documentaries

Ballet 422 (2015)

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threehalfstar

Although I don’t remember seeing the first 421 Ballet movies, I found the 422nd entry in the franchise to be remarkably accessible. Now that I’ve gotten that horrendously unfunny joke out of the way I can at least echo a similar sentiment in the way the documentary Ballet 422 indoctrinates outsiders into its tightly controlled world of professional dance. As if the film were a triple digits sequel for a franchise that’s been running strong since 1948 (when the New York City Ballet company where it’s set was established), the world it depicts is already well-established & lived-in. Instead of explaining the art of ballet as a whole, however, the film is smart to remain pinpoint-specific. This is not a film about ballet, but about the production of a specific ballet and that specificity allows it to reveal more about the artistry as a whole than broader strokes ever could.

Ballet 422 documents a world in which all of the participants are already on the same wavelength, communicating abstract ideas to each other almost wordlessly as they work together to create a new ballet. It’s strikingly intimate. The central subject is Justin Peck, a 25 year old dancer from the New York City Ballet’s Corps de Ballet (layman’s term: background dancers). Although Peck has been a dancer with the Corps for seven years, he’s still a relative youngster as far as choreographer goes (maybe? I’m guessing there; sounds young to me) and the film follows him as he pieces together the company’s 422nd production in just a few months’ time. There’s a mostly dialogue-free fly on the wall approach to documenting these few months, which is entirely appropriate for an art form that is so physical, so visually based. It’s a rare treat to actually watch the ballet culminate slowly on film without its machinations being described by needless voiceover. After Peck’s production hits the stage, he immediately returns to his secondary role in the Corps de Ballet. It’s an oddly sad, abstractly affecting moment that the film allows to remain open to your own interpretation.

Ballet 422 sidesteps interacting with ballet’s historical or critical significance as an art form & instead reduces the dance into its most basic elements: music & movement. There’s a little insight into the physical tax, the backstage primping, and the politics in the interactions between the dancers & musicians involved in the production being documented, but those moments are mostly fleeting. The real meat & potatoes of the film is when the dancers are talking shop without talking at all. There’s a physical communication at the heart of Ballet 422 that reveals a great deal about the physical communication of ballet itself. It’s fascinating stuff without being flashy or pedantic. Like the ballet documented in the film, Ballet 422 is simple, straight-forward, and effortlessly elegant.

-Brandon Ledet

I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story (2015)

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fourstar
Although he’s enjoyed a daily, masterful presence on television for over four decades now, Caroll Spinney is not a name or a face most people would recognize. With his quiet, reclusive demeanor & truly awful Prince Valiant haircut, Spinney hardly casts the image of a living legend, but his humbly dorky looks are entirely deceiving. As depicted in the profile documentary I Am Big Bird, it’s only when he transforms into the characters Big Bird & Oscar the Grouch on the children’s television program Sesame Street that Spinney’s true, wonderful self comes to light. There’s something magical hidden in those gigantic, yellow & tiny, green costumes that release Spinney’s inner child (& hopeless grump) and allow him to be himself in an extroverted way that he cannot even attempt out of costume. Part of what makes Jim Henson’s muppets so special in comparison to other puppet media is that they legitimately feel like real people. What’s special about Spinney’s relationship with the muppets he operates is that they also make him feel like a real person.

Instead of solely asking the I Was There, Man types in Spinney’s life to talk about how great he is, I Am Big Bird also digs into exactly why its subject is so hermetic. Since his dedication to puppetry dates back to his formative years and his first name happens to be Caroll, Spinney suffered abuse from his childhood peers in which he was subjected to homophobic slurs and asked questions like, “Oh Carroll, are you playing with your dolls?” The abuse persisted in his home life, where his doting mother could do little to compensate for the explosive, violent treatment he received from a father who also disapproved of his artistry. As an adult, Spinney continued to struggle to connect with others. On the Sesame Street set he felt like an outsider, struggling to connect with Jim Henson as a friend & a equal, because of his overwhelming sense of awe that tinged their relationship (can’t blame him there). When he had to deal with romantic, self-worth, and suicidal crises on the set, he had essentially no one close to turn to and would sometimes weep while wearing the Big Bird suit, a thought that will haunt me forever. Today, Spinney is a happily married man who’s proud of his life’s work and the legend he will leave behind, but it was not an easy journey for him. In countless ways, Big Bird & Oscar saved his life.

Although it’s Spinney’s emotional turmoil that anchors I Am Big Bird, the documentary also makes time to deliver a lot of behind-the-scenes information on Big Bird’s & Sesame Street’s history. There’s some insight into how Spinney operates the suit, who will take the reins once he retires, and anecdotes about the feature films & live tours of the show’s past. When Spinney was young he wanted to do something “important” with puppets and it’s a miracle that he found a home on Sesame Street, posed here as a researched educational experiment that has no doubt changed countless lives for the better since its premier in the idealist times of 1969. The story of Caroll Spinney’s career as Big Bird & Oscar the Grouch is extensive & populated with big personalities like Jim Henson’s & Frank Oz’s, but what I enjoyed most about I Am Big Bird is that it looks past the typical Wikipedia bullet points a lot of profile docs would stick to. It instead digs deeper to expose a very sensitive soul the world usually doesn’t get privy to under all of that green & yellow felt & feathers.

-Brandon Ledet

 

Rewind Moment: Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003)

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Rewind Moments are those special scenes in films that deserve to revisited over & over again due to their overwhelming impact.

One of my all-time favorite documentaries is Nick Broomfield’s Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. Aileen Wuornos is known as a psychotic serial killer who murdered several johns while prostituting in Florida from 1989-1990, a life detailed in the 2003 biopic Monster. Broomfield used this documentary to shed some light on Wuornos’ unfortunate upbringing while giving her the opportunity to speak and share her own story. After watching the film in its entirety, it’s difficult to not feel some sort of attachment to Wuornos. Her bulging eyes will haunt you for days.

There are so many “rewind moments” in this unforgettable documentary, but my favorite is the shot where she pretty much begs for her execution. She’s so terrifying and unstable in this moment, but at the end, I just want to give her a huge high-five for saying something so badass. I swear, if she’d ever been released from prison, John Waters would’ve picked her up in a heartbeat to star in one of his films. She has that special kind of charm.

-Britnee Lombas

Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton (2014)

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threehalfstar

Initially pitched to the audience as a history of the underground hip-hop record label Stones Throw, Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton actually works a lot more like an in-depth mental profile of the label’s founder, influential DJ Peanut Butter Wolf. That’s because the label’s identity is so closely linked to Wolf’s. The periods of creative excitement & devastating losses that shape Peanut Butter Wolf’s life also shape the history of his record label. Stones Throw is Wolf’s life’s work, so it makes sense that his life would have so much influence over its general sound & direction.

It makes sense then that the story of Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton begins long before the founding of Stones Throw. Providing childhood photos & home videos from Peanut Butter Wolf’s youth, the documentary shows us a young nerdy white dude as he grows in his music tastes from funk & disco to new-wave & punk to hip-hop, where he finds his calling as a taste-maker. Even in his younger days, before the turntables, Wolf is shown making mixtapes & playing curator, a skill that will later prove vital to his legacy. It’s when Wolf begins to collaborate with young rapper Charizma that his music career takes a definite shape and it’s after Charizma’s tragic, far-too-soon death that he becomes determined to make something of it. This is just one of many tragic losses Peanut Butter Wolf would suffer over the years, and it’s not until he gets excited by working with new collaborators that he can truly move on & grow.

The list of Peanut Butter Wolf’s collaborators interviewed in Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton is a staggering who’s-who of underground hip-hop & outsider indie music: Madlib, J Dilla, MF Doom, Common, and Anika are only a fraction of voices heard here. The interesting thing about these interviews is that the subjects are all too-smart-for-their-own-good nerds who are super awkward when faced with the scrutiny of a documentary crew. Because its subjects are so soft-spoken & nervous, the film has essentially no choice but to let the work speak for itself. An original score by Madlib (one of the label’s most influential contributors), throwback animation sequences, and rare footage of reclusive acts that don’t normally get a lot of face time all combine to show exactly what makes Stones Throw’s vibe so special. As Peanut Butter Wolf puts it, he sees his label as a stomping ground, a launching pad for people to move on from. The work isn’t always spectacular (to the documentary’s credit it doesn’t look away when Wolf gets into producing some really douchey Los Angeles weirdness), but it’s incredible how much work was made possible by a single man who knows great music when he hears it & knows how to bring out the best in his collaborators. For anyone interested in exactly how everything Peanut Butter Wolf’s put together came to be, Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton is an essential document. I’m not sure anyone who’s not a hip-hop nerd will be as pleased, but they might find themselves nerding out despite themselves.

Stories We Tell (2013)

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three star

By definition, Stories We Tell is likely to be the most literally personal project of Sarah Polley’s career. An actress since she was just a small child (picture her as the youngster in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen for context), her first documentary credit is just her third turn as a director, and the very first instance I know of where her own past & familial structure were the subject of scrutiny. This kind of navel-gazing has both inherent charms and flaws. The intimacy of Stories We Tell’s revelations about Sarah Polley’s past & family structure is striking. It’s highly unusual for a public figure to expose so much of themselves & their immediate loved ones in this honest of a way and that vulnerability alone makes Stories We Tell a memorable experience. On the other hand, the story at the heart of the documentary isn’t quite as fulfilling & engaging to outsiders as it is to the people who lived it and the film has a tendency to over-explain its own intent instead of simply allowing  the story to unfold.

Without revealing too much about the story Polley tells here, I’ll just say that it’s focused on a nagging question about her paternity. Interviewing her siblings, her parents, and friends of the family, Polley looks back to her birth & childhood and retraces the steps of her deceased mother to hopefully answer lingering questions about who fathered her. Because the story of her childhood is told through many voices, it has a fractured, almost Cubist structure that calls into question the difference between truth & observation. Even though Polley is mostly interviewing her own family, she is relentless in her pursuit of “the truth”, referring to her own tactics as an “interrogation process.” It’s her unforgiving honesty & tendency to push her loved ones to their limits that make the documentary an unusual & interesting experience.

As interesting as Stories We Tell is in concept & execution, the story does wear itself a little thin in the final half hour, especially once the truth about Polley’s paternity is revealed. After the story has effectively been told from beginning to end, the documentary makes the mistake of over-explaining itself. Polley directly tells the audience that her film’s not only about that story in particular, but about the nature of memory & storytelling in general. Polley’s not giving herself enough credit there. The film had already spoken for itself, especially in its fractured interview structure & super-8 recreations of significant memories (like a critical phone call & café meeting that cracked the story wide open). It would’ve been a much better movie if it had ended once the story was over, instead of continuing to provide context when it wasn’t needed in a conclusive half hour that felt more like a DVD extra than a proper part of the documentary. As is, it’s a fairly solid documentary that shows a lot of promise of where Polley’s directorial career might go in the future, but isn’t exactly essential or even necessary either. I believe she’s got even better, more important work in her that will play much more confidently once she allows it to speak for itself.

-Brandon Ledet

Paris Is Burning (1990)

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Although the subject of the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning (ball culture) is unmistakably NYC-specific, it’s not difficult to see its connection to a more recent New Orleans trend: sissy bounce. There’s very little connecting the two geographically-disparate movements in the decade or so that separates them, but there’s still a similarly effortless punk spirit & vibrant defiance that binds them in my mind, a superficial connection or not. NYC ball culture was a fashion-minded escape fantasy for the city’s POC, queer, transgendered, and often homeless youth who used the platform to feel empowered instead of disenfranchised. Where sissy bounce offers New Orleans’ queer & transgendered POC youth access to the largely homophobic & hyper-masculine world of hip-hop, ball culture offered that same minority access to wealth & the world at large. That access may have been to more of a fantasy than a reality, but it was a transgressive fantasy that was so goddamn fabulously punk that there’s really nothing else like it, sissy bounce included.

We don’t have a worthy documentary about New Orleans’ sissy bounce culture yet, but there is a more than worthy NYC ball culture doc to be found in Paris Is Burning. As a culture, the film’s subject has everything necessary for a great film: sights (in the homemade fashion), sounds (in the music & dancing that accompanies the runway “voguing”), and narrative (in its long history as told through the eyes of old-timers who had occupied the scene decades before the film’s camera crew arrived in 1987). Part of what makes the film so arresting is its combination of both surface pleasures & much deeper, more meaningful aspects. Sure the film is stuffed with lush, beautiful fashion and the absurd hyroglypics-inspired dance moves of voguing, but there’s a lot of real heartbreak at the center of the culture’s need for escape.

These are marginalized people who’ve been abandoned by their families & society at large; they depend mostly on petty theft & sex work to get by. Although there is an aggressive, competitive aspect to ball culture, there’s also an intense comradery that includes makeshift families called “houses”. Ball competitors are seeking to better one another for a chance at a “legendary status” or at least a trophy for their troubles that night, but they also serve as their own support network, giving each other a place to go and something to look forward to when practically everything else has been stripped away. As the MC at one ball puts it to the more “vicious motherfuckers” in the crowd, “We’re not going to be shady, just fierce.” There’s a catty atmosphere on the surface of ball culture, but it’s a thin veneer on something much more thoughtful & fulfilling.

It’s a little sad, then, that the isolated act of voguing was assimilated & diluted into a much larger, uncaring pop culture by enterprising folks like Madonna the same way New Orleans’ bounce maneuver twerking was assimilated (poorly) by folks like Miley Cyrus. It’s sad that such a rich, complex culture had been boiled down to such a singular, somewhat superficial detail, but that’s often how mainstream success works. Part of what makes Paris is Burning so rewarding is that it arrived in time to capture that culture before it was exposed to the public at large. There’s still time for sissy bounce to receive the same reverent treatment , but not much. The recent national fetishization of twerking makes it feel like the moment has already passed. Of course, I may be oversimplifying both sissy bounce & ball culture by linking them with such a concrete tether, but I’m certainly not the first one to do so. There was even a huge event thrown last year celebrating their spiritual sisterhood. Although one had voguing & the other twerking and one was stationed in Harlem & the other in New Orleans, there’s still a rebellious, punk spirit of inclusivity for groups of young people who are normally excluded from everything. As one of the ball culture’s old timers puts it, “If more people went to balls and did less drugs the world would be a better place, wouldn’t it?” If balls were anything like the way they’re represented in the near-perfect Paris Is Burning, I’m inclined to agree.

-Brandon Ledet

The Final Member (2014)

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fourstar

The recent documentary The Final Member, which could easily have been a mutedly quirky tour through the famed Icelandic Phallological Museum, somehow manages to find a deeper purpose beyond simply profiling what is essentially a room full of severed dicks floating in jars. The basic concept of the world-class Nordic penis museum is fascinating enough in the abstract, but not really worth putting together the travel funds for the long trek. So, a simple guided tour through its collection would’ve most likely been enough for a decent, but inessential documentary to survive on. Instead, The Final Member explores ideas like artists fading before completing their life’s work, the near-extinction of larger-than-life personalities, and the ways penises relate to patriotism, elevating itself above the mediocre aims a more straightforward production would’ve achieved. For a penis museum documentary, it’s surprisingly moving & thought-provoking.

There are three boisterous personalities at the heart of The Final Member’s success. The museum’s founder, Sigurdur “Siggi” Hjartarson, is of course the main subject and commands attention expertly. An educator & a family man, Siggi explains that a lot of people find his dedication to penile preservation off-putting, mistaking him for a pervert instead of the total sweetheart & academic taxonomist he truly is. He describes how he started the museum as a joke 40 years ago in his home with just a few animal specimens for show. It ballooned from there, resulting in Siggi’s now massive specimen room that features at least one penis specimen from every mammalian species except for one: human. His collection’s largest piece is, of course, the penis from a sperm whale and the smallest is the penis bone from a hamster. It’s adorable how Siggi proudly shows off his specimens (as well as his handcrafted penis art) even if most of it looks like organic garbage “with testicles!” (emphasis Siggi’s). As a guy who seems to have it all (penis-wise anyway), it’s heartbreaking to hear Siggi worry about whether or not he’ll be able to finalize his collection with a human specimen before he dies. He explains that often “artists die without finishing their work” & that thought visibly weigh heavy on him as his health deteriorates. That’s where the other boisterous two personalities enter the story.

As the title indicates, The Final Member is less about the Icelandic penis museum in general and more about the race to complete the puzzle, to provide the missing piece: a human penis. There are two viable contenders aiming to fill this role, an aging Icelandic celebrity adventurer & a simple American cowboy. The Icelandic candidate, although ancient, is vocally proud of his past sexual prowess, so he has a sort of a famous penis that could bring a little bit of cultural cachet to the museum. When Siggi asks him, “Do you have any use for your penis after you’re dead?” he finds himself shrugging and offering his specimen for the collection. Not to be outdone, the American candidate offers to donate his penis to the museum while he is still alive. You see, although he is a simple cowboy, he is a simple cowboy with a deep affection for his own dick. As he puts it, “I didn’t want my penis to go away when I die,” and as the story escalates it becomes increasingly clear that he really is so proud of his American man meat (which he assumes is automatically better than the Icelandic competition based on its nationality alone) that he is dead serious about mutilating himself to become the first human entry in the collection.

The Final Member does a lot of what you might expect from a film about a penis museum: it tours the specimen room; it provides a history of the museum’s origins; it asks questions like “Why is it so taboo to talk about the penis in the 21st century?” That’s all fascinating stuff, but what’s really special is the way it finds a real story to tell at the heart of the museum’s legacy, complete with a race to the finish line and a clear contender to root for, but without adopting a mocking or a get-a-load-of-this-weirdo tone for anyone involved. It’s a story about patriotism and the satisfaction of completing your life’s work just as much as it is a profile of a room filled with thousands of penises. I expected the film to be entertaining in sort of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not kind of way, but what was delivered was a lot more revealing about both the legacy Siggi will leave behind when he dies & the differences between Icelandic & American national pride. It’s a much greater film than I expected.

-Brandon Ledet

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015)

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threehalfstar

The only reason the likes of the recent HBO documentary Going Clear have not been released before (or at least not with this large of a budget) is because it’s an endeavor that requires a certain amount of bravery. Its subject, the (secretive, abusive, and dare I say cult-like) “religious” organization The Church of Scientology, is infamous for its bullying tactics when counteracting its vocal critics, almost to the point where I’m nervous to praise a film that attacks it even on this site, the most inconsequential of all blogs. Almost. Going Clear took a lot of guts to make, just like it took a lot of guts to write the book it was based on and it took a lot of guts for former church members to speak out in its interviews. It has the feeling of a long time coming for a subject so flagrantly nefarious in the public eye, but it’s also completely understandable why it took so long for a major outlet to speak out against it in this way.

Directed by prolific documentarian Alex Gibney, Going Clear does an excellent job of gradually introducing the audience to the insane world of Scientology’s beliefs & practices the same way the organization is known to gradually accustom its own members. The film mimics the form of an “audit” (a combination of a therapy session & a taped confession), a practice that plays a major role in Scientology’s recruitment process. At first the ideas of discharging hurtful memories and basic meditation through audits sound like reasonable forms of therapy and personal improvement. Also, the organization’s basic goals of freeing the Earth from insanity & criminality seem fairly admirable on the surface. As the film digs deeper, however, it starts to reveal a much stranger set of promises: superpowers that allow members to “transcend all perameters” & “achieve godspeed”, scientific instruments that can weigh the mass of your thoughts, billion year contracts to “save the world” (through indentured servitude, of course), and the quest to “unhypnotize” man. That’s not even getting into the more out-there concepts of prison planets & galactic overlords. If Gibney had introduced these details in the opening minutes (much like if Scientology introduced them in their initial recruitment efforts) they’d feel somewhat unbelievable, but by the time you get to them in the film they feel both very real and very much terrifying.

One of the tactics Going Clear employs very well is allowing the founder of it subject, deceased sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard, to speak for himself. Hubbard spent a large part of his adult life avoiding charges of tax fraud, so it is rare that you actually get to hear him talk about the monster he created. Footage from at least two separate interviews are assembled here to allow him to speak directly on Scientology’s core beliefs (as well as less savory topics like “the primitive races, including the white race”). As portrayed here, Hubbard was an abusive husband, a former Satanic occultist, a paranoid dissenter of traditional modes of mental health, and a prolific writer of pulp fiction. Initially, he conceived Scientology as a means of making money, quoted here telling his wife “The only way to make any real money is to have a religion”. A religion, of course, would afford Hubbard a tax exempt status that would allow him to hoard his earnings. As his personal health deteriorated, however, he began to believe his own teachings (concepts mostly cobbled together from the plots of pulp sci-fi novels he had written before his religious pursuit). To Hubbard’s credit, the modern monster that Scientology has become does not seem exactly like a devious, well-thought-out exploitation scheme, but rather the musings of a very sick man that were twisted even further after his death by power-hungry members of the church, especially the current leader David Miscavige.

This history lesson in this first half of Going Clear was much more interesting than what I would describe as the celebrity gossip second half. While explaining the basic teachings of the church, the film employs a fascinating type of visual collage that feels transcendent of its basic documentary format. Once the film delves into the modern era, which is mostly contingent on the involvement of Hollywood celebrities Tom Cruise & John Travolta, it loses a little steam as an unique work, depending mostly upon the church’s Dianetics recruitment videos for much of its visual charms. That’s not to say Tavolta & Cruise’s involvement are not inherently fascinating. When they first appear on the screen Travolta is dressed in soldier’s fatigues (on a movie set) and Cruise is wearing an oversized medallion (the “Freedom Medal of Valor”, as it were), two costume choices with enough bizarre energy on their own to make the millionaire weirdos’ presence interesting. It’s just that the back half of the film feels less special than the first, like it is something that anyone curious enough to watch a Scientology profile on YouTube could’ve encountered before.

As a whole, however, Going Clear is a fascinating look into the lives of people who have left the church as they look back upon the thetans, e-meters, out of body experiences, and Xenus that populated their troubled pasts. It may lose a little visual flair as it narrows its focus on Travolta & Cruise, but their inclusion is necessary as it calls into question the idea that as long as you give the church all of your money they can make anything possible. Is there an element of blackmail that maintains their involvement in Scientology or is does that “Next stop: infinity” slogan hold more weight than you would expect? Given the abusive, conniving practices of the church laid out here (not to mention basic laws of science & physics), it feels a lot more likely that it’s the former rather than the latter, but Scientology is such a strange, insular, shrouded entity that anything feels possible . . . as long as you give them all of your money.

-Brandon Ledet

French Quarter (Film) Festival 2015

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It’s usually around Mardi Gras when the city wakes up from its winter slumber, suddenly coming to life after months of hibernation. Tourists start to arrive in town to drink in the streets & enjoy the sunshine while their friends & loved ones freeze in the snow back home. Locals stop acting like total babies about what passes for “the cold” down here and venture at least as far as their front porches to enjoy the second lines & boiled crawfish. Mardi Gras is only the start to this Spring awakening, however, and the spirit to excess rolls right on into our festival season, which stretches on as long as it can before it’s too hot too drink gallons of beer in the daylight and visitors abandon us for the summer. Jazz Fest stands tall as the most obvious pinnacle of the season, but French Quarter Fest has recently been giving that juggernaut a run for its money. What used to essentially be “Jazz Fest for Locals” is now ballooning to be its own feature attraction, drawing thousands downtown for deliciously cheap local food & free music. To my recent discovery & surprise, it also features a free film festival.

I’ve been to French Quarter Fest a few times over the years, but this year was the first I’d ever heard of a film festival accompanying the better advertised attractions of food, drink, and local brass. Located just outside Jacskon Square at Le Petit Theatre, a venue that traditionally stages live drama, the film festival is a cocoon-like respite in the center of madness, the eye of a drunken storm. After wandering from stage to stage, drinking like a madman & downing hot sauce-soaked poboys in the heat (and unfortunately this year, the rain) it’s difficult to describe just how much of a relief it was to sit in a darkened, air conditioned room and watch movies. Presented by the folks behind Timecode: NOLA, the offerings at the French Quarter Film Fest are a well-curated group of documentaries seemingly selected to make the city look good for visitors. It featured several documentaries I had never seen before as well as ones I already know intimately, essentially upper crust of the kind of New Orleans-praising fare you’d expect to catch on late night PBS.

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I attempted to catch one film a day at the festival to get a decent sampling of its offerings, but my Friday afternoon plans got derailed when I coincidentally ran into a friend at a live performance on Royal Street and ended up missing the classic, doc Always for Pleasure. There pretty much is no substitution for the all-encompassing sampling of New Orleans culture in Always for Pleasure, but it’s a film I already know well (and one that’s currently available on Hulu), so I had no qualms with missing it for a chance to enjoy French Quarter Fest’s more traditional offerings of booze & live music. Actually, I feel like it was even more in the spirit of the movie to miss it. Filmed in the 1970s, the Criterion-approved Les Blank documentary truly is the best introduction to local culture that I could possibly imagine. Where else are you going to find soul legend Irma Thomas sharing her red beans & rice recipe and Allen Toussaint explaining the significance of jazz funerals & second lines. There’s also glimpses of crawfish boils, Mardi Gras Indians, St. Patty’s Day celebrations in the Irish Channel, and what essentially amounts to music videos for Wild Thcopitoulas & Professor Longhair. An interviewee in Always for Pleasure describes New Orleans as “The City that Care Forgot” & “The last city in American where you can feel free to live,” and the supporting images that surround those claims make it feel like he might be onto something.

On Saturday, I not only made it to the screening I wanted to catch; I desperately needed to. After sweating it out in the drunken, downtown masses, it was a life-saving sensation to watch the documentary He’s the Prettiest: A Salute to Big Chief Allison “Tootie” Montana’s 50 Years of Mardi Gras Indian Suiting. He’s the Prettiest obviously has a much more focused subject than Always for Pleasure, choosing to narrow in solely on a profile of Mardi Gras Indian Chief Tootie as he dressed for his final outing. Tootie is not only a significant chief because of his 50 consecutive years of suiting, but in the innovative artistry he brought to the practice. Instead of merely continuing the traditional Mardi Gras Indian beading he inherited, Tootie introduced the concept of 3-D designs to his suits, elevating the painstaking bead work to unparalleled levels of intricate design. He’s the Prettiest is less interested in the history of Mardi Gras Indian culture than it is providing a platform for Tootie’s work to shine. It’s essentially a moving art gallery for beautiful designs, a constant tribal soundtrack of thumping tambourines & rhythmic chants providing a rich texture for bead work that would already be dazzling in a silent, still image. It’s an important profile of a brilliant, unfortunately deceased artist whose work doesn’t receive as much formal fine art praise as it should.

On Sunday afternoon, once the rain died off, we caught the final film of the festival, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans. Initially conceived as a history lesson reviving a forgotten storyline in which New Orleans was a historical forerunner in racial equality & integration, providing then unheard of freedoms for people of color long before the 1960s Civil Rights movement (freedoms sadly poisoned by the years of Jim Crow), the documentary about the historic district of Faubourg Tremé was derailed by a little storm called Hurricane Katrina. The final third of the film captured a time I rarely care to revisit, a time in which most people couldn’t afford to return to the city they knew & loved and the ones that could struggled to piece their lives (and families) back together from the wreckage. It was an emotionally crippling note to end the festival on, but once I stepped back onto the city streets and watched a nameless group of ten-to-fifteen year olds playing traditional brass music draw a lively crowd outside the French Market (most likely the best set I saw all festival) I realized that Faubourg Tremé was for the most part a depressing story because it was an incomplete one. It captured the city’s incomprehensible lows (right down to the storm’s irrevocable psychological damage & a beyond troubled history of race relations), but did not have the time to capture the resiliency that brought the city back to life in the years following the broken levees. We all went through Hell to get here, but there’s plenty of our culture left to make the struggle worthwhile.

The couple of screenings I successfully made it to at this year’s French Quarter Film Festival were surprisingly well-attended, but also decidedly low-key. It seemed to be mostly older couples who, like my lame-ass self, needed a break from the external madness of drunken tourists and admittedly overpriced drinks (hey, at least they pay for the music). More importantly, the films selected had the kind of celebratory quality that gets you genuinely excited about your own city & culture in a heartfelt way, especially in the last minute acknowledgment that we’ve been through Hell together. There were plenty of opportunities for me to fall in love with New Orleans all over again at this year’s French Quarter Festival, like trying my first ever alcoholic snowball (which honestly wasn’t all that different from a daiquiri) or listening to any brass band you can name jamming outside the US Mint or overhearing a cop explain to a couple of passed out crust punks, “Look, if you want to sleep out here, you gotta do it by the river.” That sense of civic & cultural pride was surprisingly just as potent in the mid-afternoon darkness of Le Petit Theater as it was on the busy streets surrounding it; and it was just as simple as watching a couple of movies in the dark with a few strangers/neighbors.

-Brandon Ledet

The Sheik (2014)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

wrasslin

three star

Much like with hip-hop or viral content, professional wrestling is all about self-promotion. In pro wrestling, you don’t necessarily have to be the best, you just have to convince your audience that you’re the best. Just ask Hulk Hogan. As the 80s era’s choice for the face of the company (that company being the WWE, of course), Hogan seemingly tore through every formidable opponent tossed his way, from Andre the Giant to “Macho Man” Randy Savage to Zeus. His rapid rise in popularity caused a version of mild cultural hysteria that was even afforded its own name. The Hulkster was smartly branded as not only a single wrestler, but an entire movement. Hulkamania was an 80s phenomenon that gave birth to both the annual cultural juggernaut WrestleMania and the lesser, round-the-year spectacle of WWE as a household sport. Hulk Hogan’s shameless self-promotion in the 1980s built that empire, supported with major backing from the multi-million dollar company pulling the strings, of course.

Last year’s profile documentary The Sheik’s most ambitious (and yet still believable) claim is that the success of Hulkamania (and, by extension, WrestleMania) was largely dependent on the appeal of Hogan’s main opponent, The Iron Sheik. Playing off of Americans’ Islamophobic prejudices during the Carter era Iranian hostage crisis, The Iron Sheik is credited here for being the ideal heel for Hogan, essentially single-handedly putting him over with the crowd. Born in Iran in the 1940s, Hossein Khosrow “The Sheik” Ali Vaziri was raised in a culture where traditional wrestling was a national obsession, where a healthy body meant a healthy state. Describing his teenage life in The Sheik, Ali Vaziri says “I was married to the wrestling mat. I didn’t care about girls; I cared about wrestling.” It was this dedication that landed him the position as bodyguard for the Iranian shah and, after emigration, an all-American coach for the Olympic wrestling team. The Iron Sheik was a mild-mannered American hero with an exceedingly sweet Midwestern wife & three adorable daughters before he found his true calling as a pro wrestling heel (a “bad guy”) that perfectly counteracted The Hulkster’s “I am a real American” persona simply by being a foreigner (nevermind that he has a depthless love for the country that he adopted).

The Sheik is not only credited in this flattering profile as contributing to the success of Hulkamania, but also for creating the priceless term “jabroni” (later popularized by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, of course) as well as the arguably-more-important public revelation that pro wrestling is, in fact, rigged. Once upon a time the ultra-macho ballet known as pro wrestling was assumed to be a true-to-life physical competition until (as this doc tells it) The Iron Sheik & supposed opponent “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan were arrested together on a beer & drug binge. It was the first time a face & a heel were ever proven to be hanging out as buds outside the squared circle. This “revelation” eventually lead to WWE magnate Vince McMahon seeking (and achieving) the tax breaks that come with being classified as a form of entertainment and not a professional sport.

If The Sheik is to be believed its subject would be credited as the sole launching pad for the very existence of modern pro wrestling itself and not just as the highly effective, very much timely heel that’s most likely closer to the truth. However, it isn’t until the film relaxes on the revisionist history lesson and profiles The Sheik’s more recent transition from drug addict with a broken body & a heart of gold to reformed family man that it loses a good deal of its credibility. It’s true that The Iron Sheik has a truly fascinating Twitter, YouTube and Howard Stern presence, but the movie conveniently sidesteps the racist & homophobic tendencies of his statements in those forums. As a journalistic, documentary endeavor, The Sheik fails to uncover answers that doesn’t support its central thesis that The Iron Sheik is 100% awesome, no faults. As a rose-colored profile of a very storied man who calls everyone “Bubba”, never says anything offensive about minorities, and most definitely quit mountains of crack cocaine, it’s much more effective. Supporting interviews with pro wrestling staples like Jim Ross, The Rock (who was apparently babysat by The Sheik’s wife as a child), Jake “The Snake” Roberts, Mick “Mankind” Foley, Brett “The Hitman” Hart, Jimmy Hart, and King Kong Bundy are sure to please any “sports entertainment” fan who are looking for a collection of anecdotes and not a controversial expose. The Sheik may be an exercise in shameless self-promotion, but that’s far from a new concept in the world of pro wrestling and (much like with the “sport” it covers) it’s a much more satisfactory proposition if you know what you’re in for before you arrive.

-Brandon Ledet