Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a couple of really cool little films that hopefully you'll be able to catch at a venue near you that occasionally plays docs, foreign films, or smaller works that are just too damn good for the multiplex, dammit. Enjoy...
OBJECTIFIED
Believe it or not, the two most anticipated documentaries at SXSW this year were not about music or an important historical event or figure. No, the longest lines were for films about a guy who made a training video about selling Winnebagos, and a movie about industrial design. Director Gary Hustwit's follow up to his wildly successful HELVETICA is a grander concept of how object that we use every day are design for both form and function, and the transition that products made from looking like what they do to looking like a designed object that must be figured out. One designer makes the astute point that if an alien came down and saw a chair or a fork, it could probably understand its function; but how would an alien make sense of an iPod without an instruction manuel?
Hustwit's true gift is making these complicated design concepts make some degree of sense to someone who has never given thought to why his portable vacuum cleaner has a cone shape and looks like it could go on his mantelpiece. Although certainly less focused than HELVETICA, OBJECTIFIED gives example after example of different designers theories on product shape and use. I was most intrigued by the designer for Apple, who shows how a single piece of metal is used almost entirely to house a laptop. I wish I could remember his name, because I'm always impressed by someone whose brain functions in such a different and constructive way than the norm. If names like Paola Antonelli, Rob Walker, Chris Bangle, Dieter Rams, Alice Rawsthorn, Naoto Fukasawa and Fiona Raby mean anything to you, then you're probably already eagerly anticipating this film (hell, you might already have your ticket).
I'd never cared much about how much work and effort went into constructing a chair that might look just as at home in a museum as it does in a living room, but a pair of brothers from France convinced me that I should. Design critics and curators fill in some of the much-needed explanation about what we're looking at, and the entire experience of watching OBJECTIFIED is both highly entertaining and a great jumping off point for future exploration and observation. I really love films like this where I come out the other side feeling slightly more knowledgeable about a subject, especially one I interact with every single day.
SLEEP DEALER
Some of the most interesting science fiction filmmaking of late has taken the form of stories that ground themselves in very familiar settings just a few years in the future. CHILDREN OF MEN was one of the first of this new wave, and some might argue that the upcoming works like MOON and DISTRICT 9 also fit this bill. One film that kind of slipped into the landscape recently is low-budget SLEEP DEALER from Mexico, which might be one of the few sci-fi movies that actually deals with how advanced technology would filter its way down to the underprivileged as a means for them to better their lives, or at least let them think it might.
A young man named Memo (Luis Fernando Pea) lives with his family in a small farming village that depends on water it must purchase at alarming prices from a big (presumably American) corporation. A dam has been put up to capture the water so that it no longer flows for free to the villages below, changing the balance of power in the community and widening the economic gap. Memo has a fondness for gadgets and building things from scratch and has big dreams about moving to a border town to get a job working in hi-tech, but when he watches an attack on TV of supposed "aqua-terrorists," he quickly realizes that a drone jet from America is bombing his family's shack of a home.
Director Alex Rivera does a magnificent job of shifting the dynamic of the migrant worker. Rather than having their goal be to slip across the border into America, the goal is to make it to towns like Tijuana ("the city of the future," according to one sign) where enormous factories have been set up for a very special kind of labor. Rather than have low-cost Mexican labor work on U.S. construction sites or as nannies or gardeners illegally, a system has been put in place where laborers have nodes implanted in the back of their heads and arms. Once plugged in, they are able to operate robots in America doing these jobs. Amid this virtual labor market is a separate world in which people are able to record and store some of their most vivid memories, then sell them to anyone with the cash (it looks sort of like a YouTube video, but in focus). Memo sets off to be a part of this world and send money back to his remaining family.
On the bus to Tijuana, Memo meets Lug (Leaner Valero) a writer who compels Memo to tell his story. She takes her memories of their conversations and puts them up for sale--without his permission or knowledge--where they generate some interest. Memo is noded up and begins working at a factory where he does work on a construction site. He soon realizes that even in the virtual world, there are dangers. Some of the connections in the factory are not secure and occasionally a coworker will have their brains fried. I hate when that happens.
The film also focuses on the Mexican-born pilot (Jacob Verges) living in America, who discovers Memo's story and realizes that he killed Memo's family unjustly. He sets off for Mexico in search of this young man he has wronged. Meanwhile, Memo and Lug spend a lot of time together, and bond forms between these two very different people. I don't normally spend quite so much time on plot synopsis, but the story told here is so fascinating that I feel it's justified, plus there are lots of points I haven't even touched upon. The film's political undertones soon become overtones as these three characters' lives intersect in unexpected ways, while corporate practices surrounding water and cheap labor are soon targeted. The film's revolutionary message can get a bit heavy handed at times, but that by no means cheapens or degrades the quality of the work. This is the first feature from director Rivera, and I hope he continues to find such new and interesting way of telling his anti-establishment tales. Some of the film reminds me of Kathryn Bigelow's STRANGE DAYS, but SLEEP DEALER takes a much less glamorous approach to both its science and its fiction. Two weeks ago, I'd never even heard of this film, but then it just sneaked onto the Chicago release schedule this week, I got myself a copy, and I liked it a great deal. Sometimes these nice surprises come from the unlikeliest of places. Check out SLEEP DEALER if you're into well-conceived science fiction that still remembers how to stick it to The Man.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com
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