4.21.08: Minneapolis-St.Paul International Film Festival

I see a lot of movies. New releases in the theaters, old stuff on DVD, curated programs at such places as the Walker, DVR detritus from the Sundance Channel and IFC. Every April, when the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival unleashes a hundred-some films that demand attention, I can’t help but wonder when my vitamin D levels will bottom out. 

The two-week festival of global film, itself perennially in danger of flat-lining, kicked off over the weekend with about sixty titles, most of them playing at festival hub St. Anthony Main Theaters. Lobby bottlenecks and rump-busting seats aside, the movies I saw were well worth the contained chaos. I spotted festival-goers carrying seat cushions and unsanctioned theater snacks to weather their brutal screening schedules, and more than a few looking permanently disoriented. All considering, I think I held up pretty well.

The first screening for me was Traveling With Pets , a hypnotic little movie from Russia that had the arc of a good short story and some of the most beautiful cinematography I’ve seen all year. Russian stage actress Kseniya Kutepova (a Julianne Moore doppelgänger in a headscarf) plays a rural woman whose whole world opens up when the foul man she was sold to when she was sixteen drops dead. Newly liberated, she buys a flat-screen TV, punches up her wardrobe, and makes a not-so-elegiac pyre of the deceased’s belongings.

When the neighboring town’s resident cad tries to convince her he’s domesticated enough to share her bed, she tells him she doesn’t want another man but would appreciate a baby. Instead, a stray dog and a baby goat become her companions in the crumbling railroad-side hut she slowly begins to make her own. Gorgeous, lilting camerawork and a restrained tone that is by turns comic, sad, and slightly magical make for a quiet story of self-discovery that refuses to shortchange its dynamic, searching heroine with easy emotional payoffs. Put this film at the top of your Netflix queue if by some miracle it finds a U.S. distributor.

Restraint is also a strength of And Along Came Tourists , a German import that follows a young Berliner assigned to a year of civil service at Auschwitz, where he’s charged with caring for a concentration camp survivor who never left the camp. The old man has become the town’s go-to living history, delivering testimonials to indifferent school kids and the German execs that recently bought the town’s chemical plant. He certainly doesn’t want a young city kid, especially a German, intruding in his life—and the kid, who had hoped for a placement in Amsterdam, doesn’t particularly want to be there either.

All the elements fall into place for some fairly conventional (and, frankly, American-style) turns of plot. Our protagonist finds love with a young translator who grew up in the town and can’t wait to get out…by the third act. The boy and the old curmudgeon call a truce brokered over petty domestic arguments. And the kid intervenes when he learns the Auschwitz museum wants to push the old man out of his job repairing the suitcases that were taken from Jews.

There’s not a lot of dimension to the characters, but director Robert Thalheim plays the drama in a low key and has a capable cast that allows him to respectfully tackle the uneasy marriage of tourism, restitution, and resentment that permeates modern-day Auschwitz without overplaying his cards. His film is interested in what it means to live with and honor history, but it just as clearly wants us to know that it’s important not to let that history define us. This seems like a fairly noncommercial premise even in today’s indies-everywhere market, so kudos to the programmers for plucking it out of the festival circuit ether.

Talk about box office poison, the grim, low-budget Chinese film Little Moth  (playing again at 5:20 p.m. on April 29 at St. Anthony Main) turned out to be my Saturday night date with dystopia. A no-good husband and wife buy an eleven-year-old girl so she can beg for them on the streets. The little girl can’t walk, but the man won’t let his wife spend money on medicine that could treat her paralysis.

Soon, another child trafficker enters the picture, unhappy that the couple is working the same block where his one-armed boy also begs. One night, the man drinks too much and the boy escapes with the little girl on his back. The wife and shady-man-number-two take off after them, and the story only gets bleaker.

With no musical score to cue our disgust; a cast of amateur actors; and jittery, handheld camerawork, the film has a nonjudgmental, documentary-style aesthetic that isn’t quite so much detached as it is buffering. Imagine what Steven Spielberg would have done with the same story and one-hundred-times the budget. It’s not a pleasant thought.

The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival continues through May 3 with films, parties, and special events.

4.15.08: Standard Operating Procedure and Errol Morris at the Walker Art Center

To most eyes, the Abu Ghraib photos offer irrefutable documentation of an inhumane horror show that needs no further contextualizing. The photos say it all. Or do they?

Errol Morris’s arresting new documentary, Standard Operating Procedure , digs into the content and context of the most infamous of those photos and finds that for all the abuses perpetrated at the Iraq prison, it was photography that was ultimately deemed the crime.

In the Bush administration’s preferred narrative, Lynndie England and her fellow “bad apples” were rogue military police whose hundreds of digital photos offered ample evidence of aberrant but isolated behavior. We know now that the soldiers of the 372nd MP Company were following orders from military intelligence whose own directives to “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib were coming straight from the office of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

While the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side   follows the administrative trail sanctioning torture, Standard Operating Procedure investigates the photos that exposed them to the world. Who took the photos, when, why, and what was just outside the frame? Morris’s film argues that the photos themselves can’t tell us anything for certain about Abu Ghraib because, like every photo, they were stripped of context the moment they were taken. We can tap the debatable memories of those who were there at the time, but we can’t rely on those isolated still images to come anywhere close to telling us the whole truth.

Of the film’s many remarkably intimate interviews (including a surprisingly frank one with England herself), Sabrina Harman’s stands out. The smiley young specialist is a regular, eerie presence in several Abu Ghraib photos, always offering a cheery thumbs up to accompany the grisly scenes being staged for the camera. In one shot, she strikes a pose next to the bloody corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi, a prisoner who was beaten to death by a CIA interrogator and then thrown onto ice on the shower room floor before his body could be snuck out of the cellblock.

In the film we learn that Harman took twenty tightly cropped, gruesome shots of al-Jamadi’s corpse—pictures so detailed they look like they could be the work of a forensic pathologist. Was she amassing documentation so she could report the murder, or was she collecting sick trophies to take back home? Morris excerpts letters Harman wrote to her partner in the States that clearly indicate the former. There’s plenty of rationalization and self-preservation in them, but they’re hardly the words of a monster.

Morris talks to four of the other seven implicated MPs (he wasn’t allowed access to the two in prison, Charles Graner or Ivan Frederick) and to indignant former brigadier general Janis Karpinski; contract interrogator Tim Dugan; and Brent Pack, the special agent charged with analyzing the photos for the military. Morris’s 116-minute film is distilled from 200 hours of interviews, enough research to produce a companion book  with New Yorker contributor Philip Gourevitch that will be published in May and also fuel a series of thoughtful essays on his New York Times blog.

The film never feels overwhelming because, like the best of Morris’s documentaries, it’s a piece of cinematic detective work that uses a whole arsenal of feature filmmaking tools—3D graphics, computer animation, elaborately constructed sets built on sound stages, ghostly re-enactments, and, of course, the director’s own specially designed Interrotron camera—to reconstruct events for which there are often multiple, competing narratives. Morris’s weirdly seductive style of documentary filmmaking is sober Frontline journalism that’s been channeled through the lens of David Fincher. The miracle is that a man as gifted as he is so regularly makes movies about subjects that matter.

If you were lucky enough to attend the advanced screening of Standard Operating Procedure Tuesday night at the Walker (Sony Pictures Classics limited it to a small group), you also got the rare treat of hearing a chatty Morris and his longtime set photographer, Nubar Alexanian, talk about the movie, photography, and why Bush should be impeached. I’d give you a recap, but as Morris reminds us, my re-enactment would hardly be adequate.

Standard Operating Procedure opens May 23 at the Lagoon Cinema .

4.12.08: Milos Forman at the Walker Art Center

Milos Forman will forever be the guy who makes movies about eccentrics and outsiders, the Czech émigré who loves American costume dramas, the filmmaker who gave Courtney Love her detox wakeup call. He has a slew of awards (including two Best Picture and Best Director Oscars) and is a magnet for A-list actors, yet he isn’t a name brand in this country like Scorsese or Coppola. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have a visual aesthetic that screams, nor a well-funded enough publicist. Maybe it’s because his films aren’t as easily categorized. 

The Walker Art Center is giving Forman his long overdue props this month with a retrospective that spans his remarkable artistic evolution. It follows him from the pitch-perfect, low-budget, slice-of-life comedies he shot in Communist Czechoslovakia at the crest of the Czech New Wave to his eclectic ensemble of American adaptations and biographies that include Hair, Ragtime, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, and The People vs. Larry Flynt.

Screenings of Forman’s films will continue at the Walker through April 22, but last night the seventy-six-year-old director was in-house for a freewheeling Regis Dialogue with LA Weekly film critic Scott Foundas that focused largely on the director’s early work. If Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr (the Walker’s last Regis Dialogue subject) was interviewee as enemy combatant (repeatedly scolding critic Howard Feinstein, grabbing his notes and, at one point, exiting for a smoke break from which it wasn’t so certain he’d return), Forman was the well-mannered, gregarious houseguest.

Of course, Forman is as practiced in the art of the non-interview interview as any showbiz lifer, but he’s also a born raconteur whose colorful, peripatetic biography includes thirty-six years living under the Nazis and the Communists, followed by another forty in what is arguably the equally Kafkaesque world of Hollywood. He has plenty of stories to tell, and the enthusiasm and good humor to tell them well after all these years.

Orphaned by the age of ten after losing both parents to the Holocaust, Forman recalled shuttling between relatives before a short stint at a boarding school for war orphans. The school was so remarkably well funded, it became the school of choice for the progeny of Czechoslovakia’s new Communist Party poobahs and its old capitalist elite. “The school became the envy of kids who weren’t even orphans,” Forman joked in one of the evening’s many great one-liners.

After studying screenwriting at the Prague Film Academy, Forman directed (and co-wrote) his first features, Black Peter and Loves of a Blonde (both, blessedly, available on DVD). Curiously, the films would find much of their humor in familial and generational dynamics, something Forman admits he could only observe as an outsider looking in. “People were nice to me because I was the poor orphan. With their own children, they didn’t feel they needed to be so nice.’”

Those first films were shot mostly with non-actors to whom Forman would talk through [but not give] the script and encourage to add their own words if they forgot their lines. Though these are some of the funniest of Forman’s films, there’s an endearing, sweet, unmistakably melancholic edge to them as well. “The reaction of all of us making films [in Czechoslovakia] in the sixties was not to [the movies of] our idols but to the stupidity and superficiality of social realism. I wanted to show real people doing real things, experiencing real emotions.”

As Forman and his New Wave contemporaries attracted attention in the West, the hardliners at home took note. “Suddenly, we were hard to ignore. These were the only movies that brought hard currency to the country.” 

Though hardly the work of a subversive, Forman’s third feature, The Firemen’s Ball, attracted a little too much attention. It was deemed mocking of the common man and banned in Czechoslovakia for twenty years. Forman began courting Hollywood and making plans to live in the States permanently, an idea that seemed even wiser after the Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968.

His first U.S. film, Taking Off, would share the low-fi satire of his Czech work, this time with a very American subject—middle class parents searching for their daughter in the hippie jungle of New York’s East Village. From hereafter he’d find a new voice. “At the time, I thought it was very cool if a film didn’t have any ending, if it just stopped,” he said. “That’s not very well accepted in America.”

Remarkably, he would follow four years later with an adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a novel even a friend deemed too “Americana” for Forman. “I told him, ‘For you it’s fiction; for me it’s my life. The Communist Party was my [Nurse Ratched].”

The film would pick up five Oscars and establish Forman’s Hollywood credentials, but it never had the support of author Ken Kesey, who campaigned hard to commandeer the project despite the objections of the producers. “Always, I’m on the side of creative people versus money people; I guess it’s self-preservation,” Forman said. “But I have to say in this case that Ken Kesey went a little askew. The screenplay he wrote was not a screenplay but another version of the book. He also insisted he play McMurphy and that he direct the film.”    

Over the next thirty-three years, Forman would make only seven films, but for each, he expresses great affection for the serendipity that brought them into his life. During one early visit to New York, he saw the first public preview of Hair; ten years later he would finally get the rights (and the financing) to make it a movie. Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, which he saw on a London stage in 1980, would become his ticket back to Prague after ten years in exile and also his return ticket to the Oscars. Most recently, there’s Goya’s Ghosts, a historical melodrama whose backdrop is the Spanish Inquisition and the Napoleonic Wars. It was written a year before the Iraq War, but Forman sees some eerie parallels.

There was an eight-year gap between Goya’s Ghosts and the release of Forman’s previous film, the Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon. One gets the sense that Forman may take another eight for the next one.

“Every film is two years of your life and when you get older you start thinking harder about what you want to spend two years on.” Besides, he needs time to recover after a film is in the can. “It’s like my love just left me, he said. “Sometimes you’re not ready emotionally to start a new relationship.”

3.28.08: Ali Selim and Will Weaver at the Minneapolis Central Library

Plenty of authors have felt burned by abysmal film adaptations of their books. Others have eked out a nice living selling stories to Hollywood and never expressed much guilt about all the dreadful movies that have resulted (that’s you, John Grisham).

Then there’s filmmaker Ali Selim and novelist Will Weaver whose collaboration (or lack thereof) on the 2006 indie hit Sweet Land is maybe a truer reflection of how such a partnership can work when the material and talents are well-matched. The two Minnesotans reunited last night for a jokey, fast-paced Talk of the Stacks discussion at the Minneapolis Central Library that was moderated by Cristina Córdova of rakemag.com and focused on the sometimes-indelicate art of film adaptation.

When Selim first read Weaver’s short story, “A Gravestone Made of Wheat,” in 1990, he knew immediately he wanted to make it into a movie. “I got to the end of the story and I cried.” At the time, Selim was a successful director of TV commercials (antacids were his specialty). KTCA owned the rights to Weaver’s story, so Selim waited it out two years until the one-hour film they had planned fell apart. The rights now his, he began collaborating with Weaver in what turned out to be an impractical attempt at co-screenwriting. “We were so nice to each other, we weren’t really making any progress,” Weaver said. “A film, like a novel, has to have a singular voice.”

Even as Selim took over sole screenwriting responsibilities, he regularly sent Weaver revisions until the author wrote him a polite cease-and-desist note telling him it wasn’t necessary. Weaver sensed that Selim’s screenplay was succeeding for all the reasons a 1989 made-for-TV movie of his novel Red Earth, White Earth had failed. Of that early experience with film adaptation, Weaver remarked, “It wasn’t pretty, that sort of contraction of the story—or dehydration, as I have come to call it.”

Sweetland, on the other hand, was an expansion, a twenty-two page story told in 110 minutes of film so deliberately paced that Weaver, upon seeing a rough cut of the movie, worried no one would want to sit through it. Selim’s screenplay retained the central premise of the short story (a 1920s Minnesota farmer and his mail-order bride-to-be are shunned when it’s discovered she’s German) but he bookended his elegiac romance with flashbacks to and from the 1960s to the present day. It was a choice Selim knew wouldn’t be easy for audiences, but it felt right creatively. “It’s the bumpiest part of the film,” Selim admitted, “but if you can get through it, it pays off in the end.”

Whereas Weaver wrote his story from the groom’s perspective, Selim focused on the woman. He also surrounded his couple with a whole community of characters and conflicts: a best friend who is about to lose his farm, a nasty town banker, a stern Lutheran minister. And he sloooooowed down time so his camera could linger on Hopperish compositions of fields and farmhouses. The sense of life unfolding at a natural pace, something that proves so elusive in adaptations of plot-driven novels, was one of Sweet Land’s many secret weapons.

Another, no doubt, was its location shoot in Montevideo, where a lean $1 million budget and twenty-four-day shooting schedule seemed marked by serendipity. Though he was a first-time feature director, Selim tapped friendships with actors Dan Futterman, Gil Bellows, and Alan Cumming to assemble a solid cast that included Ned Beatty, John Heard, Elizabeth Reaser, Tim Guinee, and Alex Kingston.

A very small group of “Will Weaver loyalists,” as Weaver calls them, criticized the film for the liberties it took with his story, but the champions outnumbered them, especially those in rural communities who felt “authenticated by this movie.” For his part, he said, he long ago made peace with Selim’s changes.

Selim, who just finished an adaptation of Pete Hautman’s, is hoping his next project is a script based on the life of Gene Roberts, an undercover cop who infiltrated the Black Panthers. Writing an adaptation is more interesting than writing an original screenplay, he said, even if it means always being judged by how closely your work adheres to the original. “People say that all the time. ‘I liked the book better. I liked the movie better.’ It’s like comparing apples and oranges, or apples and Fords. No, you don’t like the book better; you like books better. You don’t like the movie better; you like movies better.”

03.07.08: Older Than America screening at the Walker

Call me grumpy, but I think it’s time we stop pretending that we’re adventurous moviegoers. Ang Lee does not qualify as adventurous. Neither does Guillermo del Toro. Almodóvar, genius that he is, isn’t all that outside the mainstream.

For all the awards-season blather about the diversity in the multiplexes and at the Academy Awards this year, I see very little evidence to back it up. These days, if a movie is set in another country, in another language, and isn’t part of some studio’s Oscar campaign, it has a week-long shelf life….in a so-called art-house theater…after Juno has finished its three-month run.

All the more reason to get thee to the Walker Art Center for its indispensable Women With Vision series, a global hotpot of movies by and about people who are virtually invisible outside the film festival circuit. The three-week series opened last night with the premiere of Older Than America, a Minnesota-set thriller that takes on the physical and mental havoc inflicted on generations of Native Americans forced to attend federally funded Christian boarding schools. The stated mission of these schools, the last of which closed in 1975, was chillingly unambiguous: Kill the Indian, Save the Man.

Shot in the Cloquet area two years ago and moving on to a big premiere at South by Southwest  on Monday, Older Than America explores the ripple effects of cultural genocide on the lives of a small group of family and friends on the Fond du Lac Reservation in northeastern Minnesota. Central to its crowded story is the character of Rain, a teacher who has terrifying visions we quickly realize are tied to the trauma her mother experienced in the town’s since-shuttered boarding school. Rain’s mother was institutionalized in the local psychiatric hospital by a Catholic priest (Guthrie vet Steve Yoakum) who has a creepy sort of hold over Rain’s aunt and sinister plans for Rain as well.

First-time director Georgina Lightning (also the film’s co-writer and star) introduced the screening last night along with actress Tantoo Cardinal and Minneapolis’s own mini-mogul, producer Christine Walker. A Cree from Hobbema, Alberta, Canada who moved to LA to become an actress, Lightning has been nurturing the project in one form or another for years, frustrated at how little has been told about the boarding schools and how far-reaching its effects have been in the Native community where suicide, alcoholism, and abuse rates are off the charts.

The film does not yet have a theatrical distributor, has a mostly Native American cast (Wes Studi, Adam Beach, Dennis Banks, Tantoo Cardinal) and was financed largely by a California casino tribe. It was, Lightning is proud to point out, a sovereign production—not a product of Hollywood money or Hollywood thinking. “I never had anyone looking over my shoulder or questioning my choices,” she said during the post-show Q&A. “This story could never have been told this way if it hadn’t been told by a Native American filmmaker and if it hadn’t been made with Native American money.”

There’s a lot to admire about Lightning’s decision to call her own shots. Yet, curiously, by choosing to make a mystery story out of what is otherwise a thorny tangle of relationships and compromises born of a devastating legacy, she’s turned a powerful piece of history into a Hollywood genre film—one that calls for more plot, less character, no nuance. Her film suffers greatly for it. It feels rushed and the dialogs stilted.

Here’s the thing though: You’d be a fool if you underestimated the value of a film (and the power it can have) when it represents people and stories normally neglected by commercial filmmakers. If you’re used to being forgotten by Hollywood, such a film can be an oasis. Take a look at what’s playing at the Walker’s Women With Vision series these next few weeks. It’s time for something new.

Women With Vision continues at the Walker through March 29 with feature-length films and shorts from around the world and our own back yard.

2.21.08: Tuscaloosa script reading at the Guthrie

Glasgow Phillip’s Tuscaloosa is the kind of book that eats at you like a bad dream. Chockablock with sex, racial tension, and festering family secrets, the slim but steamy Southern coming-of-age page-turner is easy to mock, but also awfully hard to shake off.

Published in 1994 to favorable reviews, but a small audience, it embraces the conventions of the Southern novel but also laughs at them. You can dismiss it as the precocious literary debut of a twenty-four-year-old Bay Area–raised Brown grad (who himself calls the book “little more than accomplished Southern voice fan fiction”) because, well, it kind of is. But just try forgetting it. You can’t.

In our skip-the-book-give-me-the-DVD age, though, there’s a more pressing debate at hand: What kind of movie would it make? My guess is a pretty damn good one. And it seems an especially good match for Phil Harder, the talented Minneapolis–based music video and commercial director who has adapted Tuscaloosa for the screen and intends to make it his first full-length feature film.

The film’s financing and cast are still coming together, but last night Harder and a group of actors assembled at the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio for an animated reading of the script—the latest installment in The Screenwriters’ Workshop’s always-enjoyable ScriptNight series. Dave Salmela and band performed a suitably melancholic opening number as the actors, scripts in-hand, took to the spare stage lined with chairs.

Among the familiar faces recruited for the reading: Prairie Home Companion vets Tim Russell and Sue Scott; local theater fixtures Namir Smallwood and Marvette Knight; and Nicole Vicius, an LA-based actress who has had small parts in Half Nelson and Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, and who made a very good case last night why she should be cast in the film. Reading the lead role of Billy Williams was TC-to-New-York transplant (and Josh Hartnett buddy) Sam Rosen, soon to be seen in two local films—the Wyatt McDill-directed Four Boxes with Justin Kirk and Nobody, set to shoot soon with Rob Perez at the helm.

Rosen’s Billy is a rudderless pothead and recent college grad who tends the grounds at the mental institution his father runs in 1972 Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and is haunted by his mother’s sudden disappearance with her female lover (the family’s black maid) when he was three years old. The script shuttles wildly between speculations about the women’s last days before they died in a mysterious fire, Billy’s growing love affair with a troubled young hospital patient, and also his awkward friendship with the son of his mother’s paramour.

Tuscaloosa the book clocks in at a scrawny 191 pages, its breathless pace fitting for a story whose narrator is hurtling headlong into a big ol’ mess disguised as liberation. The flip side, of course, is that there’s not a lot of room for exposition. When the biblical allusions and Southern stew of taboos start stacking up, you want to beg Phillips to let you up for air.

Oddly, all this bodes well for Tuscaloosa the film. Whereas most movies condense and compress the hell out of a book, leaving much of the subtlety and character motivation on the cutting-room floor, I think there’s a real opportunity to take Phillips’ poetic potboiler and give it some room to breathe. The work-in-progress script read last night still seems like a whirlwind (I suspect it will get a significant overhaul before it ever sees the screen), but the bones are there.

As a director-for-hire to the likes of Hilary Duff, Liz Phair, Prince, and the Foo Fighters, Harder has amassed a huge portfolio of music videos that moves easily between real and dream worlds. His Michel Gondry-ish fondness for low-tech-looking visual effects and his interest in regional texture would seem to be just the imaginative eye needed to translate Tuscaloosa’s comic-tragic dreaminess to the screen. Also working in the film’s favor? Its Minneapolis–based producer, Christine Walker (Factotum, American Splendor), who has a track record of working magic on a shoestring.

Could Tuscaloosa be that rare adaptation that improves upon the original? Possibly. In Phillips’ memoir which humorously chronicles his failed attempt to write a follow-up to Tuscaloosa, he recalls being interviewed by novelist Jonathan Franzen, who was trolling Stanford University asking the question, Do books really matter anymore?

At the time, Phillips was scratching his eyes out trying and failing to write a second novel and becoming more depressed by the day. Needless to say, he had some gloomy conclusions for Franzen: Books only matter if they’re on TV or made into movies. He was onto something. For Tuscaloosa, film is home.

1.26.08: The Battleship Potemkin at Orchestra Hall

It’s lonely being an old-school cinephile in a digital, downloadable world. NetFlix, movies-on-demand, and pimped-out home-theater systems have turned a night at the movies into a housebound, couch-bound activity. Ever wonder why multiplexes are disproportionately filled with the kinds of movies teenage boys love? Well, for starters, they’re a demographic that still makes a regular habit of seeing movies in a movie theater. 

I happen to think that tasteless popcorn, etiquette-challenged audiences, and dingy theaters are a small price to pay for the incomparable experience of watching a movie with a room full of strangers. But I understand why I’m increasingly alone in that thinking.

As new distribution models open up and technology evolves, it’s only going to become more tempting to stay at home. So if the moviegoing habit is going to be resuscitated, then maybe we need to make going to the movies more than simply, well, going to the movies. Program the films, curate them, bring DVD-style extras to life. The folks over at Orchestra Hall have the right idea.

The Minnesota Orchestra’s month-long Sounds of Cinema series wrapped up last night with a spectacular orchestra-accompanied screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s silent film classic The Battleship Potemkin  led by Finnish conductor (and Osmo pupil) Esa Heikkilä. In the lobby before the show, the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphony sold popcorn and Junior Mints, and a pianist played to a loop of Laurel and Hardy and Felix the Cat shorts. Film music historian Bruce Crawford even moderated pre- and post-show discussions. Try replicating that in your den.

The Battleship Potemkin is a fitting cinematic spectacle for such red-carpet treatment. A cinema-veritae-style retelling of the deadliest naval mutiny in Russian history, it’s a film of epic size and serious cinephile pedigree—a mastery of a medium that was still in its infancy when the twenty-seven-year-old Eisenstein shot the film on location in Russia in 1925.

The story unfolds in five acts, starting with the Russian sailors’ refusal to eat a maggot-infested borscht and ending with a tense standoff with other ships in the Russian Black Sea fleet that have been sent to annihilate the mutinous crew. For his fiery, Bolshevik rallying cry, Eisenstein assembled a mix of professional and non-rofessional actors (the boilerman from the hotel where the crew stayed, a gardener from a nearby orchard), but he sublimated individual characters to the larger panorama. There is no single, easily distinguished hero or villain of Potemkin, or really any fully developed character, but rather a collection of sturdy, distinct (often fleeting) faces representing what Eisenstein called the “mass protagonist.”

The film is often dissected by scholars enraptured by Eisenstein’s pioneering use of montage, a style of editing in which successive, sometimes disparate, images are rapidly cut so as to produce cool juxtapositions and a collective visual punch.

The showpiece for Eisenstein’s montage skills is the famously frenetic Odessa Steps sequence, a historically inspired (read: highly embellished) account of the violent Tsarist crackdown on the port town residents of Odessa who rallied around the mutineers. In a quick succession of images, panicked crowds run for their lives down the long flight of steps to the harbor. A mother clutching her dying child asks for mercy from the approaching armed soldiers. An unmanned baby carriage is inadvertently set in motion down the flight of steps. (DePalma would lift this sixty-two years later for The Untouchables). Captured using a camera positioned on a trolley and another strapped to the waist of an acrobat, it’s easily one of the most exciting (and mimicked) scenes of early cinema.

As with so many film classics, The Battleship Potemkin has an incredible, intrigue-filled back story—missing and lost prints, sledgehammer edits by Soviet and German censors, bans in several countries, danger on the set (they filmed on a retired battleship that housed mines), and a Russian premiere that almost didn’t happen (Eisenstein’s editing assistant delivered the freshly cut film reel by reel via motorcycle to the Bolshoi Theatre as it was playing).

And there’s the film’s music, the raison d’ëtre for last night’s showcase and the indispensable partner of any silent film. For Potemkin’s original Moscow premiere, the film was shown without music; for the Berlin unveiling a year later, Edmund Meisel wrote a score partly under Eisenstein’s direction. Excerpts from Dmitri Shostakovich’s symphonies no. 4, 5, 8, 10, and 11 were used for a 1976 restoration of the film and have been sampled over the years to accompany DVD versions. It’s from this distinguished repertoire that Heikkilä tapped last night’s performance.

Shostakovich’s music, at turns triumphant, menacing, mechanical, melancholic, even sweet, seems scored specifically for Eisenstein’s film, though the pieces were written during another time and for different purposes (One exception: the Eleventh Symphony, which he wrote to commemorate the 1905 Russian Revolution that the Potemkin mutiny kickstarted.)

Selecting and performing a musical score for a silent film is no small task. Eisenstein’s rhythmic editing and equally rhythmic use of the title cards that deliver dialog and exposition demand music that is impeccably timed to what’s on the screen. In an audience Q&A after the show, Heikkilä likened it to “conducting a singer who is deaf and always right.” His three kids back home in Finland, he said, must have been puzzled these last few weeks as they watched him conduct, sans orchestra, to many, many silent screenings of The Battleship Potemkin.

Watching Eisenstein’s haunted images race across the screen to Shostakovich’s equally haunted music, you’d be hard pressed to find a moviegoing experience that delivers quite the same visceral thrill as the one Heikkilä commandeered last night. How could you ever go back to your Lazy Boy and TV?

12.13.07: Diablo Cody and Juno at the Walker

As if there hasn’t been enough hype, let me add some more to the Juno maelstrom. For months, the pundits have blessed this movie as the hipster’s hit of the holiday-film season and anointed screenwriter Diablo Cody as estrogen’s answer to Judd Apatow. We’ve been told that the former-stripper-turned-City Pages-bloggist-now-bon-vivant is one of the “Fifty Smartest People in Hollywood” and that she’s a slam-dunk Oscar nominee.

Frankly, I’ve heard enough.

The self-perpetuating cycle of marketing hype that passes as entertainment journalism these days is great for stoking opening weekend box office, but it also raises obscenely high expectations for films that so rarely live up to them.

Here’s the shocking news, though: Juno is actually a really good movie. Smart. Funny. Memorable. The millennials may have found their John Hughes in Diablo Cody, and if saying that makes me yet another gasbag contributing to this media super-circus, so be it.

Juno opens today at the Uptown Theatre, but it also screened to a full house last night at the Walker Art Center where Cody herself was in attendance for a bawdy Q&A. But more on that later.

First, the movie. Our sixteen-year-old protagonist is Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) who experiments one night with best friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), becomes pregnant, and decides to give the baby up for adoption to a childless St. Cloud couple into whose well-manicured life she brings a disarming frankness. 

Adoptive-mom-to-be Vanessa, played by a pinched-looking Jennifer Garner, is a career woman who has had an adoption fall through before and doesn’t know how to react when Juno tells her she wants to “kick this old school” and have a closed adoption. Her husband, Mark (Jason Bateman), composes TV jingles and seems more interested in Juno than the baby she will bring into their lives. His self-satisfied smile and easy rapport with Juno send conflicting messages: Is he test-driving fatherhood or looking for a break from his marriage?

Juno’s supporting players don’t stray far from the coming-of-age template: the kooky, advice-giving gal pal; the dorky best friend who is really a soul mate; the un-hip parents who actually do get it. Nearly every character except, appropriately, bland Mark and Vanessa, speaks in an elaborate sort of quick-witted, pop-culture-infused shorthand that some twit will undoubtedly coin “Diabloesque.” Even Juno’s blue-collar dad, played with crackerjack timing by J.K. Simmons, delivers his share of choice bons mots. “Hey, big-puffy-coat-version-of-Junebug,” he greets his daughter late in her pregnancy. With the WGA strike now well into its sixth week, there’s great satisfaction in watching a film that is nothing if not a showcase for the weird and wonderful way Cody puts together words.

Juno is director Jason Reitman’s sophomore follow-up to Thank You For Smoking, and he once again has the good sense to cast the best actor as his lead, not necessarily the most marketable one. Ellen Page (heretofore most memorable for torturing poor Patrick Wilson in Hard Candy) brings a brainy individuality to Juno’s motormouth insecurity. She’s a less cynical version of Thora Birch’s geek-cool Enid in Ghost World. When Juno’s sass turns sweet in the film’s finely rendered third act, the tone shift works in large part because we can spot Page’s vulnerability from the start.

Cera is also wonderful as Juno’s maybe-boyfriend, a gangly kid who runs track and is trapped in that awkward space between childhood and adolescence. His endearing self-consciousness may not come from the Stella Adler playbook, but it’s arguably a more valuable commodity for a young screen actor these days.

Self-consciousness is decidedly not an issue for Diablo Cody, who bounded out onto the Walker stage for last night’s post-show Q&A, ditched the Eames chairs arranged for an interview with film curator Sheryl Mousley, and declared, “You can’t keep me in a chair.”

Fidgety and clearly in press-junket mode, Cody flirtatiously dismissed Mousley’s attempts to discuss the movie (“You want a kiss, don’t you?”) and segued directly to answering audience questions with a glibness that I suspect is going to wear a little thin by the time the Juno Oscar campaign really kicks into gear. (The Golden Globes delivered Cody a nomination yesterday, so consider the campaign well under way.)

Firing off suggestive one-liners (“I never had that fear—teen pregnancy. I double-bagged it”), name-dropping her Hollywood pals (Spielberg), and discussing what she considers off-limits (uh, nothing), Cody can come across as just another player in the Juno hype machine. We don’t expect (or want) someone so new to the game to be so practiced at it. And yet, with Cody that is what you get. Forget the hype, people. See the movie.

11.10.07: John Waters at Fitzgerald Theater

If there's one thing John Waters has mastered, it's how to capture his audience's attention, both in his films and in person. At the Fitzgerald last night, he immediately connected with the crowd and never let up during his hilarious one-man show and a Q&A with The Current Fakebook host Mary Lucia.

When Waters first appeared onstage, he received one of those incredibly long applauses that verges on being uncomfortably long. His opening line? "Thank you. You make me feel like Johnny Mathis."

Waters then launched into his one-man show, This Filthy World. It's an autobiographical standup routine that he proclaims is not a lecture; it's vaudeville. After asking us to think of him as our "filthy elder," Waters proceeded to crack open the door to his unparalleled mind. He told stories of where he comes from (Maryland), how he learned to make movies on his first camera (an 8 mm), and shared behind-the-scenes anecdotes that added up to a chronological history of his films.

Colorful storyteller that he is, Waters also clued us in to some of his social and political musings. For instance, in order to make reading cool, he says if a person goes home with someone, and they have no books in their apartment, the person should abstain from having sex with them. (Of course, his version was a bit raunchier.)

Another idea of his to better the world: Make a New Year's resolution to only perform oral sex on teachers. In turn, the teachers will be happier and be better able to keep students from being bored. That way, kids won't grow up to kill us.

A risqué declaration for a wholesome Midwestern venue, but can you really argue with his logic?

Waters did tailor his address for his Twin Cities audience, saying we don't deserve a bad rap for hosting the Larry Craig incident at our airport. He also announced that on his way out of town today, he's arranged to have airport security show him the infamous stall.

His nonstop wit pummeled through four decades of filmmaking, from Mondo Trasho to Pink Flamingos to Hairspray (of which he said, "I accidentally made a family movie called Hairspray").

He interjected some humorous punches on hot-button issues:

On drugs: "Ecstasy [is] a drug that makes you love everyone. Sounds like hell to me."

On gays in the military: "I'm for an all-volunteer lesbian army . . . They could find Bin Laden."

On family: "Gay people have more children than Catholics . . . I'd be a good uncle—I'd get you an abortion, I'd get you out of jail . . . "

After his monologue, and a brief intermission with music from the God Damn Doo Wop Band, Waters and Lucia returned to the stage. Q&A sessions often circle back to running themes, and this one was no different in that there was quite a bit of discussion of mental health, in which Waters, fittingly, has a strong interest.

Waters' next film, he said, is a children's Christmas story called Fruitcake, starring Jackass's Johnny Knoxville as the father. From the man who brought dining on excrement to the big screen, I'd expect nothing less.

11.9.07: No Country for Old Men Opens at the Uptown Theater

One take on Cormac McCarthy’s 2003 novel No Country for Old Men is that it’s more movie than book. In a merciless review of the book a few years ago, Joyce Carol Oates snipped that it “reads like a prose film by Quentin Tarantino.”  While it’s fun (and maybe frightening) to imagine everyone’s favorite ADHD auteur adapting McCarthy’s eulogy to the morally decaying American West, I think we should all be a little thankful that Joel and Ethan Coen had that honor instead.

The St. Louis Park brothers’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men opened yesterday at the Uptown Theater, and it is a revelation. Like all of the Coens’ films, No Country is a crime story told with a good dose of humor and (this time) a great deal of blood. Like the best of their movies, it’s also a reminder that the problem with genre films is not that they’ve been done too much, but that they’re often done with so little imagination. The Coens’ oeuvre is a master class on how to turn a genre picture inside out, at once subverting viewers’ expectations and paying wry homage to the once-classic, now creaky, conventions of film noirs, gangster movies, psychological dramas, even slapstick comedies.

Set in 1980 in the small towns that border Texas and Mexico, No Country triangulates between a hunter (Josh Brolin) who takes off with $2 million in cash he discovers at the scene of a drug-run-gone-wrong, the mysterious assassin (Javier Bardem) who is looking for him and the money, and the longtime law man (Tommy Lee Jones) who is trying to get to Brolin before Bardem does. In its economy of storytelling and its tone, the film most resembles the Coens’ stripped-down 1984 debut, Blood Simple, another Texas-set murder story that has a virtuoso scene in which predator and prey face-off in adjoining rooms. (No Country gets extra credit for arming Bardem with a cattle gun that handily blows through door locks.) 

The filmmakers’ dirt-dry humor finds a nice partner in McCarthy’s famously terse writing. But this time the simple-man shorthand seems more organic, less a device to produce laughs (which it, thankfully, still does) and more a point-of- entry to the characters. There’s a bit of a somber edge to the film and definitely to Jones’ character, a third-generation sheriff who is undergoing a spiritual crisis of sorts as he tries to reconcile the carnage brought by the nascent border drug trade with the mythic West he loves. As the title not so subtly suggests, his crisis is our crisis, a point that is teased out late in the movie as the sheriff’s uncle tells him, “This country is hard on people,” and warns that it’s only vanity to think that one can stop the rot that’s started.

Jones slips comfortably into a role that’s become almost standard-issue for him, while Bardem, an unconventional choice for the part of a psychopathic killer who is so evil he seems to be operating in a sort of parallel universe, pulls off the miracle of being truly, believably menacing for no apparent (worldly) reason. Brolin is another surprise as a Vietnam vet who recognizes how life-changing the money could be and keeps paying for that greed over and over again. He never overplays his character, never strains to make him more sympathetic, just lets his natural decency come through. Kelly Macdonald plays his wife, Carla Jean, a role that doesn’t have much meat and to which she doesn’t really bring much either.

The Coens practically have their own repertory company by now. While the acting branch (John Turturro, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Frances McDormand) sat out this film, the behind-the-scenes talents are all there: director of photography Roger Deakins, composer Carter Burwell, costume designer Mary Zophres, even hair guy Paul LeBlanc, who made characters out of the 1940s ’dos of The Man Who Wasn’t There and does the same with Bardem’s pageboy-from-hell.

I haven’t read McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, so I can’t say whether the Coens were in the enviable position of taking a mediocre book and elevating it to art (always a better proposition than adapting the next great American novel). But I do know that their macabre chase story is both artful and entertaining in a way that’s hard to argue.

11.6.07: I'm Not There at Walker Art Center

I’m bored with biopics, those stylized film biographies that attempt to condense the life of someone famous down into a two-hour Oscar bid. True, traditional Hollywood biopics tend to have the showy star turns and epic-sized production values that make for reliable Oscar bait, but the movies themselves are usually predictable and often outright dull.

If you have even a passing knowledge of the film’s subject, it’s hard not to feel manipulated by the Cliff Notes psychology and short-circuited exposition often at work in a conventional biopic. Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles? Russell Crowe as John Nash? Denzel Washington as Malcolm X and Hurricane Carter? Good turns by all. Still, I suspect that Lawrence of Arabia and Raging Bull hold up as two of the greatest biopics of all time because they were made by artists pursuing an original vision—not an express line to the Oscar podium.

When biopics detour from the genre’s plodding conventions for a more subjective interpretation, they’re often pilloried for their efforts (Marie Antoinette and Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus being two recent, if flawed, examples). The latest to subvert expectations is I’m Not There, which imagines the mercurial life of Bob Dylan through six different actors, including an African-American boy and Hollywood’s go-to junior Streep, Cate Blanchett. Director Todd Haynes’ trippy anthem to the hometown folk-rock god opens locally November 21, but it screened last night at the Walker, where it was introduced by Haynes’ longtime producing partner Christine Vachon whose films (Safe, Far From Heaven, Happiness, Kids, Boys Don’t Cry) are often unapologetically outside the mainstream.

Prematurely winterized in a trenchcoat-length black rain jacket and some serious combat boots, Vachon (who is producing local screenwriter Shawn Otto’s Dreams of a Dying Heart with Hilary Swank this winter) offered pointers for watching the decidedly unusual film to follow: “Let it wash over you,” she suggested. “Don’t think about it too much.”

Sound viewing advice for the crazy quilt that is I’m Not There, a fascinating piece of cinematic showmanship in which Haynes answers the question: How do you represent music’s most inscrutable shape-shifter? He started by casting six actors to either play Dylan, Dylan as interpreted by an actor playing a Dylan character, or in some cases merely an aspect of Dylan’s personality or influences. Each character has his own storyline, which Haynes shot in a period-specific film stock and style (black-and-white a la Fellini’s 8 1/2 for the Don’t Look Back–era Dylan; 16mm for early Greenwich Village folk-scene Dylan) and to which he’s scored thematically appropriate Dylan songs and scripted dialogue sampled heavily from the great man’s catalog of famously elusive one-liners.

Christian Bale plays both the soft-spoken early sixties folk singer Dylan and also the Born Again evangelical Dylan of the seventies. Heath Ledger has the role of a womanizing actor (playing Bale’s Dylan) who is married to a character loosely modeled after Dylan’s first wife, Sara Lownds. Marcus Carl Franklin is a rail-riding hobo named Woody (Guthrie, of course), and Ben Winshaw is a teenage Arthur Rimbaud. Richard Gere, in the film’s weakest narrative thread, is a hippie outlaw Billy the Kid who has retreated to the sticks, dropping out as Dylan did after his motorcycle crash.

The actor everyone will be talking about is Cate Blanchett, inhabiting the petulant rock-star Dylan of the late sixties who delights in tearing down everyone around him even as he’s booed by audiences who feel betrayed by his newly electrified music. Blanchett delivers a gutsy, exhilarating performance that is finely calibrated to the film’s surprisingly cheeky tone—and her performance alone is worth the price of admission.

Nothing is conventional about Haynes’s approach. He jumbles time rather ruthlessly and marries metaphor and biography in over-the-top fantasy sequences that will doubtless irritate even those Dylan nuts who know what they’re getting themselves into. The biggest surprise for me (no Dylan-phile, by any stretch) was how thrilling all this is to watch. Haynes’ artistry is all over the screen. And despite the film-geek touches and parade of name actors, I’m Not There manages to be massively entertaining, unpretentious, and bold in a way few biopics (and frankly few films) rarely are.

“I really think people are experiencing biopic fatigue,” Vachon said when she returned to the stage after the screening to answer questions and trade barbs with an audience member who called the film "cartoony." I’m Not Here, as with all art-house fare, will have to find its legs in an oversaturated market, but Vachon says she thinks audiences will appreciate a film that turns the whole idea of the Hollywood biopic on its head. She’s peddling a very peculiar film, so there’s no telling if this is the one to change their minds, but I sure hope it gets the chance.

10.16.07: Flim Flam Man script reading at the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio

I swear I’m not a snob, but with the exception of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I always like the book more than the movie. Knowing this is a good thing—because when they announce that a famous book is becoming a movie, it forces me to read something I’ve always meant to read. I procrastinate though, so I’m usually rushing out and buying the book the week before the movie comes out. By then, it’s too late. The trailers have ruined it for me, intruding on my in-brained movie camera with Hollywood stunt casting. By the time I finished The Iliad, there was still a month to go before Troy, but Achilles was already Brad Pitt in my head. When I finally committed to In Cold Blood, Philip Seymour Hoffman was visiting prisons in Kansas. I’ve waited so long on No Country for Old Men, I’m pretty sure that Javier Bardem’s bad haircut is going to get a starring role in my imagination.

Last night, I went to the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio for a cast reading of the script to Jennifer Vogel’s memoir. Jennifer’s book, Flim Flam Man, was about growing up with John Vogel, a notorious counterfeiting con-artist who was busted by U.S. Marshals in 1995. Flim Flam Man came out in 2004, and it got great reviews both nationally and locally. As if that wasn’t enough to motivate me, Jen edited a couple of my stories at City Pages back in the day, and she was really great to work with. She’s a talented editor—funny, and thoughtful, and just generally more generous than what I expected from an editor for a freelance assignment. I remember she made me read David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and let me expense it to the paper. I consider her a friend.

Anyway, I never read her book.

But I had to go to this reading. It’s part of the Guthrie’s new ScriptNight Reading Series put on by the Screenwriters Workshop. The Workshop hired twelve local actors to read a Dreamworks SKG–commissioned screenplay adaptation of Flim Flam Man, entitled Flag Day, written by a British screenwriter, Jez Butterworth. Jen was there, with her husband, Mike, another former City Pages writer, and the Hollywood producer who’s still shopping the script around, Bill Horberg. The twelve actors were all sitting on folding chairs with black folio stands in front of them.

The main reason that I like books better than movies is, of course, because I have the time. A book can go into more detail because it demands more of your time. Film only has a couple hours to reach you, so it has to cheat: films rely on exploitive visual symbols loaded with all sorts of cultural associations in order to advance the story quickly. A book can have a whole chapter of mythology on the fall of man; a film has a shot of an apple, then cuts to the shot of a woman, then cuts to the shot of a snake.

One of the problems with attending a reading of a screenplay, then, is that the visuals aren’t there. Sure, they’re described, but they’re described in a kind of technical film-school shorthand that can be powerful if brought to the screen by the right hands, but can sound cliché when you’re sitting in a theater watching a bunch of actors read off their folio stands and sip bottled water.

That said, the screenplay was cast perfectly. They might eventually get somebody like Kevin Costner to play John Vogel, but Stephen Pelinski was perfect as the dashing conman who drives a Cadillac and keeps a nickel-plated .38 in his waistband but doesn’t like to hear his children cuss. The rest of the cast looked and sounded right too: Linda Kelsey as Jennifer’s mom, both Raven Maizy Bellefluer and Tracey Maloney as young Jen and older Jen, respectively. So the cast looked right and sounded right, and there were even some sound effects that helped give the evening a kind of radio-play feel, but a lot of the imagery just whipped by faster than my ears could digest it, and there were a couple hackneyed Lifetime Network scenes that frankly didn’t much sound like Jennifer Vogel.

So I came home and ripped through the first 100 pages of Flim Flam Man. And then I finished it this morning. And yup, I liked the book better. In the book, Stephen Pelinski was starring as John Vogel, but the female characters, Jen’s mom, and especially Jen herself, are much more three-dimensional. Jen’s writing is so clear-eyed and humble and painfully honest in the book that I ended up liking Jen Vogel the character much more than I liked the movie version of Jen Vogel. Maybe it’s because John Vogel as written by Jez Butterworth and read by Stephen Pelinski was so likeable, it was difficult to understand why Jen was so bitter and angry towards him by the third act. The book, with time for a full accounting of both John and Jen’s faults, doesn’t have that problem.

9.19.07: BodyCartography's Holiday House #2

There’s a lot to be said about BodyCartography’s remount of its 2006 Momentum show, this time staged in the holiday house itself—the duo's own south Minneapolis home.

First, though, some background: BodyCartography (Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad) is a pioneer in the newly exploding field of dance film. Bieringa and Ramstad pursue a space-based, improvisational, and visually acute version of dance film, meaning that they don’t make a dance and then film it, but rather explore the space through movement, then cut and splice these improvisations together. This same process is active in their live work: what you see is improv within set limits, with certain set moments that themselves most likely arose from improv.

Why does it matter? Because what you see is at once brilliantly planned—lighting, angles, perspectives clear as cinema—and breakneck.

First, that cinema. Early on, you stand on the lawn, looking toward a side patio, but also up at the corner of the large old house. Bright maroon, with stained-glass details, the house juts out as if in an early scene from a horror film. Meanwhile, on the patio, someone is moving, limbs flailing, lit by tiny star lights.

Initially, it’s a bit frustrating to get only glimpses of movement, but then you begin to feel the pleasure of these stolen moments: a woman jumping on a mattress in a royal blue room, giggling, while another woman hovers, mostly out of sight. The performance ends in the alley behind the house, where projections and live dancers interact. At times the dancers run all the way to the end of the alley and you watch them jerking and jumping from a long way off; this isn’t a view you can get in the theater. Instead of the theater’s flatness, Holiday House has the three-dimensional grasp of reality—albeit a beautifully lit and planned reality. At one point a curious neighbor, not a performer, came around the side of one garage: transfixed by light, he became a performer. The pleasure of viewing is so intense here, so fun as to be nearly guilty.

Then there’s the dancing itself. The perspectives from which we view are planned, but the movement feels dangerously unhinged. Morgan Thorson and Otto Ramstad throw each other around within inches of the audience; Kristin Van Loon crashes her bike into every impediment she can find; three dancers fall to their knees over and over again. Outside the confines of a theater, within a house, where people generally follow certain proscribed paths, all this virtuoso flight feels especially and thrillingly risky. It’s as if BodyCartography and their dancers have just now discovered this house and are exploring it with no notion of its use or purpose.

In fact, the house, which is truly an odd one, seems increasingly bizarre as the performance goes on. Each space, each object morphs as the performers “misuse” it. Also, as you are led from room to room, some performers remain behind, lying or dancing, which gives the house a haunted feel.

But it’s difficult to say who’s haunting—you or the performers, who seem unaware of the audience. The wrongness of being in a strange house, watching its inhabitants as they enact their strange exploration—again, it’s a guilty pleasure, a thrilling risk. (There’s some literal risk here too. Holiday House #2 is only for those who feel comfortable ascending and descending strange staircases in near darkness. And don’t even think of wearing heels.)

One thing’s for sure: your own home will never feel so dull as when you return from BodyCartography’s Holiday House.

8.25.07: Girls Rock! at the Ritz

A couple of nights ago I was at the local premiere of Dirty Country, a hilarious documentary about Larry Pierce, a singer-songwriter who performs raunchy country music only the ill-informed would call misogynistic—his songs are so juvenile that you gotta believe Pierce is the only one being oppressed. Still, it was a reminder that the music business is largely a male-dominated one in which women are often relegated to the thankless role of groupie, backup singer, or video hoochie. 

But what about girls who want to rock? The inspiring chick-power documentary Girls Rock!, which screened yesterday afternoon at the Ritz Theater as part of the Sound Unseen Film + Music Festival, argues that peers and pop culture are doing their damndest to groom more Britney Spears than Patti Smiths. But it also suggests that if you put an electric guitar in the hands of a troubled teenage girl, you’re building more than a budding musician; you’re chiseling away at the cultural flotsam that tells her she’s worthless.

Scheduled to open in theaters in March (nothing’s booked yet for our Landmark screens), the film follows campers at the famed Oregon-based Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls. Over the course of the five-day camp, girls as young as eight form bands, write and perform songs, work out their hostilities (at the world and each other), and learn that they’re not weird if they want to wail on a guitar or scream into a microphone—in fact, they’re cool. The camp was started by a female roadie who was tired of seeing the tough women rockers of the ‘90s being replaced by Hilary Duff–styled “performers” of girly pop who had never picked up a guitar, much less played one.

There are no Hilary Duffs at the five-day Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp, which, judging by the film’s four hand-picked protagonists, seems to attract more than its share of kids with baggage. On one end of the spectrum, there’s Misty, a teenager with drug-addicted parents who has spent time in and out of group homes and is now ridiculed by classmates for living with her grandparents. On the other, there’s Palace (above), a cherubic eight-year-old vocalist who eats up the camera but seems to have inherited her divorced yuppie mom’s preoccupation with her appearance. Amelia is the chatterbox guitarist who writes songs about her dog Pippi but can’t find any friends at school, while Laura is the perpetually smiling Korean adoptee from Oklahoma who loves death metal but admits she hates herself.

We don’t spend enough time with any of the girls to get a real sense of how much they’re transformed by the camp or even learn much more about them than the above descriptions suggest. Luckily, director Arne Johnson has chosen such winning subjects that it’s easy forget that the film is largely a collection of captured moments than a character-driven narrative.      

Campers take self-defense lessons and talk about “body oppression,” but the film makes clear that the real work of building up these girls comes in teaching them not to tear down one another. Interviews and camp footage mingle with stylized animation that wisely adds some levity to all this self-esteem talk; unfortunately, these segments also introduce some suspect stats about the assault on girls—not an insignificant point when you consider the folks lined up to take shots at anything that argues that life is tougher for girls.

Spellbound and Mad Hot Ballroom are two other docs that followed a melting pot of talented kids readying for their big day on stage. Like these films, Girls Rock! is at its best simply observing kids being kids in all their unvarnished, pubescent hilarity—not reaching for the big message.

Women in Music Minnesota hosts its own rock camp for girls modeled after the one in the film. Visit wimmn.com or girlsrockandrollretreat.com for details.

8.23.07: Dirty Country at The Heights

Larry Pierce’s foul-mouthed country music is too filthy for even the most delicate, carefully asterisked descriptions. So, if you weren’t at the Heights Theater last night for the regional premiere of the Minnesota-produced documentary about the honky-tonk George Carlin, I insist: go to iTunes and listen. Then ask yourself if the cultural watchdogs shouldn’t be patrolling small-town garage parties instead of hip-hop videos next time they want to unearth some real smut.

One might assume that a film calling itself Dirty Country would focus on the strange marriage of red-state-entrenched country music and its obscenity-twanging fringes. Or that the filmmakers would find some outraged parents in Pierce’s hometown of Middleton, Indiana, who want to run him out of town. Nope. The fast-paced doc, an audience winner at South by Southwest, follows Pierce, a third-shift factory worker with a talent for writing country songs who gets a mid-life shot at a big-time music career.

When we first meet Pierce he’s a married-with-kids fifty-three-year-old with a second life recording smutty, comic country songs that are distributed at truck stops by a label called Laughing Hyena Records. He sings and plays guitar to an enthusiastic, boozy group of friends and family, but they’re hardly just amusing him. The guy's got a voice like a poor man’s Waylon Jennings and a quick wit that’s put to service in decidedly profane but nonetheless well-constructed songs.

It turns out Pierce has more fans than his ad-hoc garage concerts might suggest and they include -Itis, an established Colorado power-pop band that includes Pierce covers in its anatomically obsessed setlist. The group, headed by Chris Daughtry look-alike Craig Soderberg, track down their idol, who they’re surprised to learn doesn’t have a band and is struggling to make ends meet after having been forced into early retirement from the GM plant. The country singer and the rock band click, of course, and before long Pierce is playing his first real gig with –Itis at the Main Event in Fridley.

Dirty Country tells its feel-good underdog story well, letting its (often unintentionally) hilarious cast of characters tell their own stories without a lot of wink-wink-nudge-nudge from the filmmakers. It also gives some nice context to Pierce’s peculiar brand of outsider art through interviews with professors, music journalists, and other dirty-music cult favorites (the sequin-caped rapper Blowfly and white tuxedoed piano man Dr. Dirty) who cultivate their rabid fan bases despite no airplay and little in the way of traditional marketing.

In Pierce’s case, the best marketing seems to be his own understated charm, and his fortuitous friendship with -Itis frontman Soderberg, who seems to be having as much fun transforming Pierce’s life as Pierce is living out his dreams. The band and its new elder statesman now play shows together around the country, including one last night at the Cabooze after they fielded questions at a post-screening Q&A with the film’s directors, Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett—childhood friends and Wisconsin natives who also seem kindred spirits.

The Dirty Country filmmakers never get in the way of their raunchy, surprisingly affecting doc, no small feat from the guys whose touring Found Footage Festival of discarded industrial training videos and strangers’ abandoned home movies is but one indication of their offbeat tastes. So why is it they’re still shopping Dirty Country around for DVD or theatrical distribution? Somebody, please, get these guys hooked up. Pierce has plenty of audiences yet to defile.

8.16.07: Summer Sci-Fi Series at the Bell Museum

Given how utterly perfect the weather was last night, it was theoretically possible to be almost anywhere and feel a little euphoric just to be outside. If you happened to be at the Bell Museum of Natural History on the University of Minnesota’s East Bank campus, that feeling was likely compounded by the charm of watching a really bad movie surrounded by deep blue summer dusk and breathing in the smell of popcorn.

The Bell launched its summer sci-fi series—a roster of low-budget B-movies from the 1950s and ‘60s—last night with Attack of the Giant Leeches. I won’t say there were no young girls in attendance, but the movie attracted a decidedly young male crowd. (Or maybe it attracted their parents, lured by the promise of spending an evening outside with—for once—a willing young companion.) After all, who wouldn’t read the description of the movie on the Bell’s website—“When local moonshine-swilling trapper Lem Sawyer sees a giant creature in a swamp near his home, his story is dismissed as a tall tale—but when people start disappearing, the good-looking game warden begins an investigation that ends in terror!”—and not think ten-year-old boy. The rest of the crowd was remarkably mixed. One lucky elderly man even won the drawing for a pet leech.

The “creepy crawly” petting zoo, populated by a millipede, hissing cockroaches, and requisite leeches, proved a popular pre-movie attraction for kids and grownups alike. (There was also a stuffed piranha for good measure.) Facts learned: every millipede in the world is a vegetarian and only three types of cockroaches live in people’s houses. Who knew?

Not surprising: the trajectory of Attack of the Giant Leeches. The movie is set in a town on the edge of a massive Florida swamp and offers up every tried-and-true cliché and stereotype about humans and leeches being alike as possible. Of course, the predictable nature of B-movies is part of their charm. Just consider a few snippets of dialogue:

Sheriff Benton to the earnest (and, naturally, hunky) game warden Cal Moulton: “I’m not about to go tromping through the swamp looking for an over-growed gator.” (He does.)

Sheriff Benton foreshadowing Cal’s fool’s errand to the swamp: “That boy’s lookin’ for bad trouble and he’s gonna get it.” (Indeed.)

Cuckolded husband Dave Walker in response to his wife’s immodesty: “Someday I’m gonna give that she-cat the whopping she’s been asking for.”  (He does not, though she does get eaten by one of the leeches!)

Tramp and good girl, capable game warden and backcountry fumblers drinking moonshine from jugs, a slimy and, frankly, ridiculous-looking enemy/”monster,” it’s all here in black-and-white.

Still to come his summer: The Killer Shrews (August 23), The Wasp Woman (August 30), and The Giant Gila Monster (September 6).

8.3.07: The Ten Opens at Uptown Theater

No one believes me when I tell them that Winona Ryder was born in the sleepy, scenic southeastern Minnesota college town that bears her name. Or maybe they just don’t want to claim the face of Gen X angst cinema, better known these days for her 2001 pill-fueled shoplifting binge at a Beverly Hills Saks Fifth Avenue. Can’t we show a little love for the woman who made parole a career move long before Lindsay and Paris?

Ryder’s Minnesota roots don’t go very deep and, frankly, the hippie childhood that followed in a California commune (godfather Timothy Leary, family friend Allen Ginsberg) pretty much negates all that Hot Fish Shop wholesomeness. In recent years, though, Ryder has been lying low and slowly piecing together her rudderless career in a fashion that is decidedly Minnesotan in its unpredictably stubborn way. A scandal-surviving celeb’s second act usually includes a teary Dateline NBC interview and ironically self-mocking SNL skit. Ryder did the SNL gig long ago, but she seems to have an admirable disdain for press-junket born-agains and as of late has taken to ungraciously bitching about how she’s still paying the price for her youthful transgression.

Still, I detect a career rehab in progress. Just check out this month’s Vogue, in which cover babe Ryder is anointed an “Ageless Beauty.” Or, if you’re desperate for an air-conditioned respite from the Uptown Art Fair, catch her in The Ten, a raunchy comedy that opened yesterday at the Uptown Theater. After this weekend, though, all bets are off. This clinker is going straight to DVD.

The Ten’s interconnected shorts are ostensibly about the Ten Commandments, but the film’s ribald humor and sketch-comedy sensibility is more Wet Hot American Summer (writer/director David Wain’s other film) than Kryzsztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue. Which would have been perfectly fine if any of its blasphemous conceits (a prisoner negotiates for a different jailhouse rapist in “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” to pick a particularly naughty example) were actually developed into stories.

So formless, though, are most of the segments that each time Wain cuts to his lazy framing device—actor Paul Rudd introducing each commandment while negotiating his own marital strife—it’s jolting. Rudd’s narrator, who has a dismal segment of his own, isn’t the only one breaking the fourth wall. Two other stories also end with characters addressing the audience in lame asides that seem to serve no other purpose but to save the writers from having to come up with a third act.

How bad does it get? So bad that the talented Liev Schreiber plays a man competing with his neighbor to see who can own more CAT scan machines. Their wives leave them when their houses are overtaken by the machines, but then the rivals become buddies over beer and Bonnie Raitt songs, while schoolkids exposed to radiation die on their lawns. Someone thought this was funny?

Ryder makes an appearance in two of the strongest stories (relatively speaking), but she chews the scenery viciously. In the opener, she plays the girlfriend of a man (Adam Brody) who jumps out of a plane without a parachute, survives the accident, but is forever stuck in the ground, unable to be moved or he’ll die. He gets his own TV show, covers of magazines, and a cult-like following, but Ryder leaves him for a slick TV news reporter. Playing the same character in the wink-wink “thou shalt not steal” segment, Ryder makes off with a ventriloquist’s wooden dummy she has taken an, er, intimate liking to. It’s a wild (okay, gross) concept that Ryder commits to fully, hell bent on replacing her Court TV perp walk with a decidedly more indelible image.

7.27.07: No Mittens Film Festival at Rosalux Gallery

It’s counterintuitive to program a winter- and sleep-themed film festival in the middle of the blazing hot days of summer. Is that why so few of the shorts screened last night at Rosalux Gallery’s No Mittens Film Festival adhered to those advertised themes? Or maybe the number of films submitted for the one-night fest were just slim enough that Weisman guest curator Diane Mullin needed to relax the thematic-compatibility requirement. My money’s on the latter.

Too bad. Winter and sleep have proven an intriguing backdrop for some great films—The Machinist, The Shining, The Ice Storm, and Fargo, for starters—and it would have been nice to see the homegrown talent riff on these decidedly Minnesotan preoccupations. With the fest’s focus on emerging filmmakers, short works (five minutes or less), and Rosalux’s way-cool home in Open Book, I was rooting for a stellar lineup that would attract a broad audience. It was certainly standing-room-only in the narrow downstairs gallery-turned-screening-room, but the crowd was mostly friends, family, cast, and crew. And the final mix of shorts was an uneven grab bag of narrative and experimental works sadly unlikely to convert those already wary of films and film venues outside the multiplex mainstream.

One highlight was Peter McLarnan’s Duplex (left), an experimental work along the lines of the impenetrable fare on continuous projection in the Walker’s galleries. It follows in split-screen a 1950s husband and wife going about their separate rituals (he: shaving and then putzing about downstairs at his workbench; she: steaming her face and sewing), and finally working together to create the night’s dinner, a highlighter-yellow gelatinous pie that they methodically construct from separate rooms, connected only by dumbwaiter. The film has no dialogue, no soundtrack, and to my eyes nothing at all to do with winter and sleep, but it’s riveting nonetheless in its creepy, cold domesticity.

Lora Madjar’s Snow settles into its own unsettling rhythm but with a stop-motion–animated doll that doesn’t exactly have nine lives but certainly many as it continuously loses its cotton innards to a murderous music box, surgical tools, and assorted other dangers, but always manages to put itself back together from its snowy grave. It’s anyone’s guess as to what the hell it all means, but then again if you’re looking for those kinds of answers in this kind of film, you probably should have been standing in line for The Simpsons Movie at Block E instead.

Even when the winter and sleep themes were largely thrown out the window, there was a little something for everyone. Erin Hael screened two dance videos, Kern and White, the latter of which (left) has fun with choreography and color in dance sequences that remind me of Michel Gondry’s “The Hardest Button to Button” video for The White Stripes. Brent Braniff’s Do You Have a Dog? showcases the filmmaker’s moody experimental pop and the sleeping visage of a friend for several languorous minutes, while Debby Moe’s hybrid documentary/music video Ivy Morrison on the local hip-hop dancer/choreographer plays l