Tribeca Film Festival (At Home) Days 8 and 9: Creation Stories, Primera, and God's Waiting Room

Day 8: Creation Stories

  

Creation Stories is about Glaswegian record mogul, Alan McGee, loosely based on his autobiography, Creation Stories describing his life of being inspired by music, making great records and partying. I didn't know anything about McGee when I chose the movie, but I did know a lot of the bands he produced (Jesus and Marychain, My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Fanclub, Primal Scream, Oasis) and was curious to see what kind of screenplay Irvine Welsh would write. The film is a well-paced rock and roll experience that takes considerable liberties with the source material. I liked it a lot, despite the absence of closed-captions on the Tribeca app, which left me and my husband to make our best guesses at some of the dialog. There were a lot of  wonderful scenes in this movie. We see McGee lose his teenaged mind over the Sex Pistols' first TV appearance, the night of his near death from a cocaine overdose (which actually happened during an Oasis tour, and not as depicted in the movie), a more pleasant experience taking ecstasy at his first night of acid house that migrates to a small  breakfast joint. This clip from when the bailiffs come to the studio to collect the rent captures the energy of the film.  I hope this one comes out in theaters - all that sound and color is worth a big screen. 

Day 9: Primera and God's Waiting Room 

The "Primera" in the title of Vee Bravo's documentary about the 2019-2020 Chilean protest movement refers to the "Primera Linea" the front line of militant protestors who march in front to defend the larger mass demonstrations from the aggressive police. This documentary is a great exploration of movement strategy and police repression, as it follows the lives of a handful of members of the Primera Linea who explain how they first got involved in the movement and how it affected their lives afterward. It contextualizes and shows the evolution of a movement from an initial protest against a metro fare-hike to a broad movement to re-write the Chilean constitution. The film may be a bit too long; it has some slow sections, but it is very informative, showing many different types of protest within the larger movement, including a memorable feminist demo when women chant (in Spanish, but according to subtitles) "Bitch! Whore! But I'll Never Be a Cop!"  I'd recommend it to activist groups and for classrooms and university screenings. It reminds me a bit of the Oscar-nominated short documentary, Do Not Split in its structure, but it is longer, creating space for more detailed representation of individual people's daily lives, aside from their participation in street demonstrations. The film includes one character who lost his eye during the protests, and through him we learn about this police tactic in Chile - a tactic that became common in Hong Kong in 2019 and in the United States during the summer 2020 uprising. 

For whatever reason, I departed from my plan and decided to watch the movie God's Waiting Room which did achieve the director's goal of showing both the beauty and "grime" of Florida; I felt sweaty just watching. The film features strong performances from Nisalda Gonzalez, well-chosen for the role of  Rosie, the young singer-songwriter, since she is a singer-songwriter herself, and from the winner of Tribeca's best-actor award, Matthew Leone, who plays the charming drug-dealer, Jules. (Romeo and Juliet, anyone?) I agree with other reviewers who thought that the movie could have worked well if it had stuck to the story of the couple, Rosie's two girlfriends, and her father, rather than adding the element of the recently paroled murderer. Instead, the writer/director literally inserts himself into his own composition like a wrecking ball, playing the parolee and taking the expression "Kill your darlings" far too literally.  Until the ending, this was a nice, hazy story of adolescent boredom, burgeoning sexuality and confusion, and I wish Riggs had figured out a different way to provide closure that would have done justice to the characters. 

  The film was pleasantly and effortlessly bilingual and multicultural, as in almost every scene, we see white working class, African American and Caribbean, and Latinx characters from a variety of backgrounds living, partying and working together, flowing from English to Spanish and back. There were many narrative threads left hanging that he could have picked up and taken to a more meaningful conclusion driven by the conflicts among the central characters, even if it wound up just as (SPOILER ALERT!) tragic for the star-crossed lovers. What happens after you find out that one of your best friends is sleeping with the guy you're dating after she tells you he is a "gross little pizza rat from New York" that you should avoid? What if the attractive bad boy could learn something from Rosie's tough, but caring father? What about the random dude that Rosie wakes up next to after a party?  What about Jules' relationship with his mother, who we see in one scene, working in a bar and getting hassled? Beyond just showing a mix of people of different ethnicities, the movie could have said something deeper about the tensions that might be part of that cultural mix.  We learn that Jules is Puerto Rican and Italian-American, I would guess that Rosie is meant to be Cuban or Mexican, though that wasn't made explicit. Her friends are white and African-American or Afro-Caribbean (not specified). Jules's friends are also white and Black. The girls party with some white skateboarders. There was more than enough drama with the existing mix of characters and events to take this movie somewhere more interesting. Instead, as Andrew Bundy puts in his review at the Playlist,the ending was unbelievably unsatisfying.

Tribeca Film Fest 2021: Day 7 - One Tense Night, or "What IS the best thing young people can do?"

 I wanted to watch No Running because it was one of the few science fiction films in the festival this year, and because of its focus on racial justice, and then, after watching it I decided to pick a second thriller to keep the mood going, and chose the rowing drama, Novice because it was getting a lot of good buzz from critics. I thought both movies were entertaining, if flawed. While the tension in the first film comes from the evil in other people, the second film is a psychological study of the horror people can inflict upon themslves. Before watching them, the comparisons I saw were to the Vast of Night and Black Swan. 

No Running is the story of Black high school student, Jaylen Brown, who has recently moved with his family to an almost all-white town along a nameless river.  It's a mix of social commentary on racism and a suspensful tale of UFO abduction. As the pitch might go in the movie the Player, "Think the Vast of Night meets Get Out. There were some great charming moments and tight suspense sequences in this movie, but it didn't have the science fiction crunchiness of UFO-focused Vast of Night nor the more subtle and sharp analysis of race of Get Out or Lovecraft Country.  Instead of showing us the everyday racism of seeming white liberals, as Get Out did,  or the moore obvious white racism of the Jim Crow era like Lovecraft Country, No Running, though set in the present day, provides us with old-fashioned evil white sheriffs and an unbelievable classroom in which students watch a 50s-era black-and-white film to learn about the history of Reconstruction. It makes it too easy for white audiences to distance themselves from the "bad" characters in the film and, since this town is shown to be almost entirely white, also makes it possible to read the town as a uniquely racist backwater rather than part of a larger, racist U.S. culture. My other critique of this film  (SPOILER ALERT) is that it doesn't do much with the aliens who seem to periodically abduct people from the town.  Are they the saviors of characters from the wicked acts of the evil sheriffs? and if so, then why abduct Jaylen's girlfriend Amira, who unlike other abducted characters, was not in any danger at the time of her abduction? Do the evil sheriffs know about them? And if so, what do they know and why? The scenes with Jaylen and the weird old UFO hunter were great, but there could have been more of them , and they could have led somewhere more interesting. These were hanging plot threads that made the movie less exciting. 

That said, it was nice to see Rutina Wesley (best known as Tara from True Blood) again, playing Jaylen's mother. In fact all the performances in this film were excellent, from Skylan Brooks as the likeable Jaylen, to his obnoxious and more socially savvy little sister, Simone,  played by Diamond White, and even the weird old, UFO-hunting old guy, an actor whose name I can't find. Most of the tension in this film comes from the police hunt for Jaylen and his family's reactions, in scenes that most effectively evoke modern-day racism in criminal justice. 

Against Grit: The Novice 

While also a tense ride, The Novice is all about the horrors that the main character, despite being surrounded by supportive friends and having plenty of privilege, brings upon herself. I had a room-mate who rowed crew in college, so the daily 4:30 am wake-ups before practice took me back to those days, and much of the other elements in this movie rang true to the elite New England college experience. It's not surprising to learn that the film is based on the filmmaker's own experience on a crew team; the interactions between the other rowers are letter-perfect, even when they're happening in the background.   As the critics have said, the performance from the lead actor in this film, Isabelle Fuhrman, is very good as the over-achiever, Alex Dall. Despite not liking her character, I was compelled to keep watching to understand the source of her driven behavior.  Like many of the characters, I found that just watching her was wearing me out - I just wanted her to take a break! What I liked best about this movie was that it flipped the common praise for the grit narrative of today on its head, along with the tropes of the heroic sports genre in general. Consider it the anti-Rudy, where working as hard as possible actually doesn't pay off.  Some of this also relates to the nature of crew as a team sport, where Alex's hyper-individualism is often the real cause of her shortcomings. To that extent, the film may replicate another narrative about competitive sports, where characters are supposed to learn that "there is no 'I' in team." However, this film's not-so-heart-warming tone gives that point a deeper meaning.

Shortly after watching the film, I finally came across the infamous Twitter thread of that professional advising young people to work weekends early in their careers.That woman needs to watch this movie. Like the real-life woman in the thread, Alex Dall thinks hard work is its own reward, but as this film suggests, working until you make yourself sick  actually keeps you from enjoying your life.  Beyond imposing wear and tear on her own body, Dall's ruthless competitiveness and overwork alienate her from other people. As one character tells her at the end, she offered her friendship to Dall, whose behavior on the team becomes a betrayal.  In this case, getting along with others is not a sign of bland conformity, and striving against the "rest" isn't the sign of being a misunderstood and lonely genuis  - it just makes you an asshole. Particularly as it contrasts Alex with Jamie, the student who needs to get on the varsity team to get an athletic scholarship to stay in school, the movie is against rate-busters everywhere. Novice is a perfect film for the post-neoliberal era. 

Tribeca Film Festival Day 6: All My Friends Hate Me

 My adrenaline was very high by the end of All My Friends Hate Me, a film marketed as comedy/horror, which to me suggests something like An American Werewolf in London. This movie is not that! I definitely experienced it as more (psychological) horror than comedy, though I started expecting something truly terrible was going to happen by about 30 minutes in.  I enjoyed the movie, though I think it's the sort of thing that might be more fun in a theater than at home on the couch. I barely recognized the movie I saw when I read this review describing it as a hilarious comedy, and wondered if it has to do with my age, or with the fact that I'm from the US and missed the very British in-jokes, or whether I had to have the right expectations based on knowing the previous work of the film-makers, the team known as Totally Tom. Or, perhaps this movie is some sort of horror/comedy Rorschach test. 

You are probably more likely to find it escalatingly creepy and alarming if you identify with Pete, and more likely to find it escalatingly funny if you can somehow manage being in on the joke from the beginning. I don't know how attitudes about class and snobbery might also affect one's viewing of the film, but I found the group of friends both clueless and insufferable, and that may explain why my experience was closer to the escalating sense of paranoia described in this review from Cineuropa. Looking back at the contrast between the cruelty of many of the jokes, from those attributed to Pete in his own past, or those jokes they play on him during the party weekend, the film can be read as critical comment on comedy itself akin to Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, especially considering the film's final line. Of course, the movie could be more on the side of cruel humor than commenting on it, there's always that possibility. We're all living in the trolls' world now.  

Tribeca Film Festival (at Home) 2021 - the First Four Days

I used to go to the Tribeca Film Festival every year when I lived in New York City, especially because my workplace was in Tribeca, and I learned that I could buy individual tickets to films. Why not, right? I learned quickly that it was much too hard to get into the big headliners, which would come out in theaters anyway. In the early 00s, it made sense to see the smaller films that might never get major distribution. The most memorable film I saw in those early years was the 2003 documentary about the origins of the song "Uska Dara" (as I knew it in the Eartha Kitt version)  Whose is this Song? which is now available to buy on video if I really wanted to see it again. 

 For me, films are now both easier and more difficult to see. The huge amount of streaming content and the straight-to-DVD market means I will probably be able to see almost any TFF film currently running - eventually.  On the other hand, I don't go to the movies as much as I used to because I don't live in NYC where there were so many arthouse cinemas to choose from. At some point, trying to strategize by watching films that I don't think will get distribution backfires, because sometimes the reason films don't get distribution is because they're just not that good. That said, with the example of Whose is this Song? in mind, I will make an effort to see some of the more intriguing, less commercial foreign language films  before the streaming festival ends. Some of those films include the documentary about the 2019 protests in Chile, Primera  the experimental narrative feature Roaring Twenties, the Dominican/Haitian documentary Stateless and the Egyptian feature film, Souad. 

I've been trying to get the most out of my streaming pass by watching a lot of movies. Here's what I've seen so far.

Day 1: June 9: Shorts 

While the in-person festival was doing their big premiers and galas, the only available films to stream online were shorts. I watched Almost a Year, Cherry Lemonade, and Enough. I'd recommend all three of these, though Almost a Year was probably the most accessible and well put-together as a short film. Enough is like a long music video, but very thought-provoking. here it is on Youtube. 

Day 2: June 10: See For Me

The first and only feature film available for the Tribeca at Home audience was the Canadian thriller, See for Me. This was quite a good thriller. Sure, it's somewhat predictable, since it's part of a general "heist" genre, but the plotting is believably character-driven, and the characters are different from the types you often see in films in this genre. The central character, a recently blinded professional athlete, is a petulant teen, and her ex-military helper on the assistance-for-the-blind phone app "See for Me" are both completely believable, as is their sometimes failed communication. 

Day 3: June 11:Mark, Mary and Some Other People and 7 Days

This was my rom-com day. These movies both had conventional rom-com elements and were also totally enjoyable films with interesting things to say about love and identity. Mark, Mary and Some Other People is a fun, smart, sexy movie about a young couple who decide to try an open marriage and all the complication that ensues. It's very "of the moment" while also having a bit of a self-conscious 70s throwback vibe, including brief appearances from the characters' wild aunt, who they go to for advice  based on her experiences of "swinging" - played by Leah Thompson.   7 Days about a young Indian-American couple who go on a date arranged by their mothers and are then locked down together in the first days of the Covid-19 pandemic, may be a bit more conventional for the genre, as an odd couple/opposites attract story. However, it was totally charming and has some interesting depth beyond the reflection on arranged marriage. To me, the most interesting element of the story was that both the characters cheat themselves out of what they really want even though they have the opposite response to their parents' wish for them to maintain Indian cultural traditions. One adheres to the most conservative rules and the other rebels against everything, and neither one is able to express who they really are as a result.  

Day 4: June 12: Poser & The Kids 

Poser is a thriller that is mostly an excuse for a showcase of interesting bands in the Columbus, OH indie music scene. The story focuses on a shy young woman who's making a podcast about local bands and her interviews and efforts to belong in a scene that includes performancs by Damn the Witch Siren and lead singer Bobbi Kitten playing herself.  People who have been involved in local music scenes will find a lot in this movie that resonates with their experiences, including those people who hang around on the borders of the scene and may seem a little "off." The script is a bit predictable, but the representation of a music scene is fun. 

The Kids is an in-depth return to the experiences of the non-professional actors, mostly NYC skateboarders, who starred in the 1995 Larry Clark and Harmony Korine fiction film, Kids. This film is the final product of an effort by one of those kids now in his 40s, Hamilton Harris, who wound up working with Austrailian director, Eddie Martin to finally get the movie made. Learning more about the lives of the skateboard crew at the center of the film Kids makes that original film appear even worse in retrospect. While many critics hailed the film's "gritty realism" and described it as a "quasi-documentary," it was more the case as Henry Giroux wrote at the time that the film potrayed the group in a historical, cultural and political vaccuum, as a group of aimless and nihilistic creeps. This film restores the integrity and intelligence of the people it was ostensibly about, such as the girls who hung around in the scene but refused to do the film because of how sexist the script was. This film reveals all the complexity of the world that the movie Kids failed to see. As one twitter user remarked, the film is upsetting and enraging, but I'd argue, worth seeing. Hamilton Harris is a fascinating person in his own right, and his analysis of the period is what drives most of the film.  

June 13: All the Streets are Silent, Claydream and No Man of God 

My first three movie day. I started in the morning with a second documentary about the NYC 1990s skating crew, All the Streets are Silent which was a Tribeca feature from 2020. This is a much glossier representation of the same skateboarding crew, with a focus on the cultural blending of hip-hop, skateboarding, and streetwear in NYC in the 1990s. There's much less here about the lives of the individual scene members, but a lot of cool history of Club Mars (which I was lucky enough to go to when it first opened in 1988) and the Stretch and Bobbito show. 

from the Columbia college radio station and the history of brands Zoo York and Supreme. If you're into skateboarding or 1990s hip-hop, it's a must-see. 

Tribeca's promo refers to Claydream as warm-hearted, and I think that's a great description of the film. It tells the story of claymation animator Will Vinton from his beginnings as a hippie stop-motion filmmaker to his dream of becoming the next Walt Disney, including his great successes with the California Raisins and his ambitious, commercial flop, claymation feature about Mark Twain. 

. The movie shows Vinton's flaws as well as his genius, and will give you another reason to hate Phil Knight of Nike if the sweatshops weren't enough. 

I was hesitant to watch No Man of God because it's a movie about Ted Bundy, and I'm very skeptical of most of those, and because it's going to be released in theaters in August, thus breaking my old rule of avoiding "big" movies at Film festivals.  Luke Kirby is excellent as Ted Bundy, but the overall vibe of the film was like the TV series Mindhunter, except not quite as good. It sees like it was made for people who have already consumed a lot of media about Bundy because it doesn't explain much about his crimes, and makes oblique references to Anne Rule and others who have written about him. My general sense is that there were some interesting ideas here but they didn't quite get fully realized in this movie. 

Bout of Books 31: Wrap-Up

 I did pretty well during this bout of books. I was reading for research, with a little of fiction reading in the morning...as a treat. 

During the week, I finished Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future by reading about 50 pages a day. 

I also finished the much-hyped Lockdown by Peter May, during bouts of insomnia, and have to say it was just awful. The representation of the lockdown itself was OK, but the rest of the story was unbelievable. Without revealing too much *SPOILER ALERT*  here's a question that you will probably ask if you get more than halfway through: "could a person really walk around doing evil villainous stuff if they had been so badly burned that they were literally missing all of their skin?" 

I listened to 12 hours or so of the audio version of Ann and John Tusa's The Nuremberg Trial. I highly recommend this audiobook. It's already a good narrative history of the trial, and Cosham is a really good narrator for it. 

I finished Robert Paxton's excellent book on Vichy France, most of a fascinating edited collection on the U.S. relationship with Charles de Gaulle, and got about 80 pages into a book on the history of Denazification in Germany by Perry Biddiscombe.  I'm finding the Biddiscombe book annoying, unfortunately. It lacks adequate citations and is written from an anti-left point of view.  Despite that, it's a relatively recent synthesis of existing scholarship, so it's useful for getting an overall sense of where the field is on this subject right now. I've ordered a bunch of other books from the library based on reading it. I also started reading an ethnographic study of contemporary Italian fascists by MIT professor, Alessandro Orsini. It's one of those rare academic "page-turners," that provides some interesting insights into the worldviews of European fascists today. Not surprisingly, anti-immigrant racism is the dominant platform.   

Overall, I'd say it was a good week of reading, but I didn't keep track of how many pages I read. 

Bout of Books 31 - Day Five Update

 It's already day five! Well - that went fast. Today I'm reading a biography of Gaetano Salvemini, an Italian socialist who was central to anti-fascist politics in the U.S. starting when he arrived from Europe in 1927. So far this year, I've seen a lot about Salvemini:  I've read his first book on Italian fascism, and have come across stories about him in other books on Italian Anti-fascism as well as newspapers from the 1920s, but I still haven't read this biography, which is pretty fascinating. He was one of the early socialist intellectuals in Italy, and was popular with Gramsci and other left socialists in the 1910s prior to the founding of the Italian Communist Party after the Bolshevik Revolution.  He's relevant to multiple chapters of my current book project, because of his role both in agitation against fascism in the 1920s-1930s and his efforts in the post-war era when he returned to Italy.

On day four, I listened to more of the audiobook of the Tusa's Nuremberg trials book, read a little bit of Biddiscombe's book on DeNazification, and finished up reading relevant chapters on the relationship between the United States and Charles De Gaulle, including an article by Ronald Steel about Walter Lippman's promotion of De Gaulle's ideas through his newspaper column in the early 40s.  

On day three, I read the first half of the De Gaulle book, and listened to the Tusas on Nuremberg, but I was too distracted by the ongoing disastrous events in Israel and Palestine and spent too much time reading news. 

Each day, I started out with about 40 -50 pages in Kim Stanely Robinson's Ministry for the Future, so I'm now just a little over 100 pages from finishing that tome. It continues to be good, though some of the chapters with long lists of things are a little bit of a slog. In those wee hours of the night when I can't sleep, I've been reading Peter May's Lockdown, which I'd bought as a cheap ebook when it became a brief sensation for presciently setting a mystery in quarantined London during a bird flu pandemic.  The pandemic setting is fairly good, but the mystery itself is absurd. Not up to the level of May's Lewis novels at all, but at least I'm close to done with it. 

Overall, I'd say that I've read a couple hundred pages over the last few days and listened to four hours of the audiobook. I'm hoping to read more over the weekend. 

For today's listening to go with the reading, here's some traditional Pizzica music from Southern Italy, the region where Salvemini grew up, and which he (and his biographer) see as a crucial element in his character and political views. It was unusual for someone to become a professor in Florence with with what Killinger describes as Salvemini's "peasant mannerisms" and "rough hewn ways." 

Bout of Books 31 - Day 2 update

I've been reading every day for work, so I'm getting a fair amount of reading done. I finished reading Robert Paxton's classic work, Vichy France: Old Guard New Order this afternoon. I've been working with a pomodoro timer this week to reduce my social media time-wasting and "self-interruption."  in general. I think it's helping.   After finishing the Vichy book, I started another Paxton book. This one is an edited collection co-edited with Nicholas Wahl, called De Gaulle and the United States: A Centennial Reappraisal. I'm about 80 pages in, and I'm learning a lot. This book is quite interesting in its structure, because it follows a French conference model that combines presentations from professional historians with presentations by people who participated in the events, and gives both historians and participants opportunities to correct each other's recollections or work. The content of both books is also very good. Paxton was already one of my favorite historians, based on his short book The Anatomy of Fascism, but his book on the Vichy government is probably what made his reputation as a scholar. Paxton was the first historian to use German records to analyze Vichy - so his book, first published in 1972 completely overturned a lot of the more apolegtic legends about the collaborationist government that had been published up to that point.  

   Before reading these two books,. I didn't know that much about either the Vichy government or the U.S. relationship with De Gaulle and the Free French, but let's just say it wasn't really like what you see in Casablanca, though the American public was more favorable to De Gaulle than most of the U.S. government, or even a lot of the French population of the U.S., which like the French population, generally supported Petain, at least in the beginning.  The U.S. also maintained positive relations with the Vichy government even after entering the war in 1941. People in the State department saw De Gaulle as a "dictator in the making" and/or a "creature of the British." At one point, U.S. Secretary of State, Cordell Hull referred to US citizens' support for De Gaulle as "softheaded idealism." I'm learning now how the tide finally turned to get the U.S to support De Gaulle, and it seems related to the growing understanding that the French Resistance backed him.  

    I'm also listening to the audiobook of Anne and John Tusa's book on the Nuremberg Trials, which is beautifully read by Ralph Cosham. I've never listened to a book that was part of an academic project before - but this one is already meant for popular audiences. I found a used hard copy that I can use to review details, and meanwhile, I can feel like I'm working on my project when I'm exercising and doing chores.

    My other book this week is my slow morning reading of Kim Stanely Robinson's Ministry for the Future which is our local SF bookclub pick for this month. I'm a little more than halfway through it and am finding it to be the best Science Fiction book I've read in a long time. It's a near-future book about various efforts to address already catastrophic impacts of climate change. 

 So for today, I'd say I read about 210 pages, and I'll probably read another 40 or so before the day is over. And since this blog is for reading and listening, here's a song to go with today's reading: