Hubert Vigilla on Revenge of the Mekons (2013) which hits Ovid.TV April 14

(This is a repost of one of the reviews that ran when the film World premiered at DOC NYC in 2013)

Steve's already mentioned how wonderful Revenge of the Mekons is, but it's worth restating since the world premiere screening is tonight. If you're a Mekons fan, go see it. If you just like docs on fascinating people, go see it. Joe Angio's film has a lovable, amoeba-shaped quality. It isn't quite as streamlined or as obvious as some music docs, but like the band, that's part of its charm. Revenge of the Mekons is always interesting to watch because the Mekons themselves are a fascinating group of people whose longevity is rooted in the fact that they've remain consistently interesting.

There are great interviews with various Mekons boosters throughout the documentary, such as writers Luc Sante and Greil Marcus, but I think novelist Jonathan Franzen has the best summation of the band's appeal which also applies to the film (I'm paraphrasing here): the band is great for people who feel they're at conflict with their own culture; they won't show you how to win the war, but they will show you how to be a more amusing and gracious loser..

Unseen Films Stay At Home Festival: Film Twenty Two: Hubert Vigilla on on City Lights (1931)

City Lights is my favorite Charlie Chaplin movie, but it wouldn't be if it weren't for its famous ending. It's hilarious, of course, and there's so much genius in Chaplin's meticulous comic machinery and filmmaking technique--one can marvel at the expert skewering of a hole in the Little Tramp's pants and the ensuing attempts at decorum, or each well-timed and well-placed movement of the boxing scene (it may be the cinematic equivalent of a chess match set to the "Sabre Dance"), or the gradual build to the punchline while our hero tries to shovel the streets of manure, or the number of gags that can be packed into a finely choreographed long-take--but the film is ultimately about the difficulties of human kindness, and the greatness of City Lights is made apparent in that heart-rending finale.

(Spoilers are coming, so stop reading and watch the film if you haven't already. City Lights is good for the soul)

The film centers on the shabby Little Tramp's attempts to help the poor blind Flower Girl. He has no actual means of his own, but a chance encounter with a suicidal drunk millionaire allows him to do good deeds with a little bit of filthy lucre. It's kindness that drives the Little Tramp to thwart a stranger's fatal dive into the river, and it's that same kindness, mixed with an unreasonable romanticism, that makes him want to help the Flower Girl. He buys her food, pays her rent, and even helps send her off to Europe to get her eyes fixed, and all for her company and the occasional chaste, chivalric kiss upon her hand. He suffers so much for being kind even though this love for the Flower Girl is one that probably wouldn't be reciprocated (but more on that later).

Kindness has been on my mind a lot lately since it's the time of year when everyone is temporarily kinder and gentler to others. I recently re-read George Saunders' commencement speech to Syracuse graduates asking them to be kinder people. The speech, which you can read in full here, had gone viral in the early summer, partly from its optimistic content and partly from the well-deserved praise for Saunders' newest collection of short stories, Tenth of December. (In some ways, the speech is a relative to his shot story/essay/fictional press release for the PRKA, the People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction). And since it is the holiday season, I recently rewatched It's a Wonderful Life, which itself is a movie about kindness and how hard it is to be thoughtful of others since it's usually to the detriment of one's own ambitions. I can't help but feel that the Tramp seen in City Lights is a bit Ellen from the commencement speech since he's so meek and crushable, and bit George Bailey for the same reasons and because he's relentlessly crapped on by the fates, and perhaps a charter member for the PRKA given his attempt at, as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas would have put it, being for the Other.

As in real life, kindness in City Lights is terribly difficult. George Bailey, nearing the end of his rope, says that all he got for his prayers and good deeds was a lousy smack in the face. For his trouble in Chaplin's film, the Little Tramp is tossed into the water, shouted at, picked on by toady newsie scum, roughed up, knocked out, laughed at, shoved around, ignored, forgotten, discarded, and eventually thrown in the clink for a crime he didn't commit. I can't help but find some thematic connection between the rock that gets tied around the Tramp's neck as he thwarts the millionaire's suicide and the rope for the timekeeper's bell that gets tangled around the Tramp's neck during the big fight: being kind means taking on other people's burdens and, sometimes, getting the living sh** beat out of you. And yet he keeps going because his kindness, like his capacity to love, is inexhaustible. Oddly, this makes me think about a line from a newly anointed Christmas movie pariah, 2003's Love Actually: "Okay, Dad. Let's do it. Let's go get the sh** kicked out of us by love."

That brings me back to the ending of City Lights and the important moment of recognition that occurs between the Tramp and the Flower Girl, who is now able to see. Up until that point, I think that these characters exist as abstractions to each other and to the audience. The Tramp is madly in love with the Flower Girl, but she functions as a kind of idea of love; the Flower Girl is enamored with her own idea of her benefactor--she thinks he's a millionaire--rather than the dowdy Tramp himself. He can be her hero and he can help make her life easier, be he could never actually be with her because he's afraid of being something other than an illusion. She deserves a great man, and he can only be that as an idea. Had she been able to see in the first place, she probably wouldn't have given the Tramp the time of day, let alone entertained ideas about his heroic return to her life. 

When the Tramp and the Flower Girl see each other again at the end, it's through a flower shop window. He helped bring her out of poverty and blindness; he's done something for someone else that he couldn't possibly do for himself. She's laughing at him, though not out of malice, and the Tramp seems content simply to observe her through the pane of glass. She's still just an idea of love, and he's happy his pain has made a difference. The fact that she's thriving there in front of him has lifted his heart out of the gutter. Everything he's gone through was worth it, even if he's become a wilted little man. Since she's still just an idea of love, he tries to leave when she approaches him, perhaps because he's frightened of complicating her present happiness with the truth.

What's devastating about what happens next is that when they touch, they cease to be mere ideas to one other. The Tramp is so hesitant to say anything, struck dumb by her beauty and her sense of concern for him in this real first meeting, one without illusions and so barely sincere. In his face and his gait is the anxious fear of reprisal and rejection, but that unease melts away. I think what I read on his face after fear, among other conflicting thoughts, is the tenuous joy that occurs when, for once, the worst doesn't happen. The Flower Girl's reactions are similarly packed. She sees the face of kindness, and it's not the dashing stranger in top hat and tails, but a person who with nothing of his own still gives all he can. The characters' performances lose the large gestures of pantomime and become subtle motions and ticks of expression. The faces are complex and lived in and heartbreaking because the feelings they evoke are so ineffably human. By those final shots of City Lights, we're are no longer dealing with the abstractions of a buffoon and his would-be lady love; instead, here are the large existential concerns of two people who have tried to be good to one another in their own way.

Throughout my mid-to-late twenties I felt an ambiguity about the ending of City Lights. It's still one of the most astounding endings to a movie I've ever seen, but it's hard to say where this relationship would go from here. Can either of them love each other, and what about the fact that this relationship--even at a purely ethical level--is predicated on lies and mistaken (or withheld, or assumed) identity? It's a complicated conclusion to the story because it leaves us at the emotional height of a revelation without its fallout.

On my most recent watch of City Lights, I find myself a little less cynical and more touched. I noticed the way the Flower Girl held her hands around the Tramp's, and the way her face quavered as her realization continued to deepen, and the way her hands drew his hands closer to her chest. The Tramp is still chewing at his thumb, the Flower Girl will not let go. Like their first meeting when he fell in love with her, they are so still in the moving world. I'm not sure they'd ever fall in love, but I know simply that they will be kind to one another, and that's enough.

City Lights is available t o stream on various VOD platforms

The Empty Nostalgia of Ready Player One (2018)

This is a piece that I cobbled together after seeing READY PLAYER ONE. It is based on the conversations I had with Lesley Coffin and Hubert Vigilla. If there is anything you like it is due to their cleverness- I just wrote it down.

READY PLAYER ONE is a gawd awful mess. Yes it has moments, The Shining sequence for example, but it is so badly thought out and written that you have to wonder if Steven Spielberg really directed it.

The plot has a kid in the future trying to find the three keys hidden in an on line world called the Oasis, which will give him control of the whole thing plus the creators fortune. Unfortunately there is an evil corporation looking to seize control for themselves (for reasons that make no sense).

So much is wrong with the film that the only thing I can really talk about is the films numerous flaws. Frankly there are so many that I could be here for a couple of days pulling the film apart moment by moment because nothing works or makes any sense if you think about it.

Badly written on very level the two key roles of Halliday, the dead creator of the Oasis, and Sorrento, the villain of the piece, exist simply because Mark Rylance and Ben Mendelsohn are such good actors that they make something of their badly written characters. Full of someone's ideas of what these characters should be like instead of being real characters. They are full of cliches, goofy ticks and bad dialog to the point you wonder if writer Ernest Cline ever met an actual human being.

At the same would mention some of the other actors and actresses but they barely register in human form and only really impress thanks to their colorful avatars. They too are not really human beings but a collection of pop movie references and stereotypes.

Simply put there are no real characters anywhere on screen.  The closest is Mendelsohn's villain, Sorrento. He at least is given some scenery to chew but if you really look at him, he makes no sense. He was an intern for the dead Rylance who only got coffee for him (as we see in the Halliday journals) but he bullshitted his way into controlling hit squads and a slave army to do take over a virtual world and no one has called him on it - for years - when it's obvious he is a putz from second we meet him.  What board of directors would leave him in control when he had been unable to unlock any thing for years- especially when a kid suddenly discovers the first key seemingly out of the blue?

The problem with Sorrento's motivation is the first crack in a film world where nothing makes any sense on its own terms never mind real world ones. The laundry list of film world problems begins with:

-If Columbus Ohio is the worlds fastest growing cities why does it look like a shit hole?

-Does anyone work? No one seems to have a job or go to school. How is anything paid for?

-Why does IOI seem to have limitless power and yet none? How can they get away with all the bad things they do like sending out storm troopers to kidnap random people - except at the end?

-How can IOI make everyone slaves? What is their authority?

-Everyone on Wade's team is really in Columbus? Really?

-What exactly does IOI really do other than chase control of the Oasis? - And their grand schemes is take over the Oasis so they can sell the advertising rights?

-With everyone fascinated with the nostalgia of the 1970's,80's and 90's- did pop culture (and technology) cease after 1995? Why is there zero reference to anything outside of that anywhere in the whole film? It should be there.

And there is much more. You can take apart every bit of the world the film operates in and make it crumble, all you need do is just look at it to have it fall apart.

As a thriller or action film is a HUGE problem in that there is no reason to feel any suspense because nothing in the film has any weight. There is ultimately nothing lost if the Oasis was taken over.  The Oasis is lost its just a virtual place- lives aren't uprooted. No one is going to die. If they die in the game they just get to log back in and start fresh. What's the worst that can happen they get hauled off by IOI? Only very late in the game do we see what that means (and what it means really doesn't make sense) so it has no weight.

Sure IOI blows up the stack where Wade's aunt lives, but we really don't care because we have no freaking clue who she is. She is barely in the film and barely mentioned except to offer her up as a sacrificial lamb. She is the film's version of a Star Trek Red Shirt  who is there just to die. No one else, especially the main characters, is ever in any real danger - even when Sorrento takes a gun at the end we know nothing will happen since he is such a chicken shit character we know he'll never shoot because he uses Zandor to do his real world dirty work.

As for the much talked about nostalgia is empty. Its actually utter bullshit. It's less meaningful than posters on a characters bedroom wall.

In theory everything in the film is supposed to be around Rylance's love of things in his life- but everything stops at say 1990 or 1995 or so. While there are fleeting reference to newer things in the film almost every thing is old- 50 or 60 years. There is almost nothing past a certain point- as if Rylance, and the real world, had no interest in anything after that- except that he loved pop culture so there should have been references to things from the last 20 years, but there aren't. No one's love of stuff cuts off like that- not even the fanboys who live in their parents' basement. More importantly since the film makes clear that only a small number of people are obsessed with Halliday's Easter Egg, the actual nostalgia should be only a small portion of the Oasis since most people have moved on and  connected to later things and things not related to the creators life.

Even worse the nostalgia is just wrong. A key point is the Atari 2600 - except that Rylance's character would not have played the 2600 as a kid. He might have played  the games but on another system. While the point is the correct game, I doubt we would see him sitting on a floor in his bedroom with a 2600 system.  I mention this because unless Rylance was born in the 60's or early 70's the video game when he was growing up would have been something else (he'd have a later Atari on his floor). Trust me I'm old enough to know he would have to be around my age, which is kind of too old. To play with the 2600 at the age we see his younger self would have made Rylance around 80 or 85 when he died and that isn't likely.

So much of the nostalgia is just stuff whizzing by- "Hey there's Spawn!" "Look there is ... and over there...." Nothing is done with any of the references. Everything is pretty much just there. In one scene we see all these iconic space ships and they are just there- why? No clue. As I said above it would make sense if the things were posters that meant something to the character but here they are just "things" that are thrown on screen to fill a background.

As Hubert Vigilla and I discussed the film we came to realize that  the film is like looking into a a toy box where dozens of action figures and toys are collected. However they are just toys lying there inert because there is no child to bring them to life. Without a mover they are "just there". Its all a kind of dead nostalgia of things and but not the real nostalgia of emotions that comes from the things meaning something. If you want proof consider the Holy Hand-grenade from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Wade uses it- but he doesn't count. If the grenade truly meant something within the world or to Halliday Wade would have to count because the instructions in Grail states you must count to three so that God will smite your enemies. It means nothing without the counting.

How could Spielberg nor any of his team realize just how wrong the film gets it? I have issues with many of Spielberg's films but this is just a mess. It is a huge over hyped piece of commercial crap. Not only is there no heart or soul in the film there is no thought, love or understanding.  It is an attempt to hook the fans of whatever with a false and misused nostalgia at the expense of good filmmaking.

Ultimately it is a cinematic version of of Sorrento's and IOI's plans for the Oasis where 80% of the visual field is filled with product placement-and as Sorrento warned there is so much shit before us out brains explode out of desperation

Not recommended.

The Unseen Films Podcast: Hot Takes on NYFF 2017: SPOOR and BEFORE WE VANISH

There has been talk of an Unseen FiIms Podcast for a while now but there has been lots of motion but very little progress. However last week after the New York Film Festival Press screenings of SPOOR and BEFORE WE VANISH Hubert, on the clock for Flixist, and I grabbed an audio recorder and ducked into an alcove outside the NYPL Lincoln Center branch and recorded some hot takes on the two films which had just screened.

The recording called NYFF Hot Takes is the sort of thing that happens after most press screenings as we (and more often other friends) discuss the film(s) we had just seen. The recording is raw and off the cuff like our comments. It’s a moment in time capturing the pair of us trying to find the words that would become our reviews.

With the New York Film Festival in full swing we're going to try to do a few more of these, and hopefully drag in a few more friends along the way so keep reading and keep listening because more is coming.

The shattering LOOK OF SILENCE opens in US Theaters Friday 7/17

The Look of Silence is a must see. As good as Joshua Oppenhiemer’s Act of Killing is this related film is even better. I’ve seen it twice and both times I felt like I was punched in the face.

The film is the story of one of the victims of the mass killing in Indonesia quietly confronting the men who killed his brother. It’s a ballsy and dangerous thing to do since some of them men interviewed still hold some sway in the country.

With the film opening Friday I’m reposting Hubert’s take on the film from the New York Film Festival. (For those who want to know my thought’s here’s a report on the NYFF screening I attended with Mondo)

I don’t know what to say except see this film- you owe it to humanity to do just that.

Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing was one of my favorite movies from last year, a work of documentary audacity. Through the point of view of killers involved in the Indonesian genocide, Oppenheimer was able to find a sort of ecstatic truth (a term coined by executive producer Werner Herzog) about our inherent inhumanity. When I interviewed Oppenheimer last year for Flixist at SXSW, he concluded the interview by noting that The Act of Killing "is not a story about a strange place where killers have won. Killers usually win, and they usually build their normality on the basis of terror and lies."

Looking back at the interview, Oppenheimer also described one of the chilling scenes that would appear in his follow-up film, The Look of Silence. While hearing him describe this moment shocked me, actually seeing it has a different effect: it deflates the heart and dims one's view of humanity.

The Look of Silence is at least as good as The Act of Killing, if not better. Rather than treading the same ground, The Look of Silence deepens the exploration of the Indonesian genocide from an emotional and generational standpoint, and does it with such haunting attention to what is said by the film's subjects and what is left unsaid. It's another stunning achievement by Oppenheimer, who was recently (and justly) awarded a MacArthur genius grant. Just two films in--and in back to back years, no less (though the wider release of The Look of Silence won't be until next summer)--Oppenheimer is a filmmaker whose assuredness in cinematic craft is matched by the importance of his subject matter and his passion for it.

The primary subject of The Look of Silence is Adi, an optometrist whose older brother was brutally murdered by the government during the genocide. We get to hear all of the details of the man's mutilation, and so does Adi, repeatedly. He watches two killers describe how the murder was carried out. It's older footage that Oppenheimer shot a decade ago that feels like a kind of precursor to The Act of Killing. Adi hears how his brother saw his mother one last time. Adi repeats the story to people complicit in the murder. And then, daringly, Adi questions killers why they did what they did.

The Look of Silence focuses more on the victims of the genocide rather than the perpetrators of it, and yet the perpetrators are still given a voice in the film. This is unavoidable. The parents of victims live alongside the men who murdered their children. The ruling party, which is sympathetic to the murderers since they were hired by the government, indoctrinates the children of today. In school, kids learn that the communists were incestuous atheist bastards who had to be weeded out. As a counterpoint to the propaganda, we learn more about the nauseating practices that the killers adopted as mass murder was normalized. Anwar's tales of rape and torture in The Act of Killing were painful already, but the confessions of the killers in The Look of Silence are more shocking and more deranged, and they're delivered in the casual way one would describe a day at work.

With Adi asking questions in The Look of Silence rather than Oppenheimer, the responses and the conversations differ compared to those in The Act of Killing. Adi's questions are more pointed and pained given his personal ties to the killings, whereas Oppenheimer's outsider status allowed him to be more detached. Tensions run higher in The Look of Silence since Adi's questions put the killers on edge--it's as if the act of asking questions is Adi's own form of seeking understanding as well as seeking a kind of revenge. Oppenheimer's line of questioning was "What happened?”, Adi's is more like "Why did you do this?" and "How could you do this?" (Maybe there's also an unspoken "How dare you?" and "How could you let this happen?") The tension in these confrontations also reveals the power dynamics within Indonesian society that still exist today. Oppenheimer had a sort of luxury to ask what's since he was never in danger of repercussions. Simply by asking why's and how's, though, Adi is putting himself and his family at risk again.

There's an almost novelistic quality to The Look of Silence given the details and images that Oppenheimer continually returns to. While questioning killers, Adi usually conducts manual optometry tests with multiple lenses, at once gauging that person's visual acuity as well as that person's perception of the genocide. There's the multi-generational aspect to consider as well, with Adi's elderly parents (his father is over a century old, blind, and with spotty memory) concerned for his safety and, in turn, a concern by Adi and his wife for the safety and future of their children. Cobwebs, jumping beans, the approach of trucks in the distance, a river passing beneath a bridge--all of these visuals, carefully arranged, create a chain of rich metaphors for the culture's collective memory about its own history. Even the change in landscape from one testimony to another has the power to suggest some sense of new perspective, some sort of understanding. There are moments of levity in The Look of Silence, some hope in the face of this oppressive despair. Václav Havel wrote that hope, while not the same as optimism, is the certainty that something will eventually make sense, regardless of how it turns out. With time and understanding, change through perspective, slowly, may be possible.

Or maybe not. There are two famous quotations about history that go unspoken in Oppenheimer's films: George Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," and James Joyce's "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." There's another quotation throughout The Look of Silence, however, that the killers and those sympathetic to the killers keep repeating: "The past is past." It's as if the fact of mass murder is a given, that the propaganda of the killers is history, and that truth (ecstatic or otherwise) is whatever those in power tell people to believe.

In addition to the refrain that the past is past, The Look of Silence offers a chilling rejoinder to the Santayana and Joyce quotations. When Adi meets with an Indonesian politician, the man becomes defensive and then sinister. He tells Adi that he needs to stop asking questions and then makes a not-so-veiled threat about what could happen if people continue to ask questions. To Santayana, those in power might reply, "If you keep bringing up the past, we will make sure that history repeats itself." And to Joyce, "Be quiet, and go back to sleep."

Cosima Spender and Valerio Bonelli talk about their film PALIO at Tribeca 2015

Cosima Spender

A couple weeks back Hubert and I sat down with director Cosima Spender and her husband and editor Valerio Bonelli to talk about their film PALIO . PALIO tells the story of the centuries old Sienese horse race that is held in the city's main square. Its 90 seconds of  excitement preceeded by three days of rituals. The filmis one of the most breathtaking things you’ll ever see. Trust me, when it's done you'll feel who needs CGI car chases or giant robots when you can have PALIO’s horses  in a life or death race where the losing jockey can end up beaten half to death? PALIO is one of my favorite films of the year and you must see it. (My review is here. Hubert's review at Ruby Hornet is here)

When Hubert and I saw the film we were both blown away. We both wanted to know more about the race and how it was made. When the chance to do an interview with Cosima came up we jumped. The interview was one of the coolest things I did at Tribeca this year. I’m in heaven whenever I can talk to someone who is well versed and deeply passionate about a subject and as both Cosima and her husband are about the Palio and its history. They also know and love film as Hubert and I found out after the interview when we were comparing notes on the various films at Tribeca. I could have talked with them for several more hours. (Cosima and Valeria if you are reading this and want to do another extended interview let me know I will be happy to sit down with you again)

While I understand that publishing the interview now, with the film still on the festival circuit is not ideal, you may not understand some of the references, I somehow think the passion with which they speak and the subjects that we cover will make you want to see the film and keep it on your radar. You need to be aware that this film is coming because you really do want to see it. And when the film finally gets its wide release you can come back and revisit this interview and get even more out of it.

I want to thank Hubert for  helping do the interview and in editing the transcript. And I have to thank Cosima and Valerio for taking the time to talk to us about their really kick ass movie.

STEVE: How did you get interested in doing The Palio?

COSIMA: I was born outside Siena. I grew up there. My mother was half-Armenian/half-American and my father was English. They still live there. I went to the public schools there. I grew up in the countryside outside Siena and then I went to Siena proper to go to school when I was 14. So all my friends were deeply Sienese. They were members of districts. I felt very much an outsider because I wasn't born and raised inside the district. I never really understood it until I wanted to do this as my graduation film from film school, but I was young and inexperienced. I needed a big production behind me to tackle it. It’s a beast of a subject. It’s gargantuan, so I didn't do it as my graduation film

Then I made lots of films for the BBC and here and there. And then after my last film, on my grandfather who was this Armenian painter, I was going "what’s going to be my next project?" I have two children so I can't-- I used to do a lot of films in Africa and around the world but because my life has to be more stable I started to look on my doorstep on a subject. I always wanted to make a film about it and that's how I said "it's time to do Palio."

I started researching. There had been a film that had cinematic release made about ten years ago  called the LAST VICTORY which really focused on the districts. I said let’s make a film about the jockeys because no one really looks at the jockeys. I find the whole love hate relationship interesting because I come from anthropology so the whole relationship between the jockeys and the citizens and the city---they need them and they love them if they win but if they lose they are meat to be butchered. I've always been fascinated by this relationship.

STEVE: In the film you see them beating the jockeys, has anyone been killed?

COSIMA: No, no but beaten up a lot. And between the districts it comes from this medieval tradition called Pungna. I went to dinner in one of the districts when I was doing my research and the young men come in and kind of punch each other as a kind of greeting-play fighting. There is a lot of tradition, the fighting is in the DNA. The beating up, its Italy, It’s passionate. You have to express your emotions otherwise you might get cancer or something.

HUBERT: It’s true. When the one guy wins there is a kind of gladiatorial look to him, the great conquering-hero look on camera with everyone around him. There is that sense of battle.

COSIMA: Yea there is the sense of battle--it is battle. Its origins are in battle. Traditionally in medieval times the districts were headed by the captains who were like soldiers of fortune or mercenaries who lead the battle.

The whole of the Palio, if you want to get anthropological, was meant to commemorate the Battle of Monteperti in 1260 when the  Sienese with few men managed to beat the Florentines who were a big army. Dante writes how the local river was red because there was so much blood shed. The origins of it were this medieval battle ground and it was a way to sublimate the peoples nature which was very violent--take this emotion and turn it into this game, so they wouldn't go around killing each other. “Let’s find a way to try and put people's aggression and passion into a game which will distract the  Sienese”--who are by nature fiery- that’s the origin.

But I didn't want to get anthropological in the film. It had to be entertaining because it’s all so entertaining. You can enjoy the aesthetic spectacle or you can enjoy it as an anthropologist or you can enjoy it as a tourist. There are many levels to enjoy the Palio.

STEVE: When you're watching the film it’s so exciting, like a car race. Hubert turned to me at the end and said "I didn't think it would be that exciting to the end"

COSIMA: That's because Valerio is my editor and he does fiction films.

HUBERT: Its feels like a narrative feature

VALERIO: It’s BEN HUR in a way

COSIMA: I didn't go about it with a team of people who make documentaries for television- which is how documentaries have gone since the 80's. We always wanted to make it cinematic. Stuart Bentley, the cinematographer comes from cinema, wants to do cinema. He came from the same film school as us-The National Film School. The National Film School is a good school. It really teaches you the craft of filmmaking. Valeria cut PHILOMENA and  action films. He did a couple of really bad action films, no offense....

VALERIO: No problem. It was a good stomping ground for me for the races. The races are televised...

COSIMA: They are soo boring

VALERIO: They are so boring, because it's all wide shots. She really went straight on in. She was the first person ever allowed to have a zoom- really long lens, telephoto lens right at the starting line so they could get this at least close up. That’s what makes it exciting- It’s LIKE IN THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY- the standoff moment between jockeys that makes the whole film I think.

COSIMA: We always though Sergio Leone between the ropes. THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY. That moment before he shoots, the eye line, the close ups. We really looked at references which came from narratives rather than documentaries.

STEVE: Which explains the Ennio Morricone music.

VALERIO: And it’s a way to condense as well. Sometimes it can last.... In the July Palio that year, before the start, they went out something like seven times and it lasted 45 minutes.There was 45 minutes in and out . Sometimes it's boring, but if you're  Sienese...(editor note: the race starts when one of the jockeys outside of a starting corral crosses a line and signals the start of the race. Before that, the jockeys inside the corral try to gain an advantageous starting position. It's like a chess match. If the jockeys are too aggressive in the corral, all of the horses must vacate their spots, exit the corral, and repeat this line-up process again) .

COSIMA: It’s boring if you don't know what’s going on-but if you know....

By the time we have the second race in August, we were thinking can people take another race after July- we have to condense and get to the first race earlier and not actually indulge in his victory. We had a lot of amazing shots we had to cut because it felt too much like a finale and it was only the July Palio.

Or the music...we had incredible epic music there which we took off in the mix and just put a simple guitar that our composer had scored-otherwise it felt like the climax of the film coming too soon.

What I love about the August Palio is you're like the  Sienese, you don't need much explanation, you can just sit there and enjoy it and know what the intrigue and looks mean. The July Palio was training you to really look at it as an insider, even more than most insiders because unless you were born or grew up in Siena you just don't understand it.

STEVE: Since you were born there that helped you place the cameras?

COSIMA: I'd been to the Palio since I was a child. My father used to take me into the square on his shoulders. I have seen the Palio many times. I researched it in the previous year. I bought my self a little ticket to go just in front of the ropes so I knew where I wanted to be because already in my research there was a very good angle I could get- in fact in my research there was an even better angle, it was lower but it was a tiny seat. We rented a room with a window. But again a lot of red tape because your lens can not come out of the window for safety reasons because it might drop. You're not going to see the Palio like that.

So I knew where to put the camera. We had a plan of the city and we really really thought about it. We had five cameras on the first race...

But four days before the race there are a lot of rituals so you know that every day at 6 o'clock the jockeys are coming down the street. It’s like theater. There's a natural choreography that’s always been there since medieval times. All the citizens, every year, the same time walking down the street. And we'd just sit there so we'd get the jockeys coming out or them looking at the muffled chaos--it not chaotic to them. We'd just sit in the square and we knew they would come out...

VALERIO: Because they would do six rehearsals.

COSIMA: Yea, 6 rehearsals, 2 a day for 3 days before. And we'd condense all of that. You don't get a sense of that because we had to condense heading into the first race otherwise you were so worn out as a viewer. So you don't get a sense of those four days which exhausted you-by the time you got to the Palio you’ve been drunk for three days running-you stayed up until 2 and woke up to get to the trial at 9am. The  Sienese are mad by the time of the Palio-they are espresso'd up, hung over--passion and emotions-it’s all really raw.

And the race is over in 90 seconds. It’s really weird.

Then you go up to the cathedral-and if you win you keep on partying and if you lose it kind of deflates like a kind of balloon--there’s a sense of desolation. If you go around the city go around to the district that won it’s a big party time, drumming and everyone's drunk and singing-they go around parading ,showing off to the districts going "we won, you're just losers. We're the best!" The other districts are all quiet like someone died. The shops are closed. It’s pretty weird.

STEVE: What do they do with the food if they lose?

COSIMA: I don't know, I never thought of that. I guess they have to buy food in case they win....no I think it’s just wine. The winner put tables out --now I remember because I went around--

Even then we have these great shots of the districts partying, but you can't put it all in- and it’s not about the districts but about the jockeys.

The  Sienese when I showed them the film were like “It’s not about us! It’s about the jockeys-those mercenaries!” They were like “where are we?!”And I was like “you’re not as interesting as them.”

But they have simple tables and everyone is standing and drinking out of these big vats of local wine and there is no eating.

HUBERT: You could repurpose the wine for misery drinking.

COSIMA: No, if you lose there is no wine. You just go home and go to bed. It’s this weird come down.

STEVE: I wanted to ask you are horses killed in the race? You see them crash---

COSIMA: But you see them get up. You know there are far more horses dying in the Grand National than in the Palio even though it looks so wild. There are some horses that might get injured but they don't necessarily die, they could race again but they go on holiday It’s like [the horse] Guess, who you saw in the first race. He's retired because his ankle was damaged so he's in a field having a good time, eating.

Some horses die, and it’s really sad. We have a very difficult contract with the city of Siena which is guarding the tradition. They are very aware of animal rights and they were paranoid about us showing too much. We were not allowed contractually and it was difficult because I was like, “I'm not making a propaganda film. I had to have final cut” but we had to respect a bit

We were lucky because no horses were injured on those two Palios

One jockey got seriously beaten up but we were contractually not allowed to show the beating. We got away with the archive [footage of the jockeys being beaten] because it was qualified by the mayor and it was archive- but that summer there was a very bad beating and we could not show that. It was frustrating as a director, as a filmmaker but on the other hand the film we wanted to tell was the jockey.

You can't do everything in life- you can't make a film about the districts and the animals and this and that- but the story we wanted to tell was about the jockeys.

VALERIO: In the Grand National 15 horses die every year, In the Palio there have been 3 horse that died in 20 years. They take care of the horses. They have vet visits very month and a real kind of care that really surprised me.

STEVE: If the horses win they can't race again?

VALERIO: They can

COSIMA: They can depending on the strategy.

VALERIO: It depends on the age. That white horse in the film was old. He won the Palio at the end of his career.

COSIMA: It was always going to be his last race because he was 9 or 10 years old. To start they have to be 6.

VALERIO: They used to have to be a thoroughbred...

COSIMA: Now half because they are too fast and they have delicate ankles. Half-thoroughbred means they have thicker ankles. They are carefully measured. There are protocols.

VALERIO: The vets are very strict in selecting the right horse physically because the track has 90 degree turns

COSIMA: Downhill...

VALERIA: Downhill. They have foam padding. In the 70's they literally had mattresses from beds and that was dangerous.

COSIMA: And at that time they were wearing caps-tin caps and when the jockey fell it became like a knife. One jockey's nose was cut off by the visor of his tin cap.

VALERIO: And they didn't change it because they were like "This is the way we've done it since 1470. We have to keep going like that"

COSIMA: They care more about the horses than the jockeys

STEVE: They don't beat the horses when they lose.

VALERIO: The horses are pure they are the only things that can't be corrupted.

Cosima Spender and Valerio Bonelli

KNUCKLEBALL!, FASTBALL, and the Personality of the Pitch - Tribeca 2015

Walt Whitman loved baseball, but he hated the curveball. "I shall call it everything that is damnable," he once wrote. For Whitman, the curveball was an ugly kind of deception that got in the way of hits and home runs. Maybe Whitman also viewed the curveball as an emblem of the snake oil salesman and the confidence man, those sneaks of the basest American character who deal in perfidy and grift rather than the high-minded American ideals of self-reinvention and the grind.

It makes me wonder what Walt Whitman would have thought of the fastball and the knuckleball, both of which have been the subject of entertaining and informative ESPN 30 for 30 documentaries in recent years. (Surely a documentary called Curveball is in the works.) Like the curveball, there is a kind of deception behind the fastball and the knuckelball, and the whole point is to confound batters. Rather than consider the batter vs. the pitcher in terms of the American character, Kevin Costner's narration in Fastball looks at the conflict in its most fundamental prehistoric terms: it's a guy with a stick against a guy with a rock.

Comparing Knuckleball! with Fastball is pretty fascinating since the character of the pitch has so much to do with the people who practice it and the way that stories become attached to these people. I keep saying that I don't like watching baseball, but I love the idea of baseball. These docs about fastballs and knuckleballs are about the idea of baseball, and also about baseball as a collection of stories.

Jonathan Hock's Fastball, which premiered at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival, chronicles the hardest throwers in the history of baseball, from oldies like Bob Feller and Walter Johnson, to Nolan Ryan, and more recent pitchers like Aroldis Chapman. The conflict isn't just a guy with a rock against a guy with a stick. There's a kind of one-upsmanship and argument about the fastball. Who threw harder? Who threw hardest? No, but who really threw hardest? It's not just the cavemen with sticks and rocks; it's like kids in the schoolyard, each one claiming that their dad could could beat up everyone else's dad. Everything is about individual achievement and pitching superlatives that push the shoulder and elbow to their absolute limit; and about measurement methods, tall tales, and, more important than the science and the math, confessions from the mound and testimonials from the plate.

Knuckleball!, which premiered at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, is less about individual achievement than it is a small band of misfits. Co-directors Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg explore the pitch like a kind of last resort. Few people start as a knuckleball pitcher. Instead they wind up becoming knuckleballers because other pitches just plain didn't work for them. The film predominately focuses on Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey (the only knuckleball pitcher to win a Cy Young award), both of whom come across less like macho hard-throwers and more like zen masters of the mound. They're part of a select group of knuckleballers. When they're together, the knuckleballers are less prone to one-upsmanship and more likely to share tips that help foster the next rare knuckleballer into the brotherhood.

The fastball and the knuckleball work drastically different parts of the arm. Whereas the heat in a fastball is lost when a pitcher's elbow goes, the bobbling eccentricities of the knuckleball are lost from something as small a broken fingernail. And still, each pitch is about a kind of deception. A knuckleball, thrown with as little rotation as possible, can slip and dive unexpectedly, whereas a fastball is thought, in defiance of physics, to actually rise as it approaches home plate rather than fall. The observer, who cannot make sense of the observed object, strikes out. Somewhere in between the speed and uncertainty of the two pitches, the aim is ultimately the same: beat the guy with the stick.

Whitman would probably be upset about both the damnable fastball and damnable knuckleball as pitches per se, but perhaps he'd appreciate the characters who threw them.

Hubert's Tribeca coverage for Flixist and Ruby Hornet Part 2

Hubert's Ruby Hornet Avatar

As most of you know Hubert split his time at Tribeca giving Flixist and Ruby Hornet coverage of the festival as well. Because his pieces are too good to pass up here's the second collection of his posts  for other websites:

Jackrabbit…
Live From New York!
GORED’s Reckless Bravery Offers Lessons for Creatives - …
The Adderall Diaries and the Problem with the Brilliant Male Writer Cliche
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Henry Hobson, and Joely Richardson Discuss Maggie 
A review of Maggie, the post-apocalyptic zombie drama starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Abigail Breslin 
Palio

Hubert has more coming both here and elsewhere so keep checking back

Love and Chemistry: The Divergent Emulsions of BEFORE SUNRISE and VIAJE - Tribeca 2015

On the surface, Paz Fabrega's Viaje seems like it could play in a double-feature with Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise. Both involve chance encounters that wind up meaning more, and both are about various aspects of young love. People meet, they connect, and then there's a question of what happens next time they meet, if at all.

And yet, Viaje and Before Sunrise are such different movies, and Viaje falls well short of Before Sunrise. (To be fair, plenty of movies fall well short of Before Sunrise.) The reason has everything to do with chemistry, specifically emulsion (i.e., the blend of separate substances, often liquids, in this case two strangers—just go with it). Whereas Before Sunrise uses strong characterization and conversation as an effective emulsifier (a substance that stabilizes an emulsion), Viaje uses mere proximity as an emulsifier, which makes its central relationship flimsy and not particularly viable for whatever personal revelations the two leads come to at the end.

In Before Sunrise, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) are so well defined, and their flirtation on the train when they first meet has everything to do with how we project ourselves to the people we're attracted to. Jesse has to convince Celine that spending time with someone she just met is a risk worth taking, and Celine is smart enough to be wary, and they're both guarding their mutual excitement. Since Hawke and Delpy had a hand in writing their own characters (a key to the effectiveness of the later Before films), there's something so organic about they way they mesh. Nathan Rabin had a great summation of their banter when he wrote up the film on The Dissolve recently: "From the beginning, their talk has the rarified air of flirting, of people trying to impress one another by being the most fascinating, most verbose, most charismatic version of themselves they can possibly be."

The banter that Jesse and Celine exchange and their ramble through Vienna play to Linklater's strengths as a peripatetic writer/director: wander, talk, observe, react, repeat with variation, allude to previous observations, and let time do the rest of the work. Eventually a philosophical dialogue about relationships emerges, concluding in a kind of syllogism about young love and brief encounters. This deepens in the subsequent Before outings as time becomes an even more essential component in this evolving dialogue between Jesse and Celine—in Before Sunset, it's a question of picking up a thread lost years ago when time has intervened, in Before Midnight, it's a question of the ravages of time—and even finds expression in Linklater's similarly peripatetic Boyhood.

The first encounter between Luciana (Kattia Gonzalez) and Pedro (Fernando Bolaños) in Viaje isn't as charming. They're at a party thrown by mutual friends, they're two strangers, and while Luciana is in a stairway coming out of the bathroom, Pedro goes up and kisses her. This is just a couple seconds after introducing himself, and there's no sense of them flirting or interacting before this moment. (Throughout the film, Pedro seems pretty rapey rather than rakish.) Rather than slugging him in the face, Luciana walks away only return to the stairway and proceed to barge in on Pedro in the bathroom and make out with him.

Viaje isn't about Luciana and Pedro just hooking up, though. In just a few scenes, they have a touchy-feely familiarity with one another like they've been dating for a little bit rather than strangers who've just met. The sole interaction that grounds their rapport is a funny scene in a cab leaving the party in which they discuss subversions of traditional relationships. For a moment, the film seems aware of what it's doing, but then it drops this metacommentary about real-life encounters and movie encounters for a contrivance: Luciana agrees to go camping with Pedro in the Costa Rican rain forest the next morning having only met him a few hours before. The remainder of the film sets Luciana and Pedro in the splendor of nature, trying to suggest that their connection—based solely on proximity rather than chemistry—is as organic as the leaves and branches and water and earth that surrounds them.

It doesn't help matters that Luciana and Pedro's personalities are blank. They're attractive, young, and a little lost, but that's about it. Your twenties are a kind of work-in-progress when defining yourself, but characters in their twenties shouldn't feel like they're aesthetic works-in-progress. When Luciana reveals more about herself later in the film and what's going on in her life, it makes the excursion to the wilderness feel more contrived, and it makes the sudden attraction to Pedro, with a tenderness bordering on love, feel inorganic. In Jane Austen's Persuasion, two side characters fall for one another thanks to a combination of proximity and time, but here in Viaje, there's no sense of time propelling the sense of connection.

What's fascinating about this Before Sunrise/Viaje split is that the events in Before Sunrise occur in far less time than the events in Viaje, and yet Before Sunrise feels more organic. That's thanks to the writing, which allows all banter of all chance encounters to be presented in a kind of purified form. Before Sunrise has the contrivances of a lesser romance but winds up feeling like a real meeting between real people, whereas Viaje starts with the appearance of the real and winds up feeling fake. As Luciana and Pedro are in the woods together acting like a couple, hanging from tree branches, touching leaves that shrink at contact, all I could think was that nature doesn't work that way.

TRANSFATTY LIVES, THANK YOU FOR PLAYING, and KURT COBAIN: MONTAGE OF HECK: The Epistolary Documentary - Tribeca 2015

The epistolary novel is a form so textual that it doesn't really translate to visual mediums. Yet I think there's been an attempt to take the epistolary form and use it to create a confessional and often cathartic form of documentary. One of the most notable films in this mode is Kurt Kuennne's Dear Zachary, which is a love letter to multiple parties. There are shaky, clumsy bits in every love letter when a person discloses too much or confesses something too raw and inartful, and moments of Dear Zachary have that feeling, but the earnest attempt to render wild emotions in a recognizable form can sometimes make formal criticisms moot.

I thought about Dear Zachary a few times with three films that screened at this year's Tribeca Film Festival: TransFatty Lives, Thank You for Playing, and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the last of which opens today in select cities and will play on HBO later this year. All three are epistolary docs in their own way, and they're all types of love letters.

TransFatty Lives is probably the most epistolary of these epistolary docs since it's structured as a letter via voiceover. But it's more of a letter by way of Tarnation, Jonathan Caouette's memorable psychological collage. TransFatty Lives centers on director Patrick O'Brien and his fight against ALS. He was once a DJ an NYC scenester, but those days come to an end in his twenties when he's diagnosed with the Lou Gehrig's Disease. We watch his heartbreaking decline. It comes so rapidly. He loses the use of his legs, he loses the use of his voice, and yet he continues to chronicle the ups and downs of his struggle and makes art with the help of his friends. TransFatty Lives is a love letter to Patrick's son, a child who may never get to know his own father, but this moving artistic document might make that possible.

It takes a brief moment to understand the form of TransFatty Lives—the collage love letter, or a memoir as love letter, or both—but its hook is its vulnerability and determination to chronicle. While Patrick is short of breath, losing his ability to breath unassisted, he asks his sister to document the moment. She cries uncontrollably into the camcorder as Patrick commands her to film herself, not him, and to keep recording this moment. He's directing to his dying breath. His body might go, but his mind is still there, and the mind says his art must live.

Thank You for Playing (which I reviewed over at Flixist the other day) is another kind of love letter to a son. Directors David Osit and Malika Zouhali-Worrall focus on indie developer Ryan Green's videogame That Dragon, Cancer. Ryan's son Joel was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer while still a baby, and the videogame recreates the experience of losing a child. Like TransFatty Lives, this is a heartbreaking document of decline and also a love letter to a son. Interestingly, Thank You for Playing crosses two documentary modes—the making-of and the epistolary doc—and the game That Dragon, Cancer is a sort of love letter itself. Ryan and his wife Amy are trying their hardest to write to a child they'll never get to know, but to know that he was there and that they loved him is all that matters. They've written a message in a bottle.

Brett Morgen's Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is a love letter to a daughter, Frances Bean Cobain; and like TransFatty Lives and Tarnation, it's a collage. Morgen's approach combines Kurt Cobain's home recordings, notebooks, home movies from childhood, home video while strung out on heroin, concert footage, photos, talking head interviews, animation, demos, doodles, and anything available, as if joining all the stuff of a life could somehow recreate a person. When the film is at its best, it's like one of Robert Rauschenberg's paintings: the messiness reveals patterns, purpose, and moments of emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual clarity. In one of the most spellbinding sequences in Montage of Heck, a young Kurt Cobain recounts his first suicide attempt, which is preceded by an ugly moment of teenage cruelty and adolescent desperation. It's recreated in animation, accompanied by a string quartet rendition of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"; it's masterful.

Morgen loses his way in the middle of his Montage, however, once the focus of the film turns to the success of Nevermind, the grind of touring, and how much Cobain hates being interviewed. The structure becomes repetitive, whereas everything that comes before and after this middle portion of the film feels revelatory and propulsive. There's a more succinct summation of the In Utero days, and Montage feels like it treads water for roughly 20 minutes. Morgen also reuses multiple Nirvana songs rather than reserving that distinction for just one song. Montage of Heck could have been structured a bit better had Morgen considered a corresponding Mix-Tape of Heck. Yet the candor when the film works shows the good and bad of Kurt Cobain, and Morgen, with the cooperation of Courtney Love, has made a solid archival love letter.

There's an air of sadness to all of these epistolary documentaries because they are just a single letter rather than an exchange of multiple letters. They're made by parents or on the behalf of parents, and often to children who either can't respond or can never get to know their respective correspondents. If love letters are meant bring us closer, these epistolary docs may be a profound reminder of the gulf between people who love each other, and how desperately we want to make sense of a person's absence by creating something as a bridge.

Hubert's Tribeca Film Festival Coverage at Flixist and Ruby Hornet

Missing-presumed watching movies

Hubert is a busy man.

Not only is he providing coverage of Tribeca here at Unseen but he's also doing it at other sites as well. If you want to know what he's doing when away from Unseen here's his posts to date:

THE ADDERALL DIARIES
THE SURVIALIST
THE BIRTH OF SAKE

More coverage is coming and I'll link to it when it goes up

SWORN VIRGIN (VERGINE GIURATA), VIRGIN MOUNTAIN (FUSI), and How Sex Changes the Size of a Character's World - Tribeca 2015

Sex changes everything, or at least it opens up the possibilities for change. Seeing two films with the word "virgin" in the title meant an immediate possibility for contrast. While Sworn Virgin (Vergine giurata) and Virgin Mountain (Fúsi) each approach the idea of sex as a rite of passage, they also share a common idea that sex leads people into bigger more more fulfilling worlds.

In Laura Bispuri's moving Sworn Virgin, we get to explore the eponymous concept and its deleterious effects on a woman's sense of self and sense of worth. Sworn virgins are Albanian women who make a pact with their community to live as men. They're made to dress as men, and vow to remain virgins for the rest of their lives simply to participate in the patriarchal society they live in.

By becoming a sworn virgin, a woman (now considered a man) is able to own property, to carry a gun, to have some sense of a future beyond being a wife or a servant. It's not a matter of gender dysphoria, but instead a means to limit possibilities and keep the world small and women powerless; the only way for women to have some sense of agency is to surrender their sex and gender.

Mark (Alba Rohrwacher) made the vow many years ago, but she leaves the confines of her old world for Milan. There in the city, with the help of a friend, she begins to unfetter herself. The only limitations are the old traditions imposed on her in Northern Albania. There, the sheer denial of womanhood was a way to live, but in Milan denial is stultifying. Mark has the possibility of becoming herself and defining her own destiny--she finally gets to create her own future. The process is slow, and Bispuri allows the emotional journey toward agency to unfold while Rohrwacher communicates Mark's reticence. The present is intercut with glimpses of the suffocating past, until there is only present, only modernity. Sex, if it happens, isn't just a rite of passage, but an act of glorious liberation.

Virgin Mountain offers another version of small world confinement. Rather than a tradition that keeps the local patriarchy strong, we're dealing with issues of self-esteem. Fusi (Gunnar Jónsson) is a massive middle-aged airport employee who lives with his mom. He leads a sheltered existence. Also his mom gets laid more than he does.

Rather than get out in the world, Fusi prefers to deal with the world of scale models and historical recreations. He's a gigantic manchild, but he prefers this state of arrested development to the complications of adulthood. (When he's bullied by co-workers, it feels like it's still high school.) The model world presents a series of manageable situations, ones defined by guidebooks and that he can control. Historical battle recreations do not involve rejection or human interaction. There's a comfort in this sort of confinement, and it's also no way to live. The model world is a way of retreating from the real world.

Writer/director Dagur Kári presents the airport in a series of overhead shots, as if it were another kind of model that Fusi would play with. When his mother and her current boyfriend get him line dancing lessons, they introduce so many variables into the model world life Fusi leads, notably a potential love interest (Ilmur Kristjánsdóttir), maybe the first shot he's had at letting his world expand.

There's an overly sweet sense to Virgin Mountain at a certain point, and some of Fusi's behaviors strain believability. In fact, he gets down right stalker-y in an uncomfortable way. Still, it's satisfying to watch both Fusi and Mark fight to become themselves. It's as if the bigger world was waiting for them to show up.

Tribeca 2015-A Conversation (plus our 14 MUST SEE FILMS)

Tribeca is days away and we at Unseen Films are locked and loaded.  As this posts we've waded through 47 films.  Hubert and myself are in our high oxygen hibernation chambers getting ready for the madness which starts Thursday as the festival proper starts.

Going into the festival this year we knew there were going to be some changes- the festival has moved back down town, they've added Spring Studios and are having sever huge events ( Monty Python , Riff Trax and George Lucas are coming).  There are changes everywhere so much so that Hubert and I ended up in a long conversation about it:

HUBERT (H): It does seem like things are running different than two years ago

STEVE (S):... I think the big guns announcements- Lucas, Python, Riff Trax. have sent things into over drive.

H:If anything, this may be the sign of Tribeca trying to up their game and define themselves. Generally Tribeca feels sort of like the post-Sundance, post-Berlin, post-SXSW, pre-Cannes also-ran film festival. Now it's like, "Yeah, motherfuckers, it's fucking New York!"

S As much as I love NYFF, to me Tribeca has become the NYC festival. I mean its a freaking city wide festival at this point. There was one year where they did drive in movies at Rockefeller Center and brought in cars for people to sit in.

Actually the reason that Tribeca is more NYC is because not only is it a city wide fest, its also has tons of world premieres... only 30 (features) have played somewhere else. Its all new films

I do think you're right this is the year they take over their city and mark themselves as THE NYC Fesitival

H:That's kind of an interesting thing about Tribeca as the NYC festival. It doesn't have the same sort of klout as kingmaker festivals (Sundance and NYFF), but it might have that local vibe as the fest for the city. Which makes sense in some ways since it came about post-9/11.... I guess in that sense, it's less about playing kingmaker than it is about coming together and launching some ships. (Mixed metaphors are beautiful things.)

S: You're right over the last couple of years its been a major ship launcher. How many films have come from there?

The films from last year (and the year before) are all over the place. That wasn't always the case in the early years-going back to 2010 or before there are a large number of films that got out of the starting gate but then went nowhere- Trying to find some films I saw in 2010 has been a major chore. If you look at the earlier films there are a number of titles that made me go- "what are these films and did they end up anywhere?" The last few years a good chunk of the films end up getting some sort of a release- hell even the bad ones are getting put into theaters


SO here it is two days away until the Opening Night, three days away from the start of the fest proper. Its terrifying because I have no idea what the hell is going to be happening.

I can say that our coverage will start tomorrow when we run an interview with Bill Corbett about the Riff Trax show Friday. After that expect waves of film reviews, reports from the screenings and loud anguished cries from the Unseen staff who will no doubt be beyond exhausted.

I can say that we will be at Riff Trax, The Kurt Cobain documentary, The Fastball premiere and two Monty Python events. I'm still trying to work out some interviews and other events. I won't reveal more since the new lay out of venues will no doubt play havoc on what I intend to do.

We will keep you posted, well informed and hopefully entertained

I know in past years I listed everything we've seen but this year I'm going to keep it simple and just list the stuff you really should see (the reasons are very short because the embargoes this year are incredibly strict).  I would like to add that despite not liking some films there hasn't been anything I've truly hated.


THE UNSEEN FILMS TRIBECA 2015 MUST SEES

PALIO- the world's oldest horse race is brought to the big screen in a film that will take your breath away on the big screen. (Seriously you must see this as big as possible)

IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE- Che "Rhymefest" Smith buys his father's house and then things get complicated. An examination of the past, fatherhood and forgiveness kicks ass. I called my Dad as soon as it finished to tell him I loved him

SONG OF LAHORE- Pakistani musicians looking to save their craft begin to fuse their songs with jazz standards. Music this good will make you bop around the theater.

CARTEL LAND - punch in the face film about trying to fight the Mexican drug cartels that threaten both Mexico and the US.

MAN UP- Simon Pegg co-stars in a winning romantic comedy about two people on a blind date. Damn its funny and charming.

FAR FROM MEN - a de facto western set in Algeria during the war that's based on a Camus story. It could be one of the best westerns John Ford never made.

BODYSLAM: REVENGE OF THE BANANA- look at SSP Wrestling and what happens when one disgruntled wrestler gets the government involved. Its like hanging out with your best buds in the corner bar.

KING JACK- Forget BOYHOOD this is the real deal. Its so much like growing up that everyone in the room full of critics were left to ponder their own childhoods when the film ended.

TRANSFATTY LIVES- Filmmaker Patrick O'Brien documents his battle with ALS . It’s a celebration of life showing how one man’s desire to see his son grow up can hold back the inevitable

HAVANA MOTOR CLUB- Underground racing with classic cars struggles to go main stream in Cuba in love letter to the sport and the city.

MONTY PYTHON THE MEANING OF LIVE- I can think of no more fitting send off than this doc about their final shows- Easily one of the best films of Tribeca and of the year

AMONG THE BELIEVERS-  a look at the Red Mosque in Pakistan will depress and frighten you in equal measures

PRESCRIPTION THUGS is Christopher Bell's follow up to BIGGER STRONGER FASTER. It seems like its been there and done that look at prescription dug abuse-and then he flips it into something much more personal and moving

DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: THE STORY OF THE NATIONAL LAMPOON is tied as my favorite film of Tribeca so far. Not only damn funny but a great primer on where modern American comedy came from (and stay through the end credits for a final bit ala S Gross)

Film Comment Selects 2015: Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films

The phrase "Electric Boogaloo" is a perennial punchline. Add the phrase to any sequel title and you'll at least get a polite chuckle of acknowledgement. Like a movie nerd equivalent to Sriracha, "Electric Boogaloo" works with anything.

We have producer/director Menahem Golan to thank for it, and ditto his cousin Yoram Globus. Following the success of the breakdancing movie Breakin', Golan, in a fit of inspiration, announced to his fellow Cannon Films employees that they would be making a sequel, and the sequel's title would be Electric Boogaloo.

From the minds of madmen, legend--sometimes genius--is born.

And so it makes sense that Mark Hartley would title his enjoyable documentary about the rise and fall of Cannon Films Electric Boogaloo. The phrase is one of Cannon's most enduring legacies. Cannon's primary legacy, however, is its output. This was the studio that made some of the finest schlock of the 1980s: the disastrous rock musical The Apple, the TWA hijack revenge-fantasy The Delta Force, Tobe Hooper's unhinged nudie space-vampire epic Lifeforce, the Sylvester Stallone's arm wrestling mega-flop Over the Top, the ultra-violent fun of American Ninja, and the gonzo masterpiece of urban decay and urban warfare Death Wish 3.

Cannon movies were occasionally oversexed, often cheap and usually derivative, and yet they also embraced a kind of macho Reaganism that was in the air, and so many of their most well-known movies feature reconfigured cowboys (dressed as ninjas, soldiers, Chuck Norris, or Charles Bronson) who dispensed justice with brutal yet righteous certainty. The bad guys were often so bad that they didn't just get shot with guns at close range, but with rocket launchers.

Hartley continues to be the premiere documentarian of cult films and B-movies. His previous documentaries explored Australian exploitation movies (Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!) and the schlock made in the Philippines in the 1970s (Machete Maidens Unleashed!). With Electric Boogaloo, Hartley takes a similar approach to his other works, showcasing clips of some of Cannon's greatest hits and flops intercut with the various actors, directors, behind-the-scenes players, and enthusiasts.

At the center of Electric Boogaloo is a focus on Golan and Globus as these larger-than-life personalities. Some of the interviewees characterize the pair as wily hucksters (possibly dangerous ones) who happened to be in the film business. While making a movie in Israel, Golan supposedly threatened to shoot a pilot if he didn't land his plane for a scene. Yet none of the interviewees can deny that Golan and Globus loved of film as a medium. While so much of Cannon is associated with action and sleaze, the company also helped distribute Neil Jordan's In the Company of Wolves, Franco Zeffirelli's Otello, Barbet Schroeder's Barfly, and Godfrey Reggio's Powaqqatsi. The company's dalliances with prestige also led to bizarre failures like Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear and Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance.

At some points, particularly toward the end, Electric Boogaloo's fondness for Cannon turns into misplaced reverence. Much of it may be due to the dissolution of Cannon and the death of Menahem Golan last November. Tenderness is expected, but there's an odd defensiveness in some of the fondness for Cannon that seems off. In particular, one of the interviewees claims that Cannon made good films but the company was the victim of snobbiness.

It's a major stretch to suggest that Cannon was the victim of high-brow cultural gatekeepers--Superman IV's problems are wholly its own, not the product of elitism--but maybe it's also a sign of the protectiveness people have for Cannon as an idea. The feelings are engendered in part by nostalgia for the company and for the antics of Golan and Globus as personalities, but maybe the love is rooted in Cannon's unabashedness when it came to its excesses. So much stuff these days is awash in ironic detachment as a kind of posture or as a self-defense mechanism, a kind of escape hatch from engaging meaningfully with actual base emotions that make people seem uncool. The classic Cannon movies were a lot of things, but they were rarely ironic (at least intentionally). They embodied the 80s and its big dumb teenage id.

Besides, who has time to be ironic when you've got a city of goons to shoot with missiles?

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Electric Boogaloo: The Wild Untold Story of Cannon Films screens tomorrow night (Friday, February 20th) as part of Film Comment Selects 2015. Director Mark Hartley and other special guests will be in attendance for a Q&A. For more information, click here or visit filmlinc.com.

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980)

Les Blank's short documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe is built on a bet between Werner Herzog and Errol Morris. Morris had still not made a film at that point of his life, and had abandoned previous creative endeavors (not just films). To egg his friend on, Herzog said that if Morris actually completed a movie, he would go to the premiere of the film and eat his own shoes.

And so in 1978, Herzog, at Chez Panisse with the assistance of Alice Waters, cooked his footwear in duck fat and spices for five hours and then ate his shoe in front of an appreciative Berkeley crowd at the UC Theater during the premiere of Morris' Gates of Heaven.

Herzog's persona is in full effect here—observant, at times seemingly alien, deadpan hilarious, but always intelligent in articulating the points he's getting at, and often poetic while getting there. At one point, he lambasts the inadequacy of the images in society that are fed to us by commercials and television, and says that maybe a society without adequate images is culturally doomed. Minutes prior to that, he talks about having once jumped into a cactus as a promise to one of his actors.

This sense of high and low—the absurdity of eating a shoe to push someone to create, the fact we can debase ourselves to allow others the ability to dream—is what makes Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe both silly and yet oddly inspiring.

One of Herzog's more profound observations about the struggle to create art and the persistence of achieving this vision appears in two works about the making of Fitzcarraldo, the book Conquest of the Useless and Blank's 1982 feature-length documentary The Burden of Dreams: If I were to abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams, and I don't want to live like that. The line contains a dogged sense of hard work being worthwhile, the struggle being better than not having to struggle at all.

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe offers two lines that I think could be viewed as a precursor.

The first: Making films turns me into a clown, but that happens to everyone; what filmmakers do is immaterial—it's a projection of light—and it makes you a clown in the process. Herzog says this while eating his shoe. As far as clowns go, I picture a clown who takes pratfalls and pies to the face yet keeps going; a silent clown like Charlie Chaplin's tramp (who appears briefly in the doc), or even a cartoon clown like Wile E. Coyote or Daffy Duck in "Duck Amuck," clowns less like Bozo and more like Sisyphus.

The second line, which comes at the end, is the burden of fools and a call to other creatives out there to be honorable clowns: To eat a shoe is a foolish signal, but it was worthwhile, and once in a while I think we should be foolish enough to do things like that—more shoes, more boots, more garlic!