Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Beaks claims he will be writing somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,400 articles this week. Personally, I know the truth is that ever since Frosty Skywalker fixed his computer, he’s been far too busy catching up on his downloaded midget porn. Curse you, Beaks!!
THIS COLUMN HAS NO NAME, NO IDOL AND NO WHIP, VOL. 7
There comes a time in every man’s life when he wants to divorce his wife, sell the kids into white slavery and get a door-to-door route hawking GRIT. So it was that, on a balmy April morning at the Mike-sells Potato Chip plant in Dayton, Ohio, Carl Myerson briefly escaped the mental prison walled up around his “arranged” marriage to Bibi Lundqvist, finding sanctuary in a utopian world where a healthy Caucasian child can fetch a cool six figures on the Latin American black market, and GRIT enjoys a circulation twice that of USA TODAY.
Or something like that.
THE LOS ANGELES FILM FESTIVAL ENDS
That was quick. Of course, it helps that I was busier than hip-hop legend Busy Bee over the last two weeks, and, therefore, missed out on nearly every major screening I wanted to attend (the shame of not seeing Guy Maddin’s COWARDS BEND THE KNEE is intense). I did, however, get a chance to attend the festival’s Halle Berry-hosted closing night ceremony, replete with awards announcement, a screening of Pieter Jan Brugge’s mediocre THE CLEARING and a Target-sponsored party where flat-busted IFP members ravenously attacked the buffet table as if their next meal was coming out of a Fatburger dumpster. The highlight of the night was watching a few young cast members of Ferenc Toth’s UNKNOWN SOLDIER coax victory kisses out of Ms. Berry. Nice work, guys! (TARNATION director Jonathan Caouette absent-mindedly walking back to his seat with Berry’s award was a close second.)
Before this, there were lots of films, most of which I saw at the press screenings leading up to the festival. Following are brief capsule reviews for all that fell under my gimlet-eyed gaze.
RED LIGHTS (d. Cedric Kahn, w. Laurence Ferreira-Barbosa and Kahn)
Alternately hilarious and horrifying, Cedric Kahn’s RED LIGHTS is a strange marriage of domestic drama and film noir aesthetic that plays like the humanistic, first-person crime yarn Jim Thompson never wrote. Based on a novel by the massively prolific Georges Simenon (creator of the Inspector Maigret series), it’s a visually mischievous portrait of Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a cowardly, self-absorbed lout who drinks himself into complete oblivion while driving through the rural outskirts of Paris with his increasingly disapproving wife, Helene (Carole Bouquet), to pick up their children from summer camp. Along the way, Antoine makes multiple stops to maintain his buzz, finally barreling into a mean drunkenness that sends the disgusted Helene off sulking for safer transport. Freed from the marital yoke, Antoine begins knocking back the booze with suicidal gusto, and he soon finds himself in the precarious company of an escaped murderer from a nearby prison.
Kahn is clearly having fun tweaking noir conventions, but the film’s greatest strength is in the way its narrative is directly tethered to Antoine’s desperate nocturnal peregrination. It gets so into its protagonist’s booze-addled head that it becomes something bracingly new: a stream-of-consciousness thriller. This boldness sets the stage for a giddily unpredictable third act highlighted by a ridiculously protracted series of telephone calls forestalling an expectedly dire reveal. In Kahn’s hands, however, expectations are cannily dashed.
NEGROES WITH GUNS: ROB WILLIAMS AND BLACK POWER (d. Sandra Dickson & Churchill Roberts, w. Dickson)
Unearthing a little known chapter of brave resistance amid the most heated period of the Civil Rights Movement, Sandra Dickson and Churchill Roberts have done a great public service in telling the story of North Carolina’s Rob Williams, a militant pioneer whose armed intransigence was an early, and vastly important, contribution to the Black Power movement. A rather straightforward compilation of interviews and archival footage, NEGROES WITH GUNS is a spartan affair that wisely leaves the eloquent preaching to its deceased subject.
Williams was a lifelong agitator who found lots to resist in the segregated North Carolina of the 1950’s, and he did it fearlessly, penning inflammatory diatribes excoriating the region’s pervasive, deeply entrenched bigotry, and, eventually, forming the Black Guard, an armed neighborhood watch that sought to protect those the supposedly legitimate law enforcement would not. This, of course, went over like gangbusters in the white community, but violent incidents were few until a white man’s attempted rape of a pregnant black woman was acquitted despite evidence heavily in favor of his guilt. Outraged, and convinced of the law’s inability to protect people of his race, Williams sent out a call to arms. Amazingly, Williams would avoid serious conflict with the local authorities until 1961, when he was ridiculously charged with kidnapping a white couple who had wandered into an angry black mob that had gathered to protest the Klan’s beating of visiting Freedom Riders. Knowing that he’d never get a free trial, Williams fled to Cuba, from whence he broadcast the radical “Radio Free Dixie”, preaching resistance to a racist society that had unjustly turned him into an outlaw.
Sensitively scored by Terence Blanchard, NEGROES WITH GUNS is infused with a deep sadness as it celebrates the life of a man in whom the fire of righteous indignation burned hot for as long as his soul could summon up the fuel. Though it doesn’t adequately explain the details of Williams’s flight to Cuba (his reliance on Communist regimes for safe havens most likely accounts for his continued obscurity), there’s little denying that the man was a hero, a case soundly made by Dickson and Roberts. Seek this modest gem out!
THE LAST OF THE FIRST (d. Anja Baron)
Another documentary about forgotten pioneers, THE LAST OF THE FIRST is an equally joyous and heartbreaking visit with the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, a collection of elderly jazz greats who represent our last remaining connection to the music’s cultural heyday. Formed by Dr. Albert Vollmer, and comprised of musicians who played with Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Count Basie, we meet the band in happier times, set up with a regular gig at a downtown NYC restaurant, and all in relatively good health. Though not, understandably, the nimble instrumentalists they once were, there’s still an ineffable joy to their music, particularly in the way it provides us a chance, as Nat Hentoff says, “to hear where it all came from”. Theirs is an irreplaceable contribution, which becomes increasingly, and sadly, apparent as a couple of band members fall ill during the course of filming.
Director Anja Baron focuses primarily on Al Casey, an eighty-seven year-old guitarist who, amazingly, played with the long deceased Fats Waller (he passed in 1943). Though frail, Casey comes astonishingly alive with a guitar in his lap, whether in rehearsal or opening for the neo-swing group Squirrel Nut Zippers, whose embarrassingly unfettered praise he indulges with admirable good nature. Also depicted at some length is Laurel Watson, an eighty-eight year-old warbler who represents the enduring soul of the band. Subsisting, as much as anyone else, on the steady gig, it’s unsurprising that she suffers a massive stroke when it’s taken away from them. Mortality is an inescapable reality at that age, but to succumb to it without their music seems an unbearable form of cruelty.
Baron knows well enough to emphasize the most positive developments in the life of the band, which spares the film from being a depressing wallow in onrushing death. Generally, THE LAST OF THE FIRST is a valuable glimpse into a world that will soon be solely the sum of legendary recordings and archival film.
GET POSTERIZED!
This is kinda cool. Because I live a sheltered existence, I hadn’t realized that the poster for the original RESIDENT EVIL was the result of a competition that invited amateur artists to submit entries that represented their many-splendored ideal of a zombie holocaust. (Taking a quick glance at that poster, I just realized that it did nothing of the sort.) Inspired by the enthusiastic response that saw interns at Screen Gems and PLAY MAGAZINE weeding through 3,000 variations on a flesh eating theme, they’ve commissioned a second contest for the sequel RESIDENT EVIL 2: APOCALYPSE.
Want in?
Well, the email sent to me today informs me that the contest has been going on since May 10th (again, sheltered existence), and will close out on June 30th. Since most artists are wicked procrastinators, that’s still more than enough time to churn out something fiercely gruesome, yet tasteful enough that Jack Valenti won’t cough up his corned beef on rye in front of his colleagues (folks, he can do this on request, I shit you not). All you’ve got to do is check out www.re2.com, follow the guidelines, and you might win $2,500 *plus* the chance to see your handiwork shilling a zombie flick. They’ve already been inundated with 4,000 entries this time out, so you’d better get on the ball, ya slacker.
THE LOGJAM
I’ve got lots more to write about, and miles to go before I sleep. That last bit was a quote. Know who wrote it? Robert “Motherfucking” Frost. Guy could throw down some mean verse. The Masta Ace of his day, they said.
I’m rest broken. I’ll be back tomorrow. ‘Til then, I’m taking requests.
Faithfully submitted,
Mr. Beaks
Okay. I’ll admit it. That was pretty fun. But if I don’t see a LIFE AQUATIC or KING ARTHUR review cross my desk soon, I’m going to tell the Feds all about your Alexa Vega upskirt photo folder. Don’t think I won’t do it!!
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