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Protests, Cows, Charles Manson & Pornographers Loosie reviews selections from the New York Underground Film Festival. We Interrupt This Empire It is easy to hate hearing about political protests from your own friends. All too often the friend’s voice is coated in self-righteousness and the plotline always stinks of exaggeration. Documentaries and academic seminars miss too. They extract the defiance and spirit from political upheavals through idiotic geopolitical litmus tests. Now, in 2004 where mass protests have furiously stomped back into the public eye, the fireplace folklore and scholarly roundtables are bound to increase. While everyone will have a story to tell, few will be good. In fact, the odds are that no story will be as whole heartedly embraced as the one told by We Interrupt This Empire, a documentary on the San Francisco protests by Christian Bruno, Natalija Vekic, David Martinez, and the cryptic cabal from Whispered Media Video Documentary. Premiering in New York this past week for the New York Underground Film Festival, New Yorkers were treated to an hour of fiery and snide opinionated footage that mercilessly attacked the Bush Administrations’ self-proclaimed patriotism and its war on Iraq. The majority of the documentary’s footage and interviews are taken from the mass protests that sunk San Francisco into a standstill on the first day America started to lob smart bombs into Baghdad’s neighborhoods. Infuriating clips of the mass media proudly announcing the commencement of Shock and Awe are balanced with sublime footage of anarchist cheerleaders gyrating their asses to political hymns, black bloc members ransacking an army recruiting station, and a flock of flaming homos wrestling with the city police. The occasional street rant and informative sound bites also break up the footage effectively. In fact, the documentary’s success rests in the directors’ concerted effort to weave in an assortment of hilarious chapters each featuring a malicious force behind America’s aggression. The segments are produced like old health class videos. War profiteering is first defined and how it works and what parties benefits. Then the directors expose their star culprits: Halliburton, Bechtel, the Carlyle Group, Cheney, Dubya and Bush Sr. While the directors assume their audience is already briefed on the intricate ties between the insidious corporate cronies and the Bush Administration, they still heap on outrageous facts, sound bites and video production to magnify just how ludicrously evil these men are. We Interrupt This Empire is also buoyed by an ample amount of rare video and audio clips that only add fuel to fire with their incriminating evidence against the Bush Administration. A particularly exceptional audio clip features Bechtel’s CEO labeling San Francisco protesters as accessories to murder by assisting the Iraqi murders. We Interrupt This Empire succeeds on several fronts. Regular clips of American leaders’ blatant hypocrisy, like the photo-op of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam’s hand with a shit-eating grin, drive the audience into seething frenzy of fist-pumping beasts. Second, the documentary delivers the ideal mixture of hilarity and grisly footage thereby allows the audience to be susceptible to didactic political overtones and accept extremely bias opinion. Finally, most of all, the documentary makes you want to hurl rocks at the cops until the cows come home.
Described by its press clippings as “real as a fucking knife in your chest”, Jim VanBebber’s docudrama about the murderous Manson tribe is less a meditation on the origins and dangers of groupthink than it is a traditional slasher flick. Yes, there are lots of fucking knives in chests. The film’s format -– reenactments of the events of 1969 woven with restaged interviews from the 1972 documentary Manson and an unnecessary plot about modern day disciples stalking a tabloid journalist – lends the carnage a sense of grisly realism, but, unfortunately, little else. The majority of the action takes place on the California ranch where Manson and his familia prance around in waterfalls, drop tons of LSD and get constant orgies popping off. Both paranoia and Manson’s God complex burgeon, and, after a fireside fuckfest where the cultists cut a dog’s throat and guzzle the zesty canine blood, fucking knives indeed get imbedded in chests. A scheme to frame the Black Panthers for a murder committed by one of the family members is briefly discussed -- then we’re treated to the prolonged and unflinching violence of the Tate-LaBianca murders. With VanBebber seemingly more interested in producing nauseating gore than exploring the transformation of a band of hippies into bloodthirsty maniacs, there is scant opportunity to feel even a remote pang of empathy for the brainwashed bunch. The fictionalized plot of contemporary freaks with skeletal war-painted faces, dildo masks and itchy trigger fingers makes for some disturbing footage, but the wooden dialogue and idiotic ending reek with the stench of cheesiness. A final note for lusty males: there is plenty of nudity, and most of the female cast members have impressive breast game.
Split into two parts, Leche (Milk) and Mala Leche (Bad Milk), Naomi Uman presents a pair of “experimental” portraits of Mexican dairy farmers from the village of Aquascaliente. Leche, the first and shorter of the segments, is composed of black and white footage gleaned from Uman’s time spent with a family dwelling in a rustic shack sans electricity. It’s not quite idyllic, but life is steeped in peasant traditionalism – young men flaunt their lassoing prowess with guns tucked into their waistbands, women squeeze milk-bags and press up tortillas, and coyote carcasses are pleasantly sun-ripened as a savory medication for cancer. Even with minimal audio and only a few scrawled subtitles, Uman effectively shows how closely bound are the fates of the community and their cattle – the family has over 100 cows, each called by name. Mala Leche, set a few years later, centers around the house of Chivo, an immigrant from Aquascaliente that now lives in an agricultural California community. Still dangling for survival from those milk-laden udders, Chivo and the immigrants he helps to house are now disconnected from the animals they depend upon. Uman is convinced that modern farming, which allows the workers to earn more money and tend to larger herds, also strips the immigrants of the whole “livin’ off the fat o’ the land” jumpoff they enjoyed in Aquascaliente. Uman’s camerawork and subtitling skills are improved, but the visuals of life in America are just not as interesting as the scenes from the Mexican hamlet found in Leche. Still, Holstein fans rejoice, this is an hour and a half of bullshit right up your alley.
If you’ve ever seen the Manhattan cable-access program Midnight Blue or leafed through a copy of Screw Magazine while in search of a transsexual whore, you know Al Goldstein: New York’s fatter and poorer precursor to Larry Flynt. Goldstein’s harassment trial in a Brooklyn court is the centerpiece of James Gaurdino’s documentary. The case has little to do with free speech, but Goldstein, his appetite for attention whetted by the news cameras and microphones, insists on turning it into a battleground for First Amendment rights. The pornographer’s shtick is designed to offend; his frequent rants almost exclusively focus on explicit sex, race, Jewishness and lowlifes (a group which includes anyone from former friends to the judge in his trial). He harangues the cameraman as a “nerd” and, according to the Gaurdino’s post-screening Q&A comments, went apeshit when the filmmaker had the gall to suggest a restaurant for them to dine at. His mouth is a weapon Goldstein turns on himself – his fiery rants are doused by the moments of self-loathing and mournful soliloquies on his love for his “faggot” son. Goldstein is captured in the natural habitat of a loathsome yet somewhat tragic creature – his cluttered apartment, decrepit office and tacky Florida beach house are the tarnished totems of bygone celebrity and importance. The jarring voice, repellant appearance and general obnoxiousness should make Goldstein an unsympathetic character, but, for all of his infantile behavior, the film provides a humanizing portrait of a man clinging desperately to any flicker of fame, no matter how pathetic. Read more articles in Arts » |
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