I discovered just yesterday that Richard Griffith, aka “Groovin’ Gary” from The Beaver Trilogies passed away at age 50. If you don’t know the film, or what a wonderful character he was – try to check it out.

A resident of Beaver, Utah, ‘Gary’ was caught outside a cable station by videographer Trent Harris where, in an informal interview, he performed for some impersonations of more than dubious quality. His barking laugh, custom car, and joie de vivre were contagious. If we are to believe the film – Groovin’ Gary Griffiths, excited by his brush with fame (Am I on TV? Gollee – this must be my lucky day! Ha!”) later wrote to mention to Harris about a talent show in which he would be appearing as Olivia Newton John. It is one of the worst impressions on film. But his enthusiasm, along with the wonderful awfulness of some of the other acts, is infectious.

Trent Harris went onto to duplicate the entire 20 minute episode in a re-enactment by a very young Sean Penn who had simply auditioned for the short role. The sequence borrows some of the talent show acts from the first section, recreates exact shots and lines, and becomes a little more cinematic, but not by much. It does however have a tragic/comic ending of foiled suicide. The new “ending” raises all kinds of questions about Gary’s initial response to the first video sequence. Why the new ending? Why re-do it at all? Is this psychology motivated by anything other than to tell a story? What would Gary think of this license taken with his own life. Sean Penn is brilliant, his performance a Olivia even more terrifically horrendous.

If that weren’t enough, it’s recreated a third time as a kind of mini movie. Now we have reaction shots, character motivations, sub-plots, and an incredible performance by Crispin Glover in all his eccentric weirdness. The psychological profile of Gary in the new segment, now titled “The Orkly Kid” (changed from “The Beaver Kid”) is deeper, the actors are more professional, sequences more staged, and sub-plots more developed. The filmmakers continue to play themselves as they were, or as they imagine themselves shooting the piece, but they are becoming really complicate in Gary’s “exploitation”. Still, basic scenes and lines remain the same. Gary still puts on ‘Olivia’s’ make-up and wig at the local funeral parlor. The interview (Am I on TV?) still starts the piece, this time time after a dramatic impressionistic opening of Gary on a cliff in sillouette, the wind in his hair. Aha! A theme of strength and empowerment. The same Newton-John song is sung. Many of the same lines that Gary spontaneous are reinterpreted, but Glover throws it over the top, demonstrating what a brilliant intuitive actor he is. The new ending, still addressing the suicide idea, has Gary deper in remorse at his embarrassing drag performance becomes about courage and individualism. It’s surprisingly moving.
Filmmaker wrote an article about Griffiths appearance at Sundance.

The question of Gary’s exploitation and identity now hovers over the film. Time Out London wrote an analysis of the film, which asks about his homosexuality. It would be the Brits who ask. For my money it’s just a film blessed by circumstance and serendipity that ends posing some interesting ideas on up reality vs. art, narrative vs. documentary and allows us to meet a sweet and ingenuous guy along the way.

,

You know Mike Tyson is no saint, so expect a rough ride. There’s no doubt that James Toback has real affinity for Tyson as a subject, given Toback’s similar penchant for doing things his own way and that his recent films have dealt with race and relationships. He even cast Tyson in his 1999 film Black and White. So it seems perfect that he should take on a profile of this multifarious, great fighter.
The film has a lot of split screen and layered images. I expected this would get tedious – that it would be a cheesy way to keep our attention and hide too much reliance on the interview. But that turns out not to be the case at all. His quirky approach becomes like a documentary confession. Obviously Tyson had great trust in the director. There are a lot of hard close-ups on Tyson. Much of it does seem to come from one interview. The effect is that the audience becomes father confessors, or maybe psychologists for Tyson. As such there are bound to be radically different reactions to the boxer as a person, as a subject, as a man, and as an athlete.
What is clear is that he was a mighty, mighty boxer and a very troubled person. Despite his power as a fighter, there is little of the artistry, grace, and intelligence of anyone approaching the stature of Mohammed Ali. For better, and definitely for worse, Tyson is a brutal man in a brutal sport. But Toback in his respect for the man has revealed the poetry beneath the surface. That isn’t to say he lets him off the hook for some really bad behavior, but he doesn’t judge him. Tyson literally speaks for himself. I also don’t think that Toback would want to exploit Tyson who, it seems, has been exploited enough. Tyson’s contradictory, sometimes inarticulate, attempts to come to grips with his past life are filled with a lot of humor, shock, and honesty. He is not an educated man, but he is a blazing example of a superstar as anti-hero.
All the emotional confusion and ambivalence that are part of his colorful life are well served by Tobacks’s audacious style. There’s a lot of laughter at the sheer daring of Tyson’s claims, but also revelation at the emotion he has telling about his own life, his mistakes, his losses. So many questions, even at a psychological level are not commented on and are speculated on only in passing.
There are plenty of pre-conceptions about Mike Tyson, or maybe about boxing, in general. But the great archival footage makes the rise and fall of this chubby, short Brooklyn kid, afraid of getting picked on, and with little family to fall back on, to the “most feared man on the planet” worth millions and millions is clearly a compelling and very American story. Ultimately the brilliance of the film is that Toback commits his vision to the street poetry of Tyson’s own soul.

Jim Jarmusch begins his new film The Limits of Control with this quote from The Drunken Boat by Rimbaud

As I was floating down unconcerned Rivers
I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers

And so it is in Jarmusch’s film. We will slowly drift through this story of a secret agent, played by the ultra cool Isaach De Bankolé as he goes on an undefined mission in very specific places with an indefinite sense of urgency. He encounters a series of indeterminate characters played by Tilda Swinton, Gael García Bernal, John Hurt, Paz de la Huerta and the big bad guy, Bill Murray. Directors and perhaps even stories themselves are what mediate and guide an audience through a film – finally providing some kind of catharsis. There’s no such guidance here. It is a collection of unhurried unfolding, seemingly important details that lead to the unsettling fact that you will, in the end, have to put together your own damn story.

As I understand reader-response theory, it is the reader (or viewer) who is the one who causes art to exist, that it is the audience interpretation that gives life to the work of art. That seems to explain the Limits of Control as much as any anything. Jarmusch has artfully employed all the elements of genre, plot, character, event, symbolism, and even climax – just not in a way that leaves the audience in the same place about what has happened. He attends masterfully to important movie moments like lingering on beautiful stars and beautiful spaces. He dwells on De Bankolé’s face as a work of art. He catches the ambience of the Madrid’s architecture, cafes, museums, and streets. He explores the exact light of Spanish mornings and afternoons. It reminds me at times of Antonioni’s The Passenger, but with even less of a narrative thrust. Narrative clues abound, but they are less clues than random genre situations, and you make what you can of them. I don’t want to spoil the pleasure of the slowly and randomly delivered genre moments, but they are great fun.

By deconstructing his film to pure cinematic and movie elements, without a cohesive narrative, he has created a wonderfully patient and surprising absorbing work of art. As he says in the screenplay “Everything is subjective,” and “Reality is arbitrary”. But there is more going on than that. The decision to resist the ‘manipulation’ of a narrative is, of course, wickedly anti-commercial. Fans of the director’s minimalism will probably have the patience to bask in the formal compositions and wonderful cinematography by the great Christopher Doyle(paranoid Park, In the Mood for Love). Small events read like a series of arch noir and spy movie clichés – the naked beauty he finds on his hotel bed (“I never have sex when I’m working” he tells the naked women, who reappears several times in a transparent raincoat) codes and messages appear in box matches, in the café he always orders two cups of espresso in the same café each day. Is this a clue to people he is meeting? The secret to whether you are ‘one of us’ seems to be the phrase “You don’t speak Spanish do you” . But who are “us”!?
The pace is languid, the details clever, the humor intentional. It’s a different kind of movie experience. You just need to be prepared to write it yourself!

Ramin Bahrini Harvard Film Archives Sunday April 12th
First go patronize ‘Goodbye Solo’ so Bahrani can make more films…
‘Man Push Cart’ his first feature is filled with resonant and poetic images of New York. Hadyn Guest called his vision ‘poetic realism’, a ‘tool for understanding’, with an ‘integrity of vision’ – all which aptly apply to the directors three films. His top 10 films tell you much about his attitude toward filmmaking.
Here are some recalled statements regarding Man Push Cart.
It was shot at 50th and Madison for its light situation and open space
The ‘meaning of the film is work the vendor does
It inspiration is The Myth of Sisyphus
It is important to avoid sentimentality
Its essential for him to avoid the faddishness and ‘hipness’ of contemporary independent film
His biggest inspiration for Man Push Cart, film-wise, was probably Flaherty’s Man of Aran and Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Cassavetes)
The difficult balance is to foreground the ‘meaning’ or place of the labor of the push cart job as a metaphor and the life of the film’s subject as it is discovered. The life, the background of the character shouldn’t distract from the central idea.
I would add that even though this is certainly not Hollywood style and or a traditional three act structure it is also not just art for art’s sake. The challenge is being met by new filmmakers who are devising new ways of telling stories that test our expectations of narrative culturally set in our imaginations. For audiences willing to go beyond the megaplex, these new visions do bring needed understandings about ourselves and contemporary America.
Finally, though it was mentioned in AO Scott’s article on “neo neo realism”, Bahrini talked about the tradition of tazmin. When today in all the arts there is endless re-visiting and referencing of past traditions, and when appropriation is commonplace, this idea puts a different perspective on the matter:
“In Persian culture there’s something called tazmin,….which is a longstanding tradition of poets taking one line or one beat or one idea from an earlier poem, picking it up and putting it in their own poem and going on from there.” Tony Scott: “His own borrowings are not acts of imitation or homage but rather attempts to absorb and extend what other filmmakers have done. And you can see a similar process of appropriation and modification.”

I would add that it is not just that art works are intertextual, but that tazmin implies more of a respect and an amplification of the prior work. Maybe it’s nit picking, but I like to think there is a reason why an ancient concept in art has more life than turning it over to post-structuralism. Maybe he’s pretentious, and I’m just thick.

Here is a quote form Wikipedia which has some bearing on the matter, i suppose.

““the notion of intertextuality replaces the notion of intersubjectivity” when we realize that meaning is not transferred directly from writer to reader but instead is mediated through, or filtered by, “codes” imparted to the writer and reader by other texts. For example, when we read Joyce’s Ulysses we decode it as a modernist literary experiment, or as a response to the epic tradition, or as part of some other conversation, or as part of all of these conversations at once. This intertextual view of literature, as shown by Roland Barthes, supports the concept that the meaning of an artistic work does not reside in that work, but in the viewers.

I went to a screening tonight at the Harvard Film Archives of Goodbye Solo directed by Ramin Bahrani who took questions. It is a great film. AO Scott called it “near perfect”. Bahrani himself is remarkably lucid on his reasons and his approach to writing, directing, shooting his films. He expresses himself with great calm and lack of vanity or arrogance; he is just very clear on what he is doing with his art. He and his three films are a prime examples of what AO Scott has called the neo-neo realists.

Here are some paraphrased quotes, as best I can recall from the director.

“That label neo neo realist is fine. I don’t have discussions with these other filmmakers, but these kinds of labels are the way to begin the larger conversation”

“I am not against Hollywood. They are against me”

“I don’t understand those films. I don’t recognize the people in Hollywood films, or in much independent film, for that matter, because is not much difference anymore. These are not people I know”

“Little Miss Sunshine is fine, but I don’t recognize any of these kind of people. They are not real”

“I want to think that I could be in the circumstances of a film, and that the behavior I see is personal and understandable”

“I find even Bunuel (the great surrealist) more real than most commercial film. It is at least emotionally authentic”

“I admire Ozu’s ability to associate an object with an idea. The each time we return to that object the association renews itself.”

“Everything in the frame must leave you open to think for yourself. That color red (he points to a person’s shirt) is fine but you could never put in the frame. That Exit sign would have to go away. People would look at it instead of the actors and say ‘what is its significance?’ I can’t have these things happen”

Though his films seem strikingly natural “everything is carefully scripted and planned. There is only one improvisation in Goodbye Solo””

“Film began by imitating life. Then they started imitating the films that imitated life. Then they began imitating the films themselves. Now they are just enamored of the technology itself.”

“Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis was a model for this film. I work in the Persian tradition of borrowing an idea and riffing on it, in a way to honor another work”

Following a screening of Sink or Swim and Dottie Gets Spanked at B.U.
I happened into a dinner with Amy Geller and Gerry Peary,, Vlada Petric , David Sterritt , and Mikita Brottman
This was an interesting way to start Easter weekend, needless to say. “Dottie” conjured up my whole childhood with its themes of art, sexuality, memory, family. Todd Haynes is amazing. “Sink or Swim” by Su Friedrich is filled with abstract associations and brings up interesting possibilities for the new film we’re working A Woman’s Voice,.

I sat next to Vlada, legendary for his strong uncompromising positions on film art. He didn’t like ‘Dottie’ “It is not cinematic”, he says in a thick Russian accent. Sterritt leans over and says “He means not enough editing” Vladic laughs patiently. I told that him I tend to like films where actors engage, where we learn something about humanity, where we immerse ourselves.
Vladic: “That is what theater is for, not cinema. Just go to the theater for that. I never immerse … I need distance, aesthetic distance”

See Ross McElwees Bright Leaves for a wonderful and hysterical scene with Petric.

This quote would explain why he liked ‘Sink or Swim’ a lot more. The film does just this:
“The more perfect the work, the more clearly does one feel the absence of any associations generated by it….which is also to be able to generate an infinite number of associations, which ultimately means the same thing.”

A few weeks ago I saw‘Exit the King’ with Geoffrey Rush in NYC. (I saw a 1/2 price preview). It was a reasonable interpretation, if you accept Ionesco as shtick. Still, few plays are worth the exorbitant price of these star driven Broadway shows, when there is great stuff off and off off Broadway, and in Boston, and in any city where arts can thrive. To get the public to also patronize non-blockbuster theater and museums , be driven by curiosity into galleries, foriegn films, small dance and theater companies, and then get into fights in bars over art and not just over sports and politics – we obviously need a culture that supports and prioritizes artistic expression. If we’re going stay human in the post-human future taking arts programs from the schools is a really bad start.
Which leads me to this Tribeca Film Festival blurb regarding the film TRANSCENDENT MAN about Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology:

“Kurzweil predicts that with the ever-accelerating rate of technological change, humanity is fast approaching an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non-biological and trillions of times more powerful than today. This will be the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations. In Kurzweil’s post-biological world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. Human aging and illness will be reversed, world hunger and poverty will be solved, and we will ultimately cure death.”

Returning to the Ionesco and his take on the folly of power, the anxiety of death, in Exit the King and thinking about all his wonderful ‘absurdist’ comedy/dramas on the state of modern man (Rhinoceros, The Bald Soprano, The Chairs) – led me to find this quote:

“In all the cities of the world, it is the same. The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might perhaps be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and backbreaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots.”

- Notes et Contre Notes, Eugene Ionesco

We have been warned!!

John drew his film “Honeydripper” from his short story, “Keeping Time”. He’s wanted to do it as a reading with drums for years, and we finally did. At the Coolidge Corner Theater February 2008.
(There are about 30 sec. of diminished sound near the top – the sound the rest is smooth) Good story – listen and enjoy!!!

Shot by Students at the New England Institute of Art under guidance of Mary Cardaras, with help from Mason Daring
Video Cameras – Thomas Dill, Dustin Hunt
Audio by Brian Smith
Edited by LaShawn McGhee

I did an interview with this mag. Here’s the Link.

Here’s the text

Also screening at BUFF was New England Institute of Art professor/musician/actor Tim Jackson’s feature documentary Radical Jesters, which Feder described as a look at “outsider, prankster artists… people who use humor and shocking tactics to put their point across.” They’re also called “culture jammers.”

Radical Jesters investigates the media hoaxing and culture jamming of artists such as Alan Abel, who convinced HBO that he had the smallest penis in the world; the Surveillance Camera Players, who put on full plays in front of public surveillance equipment; Boston-based art activist Milan Kohout; Improv Everywhere; artist Ron English, and comedian John Hargrave, among others.

Even the screening of Radical Jesters brought unexpected surprises. Before the film began, a “Mr. Cockburn” representing “Fox Searchlight Distribution” stood before the audience in a full suit to warn against the use of recording devices. When Mr. Cockburn finished his speech, he made his way up the side aisle and forcibly ejected a “patron” with a video camera. As the film began, there were several camera flashes from the back of the theater, adding to the crowd’s amusement.

Director/producer Jackson was on hand to answer questions after the screening, and two of the jammers profiled in his film joined him at the front of the theater.

Jackson explained his hope for the film: “I wanted to do something that would be interesting for art students so that they could see what sort of work was being done outside of galleries. I also wanted people to be amused and also a bit angry while at the same time raising questions about media credibility and public gullibility. The short profiles serve to keep people entertained, curious, and inquisitive in the hopes that they find out more on their own.”

Read more…

The Wooster Group is a real gift to the theater. I first saw them in 1983 and they have been slaying me ever since. I saw La Didone in previews and Bill Brantley’s review goes a long way towards helping to clarify and making sense of the experience. These performances are not gimmicks, not “post-modern”, but a collision of brilliant theatrical and performative elements and storytelling possibilities. LeCompte is a genius and that she finds performers of the quality needed for her vision is amazing. This is world class stuff. These actors are transcendent, and hugely talented. It’s beautiful and scary. That it takes movie stars to get people into NY theaters is unfortunate when you have this right in Brooklyn. If you’re already in New York, do yourself a favor and go! (And then go to the Flea and the Rattlestick!)

Times Review