Zeitgeist Films

Kim Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts in Trouble the Water

Over Labor Day weekend, a major hurricane seems to have just missed New Orleans. But exactly three years ago, when another strong-but-not-record-breaking storm just missed New Orleans, much of the city was under water a day later. The national lack of curiosity about how and why that happened, after the arrival of a storm that was well beneath the supposed limits of the levee system, is astounding. When they speak about it publicly, government officials most often blame Mother Nature while critics of those government officials blame the lack of leadership in a time of crisis.

If you drove your car at 75 miles per hour down the highway and the wheels flew off sending your family into the ditch, you'd expect a better answer than, "Well, 75 is really fast." Or: "It's horrible that the ambulance took an hour to arrive." Yes, but. Nearly every American lives within reach of a major piece of infrastructure built by the same group who designed and built those levees, the Army Corps of Engineers. So you can even set aside compassion, if you want, and tether your inquiry to good old fashioned self-interest. Our mysterious national lethargy doesn't arise from either impulse.

Trouble the Water, a documentary by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, exposes one small part of the tragedy and highlights the fact that the storm was just one chapter in a story that continues to this day. It's the story of Kimberly and Scott Roberts who didn't have the means to get out of New Orleans before the hurricane arrived. They rode out the storm, and the movie's buzz has centered around the footage that Kimberly shot as the water rose to the rafters of her Ninth Ward home. It's a compelling eye-witness account, even though the picture is as jerky as a video camera in a hurricane, but the footage serves mostly as the introduction to a movie whose heart lies beyond the storm and beyond New Orleans proper.

Continue Reading

Cathy Kanavy / Focus Features

Judging by the squeals of laughter in the theater where I saw it, Hamlet 2 has some of the same appeal as Waiting for Guffman and The Producers. Steve Coogan plays a failed actor who now teaches high school drama and plans to direct the students in his own play, a nakedly autobiographical sequel to Hamlet. If you sketch the movie on vellum, with lines, boxes, arcs, and arrows, it might seem to be a functional piece of comedy: attractive, load-bearing, and fully inhabitable. The dual pleasures of a terrible amateur stage play and jokes that are obviously, intentionally offensive sound like the strong pillars of a grand arch, but when the project is actually built, it's clear from the first rain that this roof leaks like a sieve.

One reason is that the so-offensive-it's-hilarious routine requires the filmmakers to operate with a certain amount of precision. It helps to know that they aren't laughing about pedophilia and rape; they're laughing about someone whose artistic abilities are so poor that his well-meaning treatment of such issues is hideously crass. The needle is threadable, but this film's crassness isn't limited to the production staged by its characters. In one scene, an ACLU lawyer played by Amy Poehler (Saturday Night Live) mouths off to a large man and then holds him back by saying, "You want to hit me? Go ahead. I'm married to a Jew, so I got nothin' to lose!" Poehler delivers the line with enough spunk to sell almost any string of English words, but did they have to be these? I can't for the life of me figure out what's funny about equating a Jewish marriage to battery of women.

And once the film stirs its casual, unmotivated anti-Semitism into the mix, I find myself less comfortable with the jokes about incest, even though they seem to be penned by a clueless character. We already knew the character had poor judgment. Now we know the filmmakers do, too.

When it's not stabbing haphazardly toward irreverence, Hamlet 2 has the more mundane problem of not being very funny. Mild amusements -- like a guy who roller skates badly, or a guy who's trying to keep his testicles cool on doctor's orders -- are repeated until the chuckles are dead, like three cartoons tessellated on unfunny wallpaper.

The movie does have brief glimmers of inspiration: the roller skates are finally explained with a clever, almost throwaway comment; the abrasive theatre critic who seasonally trashes the teacher's productions feels like a character from Rushmore; and Catherine Keener's general attitude, like Amy Poehler's, is inherently funny even when her lines aren't.

But the only inspired touch that sustains more than a few seconds is the casting of Elisabeth Shue to play herself, a nurse in Tucson, a former actor who left the rat race because the world always needs nurses. Shue's self-deprecating performance is funny and absurd. Plus, she's right about the need for nurses. Maybe she can convince a few of her peers to follow her into the field of health care and stop signing up for dismal films that misuse their talent.

Warner Bros. Pictures

In The Reaping, Hillary Swank goes to a swampy town in the South to investigate some weird paranormal-type happenings. It's what she does. She's a professional certified scientific debunker.

Gets there. Snoops around. Sees some pretty plagueish occurrences of unclear scientific basis, including a river that has run red with goop and coughed up all manner of dead frogs and livestock. Even Swank and her team of rubber-booted scientists are gagging on the stench, but they gather their samples like pros and send them to the lab for analysis. Check for blood, boys. Let's see what's makin' this thing all red.

Now, the movie has lots of jolts and gross-outs up to this point, but for me it's not yet scary. However, it will be. After gathering their samples, the team retires for the evening at an old house near the river. Crickets chirp. Or cicadas. Whatever. Some Southern bug. The scientists shoot the breeze. They fire up the grill for some dinner and relaxation, and a local guy throws some grub over the coals. Plague or no plague, a team of debunkers has gotta eat. "What's cooking?" they ask the griller. And he says, "Fish."

Gulp. The team pauses. The film pauses. Its heart skips a beat. Reaction shot. Reaction shot. Reaction shot. F-f-f-fish?

Continue Reading

Jonathan Rosenbaum writes briefly on his site about Ousmane Sembène's first film, La noire de... (aka Black Girl), and mentions one of the confusing details of its history. I believe I have a bit of information to add.

The film was made in 1966, but I first saw it a few years ago in Toronto with Sembène in attendance. At the time, I didn't realize there were multiple versions of the film -- nothing was said about this at the screening, and I hadn't read anything about it online -- so I didn't take care to write down certain details that I now wish I could recall. But my fairly clear memory of the film is that it starts in Senegal. A young woman who lives there accepts an offer from a French family and leaves her relatives and friends to work in Antibes in the south of France. There's a long series of neighborhood good-byes and good-lucks. When she arrives in France, as she rides in a car from the airport to the apartment where she will live and work (as domestic help), the countryside is shown briefly in color. The rest of the film is in black and white, including the remainder of her increasingly grim days in France.

Now, when you watch this film on DVD or see the film in a retrospective, you won't see the color sequence. (As an aside: I mistakenly mentioned the color sequence in a capsule review of the DVD in Paste, because the magazine's long lead-times required me to write the review before the DVD was finished.)

The lack of this color sequence has been written about sporadically on the web -- Rosenbaum mentions it here and previously here -- usually by referring to a printing issue with the DVD, i.e. the wrong film stock was used to print the color sequence.

But I've seen no mention of a more drastic change. I was shocked to see that the DVD from New Yorker Films begins not in Senegal but Antibes with the French family. It then jumps to the girl in Senegal and picks up where I remember the film beginning. It's entirely possible that my memory is faulty, but since my understanding of the film revolves around the girl's first impression of her exciting French adventure (and the audience's, since the film is told entirely from her perspective), I don't think the version I saw began in France at all.

Since I know of no way to see the version that I saw in Toronto, I've never been able to compare it side-by-side with the commonly available one, but I'm fairly certain there are two major differences: her arrival in Antibes is in color and the structure of the film is markedly different.

Mysteries, mysteries.

Merie Weismiller Wallace/DreamWorks

Brandon T. Jackson, Ben Stiller, and Robert Downey, Jr. in Tropic Thunder

Comedies these days lack explosions and firearms, but Judd Apatow and Ben Stiller are on the job. Apatow's Pineapple Express and Stiller's Tropic Thunder, which have arrived in theaters during the dog days of August, are action-comedy hybrids that follow genre conventions even as they poke gentle fun at them. As a low-budget affair, Baghead, also in theaters, adds modestly-funded terror instead of top-dollar napalm to its comedy, but it too is a hybrid. Genres are back in vogue among hip young filmmakers, with rubrics so nice, they've followed them twice.

Very funny and very frivolous, Tropic Thunder is a big movie about making a big movie. Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., and Jack Black star as actors shooting a Vietnam war film in the jungle. The film-within-the-film has a British director, played by Steve Coogan, who's in over his head, but the producer, played by Tom Cruise under heavy makeup, is turning the screws. He barks orders and spews invective over a video link from California, determined to whip this movie into the can. Desperate to comply, the emasculated director takes the radical step of 1) planting digital cameras in the jungle's trees and 2) dropping his stars in the middle of nowhere, with their costumes, fake guns, and a script outline. His last-ditch effort is to shoot their improvisations guerilla style.

The setup reads like the parody of a well-known piece of moviemaking folklore, one that's retold like a war story: the massive production beaten by the jungle. Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo are as famous for their schedule overruns, uncontrollable stars, and maniacal directors as they are for the final products. Consequently, their associated behind-the-scenes documentaries -- Hearts of Darkness about Coppola's adventure and Burden of Dreams about Herzog's -- are as fascinating as the films themselves, and maybe more.

But Tropic Thunder's satire isn't so lofty. It's down in the undergrowth, skewering certain Hollywood personality types using the folklore as a frame. Critics have collectively tied themselves into knots trying to measure how close the movie comes to crossing various lines of good taste, but more interesting than whether it causes offense is how carefully, or carelessly, Stiller and company navigate a minefield of stereotypes. They're walking on eggshells one minute and riding roughshod the next.

Continue Reading

Michael Snow's Wavelength

The subject sits in front of the interviewer and tells her sad story. The subject sits in front of the interviewer, over whose shoulder is aimed a camera, and tells her sad story. The subject sits in front of the interviewer, over whose shoulder is aimed a camera, behind which crouches a man squinting into a viewfinder, and tells her sad story. She hesitates when asked to say a little something about how it must feel to have gone through such an ordeal. It's still so hard to talk about. The man with the squinting eye reaches in two directions at once: one hand down between his legs, the other to curve around the zoom lens, trained on the subject, aimed from the outset of the interview so that a simple zoom will shrink the frame around her eyes in order to squeeze out a tear or preferably two.

And it starts. Her response to the difficult question. The rising action. His heart races. Her chin puckers. His fingers tug the tiny shaft. Her eyes look left and right. She tells her sad story. He moves in closer, close enough to feed upon the tears of wounded subjects. The interviewer tilts her head to the right and nods to keep the subject talking, and then shifts her notepad to the opposite knee so that, when the time comes, she can reach forward and pat the subject's hand, a comforting attagirl for a job well-done. It's a crucial moment. But the squinting man is in charge. His choice to begin zooming now, to draw the viewer into the miserable world of the subject, will govern the edit, will define the scene. When he stops zooming, the scene is over, but not before. It's his shot to get, and his to lose. He stands astride the very earth.

Continue Reading

Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures

Glenn Kenny writes:

Although WALL*E ends with a very apt and moving nod to City Lights, it is in fact Pixar’s answer to Modern Times...

Michael Sicinski writes:

For a film as fundamentally simple as WALL*E, there are myriad ways to begin discussing it. Perhaps one entry point, and a key distinguishing feature from other Pixar films, is the fact that it actually integrates live-action material. The taped messages from Fred Willard's Shelby Forthright, president / chairman of Buy 'n Large not only provide a filmic texture distinct from the rest of the film; they represent a critical "outside" to the post-apocalyptic robot world and the flabby parahumanity supported by it.

• Chaplin's second movie with sound is Modern Times, but it's often referred to as his last silent film because it was shot without sound and the characters' voices are never heard. But it features an orchestral score, several of its jokes require sound effects (such as a sequence involving a radio advertisement), and two of the characters' voices actually are heard, including Chaplin's as the Tramp. Late in the film, the Tramp sings a song of nonsense syllables that sound vaguely French, but the film's larger and more imposing voice belongs to the factory boss who appears on a giant screen above his workers and seems to be able to watch them from on high. The boss barks orders: "More speed." He doesn't need to call himself the great-and-powerful anything, because he controls the machines. (Chaplin made the film five years before the Wizard of Oz and almost two decades before George Orwell wrote 1984.)
• Modern Times is a hybrid. So is Chaplin's previous film, City Lights, which also has an orchestral score and a joke about audible speech (Chaplin voiced the characters in the opening scene with a kazoo). But Modern Times, which was made well after the advent of talkies, was conceived from the start as an anachronism. Its outdatedness is built into the theme. The Little Tramp is moving into the mechanical age, the mindless age of industry. The machine to which he's a slave, the machine that swallows him past its conveyor-belted tongue, looks from the side like a giant film projector that jams when the Tramp is threaded like film itself onto its sprockets.

Continue Reading

Jen Tracy/Sony Pictures Classics

The mumblecore movement, marked as it is by a general lack of movement, has been ripe for parody ever since a sloppy, white, twenty-something first pointed his camera at slackers talking about their relationships. It's a loosely defined aesthetic of low-budget filmmaking among friends, and while its best movies -- like those by Andrew Bujalski and Joe Swanberg -- are intimate and funny, they're always a millimeter away from solipsism.

In 2005 Mark and Jay Duplass made The Puffy Chair about a downbeat road trip and a romance on the rocks. It was an early, unremarkable entry in the catalog, but their second film, Baghead, sinks a stake more firmly in the ground. The story involves four out-of-work actors who see a micro-budget indie flick at a film festival and decide, hey, we could do that. So they head to a cabin in the woods to write a screenplay for themselves.

The jokes practically write themselves, but the Duplass brothers demonstrate that the filmmakers who are best prepared to poke fun at mumblecore are probably the mumblers themselves. Once they've isolated their four characters from the world, a dozen friendly and romantic possibilities arise, many of them drawing from a setting the Duplasses are likely familiar with: the script brainstorm. But like the best films of their peers, what could have been a pointlessly self-referential exercise, where every bit of dialogue seems lifted from the filmmakers' lives, Baghead shows a nimble and discriminating editorial sense. All of the dialogue is banal by design, so the trick is to navigate a mundane conversation and cull the important bits that are as normal on the surface as everything else. "I think you're so amazing," says one of the girls to one of the guys in a quiet moment, sounding vaguely hesitant, as if she's lingering on "so" because she needs to think of a convincing adjective. Then she adds, "You're like my friend and my brother," which isn't quite what her pal wants to hear.

But more impressive than the understated humor of the dialogue is the brothers' tremendous facility with genre conventions. What looks casual isn't, and when the film begins to shift its tone away from simple parody into something a little creepy -- after all, our heroes are alone in a remote cabin -- the Duplasses blow their cover. Despite the cheap, herky-jerky camera, they're more precise filmmakers than I'd imagined. And as the suspense takes hold, they provoke the question, "What kind of movie is this?"

Part of the reason this strategy works is that it springs from the humble seeds of mumblecore. The Blair Witch Project, shot with similar technical constraints, attracted audiences who'd been told they were in for the scare of their lives, but Baghead comes from a tradition of friends talking to friends about friends and friends-of-friends. On camera. So the unexpected creepiness is unsettling because, when it arrives, the film has left the comfy couch with no indication of how far it intends to stray or even if it meant to go this far. Am I supposed to have these goosebumps? Is the call sorta coming from, you know, inside the, like, house?

Like Bujalski's Mutual Appreciation and Swanberg's LOL, Baghead seems incapable of supporting too-lofty expectations. It's a wonderfully entertaining film carefully engineered from toothpicks. Don't sit on it. Don't stack your back issues of Film Comment on it. But marvel nonetheless at its casual ingenuity.

For the past 14 months, J. Robert Parks and I have intermittently hosted a podcast at my personal site, Errata. The cleverly-named Errata Movie Podcast was an audio program for your iPod or computer that featured movie reviews, film festival reports, interviews, and general chit-cat.

The same podcast, same people, and same obsessions have moved from Errata to Daily Plastic. The program will appear every two weeks, and thanks to new vegetable-processing technologies, it's made entirely of post-consumer waste.

It's the Plastic Podcast, and it picks up precisely where we left off at Errata. Since it never biodegrades, completists may want to check out the program's fabulous archives which began there and continue here.

There's a gem buried behind each rotten bulb of fennel. We promise.

NOTE: If you subscribe to the Errata Movie Podcast in iTunes (which is free, by the way), your subscription will merge with the Plastic Podcast automatically. It's really just a name change.