The Sessions (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

The Sessions 

"The Sessions" is a new film based on the experiences of the late poet Mark O'Brien and his intimate misadventures with a sex therapist. Mr O' Brien, in addition to being a fine and evocative poet was also an outspoken journalist who wrote articles in various magazines. 

Physically, he happened to have polio and was literally boxed up with an "iron lung" which looks like an immense and medieval looking  cylinder that his body is placed in. To me, it looks like a space capsule from the 1960s but I don't mean to trivialize it. O'Brien passed away in 1999 at the age of 49 and his life was by no means depressing or downbeat. He left a solid legacy of poetry in addition to many trailblazing articles which paved the way for many of the wheeled, braced or prosthetic-users among us to live barrier free lives, regardless of whether those barriers are physical or mental.

"The Sessions" focuses on the slice of O'Brien's life when he was living at the University of Berkeley as a journalist. Despite his aggressive accomplishments academically, O'Brien was viscerally and almost spiritually blighted by missing experiences of physical intimacy which eluded him like a precious perfume.

O'Brien is played with a great delicate  energy by John Hawkes who is known for his frequently hard bitten, tobacco-tossed and vicious roles in the films "Winter's Bone", "Mary Marcy May Marlene" and the lesser known but equally confrontational "Higher Ground". The noisy intimidation that he displayed in these previous films have vanished replaced by pensive longings and punctuated gasps and this is a refreshing feat, given that the actor was quickly becoming typecast. Now I can exhale. Hawkes is The Horrible no more.

O'Brien, after much cerebral vexation and visits to his local Catholic Church (which pits him in what feels like some very real combat between Good and Evil: his  iron cylinder placed in a diagonal line underneath a mural of The Virgin Mary) resolves to see a sex surrogate, which is a euphemism for therapist. 

There have been so many films featuring physically challenged people being pulled under and over the heart. Some are excellent. Some are good. While others are a little less than good. "The Sessions" works well because it doesn't over-decorate or bog the action down with melodrama or syrup. Events are presented as they very well may have appeared without flourish, fanfare and only a couple of crocodile tears. The story moves along smoothly as is:  nakedness is shown as nakedness and awkwardness as awkwardness, and it happens in a very organic way. 

This is important.

The actors have room to breathe. They even deliver some sexually explicit content with a few winks and humor in keeping with O'Brien's personality.

Helen Hunt gives a very warm and giving performance as therapist Cheryl Greene who displays a wonderful authenticity as a professional with a light, yet matter of fact verve. And the ubiquitous William H. Macy gives his semi-wacky but priestly best (no surprise for Macy fans) as Father Brendan who weighs all matters of the flesh with the wrinkled creasing torment of Willem Dafoe and then seems to all but click his catholic heels.

Such is life.

The only asymmetry  in Macy's collar is  the moment when he heads over to celebrate with O'Brien after hours with a six pack and a headband. A priest on the prowl! Radical and a bit too much like "Wild Hogs" to take seriously. But thankfully this corny Catholicism only lasts a minute.

Most of the exchanges with Macy and Hawkes though, work quite well. Macy has a leprechaunish glee in his role that balances nicely with his saltpeter saturninity.
"The Sessions" moves at a brisk pace, unsentimental with its punches (unless you count the shot of O'Brien's furry orange kitty that sits atop his empty iron lung) and succeeds with spirit, due in large part to the gusto, the anxious cleavage tickles and touches that are shared between Hunt and Hawkes. 

"The Sessions" is neither confining nor dismal but invigoratingly light with a simple grace.
Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Week of November 9 to November 15 (Mann)

What’s on at the Tropic

by Phil Mann

SAMSARA is a thought-provoking visual feast, a cinemagraphic world tour that is “achingly beautiful and visually transfixing, …. a movie to get lost in.” (Rene Rodriquez, Miami Herald). The range of human activity portrayed transports you beyond your own little world. In a cliché: it’s mind-blowing.

CHICKEN WITH PLUMS is another mind-stretching experience, from Iranian filmmaker/graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) and her French colleague Vincent Paronnaud. The story is a fable, about a violinist who takes to his bed after his prized violin is destroyed. “A grand, romantic life story about love, loss, regret and the sadness that can be evoked by a violin… it is all melancholy and loss, and delightfully comedic, with enough but not too much magic realism. The story as it stands could be the scenario for an opera.” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)

After all this, you might be ready to return to a world of small minded, ordinary people. 17 GIRLS fills the bill. Based on true events in the fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, but written and directed by the French sister team of Delphine and Muriel Coulin and set in their working-class, port hometown of Lorient, dix-sept filles of the title are high school teens who make a “pregnancy pact” to have babies and raise them in a mutual support group. But it’s not as easy as they thought. “17 Girls is mostly fueled by grrl-power, from its nineties-era femme-centric alt-rock, to its marginalization of boys as sperm-deposit devices.” (Gabe Toro, The Playlist) Makes you wonder about lowering the voting age below 21 (35?).

THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER, SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS, and SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN are held over.

Have you checked out the upcoming Key West Film Festival (Nov. 29-Dec. 2)? After years of talking about it, there’s finally going to be a real Film Fest in town. For this we’ve got to thank Brooke Christian, a Washington D.C. executive, and son of Tropic Board Member Wayne Kruer. Brooke just got tired of our dawdling and stepped up to the plate to sponsor one on his own, but using the Tropic as the primary venue. He’s recruited a team, including a professional film booker from New York, and a local management group headed by Nadene Grossman (who also runs the Songwriters’ Festival). They’ve put together a great list of films and events.

A slate of forty movies is lined up, kicking off on Thursday evening (November 29) with WHILE WE WERE HERE, starring Kate Bosworth (Straw Dogs, 21, Superman Returns) as a married woman having an affair with a young man on an Italian island. The movie, which The Playlist says “delivers the sensuality of the sunkissed shores of Naples,” will be introduced by the writer/director Kat Coiro, who will be at a welcoming party at the Hemingway House, preceding the screening at the San Carlos.

Movies will be shown all day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, on all four of the Tropic screens and at the San Carlos. Among the noteworthy selections are:

·         SHADOW DANCER featuring Andrea Riseborough (Made in Dagenham) as an IRA turncoat double agent and Clive Owen as her MI5 handler.

·         STARLET, about the moral dilemmas raised when an aspiring and often stoned actress discovers a stash of cash in a Thermos she buys at a yard sale. The movie was featured at the SXSW Festival, and won the Breakthrough Performer Award for Dree Hemingway (granddaughter of Papa) at the Hamptons Film Festival.

·         THE SAPPHIRES follows an Aborigine girl band as they go on a tour of American troops in Vietnam -- a funny, moving crowd pleaser from The Weinstein Company.

·         TIGER EYES is the first-ever feature film adaptation of a Judy Blume novel, written by Judy with her son Lawrence, and directed by him. It’sthe story of a teenager coming to terms with the sudden death of her father and an unwanted family relocation. Judy will be there for a Q and A after the film.

I’ll be telling you about more of the movies as the festival draws closer. But full information and schedules, and advance tickets, are at KeyWestFilmFestival.com. With many of the films playing in the Tropic’s intimate theaters, you may want to book in advance.

17 Girls (Rhoades)

"17 Girls” Flaunts

Social Convention

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

 I was just reading an article about the rise of feminism in the ’70s, when ads like the National Airlines “Fly me” campaign and Clairol’s “Does she . . . or doesn’t she?” were deemed to devalue women. As a result my friend Gloria Steinem started up Ms. Magazine and Playboy quit (for a time) using the word “girls.” Instead, we had “Women of the …”

Now it seems to be okay to say “girls” again, both as a backlash of the Superwoman concept and as aging Baby Boomers seek to hang onto youthful flattery.

Of course, the French have always gotten away with it. And the recent movie “17 Filles” makes the translation to “17 Girls” acceptable.

At the risk of sounding sexist, I would have titled it “17 Foolish Girls.”

The Tropic Cinema is currently showing this Gallic film as a titular companion piece to its other feature “7 Psychopaths.” We’re only 10 psychopaths short of a high school prom.

However, “17 Girls” is less entertaining than it is an interesting examination of social convention and peer influence. Here’s the story of 16-year-old Camille who gets knocked up (to use that Katherine Heigl term) and in a show of solidarity her high school classmates decide to get preggers too.

You’d think this would make a nice little French comedy, but no – this is a drama.

Directed and written by two French women (sisters Delphine Coulin and Muriel Coulin), “17 Girls” reportedly draws on a true event that took place in Gloucester, Massachusetts, back in 2008: when 18 high-school students got pregnant at the same time – 17 girls joining the mommy track after finding out that one of their friends was expecting.

A film of generational disconnect, “17 Girls” gives us a gaggle of young women with no future who create one of their own making. An observant moviegoer compared the girls’ malaise to that found in Sofia Coppola’s “Virgin Suicides.”

Or to quote an old SNL skit, “Ah, to be young, stupid, and have no future at all!”

srhoades@aol.com

Searching for Sugar Man (Rhoades)

“Searching for Sugar Man”

Resurrects Singer-Songwriter

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

For some reason I’ve always been a fan of that the-good-die-young movie “Eddie and the Cruisers.” It’s the story of a rock star who fakes his own death to get away from the music scene.

Now I come across “Searching for Sugar Man,” a real-life documentary about a couple of fans searching for an underground music icon known as Rodriguez, rumored to have committed suicide on stage. Blew himself up. Set himself on fire. Shot himself in the head. Something like that.

The Back Story: In the late ’60s a couple of sharp music promoters discover a singer-songwriter playing in a seedy Detroit bar. Thinking he could be the next Big Sound (“a Chicano Bob Dylan”), they sign him up and produce an album titled “Cold Fact.” But the platter tanks and Rodriguez disappears into obscurity … until a bootleg tape surfaces in South Africa and he become a huge phenom there. But, word is, he’d dead.

However, fans never take a star’s death as The End. After all, we know Elvis is still alive. And Tupac didn’t really die from gunshot wounds. Just like Eddie and the Cruisers.

So the two fans (Capetown record-store owner Stephen “Sugar” Segerman and music journalist Craig Bartholomew-Strydom) set out trying to find details bout the missing musician. After all, Segerman got his nickname from a song on the first track of Rodriguez’s debut album.

A website showing Rodriguez on the side of a milk carton, phone calls to the record producers, analyzing the lyrics of his songs for hints of where he might have lived – lots of detective work went into the effort.

And one day they got an email from Rodriguez’s eldest daughter. She’d seen the website. Turns out, her dad was alive and working construction in Detroit. Still in the ramshackle little house he’d lived in for the past 40 years.

“Searching for Sugar Man” is a fascinating journey – a little-known footnote to musical history. The documentary is currently playing at the Tropic Cinema. I highly recommend it.

With a deft mixture of interviews, animation, archival footage, and narrative storytelling, we learn how Sixto Rodriguez became more popular in South Africa than the Rolling Stones or Elvis Presley. But he never knew of that success. Nor did he see a penny of royalties.

First-time director Malik Bendjelloul had to convince Rodriguez to reveal himself. Finally the modest musician agreed, saying, “It’s never too early, never too late.”

So not-dead-at-all Rodriguez flew to South Africa to give a series of concerts to thousands of cheering fans who knew his songs word for word.

After the film’s Sundance debut, it has garnered a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 98%. And a new Rodriguez album has been released to great acclaim, 14 original tracks remastered.

“This was the greatest, the most amazing, true story I’d ever heard, an almost archetypal fairy tale,” says Malik Bendjelloul. “It’s a perfect story. It has the human element, the music aspect, a resurrection and a detective story.”

I once thought about looking for Elvis, but that was before I spoke with a funeral home director in Memphis. “Hell yes, Elvis is dead,” the old man told me. “I oughta know. I embalmed him myself.”

Hmm. Now about Tupac …

srhoades@aol.com

Chicken with Plums (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Chicken with Plums

Marjane Satrapi, who wrote and directed the visually entrancing "Persepolis" (2010) from her own graphic novel, now has a live action story "Chicken with Plums" co-directed by Vincent Paronnaud. 

This story concerns a one time virtuosic violinist, Nasseer-Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric)  and his yearning for a lost love, Irane (Golshifteh Farahani) as symbolized by his Stradivarius. The story is beautifully rendered in a quasi-calligraphic painterly fashion. Although "Chicken with Plums" is mainly  composed with live actors, the action is interspersed with animated scenes that are threaded seamlessly throughout the film, giving the effect of an Indian Painting in the Rajput style with its saturated washes of deep blues and florid oranges with all of the landscape aswirl in starlike swoops and curling crescents.

We meet the bereft Nasseer who is forced to walk into a dark Underworld to find a replacement for his smashed violin. His search is as elusive and vexing as a gumshoe's search for a slinky Femme Fatale. He descends into the bowels of a dusty antique shop and is immediately accosted by the smoky purveyor Houshang (Jemel Doubbouze), a genie of sorts. Nasseer attempts to find an equal to his musical love.

But nothing works.

He faces the wall of his apartment for months: pale, sickly and anemic, without the flavor of life. One might think here of Franz Liszt, and his tortured love for Caroline de Saint-Cricq, but for the most part Nasseer recalls Monsieur Hulot in his shyness, Chaplin or Salvador Dali.  The sycophantic Faringuisse,  his wife, (Maria de Madeiros) tries to appease him, but to no avail.

 
Throughout the film, Nasseer goes on a psychological journey though his memories and desires which visually borrow many eclectic sources from F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" to Herge's Tin-Tin with its yellow ambers and its apple-cheeked children. And, in one scene, as Irane and Nasseer are at movie house in Tehran, circa 1950, there is even a nod to Tim Burton: their pale and transfixed faces are watching "The Phantom of the Opera" with Lon Chaney.  Director Satrapi's visual catalogue is comprehensive and startling and she seldom disappoints.
The scenes with The Angel of Death (Edouard Baer) in particular, are splendidly drawn and haunting with the wonder and care of a cinematic Gustave Dore. The Angel is a Cimmerian bird of night---only the eyes and teeth are visible which flutter in sarcasm. The face is a sable curtain topped with horns and transported by the huge wings of a vulture. Not since Tim Curry as Lucifer have I seen such a half-comic and visceral incarnation of Darkness.

The film's one singular stumble is a silly dream-like interpretation of a 1990s Americanized Tehran. The family is loud, garish and fat. The one daughter is pregnant, she assumes, from eating too much pizza while the kids dance idiotically to hip-hop. 

Okay, I get it. The ugly Suburban Family, overloud, obese and hypnotized by TV. But the commentary on these stereotypes are right out of Roald Dahl's  Willy Wonka and just not that funny these days.

Overall though, "Chicken with Plums" is a rich picaresque film that is almost musical in its painstaking intricacy and illuminated detail. From the florid vegetation to the monolithic gray of a cemetery and last but not least, the wilted bohemian melancholy of Nasseer's film-noir fedora which dances in time to his sideways gait, this film is a genuine transport that rivals the Baroque manner of Terry Gilliam or the spacey geometry of Ridley Scott.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

17 Girls (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

"17 Girls"

"17 Girls " is based on a 2008 true story that occurred in Gloucester Massachusetts in which 17 girls, mostly 16 years old or younger got pregnant by a pact in the same high school. In the actual case, there had been some debate about whether there was an actual "pact", but according to the Mayor Carolyn Kirk, there were definite factors including the glamorization of a teen pregnancy by Jamie Lynn Spears and the popularity of the films "Juno" and "Knocked Up".

However accurate the story, the film version directed by sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin, portrays the teens as if cemented by a cabal. The young forthright Camile (Louise Grinberg ) is accidentally expecting due to a torn condom. While initially shocked, Camile quickly sees her fated pregnancy as an opportunity to be considered adult and "in control". 

Never mind the implications. Camile doesn't consider them. To her, having a child is freedom, an emancipation from her boring, unimaginative parents. After all, in her mind, she is stuck in the honky tonk wayward town of Lorient on the Brittany coast in a mousetrap apartment complex with little hope for excitement anyway. Within days, Camile envisions herself as a trailblazer, a kind of reproductive Bohemian.

Needless to say, Camille's girlfriends follow suit. They too want to be respected, important and adult. And besides, having a child that depends on you seems like so much fun!

 Perhaps they can start their own commune and do cool stuff and solve problems and not be so bitchy like other grown ups. Who needs a job, Camile says, when they can get security?

The best parts of the film show the girls as catty and sneaky, within a kind of adolescent Amazonian circle, almost like a girlish Lord of the Flies. The girls do everything together: they build fires, drink hard liquor and smoke pot and tell lascivious tales. They paint their bodies in pop-art neon squiggles as an almost occult identification. 

Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, they seem to have no concern for the pitfalls of their condition. There is little thought to health or sickness. The girls drink wine and vodka, and smoke with abandon. They watch a pregnancy film and retch in disgust or howl with laughter. It is no surprise that their favorite song is "Les Tres Copans" an ode to heroin and chocolate, by Constance Verluca. There is a sing along scene that is quite funny, giving further evidence that these 15 girls, who almost form a gang of single moms, yearn to exist  outside conventional middle class morals, and make their own universe.

In this way "17 Girls" feels startlingly like a Michael Haneke version of Joyce Carol Oates' Foxfire. The girls are almost sociopathic. Nothing gets in their way. They never fail to disrupt an event. Even the young Clementine (Yara Pilartz) is driven and egotistical. 
The girls travel in packs and are often connected with fire and noise. The young males depicted here are little more than drones or raging testosterone vehicles.

The natural chemistry of the characters together with some wonderfully fluid yet detached cinematography by Jean-Louis Vialard,( which further enhances the Haneke-like movement  of the film) makes this a very compelling story. 

However by midway, the action loses a bit of its impact given that the tone is softened into light comedy. 

The girls sing along in a car and that's humorous and Camile is the only one that is dealt a harsh hand, but the film treats all this as it were merely something to do on a Brittany vacation, little more than an idyll as if to say "C'est la vie, oh wow, that was wild then!" There is no mention of moral implications or any real drama. The final scene compares the girls to ladybugs going to into the sea.

Is that all? Given all that happens previously the lightness  is a bit curious, no? 

Despite its anemic flavor however, "17 Girls" is an eccentric story that will interest most with the cult-like matrix it creates spiraling between adulthood and a pint-sized goddess complex, even though it doesn't quite weave into a solid by its end.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com

Samsara (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Samsara

"Samsara", the new film by Ron Fricke (Baraka) is a spellbinding look at the human and natural world. Samsara which directly translates as "the continuous flow of life" lives up to its name as a film. It is a facile, haunting and sometimes shocking look at life on earth solely by images and music.

This film owes a debt to Godfrey Reggio's "Koyaanisqatsi", especially since Fricke was the cinematographer for that film. ( Koyaanisqatsi is from the Hopi Indian word , which means "Life Out of Balance")  "Koyaanisqatsi " might be thought of as Samsara's cousin with its depiction of traffic and cities all presented non-verbally without dialogue. Yet "Samsara" maintains a fresh "Aha!" reaction with its free associative, mostly tranquil imagery. That being said, there is imagery here that will make you gasp out of your seat and also emit a few titters.

At the start we are shown immense images of volcanoes and sand dunes. These are coupled with long stretches of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath that will leave you haunted with its shots of classrooms covered in rubble, shelled supermarkets and churches covered in chunks of rock and slate as if to make new Doomsday mosaics to a wrathful god. This leads to shots of Versailles and churches dripping in gold and crystallized in stained glass transforming the entire earth into a single vast Faberge egg. 

Then we are shown youngsters at Baptism, some smiling beatifically, others crying from the shock of being doused. 

Although much of the action takes place in Asia, we are shown a good bit of Western culture as cities race into an infinity of hectic neon and windows dance crazily along a night sky. 
There are quiet moments too: one buff male who is completely covered by tattoos, protectively enfolds his newborn son perhaps shielding him from the inevitable attack of graphic design on his infant skin.

We also see the harbingers of our own destruction. Guns are made with the same equal attention given to the creation of a Chinese dumpling. African warlords are seen carrying AK-47s, along with a shot of an American family who proudly handle their rifles. There are vast caches of bullets, the gold that brings no riches, together with coffins made to look like birds and airplanes--- all futile attempts to make death into something non-threatening, toy-like and sweet. This is bizarre enough, but then there is a sudden shot of a casket being carried in the mold of a gigantic pistol.

We see fields of orange clad prisoners dancing in synch to disco, only to be locked away with some inmates dancing in place. Their staring eyes challenging the camera and us, to look away.

My favorite segment of the film shows a conveyor belt of humanoid Anime style doll parts. Seen in close-up, the heads are almost impossible to tell apart from their human counterparts whose lips are melting in sad, reluctant kisses. Then we see a conveyor slab of female legs which are contained in a hospital-like setting. There is one big heap of plastic breasts, arms and curiously life-like hands. (Is it our hands that make us human?) Then we are in a presumably Asian stripper's bar: their faces blank, their eyes wide, their lips parted while their alien, over-sexualized torsos rock to the music. 

"Samsara" raises many disquieting questions, not least of which is when does the human in us become synthetic and vice versa. 

But perhaps  the most upsetting is the imagery of a chicken slaughter house in which huge plots of pecking chickens, three hens deep, are swept up in vacuum machines, their necks instantly broken, literally mashed up to die.

This is juxtaposed with time lapse shots of an overlarge American family eating fast food in hyperdrive: chewing, sucking, talking and spitting.

At times subtlety is not Samsara's strong point, but I don't think it matters. It is a pleasure, if at times a troubling one, to simply be carried away by the sheer multiplicity of its images from across the world.

And even at its most jarring moments as when pigs are butchered in front of our very eyes, along with overweight people being prepped for liposuction, we still cannot look away. This is in part due to the masterful  score by Michael Stearns and Lisa Gerrard ( at times aural and feathery, at others syncopated and apprehensive) which makes us feel we are exclusive planetary travelers here to witness an inner space adventure story.

Write Ian at redtv_2005@yahoo.com