FILM REVIEW: SUBMARINE

Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) in Submarine.

Keeping head above w(h)at(h)er

By Don Simpson

Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) is the cinematic sibling of Harold Chasen and Max Fischer, the young male protagonists from Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude and Wes Anderson’s Rushmore respectively. A 15-year-old Welsh boy with a geeky penchant for reading the dictionary, Oliver dourly trudges around Swansea outfitted in a black duffel coat with leather briefcase in hand. Solipsistically fancying himself as a fully-formed gentleman with superior tastes and sensibilities, Oliver is the cinematic reincarnation of The Catcher in the Rye’s (Oliver’s favorite modern American novel) protagonist, Holden Caulfield.

Oliver pines over a blissful obsession, despite her eczema, with an iconic first-love character, Jordana (Yasmin Paige), a classmate who bears a remarkable resemblance to Chantal Goya circa Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Féminin (one of many film's references to the nouvelle vague). Jordana professes a severe disdain for emotions and romance, preferring a boy who would be willing to allow her to burn his leg hair with matches and co-conspire schemes of petty arson, a role Oliver would not object to playing. 

Oliver causes enough of a splash to gain Jordana’s attention when he collaborates with her in bullying a doughy classmate, Zoe (Lily McCann). Though the guilt from this incident seems to haunt Oliver for the remainder of the film, the event nonetheless leads him to meet Jordana under a railway bridge with a Polaroid camera and diary in tow where Jordana promptly orders Oliver to his knees and their romance commences with a first kiss that tastes like “milk, Polo mints and Dunhill International.”

He may start off as Jordana’s pet, but soon Oliver’s pubescent fantasies of having a girlfriend and losing his virginity are realized. Their iconic young love is presented to us by Oliver via soft focus Super 8 memories propagated by fireworks, sunsets, beaches and bicycles. The superficial first two weeks of their relationship gives way to Jordana and Oliver dealing with family issues -- Jordana’s mother (Melanie Walters) has been terminally diagnosed with a brain tumor while Oliver’s parents’ (Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor) relationship is on the skids -- that drive a wedge between them.

Incessantly monitoring his parents' sex life by way of their bedroom dimmer switch, Oliver has determined that it has been a long time since his parents have turned the lamp down low, so he takes it upon himself to save his parents’ marriage. First, Oliver plots to pull his mother away from the clutches of her cheesy ex-boyfriend, Graham (Paddy Considine), a cartoonish representation of a New Age-y self help guru who makes a living lecturing about the enlightening benefits of light. Next, Oliver must rescue his father from the oceanic depths of depression, a state of mind that Oliver quickly finds himself slipping into.

Never delving too far into Oliver’s fantastical daydreams, Submarine conveys the teenage wasteland of Wales in the 1980s with a lugubrious backdrop of deteriorating industrial plants, garbage dumps and urban decay. By avoiding the modern teenage rom-com tendency of relying upon overt quirkiness or gross-out jokes to propel the narrative, writer-director Richard Ayoade’s morbidly mundane perspective of pubescence captures the realistic behavior of 15-year olds, specifically the forced pretense of their actions, their incredibly fickle behavior and their all-so-serious dramatizations of seemingly minor events. Despite his hyperactive teenage mind’s knack for self-delusion, Oliver is a precocious and idiosyncratic teen with big, brown puppy-dog eyes and a perspicacious outlook on life.

A series of alternating blue and red, Godard-esque intertitles, separate Ayoade’s feature-length debut into distinct chapters -- including a prologue and epilogue -- thus establishing a literary structure that serves as a nod to Ayoade’s source: Joe Dunthorne’s novel, Submarine. Ayoade makes one significant alteration to Dunthorne’s novel, staging his film in the 1980s (rather than the 2000s). The production design promotes a reverential nostalgia of bygone teenage years which will probably play most effectively for viewers who were teenagers in the 1980s. (As luck would have it I am part of this target audience, which might be why Submarine was so enjoyable to me.) Teenagers pass handwritten notes in class (rather than text messaging or emailing) and keep diaries (rather than posting their every thought on Facebook); and Ayoade fills the screen with antiquated technologies such as typewriters, Polaroids, VHS tapes, Super 8 film footage, clunky cordless telephones, and audio cassette tapes as if creating an ode to the analogue ways of the not-so-distant past. Erik Wilson’s cinematography, which abides by the same primary-colored palette of Raoul Coutard, and the jump cuts and freeze frames of Chris Dickens and Nick Fenton’s editing also lends Submarine the reverential (and referential) air of a film that is submerged in the past. 

However, Ayoade steers clear of a period-defining soundtrack, opting for a new-yet-timeless soundtrack performed by Arctic Monkeys’ frontman Alex Turner.

HOLLYWOOD BRAZILIAN 2011: OPENING NIGHT

A scene from Cold Tropics.

A night to dismember

By John Esther

Riddled with incompetence, the Hollywood Brazilian Film Festival 2011 slowly started its opening night. 

Scheduled to commence at 8 p.m. patrons were held in the cold air outside the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood until 8:25 p.m. No explanation for the delay was offered.

Twenty minutes later after we were admitted, somebody from the film festival addressed the audience. Rather than efficiently go through the typical laborious yet understandable Opening Night procedure of thanking sponsors and volunteers before introducing the filmmakers smoothly and without incident, the audience was subjected to a series of banal flattery, self-congratulatory speeches, lame jokes and repetitive chatter before any films would begin.

Over an hour later after the show was supposed to start, the lights went down and the festival film schedule started with a wonderful short film called Recife Frio (Cold Tropics).  

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, who was in attendance, Recife Frio poses a futuristic scenario where Recife, a northern tropical city of Brazil, mysteriously encounters a drastic climate chance that leaves its citizens coping with some crazy cold weather. In response some discover a new marketplace for further consumption, while others find consolation and answers in religion, others use song, others move out and many others die.

Smart, satirical and shot with impressive precision and scope, the 24-minute mockumentary takes a long bite at global consumerism, self-preservation and idiotic self-reliance. 

After the short was over, and people continued coming to and fro the theater, the opening night film, Craft, started at 9:30 p.m. without the sound. After playing and tinkering with the moving image on the screen for five minutes or so, the theater lights went up to fix the problem.

Having had enough, at that point I departed the Egyptian Theatre for the evening. 

Now running through June 5, for more information on the festival, click HBFF.  

FILM REVIEW #2: TREE OF LIFE

Jack (Sean Penn) in Tree of Life.

Grace asunder pressure

By Ed Rampell

Here are four words I never thought I’d see in the same sentence, let alone in the same film: Sean Penn and dinosaurs. Yet they both co-exist onscreen in Terrence Malick’s latest cinematic tour de force, The Tree of Life. The movie’s meaning is as elusive as its writer-director is famously reclusive (his likeness reportedly cannot be used to promote Malick’s work, and he doesn’t grant interviews – including to yours boo-hoo truly). At its Cannes premiere Tree of Life was both booed and applauded, yet it went on to earn that famous French film fete’s coveted Palme d'Or.

Why boos, bravos and prizes? Tree of Life is composed of at least three stories; what’s ostensibly the primary plotline is the most accessible. This is the saga of the O’Briens, a Texas family whose strict patriarch, the businessman Mr. O’Brien, is portrayed by Brad Pitt (who also shares producer credits). Newcomer and Julliard grad Jessica Chastain depicts Mrs. O’Brien as a loving, nurturing mom of three sons. She’s an Earth Mother archetype in the modality of Jane Darwell, matriarch of the Joads in 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath, and of Hattie McDaniel, who as Mammy in 1939’s Gone With the Wind is really the movie’s central maternal figure. Chastain may be minus Darwell and McDaniel’s weight, but this is not to say that her performance as an all-embracing mother isn’t weighty. In the tradition of Italian Neo-Realism, Malick cast non-actors in major (and minor) roles, notably Hunter McCracken, who makes his screen debut as Young Jack, the eldest O’Brien boy.

The part of Malick’s epic that’s specifically about the O’Briens is actually quite conventional and rendered in a pretty linear, narrative manner. The complexity and even mystical nature of Tree of Life is deepened by its intricate interweaving with the two other storylines (if you can call them that). Sean Penn portrays the adult Jack as an alienated architect, estranged among contemporary skyscrapers and wandering in the wilderness, searching for and brooding upon the meaning of life. These sequences have a Federico Fellini or Michelangelo Antonioni sensibility, existential ruminations on materialistic modern man disconnected from his society and surroundings. Grown up Jack’s Vita is not so Dolce, his Desert is not so Red, and Penn’s performance, essentially sans dialogue, is reminiscent of the expressiveness of the great silent screen actors.

Compounding Tree of Life’s intricacy is the third leitmotif, the film’s most mystifying and obscure yet virtuoso, visually stunning sequences. The ambitious Malick and his stellar special effects/cinematography team attempt to cinematically render nothing less than the Big Bang Theory of the creation of the cosmos, the origins of life itself and the Darwinian process of natural selection. The Malickian crew is after nothing less than a filmic rendition of time and space itself, as well as what surrealist Salvador Dali dubbed “the Persistence of Memory.” Tree of Life is as if Albert Einstein has met Sergei Eisenstein.

The intense inter-cutting of these three cinematic strands is what perplexes yet enthralls viewers of Malick’s visionary film. In a nutshell, man’s place and purpose in the universe is examined, as Tree of Life asks the really big questions: Why are we and what are we doing here? What does it mean? What is the nature of being and consciousness? This 138-minute extravaganza’s title is a Biblical reference to the Tree of Life of life in the Garden of Eden, with the fruit that bestowed life everlasting.

Along the way, some members of the audience are bound to get lost in space, while others more attuned to spirituality and pondering the splendor and wonder of it all will go along for the ride, watching in hushed awe, as if beholding the unfolding of a religious experience. The former viewer will wonder what the movie is all about while the latter will become as one with Malick, a former Harvard student and Rhodes scholar who translated the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in marveling at "What's it all about?" Malick may have visualized what the quest for enlightenment looks -- and sounds -- like.

When I attended Hunter College’s film school during the 1970s there was a debate amongst cineastes about how to make films. Should movies be a strictly storytelling medium unspooling in a logical, linear manner, following a (mostly) chronological) narrative, like most novels and plays do? Or is there another path to pursue, the road less traveled by an expensive medium dominated by commerce? Should films be expressed cinematically, that is, utilizing the uniquely, purely audio-visual language, structure and attributes of the silver screen? It seems to me that since the 1970s, this film theory debate has mainly be sidelined in the American motion picture industry in favor of the trite, traditional way of making movies that tell stories like books and theatre, largely anchored in dialogue.

That’s why the appearance of a Terrence Malick movie is greatly anticipated and treated as a special event by lovers of fine filmmaking. Malick reignites this almost forgotten aesthetic debate. Although Malick is highly regarded as a movie maestro by those who prefer their cinema artsy, Tree of Life is only the fifth feature he has helmed since his directorial debut almost 40 years ago, 1973’s desperadoes-on-the-run drama Badlands, starring (Charlie’s daddy) Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. There was a full 20 year “hiatus” between Malick’s directing of the 1978 pro-labor ballad Days of Heaven co-starring Richard Gere and Brooke Adams, and his long-awaited 1998 return to the director’s chair with Malick’s adaptation of James Jones’ classic WWII novel about the Battle of Guadalcanal, The Thin Red Line, with Penn, Nick Nolte and George Clooney among its all-star cast of actors eager to work with the master. Malick’s 2005 The New World, inspired by the Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher) and John Smith (Colin Farrell) saga, was full of the expressive visual verve and cinematic sensibility that is the poetic hallmark of Malick productions.

The Tree of Life of Life is the best rendition so far of Malick’s cinematic palate of pure pictorial panache. This auteur strives to return to that rich wellspring of silent screen filmic artistry, a largely lost language derailed by the emergence of talkies, which then wedded movies to dialogue and story, as opposed to imagery. And like so many marriages, this narrative union has lost its luster. I hasten to add, however, that Tree of Life’s sonorous soundtrack includes compositions by Bach, Berlioz, Brahms, Mahler and perhaps most memorably, Bedrich Smetana’s The Moldau, a musical evocation of a river in the Czech Republic that works wonderfully onscreen. Malick marries music, sound and sight as he strives to create a film form that is one with, and organically expresses, content.

Tree of Life is in the tradition of experimental cinema, exemplified by Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man and Jonas Mekas type films. But unlike his moving picture predecessors, Malick has managed through Fox Searchlight (for god’s sake, a Rupert Murdoch company!) to create a big budget avante garde movie with high production values. In this stylistic sense, and in terms of its special effects and combination of a conventional linear story (the O’Brien family tale), unlike the Brakhage/Mekas hallucinogenic sojourns that completely eschewed the narrative, Tree of Life is actually closer to Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci fi classic  2001: A Space Odyssey, which was similarly obsessed with evolution and our role in the cosmos.

Indeed, Malick recruited the venerable Douglas Trumbull, the special photographic effects supervisor for 2001, as well as for other sci-fi epics: 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the first Star Trek feature in 1979, 1982’s Blade Runner and 1972’s Silent Running, which Trumbull also directed. Malick’s vision-eers also include visual effects supervisor Dan Glass (Matrix Reloaded, V For Vendetta),  production designer Jack Fisk (The Thin Red Line) and director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (The New World).

I also want to give a shout out to another Malick alum, the preternaturally exquisite indigenous actress Irene Bedard, who was so splendid in 1998’s Smoke Signals and portrays the Messenger in Tree of Life. Previously, in a piece of canny casting, Bedard played the mother of Pocahontas in The New World, which was apropos since a decade earlier Bedard had given voice to Pocahontas in Disney’s animated feature of the same title. Her role as Tree of Life’s Messenger is in a continuum of celluloid iconography of the “Indian maiden” as a sort of Ur woman, and it’s delightful to see the lovely Ms. Bedard back on the screen, where she belongs.

Some may be left in the dark by Malick’s The Tree of Life of Life, puzzled and feeling that the epic length work is pompous, pretentious and portentous. I, too, confess to not understanding everything on my first viewing; your humble scribe scratched his noggin more than once. But if bewildered I was also bewitched, going with the filmic flow of solar nebulae and, yes, the aforementioned dinosaurs. It's important for this type of experimental, experiential cinema to be pursued and that there be a place for it in our commercialized motion picture industry, where adolescent mall males at multi-plexes determine so much of our cultural "product." After all, one filmmaking size does not fit all.

I hope that audiences and critics won’t piss on this Tree of Life. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, “film must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of artists and studio suits. It is its natural movie manure.” Malick has created a cinematic solar system of outer and inner space for us to explore and experience. And I, for one, look forward to Malick’s 2012 as yet untitled feature, starring Chastain, Rachel McAdams, Ben Affleck, Rachel Weisz and Javier Bardem. Hopefully, the response to Tree of Life won’t cause another two-decade interregnum between the films helmed by one of moviedom’s most singular stylists and poets. 2032 is just too long to wait for another Malickian road trip through cosmic consciousness. 

FILM REVIEW: TREE OF LIFE

Father (Brad Pitt) and R.L. (Laramie Eppler) in Tree of Life.

"Dear God"

By Don Simpson 

I am still attempting to digest The Tree of Life a week after seeing the press screening, making some sense of it all and figuring out exactly what writer-director Terrence Malick is trying to communicate (or maybe I am just having a difficult time getting beyond the CGI dinosaurs). When it comes down to it, The Tree of Life‘s cup runneth over with metaphoric imagery and references to Judeo-Christian scriptures (primarily the Book of Job) and I am desperately trying to wrap my head around it all.

There are essentially three distinct yet intertwined segments of The Tree of Life that play like movements in a symphony: The O’Brien family in the 1950s; Jack O’Brien, the eldest son, 30 years later; and what I loosely refer to as “dawn of time” imagery.

Malick dedicates a majority of the film’s screen time to the O’Brien family and their idyllic Texas home. Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) and Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) have three sons: Jack (Hunter McCracken), R.L. (Laramie Eppler) and Steve (Tye Sheridan). On the surface, their household appears to be as perfect as Leave It to Beaver. Mr. O’Brien has a good, secure job as an engineer (with several patents under his name) and he plays the pipe organ at church on Sundays while Mrs. O’Brien has the middle-class privilege of cleaning the house and raising the boys. The O’Brien family resides in a beautiful and spacious home with fresh air and daylight gushing through the open windows. It is the quintessential life for a white middle-class American family, but once you peel away the top layer -- the facade of suburban tranquility and happiness -- an ugly underbelly of a family ruled by the dictatorial iron fist of Mr. O’Brien is revealed. Mrs. O’Brien is rendered voiceless in the household and the three sons live in a constant state of fear of their father.

Thirty years later, Jack O’Brien (Sean Penn) resides in an aesthetically cold and sterile home and works in an aesthetically cold and sterile architecture office in Houston, Texas. The uninviting nature of both postmodern environments work in purposeful juxtaposition to the comforting openness of Jack’s modernist childhood home. Jack does not say or do much (Penn has approximately 15 minutes of screen time and very little on screen dialogue despite his second billing), other than recollect his past. It is the 30th anniversary of R.L.’s death (we are told that R.L. was 19-years old when he died, yet the timeline is so fractured that it is difficult to know for certain), and that event still renders Jack a listless zombie. (Note: Malick’s youngest brother, an aspiring guitarist, committed suicide in the late 1960s.) 

Jack struggles to make peace with his youth, particularly his relationship with his father and his brother’s premature death. Jack recalls several moments that still haunt him to this day, such as when he: tied a frog to a rocket; threw rocks through a window of a neighbor’s shed; broke into a neighbor’s house; shot R.L.’s finger with a BB gun; talked back to his mother; and prayed that God would kill his father. The Tree of Life is intended to be Jack’s own meditations on his childhood all the while contemplating God’s existence and the meaning of life. Jack perceives himself as the bad son and R.L. as the good (the righteous) son -- so why did God take R.L.’s life? Or, as Job often pondered: Why do the righteous suffer?

The “dawn of time” imagery showcases a psychedelic fantasia of bizarre cosmological phenomena a la the “The Dawn of Man” and “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” chapters of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. First, the Big Bang; then, primordial ooze and molten magma; next, unicellular organisms evolve into multicellular organisms...and eventually there are a couple of dinosaurs. In theory, these visual head-trips represent Jack’s contemplation of the universe (thus revealing the triviality of his selfish concerns). In reality, these scenes are more likely to just conjure up inquiries into "what was Malick on?” while he imagined all of this.

The final coda brings all three segments of the film together, well sort of. We witness the earth’s demise and then a bevy of lost souls (including the O’Brien family) wandering along a beach to an endless echo of “amen” from “Berlioz: 10. Agnus Dei [Requiem, Op. 5 (Grande Messe des Morts)]” as conducted by Sir Colin Davis and performed by Wandsworth School Boys Choir, London Symphony Chorus and London Symphony Orchestra.

Malick has historically kept his affinity for metaphorical imagery somewhat in check, but his cerebral tendencies run rampantly wild within The Tree of Life. I have absolutely no complaints with the deliberately obtuse nature of Malick’s choices in imagery; in fact, it is cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s (who earned a Best Cinematography Oscar nomination for Malick’s The New World) unabashed eye candy that is the strongest element of The Tree of Life. Lubezki adroitly conveys Malick’s transcendentally dreamy vision. Several scenes play out with no spoken dialogue -- just sporadic lines of voiceover and a heavy dose of classical music (Bach, Holst, Goreckí, Mahler), so the images are left shouldering the burden of meaning. For that reason alone, The Tree of Life will certainly be one of my favorite visual films of 2011.

Three subjects that are readily discussed in Malick’s other films -- Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and The New World -- are also quite prominent in The Tree of Life: humankind’s constant struggle with nature; the inherent violence found within all humans; and the tug-of-war of gender roles. Yet in The Tree of Life Malick wraps these three subjects into a greater discussion on the battle between the way of nature (the selfish pursuit of earthly ambitions) and the way of grace (living a life of love and compassion for all).

Malick truly hits his stride when focusing on the subconscious conflict that occurs during childhood -- when young personalities are being shaped into their adult equivalent -- between the forces of good and evil. Children are prone to make poor choices during childhood, and sometimes those choices (like several of Jack’s) continue to haunt one’s memories long into adulthood. The adult Jack would never purposefully shoot his brother’s finger with a BB gun or tie a frog to a rocket, yet the adult Jack still feels guilty for the poor choices he made as a child. Like his father, Jack dishonored nature and never noticed “the glory”; he chose a selfish and violent path, rather than following his mother’s path of love.

An over-reliance on voiceovers has always been Malick’s one weakness and The Tree of Life seems to rely even more heavily upon voiceovers than his other four films. Understandably, Malick utilizes whispery and ethereal voiceovers to place the audience inside Jack’s mind as he regurgitates his childhood memories and waxes existentially (Malick is a disciple of Martin Heidegger), but Malick is simultaneously synopsizing the Book of Job for us, and this is enough to clear the seats of any atheists in the audience. There will certainly be accusations that The Tree of Life is a shameless proselytising of Judeo-Christian doctrine, but I interpret The Tree of Life as being quite the opposite. 

The title of the film references a non-denominational symbol that spans the breadth of religion, science, philosophy and mythology. Jack (like Malick) was raised as a Christian, so it only makes sense that Jack (and Malick) would turn to the Old Testament when attempting to come to terms with his brother’s death; Job -- a character who directly challenges God -- is chosen to convey Jack’s (and Malick’s) theological quandary. Jack (and Malick) doubts the existence of God, but at the same time he chooses to address God directly, challenging him (as Job did) to answer his accusations and questions. 

The Tree of Life reportedly received a conflicting chorus of boos and applause after its world premiere at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Nonetheless, Malick’s film received the Palme d'Or, but the infamously reclusive director was nowhere to be found.

FILM REVIEW: HANGOVER II

Stu (Ed Helm) in Hangover II.

Monkey pee, monkey poo

By Don Simpson

The Hangover is the highest-grossing R-rated comedy to date, and for good reason. It was a cleverly conceived, somewhat novel story with a lot of unexpected twists. In some ways it makes perfect sense that The Hangover Part II would be almost identical to The Hangover in terms of narrative structure and pacing. Heck, even some of the same gags are recycled and the gags that are not exactly the same are similar enough: instead of finding a baby in their hotel room, the guys find a chain-smoking monkey; instead of waking up with a missing tooth, Stu (Ed Helms) wakes up with a Mike Tyson-esque facial tattoo; instead of bursting into song at a piano to sum up their horrible situation, Stu bursts into song with an acoustic guitar; and instead of having sex with a hooker, Stu has sex with...well...a more endowed hooker.

In other words, it is absolutely pointless to synopsize Part II. Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, and Justin Bartha reprise their roles -- with a few additional minor characters added to the mix, including Paul Giamatti, Jamie Chung, and Mason Lee. If you have seen The Hangover you will be able to predict exactly what happens (and when it happens) in Part II, and if you have not seen The Hangover, go rent it instead of wasting your money on Part II.

Other than the obvious location change -- The Hangover takes place in Las Vegas, Part II in Bangkok -- the most significant difference between the two films is the Part II’s propensity for pushing the envelope way too far. Where The Hangover is ridiculous and unrealistic, Part II is incomprehensibly exaggerated and hyper-unrealistic. As it turns out, Part II has inexplicably succumbed to becoming a lowest common denominator gross-out fest, relying much too heavily upon stupid penis jokes and demeaning Thaistereotypes. Oh, why bother. Let’s just say that Part II is for all of you who think a monkey licking and chewing on penises is funny.

FILM REVIEW: LOUDER THAN BOMBS

Nova Venerable in Louder than Bombs.

Words and images

By Don Simpson

Call me naïve, but I knew nothing of the existence of poetry slams until 2004, thanks in no small part to a co-worker at the time -- the now 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry award winner, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, who appears in Louder Than a Bomb as an emcee. As it turns out, the first poetry slam dates back to November 1984, when Marc Smith organized a poetry slam event at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago. Poetry slams have since spread like wildfire around the world, resurrecting the art of poetry from its ashes and fostering a new generation of poets.

Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel’s (the late film reviewer Gene Siskel's nephew) documentary Louder Than a Bomb is about the 2008 Chicago-area poetry slam competition of the same name. Louder Than a Bomb is the nation's largest poetry slam competition with teams and soloists from approximately 60 high schools competing. Jacobs and Sickel opt to hone in on four teams: Steinmetz, Oak Park/River Forest High School, Whitney Young Magnet High School and Northside College Prep. Steinmetz is a troubled inner city school that won first place in their first ever foray into the world of slam poetry at the 2007 Bomb, so the self-proclaimed “Steinmenauts” (Lamar Jordan, Kevin Harris, Jésus Lark, Charles Smith and She'Kira McKnight) are an obvious choice for Jacobs and Sickel to follow in 2008. The other three teams are presumably chosen because of their gifted solo talents: Nova Venerable (Oak Park/River Forest High School), Nate Marshall (Whitney Young Magnet High School) and Adam Gottlieb (Northside College Prep).

Almost half of this 100-minute documentary takes place during the 2008 Louder Than a Bomb competition. The crowded environment seems to handcuff Jacobs and Siskel’s ability to capture the content in any kind of aesthetically pleasing manner, but the amazing performances that they capture on tape is sure to distract most audiences from the shoddy cinematography. Before we arrive at the Louder Than a Bomb competition, however, we are told the riveting back stories of the Steinmenauts, Venerable, Marshall and Gottlieb -- a clever, yet often used, directorial tactic to get the audience to be more emotionally invested into the outcome of the competition.

The Louder Than a Bomb competition stresses that “the point is not the points, it’s the poetry”while Louder Than a Bomb, the documentary, serves as a means of questioning the legitimacy of judging creativity and talent. Will the most deserving team and soloist win? Better yet, how do you define “most deserving”?

Louder Than A Bomb also showcases the importance of broadening the social circles of adolescents, while also nurturing their creative impulses and intellectual exploration. Poetry may not provide these kids with the financial support that they will need to survive in the big bad world, but it does appear to provide them with everything else they need – especially companionship, love and happiness.

Louder Than A Bomb bears an uncanny resemblance to Spellbound, Wordplay, and even Hoop Dreams – but I suspect Jacobs and Siskel will be just fine being lumped in with that family. The “competition” -- whether it be athletic, intellectual or creative -- as a sub-genre of documentary cinema seems to be a favorite of audiences nowadays, and I suspect this is because of the tension and emotional drama that is inherent within the subject matter. Of course the key to this form of documentary filmmaking is the initial choice of who the director decides to follow during the course of the competition. I do not know how they came upon their subjects, but Jacobs and Siskel made a remarkably sound decision when they chose to follow the Steinmenauts, Venerable, Marshall and Gottlieb.

FILM REVIEW: TOPP TWINS

Jools and Lynda Topp of Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls.

Double whammy

By Don Simpson

I was sorry to have missed the 2010 Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival screening of The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls but it is damn nice to know that someone (Argot Pictures) has the proverbial balls to release Leanne Pooley's documentary about the infamous (at least in their homeland of New Zealand) lesbian identical twins who mix character comedy sketches with folk/country songs. According to Lynda Topp, "We're not comedians; we are singers who are funny." 

Who would have ever dreamed that the politically-charged performances by Jools and Lynda Topp would become so darn successful? For nearly three decades, this "anarchist variety act" has been defying accepted logic about mainstream entertainment. The Topp sisters boast an audience that spans social and economic classes: rural farmers and city folk, queers and straights, seniors and anarchistic youth. Taking on political topics such as nuclear power, the environment, apartheid, women’s' issues, and queer rights, the Topps' performances never come across as mean spirited or patronizing. The Topps are not on stage to ruffle feathers or make enemies, their philosophy is simple: "Getting people to laugh is the most political thing you can do." 

What is most surprising is their inherent talent as songwriters -- they were inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame in September 2008. The Topps juggle their knack for humor and comedic timing with poignant and subversive lyrics, and the entire package is wrapped nicely in the flawless harmonies of what sounds like a stereo voice. Jools and Lynda work together as a pair -- they also live together with their respective partners under one roof -- and their knack for reading each other's minds is readily apparent (both while performing and during interviews). In many ways, their uncanny ability to determine what the other twin is going to do or say is what really gives them an edge over other musicians. 

It is the twins themselves who dominate the screen time of Pooley's documentary (and rightly so). Pooley reveals an ample array of archival footage of the Topps at various stages in their lives -- from their childhood days on their family's dairy farm in rural New Zealand to early busking performances to various concert performances. We witness the many comedic personas adopted by the Topps -- Belle and Belle, Ken and Ken, Camp Mother and Camp Leader, Raylene and Brenda, Prue and Dilly -- both on stage and in interview segments (during the interviews, Pooley cleverly morphs the characters back into Jools and Lynda). Pooley also interviews the Topps' contemporaries, friends, fans, and their parents (who have supported their two daughters' homosexuality). 

The Topp twins are an incredibly unique part of New Zealand's popular culture, and Pooley's documentary does an excellent job of conveying why. Hopefully as The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls tours the world, Jools and Lynda will wrangle up an even more diverse audience. Their messages clearly need to be heard around the world, and hopefully the power of this documentary will help spread their gospel.