages, we are met with an increasing number of emotionally grueling stories, told in films and in books, about the horrors of illness, the challenges of eldercare, and the miseries of troubled relationships between adult-children and their flawed or failing parents. At the same time, so many of us are suffering through those experiences in our real lives. The prospect of going to the movies to relive it on the big screen seems to me unappealing at best. I find myself avoiding films on these subjects, despite often being assured they are excellent or insightful. I feel I already have too much insight to bear. But this film is something different.
Especially in America, convention dictates that every story – even the saddest ones – must end with some sort of redemption, something learned, some problem resolved, and that expectation too often results in a contrived happy ending being slapped onto the conclusion of a story. Endings are hard – perhaps the most important and difficult part of any story. And if the writer resists the phony and simplistic happily-ever-after, then we often are left with an unsatisfying bitterness at the end – a bad taste in our mouths. In the film world, I call those “Life Sucks and Then You Die Movies” – not highly recommended.
With true stories, we often hear the justification, “That’s what really happened. You can’t change the facts.” But a real artist, a dedicated artist, will mine that real-life ending for a moment that is as unequivocally accurate and honest as it is transformative. It’s the sign of a true master – to be able to craft a beautiful ending without a whiff of anything artificial or the feel of anything forced. When we see that happen… it’s like a miracle. That’s what this documentary is. It is truth at its best – miraculous.
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Interested in another smart, well-made Asian-American film? (This one is in English.) Winner of the Tribeca Film Institute and AT&T Untold Stories award, Lucky Grandma is a dark comedy about immigrant life, the vulnerabilities of aging, and the primacy of family. Mostly it’s hilarious with a knock-out performance by Tsai Chin. Click here to read about it and another Untold Stories film.
Tribeca Film Festival 2019 presents a wide diversity of films, including screenings of branded entertainment. Branded programming is sponsored by a corporate marketing strategy, trying to connect with an audience in a richer way about the brand. On Friday, April 26, Tribeca X explored the intersection of storytelling and advertising. In an era of “Instagram influencers,” the audience for films no longer differentiates between advertising and editorial; that’s an old-journalism idea that has become almost irrelevant. Among other speakers, Natasha Lyonne discussed her work with the fashion brand KENZO. A short film she created for the company was so successful that it resulted in the Emmy-nominated Netflix show Russian Doll, which enjoyed amazing, almost-instant-cult-like popularity. Several different types of branded entertainment, from Feature to Episodic to VR, will be in competition. IndieNYC had the chance to view one of the intriguing Episodic Finalists, History of Memory (Short Documentary), sponsored by The Garage at HP, and talk with the directors Sarah Klein and Tom Mason, of Redglass Pictures.
“a sort of branded Proust”
Tribeca X has not created a new category of filmmaking; branded cinema has a well-established tradition. One legendary BMW campaign employed the auteur’s talents of John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-Wai, and Guy Ritchie, among others. See Frankenheimer’s remarkable film, The Hire: Ambush, starringClive Owen, below:
Tribeca’s effort to bring the genre to prominence now, through Tribeca X, offers a fascinating look into the process.
Klein and Mason were hired by HP to create a series of short films about how printed photographs affect people’s lives. They were given an evocative working title, “History of Memory,” to start them on their creative journey. The duo focused on the power of photographs to generate deep emotions, and how printed photos act as “magical artifacts.” When I interviewed him, director Tom Mason said:
“If your house catches on fire, what do you grab? You take your photo album. It’s an irreplaceable family heirloom.”
So they asked themselves, “What are the stories that do justice to the incredible emotional connection we have to our most treasured images?” Ultimately they asked the “Can one picture change your life forever?” which became the tag-line for the film series.
As with any documentary film, a key element is the selection of subjects and storylines. Klein and Mason found four compelling, true stories about lives that were altered by the image:
“At First Sight” couple in History of Memory
a woman who discovers her true racial identity via a long-hidden family photo album, and then becomes part of the family in those photos;
a couple who meet across continents because of a single printed photograph sent through the mail, now married, 25 years later, having aged along with that old picture;
an adoptee, who as a young adult receives his “baby picture” that was never taken, now framed on the wall along with the rest of his adopted family, providing a part of his life that had been missing;
and an elderly Chinese man who becomes an international sensation, based on a photo of him captured many years before, but the picture and negative lost, then discovered by a French archivist who takes his gallery show of reclaimed pictures around the world.
Separately titled “A Secret Album,” “At First Sight,” and “It’s a Boy,” each story depicts personal memories of how people were shaped by their own photographic history, sort of the branded equivalent of Proust.
“At First Sight” bride in History of Memory
It is interesting that Klein and Mason have worked with Ken Burns, where the photograph reigns supreme. Burns famously gives life to still photographs by slowly zooming in on subjects of interest and panning from one subject to another in the same photo. This technique is now made possible in many professional and home software applications and is termed “The Ken Burns Effect“ in Apple‘s iPhoto and iMovie. His once-genre-defining technique has become a commodified effect that can be placed onto a photo as easily as a colored filter.
Photo from “The Vietnam War” by Ken Burns
But Klein and Mason did not copy the stylistic methods of their mentor. They talked with us about what they learned from master-documentarian Burns — to ask the questions “Does the story move me? Does it enrich my understanding of the world?” The stories in this movie do just that. They are well-told tales about real people in the most important moments of their lives. And the film’s investigation into the relationship between photographs and personal history elevates the stories from being merely sentimental.
These four films are very seductive about the inherent power of photographs. But they are talking about analog images, good old-fashioned snapshots and fading family portraits – very tangible in the hand and lasting in the mind. Today, we live with thousands of personal photos on our phones and hard drives, too many to contemplate much less remember, and we squint to see them on tiny screens – pixels, not paper.
Can the emotions that existed when those images were captured be transported to the digital future? Maybe with the help of a printing machine, HP would like to suggest. But will digital photos, forever cleanly stored in the computer, have the same impact when they are converted to paper?
Gail as a young girl, in History of Memory
I assume HP wants us to choose the pictures we wish to save from the digital trash heap, and print them now on HP printers, so they can become our new family heirlooms. The problem is that now we have the option not to print, and to just store on a thumb drive. This is an option that did not exist in the past, and we are no longer compelled to use those antiquated analog formats, which seem burdensome and produce clutter. Modern life cares about saving trees, not memories.
It is somewhat ironic that HP, a “new technology” company, wants to re-invent the past. But if photos are to continue to play important roles in people’s lives, and especially if they are to preserve our emotional connections with our most important memories, then we and HP can only hope that people will opt to print. (See the History of Memory trailer, below.)
I cannot help but compare History of Memory to the now-classic TV series Mad Men – season 1, episode 13, called “The Wheel,” which centered around Don Draper’s efforts to create an ad campaign for Kodak’s new, circular slide projector. That particular ad presentation by Don Draper is the moment when Mad Men became a certified pop-cultural phenomenon. Watch a clip from that famous episode,below:
Don compares the slide carousel to a portable nostalgia creator. He says, “it lets us travel around and around and back again, to the place we know we are loved.” Great line! But the real story of that episode is that Don is savvy enough to manipulate the marketplace but ultimately his ad campaign works on him as well and affects his personal life. Don falls victim to his own manipulation when he uses his own family photos for his ad presentation. It’s a dramatic narrative inside an ad campaign inside a dramatic narrative.
Mad Men, The Wheel
And History of Memory works in a similar way. Director Tom Mason even mentioned that the process of making this movie changed the way he and his own family preserve and display their photographs. I think Don Draper would be proud of what History of Memory accomplishes, and so would Mad Men creator, Matthew Weiner.
Update: Congratulations to History of Memory filmmakers Sarah Klein and Tom Mason, and HP, for winning the Tribeca X Award in their category!Click here for the full press release.
Following up on my previous What-to-See article, which focused on Archival Movies at Tribeca Film Festival, I am listing a few more Top Picks that I could not exclude. There is really SO MUCH great stuff at Tribeca2019 (including Tribeca Television Festival and Tribeca Immersive, which I won’t even touch but are worthy of exploring), that it’s tough to pull out a short list. But here are some films that grabbed my attention during the pre-festival screenings, and which you cannot fail in seeing. I am recommending two Magic Realism films that are beautiful and dramatic, and two Activism films that are urgently important. Plus, one of the several Music Documentaries that I haven’t seen but is sure to be a winner.
How can a documentary be so gorgeous and tell such a perfectly formed narrative? It doesn’t seem possible; it’s a rare thing. Our Time Machine is a profound and poetic film that is achingly uplifting as it tells a universal story about the exquisite sadness and joy of life. Shaken by news of his father’s dementia, Chinese artist Maleonn sets off to build an intricately-designed time-machine puppet that will unite him and his father as it transports them to the memories his father has forgotten. (If you don’t understand how puppetry can be a true art form, this film will show you.)
Our Time Machine, at Tribeca
This Chinese-language film is full of tableaus that blend the real and the surreal as Maleonn follows in the artistic footsteps of his parents; his mother was an actress and his father, Ma Ke, was a long-time director of the Peking Opera Theater. Through the lens of a father-son relationship, Our Time Machine explores what it means to be an artist in China in the 20th century and today. From the condemnations of the Cultural Revolution to contemporary financial and social challenges of putting on a complex and wholly original hybrid art performance, directors S. Leo Chiang and Yang Sun probe the artistic impulse across generations. Mixing haunting imagery with real-life moments, Our Time Machine conveys the mystery and consolation of art against the ravages of time.
I put this movie on my Pick List because of its evocative use of animation and graphic elements (by Smith and Lee), which seem to lift the vibrancy and energy of this film off the screen and make the entire experience feel palpable and enthralling. The depressive grittiness of the story layered with the magical storytelling mechanism make for a rich film that stays with you after you’ve left the theater. Plus there is the electric actress, Slick Woods, who plays Goldie; when she is on the screen, it is impossible to look away.
Slick Woods as Goldie, at TFF2019
Goldie is a street-wise, 18-year-old dancer with big dreams of big fame, even as she is stuck at home minding her two sisters while their mother is in jail. When an opportunity to audition for a real music video comes her way, Goldie feels the time has finally come for her star to rise. All she needs is the perfect canary yellow fur coat she has had her eye on in a local vintage store window. But with the day of the shoot rapidly approaching, and Goldie’s pockets still empty of the cash needed to purchase the coat, her desire for it—and its perceived promise of transformation—becomes an all-consuming obsession.
Sam De Jong’s second feature is a stylish coming-of-age fable, anchored by a magnetic debut performance from Woods. Against the background of the vibrant Bronx streets in the summer, viewers are invited to keep up with Goldie’s breakneck race to realize her dreams or lose it all.
After the 2008 election, a secretive, well-funded partisan initiative poured money into state legislative races in key swing states to gain control of their redistricting processes and used high-tech analytics to dramatically skew voting maps based on demographic data. The result is one of the greatest electoral manipulations in U.S. history, one that poses a fundamental threat to our democracy and exacerbates the already polarized atmosphere in Congress and state houses across the country.
Slay the Dragon documentary
Gerrymandering, the practice of redrawing electoral maps to serve the party in power, has been around for centuries. But in today’s hyper-partisan political environment it has been taken to unprecedented extremes, fueled by the elimination of corporate campaign contribution limits and the availability of vast amounts of personal information. The effects of this audacious plan have continued to bear fruit through the 2018 midterms. But voters, fed up with cynical efforts to sidestep the will of the majority, have begun fighting back. In one example, a grassroots movement led by a young woman with no political experience gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures to put an anti-gerrymandering initiative on the ballot in Michigan.
The new documentary Slay the Dragon shines a light on this timely issue, and follows a handful of citizens’ groups, outraged by what they see as an attack on the core democratic principle that every person’s vote should count equally, as they battle party operatives and an entrenched political establishment to fix a broken system.
Katie Fahey, in Slay the Dragon
In this film, we learn about “packing” and “cracking” and witness creative redistricting lines full of twists, curves, and squiggles to guarantee a certain majority. But we also experience hope in the form of Katie Fahey, a Michigander who forms the group Voters Not Politicians working to bring a measure onto the state’s ballot to require an independent group—not the legislature—to draw the lines. And in Wisconsin, an activist group challenges the state’s redistricting in a case that makes its way to the US Supreme Court. Directors Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance craft a detailed, infuriating, ultimately inspiring look—deftly balancing the facts and maps with the tireless work of people like Fahey to get us to act to ensure that democracy will survive. But the battle isn’t over yet; you need to be informed and vigilant.
Note: Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance have directed several films together, including Clinton for PBS’s American Experience, and the six-part series Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies. Separately and together, they have won numerous Peabody, Emmy®, and Writers Guild Awards, and an Academy Award® nomination. Barak is also the director of another film at TFF this year, which I also recommend — Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation, detailed below.
Captain Paul Watson has dedicated his life to fighting for one thing – to end the slaughter of the ocean’s wildlife and the destruction of its ecosystems. Without the ocean’s ecosystems, Watson contends that life on earth itself will not survive, and he makes a surprisingly convincing case for the urgency and necessity of his mission. Co-founder of GreenPeace and founder of Sea Shepard, Watson is part pirate, part philosopher, in this provocative film about a man who will stop at nothing to protect what lies beneath. Like a crime-fighting superhero of the high seas, Watson and his crews confront illegal whaling vessels from Europe to the Southern Ocean, seal hunters in Canada, and shark finners in Central America. Impervious to threats, with more than one nation issuing warrants for his arrest, Watson continues to intervene on behalf of the endangered ocean creatures and ultimately life on this planet.
Captain Watson, at Tribeca
Braiding contemporary interviews with Watson, archival footage from decades of Watson’s ferocious activism, and spectacular underwater nature footage, award-winning documentarian Lesley Chilcott (An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman) tells a story that is shockingly informative, magnificent, and deeply disturbing. Watson is a must-see for anyone concerned about the future of our planet.
When business partners John Roberts and Joel Rosenman floated the idea of hosting an opening day party with live music to celebrate their new recording studio in Woodstock, New York, they had no idea what it would eventually become: a pilgrimage of 500,000 like-minded radicals and hippies to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, where they would find spiritual reassurance and release in a celebration of freedom.
Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation
50 years later, Barak Goodman’s retelling of the three-day music festival captures the zeitgeist of the time. Structured faithfully around audio testimony from attendees, Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation focuses not just on how it all came to be, despite enormous challenges, but how it felt for it to happen: an endless traffic backup was elevated to a communal experience, and a food shortage became a collaboration rather than a disaster. Historic musical performances spotlighted in the film, from Jimi Hendrix to Joan Baez to Crosby, Stills, and Nash, form the backdrop to what is fundamentally the audience’s story. Woodstock takes us all back to a time and a place now captured in a time capsule, but also reminds us of the immediacy that love, music and shared experience can elicit.
It’s Spring in New York and that means one thing to cinephiles: Tribeca Film Festival. The festival runs April 24-May 5 at Village East Cinema and Regal Cinemas Battery Park. This year I will save my “what makes Tribeca so special” intro for later (if time allows) and cut right to my Curtain-RaiserPick List, as the Tribeca2019 opening day is soon approaching. Continuing to expand its entertainment offerings, Tribeca has broken up their titles into an even more confusing array of categories than ever before, including Documentary, Spotlight Documentary, Viewpoints, Untold Stories, Spotlight Narrative, US Narrative, International Narrative, Movies Plus, This Used to Be New York, Critics Week, and on and on – not exactly easy to navigate. So, ignoring all that, and also side-stepping the more typical Critics Picks of big-name and high-profile productions (see any other publication for that), I will offer a select list of films that fall into a category defined by my own tangled and perhaps questionable perspective: I am interested in the number of Archival Movies at TFF2019, and I will list just a few here.
Archival Movies
This seems to be an unofficial theme this year – films that begin and end with images of VCR tapes or microfilm, drawers full of old photographs or scrapbooks of newspaper clippings. Archival materials are typical components of well-researched documentaries (and TFF is always wonderfully rich with documentaries), but this year the focus seems to be as much about the archival material itself as it is the subject of that material. Several films investigate real-life individuals whose identities where defined by and sometimes destroyed by their images on paper or video.
Recorder Movie: archival footage galore
I theorize that with the advent of the internet and the digital age where unlimited masses of everything are recorded, without context, the old concept of carefully collected documentation is increasingly a thing of the past. And old, analog items, such as photographs on yellowed, warped paper, are a dying breed of memoires — history made real by material things. It’s the beginning of the end for archiving as we know it, and we rightly are already nostalgic for those tangible touchstones. Here are some movies that ask the viewer, in various ways, to reflect on the relationship between archival items, the people who keep them, their depictions on screen, the memories they create, and reality.
Marion Stokes secretly recorded American television 24 hours a day for 30 years, amassing an incredible 70,000 VHS tapes. Long before our current era of “fake news,” Marion was seeking and protecting the truth by archiving everything that was said and shown on television. The public didn’t know it, but the networks were disposing of their archives for decades – into the trashcan of history. Remarkably, Marion saved it. A mystery in the form of a time capsule, Matt Wolf’s film delves into the strange life of a reclusive archivist who was perhaps crazy, perhaps genius, perhaps both.
Marion Stokes in Recorder
Beginning with the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979 and ending with her death during the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook, Stokes captured wars, triumphs, catastrophes, talk shows, bloopers, commercials, and more. The archive reminds us who we were and explores how television shaped the world of today. At the same time, it looks at the woman who dedicated her life to this visionary and maddening project and the toll it took on those around her.
Tribeca X explores the intersection of advertising and storytelling, in itself a fascinating topic. For more on that, click here.
The History of Memory is a series of short documentary films, created by Redglass Pictures and the Garage at HP, that celebrates the power of printed photographs to change our lives. From Florida to India, Beijing to New Orleans, the short films explore stories of real life people whose lives were forever altered by the discovery, creation, or preservation of a photograph. In At First Sight, a deep connection is made across continents following the exchange of two images. A Secret Album tells of a woman who discovers her true self after the uncovering of a hidden family photo album. And in It’s a Boy, a young man poses for an unconventional photo shoot, and then feels a part of a family for the first time in his life. In each film of History of Memory, we are reminded that the most important memories are those that we cherish, share, and protect. (And ideally, if you believe HP, that includes printing your cherished photos.)
Throughout his life, Bill Wyman, one of the original members of The Rolling Stones, shot hours of unseen film footage, took thousands of photographs, and collected a vast archive of memorabilia. He also kept a detailed diary to accompany these treasures. Known by his former bandmates as a man of few words, the notoriously private bass player reveals himself to the audience by talking us through his life’s archive and reflecting on his experiences. It’s an engaging perspective of a man at the end of his career. Directed by Oliver Murray, The Quiet One is a cinematic memoir from a working-class boy, raised by his grandmother, who found his home in the band that disrupted the music scene and made rock n’ roll history.
Note that I have not yet seen this film, so Helen can’t Highly recommend it. But I will suggest that it seems to be an intriguing and fresh look at a can’t-be-told-too-often story. I include it in my Pick List primarily because of the compelling and devastating use of a home-video archive. Nine year old Emmanuel began filming himself and his family with a home video camera in 1999, capturing his Washington D.C. neighborhood through the eyes of an innocent child. Growing up just 17 blocks from the U.S. Capitol, however, proved more difficult than expected. Filmmaker, journalist, and frequent This American Life contributor Davy Rothbart befriended the Sanford family as they continued to document their daily life over a 20-year period in a city plagued by poverty, addiction, and gun violence.
17 Blocks, documentary
What resulted from this uniquely collaborative effort between Rothbart and the family is a portrait of the unwavering strength of familial bonds. The film follows the characters through periods of joy and sadness, all captured on tape with stunning intimacy. This non-fiction odyssey offers a remarkable look into the lives of one family who was brave enough to share their story with the world.
I am going to break this Archival category into a sub-group of Rise-and-FallStories about iconic men whose lives were quite literally defined by the images of themselves created by and about them. Destroy the image, destroy the man? The Halston movie below begins by telling the audience how all of Halston’s tapes of himself and his work during the years of his reign were intentionally and systematically erased by the man who pushed him out of the business branded with Halston’s own name. The tapes were not trashed; they were erased, with fresh blank labels attached to cover up the old ones. Did this destructive act succeed at erasing the man himself? The documentary investigates.
Pictures meant everything to Halston. “Life is like a picture,” he used to say. The man, the brand, and the downfall of legendary fashion designer Halston, are poignantly portrayed in this documentary by TFF alum filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng (Dior and I, and The Eye Has to Travel, about fashionista Diana Vreeland). America’s first superstar designer, Halston created an empire and personified the dramatic social and sexual revolution of the last century. The film reveals Halston’s impact on fashion, culture, and business. It captures the epic sweep of the life and times of Roy Halston Frowick, the man who set women free with his unstructured designs and strove to “dress all of America.”
Halston, the documentary
While framing the story as an investigation by a young archivist diving into the Halston company records, Tcheng expertly weaves rare archival footage – depicted through contact sheets, TV monitors, negative images, and video glitches, with intimate interviews with Halston’s family, friends and collaborators, including Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Iman, and filmmaker Joel Schumacher. What results is a behind-the-headlines look into the struggle between Halston’s self-created image, his depiction in the press, his artistic legacy, and the man himself. As in the story below, it is suggested that perhaps cocaine was key to this icon’s downfall. But the film digs deeper and looks at a carefully considered timeline of events; there is a lot to this story. In addition to its glitzy appeal, this documentary truly investigates America’s cultural and business history in a way that makes it surprisingly significant today.
*Take note during the credits of the film at how much of the archival materials came from the Andy Warhol collection. Now there’s a guy who protected his image.
The story of John DeLorean and his iconic car is mainly associated these days with the beloved movie Back to the Future. The true story has faded since the cameras, gossip, and intrigue swirled around him in the 80s, epitomized by a top-model wife and an infamous cocaine bust, followed by revelations of theft and corruption. But this film suggests that DeLorean’s triumphs and downfall, and their consequences, remain relevant today. And who better to portray a flamboyant man with a giant ego than Alec Baldwin, who appears in this film portraying himself portraying DeLorean?
Alec Baldwin as DeLorean
DeLorean’s fascinating tale is documented by one of the most glamorous archives in biopic history – full of private planes, fast cars, celebrities, posh lifestyles, flashy ads, mob-guy confessions, FBI secret footage, and even a filmed polygraph test plus the rehearsal for that test. The use of that archive in combination with process-aware re-enactments and interviews with many who knew him, including his much-disillusioned and angry son, provide a portrait of a complex, brilliant innovator and marketing genius whose Midas touch disappeared too quickly. The juxtaposition of archival materials, present-day interviews, and occasional commentary from actor Alec Baldwin overtly begs the question: what was real and what was a con? But perhaps the most compelling part of the film is the disclosure of what happened after the cameras stopped filming and the newspapers stopped reporting.
Are Us and Life Sucks tethered together like combating doubles of each other?
by HelenHighly
“Us” Movie Poster with Lupita Nyong’o
It happened again: Entirely randomly and coincidentally, I saw two different narrative presentations (this time a film and a live play) just days apart, and despite their having no real connection, they merged in my brain to produce one review. The various parallels in the two stories, including matching themes and potential relevance to right-now America, were difficult to ignore and not compare, so I did – compare and contrast. First, I saw Us, the much-anticipated sophomore-effort horror film by Jordan Peele, which follows his much-celebrated first writer/director endeavor, Get Out. Next, I saw Life Sucks(now extended for a summer run at Theater Row, beginning June 4 )a play that claims to be “sort of adapted from Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov,” also a much-anticipated sophomore-effort variation on Chekhov for contemporary American audiences, by Aaron Posner (with Wheelhouse director Jeff Wise), following Posner’s much-acclaimed Stupid Fucking Bird, an adaptation of Chekhov’s Seagull. As Us was percolating in my brain, and as I was noticing more and more articles discussing the supposedly mysterious themes and hidden meanings within this genre-bending movie, my experience at the genre-bending Life Sucks hit me hard, as an answer to all my doubts and emerging cynicism about Us.
Note: There are some “spoilers” in this article. But Helen Highly suggests that if Peele wants to play in the philosophical Big Leagues, discussing archetypal relationships, then he needs to grow up and leave the notion of spoilers for lesser minds. Generations of people have known how all the Chekhov stories end, but that hasn’t yet stopped them from watching.
In the movie Us, Adelaide Wilson returns from the city to the beachfront home where she grew up, accompanied by her husband, son and daughter and planning to spend time with old friends. Haunted by a traumatic experience from the past, Adelaide grows increasingly concerned that something bad is going to happen that will threaten the safe, docile, middle-class lives of her family. Her worst fears soon become a reality, when four masked strangers descend upon the house. When the masks come off, the family is horrified to learn that each attacker takes the appearance of one of them and is harboring some long-buried resentments about power inequities and secret yearnings. Each family member must face off against their murderous other-selves, who are figuratively and sometimes literally “tethered” to them. It’s the quintessential us vs them scenario, where the threat from others truly comes from ourselves. Thus, in keeping with the classic horror genre, the danger is coming from inside. In the end, there is a parting between us and them, but the future is uncertain.
“Life Sucks” Poster, by Aaron Posner
In Life Sucks, an urban professor (Austin Pendleton in the original production and Kevin Isola in the remount) returns to the country home where he grew up, accompanied by his beautiful young wife. They descend upon the house that contains the long-ignored family and friends he left behind. Haunted by a family history of power inequities, repressed resentments, and secret yearnings, the characters experience increasing concern that something bad is going to threaten their complacent, docile, middle-class lives. Their worst fears soon become a reality as they each are confronted by the images of themselves that they project onto others, and they are forced to face their own regrets as mirrored in the seeming success of those most closely connected to them. Denial has been living in the basement and accountability has come to call. Posner has taken Chekhov’s traditional “suffering is beautiful” stance and given it some edge, and a pointed opinion: We are our own worst enemies. In the end, there is a parting between us and them, but the future is uncertain.
“Us” movie poster
Do the two sound similar? Yeah. Dualities. Opposites that create and destroy each other. The way that people are tethered to their darker selves, both personally and as a society. Who is the real “us” – the people we feel we are inside (our hurts, our hopes, our dreams) or the people others perceive us to be (selfish, ugly, threatening)? What happens when our worst selves are unleashed? In us vs them, who is truly to blame and who is the victim? Who gets to walk away a hero, and at what cost to others?
The real question is this: Would you rather explore these philosophical quandaries within a bloody battle with speechless creatures from a subterranean world or over tea and vodka with articulate intellectuals as they stroll through gardens and play piano in their living room? Box office sales would surely indicate that most would prefer the former. But Helen Highly prefers the latter. (And for the sake of total accuracy, I note that Posner changes the traditional Chekhovian beverage from vodka to rum and coke, as part of his modernization of the play – a small detail that I would have preferred to remain traditional.)
My immediate reaction to Us was extreme disappointment, as I had adored Get Out and would have been happy to see it win an Oscar for Best Picture. But this new movie is a relentlessly violent and bloody slasher flick, where the crude brutality overwhelms whatever finesse, imagination, or meaningful messaging it may contain. Peele gave quite a few interviews explaining his film, after-the-fact, and many an article was written deciphering the riddle-like significance of the film. But whatever nuanced complexities might have been in Peele’s head didn’t make it to the screen, and certainly didn’t make it into my head. And just like any joke, if you have to explain it afterward, that means it didn’t really work.
Even when Peele’s often heavy-handed metaphors did scream about their social or psychological significance, I just didn’t care, because I didn’t want to have to sit through another kill-fest scene in order to grasp his laborious, clumsy philosophizing. Is there more ironic significance to be found if one swims through all the blood to reach it? Maybe. But when I saw Life Sucks, it was profoundly and unequivocally clear that Chekhov is and always will be a master writer and philosopher, no matter how much contemporary silliness is thrown at his work, while Peele is still very much a newbie, and this film did not earn the “homework” afterward to try to make sense of his mess. Kudos to Peele for his commanding first film, and he certainly should keep working, but Helen Highly suggests that those watching keep proper perspective and reserve their highest praise for those who truly deserve it. Aaron Posner deserves it.
“Life Sucks” Play by Aaron Posner, w/Jeff Biehl as Vanya
Posner brings Chekhov out from the dusty past and makes him as fresh and relevant to contemporary life as Jordan Peele wishes he were. And director Jeff Wise seems to work in perfect partnership with Posner, delivering an audacious, immensely entertaining production that mingles mirth and angst with shock-and-awe in ways that portray life’s greatest dilemmas and despairs while ultimately sending the audience from the theater feeling strangely uplifted despite their newly activated personal pain.
It’s amazing how a few surprise gunshots that miss their targets and draw no blood can be as alarming and powerful as countless bloody murders. But what’s it all about? Both the movie and the play have a lot on their minds – virtual prisms of contemplation.
Speaking of prisms, I’ll start with mirrors, which figure prominently in Us. There is a decrepit carnival house of mirrors (and later, fractured shards of mirrors) that reflect a frightened little girl, who sees – or imagines? – her darker double, an image that returns repeatedly throughout the film. That scared little girl grows up to be a troubled, bourgeois wife and mother of two, who finally comes face-to-face with her “tethered” underworld double – her metaphysical opposite, both played with extraordinary dexterity by Lupita Nyong’o.
Plus, there is a vanity/makeup mirror in which a bleeding, murderous doppelganger of another bourgeois housewife applies lipstick with ghoulish panache, which is perhaps the most entertaining part of the movie, thanks to a thrilling performance by Elisabeth Moss. This deranged opposite-monster gives the most heinous portrayal possible of the superficial, self-absorbed character she seeks to kill and replace. At this point, it’s certainly no spoiler to reveal that all the ordinary, petty, self-entitled, real-world characters each have a zombie-like double who seeks to destroy and replace them. Does this already sound like Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Ding ding ding: You win the prize.
Meanwhile, Life Sucks sticks to the old theatrical trick of characters acting as human mirrors of each other. There is a clever scene, amazing in its simple effectiveness, in which all the characters line up to face off against the bourgeois, self-absorbed, complaining, Vanya (played by Jeff Biehl), each asking in turn, “What, am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” and then detail their own under-the-surface pains and grievances, which sometimes serve as confessions as well. Posner has taken the underlying psychologies of his layered characters and turned them inside out, so that they directly speak their interior thoughts, and even explain their personal issues and social philosophies, and still the play does not get near the level of over-bearing, self-important obnoxiousness that runs through the movie Us.
“Us” Movie Poster
What’s the most scary thing in Us? Your miserable, moaning, opposite-self, who is emotionally tethered to you, is coming to stab you to death with a giant pair of scissors. (Scissors are made of two identical halves that are attached to each other, and also represent a severing of unity: Get it?) What’s the most scary thing is Life Sucks? I asked the director, Jeff Wise.
He answered, “The scariest thing in life is our ability to delude ourselves. The characters in this play, like so many people, detach themselves from reality to avoid taking responsibility for themselves and the pain that brutal honesty would bring with it. And the more detached you are, the more vulnerable you are to reality making itself known to you. This is very scary – being so sure of something that is not real. And when the truth is made real to you, that’s terrifying. That’s when people have psychotic breaks.”
He continued, “Vanya is not happy about the decisions he has or has not made in his life. He thinks in an entitled way. He blames others. He blames society. He refuses to be accountable. And finally he starts lashing out in real and violent ways – the dissatisfied, angry part of himself who believes that life has been unfair to him. He brings a gun into the house. Now his fear has manifested in real danger. He has become toxic to his community. His unwillingness to confront his own struggle is dangerous to others. So, they must confront him.”
It’s the emotional confrontation that is terrifying. The other characters force Vanya to look at himself, as if in a mirror. But who needs a real mirror when you have the genius of Chekhov to depict the conflicts in our consciousness – the smashed glass between our egos and our ids? In fact, Posner interweaves sardonic humor with cutting truth so easily, you are able to watch that conflict – the confrontation between who we pretend to be and who we are afraid to be, and laugh at Vanya’s and our own tortured psyches. Posner doesn’t need absurd giant scissors; he has language.
Helen suggests that when Vanya’s seething resentment peaks, and he attempts to shoot and kill his better-than-him brother, he is attempting to tear the same type of tether to their better-halves that the ghouls in Us so viciously resent. In some ways, it’s a struggle to own ourselves and a question about free will. Can Vanya be the person he wants to be or is he doomed by his denial of who he truly is – his jealousy, his guilt, his weaknesses? Can Adelaide ever truly free herself from her ugly underground double? And which one of her double-selves most deserves the daylight; which one is the real one? It seems odd that these two very-different stories both grapple with the same questions. Are Us and Life Sucks tethered together like combating doubles of each other? If so, Chekhov walks away the winner.
Austin Pendleton in “Life Sucks”
There is another pair of tethered characters in Life Sucks that merits mention. Vanya’s niece, Sonia (Kimberly Chatterjee), is homely, hard-working, unsophisticated, and sexually “invisble,” especially to the man she loves — Dr. Aster (Michael Schantz). In contrast, there is her father’s beautiful, alluring, worldly wife, Ella (Nadia Bowers), who receives unwanted romantic overtures from every man within wishing distance, especially from her brother-in-law Vanya, and also, painfully, from Dr. Aster — the man Sonia believes should rightfully love her. There is a wonderful heart-to-heart scene between the two women, in which they confront each other’s (and their own) jealousies and failures and reflect on how each possesses much of what the other wants. Their late-night drunken dialogue has a charm that is both solemn and giddy. It’s a true, heart-wrenching joy to watch, and far out-classes any Jordan Peele scene of two, female opposites literally ripping each other’s hearts out.
In Get Out, Peele was more effective at integrating comedy into the tragedy than he is in Us. But Life Sucks reaches moments of outright hilarity, although it is not quite as tight and astute as Stupid Fucking Bird. Neither writer has achieved the greatness of their first efforts, but both remain promising young artists who are contributing to our national discourse on personal and societal responsibility as we move from the “old order” to the “new order,” or at least they’re making the attempt. At a time when immigration has become a national emergency in our country, they are dealing with issues of outsiders vs insiders, us vs them (within ourselves and society), and blame vs responsibility. That’s the wonder of art – to make us think while we are entertained.
Lupita Nyong’o in Us Movie
Both stories have a moral seriousness and earnest intensity dotted with amusing pop-culture references. In Us, we get to see an Amazon-Alexa-like voice-operated music player get splattered with blood as it plays “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys (a song from 1966). In Life Sucks, we get to hear the Pickles character sing “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road,” by the Beatles (a song from 1968). We also hear Paul Simon’s “American Tune” (1975). The lyrics are right at home in Life Sucks but would have fit just as well into Us:
I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
or driven to its knees
But it’s all right, it’s all right
We’ve lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
we’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what went wrong
Okay, maybe that’s me showing my age. I do agree with other critics who have applauded Jordan Peele’s savvy exploitation of how tethered we are to pop music. See this article by Micah Peters at The Ringer, for more on that.
Peele aims to be more overtly political in his story, but… his 1980’s-era Hands Across America tie-in reads more nostalgic than meaningful. I think he gets himself too twisted up between Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit references and homeless guys with Bible verses written on their foreheads to really put together anything resembling an intellectually viable political thesis; he’s made a mediocre, psychological-thriller / slasher-film combo with some archetypal undertones and enough symbolic details to let anybody read anything they want into the meaning of it all. It is generous to include his movie in any real philosophical discussion, but he does seem to be thinking about things; maybe next time he’ll express some real ideas.
Posner and Wise’s effort is much stronger and more emotionally gripping. Let’s face it; no one can touch Chekhov when it comes to existential angst and human complexity. It’s worth noting that Posner does squarely place the setting in the United States but is vague about the date, although there is an Exxon reference at one point. So it seems both stories see something significant about America in the 1980s, while they also speak to a contemporary audience.
I am left with questions: Are we our own worst enemies? Does life really suck? And if it doesn’t suck, what does it do?
Life staggers. It confounds. It rages. And it yearns. Life is beautiful and Life Sucks.
Go see the play. Skip the movie.
Life Sucks was a downtown smash hit at Wheelhouse Theater but now is having a summer run uptown at Acorn Theatre, beginning June 4. Helen HIGHLY suggests you go see it. I personally guarantee you will be glad you did. Click here for tickets.
Will the Real Patti Smith
Please Stand Up? + Nico, 1988: A Really Good Aging-Punk-Rocker Movie
by HelenHighly
I am feeling some guilt for kinda dissing Patti Smith in the last essay I wrote – just glibly dashing off a few lines about her Tribeca Film Festival appearance at the premier of Horses: Patti Smith and Her Band, the new documentary about her 40th anniversary performance of her 1975 debut album of the same name, followed by a live concert at the Beacon Theater. I hadn’t planned on writing about that film or event, but it sort of just came out as I typed my introduction to a lengthy film review of a wild, crazy, mind-blowing movie, Ghostbox Cowboy, which was part art and part politics and part comedy and part tragedy and part acid trip. I think it was just my subconscious mind that put together referencing Patti Smith as part of my intro discussion of that film (which does make a kind of surreal sense), although… what I wrote was not exactly complimentary of Patti, and certainly not worthy of the musical and artistic giant that she is.
Here’s what I wrote: ” …And if Patti Smith (my hero) can use the word ‘motherfucker’ three times in every sentence, which she recently did in and at the premier of Horses, the new and intentionally-terrible documentary film about her, followed by a bizarrely-hostile live performance at Beacon Theater (yeah, I know she was a punk rocker, and she still can rock like no one else, but she’s 70 beloved years old now and has essentially accepted the role of Goddess Mother Earth, so… fewer ‘motherfuckers’ out of her mouth might be in order)… all that and be only praised and worshipped by the press the next day, then that gives me permission to say this:”
Patti Smith, Horses
So… I want to start here by recalling one of the best concert experiences I’ve ever had – maybe the best, which was seeing Patti Smith play at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, in the summer of 2016. It was my first summer in New York. I had moved here from Chicago, which I had proudly claimed as My City for most of my adult life. But here I was running around NYC, eating up all the art and film and music around town like a kid, exclaiming, “I feel like I am the last person on the planet to realize that New York City is the best city in the world!”
And my friend took me to see Patti Smith play live, outdoors, at Lincoln Center, for FREE (!!!) on a glorious summer evening, surrounded by glistening NYC skyscrapers. I had never seen Patti Smith live before. I knew her music, and some of her poetry, and some of the photographs, but… no experience of her like this. It was such a small, casual venue, but Patti Smith rocked the sky that night. She literally shredded her guitar – broke the strings playing her final song. I will never forget it. (I won’t include her playlist because… you know, everything she sang was just everything you could ever want to hear her sing.) She also ranted about Donald Trump, shouted about how we need to VOTE, talked about the world, talked about herself… she was ferocious, she was funny, she was bright and the very definition of magnificent. That event was part rock concert, part political rally, and part religious revival, and all of it such a pure expression of brains and guts and heart and soul. Patti Smith was a Force of Nature. She was Earth Shaking. She was Gorgeous. She was Transcendent.
Patti Smith and Her Band
That is how I think of Patti Smith. She was 70 years old at the time, and I remember thinking how lucky I was to see her in what might be one of her final concerts. Ha! As she yelled in her new documentary, while she played a raucous cover of “My Generation,”… “I am old, and I’m gonna get older, motherfuckers!” And as amusing as that was, that was part of the issue I had with that night – both Patti live and her new documentary (which was directed by Steven Sebring, who also directed the previous Patti Smith documentary, Dream of Life).
I need to add that in between these two events, I saw Patti Smith another time. It was in Brooklyn, at what was supposed to be a reading and book signing for her new book, M Train. She read a little from the book. Then, she said she’d rather sing than read, and asked the crowd if they agreed (duh), and so we were treated to a surprise spontaneous concert, which felt like a private performance. Patti was sort of in mellow mode that night (which for her is still passionate). She sang and she played and she stopped often to tell stories and talk about what was on her mind and to interact with this devoted audience, whom she seemed to respect and appreciate almost as much as we did her.
That is what was missing at the Beacon Theater Monday night. I wasn’t looking for mellow; I was looking for that brilliant, radiant energy – that passionate person. I mean, Patti Smith seems to have accepted the mantle of being worshipped as Mother Earth herself. (And Mother Earth shouldn’t really be yelling MotherFucker all the time, should she?) She is adored; she is revered. As she should be. Her career as a musician and poet and artist has been extraordinary, as has been her activism and philanthropy. And yes, she started more than 40 years ago as a growling, raging, cursing punk rocker, which helped change the world. And her anniversary performance of her seminal Horses album, and the accompanying documentary are intended to be celebrations of that, as they should be. She is a legend in her own time.
NEW YORK, NY – JULY 14: Singer Patti Smith performs at the Castle Clinton National Monument in Battery Park on July 14, 2011 in New York City. (Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images)
And it really does pain me to say it, but at TFF, both in the movie and in person… the raw and original energy that made her, seemed to be lacking. Or, not lacking so much as … being forced back on stage. I felt she was playing a role – reenacting her former self. There, I said it. Patti Smith has never been anything but TRUE, and I sort of felt like I was watching someone else do a tribute concert – someone else try to impersonate her former, fierce and snarling punk-rocker youth.
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe
Yes, Patti can totally still rock out, harder and louder than anyone. But… why was she trying so hard to prove it? Why was she repeatedly yelling insults into the audience, calling everyone motherfucker, again and again? Why did she seem so angry – at the world at large as well as her own fans? It just didn’t seem like that true, well-seasoned, self-assured, and powerfully loving force of nature that she has become.
(And, kinda separately, I know that everyone was so thrilled that Patti brought out Bruce Springsteen to play with her, but… why did Patti never play guitar during this show? What was up with that? Btw, Bruce and Patti performed “Because the Night,” a song they co-wrote in 1978, and that was indeed one of the highlights of the concert — not because of Bruce, but because his appearance seemed to soften Patti some and put her in a better mood.
Then Patti brought out Stipe, and her daughter Jesse Smith, for “People Have the Power,” to close the show. That was the highlight. Finally, with that last song, this mini-concert felt like a celebration. Patti had found her groove. Too bad it took so long to get there. And btw, it still didn’t begin to rival other renditions of that song I’ve heard Patti sing.)
And, in this documentary, did I not hear Patti say to Steven, “let’s make this film really bad, like Andy Warhol would,” or something along those lines? I get that Sebring has already made the thoughtful, personal documentary of Patti’s life, and this was intended to be a pure concert movie, but… sorry to disagree with apparently every other person who was there, but… I did NOT think it was beautifully or artfully shot, and it did seem to be sloppy and “intentionally terrible” (as I said in my Ghostbox Cowboy review). Most importantly, neither the film nor the performance seemed to me to express the brains and guts and heart and soul of the Real Patti Smith.
I’m Just Sayin
And okay, I concede that I know nothing about music and should not even be speaking my mind about this, but… since I already made those glib and unflattering remarks yesterday, I figure I should at least set the record straight and say how much I do sincerely adore Patti Smith, and how much Helen Highly admires her career and her life. And yet I do not recommend that anyone use this Horses documentary to remember her by; just get the indisputably great original album instead. I’m just saying.
p.s. I should note, for serious Patti Smith fans, that she is also depicted at Tribeca2018 in the documentary Mapplethorpe, when she and the famous photographer were young lovers.
Hey, want to see a really compelling, concert-tour film about an aging punk rocker? Check out Nico, 1988. Now here is a woman for whom it makes sense to be calling everyone Motherfucker. And as would also make sense, Nico OD’d, alas, while Patti Smith is still very much alive (because she never was a drug addict and she didn’t stay an angry teenager). Nico, 1988 is not a documentary, but it feels like one, thanks to the intrepid performance of Trine Dyrholm and writing and direction by Susanna Nicchiarelli.
Danish actress and musician Trine Dyrholm delivers a high-voltage performance as Christa Päffgen—better known as Nico, the Andy Warhol darling and one-time chanteuse of the Velvet Underground. At the outset of Nico, 1988, Nico is approaching 50, tumbling down the slopes of drug addiction, and desperate to regain custody of her son. Her manager, Richard (John Gordon Sinclair), sensing her need for purpose, sets her on a tour across Europe; back on the road, she’s equal parts tenacious, manic, and erratic.
Nico, 1988 at Tribeca
Writer-director Susanna Nicchiarelli gives us an unapologetic portrait of a woman who never cared about being pretty or nice; she is the antithesis of traditional female virtue. Nicchiarelli blends a tangible reverence for her subject with dark humor, crafting a riveting examination of a fragile artist constantly pushed to perform. The audience is witness to the anguished and scattered psychology of Nico’s final years. With precision, care, and grit, Nicchiarelli and Dyrholm capture the inner turmoil of a fearless icon, artist, and mother struggling to reconcile the consequences of her tortured life.
Helen Highly Fears Ghostbox Cowboy,Talks to Writer-Director John Maringouin, Comments on Patti Smith and Horses, and Gives a Shout-Out to General Magic
by HelenHighly
I gotta start with an opening paragraph that will feed the Google search-engine monster the info it needs and also give you a heads-up that I spend a long time railing against this film, but in the end… Helen Highly Recommends the movie Ghostbox Cowboy, written and directed by John Maringouin, which saw its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival 2018. And if Patti Smith (my hero) can use the word “motherfucker” three times in every sentence, which she recently did at the premiere of Horses, the new and intentionally-terrible documentary film about her, followed by a bizarrely-hostile live performance at Beacon Theater (yeah, I know she was a punk rocker, and she still can rock like no one else, but she’s 70 beloved years old now and has essentially accepted the role of Goddess Mother Earth, so… fewer “motherfuckers” out of her mouth might be in order)… all that and be only praised and worshipped by the press the next day, then that gives me permission to say this:
This motherfuckin’ movie is totally bat-shit crazy and plays like you took a dose of bad acid and had a terrible trip (and don’t tell me it was funny, motherfucker!). And just like an acid trip, you will finally come down and be exhausted and realize… there were an awful lot of potentially meaningful thoughts and images in that experience, which you may wish you never had, and it may or may not have changed your life, for good or ill you’re not sure… but it was kinda cool and yeah you’d do it again.
Patti Smith, Horses documentary
This movie had me running home, alone and in the dark, scared for reasons I didn’t understand, but definitely totally freaked out, looking over my shoulder for I don’t know who or what. Man, what a relentlessly grim, dark, bleak, terrifyingly phantasmagoric dystopian nightmare of a movie. I tried to shake it off before I went to bed. I couldn’t. I woke up in a wobbly and disoriented state, having dreamt about it, and then sat down at my computer and saw email from the film’s P.R. guy thanking me for attending the screening and asking if I would share my thoughts on the film. What the fuck, motherfucker?!
I sat down to write him a raging letter – blame him for horrifying me for no good reason, with his awful perverse movie and faking me out in the first place by giving me press notes that called it a comedy. A comedy?! This is a horror flick! For me, it was more disturbing than Get Out. And okay, Get Out did have some comic elements, and I even loved it for being such a genre-bender, but… this was different. I don’t have many horror films to compare this with because I tend to stay away from horror, but I know a terrifying movie when I see one. (For the record, I avoided the movies in the Tribeca “Midnight Series” – especially the zombie movies, and this should have had a Midnight Series warning label on it.)
Here’s how my email started: “You already asked me if I liked it and I told you NO! Don’t you remember that you tried to ask me after the movie last night if I liked it, and I pushed you aside as I ran out of the theater and down the stairs, visibly shaken, saying it was the creepiest movie I had ever seen?!” I fully explained the unpleasant circumstances: I was dutifully watching the back-to-back-to-back pre-festival press screenings, and this was the last film of the night, and I had my notebook in my hands but became so petrified as I watched the movie that I literally didn’t move and didn’t write a single word in my notebook.
And then, at some point late in the movie, I finally extricated my brain from its twisted grip and I caught my breath and looked around me and realized that nearly all the other reporters had left the theater! They had the good sense to get the Hell out of there! And suddenly I realized I was alone, in the dark, with this hideous, evil film. (I couldn’t use enough adjectives to describe my very-visceral surreal experience.) But I had stayed this long, so I gritted my teeth and stuck it out to its bitter end. And then, once outside, I was alone late on a weeknight on a deserted street in Tribeca, with this disturbing film breathing down my neck, and it followed me all the way home and into bed and even woke up with me in the morning. Sheesh.
“I, stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.” – A. E. Housman
And now I was writing an email about it. And as I typed and the more I detailed my experience, the more I pulled my thoughts together (as I always do in the process of writing), and I started considering exactly what was so upsetting to me about this movie. I was looking for a way to describe the depth of the horror and ugliness, and what I came up with was….
Remember that scary part of Pinocchio where he goes to Pleasure Island, which at first seems colorful and fun like an amusement park but quickly becomes dark and scary, as Pinocchio realizes that it is actually a land of sin and debauchery and brutality? And Pinocchio had just wanted to be a “real boy,” but he was tricked and robbed by false friends and taken to this place where everyone he meets is a soulless, ruthless exploiter of the hopes and dreams of others? (long pause. brain wildly racing) And there is one especially repugnant scene where they dress him up in a wig and costume and force him to perform for a miserable audience? O. M. G.
Pinocchio, Pleasure Island
Ghostbox Cowboy is the Pinocchio story? Yes, it is! Well, if that’s true, then I guess maybe that lends some credence to this movie, because Pinocchio is considered a canonical piece of literature and has inspired hundreds of adaptations. I mean, that’s some worthy material from which to borrow, if that’s what is going on here. (FYI, according to Wikipedia, Pinocchio has been adapted in over 260 languages worldwide. That makes it the most-translated book, other than the Bible, and one of the best-selling books ever published.) But I only remembered the Pinocchio story from my childhood brain – the fear and horror I felt, which was so much like what this movie had made me feel. I didn’t immediately remember all the details.
I was remembering the visuals from the Pinocchio Disney movie more than anything else, which btw was made a lot more child-friendly than the original. Although it is significant that I also had the book as a child and so the book is lurking in my memory banks too, and my mother had a rule against abridgements, so all the childhood stories I read were the real deal. For example, I had to read the authentic Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, all 272 pages. In the Oz book, I think some of the most boring parts were left out of the movie, but the children’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) by Italian writer Carlo Collodi, definitely included some dark and scary parts that didn’t make it into Disney’s film, including the brutal death of Pinocchio at the end, which was instead changed to a happy ending.
So, I Googled Pinocchio. In addition to the Wikipedia info above, what I found was amazing. For you to appreciate all the significant similarities, as I did as I sat there, I guess I need to first provide you with a synopsis of the Ghostbox Cowboy movie. But my major point is that suddenly I went from hating this movie to being fascinated by it. I had so many questions! I started my email as an angry rant and ended it with a request to interview the director, which I did and is included below. Here’s a short synopsis, provided by the filmmakers:
“This darkly comedic morality tale examines a wildly ambitious Westerner who tries to get in on China’s tech boom and finds that he may not be up to the task. Texan Jimmy Van Horn (David Zellner) is a cowboy huckster who arrives in the booming city of Shenzhen with a couple of bitcoins and huge ambitions of parlaying them into economic success. Lucky for Jimmy, he’s got a friend holding open the back door to this accidental “Shangri-La” – Bob Grainger (Robert Longstreet), who’s gotten new teeth, a blonde wig and looks twenty years younger. He promises to do the same for Jimmy in six weeks. Using a startling visual language, this film offers an excitingly fresh, complex perspective on China’s economic growth and the gold rush mentality it inspires.”
Sounds simple enough, right? Well, there’s a lot more to it, and it’s difficult to describe, at least for me, for whom the movie was a kind of blurr. (They aren’t kidding about “startling visual language.”) Here is a bit more detail, written by China Underground Cinema:
“America is dead. And washed-up tech entrepreneur Jimmy Van Horn is pushing the reset button. He’s moving himself and his shell company to Shenzhen, China.”
Ghostbox Cowboy poster
“Shenzhen: A fishing village 3 decades ago, now the biggest city you’ve never heard of. A fantasia of craven capitalists where wheels of industry spin so fast it’s ‘literally impossible to walk down the street without making money – if you know the right people.’ Lucky for Jimmy, he’s got a friend in Bob Grainger, who has been living there a long time. Bob’s got friends too, like Vincent X — a 25 year old Chinese tech heir who employs thousands of migrant workers making everything from iPhone knock offs to KFC toys. And his sidekick ‘The Specialist’ – a 29 year old from the Mojave Desert turned Chinese Sourcing Lord with a profound disdain for his fellow Americans. With friends like them, who needs enemies? But in China, enemies make dreams come true.”
Wow, right? So, I will take you to my interview with the writer-director John Maringouin (along with some after-the-fact commentary by me, in parenthesis):
…a post-apocalyptic dystopia, except there was no real apocalypse; it’s as if humanity is the apocalypse…
HH: Let’s start with the genre issue. You call it a comedy.
JM: Yup.
HH: How is it a comedy? I understand that all comedies aren’t necessarily funny, but the classical definition of comedy is at least a circular structure.
JM: Yes, it is circular: it goes from one blank region to another. (HH is surprised that JM does not flinch at my introduction of academic stuff like classical definitions of genres.)
JM: It starts at a Walmart in the desert and he ends up in the Chinese version of the same – a blank space in the desert. (Hmm. Okay. If you think of it that way, I guess.)
HH: (pushing my luck) But there’s no wedding at the end. Traditional comedies end with a wedding, or some type of happy union.
Ghostbox Cowboy singing at a wedding
JM: (again, not even a pause) Yes there is. There is a wedding at end. He’s at a wedding. He performs at a wedding. (Well, sort of. I should have said in the interview that the wedding in the movie was not at all joyous; in fact it was a major humiliation and a kind of sadistic experience. But we only had 15 minutes, and I didn’t want to waste them debating the nature of comedy. I was eager to get to the Pinocchio thing.)
JM: The wedding is the very last thing that happens before, well … without giving away too much about the end.
(Damn it. Is this the place that I am going to have to write my treatise on “spoilers”? I always figured I’d save it for a more “important” review. Well, just briefly: I think the idea of spoilers is silly. We all know how every Shakespeare play ends, and yet we watch them over and over. We listen to the same songs we like over and over. Hey, we even recently watched the new version of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express – a murder mystery! It’s been done over and over, but the ending never changes. Still, we watch it. Knowing the ending does not “spoil” the experience. More on this subject another time. But for now, I am revealing a bit – not all – of the ending of Ghostbox Cowboy. Okay, motherfuckers?!)
HH: I can’t think of another comedy that ends with the death of the lead character.
JM: (laughs) That’s true. I think maybe it’s a comedy in the same way that Dante’s Inferno is – you know, part of the Divine Comedy. They call that a comedy.
HH: Well.. those are some lost brain cells for me. I can’t recall the exact dynamics of that story. I’ll have to look it up later.
[Hey, kudos to John for remembering so much from his dramatic literature class in college. I mean, this guy ain’t the least bit stupid. And I clearly got the sense that he knows what he’s talking about and that he was well aware of the type of movie he was making, and why, and how. This much I knew: Dante’s Divine Comedy detailed a soul’s journey toward God, which might also be considered true of John’s movie, sort of. So, it’s not a completely absurd comparison to make. Although that is not the real point. The real point is below (for those who are interested in a little historical literature lesson, which I just learned myself).
Here’s the deal: Dante called his dramatic poem a comedy because there were only two “genres” back then; in the ancient world, all literature was classified as High (tragedy) or Low (comedy). And according to what the internet tells me, the real key was the type of language used. Tragedy was written in the High style, using the language of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church – Latin. And they were usually epics with a structured progression into a tragic end. Thus, Latin and tragedy were the ideal combination for true – and serious – poetic expression. Whereas the Low style (comedy) was written with common vernacular and usually ended happily. So, Dante technically could not call his epic dramatic poem a tragedy, even though it contained a structured progression to a tragic end and did not end happily. If he didn’t write in Latin, it was by definition a comedy. If we stop here, then John is playing dodge ball and not answering my question with sincerity (because unlike Dante, he has a full spectrum of genres with which to identify).
Dante’s Inferno
However, there is more: Some academics theorize that Dante chose to title his epic dramatic poem a comedy, not because he couldn’t write in Latin, but in an intentional attempt to transcend the notions of High and Low styles and to challenge the belief that vernacular was incapable of true and serious poetic expression. Dante was saying, by calling his epic a comedy, that poetic expression is not confined to parameters of a categorical language.Dante was making a point that mankind is naturally poetic and every man expresses themselves creatively as they etch their unique path through life with their choices.
So, Dante wrote using his native Tuscan dialect and created one of the single greatest literary feats in history, speaking to all peoples through this revered masterpiece, which was written in the language of the common man, with the intensity of a literary genius, uniting humanity through the commonality of Death (not High language). That’s some heavy shit. But, if we agree that John Maringouin is one Hell of an intellectual, which he just might be (despite this seemingly terrible horror flick), then our director was answering in full earnestness.
John knew what he was saying. He was saying that his movie spoke in a “common vernacular” (as in phantasmagoric trippy gonzo filmmaking) and … even though we get Death at the ending, the larger point is the style of “language,” which justifies calling it a comedy. To some extent at least, the medium is the message, and even shaky-cam bat-shit-crazy horror can be a masterpiece of filmmaking and human expression. So be it John. I totally give you the Win on that point. Although, if so, I think you need to stop keeping the tragic end a secret; go full Dante. The idea of spoilers are for lessor thinkers.
Of course, The Divine Comedy had three parts, only the first one being the Hellish Inferno. So, I might pose another question to John: Should we expect two more movies to flesh out the trilogy? I won’t press that point. The Win still totally goes to John, especially considering the rest of the interview.]
HH: It’s just that I was so freaked out and scared by it, and I was even haunted by the darkness later, so it’s hard for me to wrap my head around “comedy.”
JM: Well. I love that you felt that. That’s great. I wish it were more of a horror movie. I love horror. I love the genre. I’m glad that you reacted to it that way.
HH: When you say you love horror, what is it you like about horror? What appeals to you about it?
“I have a problem with generic cinematic cuteness.” – Maringouin
JM: Anything that’s psychological – very dark psychology, or emotional terrorism, like that.
HH: Yes, that is how I felt during this movie. That’s not what you were going for? I know I’m not your target audience.
JM: I hope it appeals to a wide audience. I hope it doesn’t fit into any one genre, really. I think it’s an action movie. I think it’s a thriller. It’s also got some documentary elements. And maybe horror. I love that it had such an intense effect on you.
HH: Well, we can move on and talk about the politics. Obviously there is a socio political component.
JM: Yeah, I think that’s in the background. But to me it’s funny. Ya know, the whole thing is just funny. Really. But I can understand how some of it comes off as being a little strange. (Very strange claim, indeed, calling this nightmare funny, IMHO, but… I believe he means it.)
HH: Okay, this is my other issue with the movie. There were no likeable characters.
JM: That’s my favorite thing about it! I don’t really like movies with likable people. Not that I root for bad guys. But I root for…bad characters, I mean I want to see guys that are grimy and sleazy…
HH: You want to see them succeed at being bad?
JM: I have a problem with generic cinematic cuteness. I want you to be able to see the pores in the noses of my characters. And also just see their worst sides.
HH: When I first thought of writing about this movie, I thought I might call it a post-apocalyptic dystopia, except there was no real apocalypse; it’s as if humanity is the apocalypse. Everyone is everyone else’s worst enemy. Do you think people are inherently evil?
EIther way, it’s interesting as Hell, literally and figuratively.
JM: No, I don’t. I think people are inherently complicated. And I certainly think the film is inspired by a sense of crisis – a global crisis that is not necessarily … The question is, is it real or imagined? Is it something that the media is pushing forward? Is it a mass hallucination?
HH: You call it a morality tale…
JM: I didn’t call it a morality tale!
HH: Well, your PR guys did! It’s in the first line of the synopsis. (He laughs.) What’s the moral?
JM: I guess it’s a tale of morality in that we’re dealing with characters that have no morality. I think it’s morally ambiguous.
HH: So there is no moral to the story? Are we supposed to take some message away? Is it just “Life sucks and then you die”?
JM: There’s plenty to take away. But it definitely wasn’t intended as a lesson. I hope that you’re left with a feeling of… great mystery. (?)
HH: (Here is where I introduce the idea of the Pinocchio story. I will spare the reader my repeating myself, from above. But I explain how I came to think of the Pinocchio story and how amazed I was to find so many similarities. JM listens intently. He seems fascinated, but he insists he was completely unaware of any correlations.) So, Pinocchio was in no way an inspiration for your movie?
Pinocchio book illustration
JM: Well, I think maybe whatever archetype Pinocchio is based on might have influenced me… some universal dynamic that both stories share.
HH: You know, Pinocchio was written during the beginning of the industrial revolution in Italy. Middle class values of discipline and hard work were becoming more important. And your story takes place, sort of…
JM: Yeah, it’s the industrial revolution for China. So that’s interesting, that parallel. Definitely. Although, it’s not so much about the Chinese culture as Americans reacting to it. There’s a gold-rush mentality. Americans think they can just go to China and get rich just by being an American in China. It’s about vulture capitalism; the characters are driven by a money-for-nothing mentality.
HH: Well, Pinocchio also suffers from laziness and is warped by the idea of free stuff that turns out not to be free. But he is driven by a big ambition. He has a big wish to be real boy. What is Jimmy’s wish?
JM: I don’t think even he knows what he wants except that he’s got this desire to… do what most Americans think they should be doing.. to get ahead …to kind of be somebody. And he finds that sort of American dream lacking. So he goes to look for it in China.
HH: You said he wants to be somebody.
JM: Yeah, he wants to be a real person.
HH: Real person/real boy.
JM: Right.
HH: And he is tricked by false friends, like Pinocchio, and robbed, and exploited, and humiliated and…
JM: Yes, that’s another big similarity. That’s interesting. (laughs) After this I will need to go look up that story.
Pinocchio with false friends, fox and cat
HH: Actually, there are a few other amazing similarities. Pinocchio has these gold coins, and his false friends tell him that if he plants them in a certain place and leaves them overnight, they will grow into a tree full of gold coins.
JM: And Jimmy has bitcoins! And he is being told they will grow into a tree of more money, but they are stolen from him. Wow.
HH: And you know how Jimmy is reduced to working as an “American model” for money, except he never gets paid? They essentially enslave him and force him to put on a wig and go out and sing and perform, against his will? The same thing happens to Pinocchio; he is bought and sold like a slave and forced to perform against his will. But what strikes me the most is that they both are forced to wear a ridiculous wig.
Ghostbox Cowboy poster
JM: It’s all about transformation. (laughs again)
HH: And Pinocchio gets turned into a donkey and you have a whole thing about “swamp donkeys,” which are not exactly the same thing, but still it’s … a coincidence.
JM: Well, our swamp donkeys are kind of wheeling dealing middle men – who, if anything, turn other people into dumb animals.
HH: Well, in Pinocchio, the guy who turns kids into donkeys ends up as a donkey himself, so… just saying. It’s just weird.
JM: (laughs) Yeah, it is weird.
I guess it’s true what they say: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. In response to failure, General Magic went for the stronger and Ghostbox Cowboy goes for the kill.
HH: Okay, so for Pinocchio it’s a morality tale. He acts like a jack-ass and he is literally turned into a jackass. You don’t think there is a similar lesson in that Jimmy acts like a stupid American and so he is turned into this grotesque cartoon of a stupid American – with the blonde wig and fake tan and big white teeth?
JM: Well, that definitely happens to him. I just don’t know if he learns any lesson from it. He’s chasing an ideal of … the tech entrepreneur … this sort of new masculinity.
HH: So he wants to be a NEW kind of real man?
Ghostbox Cowboy, swamp donkeys
JM: This new masculinity, as I call it, is embodied by Elon Musk. And those sort of guys… everyone is sort of chasing… they’ve been evangelized by Tim Ferriss and his idea of The Four-Hour Work Week, where if you work for a living, you’re a loser. It’s like they all aim to be an alpha male who has his whole life outsourced. His products are made in the third world and his secretary is in Pakistan and everybody works for pennies an hour, but he’s riding a jet ski and works four hours a week — this sort of new capitalist, which I feel is everything that is wrong with the world.
I was fascinated by characters who were trying but failing at this modern vulture capitalism.
HH: Okay, so have you heard about this other movie that is at Tribeca, called General Magic? It’s about a group of people who had grand ambitions about changing the world with their technological invention, which was essentially the iPhone but way before its time; there wasn’t even internet yet. This is a true story; it’s a documentary. So these people invested everything, money as well as heart and soul, in this venture and then failed spectacularly, in public, and lost everything, and were totally humiliated, and there were even elements of betrayal in the story too. And it’s also about how they sold this tremendous idea before they really had the product. The had an IPO on the stock market and everything fell apart. They failed in a huge way at big-time capitalism.
General Magic landscape contemplates future, after failure
JM: Yeah, I know about that story.
HH: BUT… the movie shows that ultimately each of these people went on to do great things with their lives. The story of the movie actually challenges our ideas of what failure is and how we define it and respond to it. It’s about how failure is not the end. What do you think about that in terms of your characters who are failing?
JM: I think that is different in some very significant ways. I mean, yes they were trying to make it big in the tech boom, but … those guys in General Magic were truly working hard. They were building something. Those guys were at the beginning of creating this fantasy… this fantasy that outsiders had of magical success and easy money.
(Well, I guess it’s true what they say: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. In response to failure, General Magic went for the stronger and Ghostcowboy goes for the kill.)
JM: But it’s a very different scene now. My story isn’t history; it’s current. It came from my own life, and things I saw.
HH: Tell me.
JM: I live in San Francisco where there’s nothing going on now but tech. And I’d been working a day gig shooting commercials for product videos for Apple Store products.
HH: The General Magic movie is about Apple products, just btw.
JM: (laughs) Yes, but that was early 90’s, right? It’s the preceding generation to my characters.
HH: Okay, so you were working on this commercial gig…
JM: Well, I was able to sort of see behind the curtain of that world, and everything pointed to a really murky, absurd underworld behind it and it seemed to have a real complexity of fraud and hijinks that I thought would make a really great crime film. So, that’s where I was coming from. And all roads pointed to China. I’d heard a ton of chatter about it being a land of dreams where all you had to do was show up and you’d be rich just for being a westerner. For Silicon Valley folks, Shenzhen was the new frontier – a world that pays you just to show up and be a fuck-up.
Jimmy Van Horn in Shenzhen
HH: Just as a sidebar: Your depiction of Shenzhen was incredible. You really shot on location, right? How did you manage that?
JM: Yeah, we shot there. We shot the street scenes kind of guerilla-style. But the China in the film comes very much from the character’s romantic illusions of it. It starts out as this fantastical place but then its dark side emerges slowly.
HH: Which brings us back to Pinocchio. You know, there was this one place where Pinocchio went that was called the City of Catchfools. That’s like the perfect name for the city in your movie.
JM: Ha! Yes, it is. And it’s a very warped reality. Because you’re talking about a POV story. It’s a POV movie for sure. You’re seeing through the eyes of a person who kind of ignores what’s in front of him and plugs in assumptions.
HH: Is that what made it feel so terrifying for me? It was definitely an askew perspective in what looked like a very true-to-life world, and it was so… completely alienating. You communicated that visually in an astounding way.
JM: I’ve had a few personal experiences with dislocation and disassociations. I believe our world is being converted daily into a new place, which isn’t tied to the past or to any kind of identity. There’s a kind of somatic feel. There’s a comfort in that and also a terror. There are places where you feel you can lose your soul. Empty parking lots. Brand new buildings, unfinished. Strip malls.
HH: Ah! See, you admitted terror.
Ghostbox Cowboy, place where you can lose your soul
JM: To quote Housman: “I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.” (He’s quoting Housman? Housman the English scholar and poet who died in 1936? Oh yeah, this guy is a big-time intellectual. Who’d have guessed it? He looks like a regular dumb jock.)
HH: Okay, so the movie had a totally weird and creepy atmosphere. That I totally get. And that actually was kind of cool – the cinematography. And I’m sure that’s a whole different subject for a different interview. But the characters… what part of your brain did they come from?
JM: Some of those guys were real guys, playing themselves. “The Specialist” lives and works in China and doesn’t want his name revealed. There was a true documentary aspect to the movie.
HH: But Jimmy was fictional, right?
JM: Fictional in my movie, yes, but guys just like him are plentiful.
HH: So, Jimmy is just a fake wanna-be big-shot who can only drop into China and fuck up? He starts and ends as a wanna-be big-shot who can’t make it happen? His character is static? He doesn’t learn or change? And that’s why he has that tragic end?
JM: Well, he changes. He definitely evolves through the film. He changes from an impenetrable cocky personality into a much more vulnerable and real person. In fact, the very moment that he realizes that he’s become real is the moment that he makes his big decision – at the very end.
HH: Ah, so in his case, he becomes real and it kills him.
JM: Well, Jimmy has a choice. He can become a real person, live as a real person, or stick to his… sort of…entitlement mindset, which is kind of the point – he is an American that… he doesn’t …
HH: Got it. (Okay. So I’ve spoiled part of the ending, but I won’t spoil the truly fascinating details about his death. It’s one of the most bizarre scenes ever. And it’s attached to this story that is told earlier in the movie… this incredible, long, convoluted, kind of shaggy dog story, which is beyond strange, and I guess it’s sort of comic when we first hear it, but it comes back at the end and is a key part of this tragedy – this tragic/comic death at the end.)
And for all the grotesqueness and horror and misery, and the greed and lust and selfishness (it really is the full litany of biblical sins)… despite all the that, and no one is a good or even a likeable character (but I must say, they are plenty colorful and peculiar), despite kind of loathing this man, I did feel for him at the end. Maybe I didn’t feel sympathy. But I felt his trauma. I felt his pain. I felt his shame and hopelessness. It’s a vary painful movie to watch. Or, at least it was for me. I guess if you’re more like John, you will think it’s hilarious. Either way, it’s interesting as Hell (literally and figuratively). Definitely get some booze and download this movie, wherever it ends up. You’ll have lots to talk about. It will certainly fill your entire evening, and maybe the next day too.
p.s. This is a Q&A I got from the press notes, but I think it’s something that an audience might wonder (as I did), so here it is:
Q: The American characters have a lot of “Trumpian” qualities – the “folksy” business talk, the love of the “deal,” the blonde wigs, fake tans and fascination with China. Was this planned or a semi-documentary reality captured in the process of shooting?
A: The Americans with tans and blonde wigs were shot in the summer of 2015, before Trump was really a thing. I had this idea of a middle-aged, bald con-man trying to appear young to fit into Shenzhen’s “under 30” culture. Nothing to do with politics. But when we got back to the U.S. after shooting…it instantly felt eerie and premonitory.
Mat Delman, at IonCinema, writes an excellent review of Ghostbox Cowboy, and he manages to explain some of the fascinating plot details that I left out. He also beautifully captures the spirit of the film, calling it, in his review title, a “No-Frills Pynchonian Mind-blowing Masterpiece.” If this film interests you, you should check it out:
Ugh. I have an ailing and excruciatingly painful knee, so yesterday I skipped my planned schedule of Tribeca Film Festival press screenings, but I forced myself to schlep out to see the “can’t-miss” screening of Blue Night, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, and featuring Common, Jacqueline Bisset, and Renee Zellweger. It is literally the only movie I have walked out of since watching going-on-80 Tribeca2018 films. And I have a slew of excellent films to write about, which merit my coverage, and which I should be writing about right now, but sometimes it is easier to write about the bad movies than the good ones. This is a bad one. Save your money. Actually, forget the money; save your time. I am writing about Blue Night now because I am so annoyed that it wasted my precious time (and further inflamed my painful knee) during this festival full of truly extraordinary films. Sheesh. I feel scammed, and I didn’t even pay.
“Most gratuitous shot in this gratuitous movie: the close-up of the shopping bag as Vivienne sits in the back seat of the car – major foreshadowing!”
This movie helps to prove my cynical rule of thumb about film festivals: Skip the movies with the big names attached. They are there either because they paid to be part of the prestigious festival, as advertising, or because festival management chose them for their crowd-drawing potential. For the festival, they are there to pay for all the small movies that won’t make money or draw crowds. The small movies are there because they earned their way through the intensely competitive juried film-selection process. If you’ve made a film about an unappealing subject (war refugees, or ivory poaching, or human trafficking and prostitution), and you haven’t even managed to cast James Franco in it, you must be an extremely talented filmmaker to get into this Festival. So, movie watchers out there: Go see the movies you think you don’t want to see; that is where you will find the surprise greats.
But for the record, I feel the need to state that this year, O.G., starring Jeffery Wright, absolutely broke that rule; as my Tribeca Curtain-Raiser article declared, O.G. is actually Best of Fest – an impressive work of filmmaking and storytelling and top-notch acting. Never say never; sometimes the big films are worth watching. Although, still, you will get a chance to see that when it gets a national release into movie theaters (which it certainly will), so better to spend your time at Tribeca seeing the small films that may disappear after the Festival.
But back to Blue Night: It’s hard to choose which was worse – the acting or the script or the directing. Sarah Jessica Parker, as Vivienne the lounge singer with a life in which no one truly cares about her, tries way too hard to show us without telling us how distraught she is over her very-bad-news medical diagnosis. I kept thinking, “Please give her a line to say, so she stops desperately gesticulating in order to make us believe she believes she really might die.” And she is told that she might lose her singing voice due to the surgery, which would be horrible because her music is her life (cliché intended). Again, it would have been preferable to just be told this information, but instead we are forced to listen to her sing an entire Rufus Wainwright song, after which the audience might feel as if they are going to die before Vivienne does. (Question for Vivienne’s doctor: Might the surgery change her voice for the better? That could be the upside for the entire problem. Just a thought.)
Sarah Jessica Parker, in Sex and the CIty
Maybe director Fabien Constant thought that casting Jacqueline Bisset in his movie, and having her speak French, would be enough to make it an “art film,” rather than the tiresome melodrama that it is. Sarah Jessica Parker was pleasant enough to watch in the Sex and the City series, when she was wearing amusing outfits and beautiful shoes, and narrating the story with well-written essays that her character supposedly would publish in her weekly newspaper column. Those essays were the main reason I sometimes watched the show; they were often clever and usually well worded at least. This movie, however, has nothing well-worded, or well-acted. Okay, I will say “nearly nothing,” giving it the benefit of the doubt that something brilliant happened in the last half hour that I missed.
Common is in it, playing himself named someone else. Common also makes an appearance in another Tribeca2018 film, All About Nina, in which he also plays himself not playing himself, but in that case he seems more successful in his endeavor, maybe just because he is surrounded by a much better movie. And then there is Renee Zellweger. Oy. This is what has become of Renee Zellweger?! She is playing second fiddle to SJP? As our President likes to say – Sad. Not that I ever thought of her as an A-list actress, but still, seeing her play one of Carrie Bradshaw’s girlfriends – and throw herself into the role as if this were her last chance to prove she can act – was perhaps more upsetting than Vivienne’s medical situation.
Helen playing her tiny violin for Vivienne
And hey, I also live a selfish, lonely New York existence and have no one to list as my emergency contact on my medical forms, but still I felt no sympathy for this character. And I don’t even get to travel the world with my band and fuck my drummer. And she also must endure an overbearing mother? Quelle horreur!
Then, Vivienne leaves her new dress in a Lyft car. Most gratuitous shot in this gratuitous movie: the close-up of the shopping bag as Vivienne sits in the back seat of the car – major foreshadowing! I also have left an article of clothing in an Uber car (a mere glove, not a zillion dollar dress), but when the driver was kind enough to drive back and return it to me, I tipped him (even when he said it wasn’t necessary), as any decent person and real New Yorker would do. And don’t tell me that Vivienne is excused for this oversight because she has just learned that she may have a fatal medical condition; if she is calm enough to go dress shopping, she is calm enough to tip her driver.
Ain’t nobody got time for that, SJP!
I highly suspect that this Lyft driver is going to re-enter the story, as way too much screen time was given to him otherwise, but that would only make matters worse, and more hackneyed. Vivienne has no one but a rude Lyft driver will whom to share her anguish? Poor poor Vivienne. Are they going to help each other discover the true meaning of life? Save it for Hallmark. Time to go home and ice my knee.
p.s. I wrote an article titled Top Ten TFF2018 Mother-Daughter Movies, and in it I expressed amazement at how each film managed to depict a distinct and thoughtful and non-obvious portrayal of that archetypal relationship. Blue Night breaks that winning streak. This mother-daughter duo is the ultimate cliché.
Edward Albee is smiling in his grave. He is thinking to himself “You see, they will never forget me, but they also will never surpass me.” He is thinking about the new film, Egg, directed by Marianna Palka and written by Risa Mickenberg, which recently premiered at Tribeca Film Festival 2018. Albee was notoriously (and aggressively) protective of his work. He didn’t like directors inserting their own ideas into his carefully crafted dialogue or layering their notions on top of his brilliantly depicted themes.
“Egg matches Albee and raises him one.”
Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, film
But still, I think Albee might be pleased with this new movie, which is very much an homage to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (which was made into an Oscar-winning movie in 1966, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and selected in 2013 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”). Egg gives that now-classic play a fresh re-imagining for modern times and modern relationships between men and women. Yes, Albee was modern back in 1962, but today, more than 50 years later, there is a new modern.
Some things never change – such as the complexities of romantic/sexual relationships and the dangerous emotional games that couples play. And if one is going to delve into that territory with any seriousness (or any sharply incisive satire), one cannot ignore Albee. And Palka and Mickenberg model their film after his in just the right ways and go their own way on just the right issues. And yes, I mean issues; this is a movie that significantly examines real-life, relevant issues, such as pregnancy, abortion, child-birth, adoption, surrogate mothers, and parenting. It’s not just a drama. Reinforcing this Albee comparison even further is the fact that Virginia Woolf also did touch on the subject of pregnancy and dead babies, but it kept the discussion mysterious. Perhaps it was just too socially unacceptable to bring those subjects into full view back in ’62, but Egg goes all in; in this way at least, Egg matches Albee and raises him one, bringing maternal and women’s issues out of the shadows. (Insert your own joke about needing to crack some eggs to make an omelette.)
Christina Hendricks and Alysia Reiner at Tribeca
Albee is known to have said that he wanted his plays to be “useful, not merely decorative.” That is one reason he might appreciate Egg, which manages to use Albee’s magnificent plot structure and style as an arena for a more candid discussion of bigger issues than he was able to debate.
It’s interesting to note that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1963, and it was also selected for the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Drama by that year’s jury. However, the award’s advisory board – the trustees of Columbia University – objected to the play’s then-controversial use of profanity and sexual themes, and overruled the jury, awarding NO Pulitzer Prize for Drama at all in 1963. Ridiculous! You see – there really is a new modern in today’s day.
Egg is a provocative and unflinching look at two couples and a surrogate; it lays bare the complications, contradictions, heartbreak, and absurdities implicit in how we think about motherhood (and sexuality). It contains a virile dose of Virginia-esque viciousness, but not a memorable amount of obscenity, at least by today’s standards. If weighed on a balance scale, Egg would teeter between bitterness and hopefulness, whereas that Pulitzer committee might say Woolf balanced bitterness only with drunkenness. Yes, there is drunkenness in Egg as well. And – no worries – it will never come close to being considered for a Pulitzer, but it is definitely worth your watching it.
One way in which the Palka-Mickenberg team prove their true understanding of the depth of Albee, is that, despite all the nastiness and cutting dialogue, you see in this film, as you do in his play, an immense sympathy for the characters. They may or may not truly love each other, but the filmmakers love them, and you will feel a connection to them too – each of them in their very different ways. There was more than one moment when I felt pride when a character stood up and defended, and then other moments when I felt hurt when another character was insulted or rejected, and those moments were not the ones I might have expected. You also may have your assumed allegiances challenged. These characters are each strong and weak and funny and angry and relatable. Many films at Tribeca are wonderful for the way they take you into entirely new worlds and expose you to the great unknown. This film is wonderful for the way it takes you into yourself and exposes you to your own contradictions and emotions.
“Egg has its own ways of winning and losing.”
Tina (Alysia Reiner) and Karen (Christina Hendricks) were art school frenemies whose paths diverged after college. Tina became a passionate, successful conceptual artist, while Karen sacrificed a career in art in order to become a wife and mother. When Karen—eight months pregnant—and her wealthy husband, Don, make a trip to New York City, Tina and her partner Wayne invite the couple over to their bohemian loft for dinner. Things quickly move from awkward to explosive when Tina announces her newest art project – a study of mothers and babies, which has already been commissioned by the prestigious New Museum in New York, and the core of that artistic work will be a real-life performance piece in which Tina and Wayne become parents via surrogate. Stoking the fire, Tina and Wayne’s young, beautiful surrogate Kiki (Anna Camp) drops by unexpectedly, and the five-some spend the rest of the evening quarrelling about the pressures of motherhood – why and how we choose it, revere it, and sometimes forgo it.
The cast of Egg, at Tribeca
But let’s not forget about relationships. Motherhood fuels this fire, but the flames crackle with tension between man and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, married man and woman-on-the-side, egg-mother and surrogate-mother, and also between girlfriends. This is truly the way in which Egg differentiates itself from Woolf; the dynamics here give dimension to the new complexities and questions of today’s modern American society. People still struggle with reality vs illusion, but what we wish for, what we cherish as memories, and the ways in which we choose to delude ourselves, are in many ways unique to our times. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf stands as an opponent of the idea of a perfect American family and societal expectations, as it attacks the false optimism and myopic confidence of modern society in 1962. And Egg stands as an opponent of the idea of a perfect American family and societal expectations, as it attacks the false optimism and myopic confidence of modern society in 2018. And they are two very different movies.
Egg takes much of its sturdy three-act structure from Virginia Woolf as well, and it paces itself perfectly, as cracks in relationships reveal themselves, danger intensifies, and allegiances shift. But these relationships are in no way copies of Albee’s. In fact, much has been made of the way in which Albee seemed to portray George as weak and bullied by Martha, but in the end… he’s the last man standing. I will not reveal who is the last person standing in Egg, but it did manage to surprise me. It will leave you contemplating. Beyond all the ways in which this film parallels Albee’s classic tale, Egg is its own story, and it has its own power struggles and its own ways of winning and losing.
