A Million Little Parodies

Can we declare a moratorium on book reviewers’ mimicking the style of the book they’re reviewing? Although I seem to recall a scathing and amusing Valley Girl-esque critique by Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin’s piece in the Times this morning is a slog to get through, with its choppy prose, missing punctuation, missing words, and sentence fragments. Oddly, her review is pretty much a rave, ending with “That’s how James Frey saved himself.” Yes, that James Frey, of A Million Little Pieces and shamed-by-Oprah-Winfrey fame, currently profiled in Vanity Fair’s June issue. Everybody loves a story of redemption (except for, in this case, maybe Oprah?), but next time perhaps Maslin can tell it in her own voice instead of trying to imitate the writing, especially if it’s good writing. I don’t have strong feelings about Frey one way or the other, but I do believe Maslin should have let Bright Shiny Morning have its day in the sun, unshadowed by this confusing, counterproductive pseudo-Freyness. —MLM

(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Prosthetic Limbs, Torture, and Beheading?

Hauser (John Cusack) walks through the troubled land of Turaqistan.

Tribeca Film Festival 2008, April 23-May 4
War, Inc.
Directed by Joshua Seftel
Screenplay by Mark Leyner, Jeremy Pikser, and John Cusack
With John Cusack, Hilary Duff, Marisa Tomei, Joan Cusack, Ben Kingsley, Dan Aykroyd, and Lubomir Neikov
106 minutes
From USA

By Robert Rosen

I wouldn’t say that War, Inc. is the best political satire since Dr. Strangelove—it’s too ragged and meandering for that. But in the same way that the Kubrick classic was able to provoke laughter at the notion of nuclear annihilation in the grim aftermath of the Kennedy assassination (and with the Cuban missile crisis still fresh in everybody’s mind), War, Inc. performs a miracle of its own: It fires off a barrage of one-liners and sight gags about prosthetic limbs, torture devices, and beheading videos that demonstrate the much overlooked comic potential of the endless War on Terror and the cabal of criminals who’ve transformed the United States of America into an outlaw nation.

Set in the Green Zone of a country called Turaqistan, in the very near future, War, Inc. shows us what the world might be like if the entire US government and military were completely under the control of multinational corporations.

Hauser (John Cusack) is a charming CIA hit man who settles his troubled conscience with straight shots of hallucinogenic hot sauce as he goes about the business of trying to assassinate a Middle Eastern oil minister (Lubomir Neikov) in town for a Brand USA trade show. Natalie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei) is a lefty freelance journalist on assignment for The Atlantic, determined to write an honest appraisal of the situation in Turaqistan. Marsha Dillon (Joan Cusack) is a foul-mouthed government operative who functions as Hauser’s office assistant. Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff) is a Britney Spears-like pop singer slated to perform at the trade show and to marry one of the dancers in her posse. The former vice president (Dan Aykroyd) is a corporate CEO who likes to teleconference while moving his bowels. And Walken (Ben Kingsley) is Hauser’s Strangelovian CIA boss.

There’s a lot going on in this movie—often subtly, in the background. You’ve really got to pay attention. But is it entertaining? That all depends on how funny you find the notion of a chorus line of Turaqistani amputees dancing at a trade show to demonstrate the latest in prosthetic-limb technology.

I didn’t think I could laugh at such a thing. But I did.

***½ (3½ Stars)

The Unspeakable

Above: Emmanuel Jal returns to Africa and the vestiges of civil war. Below: The rapper, in concert, transforms horror into art.
Tribeca Film Festival 2008, April 23-May 4
War Child
Directed by C. Karim Chrobog
With Emmanuel Jal
93 Minutes

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

These days, we are overloaded on the horrors of the world. If we hear “Sudan” or “Darfur” while thinking “Iraq,” we’re likely to tune it out. And that’s why we need people like Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier who has spoken the unspeakable, turning the depravity he has experienced, and even committed, into art. This film tells the story of Jal’s improbable, tortuous journey from birth in a rural Sudanese village in the early 1980s (he does not know his birth date) to his current life as an international up-and-coming rap singer residing in London. Weaving historical footage into Jal’s narrative—including film of Jal himself as a self-possessed, talkative child in a refugee camp—the director, C. Karim Chrobog, shows us the devastating effect of war on one family (just try not to cry when Jal’s sister, separated from him for many years, finally reveals her own story). The wonder is that Jal, who admits to having been at times suicidal, not only survived but found a way to transform his terrors to the benefit of us all.

The film, beginning with the opening scene of Jal rapping to kids in an African classroom, is gripping, and the music lifts it to another level. Though some of it is hard to take, Chrobog, the son of a diplomat, has created an important and necessary document.

Festival Quickies

Tribeca Film Festival 2008, April 23-May 4

In the anything-goes atmosphere of the club party Squeezebox, glam-punk performer Jayne County expresses herself.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Squeezebox!
Directed By Zach Shaffer and Steve Saporito
92 minutes

Sometimes in NYC you don’t know what’s happening in your own backyard (that is, if you had a backyard). I live within easy walking distance of Don Hill’s—and have even sung there, at the publication party in 2000 for my fellow blogger Robert Rosen’s book Nowhere Man—yet missed the phenomenon known as Squeezebox, a weekly gay night now lovingly immortalized in Zach Shaffer and Steve Saporito’s colorful, kinetic documentary. Running from 1994 to 2001, the glam/sleaze/drag rock ’n’ roll event provided a home for self-described misfits and propelled a few to fame, such as John Cameron Mitchell, who developed his character Hedwig (of Hedwig and the Angry Inch) on the Squeezebox stage (the house band’s Stephen Trask was Hedwig’s composer/lyricist). Aside from the amazingly raunchy actions that went down there (beer-bottle fucking on the bar, anyone?), the event shattered a music and lifestyle taboo: gays liking rock ’n’ roll. Instead of lip-synching Judy Garland numbers, drag queens would deliver kick-ass Led Zeppelin tunes and affecting weepers like “Love Hurts.” But more than that, this was a party that wouldn’t quit, despite Rudy Giuliani’s best efforts to crack down on the city’s nightlife (apparently a threat to our quality of life, which begs the question, what quality without nightlife?). Listening to Theo Kogan (the Lunachicks), Miss Guy (the Toilet Boys), Mistress Formika (the sylphlike MC with whom you would not want to mess), Lady Bunny (who, with her signature stratospheric wig, out-Partons Dolly Parton), and even the novelist Michael Cunningham (The Hours), you can only wish that you too had been taken to the bosom, prosthetic though it may have been, of the crazy slutty mama called Squeezebox.

****½ (4½ stars)

Rym (Hafsia Herzi) confers with surrogate dad Slimane (Habib Boufares) in The Secret of the Grain.

The Secret of the Grain (La Graine et le Mullet)
Directed By Abdellatif Kechiche
151 minutes

A dour, conscientious Tunisian immigrant named Slimane, only semi-employed in the shipyard of a French port town. His raucous extended family. Their overextended dinner conversations and tearful hysteria. Your own urge to shout, as you might with your own family members, Stop talking with your mouth full! And, Shut up already!

Perhaps any impatience with this boisterous crowd only attests to the realism of scenes that include a quickie on a tour boat (the plot hinges on Slimane’s son’s philandering ways), young parents discussing their problems with diapers and potty training, expressions of wonder at the fish couscous cooked up by Slimane’s ex-wife (though no one says, “What’s your secret?”), a bank officer taking her time at nixing Slimane’s dream of owning a riverboat restaurant, and a gyrating sequence that puts the “belly” in “belly dance.”

With a breakout performance by the beautiful and beautifully down-to-earth Hafsia Herzi, playing the daughter not of Slimane but of his girlfriend, yet perhaps the one most devoted to him. And with the memorable line: “Out of respect for you and the couscous…” Winner of Césars (French top honors) for best picture, best director, best original screenplay, and best female newcomer (for Herzi).

**** (4 stars)

Insecure in his own Cairo habitat, Youssef (Amr Waked) contemplates that of some tropical fish in The Aquarium.

The Aquarium (Genenet al Asmak)
Directed By Yousry Nasrallah
111 minutes

Voyeurism, secrecy, mortality, fear—there is much that the esteemed Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah wants to explore in this film. And there is so much good in it—mainly, the basic story—that you wish he had excised the bad. The latter includes the actors’ suddenly talking directly to the audience about their characters—I may be a purist, but once someone gets me into their created world, I’d like to stay there for the duration—as well as imposed visual references to political oppression and avian flu. Nasrallah seems to think we occasionally need reminding, as we watch his tale, that the world involves scary things (America being one of them, by the way, a disturbing but not surprising perspective). He should instead trust more in our interest in his two leading characters—Youssef, an anesthesiologist who likes to listen to what his patients say as they’re drifting off, and Laila (Hend Sabri), the host of a radio late-night call-in show in which people talk mostly about sex—and how their lives intersect. That said, interest might deepen if Youssef, who does appear to care for his dying father and his abortion-clinic patients, were less of an emotional mystery. Whereas we discover that the red-lipsticked Laila is one hot tamale under those staid suits she wears, Youssef remains too much like the inhabitants of the public aquarium with which he’s obsessed—a cold fish.

**½ (2½ stars)

A very watchful Isabella Rossellini, playing a spider, prepares for some Green Porno.

Green Porno
Written and Directed By Isabella Rossellini
15 minutes (all)

The other night I caught a couple of Isabella Rossellini’s eight very short shorts, collectively called Green Porno, in which she plays bugs and other “tiny critters” in the process of mating. It’s a hoot to see a world-renowned beauty wearing costumes such as a child might create (although probably better-fitting). As a firefly, her ass lights up, she gleefully tells us while demonstrating, and as a snail she has a giant foot, which she squashes into her shell along with the rest of her, anus on top (yucky things ensue). These witty pieces are showing in pairs before selected films and all together before My Winnipeg; they’ll also be available starting May 5 on Helio mobile devices and on the Sundance Channel website. Rossellini will discuss the making of the series at the Apple Store in Soho on Tuesday, April 29, at 8:00 p.m.

He Just Keeps Rollin’ Along

Nearing 90, the Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés is still recording and performing.

Tribeca Film Festival 2008, April 23-May 4
Old Man Bebo
111 minutes
Directed by Carlos Carcas
With Bebo Valdés, Chucho Valdés, Leonardo Acosta, Omara Portuondo, and Fernando Trueba
From Spain

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

I think I went to see this movie to commune with my dad, who died 11 years ago. My father’s true loves were my mother, flying, and music, but the country of Cuba—not the least because of its own intoxicating rhythms—held a special place in his heart. He would travel there, pre-revolution, to go deep-sea fishing and nightclub hopping, and it’s very likely that one of the performers he caught was Bebo Valdés: the pianist extraordinaire who helped define the Cuban sound in the 40s and 50s, playing in bands—and sometimes acting as arranger and bandleader—in various hotels and, most notably, the legendary Tropicana nightclub.

It’s hard to imagine, what with current US-Cuba relations, that there was once a special Tropicana flight between Miami and Havana, ferrying Americans to the club and then back, with entertainers on board for a constant party. But so we learn from Carlos Carcas’s new documentary on Bebo, as everyone calls him, and his many musical and personal connections. We also find out about “Rocolas,” jukeboxes in Cuban bars that played American songs (looked down on by some local musicians); a mambo-type song form called the batanga that Bebo developed after working in Haiti (sadly, his recordings of it have disappeared); and Nat King Cole’s association with Cuba—Cole was the first black man to sing “love songs” there on TV, apparently a shock at the time, and he not only jammed with Bebo et al. but recorded an album called Cole Español.

Around the time my father stopped going to Cuba, Bebo, out of sync with Castro’s regime, fled the country. Leaving a woman who still cries when speaking of him, along with two ex-partners and several children, he went to Mexico and eventually landed in Sweden, where he found new domestic happiness but lost his previous musical fame. How he emerged from obscurity—winning two Grammys in 2002, at the age of 83—is part of the story Carcas tells, and in the telling we hear from old associates and from family members (his son Chucho is today also a famous pianist), most still in Cuba, as well as from his wife in Sweden, a land whose “pure air” Bebo credits with keeping him young, and one of the people responsible for his comeback, Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba (Calle 54).

These people share their memories of—and praise for—Bebo, called “Big Stallion” because he was “so tremendous,” in the words of a fellow musician. My favorite comment comes from one of his daughters, who in four decades has rarely seen her dad—he never returned to his native country—but understands what has always driven him: “I think my father breathes through his hands.” And I think my father, an amateur but spirited pianist himself, would understand that completely.

*** (3 Stars)

Welcome to the Tribeca Film Festival ’08

Lou Reed sings sad songs. Courtesy of Waterboy Productions

By Robert Rosen

One year ago we launched this blog to cover the Tribeca Film Festival, and now we’re back to do it again. Last year, most of our reviews were long and in-depth, offering detailed analysis of offbeat movies, usually from foreign countries. Some of the films we covered were Lady Chatterley, from France, Playing the Victim, from Russia, Dos Abrazos, from Mexico, The Last Man, from Lebanon, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, from Brazil, The Road to St. Diego, from Argentina, and The Sugar Curtain, from Cuba. Into this exotic mix we also tossed an American drama or two, like The Air I Breathe, and the romantic comedies Suburban Girl and Purple Violets.

I don’t know exactly what we’ll be covering this year, except that Mary Lyn Maiscott (who will also be blogging about the TFF Music Lounge for Vanity Fair) and I plan to go to as many movies as we can and write about as many as we feel like. Also, to cover even more films, for some we’ll use a short—really short—format, and, God help us, rate all of them with 1 to 5 stars (asterisks, actually). Though we swore we’d never do that, there are so many films to choose from, we think that a rating system will help you figure out what to see in a fast and easy way.

How brief are these mini-reviews going to be? Here’s an example, just to get the ball rolling:

Tribeca Film Festival 2008, April 23-May 4
Lou Reed’s Berlin
Directed by Julian Schnabel
81 Minutes

Left me cold…and depressed. I like Lou Reed, but not this much. For hardcore fans only.

**½

So, let us know what you think, ’cause we’re always happy to hear from you. And thanks to everybody from all over the world for reading us this past year.

BYOC (Bring Your Own Context)

Mark David Chapman (Jared Leto) holds a copy of Double Fantasy as he walks with Jude (Lindsay Lohan) near the Dakota.

Chapter 27
84 minutes
Written and Directed by Jarrett Schaefer
Starring Jared Leto, Lindsay Lohan, Judah Friedlander, and Mark Lindsay Chapman
From U.S.

By Robert Rosen

The first thing you have to do if you want to understand Chapter 27, the film about the assassination of John Lennon, is read The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s classic novel of disaffected youth, originally published in 1951. The book, narrated in the pitch-perfect adolescent voice of hypocrisy-hating Holden Caulfield, is what “inspired” Mark David Chapman to murder Lennon—because he believed that the reclusive, super-wealthy rock star who sang “Imagine no possessions” was, in the words of Holden, a “goddamn phony.”

Throughout the film, Chapman refers to the book, quotes from it, and imagines and acts out scenes from it. But unless Catcher’s fresh in your mind, you often won’t know that that’s what he’s doing. For example, the scene in the coffee shop where Chapman (Jared Leto) asks Jude (Lindsay Lohan) to run away with him is a direct steal from chapter 17 of The Catcher in the Rye—which I didn’t realize till I reread the book after I saw the movie.

Catcher also partially explains the film’s title, an essential bit of information that writer/director Jarrett Schaefer has neglected to share with his audience. Schaefer does give some indication that the title Chapter 27 is a reference to the Salinger novel. And he does show some pages from Catcher in the opening sequence, focusing on chapter numbers 9 and 26. But he doesn’t make explicitly clear that Catcher ends on chapter 26 and that Chapman, who saw himself as the reincarnation of Holden Caulfield, believed that if he shot Lennon five times in the back, then he’d write chapter 27 in the ex-Beatle’s blood. That, at least, is how I explain it in my own Lennon bio, Nowhere Man, which is the second book you have to read—because it’s the only book that explains how the number 27 karmically links Chapman to Lennon.

Anybody who’s been following my other blog already knows that, according to Mojo magazine and the Spanish-language newsweekly Proceso, Schaefer expropriated his title from Nowhere Man’s “Chapter 27.” In that section I show how 27, “the triple 9,” was a number of profound importance to the ex-Beatle, who was obsessed with numerology, Cheiro’s Book of Numbers­, and especially number 9 and all its multiples. (Lennon was born on October 9.)

Perhaps if Schaefer had made this numerological connection, it would have given his film a deeper and more chilling resonance. But choosing instead to completely ignore information that was essential to understanding both the title and the meaning of his story, he simply left it up to the audience to supply their own context, which might be asking a little too much of contemporary moviegoers.

This lack of context may partially explain the hundreds of vicious reviews that have appeared since Chapter 27 premiered last year at Sundance. And it may also explain why, despite the presence of two major stars, the film faced such epic difficulties finding a distributor.

But let there be no doubt that amidst this fundamental confusion one extraordinary performance emerges: Jared Leto as Chapman. He doesn’t just play the character, he inhabits him. Famously (and perhaps insanely), Leto packed on 60 pounds for the role—in one scene the camera sensuously caresses his rolls of fat. And he is riveting as the murderous nerd who speaks in an absurdly creepy southern-accented whisper and is onscreen for virtually every frame of the film. To watch him is a claustrophobic experience, like being trapped in a room for 84 minutes with a socially awkward psychopath.

It’s up to Lindsay Lohan, in her small but appealingly energetic role as Jude, a Lennon fan (based on a real person) who befriends Chapman before realizing there’s something wrong with him, to express the discomfort and repulsion you feel in the presence of the aspiring killer.

She has some help from Judah Friedlander as Paul, based on paparazzo Paul Goresh, who, with a well-timed jolt of energy, alleviates the often crushing sense of being a prisoner of Chapman’s consciousness. Best known for his comedic work on 30 Rock, Friedlander efficiently portrays the slightly sarcastic regular guy from Jersey who photographs Lennon (Mark Lindsay Chapman) signing Mark David Chapman’s copy of Double Fantasy hours before the murder.

But again Schaefer doesn’t give his audience enough background or context to fully understand who these people are and why they’re doing what they’re doing. You do learn that Chapman’s a Beatles fan from Hawaii, who appears to have a wife back home. (Chapman’s wife was Japanese, like Yoko Ono, but that’s not mentioned.) The movie’s confined to the three days—December 6-8, 1980—leading up to the murder, and in that time frame it’s almost impossible for Schaefer to show what drove an unemployed security guard to such delusional depths of insanity that he twice traveled 5,000 miles to assassinate a celebrity in the name of Holden Caulfield.

It would have been helpful, for example, to know about the “Little People,” the imaginary civilization that populated Chapman’s head and the walls of his room since he was a child, and whom he depended on to guide him in his decision-making; to know that when Chapman was a teenager, he played the guitar and dropped a lot of acid; to know that in Hawaii he attempted suicide and spent time in a mental institution; and to know that he was compelled by a desire to transcend his own insignificance and steal Lennon’s fame and identity. And it would have been especially illuminating to see Chapman, in his Honolulu apartment, listening to Beatles music in the middle of the night, begging Satan for the power to kill Lennon and chanting, “The phony must die, says the Catcher in the Rye.”

I wrote about all this in the seven final chapters of Nowhere Man, “The Coda,” where the concept of “Chapter 27” is at the forefront of the story and where I probed the meaning of what Chapman did.

Jack Jones also wrote about it in Let Me Take You Down, the book credited with “inspiring” Chapter 27. Though this worthwhile biography fails to explain the numerological implications of Chapter 27 or show how it played into the heart of Lennon’s obsession with the number 9, it does, indeed, plumb the ooze of Chapman’s mind, from his lunatic point of view, detailing everything you could possibly want to know about the killer’s voyage to the depths of the “bottomless pit” (see The Catcher in the Rye, chapter 24, or Nowhere Man’s “Chapter 27”).

And director Andrew Piddington covered some of this material in that other Chapman movie, The Killing of John Lennon, which delves into Chapman’s background and graphically depicts the actual murder in a way that Chapter 27 doesn’t approach.

All this contextual criticism is not to say that Chapter 27 is a “lousy”—if I may borrow a word from Holden—movie. It’s not. It’s just a dispiriting and mistitled one. And now that I’ve seen it, I think I finally understand what Jarrett Schaefer was thinking, at least as far as the title goes. He probably found artistically irresistible both the concept of Chapman writing chapter 27 in Lennon’s blood and the idea of Lennon and Chapman being linked by a mystical number. Because he’s an inexperienced filmmaker, he probably thought he could graft a cool title onto a movie that had little to do with that title, and just leave it at that. He probably thought most people would either get it or wouldn’t care. And he probably believed on some level that the author of Nowhere Man didn’t really exist. Well, he was wrong. And though I’m sure it wasn’t his intention, I’d like to thank him for inspiring this blog.

***

I’d be remiss if I neglected to mention that I knew well two of the people depicted in Chapter 27: John Lennon’s assistant and my former writing partner, Fred Seaman (Matthew Humphreys), and Fred’s aunt and Sean Lennon’s governess, Helen Seaman (Le Clanche DuRand). I must commend Humphreys, in his brief scene with Chapman, for neatly capturing the contemptuousness that Seaman routinely displayed to anybody he found “beneath” him (like the fans who hung out at the Dakota). But I must also point out that in the very creepy scene where Chapman meets Sean, Helen, an earth mother from the Bronx, is portrayed as an impeccably dressed upper-crusty English lady.

***

This review with a different photo also appears on my other blog, Chapter 27, a resource of information on John Lennon, the events surrounding his murder, his portrayal in the media, and the uncredited connection between the film, Chapter 27, and the section called “Chapter 27” in Nowhere Man.