Humble Pie Son

I want to write a folk song that heralds Richard Dutcher.  I mean, a real deal old timey folk song where the throngs of aimless, hearthless dusty mormon filmmakers huddling around open can fires in the forgotten rail yards of the rust belt and the rockies can warm their hands and hearts while they think about their past and future.  Of course, they should call the song “The Ballad of Richard Dutcher: Father to us All.” We all remember that when Mr. Dutcher released God’s Army way back in 2000, he was hailed as the Father of Mormon Cinema and the founder of a new movement where filmmakers told Mormon stories for Mormons. It seemed like amazing times were on the way. However, as we learn from Boethius, experience is like unto a wheel:  “Inconsistency is my very essence, Rise up on my spokes if you like, but don’t complain when you are cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it is also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away.” A glut of low rent Mormon comedies flooded the market and poor R.D. painted his face with frowny colors. Within six years of his first film’s release, Richard Dutcher was out of the Mormon church and moving down the road wearing a syllogistic coat of many colors. To explain his departure from the fabric of his creative matrix, Dutcher once said: “At the beginning, I was proud to say, ‘Yeah, I’m a Mormon filmmaker’ because then, I was defining what a Mormon filmmaker was… It quickly got completely out of my control. Now, no one wants to call themselves a Mormon filmmaker because you’re associating yourself with a genre that’s fallen into disrepute. It’s like having porn on your résumé.” So this makes Richard Dutcher the Mormon Sylvester Stallone, right?  What is important is that he opened a door for other Mormon filmmakers (even if he’s kind of being a dick about it).

Although I think Richard Dutcher’s personal life is more interesting than his films, I disagree with him completely. Maybe Mormon cinema is like porn. I’ll assume since he made the call he’s more familiar with it than I do and is, therefore, more qualified to make that assumption. But I think while many Mormon films are silly and a little stupid, they are also benign – harmless. I’ll also venture that some are hilarious and heart warming and others are powerful and deeply affecting. I will go anywhere and do anything to see the theatrical release of any movie made by Jared and Jerusha Hess. It’s a freaking shame that Gentlemen Broncos did not get a wide release.  The studio pulled its release when critics panned it in advance screenings. America’s critic (TM), Roger Ebert gives three stars to everything and whines like a spanked dog when filmmakers don’t take chances. Then, when they do take chances he gives them bad reviews. Who the hell cares what Roger Ebert thinks?  You know what I think? He’s Catholicism’s Richard Dutcher.  Someone should make a movie where they’re roommates in a wacky boarding house run by Ron Paul. Wouldn’t it be fun to see three grumpy old men complain about how the world is changing? No, it wouldn’t.  It would probably get a bad review by NOTED FILM CRITICS.  I thought Saints and Soldiers was more interesting than Saving Private Ryan. Did you hear that Steven Spielberg? For $70 million bucks you made a movie that was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – but Ryan Little made a film for $780,000 that had heart and soul and made me care.

I will venture to add that I want to put the wider discussion of Mormon cinema aside and discuss its developments since those heady days. Specifically, I wanted to draw attention to a little film called Humble Pie. Originally released in 2007 as American Fork, this is the story of Tracey Orbison and his family and struggles. Have you ever found yourself in, we’ll say a gas station, paying a clerk for a soda or a donut at 2 in the morning and wondered to yourself – what is that person’s story? Where did they come from and what are they doing here? Well, you probably won’t see it coming from Hollywood; unless the person behind the register is Scarlett Johanssen. Of course, we can’t all be space marines or famed explorers, or personal assistants finding love in New York City while living in unexplainably huge apartments – so, if we aren’t, where is our story? It won’t be coming from Hollywood. I kind of am in love with movies that look a little deeper and concern themselves with more ordinary themes and try to peel back the layer of fabulous that H.Wood bastes its actors in. Like, I’d love to watch a romantic comedy shot in HD/3D where the actresses aren’t allowed to wear makeup or do deep-cleansing colonics. I think it would freaking blow our minds to see what Cameron Diaz really looks like. I remember watching an episode of Caprica and a character was introduced who was completely normal looking and, in consequence of his implicit comparisons with more attractive people, unattractive. I thought to myself: there is no way on God’s green earth that he’s going to make it through this episode. What were they thinking? Sure enough, by the end credits his character is off the show.

I guess I’m jealous, in a way. People like Eli Roth and Alejandre Aja will get millions of dollars to make awful movie after awful movie about the evisceration and rape and torture of beautiful people in exotic, low rent locations; but people like Chris Bowman and Hubble Palmer have to scrimp and save and borrow from their families to make movies about the world’s Tracey Orbisons because (I guess) there are places and themes that are just too shocking for the modern American audience to take in, even for Hollywood. Perhaps this is wise. Making a movie on a shoestring requires the film makers to pay something for their effort. Maybe in considering what they can and cannot afford to do, the film makers invest something in their work that enobles it. American Fork, Utah is one of those places and the story told in this movie deals with those themes. Loneliness, disapointment, failure, a lack of recognition and outlet. These are the strains of Humble Pie.  Tracey Orbison is a stock boy at a grocery store whose life ambition is to get his driver’s license. He lives with his mother (Kathleen Quinlain – who offers two of the best prayers ever recorded on film) and his sister (Mary Lynn Rajskub – who takes a turn from playing Chloe on 24 to show that she might actually be an interesting person). In the middle of appeals to Tennessee Williams’  play the Glass Menagerie, we watch as Tracey discovers a sense of purpose and fulfillment in an acting class taught by a terrible actor (played BRILLIANTLY by William Baldwin who brings a deep sense of passive, hilarious pretension/regret to the role). The movie follows the exchanges and stories of these people as they make the best of the humiliations that follows life’s many slices of humble pie (cue tiny brass horn).  The film is an intelligent, thoughtful comedy that explores how a person finds motivation and ambition to improve their life in the middle of many small underwhelments. It is beautifully shot as well, recalling images of longing in the long and short takes of its unremarkable subjects. The ending scene is calculated and pitch perfect. Just as you find that your cup of expectations is running over, the director empties it all over the floor. Some people will probably hate this, but I don’t. I think its a sign of artisitc maturity. This is a film that respects its audience and if you give it a chance, you might see that Mormon Cinema has far outstripped the ego of its Father and become something so much more than its original, (purportedly) halting offerings.

– Dr. Conrad Wonderbrook

Inception

As a doctor, I like the Oscars. I want to go to them some year. Hopefully footage of me will be cross-cut against footage of my ex-wife or (crossing my fingers here) ex-wives.  I also like genre films. I’m kind of a sucker for spaceships and aliens and wizards and people who fly around. I’m getting better, but it’s still part of who I am. However, historically, the Academy has not liked genre films – particularly science fiction. For some perspective, the last time a “science fiction” movie was nominated for Best Picture was when Star Wars got the nod 1977.  You can expect that the year’s tentpole sci-fi extravaganza will nab all the technical Oscars but you know they won’t get the sexier nods. That bothered me when I was a teenager but as I got older I began to see the ostensible merits for the Academy’s refusal to nominate Sci-Fi movies in the argument that no one was having outside of my high school AV room. This occurred in time from my own growing sense that Sci-Fi reprepsented my youth while quirky dramadies where everyone was unhappy but well dressed represented my emerging adulthood. Sci-Fi movies are about spectacle first and story second. Writing and characterization is always the first to go. If it isn’t lost in the translation to a wholly unreal space and time then its lost in the obscurity that techno-wharbrgll engenders or the quest to out Special Effect whatever other film is being released that summer. I don’t know whether it was the filmmakers or the critics who started giving Sci-Fi a chance but its clear that within the last ten years emerging talents have invested considerable attention, money, and talent in genre films  and that its beginning to show. Unfortunately, the attention is going to all the wrong films. Example? In 2009 when the Academy upped the number of entries for Best Picture from 5 to 10. 2008 was a hell of a good year for Sci Fi in Hollywood (Wall-E, Iron Man, Jumper (ha! fooled you – Jumper sucked)) 2009 was not. It seems that making that change, the Academy looked at its field of movies and said “to hell with it,” put out its cigarette on the nearest child/puppy/paraplegic, and nominated Avatar and District 9 for best picture. I’ll write about Avatar later when I can unclench my fists of rage. I will admit that District 9 was a great Science Fiction movie, but best picture?

Fast forward to 2010, dizzying, right? Have you seen Inception?  It is the fifth entry in Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Squinty Eyes = Gooder Acting Quintet TM” (preceded by the Aviator, Blood Diamond, the Departed, and Shutter Island where he played angry, family-less men with a penchant for strange accents and violence). I am using my psychic powers to predict that Inception will be nominated for best picture. It might even win it. Too bad that Inception is a maudlin film. If it is nominated, it will officially mark the place where Academy’s pendulum started to overcorrect. My point is that Inception is a good movie; but it is not a great movie. All the love its getting is a near-subliminal, collective unconscious effort to expiate for slights against better films in the past. I’m happy to hear all naysayers. I’m happy to have a controversial opinion; but folks this time I think HISTORY will bear me out.

My problems with the film are thusly explicated:

1) Leonardo DiCaprio and Juno (Ellen Page is too much to write) are misused/miscast in this film

Call it the Dakota Fanning-War of the Worlds Rule; anytime a character in a science fiction movie spends most of their screen time employing an unpleasant tone of voice or  awkward physical mannerisms then there’s a good chance that I am going to really hate the movie. So, to that end, no one will ever convince me that Leonardo DiCaprio is a good actor. Dress him up, spin him around, give him a weird accent – it still won’t work if he spends the majority of the film squinting his eyes and speaking like an angry chipmunk is making laps in his underdrawers. All I knew is I leaned forward in my chair every time he leaned forward in his because its Leo’s only tell. He’s ACTING guys, can’t you see? And also, why do the other people in the film spend time with his character? He’s kind of an ass. And I have some questions about his competence. We only see him try Dream-Stealing (or whatever the hell it is) twice and he bungles it both times. Is he really the best? I guess everyone in a Christopher Nolan film has a learning curve (think Batman being set on fire and falling off a building or Wolverine drowning his wife in the Prestige) – but Leo is really terrible at what he does. And Juno, I tell you what – don’t you hate it when you go into someone else’s subconscious and they warn you that if you change things around too much in there it will try to kill you but you’re like sooooo smart so you ignore them and start changing a hella lot of things around and then their subconscious DOES kill you and when you wake up you’re like damn I’m Juno and I’m angry at you because exactly what you said would happen happened! Well if you can find yourself in that sentence then you’ll probably love her character’s story arch in this film. I didn’t. I hated it. I had a girlfriend once who was a lot like Juno  is in this movie. Needless to say she kept her hands in constant orbit on her hips when she talked with me. And by talked, I mean henpecked. Is this a misogynistic comment? Probably, but its on the internet so it probably doesn’t matter.  Anything gained from her character’s presence in terms of exposition on the process of Dream-whatevering or psychoanalysis (“She’s dangerous Dom! If you don’t tell them about your X-Wife, I will!”) was offset by her incredible unlikeabilitiy.  Contrast these two to the supporting cast. Joseph Gordon Levitt, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, and the Indian guy who played the Chemist  were superb compared to the leads. Marion Cotillard remains, as usual, mysterious. I don’t get it – is the poor man’s Amelie now? Or is Amelie the poor man’s Marion Cotillard? Or, are we sure that she isn’t just Audrey Tatou?  French, what a mystery.

Compared with the supporting cast’s excellence in both execution and conception, the casting and conceptualization of the lead characters left so much to be desired that I kept asking myself – would I have liked the movie more or at least understood it more if these two characters hadn’t been played in such a distracting? Like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop, the world may never know. But wouldn’t it have been cool if Christian Bale was the one who was leading the team? Seriously.

2) The plot is not tight like unto a dish; it was  a sieve for ideas

What the bucket is going on in this movie? I mean, really; WHAT THE BUCKET IS GOING ON IN THIS MOVIE? Is there a person in the continental United States who can articulately describe the plot of this movie in, we’ll say, 40 words or less to the satisfaction of the people who saw it? Everyone who has seen this movie walks out of the theater confident that they’ve seen a movie that bears no resemblance to the one the other people saw and so on. Let me put it another way, people will be arguing endlessly on the internet about what this movie means. Was Leonardo DiCaprio performing inception on Fisher? Or was Juno part of a team performing inception on ole’ Squinty Eyes? Was it a metaphor? Hell, one of the best explanations I heard was that it’s a dream in the mind of Lukas Haas as he’s being dragged away to sleep with the fishes; the problem is that I have heard no single explanation for what was occurring between credits that satisfies me. This is not to say that I am picky, it just means I am confused. Sometimes I like a little mystery, I am fine with a story that works like a strung up knot. In the case of Inception, every time I get to the end of the knot which represents the story itself I feel like I end up with a banana in my hands instead of string. To quote Stephen Robinson, “it does not compute.”   It may be an issue of pride, but I can’t like a story if I can’t understand it. And, despite their grandstanding, I haven’t met anyone else who has convinced me that they understand it either. See this doodle noggin (http://hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2010-07-18.shtml) for an example of what I mean.

 3) Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter

William of Occam once said that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.” We call this “Occam’s Razor” which is generally construed as meaning that the “simplest explanation is the best.” But, according to wikipedia “[simplest] is really referring to the theory with the fewest new assumptions.” I gave Inception a B+ and then a B- because I really, really wanted to like it. I think that Arthur’s fight in the hotel hallway will become a pillar in the hallway of great cinematic moments. The movie has many clever ideas and hints at something that Christopher Nolan was trying to communicate but that I could not understand. Maybe I was distracted by the acting and the complexity of the plot. Maybe I’m just not that bright. The only saving grace that I find for this movie is in the thought that, at least in terms of what a movie is and how it figures in the architecture of the mind, Christopher Nolan might be trying to say something entirely unexpected.  When my mother told me that she didn’t like the movie because it reminded her of “all those video games you guys are always playing” I thought about my old pal Willy Shakespeare and A Midsummer’s Night Dream. In that play, a character named Puck says in reference to the play itself (which, by the way – is a lot better than Inception – which, come to think of it, might make a better play than movie):

“f we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.””

The idea of any fictive story being “all a dream” is at least as old as a Midsummer’s Night Dream – but it’s probably older. And when I re-read Puck’s words it occurs to me that maybe Christopher Nolan is saying that a movie is not dissimilar from a dream. A movie is full of images and our expectations & interpretations, it allows us to inhabit a world which is unreal, and once there to experience the unreal. I wondered, considering that this explanation is the simplest of all the ones I have heard so far, if, in the long and short of things Nolan and his crew of actors and make-up people and camera-men, executives, and caterers were the ones who were performing an inception on the audience.  We are all dreaming together. They succeeded in implanting an idea (“like a virus!”) into my head and it stayed there despite the fact that it didn’t make much sense and any flaw or failing in the story can be explained by the fact that it was just a dream, kind of. I could be wrong but again I digress. In final analysis, I realize that my grade goes against the grain. Many people loved this film and many more will see it. My money is on the film getting the big awards but I’m disappointed that it will earn them for its inscrutable nature and not for its actual merit.

– Dr. Conrad Wonderbrook

Quoth the Screaming Skull: “Nevermore”

And one need not be derivative to tell a classic story

Ashley Thorpe’s horror short, The Screaming Skull, aired Friday night at the Salt Lake Film Festival. Part of Thorpe’s “Penny Dreadful Shorts” series, in which he retells classic British folk-horror tales, this film is ten minutes of incredibly challenging movie-watching that ultimately doesn’t quite pay off.

Based on a folk tale popularized in a turn-of-the-20th-century short story, Skull is shot digitally and edited into stop-motion animation with a heavily saturated look. The sound effects are intentionally harsh and omnipresent, and the technical elements combine to generate an astoundingly deep sense of dread. If that were the extent of its intent, I’d call it a rousing success. Sadly, there is a narrative peeking its way around the corners of the technical abstraction, and it’s a pretty dumb one.

It’s easy to call a folk tale derivative, because by definition, folk tales have been told enough to have wormed their way into the collective understanding. Even with that caveat, the story of an object (in this case, a skull) of which a character can’t rid himself, no matter how hard he tries, has been told a thousand times. Nor is it novel to associate the returning object with the haunting memories of war and family tragedy. If Thorpe thinks he’s the first person to create a short work in which a character is haunted by an idea at the fringe of his consciousness that seems to grow stronger the more he tries to push it aside, I believe a Mr. Edgar Allen Poe would have something to say about that.

Still, this short is technically interesting, and if you’re into feeling really uncomfortable for ten minutes, you should check it out. Watch the trailer below or download the short in its entirety from Carrion Films.

45365 is a Midwestern Fantasia

45365, a critically acclaimed documentary by Bill and Turner Ross, is currently tearing up the festival circuit. A meandering tone poem lovingly addressed to Ross Brothers’ Ohio hometown, Sydney, the film won best documentary at SXSW and the Truer than Fiction award at the Spirits, among other impressive accolades. 45365 made a quick stop at the Salt Lake City Film Festival on Friday night and I had the pleasure of checking it out (paired with the previously reviewed Out of a Forest).

“45365” is, of course, the postal code of Sydney, Ohio, tbe small town through which the audience is ushered in the so-titled film. The camera takes us from life to life, like a hummingbird, stopping lightly to drink from a character before moving effortlessly to the next subject. The audience isn’t permitted to get very far beneath the surface of any of the film’s subjects, and I’m not sure if that’s a strength or a weakness. On one hand, some of these people are fascinating and endearing, and appear to deserve more than a cursory glimpse. On the other hand, the star of this movie is the town as a whole. The Ross Brothers want us to see it as a unified organism, a complex machine with interesting, though largely interchangeable parts.

One particularly handsome resident of Sydney, Ohio

The camera work in 45365 is gorgeous. Shot in high-definition, and painstakingly framed, most of the shots are highly evocative and moving, linked and juxtaposed together into something approaching coherence. This film is extraordinarily successful when it remains in the visual realm–like a sort of microcosmic Baraka—and doesn’t intrude too deeply into the lives of the people it portrays. One particular sequence in which a frantic, Friday night football scene cuts quickly to a shot of the same field, now silent and snow-covered, communicated mood and idea with an efficiency that simply can’t be translated into the spoken or written word.

The film struggles, however, when it starts to flirt with narrative intent, examining elements of conflict in its subjects’ lives with a startling shallowness. Really, the “stories” the movie tells are either boring (a local judge runs for re-election), inconsequential (a teenager deals with typical teenage relationship problems), or dangerously close to exploitative (various family spats and legal woes of the lower-class). The result is a movie that clocks in at only 90 minutes, but feels quite a bit longer, and could easily stand to shed ten or fifteen of its least successful minutes.

Despite its weaknesses, I liked 45365. In fact, I’m probably overstating my criticisms. As a whole, 45365 is a lovingly-shot homage to the communities that molded and shaped who we all have become. As a debut, it shows startling promise, and I can’t wait to see what part of the world the Ross Brothers decide to show me next.

Out of a Forest

I went last night to the Salt Lake City Film Festival. Turnout was weak and the festival organization seemed haphazard at best, but the films featured were impressive–a real testament to Salt Lake’s burgeoning film culture. The first film we were treated to was a Danish short by Tobias Gundorff Boesen called Out of a Forest. It’s a moody, stop-motion animated piece, set to “Slow Show,” by The National. The animation is gorgeous, and the song is one of my favorites. The narrative structure, however, seemed less than fully realized, more like a clever joke than a true story. That said, the visuals are more than enough to carry the five-minute film, and Out of a Forest is, if not an excellent movie, a pretty damn good music video.