I don’t know what it is about Best Worst Movie that makes me want to call it a guilty pleasure; perhaps it’s that it is based on one of the ultimate guilty pleasures of cinema history, Troll 2, or that it is destined to be the documentary of choice for geeks and fanboys across North America for the next year or more. It could also be that, while most definitely being the most entertaining and enjoyable documentary in Hot Docs this year, it doesn’t actually function in many of the ways a ‘good’ doc does. It is all of the above, of course, but mostly the latter. The film has at least half a dozen spectacular characters that really couldn’t have been scripted any better. George Hardy, the father in Troll 2, is an excessively amiable dentist, charming in his good intentions and naivete. Claudio Fragasso, the original film’s director, and his wife, the screenwriter, are completely oblivious to the cult following that their film has developed, and we get to witness their epiphany first-hand, in all of its bitterness and confusion. Don Packard, the drugstore owner, is every bit as mentally unstable and frightening as one could have hopes he would be. And then there is Margo Prey, the mother. Poor Margo – the revelation of what she has turned into is too good to be spoiled, and really has to be seen to be believed. I have never seen Troll 2, but I came away from Best Worst Movie with an appreciation for the film that is on par with Sleepaway Camp, Dead Alive, and The Re-Animator: the best of trashy, cult, camp horror. As a documentary that studies the impact of making/starring in a terrible film, and the trauma that the cast must have experienced, shifting over the years into hyperbolic worship and praise, is hit and miss. The film works best when the tragedy of fallen dreams is shown to have taken its toll on the cast and crew in its most heartbreaking form, and even more when that tragedy morphs into joy and euphoria after those years of suffering. The first half hour of the film, I thought it was in trouble. Many of the laughs and set-ups were satisfied simply by showing footage from Troll 2, a cheap and lame reliance on the source material instead of the substance and craft of the documentarian. The substance does get better (much, much better), but it still feels like a lot of luck, rather than talent. Nagging criticisms aside, though, fans and the un-converted (as I am) of Troll 2 are almost gauranteed satisfaction from this feel-so-bad-it-feels-good film. I laughed till I cried, it’s true.

Audition feels like it could have been made by an inexperienced Abbas Kiarostami, which is supposed to be a compliment. The filmmaker goes to Afghanistan to audition civilians for a role in a film that she is making, and she films the audition process and gathers interviews about the experience one goes through in Afghanistan after appearing in films, or even photographs. Predictably, the women have a tougher time with it than the men. Many women who are approached by Pazira for an interview immediately cover their mouths and decline, while others around often begin teasing. To have one’s image taken in this country is seen to be shameful, and somehow taints the image of those who are filmed’s entire families. One of the film’s two bravura moments occurs when Pazira asks a man if he would behead his sister if he found out that she had been filmed, and he easily said yes. He then asks her why she came to Afghanistan to shoot this film, and her answer is bold, eloquent, and ballsy; it caused gasps.

A amoxicillin dosage big decision was made to keep many of Pazira’s questions and replies in the film, which I think is essential, and something that most documentaries should be doing. How can I expect to appreciate and understand what a subject is answering if I do not know what was asked? To have the question, then the answer is to have the full, unabridged picture of the experience. The only moments of diegesis in the film are with intermittent voiceovers accompanied by superfluous , non-diegetic music where Pazira inexplicably tells the viewer what we will be seeing in the next scene. After the editor made such a good decision to leave the questions in with the interviews, it is nearly undone by this silly idea.

The film poses some fun, but pretty pointless comparisons of male auditions and female auditions. Basically, the men are goofy and terrible, while the women shown are sensitive, and serious. Such a limited sampling means pretty much nothing, but it did allow for a pretty great scene in which three male actors all perform terrible examples of crying, and then a young woman is asked to cry, and then she just starts to flat out weep on demand, one-upping the brilliant audition in Mulholland Dr.

Jackpot, a 50-minute documentary that tracks five regulars of Ontario’s Delta Bingo, is sweet, funny, melancholic, and nostalgic. Bingo halls, which have a small-town, vintage aesthetic that is similar to bowling alleys, feel like a homier incarnation of a casino. This makes for a film that really pops visually, with a minimal, but bright, palette of blues, purples, yellows, pinks and neon lights. The film’s charm comes from the superb selection of subjects, all of which wallow in the simple game as a way out, whether it’s from divorce, deceased companions, or a disability. Margaret, the elderly woman in the picture above, comes to bingo six days of the week, and spends her winnings on more bingo. A moment toward the end when she is shown descending a staircase in her home while saying that she would die without bingo, is cute at first, but grows more tragic when you realize that this is absolutely true. A divorced man who spent many years crying over the absence of his ex-wive and his children found solace in his trips to the bingo hall, and even met his new partner there. Another man, whose wife passed away ten years ago, says, clearly choked up, that his wife would never come to bingo when she was here, and that he just started coming regularly after she passed. Bingo, like slot machines, is pure luck, one of the few games that really is 0% skill, lending another degree of pity to these characters who find so much pride in winning a game that they have no control over. It’s a glimpse of lowered expectations, but also of the simple things that can bring someone happiness. The film could have benefited from looking a bit at the history of bingo, and a look at supposed strategies, as well as the game’s history and development in Canada.

A drawn-out commercial for the already excessive Toronto club scene, Clubland is too superficial to provide any insight for Toronto residents who are familiar with the city’s club scene, the largest in the world, and won’t hold any interest for anyone who doesn’t live in Toronto. Aside from a phony, raspy voiceover that sounds like it belongs to the voice of a midnight radio DJ, the film is obviously filmed to glamorize the clubs rather than question them. The film spends as much time documenting Paris Hilton’s visit to one of the clubs as it spends on a major conflict, that of residents vs. clubbers. It studies this for about ten minutes by interviewing two sets of residents, both over the age of fifty, and forges the conflict, then, as the reserved elderly vs. the lively young. The film also doesn’t address the fact that Toronto clubs give very little of the money that they make back to the city, despite the fact that the city funds the police that have to constantly be on guard to maintain the 50,000+ drunks every night. The producer of the film, who was present for a brief Q & A, also shrugged off criticism from an audience member who asked why the film didn’t at least mention the city’s 1970s rave scene, the clubbing niche that allowed the Toronto clubs to blossom into what they are today. He seemed more interested in heading off to the after-party than defending his putrid film that has zero format that it could be useful in: no cinemas, no cable, no VJs.

This was a sweet but limited insight of the lives of four ‘cat ladies’ in Ontario. Two of the women are somewhat novices to the cat lady moniker (have less than twenty cats) while the other two each have over a hundred cats. The film tracks the women’s household activities with the cats, then an attempt at explain why they do this (the novices are lonely and/or had abusive childhoods, the crazies took in every homeless cat they could find for shelter), then the ridicule they get from the Humane Society, neighbors, and the press, and finally a bit of self-regret for becoming this stereotype (though one woman, who has the least cats (less than ten I think), is convinced that cats will always be her one, true loves). The film annoyingly ignores the 2007 discovery of an actual parasite that is believed to be the blame for the ‘illness that is being a cat lady. The parasite comes from cats, and can migrate to the brain, where the effect is a tendency to collect cats (this sounds too good to be true, maybe, but it was a big story that can be read here). The film mostly ignores the death of these cats, and the emotional devastation that may or may not come from being around so many deaths for an animal that these women love so much. If you have 120 cats, several must die every year, which I would have been curious to see how they handle it. Also, I know the film is Cat Ladies, but the perspective from a male collector would have been welcome. The film was filmed in pristine video (must have been 4K), the cats are cute, and the women are crazy and entertaining. Watching the film (in a theatre filled with cat ladies, no doubt) was fun, but not much more than a superficial look at a limited sampling of a fascinating illness.

This must be one of the most beautiful looking films ever made; the photography of nature is absolutely magical, and the portrayal of time, and jumps in time, are the most effectively disorienting of any of Tarkovsky’s films. I don’t know what he does, if he artificially created the gusts of wind that pause time at exactly the right moments, but the flames, rains, and winds seem to be on their very best behavior for this film. Surreal moments are not only more plentiful than any of his other films, but also more believable in this film versus, say, the final scene of Stalker when the glasses are telekinetically guided across a table. The woman floating in her sleep towards the end of Mirror is realistic enough that it wouldn’t be out of place in a J-Horror film; it’s more than a little bit terrifying (not to mention the similar, earlier scene in which the same woman raises her wet hair about of the tub, and seems to be simultaneously moving forward and backward in time as the ceiling crumbles around her. I was especially drawn to the visuals of the film because, on first viewing, this film is so difficult to assemble and make sense of, that I gave up on comprehension and just stared in awe at the eye candy. The shifts through time, multiple roles for the actors, and self-references made me think of INLAND EMPIRE, a film that, formally, I think has a lot in common with this one.

Speaking of David Lynch, I was also reminded of The Straight Story when the we see the burning home (as well as Days of Heaven). As Mirror is a film heavily attuned to the feelings of childhood and memory, I thought it was an interesting thematic symbol, having a burning home as a representation of a troubled childhood, that this film shared with Straight Story. Alvin Straight loses control of his lawn mower when the brakes fail and races violently down a hill. In the background a large house is in flames, and grabs Straight’s attention. The burning home represented the incident in which his (slightly mentally disabled) daughter Rose lost the rights to care for her children after she was blamed for a house fire. The flames of the homes in both of these films are filmed very Romantically , suggesting a disturbing correlation pertaining to the relationships between parents and their children. If Mirror is a telling of childhood, which I believe it obviously is, it is certainly not a pretty one.

So much of the film beckons for deeper readings and interpretations, like the opening scene with the seance, and of course the mirrors, that I would just make a fool of myself to act like I can write something insightful about it. But it would be oh so nice if Kino could take their feet off of their greedy hands and give the rights to this and every Tarkovsky film they have over to someone who will transfer it for Blu-ray. It would make revisiting it even more exciting.

Some minor spoilers below.
Of Kiarostami’s films that I have seen so far, The Wind Will Carry Us is easily the most elusive and mysterious. An Engineer arrives in a small town with a small crew, and the only information given about their journey to this area is that they are anticipating the death of a hundred year-old woman and the subsequent ceremony. The Engineer receives phone calls from a woman who naggingly checks up on the status of the project a few time a day, and he befriends a boy who, much to the pleasure of Kiarostami, considers his studies to be the most important part of his life. As the days wear on, the old woman shows signs of improvements, and from here the tension in the film mounts. The phone calls, which require the Engineer to drive up to the top of a hill for better reception, become more frequent, an earthquake buries a man alive, and the young boy refuses to speak to the Engineer he scolded him for giving out information to someone who he shouldn’t have. The film will end with many of these plot points unresolved.

Much of this film is about the ‘between’ step, the limbo of a process. When the Engineer receives a phone call, every time, it is put on hold while he runs to his car, and then drives up a typically winding path where he can resume the conversation, out of breath. A man digs a trench at the top of this hill, the job handicapped and stalled after the tremor. The Engineer befriends a woman across from the balcony of his lodging who is pregnant with her 10th baby, living in the disabling trek between conception and labor. And then there is the viewer’s relationships with these people, rarely fully developed if only because we never see them or know their names. I believe the only character who is given a name and a face is Farzad, the boy studying for his exams. This distinction creates a crux of his character, one that directly contrasts the films other crux, the dying invalid. Farzad is thriving and growing and learning while the invalid, and the visiting crew, awaits her death. The Engineer, the film’s protagonist, dwells between these two poles of life. Farzad finds a domain in the school and the invalid a domain in her deathbed, but the Engineer runs from place-to-place, racing back and forth from the hilltop, fetching milk, and scampering away from his tea time, absentmindedly leaving behind his camera, at the slightest distraction.

The bone in the end drifts, zigzagged again, down the stream, between the top and the bottom. It is one of the most overt symbols of mortality, a bone without flesh. While the bone may still exist, it is a reminder that the mind of the person who used to rely on this leg bone for walking doesn’t; the mind that has escaped the limbo that is life, the stopgap between oblivion and oblivion. Up until this film, I’d have described every film by Kiarostami that I’d seen, save for his early The Traveler, as the simplest and purest representations of love, not the weepy swoony kind that occurs between two lovers, but the essential love and respect that occurs being two beings, regardless of how they feel toward each, or how well they know each other. The Wind Will Carry Us falls in this category. It’s there amongst the Engineer and Farzad, and it’s between the Engineer and the invalid.

RR (2007)

There is a world of metaphor that can be exhumed from an idea that is simple and elegant; reading the project description yields many of them. A film composed of 43 shots of trains, each beginning as the train is just about to enter in the frame, and ending a few seconds after it leaves the frame. And that really is all there is to it, save for some questionable audio choices. So, looking at that description, one gets the film’s sense of history, both in terms of early American trade, and film history with the Lumiere brothers. Then the film’s structure, with shots whose lengths cannot possibly be determined by Benning after he has decided on his rules. After Benning sets up the camera and begins to wait, the train, its conductor, and America’s demand for material and construction become the factors that decide the cuts. And the cars of the train, which visually mimic the progressing images of celluloid, following each other up, one-by-one in a stampede through time. And just as much as I thought I knew what I would see going into 13 Lakes, and did, there is still something impossible about these films’ brilliance that simply cannot be glimpsed in ‘plot’-alluded foresight.

There is a battle that takes place in the film between the landscapes and the trains. This isn’t a man vs. nature dichotomy, though, because the landscapes still include manufactured structures like bridges, homes, factories, and windmills. It is, instead, a competition between that which is still and that which is in motion. Benning’s extraordinary gift for composition of these landscapes makes the train into a kind of malevolent force, a timer that not only cuts that beautiful image that we’ve only briefly been allowed to swoon over right in two, but also tells us just how long we can look at it. I cannot recount how many times I internally pleaded with the conductors to slow down their trains, to please let me have these images just a little bit longer. And like the glimpse of an entire lifetime that might flash before one’s eyes before dying, so is the last, complete view of the landscape, post-train, that lingers for just a bit before the harsh cut to black. If I’m sounding excessively schmaltzy about all of this, it is only because it is all so moving that anything less would feel inadequate.

This is part of what makes the 43rd train so mindblowing. Running through what could inarguably be the film’s most beautiful image, the train grinds to a halt, with one car missing, creating a window in the perfect spot to see through to the windmills that stretch back to the mountains. The train is stubborn, and will not budge, much to the pleasure of anyone looking. The motion of the windmills no longer has to compete with the train, which has now joined in with the landscape rather than barging through it like so many times before.

Casting a Glance (2007)

The framing decisions in the film have the least substance of any of Benning’s films I’ve seen, since the shot selections, lengths, and quantities are arbitrary and inconsistent. The film instead, as I only detected after the film, is an interesting example of truth, documentation, and the cyclical patterns of nature. In a way, Smithson’s Spiral Jetty could be the quintessential James Benning landscape. Completely organic and natural in its materials and archetypal form, the intrusion of man is subtly, instinctively awkward in its surroundings, which collaborates with its scale to produce a moving and mammoth sense of awe.

Structurally, the film is like a log (an account, not a stump). A date shows up on the screen, followed by 5-7 shots of the jetty and surrounding landscape that each last about two minutes. The first date of April 20, 1970 is when the jetty was completed. The next segment is in the following September, then in December, and so forth for the first three years, documenting the physical and chemical changes of the lake and its interaction with this bit of land. As time progresses, the log becomes more and more spread out, beginning to jump years at a time. There are only two segments in the 1980s, and both of them could be outtakes from 13 Lakes; the jetty was, at this point, completely under water (12 feet under in 1988). In the 90s it begins to resurface, and in the 2000s it seems to be back to where it was when the film began. Like a parabola, the film begins to scrunch up again at the end, ending with three or four segments in 2005, 2006, and 2007.

What I initially thought was a well-kept and relatively consistent documentation of an important piece of art turned out to be only a recreated estimation of time and nature. The entire film was shot in about an 18-month period from 2005-2007, and merely matches up annual water levels and tide shifts with historically accurate dates and statistics, the equivalent to Brad Pitt performing his entire lifetime for a film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, that was in the production for less than two years, minus the CGI.

Over the course of this film, Spiral Jetty became more and more of a natural creation, seemingly just as belonging as any of the near by mountains. To see it submerged made the locale feel hollow, and calls attention to climate change, and what defines a landscape. Often, Benning’s framing will mask the lake to where the asphalt and rocks are unrecognizable as the Spiral Jetty, which made the film feel even more like a pure study on climate and environmental shifts and balance.

13 Lakes (2004)
Update on 4/30/2009:
Not much to add here, other than obvious tweaks, like the film looks much better projected from 16mm in a theatre than a TV rip on a computer. The grain and dust is even more of a factor here, becoming like the birds and cars that intrude on the perfect half-and-half compositions.

Originally posted on 3/17/2009 @ 11:51pm after viewing a bootleg of the film:
The initial prospect of sitting down to watch this film, or any James Benning film, or any structural film for that matter, can almost be comically rebarbative. The film is exactly what one would imagine from its ‘premise’: thirteen uncut ten minute shots of thirteen different lakes from around the United States. While what you see over the 2 hours 15 minute running time is predictable based on this description, its effects on the viewer are very much not. In the first glimpse of each lake, acknowledging that the next ten minutes will be devoted to staring at this near-photograph, I searched for idiosyncrasies of the image, for some reason, starting with the more detailed very bottom of the frame, the part of the lake that is closest to the camera, then skipping immediately to the sky, and finally the ‘top’ of the lake. In the drawn out blackness that separates each shot of a lake, the anticipation is more than noticeable. ‘What will aesthetically separate the next lake from the others?’ ‘Will it have enough substance (wind, rain, manmade motion, rolling clouds, dynamic sound) to sustain my interest for 10 minutes?’ In some cases, like the show-stopping, heart-dropping 9th lake, the answer to the latter concern is a resounding ‘Yes!’ And others, I greeted the first few frames with, basically, disappointment, before I settled into it, zoned out, or it developed into something more complex than I’d first expected.

Formally identical to 13 Lakes, Ten Skies has the added bonus of being originally conceived as an anti-war film, inviting all kinds of metaphors and meaning. I tried to ignore this, though, and the main question on my mind during this film was the definition of ‘sky.’ According to Dictionary.com, the word is defined “the region of the clouds or the upper air; the upper atmosphere of the earth,” but I think this is silly. Why should clouds define the sky if the sky still exists without them. There is no mention of stars, either. And if clouds can be low enough to roll through hills and still be in the sky, then it should just be ‘the space above the earth.’ If the camera is placed on the ground pointing straight up, and a person is standing at the base of the camera, stretching up into the blue, then I think he is part of the sky. And so are the birds and the airplanes and the smoke and the sun and the moon. Benning claims that he wanted to make Ten Skies after making 13 Lakes because he was frustrated that the sky was only half of the frame, and he wanted a film with the sky as the central subject. As if the lakes weren’t also shafted out of the other half of the frame hogged by the sky (which, in my book, got two films), Benning never felt the need to make a film where the water took up the whole frame and didn’t have to share with the skies?

Where looking out at the Lakes felt like a study of composition and rhythm, Skies yields an interest in subtle movements and a search for something. To look up, craning one’s neck, is to exert energy for a purpose or a goal. Watching 13 Lakes could be mistaken for looking through a window cut out in the cinema wall, but with Skies, gravity tells us that these images must be reproduced; we know that we are not looking up and feeling the pressure that that entails. This is a spiritual allegory.

I was surprised by this film, because I didn’t think it was possible for Werner Herzog to take such ripe material and turn it into such a flawed product. That flaw is a conceit that calls for an ‘alien,’ performed by Brad Dourif (who is pictured in the poster), to whine about astronauts and the human race while Herzog shows a compilation of NASA footage that he obtained. Dourif, delivering some of the worst dialogue of the decade, speaks as if he were performing slam poetry for a day care center for astronauts’ children. While the effort toward infusing a space/underwater documentary with an air of magical realism is appreciated, I don’t know how Herzog didn’t pull the plug on the idea when it was so obviously falling flat. For an idea of the performance, look at the film’s poster, with Dourif glaring at you, and imagine that as he is glaring he whispers, angrily, and with a voice not far from that of Christopher Lambert, “we aliens all suck.” And no, it doesn’t have any camp value.

The film is otherwise well-lensed, and the soundtrack by Mola Sylla is pretty but doesn’t match or enhance the imagery, and makes it feel like a Discovery Channel for Kids program (which, if it were, would explain a lot). This film should have been completely scrapped and skipped in favor of his more mature Encounters at the End of the World. As evidenced in For All Mankind and, to an extent, Picture of Light, well-composed documentation of celestial subjects doesn’t need to be dolled up with phony alien rants in order to have a mysterious and ominous aura. I appreciated the film towards the end for it’s comparisons of the depths of the ocean to deep space as equally foreign spaces, despite one being light years away and the other being right here on our planet, but I was so angry about Dourif’s alien that most of this was immediately dismissed while the credits rolled. Herzog should bend the truth in his non-documentary documentaries all he wants, but he can at least realize when he is treating his audience like ridalin-starved juveniles.

It’s rare to see a film that is sucessful simply because of its subject, but this film fits that bill. The Cruise, a film by Capote’s Bennett Miller, is successful entirely because of the strength of Timothy ‘Speed’ Levitch’s personality, and Miller’s wise decision to hand the film over to him. I’ve seen this film many times now, and it is the only film that I own on VHS (which I’ve retired since the DVD came out); and it is one of the first films that comes to mind when I am in charge of putting on a movie night for a group of individuals which I am unfamiliar with their tastes. It feels as if I am introducing them to a friend of mine that I am sure they will get a kick out of rather than a film. Every reaction that I have heard from the film is along the lines of ‘I love that man!’ to ‘that guy is hilarious!’ and hardly ever ‘that was an film!’ So anyway, yes, Levitch is great, insightful, eccentric, addictive, et al; and the film captures this almost perfectly.

I was pleased when Levitch admits that everyone has moments of narcissism, because the manner in which Levitch is hoisted during a good chunk of The Cruise, if not all of it, is extremely self-indulgent, and the worst instances of this are so glaring because of Miller’s inexperience, such as a shot of Levitch, standing on the edge of the sidewalk, cautiously tapping his foot onto the street before crossing slowly and aimlessly, while the camera sits back and watches. While much of the film has the camera following Levitch around, this scene self-conciously screams ‘look how strange, yet fun, this guys is!’ The film works best when Levitch is giving his tours, calling out his unimaginably rich knowledge of NYC landmarks as if it were the alphabet, engaging in repartee with the driver, and letting his personality out more candidly and spontaneously.

As a film focused solely on Levitch, it naturally calls many decisions into question, such as the narcissistic tendencies, and it makes me wonder if the film would have functioned better if it had followed other bus tourers, too; even if only three total. Levitch’s personality still would have stood out from the others’, no doubt, but it would have offered a nice point of reference as to just how much more Oomph there is in his tours than anybody else’s, instead of Miller deciding this for us by choosing only him to be the subject of a feature-length film. Either way, this film is very engaging from start to finish, and I’m glad that Levitch hasn’t been exploited too much since this film’s release other than the occasional Linklater cameo; it retains this film’s charm.