Tag: documentary

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Heart & Soul

Wednesday’s all about celebrating the grand U.S. of A. for the Fourth of July. So what about the 29th of June? That Friday, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art will hold a screening of the documentary Above the Line: Saving Willie Mae’s Scotch House as part of its “Soul Food” exhibition. And while this is certainly a regional affair, the film — which details the efforts to rebuild 91-year-old Willie Mae Seaton’s Hurricane Katrina-devastated restaurant — gives witness to traits so admired of people in this great land of ours: the can-do attitude, pride, ingenuity, steadfastness, and loyalty.

For decades, Seaton drew praise for her fried chicken, which she cooked up in a deep fryer in a shotgun house, half of which served as the restaurant and the other half as her home. The recipe for her chicken she kept secret; that it was damn good was widely known, so much so that she was honored with a medal from the James Beard Foundation only months before the restaurant was seriously damaged in the wake of Katrina. For a year-and-a-half after the storm, volunteers from the Southern Foodways Alliance led by Oxford, Mississippi, restaurateur John Currence worked weekends to restore the Scotch House. Last May, the Scotch House was once again open for business.

SFA resident filmmaker Joe York and SFA director and noted food writer John T. Edge will be at the Brooks to present Above the Line. And if the film’s not enough to have you God-blessing-America, after the screening, there will be food from Gus’s Fried Chicken and other restaurants.

“Above the Line,” Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Friday, June 29th, 7 p.m. Tickets are $10 for members, $20 for nonmembers.

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News The Fly-By

Today’s Tom Sawyer

Somewhere on the forested northern tip of Mud Island, there is a battered, yellow canoe covered with handwritten notes and lying in a thick patch of poison ivy. Just a few yards away, the bluff drops off steeply into the river. The nobody who owned the canoe camped here until a hard storm blew his makeshift tent into the water below.

The unfortunate river rat’s name was Jerry, the subject of Nobody, a visually poetic documentary by first-time filmmakers Alan Spearman and Lance Murphy, both employed by The Commercial Appeal. In 2006, Nobody won Indie Memphis’ Hometowner Award for best documentary film. More recently, it was selected for the Full Frame Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, widely considered America’s premiere festival for documentary filmmaking.

“This really is as good as we could have hoped for,” Spearman says, noting that this is the most prestigious festival selection for a first-time filmmaker from Memphis. Although Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow triumph at Sundance is now part of industry lore, Brewer made his first splash outside of Memphis with his film The Poor & Hungry, winning best digital feature at the strategically located but seldom heralded Hollywood Film Festival.

Although Spearman and Murphy’s film is gaining attention, its subject is still missing. The last anyone saw of Jerry were the shots Spearman took as he paddled his new canoe into the Mississippi, heading toward the Gulf. Fears that Jerry might have died in Hurricane Katrina were allayed when the affable vagabond left messages on his sister’s answering machine. But nobody knows the whereabouts of the man who tried to outrun his personal tragedies by devoting his life to the river.

“I think we’ve always kind of hoped that the movie would find him,” Spearman says. “Maybe he did what he said he wanted to do and went all the way down to Florida. Nobody is showing in Key West and Ft. Lauderdale.”

Nobody will also screen at the Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis on Thursday, April 12th at 7 p.m. as part of the Emerging Pictures/Full Frame Digital Extension, which programs notable Full Frame documentaries in venues all around the country.

“There’s a digital participation award connected to the [satellite] festival,” Spearman says. “So it would be really good to get a lot of people to come out, see the film, and vote for the home team.”

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News News Feature

River Rat

It sounds like a punk-rock version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — a group of twentysomething hippies build homemade boats using parts from the trash and set out from Minneapolis for a summer-long trip down the Mississippi River.

Every year, a mix of artists, poets, activists, anarchists, and adventure-seekers craft boats using salvaged materials, like old wood and Styrofoam. Most live up north and spend July through the fall exploring various river towns along the Mississippi.

“They show up in towns like migratory birds on their way down south for the winter,” says local artist Andrea Buggey.

Back in 2005, Buggey decided to join the ramshackle crew. She headed to Minneapolis, got some help building a boat she affectionately dubbed the Ida B, and set sail on July 4th. Photographs, drawings, and poetry from her trip are on display in “Traveling Down the River” at Java Cabana through March 31st.

Originally, Buggey hopped aboard a boat for only a day, packing her bike so she could ride home when she got back on dry land. She had such a great time, however, she decided to spend the following summer traveling with the crew.

Two of the river regulars helped Buggey construct her boat, an open-air pontoon-style craft made from cypress wood, Styrofoam, and plastic bottles for buoyancy.

“Using salvaged materials is a lifestyle thing — saving what other people have wasted,” says Buggey. “It’s like recycling.”

For example, white PVC piping curved into arches over the top of the Ida B resemble an elephant ribcage. When it rained, Buggey would drape a blue tarp over the piping to keep dry.

“All the boats had motors, but the Ida B also had a paddle wheel. It was made of cypress planks and was hooked up to two exercise bikes, which propelled it pretty quickly. You just had to ride the bike,” says Buggey.

Altogether, there were 12 crew members occupying five homemade boats: the Ida B, Shadow Builder, Gator Bait II, Bobby Bobula, and the Leona Joyce. Throughout the months-long journey, the crew would hop from boat to boat to visit, dine, and help captain. Occasionally, adventurous folks from towns along the way would join them and ride for days or even weeks before getting off.

“Four of the boats had dinghies that we’d trail behind us,” says Buggey. “We’d keep our bicycles on the dinghies so when we got to towns, we could travel to get more supplies like food and gas.”

Meals, cooked on camp stoves on boats or campfires on beaches, were generally communal. Boats were hooked together for eating and sleeping, so only one person had to captain rather than five. Most meals involved fish or food from cans, seasoned with fresh herbs grown on Buggey’s boat garden.

At night, a couple of people usually stayed awake to steer and serve as lookout for barges or other river traffic. But occasionally, even the lookouts would fall asleep on the watch.

“One night when we were floating together, we woke up and discovered we’d landed in a stump field,” says Buggey. “It was very shallow and we all had to get out and push. The propellers on the motors were tangled with weeds.”

Sometimes the crew would retire their sails for several days, opting to hang out in towns.

“There was this small town in Illinois where all the people were very frightened of us. They were whispering to each other and following us around in stores. We created this panic,” says Buggey.

The crew brushed the experience off until they befriended some teenagers a few towns down the river. The teens claimed the previous town was under the “Curse of the River Gypsy King.”

“They told us that during the Depression, there was this group of gypsies that lived on houseboats,” says Buggey. “They stopped in the town and their leader, the gypsy king, had a heart attack. They took him to the local hospital, but he was refused service. He died in the waiting room, so the gypsies cursed the town. The tale has apparently carried on.”

By the time the boats reached Missouri in October, Buggey was running low on money for gas. Prices were high after Hurricane Katrina, so she decided to abandon ship and call her parents to pick her up. She left her boat in a creek while the rest of the crew headed on to New Orleans.

Buggey says the travelers generally give the boats away or sell them for a couple bucks since they often can’t afford to trailer them back north. New boats are constructed for the next year’s trip. Buggey doubts she’ll be building another boat though:

“I might go visit when they pass through, but I wouldn’t want to do a whole season of traveling again. I did gain a deep respect for the river and nature. There’s so much beauty and wilderness out there. And we pretended like we were pirates.”

“Traveling Down the River,” photos, drawings, and poetry byAndrea Buggey, are on display at Java Cabana (2170 Young) through March 31st.

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Film Features Film/TV

Out of Step

In chronicling the U.S. “hardcore” punk scene of the early ’80s, American Hardcore rhymes strongly with other recent counterculture “scene” docs such as surfing survey Riding Giants and the skateboarding flick Dogtown & the Z-Boys. In other words, there are lots of talking-head interviews with semi-famous old farts reminiscing, spinning variations on “You had to be there, man.”

Even if you’re a fan of the music in question (and I am), a strain of comedy emerges that earnest filmmakers Paul Rachman (the director) and Steven Blush (the writer, adapting his book American Hardcore: A Tribal History) don’t seem to intend. There are more “fucks” here than in Scarface. Vic Bondi, of the Chicago band Articles of Faith, sets a tone early on, remembering the cultural conservatism of the Reagan years and relaying his scene’s attitude about it: “Fuck you. Not us. You can take that and shove it up your ass.” (Says Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins: “Punk rockers love to hate Reagan worldwide.”)

But just as Bondi and others from the scene talk about how Reagan signified the return of white male power, the documentary begins to accidentally reveal how much the hardcore scene — or at least this film’s vision of it — now looks like a different matrix of white male entitlement and resentment. The worst offender here is Keith Morris, the original singer for the scene-starting L.A. band Black Flag. Morris talks trash about such turn-of-the-decade cultural targets as disco, wine coolers, and arena-rock bands, but the unintentional irony is rich when you realize he’s sitting in a lounge chair in front of a big swimming pool. And, eventually, his resentment and belligerence reach a point where you see that this punk rocker’s demeanor could have easily made him a militia member instead.

But the fact that American Hardcore is so indulgent of macho scenester bluster may be more of an indictment of the movie than the scene it covers. In focusing so much on the thrashier side of the scene, American Hardcore short-changes the bands that brought the most humanity to the genre — namely, California’s Minutemen and Minnesota’s Hüsker Dü.

Both bands recorded for Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn’s SST label in the early ’80s, so they’re absolutely within the scope of the film’s coverage, and both bands exploded the genre from the inside with a pair of brilliant double albums for the label: the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime and Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade. But the Minutemen are mentioned only in passing, and, unless I missed something, Hüsker Dü isn’t mentioned at all.

Instead, American Hardcore focuses on the Los Angeles scene surrounding Black Flag and the D.C. scene that emulated it in the form of African-American punk band Bad Brains and their baby-faced Caucasian counterparts Minor Threat. Riding Giants and Dogtown had lots of zingy archival footage, and so it is with American Hardcore. If you’re a fan of this music, you’ll get a thrill from seeing Black Flag playing “Rise Above,” Bad Brains blasting through “Pay to Cum,” and Minor Threat whipping through “Straight Edge” and “Seeing Red.”

Rollins and Minor Threat founder Ian MacKaye are the stars here, but my favorite interviewee might be blond, bespectacled Minor Threat guitarist Brian Baker, who remembers his teenage self: “We were kids, and we were fucking pricks. Smart, hostile, and sober.”

From there, American Hardcore devolves into a scene-by-scene survey, with cursory looks at the Midwest, South, and Pacific Northwest.

If I responded to this movie more than its artistry or interest warrant, it’s because I have a personal connection. Much of this music (especially Minor Threat and the missing Minutemen and Hüsker Dü) has been really important to me, and I spent many hours as a teen seeing later-generation hardcore bands such as Fugazi, D.I., Trusty, and locals Raid at the Antenna club.

If you have a personal connection to this scene or its music, you’ll want to see American Hardcore. If not, you should take a pass, because this is a fan’s testament, not first-rate documentary filmmaking.

American Hardcore

Opens Friday, February 9th

Studio on the Square

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Film Features Film/TV

Shut Up & Sing

For fans of the great labor documentarian Barbara Kopple (American Dream, the magnificent Harlan County U.S.A.), the mere idea of Shut Up & Sing — a film about the travails of the world-famous and multi-platinum-selling pop group the Dixie Chicks — might sound like a perverse kind of sell-out. But there are some fascinating links between Kopple’s previous works and her surprisingly moving and entertaining new film about the controversy that surrounded the Chicks after some impromptu remarks at a 2003 London concert on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

As singer Natalie Maines points out, most people probably don’t know what she said to start such a ruckus, though the film tells us almost instantly: “We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.”

This comment cost the Chicks plenty of airplay. But it also gave them plenty of nationwide notoriety. Thus, the main portion of the film consists of the ways in which the Chicks and band manager Simon Renshaw try to reclaim their market share while keeping their band (and brand) integrity intact.

As these three women juggle motherhood, image management, and the daily grind of songwriting and performing, Kopple’s past sympathies with outspoken, no-bullshit women emerge once again, finding her heroine in the form of the raunchy, folksy, enormously entertaining Maines, a business-first leader and mouthpiece who, unlike her more cautious bandmates, is unafraid to riff on any subject. She never loses her cool or her edge, whether she’s calling G.W. Bush a “dumb fuck,” declaring on Howard Stern’s show that she “won’t wear panties until the war is over,” or opining that an alleged stalker and assassin is “kinda cute.”

In showing us the obstacles that arise when people who aren’t supposed to have a thought about anything finally let something slip, Shut Up & Sing, incredibly, works some of the same turf as Kopple’s most incendiary films. She’s made one of the year’s finest documentaries.

Opening Friday, December 1st, at Ridgeway Four

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Film Features Film/TV

Evangelical doc preaches a scary sermon.

The first children we see in Jesus Camp, a documentary about youth ministries on the far-right end of white, evangelical Christian culture, are adorned in camo and war paint. They’re performing a play at the Christ Triumphant Church in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, promising their God, “I’ll do what you want me to do,” and readying themselves to “radically lay down their lives for the gospel” as children “in Pakistan or Palestine” are doing for Islam, in the words of Pentecostal youth minister Becky Fischer. War analogies, we quickly learn, are legion in this little corner of the religious world.

Fischer is Jesus Camp‘s hero or villain, depending on your perspective, and though filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (whose Boys of Baraka screened in Memphis earlier this year) have apparently made pains to get their film shown in evangelical-friendly communities, if you’re seeing Jesus Camp at all, you’re probably preconditioned to see Fischer as a villain.

Though it may not want to be, Jesus Camp is an art-house horror movie for secular liberals, a bias telegraphed by the odd, unnecessary inclusion of Air America radio host Mike Papantonio in a framing device that gives urban libs a mirror to reflect their horrified reaction back at them.

At the heart of the movie are Fischer and three elementary-aged kids who attend her Kids on Fire summer camp in North Dakota, where kids clutch tiny plastic fetuses, pray about (not, crucially, to) a cardboard Dubya, and sing and dance to evangelical hip-hop (“kickin’ it for Christ”) at sessions that evolve into admonishing, tear-filled confessions. (There are, apparently, “no phonies in God’s army.”)

One boy, Levi, is an aspiring pre-teen preacher who was saved at age 5 because, he says, he “just wanted more out of life.” Tori is a Christian heavy-metal fan, first seen break dancing in her bedroom. Most compelling is Rachael, a mousy, excitable, and preternaturally self-possessed 9-year-old. She explains that she’d like to be a manicurist because it seems like a great opportunity to proselytize to the unconverted all day.

Jesus Camp likes these kids, and you probably will too, even as Rachael strolls up to strangers at the bowling alley or on the street to attempt a conversion. And because you like them so much, it’s painful to watch them manipulated or discouraged from thinking. It’s rattling to watch small children coaxed into tears of religious ecstasy over matters they can barely understand. And it’s infuriating to watch a kid as bright as Levi being home-schooled from a book called Exploring Creation with Physical Science and learning that creationism provides “the only possible answer to all the questions” and “science doesn’t prove anything.”

Which is why, though Ewing and Grady might like their film to be an evenhanded examination (and, if so, why spike it with monologues from an Air America host?), it’s really an exposé — shoddily filmed and poorly thought out but helplessly riveting.

Jesus Camp

Opening Friday, November 3rd

Ridgeway Four