LAFF 2014: JIMI ALL IS BY MY SIDE

A scene from Jimi: All is By My Side. 

A walk with a maestro 

By Ed Rampell

John Ridley has followed up his 2014 Oscar-winning screenplay for 12 Years a Slave by writing and directing a must-see Jimi Hendrix biopic, one of LA Film Festival’s most highly enjoyable movies. As is befitting the screenwriter of Solomon Northup’s slavery saga, Ridley exposes how racism -- among other things -- affected and afflicted the virtuoso guitarist in Jimi: All is by My Side.

The feature follows Hendrix (rapper André Benjamin, aka André 3000)  from the time he is plucked from obscurity while performing backup in New York clubs and recording studios and brought to London, where he formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience and his astounding talent earns him the recognition Hendrix so richly deserved. The “plucker” from obscurity is Linda Keith (Imogen Poots), who is Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards (Ashley Charles, in one of the film’s numerous cameos portraying the era’s hottest rockers) “groupie” -- uh, I mean girlfriend. This mod London lass is sort of “slumming” across the pond while the Stones are on tour when she stumbles upon Hendrix at Manhattan dives. Believing in his talent Linda takes Hendrix under her wing and introduces him to Chas Chandler (amiably, ably played by Andrew Buckley), The Animals’ bassist who is in the process of leaving that group to become a manager of rock acts.

The subtle depiction of Hendrix, full of nuance, by Benjamin -- who, offscreen, is half of the hip-hop duo OutKast -- is nothing short of uncanny. (Can you say “Oscar nomination”?) He perfectly looks and acts the part. Benjamin’s delivery of a single line regarding Hendrix’s mother reveals much about what troubles him and his attitude towards women. A phone call to his father likewise provides insight into Hendrix’s back story. All this helps explain his turbulent relationship with English groupie Kathy Etchingham (Hayley Atwell), and why Linda remained the Foxy Lady who got away. Mr. “Peacey Lovey” had his inner demons and this “Voodoo Child” didn’t always practice the cosmic consciousness he preached.

As noted, Ridley’s script also reveals the prejudice that confronted Hendrix in the U.K., where he falls in with Black nationalists through Ida (Ruth Negga) and the wannabe Malcolm, Michael X.

The film is a sheer pleasure for Hendrix fans to watch as his talent ascends, A particularly enjoyable sequence is when the still unknown Hendrix guests with the Cream at a London gig and Eric Clapton (Danny McColgan) -- whom graffiti proclaims to be “god” -- storms off the stage, as Ginger Baker continues to pound the sharkskins and Jack Bruce wails on. In a delightfully revealing backstage scene sure to give Hendrix fans the proverbial smile of the day, Clapton discloses why he deserted the stage, mid-performance.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers were reportedly unable to secure the rights to some of Hendrix’s greatest hits. Nevertheless, with Jimi: All is by My Side Ridley reveals himself to be a true auteur, as talented a director as he is a screenwriter and novelist. This groovy movie perfectly captures that ’60s scene with a cinema verite documentary-like, fly-on-the-wall flair.

In addition to being a pure delight in the tradition of works about struggling Bohemian artistes (paging La Boheme!), along with the Simon Bolivar biopic The Liberator and Dear White People, which LAFF also screened, as well as the upcoming Civil Rights drama. Selma, Jimi: All is by My Side continues the cinematic surge of Black-themed movies that 12 Years a Slave has helped to spearhead.

  

LAFF 2014: LAST DAYS OF VIETNAM

A scene from Last Days in Vietnam. 

Family heirlooms 

By Ed Rampell

As U.S. foreign policy in Iraq faces its biggest defeat since the Indochina invasions, the niece of US President John Kennedy -- who escalated the U.S. presence in Vietnam -- has directed the cinematic equivalent of putting a blossom on a turd. Rory Kennedy has fired the opening salvo in the propaganda war regarding upcoming historic anniversaries with Last Days in Vietnam. This film is so shamefully, wildly one-sided film that this historian/reviewer hesitates to call it a “documentary” -- rather, Last Days in Vietnam is a piece of propaganda in the very worst sense of the term. Indeed, this egregiously biased, one-sided work is arguably more of a mock-umentary -- but unlike This is Spinal Tap, Rory's Orwellian disinformation is no laughing matter.

As the 50^thanniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident -- that fabricated hoax US President Lyndon Johnson exploited to further escalate U.S. military activities in Vietnam -- much as  the Bush regime’s blatant lies about Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction were cooked up to “justify” another disastrous U.S. invasion of a sovereign nation that had not attacked America -- nears this August, and the 40^th anniversary of Vietnam’s liberation approaches next April 30, Last Days in Vietnam desperately tries to find something positive to say about the role the American military and diplomats played as the “Yankees go home” scenario unfolded and the communists took over what was then Saigon.

According to the film, some soldiers and State Department officials took great pains -- and sometimes at grave personal risk to themselves -- to evacuate about thousands of the Vietnamese, including military, who had worked for and married U.S. personnel, as well as the up to 5,000-7,000 Yanks still “in country.”

Rory and her partners, including co-writer/husband Mark Bailey, have taken great pains to try and find something glorious and heroic in the greatest defeat for U.S. imperialism in the entire history of the American empire. In their disgraceful effort to make a stinking garlic smell like a rose, the filmmakers willfully expunge history and any sort of context from their one dimensional exercise in disinformation. 

For example: It’s alleged that during 1968’s TếtOffensive the communists executed thousands of South Vietnamese at Huế. However, the countless war crimes committed by Washington and US forces are never, never once mentioned in this execrable piece of agitprop. Hey Rory, ever hear of the Mỹ Lai Massacre? How about the 1972 bombing of Hanoi -- during Christmas? Or the mining of Haiphong Harbor? Of course, the list of American atrocities committed against the Indochinese -- starting with intervention in the domestic affairs of nations that never attacked the U.S.A. -- is endless, the millions murdered by carpet bombing, landmines, agent orange, etc., is innumerable, and it would require an entire series of documentaries to record them all. But Rory never mentions any of them -- although she goes out of her way to vilify the Reds (don’t forget that her father, Bobby Kennedy, served on anti-communist Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunting Senate Permanent Subcommitteeon Investigations).

Last Days in Vietnam simplistically endeavors to depict the Vietnam invasion (which, by the way, the Vietnamese call “the American War”) as a conflict between the north and the south, with Washington backing the latter. Rory conveniently commits the heinous crime of omission by never -- not even once! -- ever mentioning the National Liberation Front (NLF), the resistance fighters in the south. According to the Pentagon Papers, 300,000 people belonged to the NLF by 1962 (you know, when Rory's uncle was president). Millions f people in the south must have supported the NLF in order for the TếtOffensive to have been carried out in 1968, let alone for the south to have been liberated seven years later, beating both the American imperialists and the army it supplied and funded. Last Days in Vietnam mentions that the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) “eroded” in 1975, but never ponders why the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong didn’t.

(Assuming that Last Days in Vietnam's conceit -- that the U.S. merely backed the south against the north -- is correct, then why is it that last month, when this critic visited Hanoi, he saw wartime shrines, such as the Hanoi Hilton and Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, but did not see some wall inscribed with the names of the 50,000-plus Vietnamese who died fighting in the U.S. Civil War, from 1861-1865?)

Last Days in Vietnam's sources include former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who appears in news clips and presumably in contemporary, original interviews, where this mass murderer of millions in Indochina, Chile, Timor, etc., is once again given the softball “elder statesman” treatment. Richard Armitage -- no, not the Hobbit actor but the Navy and U.S. government operative who apparently never met a covert action he didn’t like -- is likewise given the hero treatment. But Armitage’s willingness to break the law -- purportedly to save south Vietnamese lives -- is never put in the context of his alleged involvement with Ted Shackley, the CIA chief in south Vietnam, and the heroin trade, or Armitage’s dubious role in the Iran-Contra Scandal -- are never mentioned.The film also conducts original interviews with former ARVN officers.

After the LA Film Festival screening an audience member asked Rory and crew members why nobody from the communist and NLF side were interviewed for the film and she replied, “We considered this but ultimately their part of the story was about the war. We wanted to focus on the heroes,” that is, those Americans who put themselves in peril to rescue south Vietnamese lives, in order to tell what Rory blithely called “a human story.”

Author Stuart Herrington, who served in military intelligence and then the Defense AttachéOrganization in south Vietnam and is a source in the film as he was an eyewitness to the events of April 1975, joined Rory for the post-screening Q&A. Herrington said that the communist side “did not add to the film” and that they would have merely indulged in “chest thumping” had they been interviewed. Sore Loser!  As if Yanks never take part in “American triumphalism” screaming “USA! USA!” and the like, especially when it invades -- unprovoked -- smaller, weaker nations.

But here’s the real reason why this agitprop pic never makes any effort to show the other side of the story: NVA and NLF supporters would presumably point out that the southerners the Yankees tried to save at the last minute were collaborators and running dogs of U.S. imperialism, who supported a Washington-backed puppet government. And that it was the Viet Cong who were the south’s real patriots. But don’t worry: The former president’s niece, charter member of the ruling class, has taken great care to make sure that American ears aren’t offended by hearing the other side of this “human story.” The Vietnamese Left doesn’t just not get equal time -- it gets no air time in this blatantly biased propaganda flick, violating journalistic ethics to present multiple viewpoints, without fear or favor.

However, skillful propagandist that Rory is, in her effort to whitewash history and to try to ferret out something positive in a colossal debacle so she can pander to U.S. rightwing sentiment, there’s something even she can’t hide. Look closely at the newsreel clips as the NVA tanks roll into what was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Not only are the soldiers jubilant, but look at the smiling faces of the Vietnamese masses as they are being liberated from decades of Japanese, French and Yankee occupation and imperialism. Perhaps we should thank Rory for not using CGI to turn those smiles into frowns.

To be fair, Rory has produced and/or helmed some good documentaries in the past, including 2005’s Street Fight, 2006’s The Homestead Strike and 2007’s Ghost of Abu Ghraib. The jury is still out as to what US President Kennedy would have done in Vietnam had he had a second term in office. Some, like film director Oliver Stone (JFK), contend he planned to pull out of Vietnam (which Stone and others believe is a major reason why the president was liquidated). And Rory’s father, Bobby, did run as a peace candidate in 1968, although again, bullets cut short his life and who knows how a possible Bobby presidency might have ended the war, instead of Tricky Dick Nixon's ascension to the presidency in 1968?

And Last Days in Vietnam does point out that the U.S. Ambassador to south Vietnam, the Nixon-appointed Graham Martin, was in denial of reality up to the very last minute (if not, like the pig who appointed him, unhinged), resulting in chaotic, last minute evacuation plans. More than 400 of those Vietnamese camping out at the U.S. embassy grounds in what had been Saigon never made it to those choppers or boats to escape their fates. 

Having said this, with liberals like Rory Kennedy, who needs reactionaries? 

Last Days in Vietnam will premiere on PBS’ (your tax dollars at work!) American Experience in Winter/Spring 2015 -- just in time to brainwash Americans as the 40^th anniversary of U.S. imperialism’s greatest defeat nears, and as another catastrophe for Washington’s foreign policy unfolds in Iraq. 

But the real lesson to draw from the Vietnam invasion is not that at the very end, perhaps a handful of Yanks put themselves in harm’s way. (Which is a bit like arsonists patting themselves for rescuing a few folks from the house they’ve set afire.) Rather, the true moral of the story is that being the world’s policeman is a disastrous policy that costs Americans and the nations they willy-nilly invade dearly, in blood and treasure. U.S. military and intelligence are arguably the most destabilizing forces on Earth, with bases straddling the globe and eternally intervening in others’ internal affairs. Nobody likes busybodies and meddlers: If you go around the world sticking your nose into other people’s business you’re likely to get punched in the nose. Washington’s empire is bankrupting a country that can’t even take care of those hapless soldiers who politicians and corporations blithely send abroad for foreign misadventures -- should they eventually make it back home outside of body bags. No amount of flag waving can hide the truth: that when it comes to militarism, Washington should mind its own business -- as if America doesn’t have enough pressing problems back home.

Having just returned from Vietnam, this reviewer can assure readers that there is life after U.S. imperialism. Rory's despicable, reprehensible propaganda flick might be called Last Days in Vietnam, but the liberation and reunification were certainly not the last days of Vietnam. The Vietnamese won the war and they are winning the peace, proving that the last shall be first.

LAFF 2014: RECOMMENDED BY ENRIQUE

The Star (Sarah Swinwood) in Recommended by Enrique.

Demons and such

By Miranda Inganni

Two individuals with their own agendas find themselves biding their time in Del Rio, Texas, in this quirky, enigmatic film "based on actual events."

An aspiring actress (Sarah Swinwood) comes to town to shoot a no-budget horror film, which she believes will be her big break into Hollywood stardom. Despite being told each day that the director is stuck in meetings in Los Angeles, she and the teenaged cast and crew continue to make the film. Meanwhile, a cowboy with a secret (Lino Verela) is held up in town awaiting a colleague. He is there to ostensibly deliver some plants and is bored out of his mind with the small, dusty town. Both the starlet and the cowboy pass the time in their own distinct way – the starlet swims with the local kids and sticks to the shooting schedule; the cowboy drinks himself to sleep at night, desperately missing his dead wife. When their projects are complete, both cowboy and actress move on.

Based on another film that was never completed, there is a quietness to Recommended by Enrique, written and directed by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia. Both lead characters spend much time in solitude, despite (or in spite of) merriment around them. They each have their own inner monologues, with the cowboy’s acting as a narration and the actress’s manifesting itself in her video blog entries. Though they are staying a couple of rooms away from each other in the same small motel, they never interact.  

Newcomers Swinwood and Verela both give excellent performances in this film hinting at mystery and nuance.

LAFF 2014: EAT WITH ME

in Eat with Me. 

Half-baked

By Ed Rampell

Eat With Me, which world premiered at the LA Film Festival, alternates between being an enjoyable, poignant coming out comedy drama and a paint -- or rather film -- by the numbers story. The plot of writer/director David Au’s feature-length directorial debut movie also has more holes in it than -- to use a culinary comparison -- Swiss cheese.

Elliot (the diffident Teddy Chen Culver) is a restaurateur of what is presumably a Chinese (like much else in this story, Au never specifies the ancestry of his Asian-American characters) eatery that is more or less a run of the mill dive in (presumably) a rather generic Downtown L.A. that could be the downtown of almost any urban American center. As the restaurant with its mediocre menu faces shuttering, after a falling out with her husband (over what, we’re never really quite sure) Elliot’s mother, Emma (the wonderful Sharon Omi), suddenly shows up out of nowhere and starts lodging at her son’s pad in (presumably) Downtown L.A.

Complications ensue, as Elliot’s homosexuality becomes an inescapable fact that Emma must contend with and face. She had more or less previously known of her son’s sexual orientation but preferred to ignore it. Eat With Me is most insightful when it shows how Elliot’s parents’ failure to communicate is passed down to him, resulting in his inability to form lasting relationships and his miscommunication with the sensitive musician, Ian (Aidan Bristow).

The various cooking sequences have that painting/filming by numbers quality: There is a food network, chefs are celebrities, Anthony Bourdain has replaced the news on CNN, so Au appears to be pandering to that coveted foodie demographic.

The strength of Eat With Me is its cast, led by the estimable Sharon. Oh my, Omi is stellar as a loving if traditional, conservative mom who struggles with her son’s “deviance” off the beaten sexual path and with her deep maternal instincts, which she expresses by cleaning his loft and by, but of course, cooking for the son she is desperately trying to reach to and connect with. Previously, Omi has mostly been confined to small big and little screen roles but here this gifted artist is allowed to shine in a lead role, and we are all the better for it.

LAFF 2014: LAKE LOS ANGELES

Cecilia (Johanna Trujillo) in Lake Los Angeles.

Dusts in the wind

By Miranda Inganni

Set in the desolate high desert of California’s Antelope Valley, Lake Los Angeles is a story of struggle and survival for two incongruous, but quietly complementary characters.

Francisco (Roberto Sanchez) is a Cuban immigrant long since distanced from his wife and family. When he is not doing various day labor jobs and writing poetic love letters to his wife, he uses his house as a temporary holding place for immigrants crossing into the US from Mexico. One such person is young Cecilia (Johanna Trujillo) whose mother has purchased her passage with a promise that her father will collect her upon her arrival.

Things do not go according to plan on these vast arid plains pricked with Joshua trees and littered with abandoned houses.

Francisco and Cecilia both came to this land in search, or with a promise, of something better, only to face disappointment. Cecilia’s promised life with a father who she has never met is turned topsy-turvy when she, in a sudden act of self-preservation, runs off into the expansive desert. To keep herself occupied and comforted, she whispers stories, legends she has heard, to an imaginary friend as she wanders in search of her father, any father – a little girl lost in an expanse of grit.

Directed by Mike Ott and written by Ott and Atsuko Okatsuka, Lake Los Angeles uses the location almost as another character. The area drives the actors to various actions. It elicits a practically palpable, desperate dryness that gets into everything and sets the tone carried throughout the enjoyable film.

LAFF 2014: EVOLUTION OF A CRIMINAL

Darius Clark Monroe in Evolution of a Criminal.

Easy come, difficulties grow

By Miranda Inganni

When he was 16, Darius Clark Monroe and two of his classmates decided to rob a bank at gunpoint. Ten years later, Monroe’s film, Evolution of a Criminal, depicts this criminal episode of his life, what lead up to the robbery and how it affected him, his family and the victims of his crime.

Growing up in the outskirts of Houston, TX, Monroe was a good student and loving child. Unfortunately, he learned a little too much about his parents’ financial woes. He heard too often his mother complain about their mounting credit card debt and the struggles of living from paycheck to paycheck. Trying to be a good son, Monroe got a job at a local big box store and kept his nose to the high school grindstone. After a frightening home break-in, in which all of the family’s valuables -- most notably the VCRs, a gun and his stepfather’s full paycheck -- were stolen, something changed for Monroe. 

The brazen thieves had kicked in the basement door, climbed through the attic and busted a hole in Monroe’s bedroom ceiling to gain entry to the house. Monroe reasoned that he could simply replace the stolen VCRs with some from the store at which he worked and easily made that happen. Shortly thereafter, Monroe and his friends came up with the plan to rob a small, local branch of a bank. Armed with a shotgun, Monroe and his friend stormed the bank, while their other buddy waited in the getaway car.

Due to the severity of the crime, in which they stole about $140,000 and held a number of people at gunpoint, Monroe was tried as an adult and found guilty. He was incarcerated. 

But that is not where the story ends. Rather than become a criminal for life, Monroe had more creative plans. 

Evolution of a Criminal combines home movies, interviews with family members, former teachers and some of the victims, plus some reenactments to explore what happened and what it lead to Monroe's criminal enterprise. 

One of the many documentaries offered at Los Angeles Film Festival 2014, Evolution of a Criminal offers a sobering exploration of what can (and all too often does) go wrong for young men trying to better their lives through “easy” means.

LAFF 2013: LEVITATED MASS

A scene from Levitated Mass: The Story of Michael Heizer's Monolithic Sculpture.

Rock and road

By Miranda Inganni

Energetic and highly enjoyable, director Doug Pray’s Levitated Mass: The Story of Michael Heizer’s Monolithic Sculpture brings to life the 2012 journey of a giant piece of granite through darkened city streets that caught the attention of mainstream media and sleepy communities alike.

In the late 1960s artist Michael Heizer envisioned the idea for “Levitated Mass,” a hulking rock balanced on top a long walkway. Decades later, Heizer received a call from his friends at Stone Valley Quarry in Riverside, CA saying that they had found Heizer his rock. Blasted out of the ground, the enormous mass sat where it was until a suitable location was found and the money raised to attempt to move it. No small feat, indeed. Step in Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan and the art-loving donors who helped fund the $10 million transportation project.

Pray’s film does not try to explain Heizer’s vision, though Pray includes many clips from previously recorded interviews and shows a number of Heizer’s other installations and exhibits. And though it took over a year to figure out the engineering and logistics, the rock only traveled for 11 nights. Along the way, something seemingly magical happened, wherever the rock went, people followed. The public’s response was overwhelming. Some folks were bewildered, others saw a conspiracy, but mostly people were impressed at the largesse of it all.

With cinematography by Christopher Chomyn, Edwin Stevens and Pray that expertly captures the scale of the rock and the undertaking and a score by Akron/Family which highlights the drama and suspense (literal and figurative) of the film, Levitated Mass is a movie that will be sure to get audiences discussing the meaning of art and the amazing feats that humans continue to accomplish.

 

LAFF 2013: DORMANT BEAUTY

Maria (Alba Rohrwacher) in Dormant Beauty.

Death panelists

By Ed Rampell

Marco Bellocchio rocketed to fame in 1965 with Fists in the Pocket, a riveting look at epileptics, and 1967’s China is Near, which daringly dealt with Maoism when this was a strictly taboo topic. The Italian director’s leftist bent was also evident in 2009’s Vincere, about the son of Mussolini and his mistress. Bellocchio is still pushing the proverbial envelope -- his latest offering, Dormant Beauty, sort of combines the searing look at sickness and hard hitting politics of his first two features with yet another forbidden subject.

 

The topical Dormant Beauty is about -- depending on your point of view -- the right to die, or perhaps, rather, the right to life. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy is torn apart by warring factions who oppose state sanctioned and administered deaths, in particular, for people in comas. Bellocchio skillfully interweaves news footage about an actual 2008 court battle involving Eluana Englaro -- a woman who had been in a vegetative state for 17 years and is about to be removed from life support -- with several private stories that are variations on the same theme, proving once again that the political is also personal.

 

Tony Servillo (2008’s Il Divo, 2010’s Gorbaciof) stars as an Italian senator, Uliano Beffardi, who decides to go against party discipline and do that odd thing in bourgeois electoral politics: take a principled stand in favor of the right to die and deciding to end one’s own life. In the process the senator ends his own political life. (At one point a protester mocks him for turning his back on socialism.) Previously, the senator’s own wife was dying in the hospital and now Beffardi’s daughter, Maria (Alba Rohrwacher), has joined the religious zealots who vociferously oppose the right to die. She has one of Dormant Beauty’s two “cute meets”, as she romances Roberto (Michele Riondino), whom she encounters through demonstrations regarding the fate of the comatose woman. Although they are on opposite sides of the issue, the couple provide the movie’s nude scene. Roberto’s brother, Pipino (Fabrizio Falco), is a right-to-die fanatic as angry and disturbed as any of the characters in Fists in the Pocket.

The sensuous Italian-Iranian actress Maya Sansa plays a suicidal thief and addict who has the movie’s other cute meet, with the compassionate Dr. Pallido (the director’s son, Pier Giorgio Bellocchio). Playing true to type, the great French actress Isabelle Huppert (1974’s Going Places, 1980’s Heaven’s Gate, 1982’s Godard’s Passion, 2012’s Amour) portrays a thespian called Divina Madre, whose own daughter hovers between life and death in a coma.

It’s an odd thing that (especially in this country) the so-called right to life movement fanatically opposes abortion and assisted suicides, but often the very same leaders and rank-and-file true believers are gung ho when it comes to capital punishment and going to war. I guess matters of life and death are like comedy -- it’s all in the timing.

Be that as it may, this Italian writer-director remains in good form and renders a trenchant, poignant, thoughtful look at this controversial issue.

 

 

 

LAFF 2013: AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY

Grace Lee Boggs in American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs.

Lee winding road

By Ed Rampell

American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggsis engagingly, wittily directed by Grace Lee. No relation to her documentary’s subject, Lee first stumbled upon Boggs a decade ago while making another nonfiction film, 2005’s The Grace Lee Project.

The director appears onscreen in American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee, but the focus remains fixed on Boggs. Lee has a good film sense and her techniques run the gamut, from naturalistic talking heads footage -- including of Bill Moyers, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis and Danny Glover -- to the imaginatively cinematic. For example, in sharp contrast to most longwinded leftwing intellectuals, Lee humorously sums up Hegel and Marx in 30 second montages, and creatively uses reverse motion historical news clips to represent going back in time for this biopic about Boggs.

Boggs attended the LAFF screenings in her wheelchair, took part in Q&As with Lee and appeared on Tavis Smiley’s PBS talk show on June 21. An inspiration on- and offscreen, this radical icon remains full of grace -- bogged down she’s not, as she remains ready for the revolution -- whatever form it may take.

 

 

LAFF 2013: OUR NIXON

Richard M. Nixon in Our Nixon.

In your ears and in your eyes

By Ed Rampell

Our Nixonis a compilation film by Penny Lane about the only U.S. President (so far!) who resigned and had to leave that office is disgrace. The documentary is largely composed of and culled from 500 hours of never-before-publicly-seen Super 8 home movies shot by three Nixon aides that were seized by the FBI during the Watergate investigation, then filed away and forgotten -- until the intrepid (and obstreperous) Lane unearthed and rescued this cinematic treasure trove for posterity. She has shaped out of the raw material of this footage an eye-opening insider’s glimpse of President Richard Milhous Nixon and his benighted administration.

Lane painstakingly matches sound and wry musical choices to the silent chronicles and adds archival video from network news vaults. From a film form point of view this is a fascinating exercise in cinema verite. The fly-on-the-wall Nixon remix includes celluloid shot by advisor John Ehrlichman, Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and special assistant Dwight Chapin. The documentary reminds us how young this regime’s hacks and hatchet men were -- Ehrlichman was 43, Haldeman 34 and Chapin a mere 27. But boy were they ever on the wrong side of the 1960s/1970s generational divide!

Chapin, the youngest, went to college with dirty trickster Donald Segretti, whose Nixonian specialty was “ratfucking,” (pardon my French, but the Nixon administration was known for its “expletives deleted”) the Democrats, such as that phony “Canuck” letter to presidential candidate Sen. Edmund Muskie that supposedly caused him to cry and appear weak; tossing marbles on the ground at a Democratic rally, and other pranks gone beserk. The film discloses that “Segretti” translates, appropriately, from the Italian to “secrets” in English. This is who Nixon’s henchmen hobnobbed with: Verily, ye shall know them by the company they keep!

Our Nixon contains great behind-the-scenes footage of historic events, such as Tricky Dick’s 1972 breakthrough Beijing trip, where the veteran anti-communist met with Mao and applauded a performance of the revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women. The documentary also has surprises, such as: Did you know that the right’s idiot savant, William F. Buckley, was on Nixon’s China trip? And Tricky Dick’s comments on Henry Kissinger (the National Security Advisor’s sex life is far more offensive to Nixon than his mass murders), eavesdropping, approval ratings, etc., are eyebrow- and hair-raising.

The documentary’s most jaw-dropping moment took place not behind closed doors in the Oval Office but in the White House’s East Room on Jan. 28, 1972 when Nixon -- presiding over a dinner marking the 50^th anniversary of Reader’s Digest -- introduced the decidedly unhip Ray Conniff Singers by defiantly snarling: “And if the music is square, it’s because I like it square.” But then, one of the singers did something cool enough to give Nixon indigestion. Canadian alto Carole Feraci pulled a Medea Benjamin, held up a banner saying, “Stop the Killing” and proclaimed to the astonished crowd that included aviator Charles Lindbergh, astronaut Frank Borman and Alice Roosevelt Longworth: “President Nixon, stop bombing human beings… You go to church on Sundays and pray to Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ were here tonight, you would not dare to drop another bomb.” As the bandleader tried to snatch Feraci’s banner the 30-year-old held onto it and added: “Bless the Berrigans and bless Daniel Ellsberg.”

Lane is the perfect name for someone who compiles documentaries out of archival footage -- after all, the Beatles song entitled “Penny Lane” is all about a trip down, well, memory lane. After the LAFF screening, Penny Lane did a Q&A and buttons declaring “Hi. I’m an effete, impudent intellectual snob,” were handed out to viewers.

Our Nixon is a pointed reminder about the U.S. surveillance state run amok as America grapples with another presidential Big Brother snooping scandal. 

 

 

LAFF 2013: FOREV

A scene from Forev.

Too early to be securely

By Don Simpson

Sophia (Noël Wells) is the type of girl who drunkenly brings random guys home to her apartment with the naïve hope that it will be the beginning of a beautiful long-term relationship. Her neighbor, Pete (Matt Mider), is a socially awkward computer support technician who works from home, therefore he rarely leaves his apartment. Hence he is hopelessly single.

Nonetheless, Sophia and Pete spontaneously find themselves engaged to be married. (Nope, she isn’t even preggers!) They go on a road trip across the Southwest to pick up Pete’s sister (Amanda Bauer) from college. Mayhem ensues, as the trip puts their (non-)relationship to the test.

Forev is a somewhat typical, yet smartly written, rom-com that quickly evolves into a quirky road movie which contemplates the meaning and significance of marriage in our modern world and whether or not dating (or sex, for that matter) should be a required precursor. Not all that long ago, Sophia and Pete’s rapid-fire engagement would not be all that surprising. Nowadays, they seem a bit nuts; yet within the cinematic universe of Forev, Sophia and Pete are given ample motivation to justify their sense of desperation.

At Sophia and Pete’s age, everything seems like an eternity. They are stuck in a purgatory between college graduation and settling down into family life, and they are both growing increasingly impatient with the pace of their lives. They have been waiting forever (in the figurative sense) to take the next step in life — in this case, marriage — yet it never comes. Of course, if and when they do get married, that means being with their significant other forever -- if they take their vows seriously. That is a lot of forever for two people in their 20s.


Forev screens at the Los Angeles Film Festival, tonight, 9:50 p.m., Regal Cinemas. For more information: Forev at LAFF 2013.

LAFF 2013: FOUR DOGS

Oliver (Oliver Cooper) in Four Dogs.

Encino Man

By Don Simpson

Oliver (Oliver Cooper) is a struggling actor who lives with his aunt (Rebecca Goldstein) in Encino, California. Actually, Oliver is taking a break from acting, spending his days smoking weed in his aunt’s house while she flies around the world as an airline attendant. It seems as though the only way he legitimizes his free room and board is by taking care of his aunt’s four dogs while she is away. Otherwise, Oliver is just a lazy, 20-something slacker, caste in the mold of Jonah Hill.

Lonely and secluded in suburbia, Oliver creates a strange array of characters to entertain himself, essentially developing his own invisible friends. Oliver’s only real friend, Dan (Dan Bakkedahl), is twice his age. They met a while ago in acting school, though neither one of them seems to understand why they are friends. Misery loves company, I guess; or maybe misery just enjoys having a miserable friend with a car to shuttle him around. Both men — or, rather, man childs — do share a certain kinship in their desperation for female attention. Oliver quickly develops an obsession with the soon-to-be-divorced Diane (Kathleen McNearney), while Dan is fixated on an acting partner from school.

Writer-director Joe Burke’s Four Dogs focuses on the averageness of Oliver and Dan’s existence as well as the averageness of cookie-cutter life in Encino. There is nothing glitzy or glamorous about life in this Los Angeles suburb, nor is there any grit or sleaze.


Four Dogs screens at the Los Angeles Film Festival June 22, 9:40 p.m., Regal Cinemas. For more information: FD at LAFF 2013.

LAFF 2013: IN A WORLD...

Carol (Lake Bell) in In a World...

Hear me roar (sort of)

By Don Simpson

In a world where men — such as Carol’s father, Sam (Fred Melamed) – are worshipped for their booming bass voices that accompany the trailers for Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters, Carol (writer-director Lake Bell) works as a lowly speech and accent coach for actors. Luckily for Carol, a new wave of female-centric blockbusters has begun, thus opening the possibility for Hollywood’s first female voiceover artist.

Bell’s In a World... reveals the chauvinistic and incestuous tendencies of Hollywood, showcasing just how ridiculous it is to have the same male voices attached to every movie trailer. She might not be any better than her male counterparts, but Carol is incredibly unique because she is a woman. Now that Hollywood action films have finally opened their arms to female heroes, it only makes sense that they retain that strong female voice in the trailers to those films. It seems logical, but not necessarily in a man’s world.

In a World also speaks directly about the female voice as Carol works with women to correct the way in which they speak. Often, women are judged by the sound of their voice. If a woman speaks in a high-pitched Valley Girl tone with a lot of filler sounds, she is typically not taken seriously by men. Even Carol conforms as much as possible to the voiceover industry standard by lowering the frequency of her own voice whenever she is on the microphone. In other words, to break into a man’s world, you must play by their rules and abide by their standards with the hope of eventually making changes from the inside.

Female writer-directors are unfortunately a rare breed in Hollywood, so we need women like Bell to bring their voices to the forefront. As In a World... suggests, this is not an easy proposition. It is one met with ridiculous resistance from the old guard of Hollywood. In the end, the decision will have to be made by fans. If films with powerful women sell tickets at the box office and do well in home video sales, then Hollywood will have no choice. In a World... is a worthy crossover comedy that seems independent but has enough star power to hold its own in the box office.

LAFF 2013: INEQUALITY FOR ALL

A scene from Inequality for All.

Freedom to monopolize

By John Esther

Thanks to theReaganite fiscal policies over the past 30 years, the economic disparity between rich Americans and the rest of America’s people has increased monumentally. The middle class is disappearing into the poor while the rich get richer. This is not good news for Americans, even the rich. Our economy thrives on consumption and when the middle class are not doing their dutiful duties by consuming, we all suffer.

At least that is what Robert Reich says.

A United States Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, Reich is now a teacher at UC Berkeley who occasionally goes on the airwaves to present the neo-liberal economic policy point of view.

With a great amount, -- perhaps a little too much -- of reverence for his subject, director Jacob Kornbluth traces Reich’s roots before and during his Clinton years as well as capture Reich’s academic life today where he can pack a large classroom of students while increasingly being ignored by mainstream media. 

Since trickle down economics/austerity fiscal planning has been refuted by every legitimate economist (and the poor quality of reality itself), the contents of Inequality for All are hardly revolutionary, but the documentary is an amusing piece of non-fiction.

Equaling the paying field, The Los Angeles Film Festival is screening Inequality for All for free.


Inequality for All will screen at the Los Angeles Film Festival June 22, 8:30 p.m., at California Plaza. For more information: IFA at LAFF 2013.

LAFF 2013: POLLYWOGS

Sarah (Kate Lyn Sheil) and Dylan (Karl Jacob) in Pollywogs.

Minne me

By Don Simpson

Recovering from yet another failed relationship, Dylan (co-director Karl Jacob) retreats back to his rural Minnesota hometown for a family reunion. In cinema and literature, an urban protagonist often returns to their rural hometown out of necessity, and they do so with apprehension and fear. These characters are stereotypical patronizing urban elitists, who are eventually forced to learn that the town they left behind is not all that bad. In the case of Pollywogs, however, Dylan has returned home to reboot his life, to get back on track again. While he may not be able to work in a lucrative career here, this quaint Minnesota lake community serves as a magical respite from his not-so-happy adult life.

Upon arrival, idyllic memories of Sarah — Dylan’s first love at age ten — rush straight to his head; then, as fate would have it, Sarah (Kate Lyn Sheil) appears at Dylan’s family reunion. They have not seen each other for 18 years, yet they both have held onto idealized fantasies about what it would be like to reunite. That is a heck of a lot of pressure for two single people who may or may not be wanting to fall back in love.

Dylan and Sarah form a cute foursome with Dylan’s cousin, Julie (Jennifer Prediger), and her husband, Bo (Larry Mitchell), which temporarily eases the romantic pressure. Luckily, they have plenty of booze and weed to calm their nerves and a sauna to steam things up. The drastic juxtaposition of sweating in the hot sauna and shivering in the frigid lake seems like a perfect metaphor for the fluctuating hot and cold feelings between Dylan and Sarah.

They are obviously confused and who can blame them? They were once so close, but that was so long ago. Dylan and Sarah barely know each other any more. Eighteen years have passed. Dylan is now a full-fledged New Yorker, while Sarah seems temporarily content with taking care of her ailing grandmother in Minnesota. As their pasts begin to inform their present, Dylan finds himself desperately pawing at Sarah because he is the type of person who anxiously jumps from one relationship to the next, but Sarah immediately regrets reciprocating his affections and begins to cower away. Having once been forced by her parents into living on a Branch Davidian commune in Colorado, Sarah is wary of doing anything that she does not want to do. David may be primed to jump off the (literal and figurative) cliff, but Sarah pauses and eventually chickens out.

Co-directors Jacob and T. Arthur Cottam approached this project with story points, then developed the characters and dialogue during a six month rehearsal process. The result is a foursome of fully realized characters whose actions are all backed up by motivations. That is not to say that the script is saturated with expository dialogue, because whenever characters are interrogated about their feelings or past, it is done so with the utmost level of naturalism.

The emotional honesty of Pollywogs is much too powerful for this story not to be rooted in some sense of reality. While we might not all have romantic crushes from age ten to fondly look back upon, most of us have some sort of idealized notion from our past that we would like to somehow reinstate into our present lives. The problem is that our ten-year-old selves are hopefully nothing like our fully-matured selves, so something that enraptured us back then will probably not have the same effect on us now. That is why the resolution of Pollywogs is so important. Jacob and Cottam could have very easily chosen to go with an overtly saccharine Hollywood ending, but they opt to conclude the film in a manner much more true to real life.