I’ve seen a wealth of incredible documentaries over the past year or so. In fact, I’d say each of these was better than almost any current-run feature films I’ve seen in the same time frame:
Rivers & Tides
Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns
Riding Giants, and perhaps the best of the bunch:
Stevie .
So maybe I was getting suckered into thinking that docs these days are just really good. Well, in any case I was excited to see I Don’t Know Jack appear at my local video store. It’s about Jack Nance, who died after a fight at a donut shop in South Pasadena. Nance was Eraserhead, and had roles in almost all of David Lynch’s films.
He was a notorious drunk and fighter and the donut shop was close to where I lived at the time. I remember reading about the death is the paper the next day and being quite saddened by it. he’s best remembered for slow delivery of bewildering lines, like, “My dog barks. …You’re picturing my dog… but I havent told you… what kind of dog… it is.” Also, “There’s a fish in the perculator.”
Well, the film was awful. Don’t bother. Amateurish, uninsightful, poorly researched, painfully edited, and it included an extended scene from Meatballs 4, in which Corey Feldman also appears, though mercifully remains silent.
Team America: I laughed several times. I quite like a lot of the old Gerry Anderson puppet adventure shows from the UK; particularly Stingray, and this obviously pays tribute to those shows in a way that the Bill Pullman Thunderbirds did not. In fact Thunderbirds basically took a big dump on those old shows. There are some very funny songs, and some of the Kim Jung Il stuff is clever, and a scene where Tim Robbins and Martin Sheen are “gaards” got watched a couple of times by me b/c it was so funny.
But Matt & Trey’s films that aren’t South Park generally aren’t anywhere near as funny as South Park. Remarkably, that show, and the excellent film version, still hold up. The show still manages to leave me bewildered as to how each episode gets on the air. HBO would blush at this material. And Team America just didn’t come off that great here. If you want to see something mildly offensive to some left and right wingers – and something that’s fairly funny – it’s worth your time. But the South Park tv shows are still way beyond this in terms of wickedness and laughs.
I was going to post on this later but since you mention documentaries, I´d recommend In the Realm of the Unreal. I came across Darger´s work in an Artforum during the early nineties and was very intrigued (my diss focused on representations of childhood in American theatre–a shout out to Dr. Kincaid, if you´re lurking, whose work was so influential to me) . . . anyway, the documentary is middling good but the animated sequences are superb. Also Bright Leaves is out on DVD!!!
Yes, I’ve meant to see In the Realm of the Unreal. The OC Weekly did a cover story on Darger and the film (though I can’t find the link now)
I am not familiar with McElwee’s films and know nothing about Bright Leaves, but I am fond of tobacco, so I might put that on the list too. Next up though is The Trial of Henry Kissinger, because I am again on a Christopher Hitchens kick. (Hitchens believes Kissinger to be a bone fide war criminal, and has started a sort of growing belief in many countries that he can be tried – to the point that there are many countries the good doctor is now unwilling to visit for fear he may go the way of his old pal Pinochet.)
Is there another person who makes blood-sport politics (which I otherwise abhor) as much fun? Is there another person that speaks as much sense consistently as Hitchens (excluding his Chalabi loving)?
On the 4th of July I watched him on Cspan standing in front of a Snapple machine talking about Jefferson and the decisions he had made, and the things Jefferson himself knew to be wrong, but did anyway. Remarkable.
re “team america”: can’t remember if i posted about it after we watched it but i thought the skewering of liberal actors etc. was a bit much. the left comes in for much more vicious lampooning than the right (which doesn’t really have any specific figures associated with it in the film). if you’re going to go after sean penn and michael moore then ann coulter and toby keith and bill o’reilly should all be fair game too.
but the puppet sex sequence is one of the funniest things ever filmed and should be placed in a time-capsule. the puke scene and a couple of the songs (“america, fuck yeah!” and that “i miss you” song) were also excellent.
I almost died in a fight at a Winchell’s in Koreatown. Hanna Schygulla, staple of Fassbinder films, was holding up the line, calling the glazed cruller a “wiener-donut” and snickering to herself. She went nuts when I said, “hey, Lili Marlene, machen Sie schnell, this ain’t Inside the Actor’s Studio!” damn kraut!
Team America is on my netflix list. But I have to admit that I find Stone/Parker’s anti-liberal celebrity schtick–at least what I saw in promos and interviews for the film–a bit tiresome–and certainly they must be aware, despite the claims for an “everyone gets hit” approach to satire, that this schtick plays mainly into right-wing attitudes which got elaborated ad nauseum on cable TV and talk radio. Yes, self-important celebrities are ludicrous but maybe the skewering of anything that smacks of an attitude also conceals some kind of self-importance of its own, or at least an attitude? But the film does feature my favorite radio host of all time, Phil Hendrie, as Intelligence. He and Art Bell/George Nouri (3 hr all-night roundtable discussions on Bigfoot!) are the only reason I don’t smash my radio into a thousand pieces.
The problem with “Team”s liberal-smashing is that it is mostly unfunny–Matt Damon only saying “Matt Damon” is hilarious, and got funnier every time for me, but Michael Moore eating lots of hot dogs? Bleah.
I almost wish they had stuck to the deadpan parody of Bruckheimer and Gerry Anderson, which never made me laugh out loud but was so pitch-perfect I stared in amazement. But then the puking, the sex, and the glories of Kim Jong-Il all popped up, wrecking the parody’s pitch but making me laugh very hard. I think the movie gets confused about what kind of comedy it is, and it gets a bit grab-bag as it goes on. “South Park,” on the other hand, is consistently a superbly-structured and cohesive show. Even the wildest elements are subsumed in a clear plot. Especially the film–which is one of the best damn musicals ever made. It’s strange, perhaps, to applaud them for keeping the unities, but….
Their liberal-bashing did annoy me, more because it was about as funny as Bill O’Reilly in many instances. But then I bought a doc called “How’s Your News?” that Stone & Parker funded–it’s a news-crew comprised of adults with various disabilities, doing person-on-the-street interviews. It’s fantastic–not always riotously ha-ha funny, but absolutely brilliant at both sending up the mainstream media and illuminating the discomfort most people have with the disabled. It also gives the news crew their own voices, doesn’t fuck with them, doesn’t condescend.
On the dvd, there are two extras worth checking out–first, the crew interviews Stone and Parker, who clearly adore and appreciate the interviewers. I’ve thought for a long time that South Park’s Timmy was an empowering (and funny) challenge to the representations of the disabled, and I’m struck in these interviews how open and comfortable and non-judgmental Stone and Parker are with often-funny physical and mental difference. So, what I’m getting at: I’d been seeing all this bad-boy liberal-bashing and growing irritated with them, but you can’t help but like them for their efforts with and on this dvd.
(The second great extra involves one crew member’s overpowering love for Chad Everett, whom he finally gets to interview–and wow. Wow. It’s amazing.)
Keep in mind one one of the themes of the film: Acting is a weapon. It was one of the funniest things in the movie the way they kept saying, “With your acting, we can’t lose!” “Act your way into their headquarters and find out where the WMD are.”
It didn’t bother me at all that they didn’t make fun of easy right wing targets such as Bush or Rumsfeld for example. Why bother? Everyone has done it already. Micheal Moore is of course an easy target, but I had no problem with them going after actors the way that they did, and as harshly as they did. They made actors the bad guys, and the advantages they got from it was to kill Tim Robbins and Helen Hunt etc. That’s funny. So is the act-off between Alec Baldwin and Gary.
Is it more vicious than South Park having Barbra Streisand turn into a Japanese mecha-monster? Or the nearly obscene Rosie O Donnell episode? This is what Matt & Trey do, and I’m glad they didn’t try to “balance” their attacks.
Mike: Please send me How’s Your News – I’ve wanted to watch it for a long time. I’ll send it back with a copy of the Neko Case live album.
And Frisoli – Phil Hendrie has to be one of the last great joys of the radio medium. I miss Joe Frank being on the air, and Art Bell can be amusing – especially if you’re driving though rural areas, but man oh man – Phil Hendrie is just remarkable with what he does.
i’ll send you news. i know they put together a film on the last election, including a much-ballyhooed piece on the convention, but i’ve never seen it pop up anywhere. (good deal, too, ’cause i’ve wanted that case album for a while.)
it isn’t the viciousness of team america; as you note, streisand and o’donnell get it a lot worse on south park. but i found the latter two funny, and … well, when you tell me about the act-off, that sounds funny. but i don’t recall laughing.
I admit to being something of a slavish fan of Hendrie, having all of his best-of CDs, as well as making the trek to see him twice. He is a major relief in the sludge of “talk radio” which is primarily concerned homogenizing discourse while appearing to remain “independent.” Hendrie and Bell are the last gasp of radio before Clear Channel and Infinity and the like take over completely–then it’s Republican ass-kissing and Phil Collins or Delilah “Love Songs” and nothing else! Bell is an independent, too, doing bizarre interviews from the depths of some bunker in Parumph (?) Nevada–anything from Mel who claims to have unearthed a mystical sea lionish creature from an enchanted hole, a creature which brought a message of peace before disappearing, to genuine Professors of Physics and the like from Harvard, Cambridge, etc. Whatever happened to radio? Where are the pirates? but thank god the FCC cracks down on exposed nipples and “Fuck” on TV while allowing corporate consolidation to move along unimpeded.
P.S. www. philhendrieshow.com
As Rudy Canoza might say “Lalalalalalalalalalalalaalala.”
On the subject of documentaries, I just watched The Agronomist, directed by Jonathan Demme, about a Haitian journalist who he interviewed several times over more than a decade before he was assassinated in 2000 (the journalist, not Demme). It appears to have been made by Demme out of friendship or love rather than craft because it is a very basic, straightforward documentary. Lots of interviews interspersed with some stock newsreel footage.
What makes it enjoyable is the subject, Jean Dominique, who is an almost archetypal voluble Frenchman, constantly appearing to mug for the camera. And it is fascinating to hear him on his radio station in Haiti, speaking perfect middle class French, and then on the stump, speaking to farmers, when he uses a creole dialect