August 8: Gates of Heaven (1978 – Errol Morris)

★★★★★

August 8: The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins (1968 – Les Blank)

★★★★★

The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins opens in a rural countryside with green fields, a dirt road and a broken-down wood fence.  Incongruously, a group of what looks like ramshackle farmers is playing music in the road, and just as unexpectedly, the camera that is watching them swings from one player to another, once even wandering off the harmonica soloist in obvious anticipation of a guitar solo that doesn’t come.  The camera swings back to the harmonica.  This opening sets up the rest of the short film: We see the environment that gave birth to Lightin’s blues, but we see it though a camera that is not only observant but also engaged.  We’re participating in Blank’s personal involvement with what’s before him.

Fortunately for us, Blank has a knack for putting people at ease, for picking out nuggets from conversations and for not interfering in important moments.  Early in the film, the camera is in a simple room with Lightnin’ playing guitar and another man who is singing.  At one point, the singer goes down on his knees, vocalizing a deep, raw emotion while Lightnin’ continues to play.  The singer is overcome, but it’s not clear if it’s with happiness or pain, if he’s laughing or crying.  But as he sways, it’s still music, Lightnin’ is still playing, and there on the floor of the dingy room, we see the rawness that the blues is in a way no text could describe it.  Lightin’ later tells us that the blues is a preacher preaching, which sounds like the not-uncommon formulation that the blues is a secular version of gospel music.  But Blank goes beyond such bromides and enables us to authentically hear what the blues is saying.  In one performance, Lightnin’s words are “she said…,” and then the lyrics drop out for an intense several bars on his guitar.  Lightnin’s words come back with “…that’s what she said,” an emotion that was palpably beyond words.  As we learn with Blank, that’s what the blues is.

The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins also immerses in the blues by showing us the physical environment that nourishes the music.  It’s one of rural poverty and small clapboard houses, of tiny interiors with shabby furnishings.  It’s also one of deep humanity and of the ability to experience joy.  African American cowgirls dance with their midriffs exposed and a pistol on their hip, African American cowboys stick on bucking broncos during rodeo competitions.  And when Lightnin’s plays, everyone dances, while Blank’s camera lingers on the faces of those in attendance, letting us how they experience the music.

Another strength of this small film is the way it acknowledges its own subjectivity.  People look directly at the camera throughout, and we follow Blank’s obviously subjective gaze as he sees things he’s interested in, like we did in the opening sequence.  Other moments highlight the elements of film-making.  At one point, we’re watching two men kill a snake by a railroad, and as we see this, our sound is an interview that was clearly done afterwards.  The sound has been edited in from an entirely different moment of Lightnin’s life.  Throughout, The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins isn’t an objective rendering of an objective reality; it’s a subjective construction of a subjective experience.  And the film is more honest for that.

The strength of this film lies in the way it gives Lightnin’ Hopkins’ music such authenticity.  Blank watches Hopkins and talks with Hopkins, and he observes the environment Hopkins lives in.  The film unites all Blank’s discussion and observation into a powerful understanding of what the blues is and then communicates that understanding to us.  Through this short, we get a deep appreciation for the fact that the blues in't a style but a deep, authentic cultural expression.

August 7: Grey Gardens (1975 -- Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde & Muffie Meyer)

★★★★

August 6: The Man with the Movie Camera/Chelovek s kino-apparatom (1929 -- Dziga Vertov)

★★★★★

August 5: Hoop Dreams (1994 -- Steve James, Frederick Marx & Peter Gilbert)

★★★★★

August 4: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 (2012 -- Bill Condon)

★★★

At minimum, Bill Condom’s Breaking Dawn - Part 2 is a competent action thriller.  The thriller plot proceeds from the recognition of the Volturis’ threat to the assembling of a team to resist them and then culminates in the confrontation in the field.  Getting to this faceoff, we get to meet different vampires from different areas of the world and we ponder what’s happened to Alice and Jasper. 

But it’s the other things that we watch while getting to the climax that are more interesting.  Bella becomes the central female action hero as she tosses Edward and Jacob about and out arm wrestles the powerful Emmett.  She has superior self-control in resisting the urge to feed, and she develops her own super power quickly.  She even takes the lead in love. 

Such dominance is standard fare in the new genre of female-empowerment action heroes, but as the film builds to its final confrontation, we see that there is more to Bella than simply being stronger than the guys.  She is a loving mother whose primary concern to protecting her daughter, Renesmee.  She’s also a loving wife who wants to protect her husband and a loving daughter who wants to protect her father.  And Breaking Dawn, Part 2 pauses for more tenderness than the bulk of today’s action films.  Bella’s early love scene with Edward has more soft-focus and lingering than do similar scenes in other action films, and Condon brings poignancy and tenderness into his film far more than other action film directors do.  Breaking Dawn Part 2 gives us a tough action hero but also one infused with more traditional feminine characteristics.

This film has its faults.  It can be saccharine, trite, clumsy and obvious, and everyone in the cast clearly isn’t as accomplished as many of the prominent actors here are.  But an action thriller that can spend so much time on love and tenderness is a unique contribution to the genre and makes Breaking Dawn Part 2 worthwhile. 

June 27: Firefly (2002 -- Joss Whedon) & Serenity (2005 -- Joss Whedon)

★★★

Joss Whedon’s  been busy with two Marvel Avengers movies lately, and it’s easy to see why they’re a good fit for him.  The Avengers movies concern a disparate group of individuals who must learn to work as a team in order to succeed,  the same theme that Whedon’s earliest work focusses on in Firefly and its movie spin-off, Serenity.  The idea of building a community or team couldn’t be clearer in both his earliest and latest work.

In Firefly, this role of community-builder falls to Capt. Mal, who commands the Serenity.  Through all 14 TV episodes and the feature film, the one constant is the Captain’s focus on the importance of loyalty to the team and support of other team members.  The members of the crew take risks for the others, and betrayal of one another gets dire sanction. It’s not a big thematic shift from this to The Avengers having to learn to act as a single, cohesive unit despite their varied personalities and abilities.

But Firefly is a first effort, and there are drawbackss.  The acting recalls the deadpan declamation common in low-budget cable TV, and there are many problems with the script, from the too-frequently-painful dialog to the lack of character depth or arc.  A lot of the CGI and its design is good for its time, but the interiors recall those of Lost in Space or Star Trek some 40 years before.

An interesting aspect of Firefly is its overt drawing on the Western genre.  At the center of the narrative are two veterans of an interplanetary Civil War, having fought on the side that lost and then headed for the frontier.  And there are other Western characters like the dance hall girl, the tomboy, the hands and the preacher – all with a sci-fi twist here.  More obvious are many superficial references to Westerns, from the ¾-overcoat to the wood table and tin cups in the ship’s galley. The planets in Firefly are often sparse and dry, and horses and Conestoga wagons make appearances on this frontier.

It’s tempting to see these references as gratuitous, but Firefly/Serenity gets at some interesting intertextuality.  From watching Firefly, we recognize that the sheriff and his deputy isn’t far from the space captain and his sidekick, and a gruff Capt. Mal falls into a line of Western heroes that John Wayne so ably inhabits.  Evil, pretension, greed and ruthlessness drive both sci- fi adventure and the Western, and both genres can also be used as a search for knowledge and truth.  And if, like me, you like the way a Stagecoach deals with democracy and inclusion, you’ll get a pleasure out of watching how the crew of the Serenity grasp for the same despite their many differences. 

These early works by Joss Whedon have technical shortcomings, but the pleasure of watching the inter-genre play and of enjoying the theme of community in both make them worthwhile views.