Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with MiraJeff, once again checking in to tell us about what's hot and what's not about Tribeca Film Festival. Below he has reviews of two films, both documentaries and both documenting icons of the film world, be it the actual bank robbers that DOG DAY AFTERNOON is based on with BASED ON A TRUE STORY or an intimate look at Melvin Van Peebles' life with HOW TO EAT YOUR WATERMELON IN WHITE COMPANY (AND ENJOY IT!), the coolest title of the festival as far as I'm concerned. Both sound very interesting, particularly HOW TO EAT YOUR WATERMELON... Enjoy!

Hola AICN, MiraJeff here with two reviews from the Tribeca Film Festival. The review riding shotgun is for “Based on a True Story,” but first I gotta tell you about “How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It),” a documentary about revolutionary filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles. The man led a pretty extraordinary life and director Joe Angio does a good job of expressing its many different facets.

The film begins with two artists making a mold of Melvin’s head for a future ceremony in his honor. This lengthy artistic process is glimpsed throughout the film, perhaps to symbolize the gradual progression Van Peebles’ career has taken. Born in 1932 on the south side of Chicago, Melvin went to a mostly all-white high school. A former classmate of his remembers how he always made the class laugh by wearing orange shoes that would squeak whenever he walked to the chalkboard. He accepted an ROTC scholarship to Ohio-Wesleyan and was an Air Force Lt. until he graduated at age 20. He goes to Korea and flies atomic bombs around the world, gets fired from a San Francisco cable car company, studies astronomy in Amsterdam, lives as a beggar and street-singer before he turns himself into a French writer and is invited to screen his short films at the Paris Cinematheque. Early on in the documentary, MVP declares his politics “is to win.” Angio shows us Melvin’s determination to succeed by introducing him as a young intellectual in France where he wrote books and had a mistress translate his novels into French. Eventually, he made a name for himself and joined the staff of Hara Kari, a newspaper specializing in political cartoons, as he continues to make short films, many surrounding the theme of interracial romance. The film then jumps to present day, where we see Van Peebles chasing his dreams and a cast of schoolchildren as he directs “Bellyful,” a project he’s waited more than twenty years to bring to the screen. It’s amazing watching the old man run along European hillsides, ducking and weaving, crouching and slouching to get the shots he wants with only a hand-held video camera. His determination to shoot the film his way, under his rules is astonishing, and certainly this do-it-yourself attitude is what made his breakthrough film, Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song, such a success.

“How to Eat Your Watermelon…” outlines the ramifications of Sweet Sweetback. Melvin describes there being a prevalent fear of blackness in American society. Blacks in movies were never depicted as heroic or dignified, so that is what he set out to do by writing, directing, acting, editing, and composing the film. Sweet Sweetback inspired waves of controversy, as well as several popular 70’s blaxploitation flicks, including Foxy Brown, Superfly, and Shaft. Van Peebles calls blaxploitation the bastard child of what he was trying to do with Sweet Sweetback, which was to empower African-American audiences. Mario Van Peebles is interviewed about his father who he says “didn’t open doors, he blew them off their hinges.” He argues that though Sweetback has its critics, it certainly didn’t glamorize drug dealing like Superfly. After finishing shooting on Sweetback, Melvin refused to submit the film to the MPAA, which was entirely white, and as a result ads ran with the film touting it as “Rated X by an All-White Jury.” The clever marketing ploy paid off and the Black Panthers endorsed the film. Sweetback became the highest grossing independent film of all-time and proved that Melvin was a clever provocateur. Van Peebles went on to have a successful career on Broadway and Wall St. where he was the first black trader, though he didn’t entertain many offers to act or direct following Sweetback’s initial success.

Throughout the film, Van Peebles offers eccentric advice. “The more you have what you want, the less you’re gonna do what you want.” And, “When you win, the Big Boys (the studio) have to win, cuz if they don’t win, you don’t win.” Angio also shows us the more personal side of Melvin, as it details his music career, as well as his many casual relationships with women. “I want a girl who doesn’t tell, doesn’t yell, doesn’t swell, and is grateful as hell,” he proclaims. The man is full of interesting anecdotes and stories and director Angio is the perfect director to record them all. Melvin elaborates on his filmmaking style, where he is fond of close-ups because they’re personal. For the most part, Angio follows Melvin’s advice and films his subjects in extreme close-ups, capturing their wide-eyed excitement as they talk about him. The lines in Melvin’s aged but hard-nosed face tell their own story, one of willpower and triumph. In Hollywood, everyone loves an underdog, and Melvin Van Peebles is one of the originals. In conclusion, “How To Eat Your Watermelon…” is a good movie about a great man. Check it out and learn something about African-American film and one of America’s most original, beloved filmmakers. Grade: B+

BASED ON A TRUE STORY

Audiences love movies that are based on true stories. The knowledge that the events unfolding on screen actually happened helps us see our favorite actors not as fictional characters, but as real-life people, like we are in the audience. True stories are inherently more relatable and that’s why people flock to them. It is surprising then, that with so many movies these days based on true stories that more documentaries aren’t made about the actual events themselves. Amsterdam filmmaker Walter Stokman took note of this unfortunate trend and set out to do something about it. Inspired by a favorite film of his, Sidney Lumet’s 1975 classic Dog Day Afternoon, Stokman has made a film about John “The Dog” Wojtowicsz, the troubled bank robber portrayed by Al Pacino in the film. It is ironic then, that “Based on a True Story” was made without Wojtowicsz’s cooperation, and therein lies its biggest problem. More on that story later.

The film, made with the help of a very small crew, introduces us to old-lady bank tellers (the hostages), law enforcement officials, and the two women caught in the middle, ex-wife Carmen, and transsexual Liz Eden. If you remember Dog Day Afternoon, Wojtowicsz robbed the bank to pay for his boyfriend’s sex-change operation.

The film, wounded by Stokman’s voice-over narration in poor English, follows his attempts to contact The Dog, who has been released from prison and is trying to sell his story, “the real story,” to the media. The filmmaker, working on a tight budget, can offer only $10,000 and 10% of the film’s profit. Wojtowicsz wants $28,000 and up front too, because ‘that’s how Pacino operates. He doesn’t show up to work without the money and neither do I. Just trust me.’ Stokman declines, wisely, because even a child knows better to trust a bank robber. Wojtowicsz is certainly an interesting figure, (he answers his phone in a high voice saying, “Hello, this is Dick. How may I serve you?) which is why it’s so disappointing that he barely appears in anything more than these bizarre phone calls.

The old women interviewed shed some light on what it’s like to be held hostage in a standoff with police, but there is no security footage of the incident inside the bank, only news footage shot on the street. Stokman himself, as narrator, offers little insight, and just tries to dramatize and re-create the events in the film with the real people. For example, an ex-FBI agent who drove the hostages and the bank robbers to the airport choreographs how the shootout in the car went down, though even his and Wojtowicsz’s accounts differ. Stokman does serve up entertaining segment titles like “29,000 and Some Traveler’s Checks” (the score) and “Lollypops and Shotguns” (hostages ate the bank’s candy at gunpoint).

The filmmaker spends a lot of unnecessary time with Carmen, the mother of John’s two children who have disowned him. She does offer the most complete analysis of John as a man, having known him since before the bank fiasco, but she’s not the real woman at the center of the story. That would be Liz Eden, who sadly died of AIDS in the 80’s, and appears here in some archive footage of a talk show where John speaks to her from jail. John’s accomplice, Sal, is also omitted from the film until the very end, and it would have been interesting for Stokman to delve further into their relationship. By not really showing the three main characters in this true story, the bank robber, his accomplice, and the woman he did it for, Stokman has weakened the impact his documentary has. The subject matter is fascinating and while Stokman does bring to light some unknown aspects of the 14 hour standoff, his film could have been so much more. The best thing about it now are its interviews with Dog Day director Lumet and screenwriter Frank Pierson, who will be serving on a panel when Based on a True Story opens at the Tribeca Film Festival. Die hard Dog Day fans will be interested. The rest of you, go see Pacino in one of his best roles and scream “Attica” for me. Grade: C

So long for now. I’ll be back soon with reviews of “Special Thanks to Roy London,” and “The Beautiful Country,” a movie you New Yorkers should definitely keep your eye on.