Category / Film

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Joe Dante

In this frank 25 minute radio interview, director Joe Dante discusses The Hole, the problems with creative control, 3-D, Mario Bava, the Hollywood system, and surviving as an independent director.

Joe Dante appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #359. He is most recently the director of The Hole.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Doing his best not to feed Mr. Dante after midnight or before 10:10 AM on October 10, 2010.

Guest: Joe Dante

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I want to talk about the inside jokes. There are a few in The Hole. I noticed the yellow smiley face from The Howling in the background at one point. But it seemed to me that you were almost dialing down the inside jokes within the shots with this movie.

Dante: I did. Because, at heart, it’s kind of a sad movie, if you think about it. When you find out what’s in the hole, it’s much more melodramatic and personal than you would expect. It’s not little monsters coming out. And so the tone of the movie, it’s a little tricky to do a lot of those nudge nudge wink wink things, which I learned early on in my career. That you can’t do things at the expense of people who don’t know what you’re talking about. In The Howling, I had a scene in which Roger Corman looks for a dime in a phone booth. And it was funny to people who knew Roger. But when people didn’t know Roger, it was like, “Well, the scene is over. Why are you lingering on this extra piece? Because it didn’t mean anything to me.” And I realized that you can’t do that. You have to play within the rules. And if you do something that’s off the point, it should be done as an aside or in the background or as a tail — so that people maybe notice the second time when they see the picture.

Correspondent: Well, this is interesting. You’re talking about a lingering moment. And this leads me to wonder if it’s more difficult these days — not just from a financial standpoint, but also from an aesthetic standpoint — for you to convince a producer to give you work. Because your movies do, in fact, linger on that beat. Like that Corman moment in The Howling you were just mentioning. I even watched your episode of CSI out of morbid curiosity, and I’m seeing all these really great Dante master shots that unfortunately are being butchered by the crazy editing that goes on with that show. So the question is: How can a guy like you, who is extremely skillful with these Panavision-like shots, the 70mm that you did in Explorers and the like — I mean, is this more of a tougher sell?

Dante: It’s not a tough sell. People hire me for various reasons. But when you sign on to do a TV series, you must adopt the style of the TV series. Now I can shoot the stuff any way I want. But I know that in TV, you do your cutting. You hand it in. And then you see it on TV. And it’s always different. Because the show runners come in. And they change it to the style that they prefer. So you shoot a lot of long takes. But you just have to give them enough material for them to turn it into what they want. It’s never an expressive job. You don’t really feel you’re putting yourself into it. Although as much as I could, I stuck myself into it. And I stuck people who were familiar to working with me in the show. And it was, I think, a little bit different. A little bit offbeat from the usual episodes of the show. But the problem with doing a show like that, there’s an overarching storyline that happened before you came and that’s going to continue after you’re gone. So there’s really not a lot of space for you to insert yourself. Because you’re doing a job of work. And you’re not the auteur of the show. The auteur of the show is the writers. Because they’re the ones who are mapping out this entire scenario. The great thing is if you can get in on the ground floor and get in on the pilot.

Correspondent: Yes.

Dante: If you do the pilot for the show, which I did for Eerie, Indiana, then you get to not only choose the cast.

Correspondent: You set the aesthetics.

Dante: You set the aesthetic and you get to influence the way the stories go and which direction they go. And even sometimes who’s hired to direct them. So that’s very creative and interesting and fulfilling. Doing one-offs is financially rewarding and a chance to work with a lot of talented people that you probably wouldn’t get to see otherwise. But it’s never like making a feature. It’s never like saying, “Okay, this is my movie.” And that’s why I prefer on TV to do anthology shows. Because it’s much more like doing a short film than it is to coming in and doing it. Illustrating an episode of somebody’s series.

Correspondent: Is it also a way of staying in shape so you don’t atrophy?

Dante: Well, it’s also a way of paying the mortgage.

Correspondent: (laughs) That’s true. That’s really the reason you did the CSI: New York episode.

Dante: Uh, I did it because it would be fun. But also, yeah, I did it because I wasn’t working. The great thing about Eerie, Indiana was that if I was going a feature, I could do that. I could go away and then do more Eerie, Indianas. But then it went off the air. And then I couldn’t do that anymore. So the trick is to try and find a way to keep yourself employed that doesn’t turn you into a hack. Basically. I mean, I always try and do things that — for movies, my yardstick is I don’t make movies that I wouldn’t go see. And I think if more people did that, we’d have better movies.

The Bat Segundo Show #359: Joe Dante (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

NYFF: Another Year

It is a ubiquitous truth that distinctive art often polarizes. But Mike Leigh’s films often cause some of the more catholic critics to reveal their unadventurous sensibilities.

[This is the tenth in a series of dispatches relating to the 2010 New York Film Festival.]

“I’m concerned in making films that talk to people. Like anybody, I only want to talk to anybody who wants to listen, who wants to know, who wants to share, or have a conversation with me, as it were. I can’t deal with the kind of media-obsessed, decadent position that can’t decode the film for what it actually is. Which is to say an open, honest look at real people and how real people are, with their needs and all their vulnerabilities. Warts and all. If you can’t embrace that, then go away basically. You’re quoting people at Cannes. Journalists, no doubt, who say that these are people I wouldn’t want to meet at a cocktail party. Well, you know, you’re not going to meet these people at a cocktail party. Clear off to the cocktail party and don’t worry about this sort of film. Because you’re not interested basically. And if people are not interested, I can’t do anything about it.” — Mike Leigh, in a soon-to-be-aired Bat Segundo interview conducted on October 4, 2010

It is a ubiquitous truth that distinctive art often polarizes. But Mike Leigh’s films often cause some of the more catholic critics to reveal their unadventurous sensibilities. (One of Leigh’s masterpieces, Naked, was, by way of depicting particularly nasty behavior, declared misogynist.) While there’s nothing wrong with responding to a movie like one of Harry Harlow’s monkeys from time to time, a cinema intake composed of nothing more than genetically modified bananas will inevitably cause an otherwise sound mind to bray for his cloth mother.

Yes, I’m a Mike Leigh fan, but not slavishly so. Topsy-Turvy is overlong, but quite admirable in its historical ambition. (And it was absolutely the film Leigh needed to make to get to his next “historical” film, Vera Drake, which is one of his masterpieces.) Secrets & Lies, for all of its brilliance, resolves too tidily. I’ll take Abigail’s Party over Life is Sweet, even though I revere both flicks (and enjoy Alison Steadman in both). But aside from these very minor complaints, Leigh’s characters — whether you like them or not — may be more realized than those of nearly any other living filmmaker.

As Leigh’s films have defiantly chronicled the human in an age more concerned with calculating clinging, certain critics have revealed their not so closeted misanthropy — in other words, an innate disposition towards an unchallenging and predictable type of film.

Yes, Mike Leigh’s latest film, Another Year, features a very sad and troubling character clinquant in dimension played by Lesley Manville. The cookie-cutter protagonists and antagonists you asked for are available at the multiplex, thank you very much.

But I’m convinced that Another Year‘s mixed reception at Cannes (alas, a few rumblings were overheard in the Walter Reade Theater) can be squarely divided between those who are interested in life and those who are not. For Another Year dares to show several sides to kindness, a topic that has been very much at the forefront of Leigh’s films since Vera Drake. Leigh seems to share the sentiment behind Kurt Vonnegut’s famous declaration from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” But he’s also smart enough to understand that societal forces threaten to crush this human spirit. Thus, housekeeper Vera Drake sees her illegal abortions as an act of kindness (and receives no pay for this) and is almost incapable of perceiving her actions as wrong, even as her family and others attempt to explain why she’s in such trouble. Merciless government permanently transforms her. Happy-Go-Lucky, by contrast, sees a very happy character, Poppy, finding her natural temperament tested — particularly, by a humorless driving instructor — and is, even at film’s end, asked not to be so nice (or kind) to everyone. She defies this. And in Another Year — the first of Leigh’s films to be squeezed into a yearlong sectional narrative (although certainly not the first to concern itself with cyclical behavior) — the human spirit’s effort to flourish is very much determined by vocational expectations. (And, as my moviegoing companion and I agreed, one minute of Another Year contains more understanding of people than the whole of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.)

But let’s first consider the naysayers (with much gratitude to David Hudson for rounding them all up). The Hollywood Reporter‘s Ray Bennett complained that most of the film’s characters would be the type “whom you would go out of your way to avoid at a party.” Time‘s Mary Corliss offered similar sentiments: “All the actors make the most of their time before the camera; eventually a plot emerges and a narrative crescendo is reached. It’s real life, processed for the cinema in Leigh’s practiced style. But the real life it simulates is too often that of an evening that turns into an endless night with friends one wishes might just get their coats and get out.” Never mind that Bennett and Corliss fail to see certain advantages to “meeting” such apparently unpleasant people on film. Yes, they rightly compare Leigh’s film to a cocktail party, but they don’t seem to understand that a forty foot screen protects them from social immersion. The audience is not chatting up these characters, but Leigh presents them so vividly (the final look on one character at the end of a long dolly shot, Manville’s masterful head and shoulder bobbing as Mary, a widower’s laconic vernacular and the look in his eyes as he observes the madness around him; to cite just three) that it is nearly impossible not to lose yourself (as my moviegoing companion and I did, sitting still and mesmerized for 129 minutes) and feel that You Are There. And the idea of going to a movie, whether for entertainment and enlightenment, to have your worldview confirmed strikes me as antithetical to existence — diametrically opposed to why any enthusiast soaks up culture. In other words, why did these critics bother to go to Cannes anyway?

And then there’s Todd McCarthy’s schematic assessment via blog: “For me the film is obvious, schematic and lacking in interesting undercurrents or subtext.” Never mind that McCarthy is unwilling to describe what precisely that “obvious” and “schematic” perception is. But thankfully, his tepid criticism can be easily rejoined by what is contained within the movie.

You cannot call Another Year‘s Tom and Gerri “obvious” and “schematic,” because, despite the fact that this couple is somewhat privileged (an apparently stable marriage, reliable middle-class income from geologist Tom and counselor Gerri, a garden allotment, and so forth) and permits maladjusted people into their home with a kind of liberal guilt and empathy that may not be entirely reconciled, they do not offer any defense when friends ridicule Mary (over the fact that she doesn’t know the precise engine type in the used car she has just purchased). Gerri, despite being trained to recognize a narcissist, nevertheless permits Mary to crash into her family home with the same shaky skill she has behind the steering wheel. And when there is the inevitable skirmish during the autumn, Gerri still waits until the winter to state, “You have to take responsibility for your own actions.” Which is something she has been meaning to say all along. There’s also something slightly predatory about the way Tom and Gerri invite friends who are less successful than they are into their house, such as their old portly friend Ken, who appears in the summer, but is a few beers short of a cardiac arrest. Yet Ken, despite being lonely and unhappy, has refused retirement. He is content to “eat, drink, and be merry,” but, from the vantage point of Tom and Gerri, he is “better” than Mary by way of remaining employed in a more lucrative job. (Mary toils as a secretary; interestingly enough, at the same workplace as Gerri. When Gerri invites her for a drink, Mary says that she has only an hour to spare — the exact amount of time that she would devote to a patient) One is left wondering whether Ken would be in worse mental shape, were he to be toiling in a similar position as Mary. (In an ironic bit of casting, no doubt entirely unintentional, Leigh has cast Peter Wight as Ken. Wight played the security guard in Naked, who urged Johnny not to waste his life.)

Aside from this intriguing relationship between happiness and class, there is also Janet (played by Vera Drake lead Imelda Staunton), who appears at film’s beginning (in spring). She is a cautionary character and, if we are to look at Another Year as a cycle, she represents what Mary may very well transform into. Janet is depressed. She cannot sleep. She rates herself 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 on how she feels. And when we are first introduced to her, the camera initially concentrates on little else but Janet’s face. We gradually see more of the doctor who is treating her, and the first detail we notice is that the doctor is pregnant. Thus, Janet (like Mary) is very much consumed by her own internal world. Does society then have a duty to treat people like Janet and Mary? Is it “kinder” to retreat from miserable people (as the above mentioned critics clearly have) or to let them into your home with the hope that your kindness will help them figure life out?

Since this is a Mike Leigh film, there aren’t any easy answers. But the film’s commitment to such concerns is a much needed reminder for any humanist, whether lapsed or well-practiced. Another Year, like the best of Leigh’s films, is very much a Rorschach test. It will be appreciated and understood and felt by anyone who understands that even the unpleasant and the marginalized have souls. I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of this considerably embedded masterpiece, but it’s definitely one of the year’s best films. And I’ll probably have another go at it just before release date. Anyone who compares Another Year to “an endless night” probably doesn’t have the guts to leave her cloistered comfort zone.

by Edward Champion

NYFF: Hereafter

It seems inconceivable that Clint Eastwood would direct a film that uses the facile falsehood of psychic ability to drive its story, and that Peter Morgan (Peter Morgan! The man behind Frost/Nixon!) would write the screenplay.

[This is the ninth in a series of dispatches relating to the 2010 New York Film Festival.]

It seems inconceivable that Clint Eastwood would direct a film that uses the facile falsehood of psychic ability to drive its story, and that Peter Morgan (Peter Morgan! The man behind Frost/Nixon!) would write the screenplay. Eastwood, who told the tale of a bigoted Korean War vet adjusting to multicultural reality in Gran Torino, explored moral complexities with The Unforgiven, and expressed a willingness to invert 20th century historical expectations with his 2006 pair of World War II pictures, is hardly a fool. And he’s certainly not the type who would suddenly show up on late night TV with a psychic hotline – even when one accounts for such late-career misfires as Space Cowboys and Blood Work. But I’m pained to report that Eastwood’s latest film, Hereafter, is so utterly preposterous and condescending that I actually longed to revisit The Eiger Sanction. At least that disastrous film had some soul in the unlikely George Kennedy.

Psychic ability is not only unscientific. It is one of the most egregious and overused plot devices used to advance a story, particularly those which are outside genre. Indeed, even the Star Trek: The Next Generation series bible – a document for a franchise that proved too complacent to steer out of its utopian comfort zone – was careful to forbid its writers from including such omnipotent character types. Psychic ability is the reason why the fourth Indiana Jones movie was such a dud. It is often the reason why some cheesy movies are best enjoyed with friends over beer. And when Spielberg’s regrettable name emerged as executive producer during Hereafter‘s end credits, I immediately wondered if Morgan and Eastwood had been pressured, much as George Lucas and Spielberg had muscled out Frank Darabont during Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, to insert such nonsense into a later draft. After all, consider one side character at a resort who offers the line, “As a scientist and atheist, my mind was closed to this,” and who then states that the evidence is “irrefutable.” It’s almost as if this script was designed to recruit wild-eyed naifs.

What the fuck, Clint?

Whatever the film’s production history, I doubt that any of us will be privy to it anytime soon. There’s just too much money and too much power at stake to get an accurate glimpse through the dust motes. Maybe it’s possible that age has finally caught up with the old gunslinger and he’s now firing blanks. But what we have in the meantime is a colossal dud that is easily the worst film of Eastwood’s career. It’s as if Eastwood has traded in his class for the cash. Sure, Eastwood directs a pleasant scene with Matt Damon and Bryce Dallas Howard (who appears as a fresh San Francisco transplant escaping a bad breakup in Pittsburgh – or possibly Pittsburg, over by Antioch; whatever the case, she’s just about the only character in this movie with personality) flirting with each other in a cooking class. One wears a blindfold. The other spoons in mouthfuls of sauce. It’s hardly 9 ½ Weeks (or even Hot Shots), but the two confess their real reasons for attending night school. Alas, just as this promising relationship develops, Matt Damon’s George confesses his secret talent – which is the ability to find psychic connections within people, a “talent” that filled up the coffers in halcyon days. (That George asks each recipient to only reply to these sessions with yes and no answers, and that he wins them over with such painfully leading inquiries – “You’ve lost someone recently” and so forth – leads one to believe that he’s a con. Unfortunately, the film lacks the courage to view George’s ability as even vaguely illegit, and his internal conflict is narrowed as a result. This is too bad for Damon, who offers a quietly commendable performance here. Indeed, his graying hair and sad mug reminded me of a young Gary Cooper.)

In Hereafter, Eastwood is sometimes competent at conveying the visual isolation of his characters by having them depart into dark corners of a room, where their faces blend into the dark murk. Such old school panache would be welcome if Eastwood wasn’t operating off of a script that’s stacked with unacceptable and unpersuasive anti-human twaddle.

Hereafter is a three-plot story that takes place in three countries, and that ties up through several highly contrived circumstances at the London Book Fair. It is a movie so fundamentally stupid that it believes that some kid can call up a publisher and find out which hotel a famous Frenchwoman is staying. It is naïve enough to presume that someone who toils at a sugar factory can pay rent and live alone in what appears to be a spacious North Beach apartment. (The press information sheet I have laughably refers to this character as “a blue-collar American.”) It believes that book publishers will actually have the time and the decency to set up a failed manuscript (written by a troublesome author who can’t even turn in the Mitterrand book she promised) with another house.

What else can one expect of a flick that offers psychic ability as its great instigator? But nobody goes to a Clint Eastwood film to get frequent flashes into a shadowy white realm occupied by dead souls. That’s M. Night Shyamalan territory. And it’s extremely disheartening to see a living legend adept with human nuance debase himself like this.

I didn’t so much mind the surprise tsunami at the film’s opening or the unanticipated explosion close to the film’s end. Such melodramatic interventions are not only the stuff of crass Hollywood, but recent headlines. But I couldn’t abide Morgan’s veneer-thin stereotypes. Aside from the one-dimensional George, you have Marie, the celebrity journalist (so famous that she’s appearing in BlackBerry ads; how’s that for journalistic integrity?) suddenly incapable of asking the tough questions after surviving death and who doesn’t understand why her tale of phony psychic victimhood won’t sell. You have Marcus, the angry kid who pickpockets 200 pounds and won’t talk to an adult about his grief. (Hey, Peter Morgan, ever heard of a little thing called counseling? Social workers don’t just knock on doors.) Morgan doesn’t even nudge us towards how these three vapid and disparate stories will merge together. I mean, even Paul Haggis had the decency to do that. And he doesn’t give us much reason to care.

Amidst such anemic archetypes, Morgan makes a foolish move and references Charles Dickens, informing his audience of a novelist who created quirky and unforgettable characters and telegraphing that, with this script, he’s nowhere near the same league. And if that isn’t enough self-sabotage for you, believe it or not, Morgan actually has George visit Dickens’s house!

And consider these lines:

“I don’t want to be here without you!” (during a moment of angst-ridden confession)

“I promise you I’m not going to let you down.” (during a moment of overwrought crisis)

“It’s what you are! You can’t run from that forever!” (during a moment of confidence building)

“I didn’t know you were going to be here.” (during a “surprise” run-in)

If Peter Morgan is not nominated for a Razzie for these unpardonable cliches, and for such an unfathomable surrender of his faculties, I will be stunned.

But Morgan isn’t the only one here who should be thrown to the wolves. It was Clint Eastwood, a man of advancing years, who signed on for this nonsense. It was Eastwood who knew damn well that he has perhaps a handful of films left in him and who believed that this shoddy material was the place to deposit his talents. This film is beyond embarrassing. It’s indefensible.

by Edward Champion

NYFF: Old Cats

If you’re making a film featuring an older woman with a middle-aged narcissistic daughter who enjoys snorting up coke in her mother’s bathroom, then a little perspective is in order.

[This is the eighth in a series of dispatches relating to the 2010 New York Film Festival.]

I am pleased to report that, in addition to the promised titular felines, the film Old Cats features a few dogs and numerous actors in bee costumes. And I don’t think it’s possible to convey in words just how much it tickles my heart to find a film going well beyond the anticipated tally!

The literal old cats here, living with metaphorical old cats (that is, a couple in their eighties), serve the story well. Their flapping tails reflect the octogenarian couple’s inevitable last sighs. It helps immensely that we’re introduced to Isadora (Belgica Castro) and Enrique (Alejandro Sievking) as they are being lazy in bed. And, indeed, this Chilean flick is most interesting when it sticks resolutely to the interior (in this case, an eighth floor apartment with a malfunctioning elevator) and when it evades narrative demands. It is clear to me that filmmakers Pedro Peirano and Sebastian Silva have a great desire to portray consequential life (more on that rickety lift in just a mite), but they have a distressing distrust towards realism. This is odd, because Peirano and Silva have such a knack for it. When Isadora experiences senility, her declining mental state is telegraphed by a rumbling tone and what sounds like sequenced strings in the background. Considering the film’s China Syndrome-like commitment to drama sans music, and considering the film’s willingness to depict (almost in toto) the failed boot of a dying desktop computer*, these belabored attempts at surreality detract rather than grab.

This may be part of the point. After all, if you’re making a film featuring an older woman with a middle-aged narcissistic daughter who enjoys snorting up coke in her mother’s bathroom (not that Isadora notices this, but at least her writer husband is on the case), then a little perspective is in order. And I wouldn’t ding the directors so much over this lunge towards the phantasmagorical if they hadn’t delivered so many scenes in which the absurdity of a domestic situation hadn’t been sufficiently established already! I’m thinking of such moments as Rosario (the above-mentioned druggie daughter, played by Claudia Celedon) trying to unload some “healing tablets” (bars of soap that, like any phony New Age narcotic, profess to deliver great cures to their users) while visiting her mother. And if this “surprise” isn’t bad enough, sadly timed after Rosario’s nostril tangos with a spoon, Rosario deigns to reads out the instructions to all assembled. Later, when Rosario doesn’t get her way, she’s calling mom “an evil witch” (actually, something worse in Spanish) when she isn’t trying to get her to sign a power of attorney. Oh, and did I mention that Rosario has a lover named Hugo, whose original name is Beatrice, and that Isadora’s failure to comprehend a woman named Hugo forms one of the running gags? (Later in the film, a few stray family members show up to put this troubling Isi-Rosario dynamic in perspective.)

So the film’s first hour has the twisted dynamic you’d expect from an early Mike Leigh movie (Abigail’s Party comes to mind), where the character actions naturally escalate into chaos and lead us to wonder just how much boorish behavior Isi and Enrique will tolerate before they throw Rosario and Hugo out. I mean, they’ve had a wonderfully lazy morning, complicated by the elevator going out (meaning that Isi, who has hip problems, is trapped upstairs). There are cats who are starving and need food. Isi has just had an unanticipated episode in which she has kept the faucets on and overturned a drawer of knick-knacks upon her bed. And then the irksome Rosario shows up, tyrannically demanding that the cats be shuttled away into another room because she’s allergic to them. Anyway you slice it, this is a great setup for a farce or a melodrama. Hell, you don’t even need a plot. Just let the characters wander about and do what they do.

But unfortunately the filmmakers feel some strange need to tie it all together. The strange need to provide an answer to everything is what ultimately simplifies an initially charming domestic mystery. Earlier, I mentioned the dudes in bee costumes. Well, that’s all part of some television commercial that’s shooting across the street from the apartment building. That metaphor, in and of itself, is all that is needed here to illustrate the point that certain atavistic qualities are buzzing about on the outside the building: the insects that will sting, searching for their honey. (That wouldn’t be Rosario and Hugo, would it? Preposterous figures who will sting you in an instant.) And yet the filmmakers opt to return to these bees late in the film that just isn’t necessary when there’s the more fascinating aspect of Rosario being incapable of parsing her mother’s state of mind (“She’s playing the victim!”) or remembering long-term memories.

Thus, I feel compelled to conclude this review with an Emily Dickinson poem:

Like trains of cars on tracks of plush
I hear the level bee:
A jar across the flower goes,
Their velvet masonry

Withstands until the sweet assault
Their chivalry consumes,
While he, victorious, tilts away
To vanquish other blooms.

His feet are shod with gauze,
His helmet is of gold;
His breast, a single onyx
With chrysoprase, inlaid.

His labor is a chant,
His idleness a tune;
Oh, for a bee’s experience
Of clovers and of noon!

* If there are any hard-core geeks or Wired contributors reading this (he posited ever so humbly), are there any other movies that have lingered on a computer booting up? I’m honestly drawing a blank. But Periano and Silva are to be commended for replacing kitchen sink realism with heat sink realism!

by Edward Champion

NYFF: Foreign Parts

A documentary that concerns itself with the outskirts of life has the obligation to make more concrete connections to its privileged audience.

[This is the seventh in a series of dispatches relating to the 2010 New York Film Festival.]

The Willets Point area is a haven for Mets fans, its rich spectrum reduced to a superficial stop on the 7 train or a distant speck from an ignored window just before the touchdown at LaGuardia. But for those who toil in the salvaging yards, and who continue to fight for the right to maintain a livelihood, the Iron Triangle is a vital community where a sexagenarian native lives with a blunt enthusiast who is overly familiar with the hoosegow. The native takes the time to observe the sparrows that return every May, defying the waste, the uncharted museums of car parts, and the steadfast flooding that comes with the rain’s brutal pounding into the pocks. The blunt enthusiast lacks money, but cannot offer a reliable explanation as to where his drugs from. Meanwhile, seemingly wiser and truly unsympathetic city forces rush to “redevelop” and “renew,” without bothering to communicate their half-made plans to those trying to subsist at the other end of the bulldozers.

Such is the perfectly sensible worldview promulgated by Foreign Parts, a mostly engaging picture that invites comparisons to Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop. This documentary was shot by a pair of Harvard anthropologists named Verena Paravel and JP Sniadecki, and it deserves both a distributor (for how else will the film’s subjects find an audience?) and a few criticisms. For while Foreign Parts does a fair job at portraying life without commentary, it doesn’t give an outside observer the full picture of Bloomberg’s avaricious intent until the very end – a rather strange choice, considering its obvious though admittedly mild subjective position.

The first twenty minutes are something of a visual essay, with subway trains and planes reflected in mucky puddles, cars gutted and thrown onto their sides like corpses, and ripped off rear view mirrors dangling as surrogate vanities. But when the people photographed start to speak at roughly the twenty minute mark, the two anthropologists-turned-filmmakers — despite their efforts to capture bistec barbeques (with the striking juxtaposition of a spare steak accidentally thrown atop a wrench), gritty locals dancing without apology in diners and around gutted engines, and a good deal of hustling – reveal their conspicuously Anglo-Saxon approach. Which is to say that Paravel and Sniadecki prefer to talk to people who speak English – “the only white girl in the junkyard” and so forth – instead of those who speak Spanish. While these subjects are certainly interesting (one late middle-aged man shouting in the streets, directing approaching cars to those who have the parts, could almost be confused with Bruce Willis), this seems a glaring and elitist omission for a community in which 80% of the people don’t speak a word of English. This divide is perhaps best epitomized by one lengthy take of a Hispanic parts-gutter rattling off the names of automobile brands. I kept wishing that the filmmakers possessed the humility to learn some Spanish, hire an interpreter, or figure out a more effective way to flesh out this man’s story. Surely he is more than the sum of his parts.

But the filmmakers are somewhat recused by their good intentions. It’s very clear that the final result comes from a place of passion. Yes, the duo isn’t particularly street smart. They are easily fooled by the performances of two men engaged in some male swagger over drug habits. (A discussion relating to this “performance” point was brought up during the press conference, which you can listen to below in audio form. It starts around the 19:18 mark, with Paravel talking about the difficulties of “penetrating the space” and “giving equal parts to the human being.”) But they do talk to those who shiver in vans during the winter. And they are good enough to not invade the space of a smiling and diminutive woman with a slur, who is a quiet but friendly presence among the neighborhood and who proudly declares why these are “her people,” but who doesn’t entirely impart her life history. And there is one very pleasant shot where the camera almost dances with this woman. It’s a nice invitational nod to the audience to pay attention.

Yet a documentary that concerns itself with the outskirts of life has the obligation to make more concrete connections to its privileged audience. The film snobs who tend to flock to movies like this often fail to understand that twelve George Washingtons represents a good deal of green. And I greatly wished that Foreign Parts had been strong enough to force some of these contemptuous assholes to understand that the Willets Point scenario sees callous greed paving over the working poor, that lives are now being crushed, and that souls are being left behind in the Almighty Dollar’s cold shadow. In the end, the people who will see Foreign Parts will walk out of the theater and spend the next hour talking over wine and cheese and confirming how “enlightened” they are. And eventually they’ll forget about the people who live in Willets Point. I’d curse the filmmakers for keeping a vital story so tepid, but then people who have rarely known a day without a hot meal and who rarely speak outside of theoretical vernacular often don’t know any better.

NYFF: Foreign Parts Press Conference (Download MP3)

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