While the
second day of the Los Angeles Film Festival certainly
didn’t bring any great films into my plane of vision, it
provided me with three selections to watch that proved
far more engrossing than those it did on opening day.
(Even better news was the fact that not a single one of
the movies I caught even neared the awful territory
treaded by The Poker House, currently the
bad-movie-to-beat this festival.) That’s not to say that
I didn’t catch a mediocre film over the course of the
day, because I did. Luckily, I got it out of the way
first…
Sonja Heiss’
Hotel Very Welcome was peculiarly described in a
festival programmer’s introduction as one of the
“hippest” works that this year’s lineup has to offer.
While I suppose I understand what she was saying from a
filmic point of view—the movie is full of all the
existential angst and free-spiritedness that one needs
to get the blood of most film-school students pumping—I
can’t imagine the picture pleasing anybody who welcomes
the word hip as a self-description. In truth, Hotel
Very Welcome is anything but fashionable.
The movie
follows five travelers in Southeast Asia—two in
Thailand, two in India, and one in China—who are all
searching for fulfillment in their lives. All five
represent loose skeletons of characters—in fact, we
barely come to remember their names by the end—but their
purpose is not necessarily to allow the audience to get
to know them. The exercise is much more subliminal than
that: the people and locations of Hotel Very Welcome,
I think, are merely supposed to wash over the viewer and
bring them to the very nirvana-like state of mind that
the characters are trying to achieve themselves.
Reading over
that description, I realize that I’ve made the movie
sound better than it really is. In many respects, there
isn’t much to Hotel Very Welcome: the
performances and dialogue are both detrimentally
minimalist. Nonetheless, the movie becomes compulsively
watchable for its highly pedestrian qualities: because
these people and places aren’t very well defined,
nothing is at stake. While this very feature may
ultimately doom the movie into a state of mediocrity, it
also allows the viewer to forget about the conventions
of filmmaking in order to simply experience what
is being projected onto the screen before them. Hotel
Very Welcome may not be a very good movie, but it
has an addictive quality about it: as little as I cared
about the characters, I still found myself wanting to
spend more time with them when the movie was over. Even
if they didn’t change my life or even make me think,
they were true enough in their simplicity that I wanted
to learn more about them.
The
aforementioned represents a sizeable compliment to
director Heiss, despite the misgivings of her work.
(Make no mistake, the movie is highly forgettable on the
whole.) Her efforts behind the camera aptly prove her
ability to work with what she and co-writer Nikolai von
Graevenitz afforded the picture in a rather underwritten
screenplay, which is more than most first-time
independent filmmakers can boast. (Not to mention, she
and von Graevenitz, who also worked as the
cinematographer, have blessed the film with a beautiful
visual-appearance despite its low budget.) Even though I
may not be able to wholeheartedly recommend Hotel
Very Welcome, the movie provides me enough of a
reason to look out for Heiss’ name in the future.
It’s hard to
find an appropriate phrase to segue into a review of
Margaret Brown’s much more socially-relevant The
Order of Myths, a documentary about contemporary
race-relations in the American South. The title refers
to a prestigious ceremony at the Unites States’ oldest
Mardi-Gras celebrations in Mobile, Alabama. I say
celebrations—plural—because there are two of
them: one for whites and one for blacks. Yes, there is
at least one public institution that is still officially
segregated by race in America.
Thankfully,
The Order of Myths doesn’t ever preach about the
necessity of racial tolerance in American society or
portray the issue in any other conventional manner.
Director Brown is more self-assured than to rely on the
typical “We shall overcome!”-style mantra taken on by
countless afterschool specials that tackle the same
themes. In fact, she allows subjects of all views solid
amounts of talking-time: both whites and blacks who
believe that there’s no reason for the ceremonies not to
be segregated and those who believe they should be
merged.
Brown
specifically follows the 2007 ceremonies on both sides,
which mark the first instances of the kings and queens
of either event attending functions of the other. We
meet Helen Meather and Max Bruckmann—white king and
queen—and Joseph Roberson and Stefannie Lucas—black king
and queen—as they prepare for the day of the Mardi Gras
Parade. (And, no, it isn’t the alcohol-filled event that
we typically think of when it comes to New Orleans’
version of the “historical ritual.”) Each of the four
are followed and interviewed in detail, as are other
town-members including, the viewer learns, Brown’s own
very-traditional grandfather.
The Order
of Myths isn’t the terrific film it is because of
its depiction of the Mardi Gras celebrations
themselves. Rather, it functions as an eye-opening
cultural-artifact. Those who live in the South and have
encountered the movie’s material in their everyday lives
may not be quite as captivated by it, but as a
Californian who has never observed real
racial-discrimination firsthand, the experience proved
rather riveting for me. That there is still a place in
the United States with a citywide parade that has
separately scheduled appearance-times for its white and
black participants is fascinating to me. And to see it
captured on film is borderline-otherworldly.
Some will
undoubtedly label me as ignorant for making the
aforementioned admission, but I think a lot of Americans
are in the same camp as me. Will The Order of Myths
lead me to become an activist for racial-justice? Of
course not. Actually, I tend to side with the opinions
of white-parade king Bruckmann who, despite enjoying his
time at a “blacks-only” party before the black parade,
sees no need for the two events to be forcibly merged.
(No individual is barred from any race’s function, but a
rebel would likely be humiliated for going against
custom.) Whatever one’s view of the issues presented,
The Order of Myths is an effective picture in the
way that it captures the stunning complexities of what
many would assume to be a simple issue (after all, the
topic could be boiled down to “the existence of two
Mardi Gras parades in single city”). Talented crew and
candid subjects at her disposal, Brown has fashioned a
documentary that is well worth supporting when it is
released late this July.
At that, I
reach another impossible segue. Azazel Jacobs’
Momma’s Man tackles perhaps one of the oddest
subjects that a sparse examination of the hurdles faced
by the human psyche ever has: the young man who can’t
seem to leave his parents’ house. Make no mistake,
though: this ain’t your average story about a momma’s
boy who has to overcome his fears of separation before
leaving the nest for college. In fact, it’s just the
opposite, as the title suggests: the protagonist is
actually Mikey (Matt Boren), a thirtysomething-year-old
man with a wife and kid. When the viewer first meets
Mikey, he has returned home to his parents’ Manhattan
apartment, supposedly on a business trip from his
resident California for a short stay. Days turn into
weeks, however, as Mikey can’t find it in himself to
leave, meeting up with old friends as his family and job
begin to waste away without him. All the while, he makes
excuses for his extended stay, which his tolerant father
(Ken Jacobs) and over-attached mother (Flo Jacobs)—both
in their seventies, mind you—buy until his abandoned
wife becomes so desperate she calls them.
If the above
sounds like a painstaking cinematic exercise that goes
absolutely nowhere to you, then you’re probably right.
Jacobs’ screenplay for Momma’s Man likely reeked
of indie-filmmaker angst and self-indulgence on paper.
But the material clearly transformed in its execution.
Anchored by a realistic and painstakingly authentic
performance by lead Boren, the movie feels realistic. As
Mikey comes to pathologically lie about his reasons for
staying in New York, neglecting his home-life and
clinging to his mother’s over-accommodating attitude,
the experience is something of a marvel to watch. I
believed in the character and in this very belief I
forged a connection with him. Yes, he might be too
exaggerated in his internal desperation to identify with
and, yes, he might be too much of an idiot to respect,
but he earns the viewer’s sympathy nonetheless. Here’s a
guy who is suffering from the circumstances of his life
and, while he can’t seem to do anything right, it’s
evident that he’s smart enough to overcome the reality
before him by the picture’s end. Perhaps this very
realization is what lends to the empathy he is able to
evoke, or perhaps it’s merely the skill that actor Boren
exhibits in being able to provide such a realization
from a character that is defined almost exclusively by
facial expressions and Jacobs’ sparsely-written
dialogue.
The fact
that the movie and its protagonist ring so true seems
especially remarkable when one considers Jacobs’ motives
for creating them. In the Q&A that followed the
screening, Jacobs extensively discussed the fact that
one of his main considerations when writing the script
was to use the story as a means to document his
childhood apartment home. The apartment, which his
parents (who play Mikey’s mom and dad in the movie)
still live in, is built upon mounds and mounds of old
junk. The walls are literally made of piles and racks of
clothes and toys and files and papers and books. The way
the place functions as a living, breathing supporting
character in the movie is particularly amazing:
furthering Mikey’s inability to leave home is the fact
that all of the memories of his youth surround him. In
one eerily memorable scene, his mother actually uses a
wire to pull down a ceiling-hoisted PVC-pipe rack on
which his childhood clothes hang. Jacobs’ clearly built
his story around a setting—not the other way around. In
this very method of creating, the budding filmmaker
achieved a thoroughly innovative product, one that bends
the traditional rules of cinema in all the ways that a
good film-festival selection should. Dry and existential
as its premise may sound in principle, Momma’s Man
is actually quite the involving motion picture.
So ends my
coverage of Day Two of the festival. Stay tuned for my
commentary on Day Three.
-Danny Baldwin, Bucket Reviews
(post date: 6.29.2008)
