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Also this issue: Around the Whirl Success Stories |
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June 5-11, 2003
screen picks
Persona Non Grata (premieres Thu., June 5, 7 p.m., HBO) One-third of a proposed documentary trilogy on controversial world leaders, Oliver Stone's Persona Non Grata might as well be called Looking for Yasser, concerned as it is with Stone's arduous (and eventually unsuccessful) attempts to land an interview with the PLO leader. (Comandante, Stone's Castro portrait, has been publicly screened, but HBO's sent him back to Cuba for a re-interview after Castro's recent crackdown on artists and dissidents; a mooted installment on North Korea's Kim Jong Il is still in the planning stages.) Given Stone's tendency to treat history as a matter of convenience in his fiction films, his turn toward (purported) nonfiction deserves to be regarded with a certain skepticism, a prejudice that Persona does not disappoint. Though Stone scores interviews with most of Israel's living recent leaders -- Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak -- the footage is chopped up and regurgitated in the rapid-fire style that finds its way into every one of Stone's movies, called for or not. (It's his equivalent of a dog pissing on a tree.) Interviews, with Stone (and his Sam Elliott mustache) prominently featured, are captured with multiple video cameras, strewn so plentifully that they inevitably end up in-shot, the overall effect being less Nightline, more 8 1/2. There's doubtless some great aesthetic point behind Stone's fisheye view, but seeing Peres with a minicam practically shoved in his face is distracting, to say nothing of disrespectful.
That's not to say Persona Non Grata doesn't have its moments, particularly when Stone tracks down three members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, one of whom calmly, in English, lays out the terrifying logic behind their suicide-bombing campaigns. (Despite his perfectly intelligible command of English, he's still subtitled, as is almost everyone in the movie except Stone, including the Cheltenham-educated Netanyahu.) Sequestered in what looks like a gloomy basement and under the (possibly exaggerated) threat of physical harm, Stone is forced to abandon his overactive camera and actually listen, to a point of view that most American media outlets wouldn't dare broadcast. Even taking into account that it's a film about one of the world's more intractable conflicts, Persona Non Grata seems haphazard, fractured -- which, to state the exceedingly obvious, is probably Stone's point. It's just that in framing the difficulty of staging meaningful Palestinian-Israeli discussions with Stone's inability to get a sit-down with Arafat, Stone inadvertently makes another point, about American arrogance, and our inability to see things other than through our own lens -- or lenses.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Fri., June 6, 8 p.m., $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org) Robert Wiene's 1919 expressionist landmark gets a dusting off in a restored 35mm print, with live accompaniment by former I-House resident Guglielmo Foffani.
Night of the Hunter (Wed., June 11, 4:30 p.m. and Thu., June 12, 9:15 p.m., County Theater, 20 E. State St., Doylestown, $5.75-$7.75) This 1955 noir, the only film directed by actor Charles Laughton (Mutiny on the Bounty), might be an American answer to Caligari, with the crazed contours of its madman's mind clearly reflected in Stanley Cortez's nightmarish black-and-white cinematography. (Cortez also shot The Magnificent Ambersons and Sam Fuller's even more intense The Naked Kiss.) As a Bible-quoting "preacher" who stalks two children through the bayou in search of their hanged poppa's money, Robert Mitchum turns his easygoing charisma inside-out; the more he coaxes those kiddies into his grasp, the more you beg for them to run away. The movie flopped and Laughton's directorial career was over, but Hunter's uniquely lurid poetry has weathered the years. The County and Ambler theaters will show a restored 35mm print.
Jasper, Texas (premieres Sun., June 8, 8 p.m., Showtime) Directed by Jeff Byrd and written by Drexel Dean Jonathan Estrin, Jasper, Texas wants to be unflinching, a no-punches-pulled dramatization of the horrific death of James Byrd Jr., a black man who was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to his death by three white men in 1998. But despite its explicit gore (including convincing, and perhaps authentic, autopsy photos), Jasper is a standard-issue docudrama whose pat resolution doesn't dredge up anything like the national horror of Byrd's murder. It doesn't help that an infinitely better movie has already been made on the same subject: the documentary Two Towns of Jasper, which will be rebroadcast on WHYY Friday at 10 p.m. (Even Boys Don't Cry couldn't outstrip the documentary on the same subject.) Rather than probing the deep scars of Southern racism, Jasper, Texas pushes onward toward naive resolution, symbolized by the alliance between the well-meaning black mayor (Louis Gossett Jr.) and the well-meaning chief of police (Jon Voight). If anything more than liberal hand-wringing might have come out of Byrd's death, it might've been a reminder of the terrible cost of progress, or reminders of our lack thereof; American complacency is so deep-set it takes true horror to shake us, however briefly, out of it. Jasper, Texas jolts you awake only to lull you back to sleep.
Full Frame ($24.95 DVD) The country's most highly regarded documentary film festival is inconsiderate enough to occur at the same time of year as the Philadelphia Film Festival, meaning that without playing some serious hooky, this seven-film collection of documentary shorts is as close as a serious Philly film fan can get. Close enough, though: There's nary a dud in the bunch, and a handful are outright great. Tops of the bunch is Kaarina Cleverley and Derek Roberto's Mojave Mirage, the strange story of the Mojave Desert Phone Booth. The booth, which stood 14 miles from the nearest paved road, literally in the middle of nowhere, became a homegrown tourist attraction as word spread over the Internet, with people camping out for days to answer calls from all over the world. You can hardly wait for the film to end -- not because it's dragging, but because you can't wait to get on the line and try it yourself. (No such luck, but I'll let the film explain that.) Also in the mix is Eva Saks' Family Values, aired last year on WYBE's Philadelphia Stories, a portrait of a Philadelphia lesbian couple who've carved out an unlikely career as professional crime-scene cleaners. Though awkwardly edited and indifferently shot, it's essential viewing if you've ever wondered about the best way to get brain fragments out of your bathtub. Mira Nair's The Laughing Club of India and Phil Bertelsen's The Sunshine (not to be confused with Sunshine Hotel, about the same Lower Manhattan flophouse) fill out a bill that also includes Joan Brooker's charming We Got Us, a loving portrait of an old ladies' mahjong circle that's also a moving examination of lifelong friendships.
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