Student Movie Reviews

Per an anonymous comment, I was unable to attend the 508 screening and unfortunately cannot provide any reviews. I feel as though I missed a story or something...had I known someone anticipated some reviews, I would have a made a point of going. Actually, that's not completely true, I opted to see Lawrence of Arabia instead, a film I hadn't seen. That being said, I did see 546 Docs and Narratives, and here are the reviews:

Frank, ----, Benji, and Me - A documentary about fatherhood and generations. Frank was a "great" man, but a shitty father. Josh explores his father's anger towards his grandfather and how difficult it is for him as a young father to Benji. I was tired when I went to see this film and fell asleep, not because it was bad, but because docs are generally slow and it was a long day after a long night. But from what I saw a couple things struck me. I never got a sense of why Frank was a "great" man. There was a picture of him with Martin Luther King and some archive footage of him at McCarthy-like hearing. But I think it is some sort of weird liberal assumption that if you were persecuted during McCarthy times you are some type of hero. The truth is, he was probably doing some shady-Communist shit, creating an environment of tolerance of Stalinist Russia.

UPDATE: Per Kevin's comment, I am removing the reference to commie bastard - I can see how this may be offensive, particularly to Josh, although I mean in the ironic tone, referring to the use of the term in excess with respect to communists during the cold war - but I imagine that gets lost when sensitive people read the blog. But my point remains the same, what is never addressed in the film was WHY Frank was being called in front of the Senate. I recognize that the Senate was acting out of line during the McCarthy era - I'm the first one to react against straight bullying. But to liken it to today, what if there were groups of Islamic Fascists organizing in Mosques, espousing anti-western, anti-american ideology, essentially what is happening in Saudi Arabia. Sure, they are not actively ordering young men to blow up airplanes, but they are creating an environment where that behavior is tolerable and maybe even admirable. Am I the only one who finds something wrong with that, besides Joe McCarthy? It doesn't make one a hero to stand up and say, "Yes, I'm allowed to say whatever I want because this is America - especially if what you're saying creates harm to other people." This is why we outlaw hate speech.

Elia Kazan was shunned in Hollywood because he named names. They said he caved to pressure by the government bullies. But I wonder if Kazan actually came around and thought to himself - actually, what my old communist buddies and I were doing was wrong. We were creating an environment of tolerance for Stalin and his gulags, forced labor and execution camps, by supporting communist ideology in the states. But he's not considered a hero - he's considered a traitor.

That being said, the issue of fatherhood always gets to me, because it's such an odd relationship, fathers and sons. There is a tremendous amount of love and vulerability in the relationship, yet generally it so unspoken and cold. The film touches some elements of it and I particularly appreciated the last scene, when Josh was watching Benji go off to school with a voice over....but then at the lost moment I realized - Josh is ACTING right now.

Event Horizon - A movie about 20 something cancer survivors. This one didn't do much for me - there wasn't a story. It felt like a home video of a girl and her boyfriend dealing with her cancer. I liked that she experimented with some imagery, some Super 8 (I think) and film archive footage. But those images made the Sony Betacam shit look terrible and boring. I wish she had done the entire movie in Super 8, half out of focus, or gone all the way with the artisan aspect. The characters I liked, but didn't love, so it's really hard to pull of a journey like that without either a story or people you love. It's why home videos are generally so boring.

Geocaching - This was the hit of the night. A film about the sport of geocaching, following three characters, TruRocker, The Ventura Kids, and this fat depressed guy about what geocaching means to them. A good conflict develops between TruRocker and The Ventura Kids - Rocker does the geocaching for love of the outdoors and family whereas the Venture Kids do it for the competitive aspect of finding caches. The depressed guy finds community and happiness in caching. It's a solid, quirky, fun movie.

What was interesting to me was to hear afterwords that TruRocker (who is really lionized during the film) had some really weird relationship with his sister, which got totally cut out of the movie. It didn't surprise me to hear that, because he struck me as a weirdo - this ex-rocker guy whose really self righteous about nature and gets really, really angry at people like the Ventura kids who compete. He reminds me of the ideology of Classic Rock radio stations, the DJs who bellow over the airwaves "Classic Rock is the best music EVER!" As if saying it really loud and with passion makes it true, undisputeably true. I felt like that was the TruRocker approach to geocaching - like, this is the BEST WAY, we're saving the environment from fucked up humans (rappers, pop stars, and the Ventura Kids).

The crowd was really into the film, and then at the end, Nora had all the geocachers stand up and they took up half the room. All of a sudden I realized, the crowd was stacked...and then I realized something else - these 546 screenings in Norris, as big as they used to seem to me, are really just the crew + friends, plus subjects, plus faculty + faculty friends...which makes it bigger than 508 ONLY because the crews are bigger. Something to think about.....

546 Narratives - Last Night (David Thomson laments that films these days often don't warrant being written about. Beware USC filmmakers)

Secret Agent - Beautifully shot. Majestic, really. Move over Storaro. The film itself....aspired to be funny, and it is, in a real easy, sit-com meets Alias way. The thing that actually ruined the experience for me was the first shot of one of the sisters holding a gun. It was obvious that we were in a kids game, this girl looked like a kid playing with a fake gun, not a badass secret agent. I guess it was meant as a sort of real life inspector gagdet type of film, for younger teenage people whose fantasies of being secret agents are rife with such secret agentisms as "You got the 642." My response as a 10 year old - "Holy shit! The 642! She's got the 642! (what's the 642?)"

Lucky - This film had potential. I think the filmmakers needed to watch Cutter's way, but didn't do their homework on amputee movies. I'm totally serious with this. The whole handicapped thing could've been done very well and it was done pretty well. My favorite part was the line, "Do you guys think you were sexually abused as a child." Looks: Huh? "Because, if you repressed it, you wouldn't know." A moment of genius.

In the Grave - So, the dad was a sexual molester and the brother was in love with the sister, right? That's what I got from the scary Halloween imagery/flashbacks and the "knowing" glances and tension with the sisters boyfriend between siblings. But what do I know?

Meeting In Cars - The best thing about this movie was that it went for something different - a parallel story structure, which was actually two stories that barely intersected. I liked to see a different narrative structure. The movie was the most fun to watch because they went out on the streets of LA and got a lot of production value - like Godard says, "my set is the real world." That being said, I didn't care too much for the story or the characters, but whatever, like my friend said at the Pantry last night - These ain't not 533s!