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Another Ingmar Bergman in "Monika"

Ingmar Bergman: Master of Sleaze? OK, that’s not exactly how we remember the maker of such deeply serious classics as The Seventh Seal, Persona and Cries and Whispers. (Unless you consider erotic the latter’s scene where Ingrid Thulin inserts a glass shard in her vagina, then wipes the blood over her face. In which case, please seek help.) But you might have thought otherwise from the American marketing of some early Bergman films, at a time when many European movies—even wildly inappropriate ones without a speck of sex appeal—were suggestively advertised as “shocking,” “frank,” “bold” and so forth, usually with art depicting a barely-clad Eurobabe barely resembling anyone in the flick.

Actually, at least one early Bergman really was pretty steamy for its era, if hardly in a sleazy way. 1953’s Monika, which plays the Red Vic this Sunday and Monday in a newly restored print, does indeed deal with underage, guiltlessly unfaithful femininity, out-of-wedlock sex and pregnancy.

topics: directors, red vic movie house, reviews, world cinema

Review: "Hannah Takes the Stairs"

Literacy rates are plummeting — clearly our increasingly test-oriented, teacher-punitive ill-funded public education system is failing today’s youth, particularly in lower-income neighborhoods. But a (relatively) old fart like me also wonders if even comparatively well educated, middle-class kids have a less-than-firm grip on the English language these days. They are so, like, whatever. Still, youth is youth — forever stumbling in the wilderness of new things like love, relationships, sex, employment, careerism, and … stuff. Such formative experiences are always interesting because they are so fraught with the intensity of discovery.

The intersection between “interesting” and “inarticulate” is practically the whole gist of an emerging genre dubbed “mumblecore,” which label no doubt its major practitioners hate.

These are frequently improv-based, digitally shot, minimally budgeted seriocomedies about twentysomethings stumbling through, you know, relationship stuff. They are like audiovisual eavesdropping, Cassavetes reloaded for the Whatever Generation. They are massively indulgent, irritating and aimless, or fantastically real, insightful and uncontrived. Either response is totally legitimate; these movies are totally a matter of viewer taste, mood, perspective.

“Hannah Takes the Stairs,” which opens at the Red Vic this Friday, is the perfect case in point. It’s a very casual portrait of Hannah (Greta Gerwig), who is young, smart, and cute in a sorta punky, slightly androgynous, peroxide-blonde way. She works at developmental TV company where at least a couple of the pretty-damn-geeky male bosses are crushing on her. When her own slightly older, almost-30 boyfriend (Mark Duplass), quits his job to slack full-time, Hannah’s restlessness soon results in his being cut loose. She dives into a new relationship with Paul (Andrew Bujalski), while also sending & receiving signals that relate to fellow workmate Matt (Kent Osborne). There’s nothing simple about this triangle, but there’s not much complexly detailed about it, either. Director Joe Swanberg simply lets the improvised scenes go where they will, each utterly credible in their awkwardness if variably revealing of character.

This might be a recipe for meandering torment, but it’s sharply edited and gamely played enough to hold attention. The big question is: Will you care what happens to these people? I enjoyed “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” which is sort of an all-star mumblecore effort: Duplass was in the utterly great “Puffy Chair,” which only semiqualified as mumblecore; Swanberg previously directed “LOL” and “Kissing on the Mouth;” Bujalski directed prior mumbly faves “Mutual Appreciation” and “Funny Ha Ha.”

But it’s still the kinda video-verite vagueness that can’t resonate as deeply as more formally sculpted relationship films — the current “Margo at the Wedding” being an outstanding example of fine craftsmanship within a seemingly loose, intimate narrative context. “I tend to leave destruction in my wake,” an unusually verbose Hannah finally confides at a meltdown point, to the person who’ll most likely be confused by her offer of vulnerability. We feel her pain…but where does it come from? Is it genuinely empathetic, self-pitying, or a role-play even she can’t recognize as such?

She’s as enigmatically ambiguous as the troubled souls Monica Vitti used to play in Antonioni films. Yet while Vitti came off as a beautiful blank surface onto which profound directorial ideas were projected, Gerwig’s Greta is a shallow pool in which very little beyond indecision is reflected, and emotions grow thick but useless, like algae. And needless to say, Antonioni was a cinematic poet — Swanberg is more a transcriptionist. These are people you might very well know. But with maturity, you might also look back and realize such entanglements weren’t even worth the cynical knowledge gained. I can say this for “Hannah”: It’s almost as involving and annoying as whatever last friendship or romance went bust for you.

topics: experimental film, red vic movie house, reviews

Reviews: "Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox;" "Ten Canoes"

Getting in a lather with Dr. Bronner

At least since the 19th-century days of travelling “Medicine Show” quacks, hucksters have promoted cure-all substances that could do everything short of curing cancer while washing your dishes. How many actually lived up to their promises?

One did: Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap, the liquid I slap (in original pepperminty form, diluted as instructed) on my bathing body every day. This all-natural stuff is good for all it claims, far as I know — and it claims plenty. Facial packs, deodorant, mouthwash, soothing body & scalp rub, cleanser equally suitable to floors, babies, pets, clothing, and other miscellaneous household items. Why, it’s practically as all-purpose as that other ecologically kind and endlessly useful thing, hemp. In fact, Dr. B’s “Pure Castile Soap” sports organic hemp oil as a major ingredient. Don’t try to smoke it, though.

All this would be nice but not terribly interesting if it weren’t for an additional fillip: Each fully-recycled-plastic bottle of Dr. Bronner’s comes wrapped in a label whose tiny script is like the mutterings of some insane guy muttering about UFOs and Jesus Christ on a street corner.

“Essene and other birth control methods must reduce birth or Easter Island type overpopulation destroys God’s Spaceship Earth!” “Thank God we don’t descend down from perfect Adam & Eve to sinful sinner, brother’s keeper, divided slave!” Etcetera.

Actually most of the sentiments aren’t all that crazy, if you can grasp their gist beyond the ranting surface. But it’s a very distracting surface. And in Sara Lamm’s documentary “Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox” (which plays this week at the Red Vic Movie House), you get a full gander at the slightly loopy Bronner legacy. Allegedly Albert Einstein’s nephew — but then his take on reality isn’t automatically trustworthy — Emanuel Bronner was a German Jew who emigrated to the U.S. in 1929. Back home, his parents were killed and family soap factory destroyed by Nazis.

Declared psychotic, he escaped an Illinois insane asylum twice, finally launching his own peppermint soap with hand-scrawled labels proclaiming his philosophy of “ONE EVER-LOVING GOD! ALL-ONE!” A nudist eggshell eater paranoid about Communism, the FBI, and water fluoridation, Emanuel (who died a decade ago) found moments of clarity to check on the children he’d abandoned in Wisconsin.

Among them was now 68-year-old Ralph Bronner, who’s carried on the family tradition and then some. He’s a fascinating subject — scarred by terrible memories yet an obstinate, borderline manic proselytizer for his father’s causes.

“Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox” occupies a realm similar to recent “Crazy Love,” another documentary profiling people grown certifiably “eccentric” following great travails.

Age-withered yet vigorous Ralph remains an extrovert whose sunny message to the world may seem naive, even a bit cracked. Nonetheless its simple hopes for uniting the human race are potent stuff. He’s a wacky old guy — but compelling company in this absorbing documentary. Not to mention an inspiration to anyone who enjoys his “Magic Soaps” not just as household convenience but an ergonomic exercise of mild anti-consumerist rebellion.

Story, telling: Rolf De Heer’s “Ten Canoes”

[SF360.org editor’s note: This review, from Reverse Shot, was published in indieWIRE originally on May 31, 2007.]

I’m usually left slightly anxious by those works of western filmmakers that take as their subjects the nature and stories of indigenous peoples. The potential for exploitation — artistic, commercial, moral — runs so deep in these instances of cultural intersection that it’s amazing such films don’t all turn out like the garishly insensate “Apocalypto” which, if not for its bloated running length, might have worked perfectly as part of a “Grindhouse”-style tribal-exploitation double bill. We can point to films like “Walkabout,” “Where the Green Ants Dream,” or “The Fast Runner” (interesting in how it adopts an Inuit media workshop ground-up approach) as genuine attempts to render the experience of an indigenous culture cinematically, but those are like needles in a haystack – more often you’ll find something like “Geronimo” instead.

Enter Dutch-born Australia-raised Rolf De Heer’s “Ten Canoes” which casts its glance on the traditions of the Yolgnu peoples of Australia. De Heer’s a festival favorite (a Cannes and Venice regular) who hasn’t achieved a tremendous amount of notoriety in the States, so hopefully “Canoes,” a positive, nuanced representation of native culture, isn’t just a lucky exception to an otherwise unflattering rule. Instead of the worst cliches about noble natives invested with quasi-mystical powers, a deep relationship with the land, and the tendency to speak in Yoda-worthy riddles, De Heer’s Yolngu are conflicted, jealous, earnest, horny, and often terribly funny (especially around scatological themes) — in short, all too perfectly human. De Heer developed the screenplay in conjunction with the Yolngu community in Ramingining, on the northern tip of Australia, so this probably accounts for the sensitivity and richness of the experience.

De Heer’s intricate, but never convoluted, narrative layering finds David Gulpulli (from “Walkabout” and “The Last Wave” — he’s Australian cinema’s answer to Wes Studi) supplying gently comedic conversational narration throughout the film’s two major sections. The first, in crisp black-and-white and meant to evoke famous anthropological photographs taken by Dr. Donald Thompson in the ’30s, follows Gulpulli’s son Jamie Dayindi as he embarks on his first goose hunting and canoe building experience with nine others from his village; the second, marked by lush nature photography that calls to mind both “The New World” and “The Wind Across the Everglades,” tracks Jamie Dayindi again as he adopts the role of Yeeralparil in a historical legend as it’s related to the present-Dayindi of the black-and-white sections. In both, the younger Gulpulli is single and interested in his older brother’s young and beautiful third wife. The legend, full of warring factions, mysticism, and sorcerers skirts the line of the expected tropes, but in the end, De Heer’s frame sets the color sections up as a surprising, hilarious cautionary tale about a covetous nature-the utterly deflating concluding joke undercuts the potentially staid, tentative traditionalist bent that’s often a hallmark in this arena. The best praise I could level at “Ten Canoes” is that it reminds me most of Ousmane Sembene’s seminal historical fiction “Ceddo,” which felt at once ancient and wholly modern, a bridging of gaps — for all the differences between the viewers and those viewed, it was the kind of film that brought all involved in the experience just a hair closer.

[Jeff Reichert is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot and currently works for Magnolia Pictures. Reprinted with permission, copyright Jeff Reichert, indieWIRE 2007.]

topics: documentary, red vic movie house, reviews

"American Cannibal" bites into Reality TV

“American Cannibal” documents two down on their luck television writers, Gil Ripley and Dave Roberts, as they sell their souls to the reality television circuit. When Roberts and Ripley jokingly pitch their idea for “American Cannibal,” in which six contestants, trapped on an island without food, are led to believe they must eat each other to survive, Paris Hilton Sex Tape promoter Kevin Blatt sets in motion a production train-wreck just waiting to happen, which of course it does. The film eventually proves that life imitates art, as the films itself feels a bit like a reality television show. As the filmmakers decry our obsession with watching people torture themselves for their 15 minutes of fame, they clearly have no qualms showing the painful and dramatic decay between Ripley and Roberts. These two seem perfectly cast for a fall-out; Ripley, with his Super 8mm camera at his side, is set apart early as the man with integrity and artistic vision, while Roberts, desperate to provide for his family, comes off as the man willing to sell it all to make a buck. What seems like a great writing relationship in the beginning degrades with the introduction of reality — television, that is. Once production begins, and their rationalizing ceases, the writers expectedly slip into their established characters and a friendship withers, all caught on camera for viewers to lament and enjoy. The film has gotten plenty of press — celebratory, and skeptical — including a few minutes with Dr. Phil himself. A few highlights are here collected with the help of the filmmakers for your dining pleasure. The film opens this weekend at the Red Vic.

1. New York Times
Stephen Holden: “If you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.”

2. The Onion
Noel Murray: “It’s hard to deny the sickly feeling that arises while watching two smart, well-meaning guys sell their souls.”

3. MTV
Kurt Loder: “Leading us down into the lowest depths of the reality-TV industry, that bog of veiled sadism and voyeuristic obsession into which it seems our entire entertainment culture is being sucked, this 91-minute documentary is by turns funny, pathetic and appalling.”

4. Huffington Post
Tobi Elkin: “Eventually, the selected contestants are flown to the island where they party down until they are abruptly awakened at 3 a.m. to start the twisted adventure. They arrive on the island set exhausted, broken, and hungry — one having puked her guts out crossing the choppy seas to the beachfront set.”

5. TimeOut New York
Joshua Rothkopf: “Ever since its Tribeca debut, this witty, well-made indie, about a pair of ambitious writers (Ripley and Roberts) who successfully pitch a ‘Survivor’-style contest that ends gruesomely on location, has been plagued by questions of veracity.”

6. Papermag
Dennis Dermody: “An acid commentary on the appalling reality-TV phenomenon, this is also a heart-wrenching story of two friends whose stupid show blows up in their faces, and it makes for sensational drama. That’s the kind of reality I love.”

7. LA Times
Michael Ordoña: “Audiences probably often wonder when the reality genre is finally going to eat itself. “American Cannibal” stands ready for that moment with a bib and vinegar.”

topics: lists, red vic movie house