Thurs Sept 16-Thurs Sept 23 at NW Film Forum.
The First Person Cinema series, an annual event at NW Film Forum theaters for four years now, exhibits the best and worst aspects of the digital video revolution. The idea that anyone can make art is appealing to people who wish they were artists, and seductive to people who can afford a video camera. Add the recent proliferation of self-publishing via weblogs and the national affliction known as reality TV, and you have the ingredients for a syndrome: An army of would-be filmmakers convinced that their own lives are the most interesting subjects of all, leading to a nation of narcissists, too busy looking in the mirror to see what's going on around them.
But this is the cynical view.
A more generous perspective finds that by dealing seriously with the self as primary source material, the explosion of first-person cinema contributes to the much-needed understanding that human lives are inherently interesting, and far more complex than what our increasingly disconnected experiences would suggest. If this were a movement, it's not hard to imagine it leading to a world in which self-respect, self-esteem, and self-awareness might arise to replace their lazier social counterparts, self-regard, self-centeredness, and self-obsession. Still, if every life is worth examining, the role of the artist becomes all the more crucial; it's one thing to be an interesting person, but quite another to make an interesting film.
Up Close and Personal, as the NWFF festival is called, offers many examples of lives worth watching, and almost as many examples of films that do those lives justice. Foremost among the highlights are six works by the laureate of cinematic self-examination, Ross McElwee, whose easy drawl is like a hypnotist's watch, drawing you into his romantic anxiety, his fear of death, his Southern heritage, until even the most quotidian details become as significant to you as they must be to him. Not all the festival entries are great (Soleil Moon Frye's Sonny Boy, about a road trip with her father, who is teetering on the brink of Alzheimer's devastation, feels, if anything, too personal to watch), but its two closing works demonstrate the best the form can offer. The Sheriff looks at a small-town law enforcer, revealing a wealth of contradictory human frailties, while Rockets Redglare! is a straight-up biography about a fringe-dwelling artist with a life so tragic you almost can't believe how sweet he is--even at 675 pounds, wasted on methadone.
We should all be so fascinating. SEAN NELSON
Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence
dir. Mamoru Oshii
Opens Fri Sept 17.
Mamoru Oshii's follow up to Ghost in the Shell (1995), Innocence is a mess of a film. To begin with, one of Ghost in the Shell's many achievements was to convincingly integrate computer-generated graphics with hand-drawn ones. In Innocence the difference between manual and digital images is too apparent. The city world is computer generated but the characters are hand-drawn--as a result, the characters look like primitive cartoons lost in a city whose details are hyper-real and futuristic. For example, the movie's opening shot of the megalopolis stuns the senses; your eyes try but fail to absorb even half of the sprawling mass of buildings, the air and ground traffic, and the galaxy of street and room lights. (What kind of hard drive was needed to store the information that produced such a powerful image--100? 500? 1,000 terabytes?) But when the characters of the story appear on the scene, you easily imagine the amount of paper that was used to make them walk and talk.
This considerable disparity between the quality of images that are manually produced and those that are digitally produced parallels the disparity between the quality of the action scenes and the philosophizing scenes that make up the plot. Innocence is set in the year 2032, and concerns an android cop and his human partner trying to determine why a series of pleasure robots have turned into killers. What begins as a murder investigation ends as an ontological inquiry--an examination of the meaning of being. The fight and battle sequences are impressively complex, but the long sections of philosophizing are laughably simple. The director, Oshii, forced his film to confront and answer the biggest of all questions about human existence. But Innocence is a poor medium for such an ambitious discourse. Descartes has no business being in the land of anime. CHARLES MUDEDE
Bang Rajan
dir. Thanit Jitnukul
Opens Fri Sept 17.
Thai filmmakers have started celebrating stories from their country's turbulent history through large, cinematic, historical epics. Prince Chatri Chalerm Yukol illustrated some early pages from Thai (perhaps we should say Siamese) history books with The Legend of Suryiothai, colorfully documenting royal intrigue while intercutting it with huge battle scenes where they fight the Burmese army. In Bang Rajan, popular Thai director Thanit Jitnukul also takes on the Burmese invaders, but shifts the focus to the rural villagers of Bang Rajan. This turns out to be a good move.
After an extensive sequence of illustrated title cards geared for those of us who aren't that familiar with the 18th-century battles for Siamese independence, Jitnukul jumps right into a bloody battle scene where the villagers repel the well-stocked Burmese forces. The fight scenes are well choreographed throughout, and at first it seems like the villagers are destined to win because they have the better stuntmen and fight choreographers. Then the story kicks in, and I was worried that it would descend into that soap-opera-style melodrama that some of the more established Thai films fall into. Though the main characters do seem like comic-book characters brought to life (especially one hero with an amazing moustache), the key word there is "life." They do gain a life of their own, which helps you care about them when they go into the next bloody battle. I won't tell you how it ends, but I will say that the actions of these villagers have inspired the Siamese/Thai people for centuries. ANDY SPLETZER
