jürgen fauth’s muckworld

One afternoon last week, I found myself explaining the benefits of transcendental meditation — and its much cheaper, guru-free alternative Natural Stress Relief — to a junkie at an East Village pizza joint. (He asked.) You see, I was predisposed to love The Dhamma Brothers, a documentary about inmates of an Alabama high security prison who take up Vipassana meditation. Despite its fascinating subject, the film turned out to be a disappointment. Read my review on About.com to find out why.

I also saw Redbelt, David Mamet’s latest. It’s an entirely enjoyable fight movie starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as noble jiu-jitsu teacher that’s perched somewhat uncomfortably between Mamet’s usual snappiness and a few very tired genre conventions. In typical Mamet style, Redbelt is thick with cons, counter-cons, and strange coincidences, but this time, it’s nearly impossible to tell which is which. Opens on May 9.

Tonight, I’m excited to see Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, and on TV, we’re enjoying the continuing adventures of Liz Lemon and Kara Thrace. In the mobile department, Peeping Tom and Paths of Glory have proven themselves eminently watchable on a packed subway — just don’t tell Messrs. Powell and Kubrick.

The Dhamma Brothers. Andrew Kukura, Jenny Phillips, Anne Marie Stein, 2007. **
Redbelt. David Mamet, 2008. ***
Peeping Tom. Michael Powell, 1960. ***
Paths of Glory. Stanley Kubrick, 1957. ****

The Redbelt trailer:

If you drive a couple of blocks down Konrad-Adenauer-Ring from where I was born, you come to what used to be the biggest American military hospital in Europe. It was here that in 1981, the diplomats that had been held hostage in Teheran made their first stop after they were released. Jimmy Carter, the first U.S. President I was ever aware of, came to Wiesbaden to meet them. My parents went down to witness the excitement and later reported that they had, in fact, seen the back of Jimmy Carter’s head.

It ain’t much, but it’s the best Jimmy Carter story I’ve got. Jonathan Demme’s documentary Man from Plains only mentions the Iranian hostage crisis in passing as we follow Carter on a 2006 tour promoting his controversial book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. More snapshot than full-blown portrait, the film is as much about the elder statesman’s ongoing struggle to bring peace to the Middle East as it is about the ways in which the American media deflects complex and controversial issues. For more, check David Hudson’s roundup of reviews.

Jimmy Carter Man from Plains. Jonathan Demme, 2007. ***

From 1989 to 2001, the Wetlands Preserve flourished just off of New York’s Houston Street. Founded by a Deadhead, the club attracted rising bands in the burgeoning “jam bands” scene, along with ska and hip-hop acts, while maintaining an activism center that held “eco-saloons” and launched inventive street theater protests. Dean Budnick’s Wetlands Preserved, produced by second and final owner Peter Shapiro, is a heartfelt tribute to a joyous anomaly in New York’s nightlife scene that eventually surrendered to Tribeca’s increasing gentrification in the days following September 11.

Continue reading my review of Wetlands Preserved, opening March 14, on About.com.

Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Nightclub. Dean Budnick, 2006. ***

And here’s a video to go along with it: Ann Marie Calhoun and her brother Joe cover Phish’s “Stash” [via Andy Gadiel]:

Ecstatic worshipers in store-front churches, steel workers in their homes, the down-and-out inhabitants of Buffalo’s skid row: social documentary photographer Milton Rogovin was never interested in the well-to-do. Thus, the quote that serves as the title of Ezra Bookstein’s sharp and fully realized portrait of Rogovin, now 98 years old.

In the fifties, Rogovin was working as an optometrist when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He refused to give any answers and was promptly named “the top red in Buffalo.” Silenced in the political arena, Rogovin turned to photography as an expressive outlet. His photos of poor Black church services were published in Aperture Magazine with an introduction by W.E.B. DuBois. For the next nine years, Rogovin and his wife Anne spent their summers in Appalachia to take portraits of miners. He went on to collaborate with Pablo Neruda on a book of photos from Chile and produce an ongoing series of portraits from Buffalo’s Lower West Side at ten-year-intervals.

Rogovin’s photos are a revelation: startlingly honest, they are as beautiful as they are unnerving. The unglamorous subjects are not usually the center of our attention, yet we can somehow see their personality before we see their dire surroundings. These are pictures that spark talk of inequality and human dignity. As James Wood of the Art Institute of Chicago explains in the film, the photos’ undeniable artistic accomplishment is a way of making a more effective case: the beauty comes bearing a message, and for Rogovin, art is only ever a means to an end.

• Official Site of the Film
• The Trailer
• Milton Rogovin’s Web Site
• Milton Rogovin at Wikipedia

The Rich Have Their Own Photographers. Ezra Bookstein, 2007. ****

The last time we saw Dawn Logsdon and Lucie Faulknor, we were shaking our bones to Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers at the Jazzfest fairgrounds. Now arrives their documentary, directed by Logsdon and produced by Faulknor, telling about a storied New Orleans neighborhood that barely appears in the textbooks — even though in the Tremé , “the sit-ins began in the 1800s, the Harlem Renaissance started before the Civil War, and the roots of jazz music and Creole cuisine were being nurtured every Sunday in Congo Square.” Like everything else in New Orleans, the film was delayed and profoundly altered by Hurricane Katrina; the storm had changed the history of the Tremé and needed to become a part of the film.

It’s muckworld policy not to rate movies made by friends, but it’s worth noting that Logsdon, Faulknor, and writer/narrator Lolis Eric Elie take the exact opposite approach from Ed Pincus and Lucia Small, who headed south after the storm to make The Axe in the Attic without any apparent connection to the city. Faubourg Tremé illustrates all that was hopefully not lost when the levees broke — and the music is kick-ass. My own short movie from April 2006 is on YouTube.

Faubourg Tremé. Dawn Logsdon, 2007. N/R

A few months after Hurricane Katrina, Ed Pincus and Lucia Small went on a road trip though the South to trace the stories of Americans who had lost not just their homes but also their trust in the government in the storm. Along with heartbreaking stories of FEMA trailers, red tape, grief and loss, they also filmed their own reactions to the devastation.

Read my review of The Axe in the Attic on About.com. Here’s the official site. For some reason, there doesn’t seem to be in IMDb entry for this movie.

The Axe in the Attic. Ed Pincus and Lucia Small, 2007. **

Related: my short film from New Orleans and the Ninth Ward, April 2006, and Juvenile’s “Get Your Hustle On”

Walther Ruttmann’s non-narrative rhythmic portrait of Berlin, usually connected to the “kino-eye” of Dziga Vertov, also had a clear influence on Godfrey Reggio. Much more upbeat than Koyaanisqatsi, Symphony covers a “regular day” in the metropolis circa 1927, celebrating modern life before the speed and exploitation turned sour. No dire Hopi prophecies here, even though a dire future was right around the corner. There’s a new score by Seattle psych rock band Kinski which I’d love to hear. Ruttmann went on to make Nazi propaganda: Blut und Boden, Metall des Himmels, Deutsche Waffenschmieden, Deutsche Panzer, and so forth. According to Steven Bach, Ruttmann worked on Triumph of the Will as Leni Riefenstahl’s co-director but was later excised from the credits.

Berlin: Die Symphonie der Großstadt. Walter Ruttmann, 1927. ****

• Cinecine: “holds up as one of the most striking non-fiction films ever made.”
• Channel 4
• Dave Kehr
• No love from TimeOut
• Allan James Thomas in Senses of Cinema
• Klaus Kreimer for Filmzentrale (in German)
• Speaking of Vertov: The Man With the Movie Camera on Google Video
• Watch Ruttman’s short Opus I on YouTube
• And now… Berlin, Symphony of a Great City in its entirety:

There are exactly three reasons why this competition doc is much more enjoyable than The King of Kong, this summer’s other film about major-league nerds making fools of themselves:

1. Unlike The King of Kong, which wimps out in the third act, Air Guitar Nation tells a complete story, from the inception of the U.S. Air Guitar Championships and qualifying rounds in New York and L.A. to the World Championships in Oulu, Finland.
2. The contestants are in on the joke. King of Kong’s joystick wigglers Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell seem to think beating a thirty-year-old video game actually matters. When C-Diddy and Björn Türoque do their thing, they know they’re being dorks, and they love every minute.
3. Nobody but the judges sit and watch guys jump over flaming barrels for two hours, waiting for them to screw up. Unlike Donkey Kong, Air Guitar is a spectator sport, and there’s always a crowd ready to rock.

Air Guitar Nation. Alexandra Lipsitz, 2006. ***

• Air Guitar Nation is now out on DVD
• Air Guitar Nation on Rotten Tomatoes: 83%
• Here’s C-Diddy: