AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE
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Your enjoyment of And Everything Is Going Fine, Steven Soderbergh’s documentary about monologue performer Spalding Gray (Swimming to Cambodia, Monster in a Box), will depend on your affection for and knowledge of Gray. Assembled from hours of interviews, home movies, and previously unreleased performance footage (most extensively from his monologue “Sex and Death to the Age 14”), Soderbergh attempts to tell Gray’s life story using only Gray’s words.
Knowing little about Gray going in, I found myself generally baffled by the film’s first half: this impressionistic approach to biography ends up raising more questions than it answers about Gray’s early family life, sexuality, and middling acting career (not to mention his brief, curious stint in pornography). The film becomes warmer and more coherent in its second half, when Gray discusses his accidental fatherhood and gradual acceptance of his new family. Gray fans will be able to fill in the holes, but I think there’s something wrong with Soderbergh’s approach on a very fundamental level: by interspersing so many different performances and so many different interviews, he does a great disservice to Gray’s art by undercutting the momentum and confusing the tones that Gray worked to cultivate in his monologues.
BABIES
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The best moment in Babies comes when Hattie, an infant from San Francisco, lies on a carpet and simply stares at the vacuum cleaner being operated next to her. The look on her face is intense, a mixture of awe, fear, and confusion, and it causes one to consider how strange it must be to see a vacuum for the first time.
I would have appreciated more moments like that from Thomas Balmes’ film, which cuts back and forth between four babies from San Francisco, Tokyo, Mongolia and Namibia with a lack of patience more in line with a cutesy YouTube video. Lacking any clear thesis or any real structure, the film captures plenty of neat little moments, but they’re over too quickly: Balmes is always too eager to cut to the next thing instead of simply, patiently observing his infant subjects as they become acquainted with the world around them. This is a pleasant, sometimes fascinating documentary, but something a little slower, a little more meditative, and I daresay a little longer would have done a better job showing us the world from these babies’ eyes.
JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK
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Times are tough for Joan Rivers. 75-years-old in a youth-obsessed society, her work schedule is lighter than ever, with prime club dates and TV appearances being snatched up by Kathy Griffin left and right. Billed as “A Year in the Life of a (Semi-)Legend,” Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work follows the comedienne/talk show guest/red carpet gadfly/ plastic surgery aficionado as she writers/performs an ambivalently-received play, promotes a book, wins Celebrity Apprentice, stars in a Comedy Central Roast, performs dozens of stand-up dates, and does anything and everything she can to remain culturally relevant. Or to simply continue working: at one point she agrees to endorse a penis enhancement product. If that’s not embarrassing enough for you, consider that she was third choice behind William Shatner and George Hamilton.
You could be forgiven for not pitying Rivers for needing to take on these demeaning gigs to support her extravagant lifestyle. What’s really valuable about this film is what an unvarnished portrait it paints of its subject: directors Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg depict Rivers as a woman still unsure of her own talent, unhappy unless every waking hour is occupied. She comes across as insecure, needy, and perhaps a little too desperate for audience approval, but also sharp-witted, bluntly honest, and, in footage of her often-raunchy stand-up act, very, very funny.
THE PARKING LOT MOVIE
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“Parking lot attendant” is probably not the job most people would want to pop up on their tenth grade CareerCruising.com profile, but Charlottesville, VA’s Corner Parking Lot seems an especially deep pit of hell. Located behind an often foul-smelling restaurant, the attendants must frequently deal with drunken, college age vandals, customers who drive away before paying their two-dollar fine and uber-rich SUV-drivers who complain endlessly when their 50-minute parking time has been rounded up to a one-hour fee.
According to one of the employees, working at the lot means “long periods of tedium punctuated by moments of ‘Fuck you, buddy!'” and The Parking Lot Movie suggests that the Corner Parking Lot is a microcosm of man’s inhumanity to man. Describing a day on the job, one of the attendants says, “Then the night would be over and depending on how many violent interactions you’d had, you would go home and lie awake thinking about how much you hated those people and how stupid they were, and eventually you’d fall into a fitful, troubled sleep.” Poetic stuff, but director Meghan Eckman is more interested in compiling horror stories from talking head interviews than evoking the lot’s atmosphere in visual and aural terms. And the bland, generic synth music that accompanies this and many other statements stifles any atmosphere these descriptions might evoke on their own.
The lot has employed over 100 attendants and The Parking Lot Movie interviews 18 of them. That’s still too many. Crammed into an 84-minute documentary, none have a chance to become memorable characters on their own. Instead of Eckman’s interview-dependent, warts-and-all approach, how about a documentary that follows one or two attendants during a typical working day? This might have given this episodic film some much-needed structural coherence, and undoubtedly would have done a better job conveying the deep, sometimes Zen-like emptiness of the job. It also might have spared us the closing music video, in which, alas, several of the attendants are called upon to rap about their job.
THE PEOPLE VS. GEORGE LUCAS
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On one level, The People vs. George Lucas is a complete mess. Charting the descent of George Lucas’ public image, from God-of-Geekdom to soulless cash-grabber one terrible prequel or ‘Special Edition’ at a time, director Alexandre O. Philippe has assembled dozens of Star Wars fans to explain the various ways that the bearded one has wronged them. In other words, this film is pretty much what you’d get if you strung a lot of YouTube videos of angry nerds ranting into their webcams about George Lucas into a feature length movie.
And strangely enough, that might be the perfect approach for a movie like this. The mass of voices in The People vs. George Lucas are always enthusiastic, sometimes insanely hyperbolic, often downright idiotic (someone compares the Special Editions to Holocaust denial), and seemingly unable to come to a consensus on anything (yes, turns out some people like Jar-Jar). Interspersed between the interviews is footage from Star Wars fan films; they function like a Greek Chorus to the narrative, and show that for all his flaws as a filmmaker and businessman, Lucas was still smart enough to think up some culturally resonant characters.
As redundant and exhausting as it gets, The People vs. George Lucas does an excellent job evoking the chaos, passion, and sometimes stupidity of fan culture. It also manages to argue four points very eloquently: Lucas’ decision to suppress the original versions of Episodes IV-VI in favour of the 1997 ‘Special Editions’ is disrespectful to the technicians who worked on the films; Greedo shooting first was a really bad idea; the weight of the Star Wars empire crushed a potentially exciting directorial career; and The Star Wars Holiday Special is still the worst thing ever.
RUSH: BEYOND THE LIGHTED STAGE
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“These guys made me care about art. These guys made me care about culture.” So said the man in front of me in line for Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. If you feel the same way about Canada’s answer to Led Zeppelin (and judging by album sales – 24 gold records, 14 platinum – you just might), then this will provide you with everything you could possibly want from a Rush documentary.
As a piece of drama, Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage is very Canadian. It is almost entirely free of melodrama and gossip (“My god,” you could even be an ugly guy like me and get laid, but they guys never did,” says Gene Simmons, who toured with the group), and Neil Peart’s breakdown after the deaths of his wife and daughter, easily the film’s trickiest material, is handled with surprising class and understatement. Directors Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyn are more interested in chronicling the band’s artistic evolution (if that’s the phrase I’m looking for), while interviews with Trent Reznor, Jack Black, Kim Mitchell and others go a long way in explaining their appeal. The film also benefits greatly from extensive interviews with Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart, who are down-to-earth, witty, and modest while still taking their art seriously. It definitely helps to be a Rush fan to appreciate this material, but Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage does its job well enough that it actually makes a convincing case for “Crest of Steel” being a daring work of art. Huh.
SPACE TOURISTS
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During the height of the Soviet era, when Sputnik made the Empire’s space program a bona fide threat to that of the United States, rockets were launched into space on a nearly weekly basis. Thirty years later, in the early stretches of Christian Friel’s Space Tourists, the space program’s once-thriving headquarters in Kazakhstan couldn’t be more desolate. Friel’s images of the program’s decaying buildings surrounded by vast emptiness, shown one after another in exquisitely framed compositions like a coffee table art book, are certainly bleak. Even bleaker is a short scene in a Russian space museum. Sterile, gloomy, with Soviet marching songs playing in pitiful Muzak form, it has all the vigour and glory of a zombie.
“Can you put a price on a dream?” asks Anouseh Ansari, an Iranian-American businesswoman who, through Russia’s moribund space program, becomes the first female tourist to travel to space (at the cost of a cool 20 million). This statement, plus Friel’s dreary landscapes, implies that the collapse of Russia’s space program with the demise of the Soviet Empire also meant the death of a dream that outer space might one day be attainable. Ansari hopes for a day when the public at large will be able to experience space travel, and whether or not this strikes you as a worthwhile goal, you sure can’t fault her for thinking big.
In its first hour, Space Tourists is hauntingly beautiful; its meditative pacing forces the audience to contemplate images we might normally take for granted (such as astronauts assembled in their suits posing for pictures), and the film generates a sense of awe at the very notion of space travel. The scenes onboard the International Space Station (filmed by Ansari during weightlessness) are particularly striking.
Space Tourists deftly walks the tightrope of generating mood while eschewing a conventional narrative, until its storyline becomes shapeless and dull in the last third when Ansari, back on Earth, develops ways to make space travel more accessible for civilians, along with redundant scenes of another space tourist (Charles Simonegi, chief architect of Microsoft Word) preparing for his orbital holiday.
THE STORY OF FURIOUS PETE
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Hockey had Wayne Gretzky, boxing had Muhammad Ali and competitive eating has “Furious Pete” Czerwinski. Not since Mike Tyson was in his glory days has a single competitive sports figure been so seemingly invincible. Quick visits to his YouTube channel and website (“Furious Eats”) uncover videos with titles like Furious Pete downs a 15” Pizza in Sub 2 Min ― An Epic Eat and the even more self-explanatory Ramen Eating Stunt ― 5 minutes, Almost 6 lbs. The fundamental problem with The Story of Furious Pete is that once you’ve seen Czerwinski eat an entire pound of butter and god knows how many pizza slices, the rest of the film becomes anticlimactic. Maybe there is supposed to be some suspense when he has to wolf down ten pounds of ribs at Burlington Ribfest to raise funds for Multiple Sclerosis research, but by then we’ve seen him eat so much food that ten pounds starts to seem like a fairly conservative figure.
The Story of Furious Pete isn’t exactly stirring, but it’s never less than pleasant, thanks in large part to Furious Pete. His and his family’s recollections of his early struggle with anorexia carry poignancy, and Pete always comes across as a genuinely nice guy, particularly during the film’s last act, when he parlays his eating prowess into MS fundraising to support his ailing mother. There was one question, however, that the documentary conspicuously avoids: just how much more punishment his poor bowels are going to take.
TALHOTBLOND
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In his opening narration, 22-year-old Brian Barrett (aka “Beefcake,” his online name) tells us that he is speaking to us from beyond the grave, revealing to us the sad story of how he was “cybersexed to death.” Such a description evokes some pretty ghastly mental images, but don’t take it literally. He was actually murdered by 47-year-old Tom Montgomery (aka “Marinesniper”) for striking up an online relationship with his own on-again, off-again online girlfriend, 18-year-old Jessi Shieler (aka “Tallhotblond”).
None of these three ever meet each other in person, but our undead narrator can still be counted on to solemnly deliver a cliché or hyperbole for every situation: “Finally, fate stepped in and exposed Montgomery’s charade”; “She took her new friendship with the real Thomas Montgomery to a dark and twisted place”; and, my personal favourite, “Jesse lost her virtual virginity.” If director Barbara Schroeder is reading this, I would like to gently suggest that if you’re going to go to the trouble of resurrecting a dead man to narrate your documentary, please be sure to resurrect a better writer. Nothing says “classy documentary” like “posthumous narration” and, indeed, Talhotblond is one hilariously cheesy, sleazy movie.
Still, it can’t be denied that Schroeder has found a story of intrinsic, voyeuristic fascination. Bored with his marriage and suburban life, Tom Montgomery strikes up an online friendship and romantic relationship with teenaged Jessi, creating an elaborate persona for himself as a young sniper to impress her. Complications arise when his identity is revealed, but the pseudo-affair continues and Brian, Tom’s co-worker, enters the picture. And, hey, is Jessi even all she appears to be? The overheated synth score suggests a particularly bad episode of America’s Most Wanted, and the film has trouble making the abundance of chat room text dynamic, though Schroeder’s gratuitous inclusion of a graphic piece of cyber sex (yes, right up to cyber orgasm) proves that she’s nothing if not a showman. By turning the Talhotblond/Marinesniper/Beefcake fiasco into such an over-the-top soap opera, Schroeder has lost sight of what it’s really about: stupid, sick people doing stupid, sick things.
