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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NW FILM CENTER presents FILMMAKER MAGAZINE'S 25 NEW FACES OF INDEPENDENT FILM

Tomorrow night, the NW Film Center will be screening a showcase of seven short films drawn from Filmmaker Magazine's selections for their 2012 list of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film.  Among those films and filmmakers is Oregon's own Ian Clark whose Searching for Yellow is a study of a landscape painter (seriously, the guy literally paints the land) who's dealing with the dissolution of a complicated relationship.  Clark will be at the screening to introduce the evening's presentation.

Hannah Fidell's The Gathering Squall

Also in the program is Ian Harnarine's Doubles with Slight Pepper, which concerns a man struggling to make ends meet by selling food out of a mobile cart.  When his father returns after a long absence, he is forced to come to terms with both issues of abandonment and mortality.  Harnarine's film is well acted, emotionally authentic, and shows a sharp eye for camera placement

Ian Clark's Searching for Yellow

A.J. Rojas' Hey Jane is a music video for the Spiritualized song of the same name.  It follows the exploits of a transvestite hooker trying to make a living on the street.  It's probably also the most energetic short in the program, kinetic as hell, really.  This short is totally not safe for work, but, that's okay, 'cause you'll be far from the confines of your cubicle when viewing it.

Ian Harnarine's Doubles with Slight Pepper

The best two shorts in the program are Jonas Carpignano's A Chjàna and Cutter Hodierne's Fishing without Nets.  Carpignano's film sheds light on the experience of African immigrants living in a section of Italy known as "the Plains."  The story picks up just as a riot breaks out in protest of violence against the immigrant population.  There's an incredible amount of depth explored in just under 20 minutes here and Carpignano's cinematographer Maura Morales Bergmann knows just how to capture the action.

Fishing without Nets is a short film just dying to be expanded to feature length.  Hodierne tells the tale of Somalian piracy through the eyes of the men planning to capture a large seagoing vessel.  It features amateur actors, vividly captured imagery, and a considerable amount of tension building.  This might be the best short I've seen all year.

Cutter Hodierne's Fishing Without Nets

Hannah Fidell's The Gathering Squall is based on short story by Joyce Carol Oates.  It's about a traumatic event in a girl's life.  It's solid enough, but it might have been even better as a longer piece, since it feels a bit pinched for time as it draws down the curtain on its story.

A.G. Rojas' Hey Jane

There's one more short included in Thursday's presentation (Ryan Coogler's Fig), but I wasn't able to view it before readying this post.

Jonas Carpignano's A Chjana (The Plain)

Filmmaker Magazine's The 25 New Faces of Independent Film screens at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) on Thursday , September 27th at 7pm.  More info available here.

 
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THE MASTER: TWO MEN, LOST AT SEA

A transcendent image of a glassy blue and roiling sea appears before us three times during Paul Thomas Anderson's latest and most-challenging picture, The Master.  On each occasion, it offers to swallow us whole, dragging us into its chaos, perhaps joining our turbidity with its own swirling, constantly shifting mass.  This vision ends up painting a perfect analogue for the film's two chief characters, both of which have the potential for casting themselves wildly into the abyss, driven by something dark at the center of their being.

Forget what you've heard: The Master isn't (necessarily) about Scientology.  Yes, the character of Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) absolutely takes its inspiration from the figure of L. Ron Hubbard and there are many similarities between Hubbard's organization and Dodd's The Cause scattered throughout the film.

The real story being told here is about the uneasy connection formed between an alcoholic drifter named Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and Hoffman's Dodd.  Without these two halves of the same soul, there is no film, something which Anderson goes to great lengths to ensure, fragmenting and suppressing most every nod to conventional or sustained storytelling in order to reduce the film down to a basic stew comprised of these men, their similarities, and the different directions in which they are headed.

The aptly named Quell is a World War II naval veteran cast adrift after his experiences in the war.  He's drinking too much (concocting potions out of fuel, paint thinner, or whatever he can lay his hands upon) and running from the consequences of having poisoned a man with his home brewed liquor; he tells Dodd that you have to know how to "drink it smart."  The truth is that Freddie is recklessly careening through life when he drunkenly stumbles onto a seagoing vessel containing Dodd, his wife (Amy Adams) and family, and a boatload of his followers.

Upon regaining consciousness, Freddie becomes drawn into Dodd's orbit, undergoing the questionable manipulations of his "screenings," and becoming an unpredictable and volatile protector against anyone who dares to defy the older man's quasi-religious rhetoric.  There's little indication that Freddie believes or even understands what The Cause stands for and so, since it is mostly through his eyes which we view the film, neither do we.  In fact, if the film passes judgment at all on the charismatic Dodd's belief system, it's when his son Val (Jesse Plemons) asks if Freddie can see that his father is "making it all up as he goes along," an accusation that Freddie later lays at Dodd's doorstep.

For reasons not entirely pronounced by the film, Dodd takes this reckless heap of a man, blind animal-like behaviors and all, under his wing, trying to cure him while simultaneously delighting in some of Freddie's "magic potions;" a weakness that Dodd's wife discourages with a shockingly commanding sexual act.

It's within this contradiction that we're able to locate the duality expressed by these two characters; Dodd could clearly inhabit Freddie's position in life and jealously guards this truth compounded with the basic deception at the core of his trade, while Freddie hopelessly attempts to mask his disease and pain-even if it's plainly apparent to all who look upon him-expecting that no one should be able to question his path.  There's a shared essence of self-determination binding these men; as before, two halves of the same soul.

Where many viewers will have difficulty is with the pacing of the piece, as well as Anderson's resolve to allow the performances to trump the plotting of his film.  At nearly 2 1/2 hours long, The Master contains about an hour's worth of focused, conventional storytelling.  During those moments explored in Boogie Nights, since both films share observations on small sects performing transgressive social experiments way outside the mainstream.  But visually and, especially, in terms of its atmospherics, The Master is very much in tune with P.T.A.'s There Will Be Blood, albeit a far less immediate and darkly charming version of that 2007 piece.

This is an incredibly well made, slowly drawn out film that will likely bloom further on subsequent viewings.  One suspects that the experience will benefit the second time around, much as Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life did, from being freed of the burden of trying to harmonize what's onscreen into an easily digestible story.  For now, though, the lack of moorage within the tale speaks volumes about the principal characters in this drama, articulating just how lost they are in their own private whirlwinds.

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GRINDHOUSE FILM FESTIVAL presents ROLLING THUNDER

John Flynn's (Lock Up, Out for Justice) notorious 1977 revenge thriller Rolling Thunder has been discussed over the years almost as much for its unavailability on dvd as for the explosive acts of violence littered throughout it.  Even though it was finally released last year via the MGM Limited Edition Collection (the studio's trumped up name for the orphaned films in their portfolio, dumped onto burnt dvds, often with questionable transfers), it'd be a crime to miss out this Tuesday night when Dan Halsted has a rare 35mm print of the film lined up for his monthly Grindhouse Film Festival event at the Hollywood Theatre.

Yes, Quentin Tarantino likes the film so much that he named his short-lived distribution company after it, which is all fine and dandy, but the real reason to pay attention to Rolling Thunder is Paul Schrader.  Obviously, Schrader's best known for his screenplays for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, as well as for his work as a writer/director on such films as American Gigalo and Affliction.  Rolling Thunder is Schrader at his prime, when his entire output seemed to be dedicated to investigating outsiders prodded towards acts both violent and transgressive.  If you're a fan of any of the films dissected in Robert Kolker's "A Cinema of Loneliness", you owe it to yourself to catch this film.

Enough of my blathering, here's the press release for this month's Grindhouse event:

On Tuesday September 25th at 7:30, the Grindhouse Film Festival presents a rare 35mm print of the 70′s revenge masterpiece Rolling Thunder. Written by Paul Schrader around the same time he wrote Taxi Driver, this is one of the most underrated American films of the 1970′s. 

Rolling Thunder (1977) William Devane stars as Major Charles Rane who returns from a long tortuous stay in a Vietnamese POW camp to find his wife married to another man and his only son wary of a father he doesn’t know. Tommy Lee Jones co-stars as a shattered POW survivor who finds it impossible to readjust to civilian life, and sees Rane as the only man he can relate to. When a crew of thugs invade Rane’s home, mangle his hand in a garbage disposal, and kill his son, Rane begins down a focused path of revenge. With a sharpened hook for a hand and a duffel bag full of shotguns, he crosses the border to Mexico with the only purpose he has left in his life.

Here's a bonus clip of director Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel) discussing the film:

Rolling Thunder plays one-night-only at the Hollywood Theatre on Tuesday, September 25th at 7:30pm.  More info available here.


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COMPLIANCE: AUTHORITY, CHICKEN, & THE STRUCTURE OF EVIL

Compliance is a troubling, true-crime drama set at a fast food joint.  No, it's not about a drive-thru robbery.  Instead, director Craig Zobel (Great World of Sound) has a far more insidious tale to tell, one that confronts blind adherence to authority while asking the audience to endure to some fairly icky developments.  He's crafted a complex cocktail that raises far more questions than it ever intends on answering and doesn't shy away from interrogating the audience's response to the nightmare it presents.

Zobel opens the picture with a convincingly mundane depiction of life in a fast food restaurant.  Most of the workers there are, predictably, teenagers.  It's plain to see how the much older manager, Sandra (Ann Dowd), wearily deals with the daily disappointment of still working around fried chicken, barely masking her condescending tone as she leads her crew through a morning meeting.  What seems like an average morning shifts abruptly when the phone rings in Sandra's office. 

The voice on the other line identifies himself as Officer Daniels (Pat Healy).  He claims that one of Sandra's employees, Becky (Dreama Walker), has stolen cash out of a customer's purse.  Daniels says the theft has been confirmed because Becky is already under observation for "an unrelated investigation."  Since all police personnel is currently tied up with that other investigation, Officer Daniels tells Sandra that she'll need to detain Becky in her office until someone for the department can make it down; which is all fine and good, if somewhat questionable, until the voice on the other line asks Sandra to strip search their suspect.

The request destabilizes our understanding of what's going on here.  It's like the film is letting us in on a dirty secret and the impact of that revelation ripples throughout the remainder of the film.  What follows is a test of Sandra, the other employees at the restaurant, and the audience itself.  Each time the instructions of Officer Daniels are followed, another more invasive command is issued and the tension grows.  And we're left to watch as it all unfolds.

This is not a feel-good film.  There were moments when I wondered if I'd accidentally stumbled into a torture porn film, such is the level of degradation on offer.  Compliance rises above the pointless sadism of that horror subgenre by actually having and coherently delivering a well-organized interrogation of how culpable we are in the structure of evil, refuting the notion that such phenomena ever springs from a single individual.  Let's just say that I don't think it's a mistake that Zobel has cast a chicken restaurant as the setting (the incident it's based on happened at a McDonalds).

Bottom line: this movie will be rattling around in your head for weeks after viewing, so powerful are its themes, accusations, and the level of filmmaking on display.

Highly recommended.

Compliance begins its run at Cinema 21 on Friday, September 21st.  More info available here.


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