Better late than never…

My Favorite Feature: Precious

As a general rule, I see documentaries at the SDFF because I figure they’re less likely to show in theaters. And although I did see several this year, I started with Precious, which is making quite the stir in the film world. As refreshing as it is to watch a film about an obese black teenage girl (not what filmmakers think most 18-year-old boys want to see), what made the film for me was the confession by the mother at the end. It was awful and heartbreaking and completely understandable and disgusting, all at once. It took the film to an entirely new level.

Shorts from Colorado

Next was Winners and Losers, a collection of Colorado shorts. My favorite was The Unrecoverable Loss of Eugene, a hilarious take on Victorian and modern sexual mores. Perhaps my husband will have more to say in the comments (hint, hint).

Second Feature: Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench

Go see Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench to watch the female lead break into song and the male lead play his trumpet. Go for the experimental take on musicals and story. Don’t spend so much time trying to follow the love story, as I did; just enjoy the music-fest.

My Favorite Documentary: Still Bill

Still Bill won the People’s Choice Documentary Feature award for its warm portrayal of Bill Withers’s decision to step away from fame. It opens with “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone” and closes with “Grandma’s Hands.” It has good cinematography, good music, and good stories. If you can’t see it in the theater, try Netflix or Video Station in Boulder.

At this point I began to notice how many of the movies I chose had to do with music.

Third Feature: Crossing

Crossing had nothing to do with music. Written by two Texans who also starred as Manuel (the lead) and Diego (his camera-toting friend), it follows a Mexican ne’er-do-well who learns his father will be executed in Texas and runs north because he refuses to let his father leave him again. His pregnant wife protests, but he goes anyway, into his own personal comedy of errors.

Second Documentary: Turtle: The Incredible Journey

According to Britta Erickson, festival director, Turtle is another March of the Penguins. I disagree. The overwrought script read by Miranda Richardson got on my nerves. I did like the use of “she”; it’s nice that not all moviemakers feel adventures belong solely to male creatures. And there were beautiful images, especially the opening shot of the hatchling leaving its egg.

Third Documentary: Two Spirits

Like Turtle, this movie showed at the King Center across the parking lot from the Tivoli, where Starz’s main theaters are located. I used my membership privileges to get to the front of the huge line, though I’m not sure it really made a difference; I think all the seats there are pretty good. A documentary about the murder of Navajo teenager Fred Martinez, Two Spirits explores the traditional Navajo concept of gender (there are 4) and notes that it was common for Navajos to celebrate the lives of gay and lesbian children because they were thought to embody both genders and thus to represent the balance of life.

At the panel afterward, an activist from New York who came to Cortez, Colorado, to investigate the murder said this kind of hate crime happens every week. You can find more information at the Fred Martinez Project or the Two Spirit Society of Denver (a performance by several members is pictured here).

Fourth Documentary: The Duke of the Bachata

Made by local filmmaker Adam Taub (La Quinceañera), The Duke is about a Dominican musical genre dismissed as vulgar by the musical elite of that country. I wish I could say more about it, but it was my third film of the day, and I couldn’t stay awake. It was preceded by an amusing short, The Eighth Samurai, which Todd thought was a dead-on parody of Kurosawa.

Yet ANOTHER Documentary Seen After the SDFF: The Yes Men Fix the World

If you’re a liberal, and the idea of playing a prank on a multinational corporation makes you drool, go see this movie. Very amusing. I couldn’t believe that these guys kept getting away with their media stunts.

Pressure Cooker

I went to see Pressure Cooker on the advice of Denveater, who described it as Rocky with toques. It was the third movie I saw at the Starz Denver Film Festival.

That seems like a pretty accurate description to me, though I haven’t seen Rocky since it originally came out: my memory is a little hazy. Certainly, all the high school students in this movie had something to overcome, even if, in the case of the football player cum chef, it was only his reputation.

This being a movie about a high-class cooking competition, they also had to overcome their ghetto tastebuds, as their hard-driving teacher put it.

She is the kind of person I would have run from screaming when I was younger, but she managed to motivate those she loved. She’s a terror and a lover—if you get on her good side. And she does not settle—ever.

What surprised me about this documentary was the relatively small amount of cooking in it. I expected all cooking, all the time, but most of the movie was taken up with stories about the contestants’ families and other aspects of their lives. The cooking competitions themselves functioned like punctuation.

My favorite character was Fatoumata, a girl from Africa who was basically a slave to her father and her stepmother. She did all the cooking and cleaning for them, but she was so earnest in her appreciation of the opportunities this high school in Philadelphia offered her. And in the end, she won a scholarship through the cooking competition, won her freedom by attending Monroe College and being “happily on her own.”

At the end we met one of the directors, Jennifer Grausman, as we have with every movie we’ve seen at the Starz Denver Film Festival. And when asked how she came across these people, she said her dad runs a nonprofit program called the Careers Through Culinary Arts Program, which distributes scholarships to at-risk high school students who train in the culinary arts.

***

Todd and I went to the Closing Night show, which was Last Chance Harvey. Here’s my review: if you are completely, absolutely addicted to Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, go see that movie. Otherwise, don’t bother.

The Last Reel party was fun, but Bill Pullman left halfway through the movie. That’s the closest I ever got to a celebrity in my life!

Go forth and eat, everyone! Happy Thanksgiving.

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An Evening with Carolee Schneemann
Stan Brakhage Vision Award
Starz Denver Film Festival

Tender moviegoers should probably start their acquaintance with Schneemann at Americana I Ching Apple Pie. It’s a hilarious deconstruction of baking an apple pie that involves hammers, two-headed axes, car scrapers to mix dough, audience participation, and deep questions, such as “Should I just throw it on the floor?” Eventually the audience got their pieces of “pie” on napkins, but there was a moment when I thought they’d be diving for the goodies and licking them off the floor.

Academics who like to bake will be doubly delighted with this film.

Compared to Meat Joy and Fuses, the first two films Schneemann showed after receiving the Stan Brakhage Vision Award, Americana was mainstream and lighthearted.

I guess there’s a narrative of sorts in Meat Joy, but it’s not exactly a whodunit, though apparently there were lots of rules involving what happened if you got hit with a dead fish or a plucked chicken or sausage.

Schneemann said the scene at the end, in which the 4 couples dive into a pile of shredded paper, took 14 hours to rehearse, because everyone needed to be in the paper and it needed to be moving.

But it was Fuses that really amazed me.

Warning: Many people would consider Fuses to be pornographic.

Schneemann was inspired to make this film after she noticed her cat watching her and her partner having sex. She wanted it to somehow be from Kitch’s point of view. So she hung a camera from the ceiling and got into bed with her partner.

When the film ran out, she changed it and got back into bed. She never had any idea how it would turn out until she got it back from the lab.

Sometimes the camera fell off the rope that held it.

In between the sex scenes, extreme closeups of genitals, and shots of the cat, there were many lovely, tender moments, but they were interrupted by collage and all the damage she intentionally inflicted on the film. “I wanted to interact with the film [pause] almost the way the apple was treated [being smashed with a hammer in Americana], she said. She painted the film with aniline dyes (but here she mentioned as an aside that she never put the dyes in her mouth. Brakhage did, and she thinks that may have caused his cancer). She collaged the film, baked it, and hung it out the window.

There was no sound, except for other audience members breathing. I kept wondering if I heard people breathing heavily.

Fuses was made in 1964 and understandably for that time, was censored.

I’ve never seen anything like Schneemann’s films. I’m thankful I live in a country where I can watch them.

If you want to see them, you can order them at Electronic Arts Intermix.

Bird continuity: the chickens in Meat Joy

Sorry this post was not up until Wednesday. I had a deadline Tuesday, and then I had to get to the airport. I’ll be posting from Chattanooga for the rest of the week.

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Lord God Bird
Starz Denver Film Festival

Hell, it wasn’t just grown men crying at the thought of seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker. I cried too, for all the times that some piece of land where I used to wander had been developed, for the fact that I’ll never see a flock of passenger pigeons darkening the sky.

And please understand, the men crying in these movies are hunters, backwoods types, comfortable traveling through swamps where they could float past a crocodile in their canoe. They know the area so well they “have the trees named.” (I think I saw one female researcher in this movie.)

Butler must like tough guys—his first movie was Pumping Iron, which made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star. His next movie will be about Bengal tigers in the Sundarbans (India), which he says are quickly going extinct. He hopes Lord God Bird will draw attention to the problems of extinction.

This movie is thick with the politics of ornithology. Who’d have thought there was such a thing? But in the mid-twentieth century, saying you’d seen an ivory-billed woodpecker was death to your career.

It opens with John Dennis, Jr., son of a man who said he saw the ivory-bill in the 1960s and was mocked for it. Everyone thought it had gone extinct in the 1940s.

John Dennis, Sr., became obsessed with proving himself and kept going to the Big Thicket in Texas year after year. One year he made a recording of the call, which sounds like a cartoon character saying meep, meep, and sent it off to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to compare to their 1944 recording. They dithered around and then eventually implied he’d somehow made a copy of the 1944 recording of the bird’s call.

To his son, the search for the ivory-bill is the “search for a lost part of American heritage” and also a chance for him to vindicate his late father.

Even if you’re not a birder or would shoot a woodpecker as soon as look at it, go see this movie for the landscapes and their light. Most Americans won’t get a chance—or wouldn’t be caught dead—floating through cypress swamps, but they do make for great armchair traveling. The cinematography is stunning.

There’s so much more I could say about this movie. I could tell you about all the reported sightings, about the lone female ivory-bill calling and calling with no answer, about the men crawling up trees and vacuuming debris out of holes in the hopes of finding a feather, about the Singer Tract and the airport in the Florida panhandle that will destroy habitat (in which ivory-bills might live), about the trays and trays of dead ivory-bills shot for museum collections in the nineteenth century.

But I’ll leave you with the final image of the movie: a big man covered in shredded camouflage, sitting at the base of a huge cypress, his ivory-bill decoy moving back and forth above him, calling. He sits there, and he listens.

Best quote from a movie so far
“Get on the pecker bench.” (Florida)

Bird continuity
Count Basie’s band used to play at Birdland.

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Count Basie: Then as Now, Count’s the King
Starz Denver Film Festival
Directed by Gary Keys

I like to see documentaries at the Starz Denver Film Festival because they don’t show at nearby theaters. We truly are doubly blessed in the Denver-Boulder area: we have the film festival, and when that’s over, we can go to Video Station, which has everything, including a large collection of documentaries.

The first and last thing I noticed about this Count Basie movie was how cool the director, Gary Keys, was. His first film played the Denver Film Festival in the 1980s. Before that, he was an art director at MOMA and concert promoter, so that’s how he met all these jazz types. He knew Sinatra, Basie, Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis.

He produced the first pop concert at Lincoln Center (the Supremes) and sold them as the “modern-day Andrews Sisters.” The crowd at Lincoln Center was so hyped up at the end of the show that staff wanted to call the police, but Keys said, “No, no,” and had the Supremes come back out and sing the line, “Stop, in the name of love!” I wondered if he was having us on.

The first thing I noticed about Basie himself in the movie was his lovely eyes. I would call them “Egyptian eyes.” I’ll bet he had the ladies coming and going.

The movie spent most of its time listening to members of Count Basie’s band, sitting around a table, reminiscing. And one of them—speaking of ladies coming and going—recalled a night soon after his wedding, when his new wife was in the audience and his mistress started following her around. He got so mad he ran off the stage and chased the mistress out of the theater and still managed to make it back for the end of the song.

No word on whether he kept the old mistress or got a new one.

They talked about Lester Young, how he did everything different—how he famously held his tenor saxophone up sideways—”he was from somewhere else,” one of them said.

I went to this movie to listen to the music, and I wasn’t disappointed. When the director said, “Count Basie made you want to dance,” he was so right. There was a lot of great music, including vocals by Billie Holiday and Joe Williams and Ella Fitzgerald (at the very end), but I did wish Keys would have included more entire songs.

My husband didn’t like it as much as I did. He wanted more about Basie himself. To be honest, I got the impression that the movie might not be quite finished, that its makers were using the film festival as a way to gauge audience reaction. One of the questions on the survey form was about the title, which I disliked, and the television footage shown in the film was just awful (Todd’s suggestion was “video tiling”).

Amazing and Hilarious
Two passages from the movie in which Jerry Lewis pantomimes Basie songs. You can see them in “The Errand Boy” and “Jerry Lewis Does the Dishes” on YouTube.

Another Reason to See Blazing Saddles Again
Basie’s band plays in the middle of the desert.

A Memorable Gesture
To get his huge band to go all out, Basie would raise his index finger.

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