Prairie Home

Depending on your appreciation of Keillor’s conflation of schmaltzy cornpone and dry, sly sting (which brings out, in the actors, ham on wry), either a dreamy afternoon in good company or a forceful lug-wrench to the soft area between your forehead and your ear. I fall in between: I am a sucker when Keillor stops singing and wanders around flatfooted, mumbling out yarns and sidestepping emotional reactions; I’m equally smitten with the extravagant “Midwestern” dramatics of Meryl Streep’s Johnson sister or the equally outsized snap of Lily Tomlin’s more bilious, bibulous Johnson sister. I also happily confess to loving John Reilly and Woody Harrelson shamelessly twanging and slanging away in the wings.

I’m less keen on the many false notes struck by the framing narratives (an odd misplaced wandering death angel, a vision more in keeping with Michael Landon than, say, Bergman; a dull plot about the end of the show, and a mean old capitalist from Texas, ably and acutely played by Tommy Lee Jones without one hint of whimsy but also lacking any hint of dramatic purpose); the waste of Kevin Kline and Maya Rudolph and a few other stray supporters, left drifting with the wisp of character and comic “bits”. And I almost always turn off the radio “Prairie” (if Kris will let me) whenever anyone starts singing; that ain’t my cup of joe, and it wears about as poorly when seen as when heard.
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The Agronomist

Jonathan Demme’s documentary about Haitian journalist/activist Jean Dominique gets a quick recommendation from me. It doesn’t reinvent the form, nor is it the one film to see about Haiti’s political struggles over the last 40 years. But–kind of like the doc on William Eggleston–this film emerges from a personal relationship between filmmaker and subject; its talking head footage of Dominique was collected over a few years, during his periods of exile in NYC, and after Dominique’s assassination Demme spliced it together, fleshed out the history, caught up with some others.

What I very much appreciated about the film was that it didn’t stop to provide tons of explication–it demands that you either inform yourself or pay close attention, rather than giving you Haiti 101 on a plate. I also loved Dominique, garrulous and theatrical and impassioned–the film hews to his personality as a vehicle for conveying the storm of Haiti’s history, but never in that too-pat bio-doc format that collapses personal and national histories into one shared story. Instead, we are learning about Dominique… and necessarily, with this committed social activist, we engage with Haiti.
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