GIRL MODEL: YOUTH FOR SALE

A long line of very young girls in bathing suits winds in and around the backstage of a theater.  As the camera weaves through the queue each girl notices it, reflexively smiling or pivoting towards it and adopting a less natural pose than prior to their awareness of being captured by its lens.  Thus begins Girl Model, the new documentary by David Redmon (Mardi Gras: Made in China)  and Ashley Sabin (Intimidad), about the recruitment, exploitation, and, in many cases, abandonment of underage Siberian girls by unscrupulous modeling agencies seeking to sate the Japanese market's hunger for images of budding femininity.

Watching that opening, one is reminded of a cattle sale or the 4H tent at a state fair, as each girl lands the stage to be judged by former model Ashley Arbaugh and her fellow modeling scouts.  Arbaugh becomes our guide through this world.  She's a complex character, still suffering from the memories of her own journey through the meat grinder that is this trade, while continuing, despite her qualms, to supply the industry with young flesh to photograph.  At this particular audition, Arbaugh ends up picking up 13-year old Nadya Vall for a contract on the Japanese market.

Like many of these girls, Nadya comes from an extremely poor family.  We get to see how little she has at home and how the promise of riches from a successful modeling career could mean a lot to both her and her family.  Even if she isn't able to find work, Nadya's agency is required by immigration to guarantee her at least two modeling jobs and a lump sum.  But, once she arrives in Japan, it's an entirely different picture.  She bunks with another model her age in a dreary, box-sized apartment, leaving each day to audition for gigs she can't book.  Instead of working, we learn that Nadya and her roommate's debts to the agency are growing, promoting the already niggling feeling that these girls have been sold into some form of slavery.

Girl Model is an anguishing, anxiety-inducing view of an unethical and, for all intents and purposes, unregulated trade dealing in human flesh.  As a product of this system, Arbaugh becomes both the victim and unlikely villain of this story, as whatever sympathy the viewer harbors for her eventually fades away after being exposed to her callous statements and complicit behaviors.  Though she provides much insight into the psychic damage that can be wrought on young girls in the industry, she strikes a pose not unlike Cruella De Vil during much of the film.  To a certain extent, the conflicts exhibited within Arbaugh paint an ugly picture of what Nadya and others like her might expect to become at the end of their journeys.  

Directors Redmon and Sabin have crafted a disturbing look at a reality worth confronting, even if it enrages one's sensibilities as it engages with its subject.  It would be a stretch to laud Girl Model as a pleasure to behold, but it does pull the viewer into spaces rarely explored, evoking questions and concerns, which is all you really can ask of a socially minded doc.

Recommended viewing.

Girl Model opens at the IFC Center in NYC on Friday, September 5th.  It will play locally at the Clinton Street Theater beginning November 30th.  More info available here.

 
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BARBARA: SECRETS AND LIES IN EAST GERMANY

Chrisitan Petzold's (Yella, Jerichow) Barbara reunites him with his frequent leading actor Nina Hoss for a tense, but quietly measured, look at one woman's life in 1980s East Germany.  Hoss plays Barbara, a doctor whose incarceration for an unnamed crime forces her to be assigned to a small provincial hospital.  By day, she works under the authority of André (Ronald Zehrfeld), another doctor whose own reasons for toiling in this understaffed, poorly supplied facility eventually come to light.  In her evenings, Barbara is under constant threat of having her body and apartment searched by the secret police, whose suspicions are not unfounded, even if their methods are questionable.

As the film unfolds, we see Barbara meeting with a secret lover.  She's also stashing money, both at her apartment and under rocks.  Petzold is careful to not let many secrets shake loose too early in his story, preferring a slow, suspenseful intrigue to build.  We watch as Barbara lives her double life, bristling against André's attempts to connect with her at work while planning something in her time away from the hospital.  What ends up being most revealing about these characters is the reactions they have to the patients who come under their care. 

Barbara is Petzold's best film to date.  It contains multiple small revelations, each one shifting our understanding of Barbara and André situations and their inner lives.  It's astonishing, for instance, when Barbara has a second visit with her lover, how Petzold is able to completely redefine the relationship without leaning on needless exposition.  Most of the film pulls off this trick, offering up depth of character sans confessional pronouncements.  It's a film that requires a patient commitment in order to keep engaged with the slow changes in its story, but it's very much worth the time and effort.

Highly recommended.

Barbara screens at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) as a part of their Kinofest PDX: New German Cinema series on Friday , October 5th at 7:30pm.  More info available here.

 
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THE MAKING OF THE SHINING: A METHOD TO HIS MADNESS?

Stanley Kubrick was famous for putting his actors through the hell of endless takes.  On the set of The Shining, a good deal of that hell reportedly fell on the head of Shelley Duvall.  The short documentary Making The Shining, directed by Kubrick's daughter Vivian, certainly adds credence to those rumors.  It's hard to argue with Kubrick's end result--The Shining IS phenomenal--but it sure looks mighty terrible to be Duvall in this revealing 1/2 hour, behind the scenes documentary.

Take a look.  It's pretty fascinating stuff, especially for Kubrick fans:

The Shining returns to the Hollywood Theatre on Friday, October 5th.  More info available here.


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THE SHINING: SEE, IT'S OKAY. HE SAW IT ON THE TELEVISION

While many cinephiles out there would insist that Jack Nicholson's best performances can be found either within Chinatown or the more naturalistic and off-the-cuff aesthetic of New American Cinema gems like Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider, the majority of movie fans remember the Jack-man best for his over the top rendition of axe-happy, madman Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining.  I saw it for the first time late at night on tv as a kid and Jack (and the film) certainly made an impression, scaring the living bejeezus out of me

Kubrick took King's text as a mere jumping off point for the story he wanted to tell; in his hands, it's a chronicle of a man whose ego and vision of himself are way out of check with the reality of his family and social position.  Cognitive dissonance, ain't it a bitch?  Well, something's gotta give and, in The Shining, it's Jack's mind and soul that takes on most of the damage (even if it's Shelly Duvall, Danny Lloyd, and Scatman Crother's characters who are most directly terrorized by Jack's actions).

Kubrick's intentions seem to go a bit deeper than what resides on the surface of the story, though.  Over time, many interpretations have arisen surrounding the meaning of the film, ranging from The Shining as a Holocaust metaphor, commentary on the genocide of Native American peoples, etc.  When taking a horror genre film course at school, I was drawn to view the film through an ecological feminist lens, one that incorporated the obvious patriarchal aspects promoted within a surface reading and mingled them with issues of race, dominance over natural landscapes, and, truly, the uncontainable desire to exert control over all things (aka Manifest Destiny).  Basically, there's a lot going on here and, if interested, one can spin all kinds of theories that arguably fit within the film's narrative framework.  Or you can just choose to sit back and enjoy a damn fine and frightening film.

But on to the main point at hand: the Hollywood Theatre's got a 35mm print of The Shining to share with the Portland public.  It starts tomorrow.  You should definitely go.

And, yeah, though it's been way overplayed since going viral way back in 2005, this recut trailer still makes me laugh:

The Shining returns to the Hollywood Theatre on Friday, October 5th.  More info available here.


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DOUBLETIME: SOMETHING TO SHOUT ABOUT

Would you believe it if I told you that one of most emotionally captivating films I've seen in recent times is about jump rope?  Yeah, I'd be skeptical, too.  But here it is, more than a week since I watched Doubletime and I'm still impressed at how deeply the story cuts, the astounding look of the thing, and, most of all, just how personally involving of a documentary director Stephanie Johnes has put together here.

The film quickly sorts out the two main types of competitive jump rope; for those not in the know, there's skip rope and double dutch.  Skip rope is what most people talk about when they refer to jump rope, pretty basic on the surface, but, as the champion-level kids featured in the doc prove, there's a level of mastery within the competitive skip rope world that's far beyond what you'd see being practiced on your local playground.  Double dutch uses two jump ropes at the same time and is just as challenging for the jumper as it is for the two individuals working the ropes.  Additionally, in competitive double dutch, there's a style known as fusion, which incorporates dancing and hip hop culture into standard double dutch technique.

Perhaps the most important distinction between skip rope and double dutch, however, is their division along racial lines.  Double dutch is almost entirely identified with and practiced by the African-American community, while the kids in Doubletime who work at skip rope are primarily Caucasian.  Johnes spends a good amount of time exploring how the split between the two forms of jump rope started, chronicling the history of both sides of the divide.  The big event in Doubletime--and, yes, there's always a big event in these kinds of films--is the annual Double Dutch Holiday Classic at the Apollo Theater, where for the first time a group of competitive skip rope players will compete alongside the kings and queens of double dutch.

Johnes captures an inside view of two teams of kids as they prepare to compete in Harlem.  South Carolina's Double Dutch Forces are, as their name indicates, well versed in the ways of double dutch, but this inner-city team still has a lot to work ahead of them on their way to the Apollo.  North Carolina's Bouncing Bulldogs are the newbies from the suburbs at the competition and they're facing an uphill battle as they try to incorporate the more foreign aspects of double dutch fusion into their repertoire.  Each team has its own set of characters, including their trainers whose own hopes and dreams are caught up in the excitement of the upcoming competition.

Doubletime is a great pleasure to watch.  From its remarkable perspective on both present and historical issues of race in America to the incredibly optimistic and talented kids performing their incredible, near-acrobatic routines, I was sold from the first minute until the last.  Seriously, I was grinning like a damn fool during most of this film and shouting, "whoa," or, "wow," during the rest of it.  If you loved Spellbound, Murderball, or Hoop Dreams, you'll absolutely find something to love in Doubletime.

Doubletime is available on dvd & video on demand now.  More info about how to see the film can be found here.


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V/H/S: HOW MUCH LONGER IS THIS GOING TO LAST?

The found footage horror trend that kicked off some thirteen years ago with The Blair Witch Project had already worn out its welcome some time back.  But that didn't stop the ensemble of directors behind V/H/S from trying to do something new with it.  They've put together an omnibus presentation of short horror pieces linked together by a promising premise: a group of video-making douchebags break into a house searching for a rare videocassette and, finding it difficult to distinguish the rare one among the many that litter the place, begin watching what's on multiple vhs tapes.

Unfortunately, V/H/S ends up being the definition of a mixed bag and there's very little worth recommending here.  The directors have squandered the chance to have the shorts and the interlocking premise in the house relate to each other.  Perhaps worse are the stupid, lewd, and poorly drawn characters contained throughout the film as a whole.  It doesn't take long before watching the film begins to feel like being trapped in a corner by an unpleasant party guest.  On the plus side, the misogynistic tone and lazy writing of the introductory segment (directed by Adam Wingard) does greatly diminsh one's expectations, so if you stay in your seat for the remainder, it's your own damn fault. 

If you're hoping for surprises, you've stumbled into the wrong movie.  Most of these films go exactly where you'd expect them to.  Probably the best thing here is Ti West's Second Honeymoon, which follows a couple's adventures on a road trip.  The two are stalked at night by a dangerous and mysterious stranger who invades their hotel room as they sleep.

West's reputation as one of the best new horror directors on the scene is well deserved after his work on the excellent The House of the Devil and his much underrated follow-up The Innkeepers.  Most folks who see V/H/S will likely have been drawn to it because of West's participation.  But it turns out that being constrained to a reduced running time doesn't exactly play to his strengths.  As his features have proven, he's at his best when given the time to slowly ramp up tension.  Second Honeymoon feels like it's just beginning to develop into something when it reaches its rushed and unsatisfying conclusion.

Directed by the video collective Radio Silence, 10/31/98 also works better than much of the rest of V/H/S, if only because it finally breaks free from expectation by the end of its story, offering up a few twists to an otherwise basic story of some moronic dudes entering the wrong house one Halloween night.

The rest is all middling (David Bruckner's Amateur Night and Joe Swanberg's The Strange Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Young) to downright awful (Glenn McQuaid's truly terrible, glitch-happy Tuesday the 17th).  But even the better moments of the film are muddied by displays of infantile male sexuality, an overreliance on sharp objects piercing flesh, and the boring predictability of it all.  That last failure makes for an exceedingly flat viewing experience, one that had me constantly wanting to check my watch as the film dragged on; never a good sign.

V/H/S begins its run at the Hollywood Theatre on Friday, October 5th.  More info available here.


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CINEMA PROJECT presents TORSE

Cinema Project's fall season opens this coming Saturday and Sunday night with an extremely rare showing of a collaborative piece by Charles Atlas and Merce Cunningham.  Torse is a split-screen dance performance prepared for the stage and committed to film in late 70s by the duo.  The program kicks off Cinema Project's year-long residency at Yale Union.


Here's a description of the film from the Cinema Project website:

Merce Cunningham’s dance “Torse” focuses on the flexibility of the back, expanding on five basic positions (upright, arch, tilt, twist, and curve) into 64 possible movements, the total number of symbolic hexagrams in the I Ching. Steps and phrases are arrived at not by instinct or a sense of flow, but through a methodical approach that also happens to be chance driven. The stand-alone filmed version, Torse (1977), from long-time Cunningham collaborator Charles Atlas, continues mathematically. 

Shot at the University of Washington with three 16mm cameras—two mobile and manned by Cunningham and Atlas to capture close-ups and a third stationary—Atlas edited the piece to appear on two screens side by side. This strategy allows viewers to see the dance from various vantage points at once. From Einstein’s theory of relativity, Cunningham took the idea that there are no fixed points in space, therefore no intended perspective point, no preferred seat from which to watch. 

This recent HD restoration also includes the original soundtrack by composer Maryanne Amacher. As with many of Cunningham’s works, the music is created completely separate from the dance. In Torse, then, rhythm is felt then not through musical timing, but through the speed of and weight change from one position to the next. 

Cinema Project presents Torse on Friday, September 29th and Saturday, September 30th at 9pm.  More info on the program available here.


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