Full Battle Rattle
Toby Gerber and Jesse Moss’s documentary seriocomedy is the most darkly funny and ultimately disturbing such American export to reach us here since the similarly wincing Jesus Camp. Like that humdinger before it, Full Battle Rattle supplies its fresh unit of incompetents and engineers of sicohistoric folly as straight-faced as you could please, but as it goes along one can almost see evidence of the cameraman shaking his head in disbelief at the vain-at-best comedy-of-the-absurd on display. Full Battle Rattle takes us on a journey into two-weeks-as-usual on the grounds of one hell of a clusterfuck: welcome to Iraq, California, a town called Medina Wasl not found on any maps, population some three-thousand-some-odd, brought to you by the House Committee on Ways and Means … wait, strike that … brought to you by the National Training Center out in a thousand-square-mile patch of Mojave Desert, near Fort Irwin, where expatriated Iraqi refugees, most previously living in San Diego, and military muscle in training for imminent Persian deployment play one hell of a game of house/laser tag/Dungeons & Dragons wherein all the programmed obstacles and cataclysms go particularly wrong by virtue of a brash mixture of utter incompetence (at the bottom) and much-more-destructive well-meaning-hubris (at the top). Insurgents in our fantasy camp are not played by Iraqis but by American infantry goons, many if not all of whom have already been to the front and who take pernicious kid-w/-candy pleasure in blowing imaginary shit imaginarily up. They are so good at what they do that near the end of training they turn a major public relations opportunity for the Major into a scene of Bosch-like mayhem w/ no likely survivors amongst the townspeople or the cavalry. High noon covered in fake blood, crash-test-dummy corpses w/ photo-real gore, and very real fears and frustrations, the plywood Baudrillard sets suddenly eerily prefiguring the real sets to come. Maybe this camp does work, though. Perhaps its real unspoken raison d’être is to prepare these boys for the loss of a number of their own rank when they finally get over there to face the insurgency beyond this bubble of simulacra, of which the expository closing credit titlecards tell us that they did indeed subsequently lose about eight. These boys are starring in a prophetic western allegory about their own miserable future with very real bodies on the ground and explosions that will shake the shit out of them and cause them to pass out from the combustion at a few miles distance. None of the dead dummies ever look like women or children so they’ll have to build the intestinal fortitude to confront plenty of that as well. When we finally see our reality TV storm troopers boarding the planes that are taking them away to war and temporarily (they hope) from their weeping wives and children, it is impossible not to realize that any laughter this absurd lesson-in-what-not-to-do-as-empire has elicited from you over the course of the film’s running time is now sticking in yr throat like sharp glass. When you then again are laughing at “The Cowboy’s Lament” – which plays over the subsequent credits and which you may remember Roberto Benigni singing in Night on Earth – you will bleed in agony, spitting-up.8/10
The Sweet Lady with the Nasty Voice
I’ve been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima too
the same I did to them, baby, I can do to you
‘cause I’m a Fujiama mama and I’m just about to blow my top
Fujiama-hama, Fujiama!
When I start erupting ain’t nobody gonna make me stop.
– Wanda Jackson, “Fujiama Mama”
‘cause I’m a Fujiama mama and I’m just about to blow my top
Fujiama-hama, Fujiama!
When I start erupting ain’t nobody gonna make me stop.
– Wanda Jackson, “Fujiama Mama”
Wanda Jackson is one of my most verily prized female icons of this or any era, somewhere just below Louise Brooks and Catherine the Great and just above Clara Bow and Helen of Troy, so to see a documentary about not only her life and history but also her inspiring fidelity to God, music, and brotherly/sisterly love – plus her having been married to the same good-hearted and well-heated fellow for nigh on half a century – this being the woman who sang in the 1950s, or rather none-to-subtlety growled: “rock me baby! all night long” over and over until you had to go and bust a nut – is frankly not likely to disappoint even if it is full of doubled lines for the minds of television viewers whose active-faculties-of-forgetting have been periodically tampered w/ by advertisers as this is the kind of context in which the doc was built to be staged (and upstaged by market demands). Or the eye-melting chapter-break titles, which look like Marc Bolan’s birthday cake if you were on microdot. Yes, this a mere talking-heads built-by-numbers operation, but w/ a subject like Wanda, then and now, you are still doing the world a great service by cutting this stuff together in even the most cursory way. Wanda’s early rockabilly songs are not amongst my favorite tracks of the Sun Studios white kids, they are the best tracks period, and I’m afraid Carl Perkins and deeply-twisted Charlie Feathers were her only competition of any real consistent caliber. Wanda was the only woman doing this music back then and the effect that she had on the societal moors of the day made Elvis, her ex-boyfriend, look like an impotent ponce. Any woman who has subsequently gotten up with a guitar and a growl owes Wanda for their bread and butter or perhaps just their leash on capital-S Spirit. I know that most of the female singers I loved as a young teenager took all of their fundamental anarchic energies and confrontational, brashly sexual energetic from Wanda and so I have her to thank for all of them too: Kat Bjelland from Babes in Toyland; Kim Shattuck from The Muffs; mostly the holy quadrilateral, though, of Patti Smith, Kim Gordon, Julia Cafritz, and Jennifer Herrema – this doc, for understandable reasons, veers to Chrissie Hynde and Joan Jett doing the Original Modern Lovers when searching out her contemporary avatars, assuring it a possible latenight run on VH1. At least some Wendy O. Williams footage would have been amusing though, sheesh. It should tell you something, also, that both Bruce Spingsteen and Lemmy from Motorhead go to see her on two separate occasions, each requesting “Mean, Mean Man,” a song that can still make you hard when she sings it now in her ridiculous black, old-lady Grand Ole Opry wig. No matter the quality of The Sweet Lady with a Nasty Voice (such a good title you hear it repeated at least five times) in terms of its situation of the nuts and bolts, the film is as good a gift as you could possibly bestow upon either yr ears or sense of moral courage. If its on the box you might just get yrs off, hey ladies!? My uncle and I left as giddy as schoolgirls w/ naughty thoughts.8/10
Korridor No. 8 / Corridor # 8
Corridor # 8 is a quiet, unprepossessing sort of a ramblin’-blues community doc the template for which is undoubtedly Errol Morris’s extraordinary Vernon, Florida, following the lollygagging madcapped amblings of its various denizens living by or off of the titular EU-constructed highway traversing Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Albania. And then two Turks walk into a bar, right? Well not exactly, but you’ve got the gist of it. Things are laidback and playing for a vein of playful-touching here even if the Baltic realities of racial, ethnic, and microscopic regional differences create more sensitive faultlines than in the aforementioned Morris precursor, also addressed as part and parcel of the two first-rate Russian features that played this years, Aleksandra and 12. If Vernon, Florida is more about economic disparity and dispossession unable to trump faith in “God” and “America,” Corridor # 8 looks at economic disparity and dispossession in terms of the projected other, almost always from a standpoint of well-meaning folksy sort of prejudicial ontotheological construction that seeks to make ‘perceived difference in the other' the final Aristotelian causation of its own perceived blight. There’s a lot of humanity and resolution-despite-absolution dignity amongst the strange faces and stranger worldviews we come ever so fleetingly to engage in director Despodov’s not-so-sunny-afternoon documentary gallivant. It is unfortunate because somewhere in there is an even better documentary about how identities are formed in these interstitial zones, and not just how they are merely preformed. A more critical gaze was needed to open up this subject and better gut it. If, like Lacan, we want to really look at a community we must start w/ the psychic epiphenomena at the neural heart of these human positive-feedback-loops driving the post-Marxist engine. We want to see the Real emerge as a proper sewing between the Symbolic and the Imaginary. Though we realize the symbolic Other is structurally incomplete, that should not stop our desire from searching for these moments where the Imaginary and the Symbolic are sewn together on the visage of the Other. This evidence of the Real w/ which art and storytelling (even in the form of jokes and word games) have always best supplied us. Here, in Corridor # 8, is a stylized imaginary fog of real voices and actions barring any other delivery systems of direct exegeses. Unfortunately, in this fashion, it turns its subjects into cutouts and itself back into its subject but not to any explicitly reflexive effect or affection. It is too much a costume show for its participants and its cultural signs remain curiously hazy or maybe just too shallow to get much of a read on. I cannot help feel that this battered people, resentful in their refusal to succumb to the tragedy of poorly flung borders, are finally just supposed to come off as grumpy kooks. Of course they probably are just that … amongst other things we don’t get to see. And we don't need the lower-right-hand-corner nightly news-style titles telling us who's who. Especially if the film resists doing so.
7/10
La Crème / The Cream
Of all the films I knew little or nothing about this year, La Crème was definitely the major standout. It’s basic plot outline actually resembles almost note for note the previous American neo-noir Broke Sky during their mutual first acts in that it likewise focuses on two men sharing the same job, nowhere near the top of the rat pile, who are forced to decide which of them will step down from their position due to restructuring, or face having someone else make the decision for them. It does not help that our sad sac hero François has to watch his eminently contemptuous wife unapologetically flirt and make-out w/ his younger and less beaten-down competitor-in-training. When François receives a canister of face cream for Christmas he is surprised to quickly discover that the cream changes the way people perceive him, while in no way actually altering his face (except to slowly give him exzyma, changing him from unattractive to utterly unplesant). Folks begin thinking that he is a huge celebrity of some kind. The film is a truly funny check-yr-fantasy ethical parable, then, detailing just what you can expect from that thing you shouldn’t have hoped for because it just came true. Sure through-the-backdoor fame allows François to finagle his way out of dept in the cheapest and most callow way possible by exploiting a charity for sick kids, get his rocks off w/ all kinds of esteemed female partners, shut his wife up and make her idolize him, make his miserable kids love him, and allow him to pretty much go anywhere and do anything he wants. We shouldn’t be surprised that there are complications: 1) the cream tends to wear off at the most inconvenient times as when one woman’s orgasm-of-a-lifetime turns to screams of rape as she suddenly finds herself downstairs beside the washroom in a nightclub getting fucked by a man who at best looks like a much swarthier version of a middle-aged Serge Gainsbourg; 2) yr business is everybody’s business but nobody really knows who you are (though one bartender is pretty sure you are Gérard Depardieu); 3) being loved continuously is ultimately as unbearable and quesy as being stuck on a rollercoaster; and 4) yr younger competitor, the asshole, knows about the cream and wants in on the action (and then proceeds to engage in brazenly public sexual antics of both the oneist and group variety). It is a fairly predictable farce in its rudimentary scaffolding, I will grant you, but La Crème has a minimalist lived-in style and genuine sadness and warmth to it that is entirely its own. Laurent Legay is absolutely great as the lead, the only poster in his flat’s main room being of Chaplin and the kid from The Kid, the one in the kitchen from City Lights, as his performance continually hits those frowning and flabbergasted Buster Keaton grace notes, similar to similar-looking Palestinian actor-director and oft-considered Keatonesque Elia Suleiman in his great features Chronicles of a Disappearance and Divine Intervention. This is an oldschool comedy filled w/ childlike Chaplineque moments when the social seems to have been conquered, put in its place, situated to please you, and then it up and knocks you down on yr ass again while yr not sure what just happened, the audience full of knowing laughter. The whole thing comes off like a postmodern Tati or Chaplin additional episode for Bunuel's Phantom of Liberty, and not unlike the winning French comedy of festivalia '06, La Moustache, shot in the style of one of critic-professor-filmmaker Harun Farocki’s unflinching video eviscerations of management seminars, job interview training programs, and Playboy centerfold shoots. Best festival debut feature for sure.8/10
My Name is Albert Ayler
My Name is Albert Ayler has just beaten out previous Cowberry Festivalia ’06 contribution, the Keven McAlester-directed, Lee Daniel-photographed Roky Erickson documentary Your Gonna Miss Me, as my favorite music-related documentary ever, though it may not be quite as good as documentary. Who cares? It’s the story of Albert Ayler served up w/ an audio-collage of his own interview fragments and epochal compositions from “Ghosts” to “Bells” to “The Truth is Marching In.” As with the Wanda Jackson doc this one cannot help but be a must-see event of unmissable proportions, though unlike that one it never wavers or staples into the margins of its powerful flows. Does this one ever keep its grip! Garnished w/ amazing interviews w/ a relatively balanced but heavily medicated Donnie Ayler and the supremely massive wall of percussion-bludgeon that is the inestimable Sunny Murray who, I suppose, would about have to be that big. As clearly God (or at least some dude with a beard and flowing white hair) brought this movie here just for me there is only one thing left left to say: thank’e, from one universal Indian to another. Any film that counterpoints Ayler's music w/ both church-going ecstacy and race-riot agony pretty much has its finger on the pulse!9/10
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