Wednesday, August 6, 2008
I couldn’t persuade any of my friends to come out to see My Winnipeg at the Tinseltown on a Wednesday night, so I saw by myself, in a theatre occupied by just me and a couple few rows behind me. It’s okay, though — if ever there was a movie meant to wash over you alone in the dark of an empty theatre, it’s this one. I don’t know if it’s the kind of movie I would go around recommending to people, but I’m pretty damn glad I saw it.
My Winnipeg is a dreamlike pseudo-documentary by Winnipeg’s own Guy Maddin, who narrates in a kind of prairie-beatnik drawl tinged with regret and dry humour. Using a pastiche of silent and modern film techniques, he tells real and imagined stories about a forgotten city of dark and cold, with lakes full of frozen horses and underground rivers feeding public swimming pools. Maddin’s Winnipeg is a land of sleepwalkers and corrupt male beauty pageants and demolished hockey stadiums. In the film’s funniest, cleverest conceit, he hires actors to portray his family in re-enactments of scenes from his childhood, complete with the exhumed corpse of his father under the living room rug.
I loved My Winnipeg. I’m sure no small part of this comes from, you know, actually being born there, and being raised on the Canadian prairie. Not to mention I’m a fan of both the pure cinema of the silent era and DIY indie-cinema, which seem to serve as the jumping-off points for Maddin’s own “anti-progressivist” style. And I also love the imaginative potential of the banal (something shared with Spaced, Flight of the Conchords and Twitch City). But while I enjoyed movies like Saddest Music in the World and Careful quite a bit, I sometimes found Maddin’s visual style more appealing than his storytelling. Here, though, Maddin’s deadpan visual nostalgia and tongue-in-cheek myth-making come together to make something I found pretty awesome, something that tapped into the latent flatland whistfulness that has been rolling around in the corner of my skull since I left the prairies.
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My Kid Could Paint That is a documentary about the career of 4-year-old painter Marla Olmstead, who was producing powerful abstract paintings in Binghampton, NY in 2005. The lure of a child painting prodigy was irresistible to the media and the New York art scene, and Marla’s paintings started selling for thousands — and then tens of thousands — of dollars. However, it took 60 Minutes to ask the questions that any reasonable person should have asked, namely has anyone other than her artist father ever actually seen Marla produce the paintings? The answer is “no”, and when attempts to film Marla at work prove less than satisfactory, it all starts to unfold. The documentary started filming before the debunking, and we get an immediate look into the unfolding of the scandal. And while the filmmakers are at first inclined to give these two likeable, unassuming parents the benefit of the doubt, that gets harder and harder to do as the difference between Marla’s on-camera and off-camera paintings becomes more apparent with each attempt.
Unfortunately, that immediate, personal story is, for the most part, as deep as the documentary goes. Which is really too bad, because it really raises a lot of interesting questions about the world of modern art.
My dad is an amateur painter, and growing up I was always surrounded by his paintings and art books. So while I’m not remotely a sophisticated or knowledgeable appreciator of modern art, I know enough to know that modern art isn’t a scam. I probably couldn’t tell a Rothko from a decent imitation, but that doesn’t mean that when I saw No. 5/No. 22 it didn’t have a big impact on me. And so, I think that My Kid Could Paint That does not show that modern art is a scam. It shows that the modern art world — the place where art meets marketing, vanity and greed — is the scam. Or, to quote Roger Ebert: “your kid couldn’t paint that.”
“Marla’s” paintings are beautiful, but there are a lot of pleasing paintings in the world. If they had been done by a 44-year-old, they would be more likely to be lining the walls of a moderately upscale coffee shop than a Manhattan art gallery. But because there is a story — and an easily digestible and imminently repeatable one — attached, the merits of the work are outweighed by its marketability. It’s not a case of the emperor having no clothes, though. There’s clearly some heroic self-delusion going on, as Marla’s parents and the sellers and collectors of her paintings struggle to convince each other — and themselves — that no, they are the victims and the media has been twisting the facts. The culmination of which is ( http://modernsmile.com/products/whitening-toothpaste/ SPOILER) Marla’s re-emergence in the art world at age 6, complete with a fresh cycle of uncritical news reports and higher price tags on her work than before.
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I had big plans to see several of the films in the Pacific Cinemateque series of 1960s Japanese genre films over the long weekend (happy BC Day!), but laziness and a high neighbourhood Walk Score conspired to keep me around Main Street, which I am still enthusiastically exploring. Today, for instance, I walked up to the summit of Queen Elizabeth park to finally see the view (it’s spectacular), and out second-hand shopping with Meghan yesterday, we saw a fantastic vintage 1970s rug that I might go back and pick up.
Also, rumour had been that A Colt is my Passport, a cult Japanese ganster flick, might be the best of the series, and… to be honest, it’s fun, but really, it’s mostly just an above-average B-movie starring chipmunk-cheeked tough guy Jo Shishido. I’ve seen Shishido in Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill from the same year, but seeing him again in this one mostly reminded me that I wanted to go back and see more Seijun Suzuki movies. Which is fair enough, I think — the movies in the series seem mostly intended for people who have already discovered Suzuki and want to see what else is going on in 1960s Japanese gangster flicks. While I would kind of liked to have seen more of the films in the series, it seemed more interesting historically than artistically. I’m just beginning with Suzuki — no need to move onto advanced studies just yet.
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Two minor documentaries from two master directors, with two very different approaches. John Landis’ Slasher is very much in the cinéma verite style — in fact, it’s really not much of a step from the classic 1969 film Salesman. Like that doc, this is concerned with the life of a travelling salesman, in this case, a master used-car salesman, “The Slasher”, who travels around the US trying to sell cars the regular dealers can’t clear off the lot. It’s not quite verité — there are some talking-head interviews and a little hamming for the camera — but for the most part, Landis takes a fly-on-the-wall approach and shows us the ins and outs of a three-day lot-clearing sale in economically depressed Memphis. I actually really dig these kinds of documentaries — the details of people who have jobs I never knew existed — and The Slasher is truly a character. Fast-talking, hard-drinking, charming and vaguely sleazy: once you see him, you can instantly see that the only possibly job in the world for him is elite used-car-sale hitman.
Werner Herzog, on the other hand, has no time for cinéma verite — in his Minnesota Declaration he states that “cinema verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones.” And he’s quite happy to put his money where his mouth is, in one brilliant documentary after another. In Encounters at the End of the World, after stating to his funding agency that he “would not be making another penguin movie” and getting the okay, Herzog goes to Antarctica to talk to the scientists, adventurers, and other weirdos who have found themselves at the end of the world. What follows are interviews with colourful characters who run the gamut from a cheerful Aztec plumber to a solitary, taciturn penguin researcher, and some stunning footage of Antarctica — from the beauty of the waters under the Ross ice shelf, to the mining-town ugliness of McMurdo Station, to the long shot of a lone disoriented penguin marching determinedly to certain death, which probably sums up in 30 seconds everything you need to know about how Herzog feels about “the penguin movie”.
I really enjoyed both of these docs, but there is something of a “minor project” feeling to both of them. Slasher has clear focus, but the whole fly-on-the-wall approach lacks drama, even when the slasher is flailing around, trying to talk up sales in a deserted car lot. Encounters is probably the more successful film, but it lacks the clear point of view of my favourite Herzog films, like Grizzly Man, and the episodic structure instead comes across a bit like “travels with Werner”. Which is not a bad thing — you couldn’t ask for a more interesting travel companion than Werner Herzog.
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Val Kilmer has a reputation for being difficult to work with, but it’s clear from this, his very first movie, that he has always been a major talent — I really don’t think many actors could anchor a comedy this zany, and still come across as anything other than a cartoon. Kilmer is basically Elvis as he appeared in his movies, though maybe that would be Elvis if he were one of the Beach Boys and lived in the 1980s. He visits an East Germany that looks more like Nazi Germany and is, inexplicably, under attack by the French resistance. Oh, and there’s backward-talking Peter Cushing and cows with boots and a long parody of The Blue Lagoon that has, shall we say, “dated poorly”. But for each misfire, there are a couple of brilliant, hilarious gags — in fact, this is probably my favourite of all the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movies. It’s smarter than the Naked Gun movies, more anarchic than Airplane, and smarter and more anarchic than anything else they’ve done.
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