Last night we went to see Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep at the Coolidge Corner Theater. A great movie and a great theater. Karl first introduced me to Gondry with a DVD he has of Gondry’s music videos, which is among our most frequently watched DVDs. It just doesn’t get old.

This movie continues Gondry’s style of whimsy and surrealism developed in the music videos and in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There isn’t a whole lot of story in The Science of Sleep, but the visuals, the characters, and the sheer creativity of it all kept me on the edge of my seat. It’s set in Paris, but mostly in five or six small rooms that morph into each other and into other worlds as dream morphs into reality. It was not clear cut like The Big Lebowski. I was always asking, “Is this a dream or a reality?” So was Stéphane, the main character, lost in his own intense creativity.

I’d like to see Gondry collaborate with Wes Anderson on a movie. Lets have Anderson write the script and Gondry bring the cardboard schizophrenia.

Mardi Gras: Made in China / 2004 / 74 minutes

Mardi Gras beads were once made of Czechoslovakian glass and often kept, whereas the plastic beads, popular since the 1970s, are usually thrown away after the festival¹. Today’s bead industry sustains itself by continuously remanufacturing a disposable product. David Redmon’s documentary, Mardi Gras: Made in China, traces plastic bead necklaces, masks, oversized genitals, and other Mardi Gras accouterments from the New Orleans festival back to a bead factory in China, tying production to over-consumption. The film is direct, even-handed, and honest—not easy for a documentary. In interviews with Mardi Gras revelers, the bead distributor in New Orleans, the factory owner in China, the factory workers, and the parents of workers, Redmon’s questions are simple and straightforward, free of angry invective. He visits the bead factory as an anthropoligist or, at most, as a cultural ambassador, not as an investigative reporter, and that’s why Mardi Gras: Made in Chnia is the best documentary I’ve seen this year. Mardi Gras participants are asked “Do you know where the beads come from?”, and factory workers are asked, “Do you know where the beads end up?”, and it’s clear that neither side is fully aware of the other’s existence. The factory workers are incurious about who would want to buy “these ugly beads.” Sadly, the Chinese workers don’t venture to characterize the thousands of purple necklace and plastic penis consumers, while the Mardi Gras revellers are either ignorant of the beads’ origin, ambivalent and momentarily embarrassed about their role as consumers, or too drunk to care. A typical response: “Please don’t make me think about it—I’m on vacation!”

The Chinese workers, 95% of them teenage girls, are paid around $1.50 for 12-18 hour days in the factory. They live at the factory, and are only allowed to leave on Sundays (if their day off happens to fall on a Sunday) and holidays. The factory owner proudly explains his labor policies: every worker has a Sisyphean production quota, there is a 5% penalty for not meeting your quota, and an “up to 10%” bonus for going over your quota. One worker’s stated maximum output is 100 items per day, but her quota is 200, so she gets penalized every day. Penalties are a big part of what keeps the workers in line: a day’s pay is deducted for talking at work, a week for any machine failure under your watch, and a month if you’re caught hanging out with the opposite sex in the evening. The factory conditions are clearly dangerous, and much of the loud, aging machinery is operated around the clock. But it’s not entirely clear from the film whether these workers are unhappy at the long hours and repetitive work, angered by the low pay, or simply relieved to have a job “on the outside.” The girls are without much hope (“hope is irrelevant for me,” says one, who is saving money so that her little brother may go to school). Despite their working conditions, their spirits are high and they do not seem overtly angry or bitter.

After interviewing the producers and consumers, Redmon decides to do a cultural exchange: he makes photographs of Mardi Gras partiers and shows them to highly amused factory workers (“She’s showing her boobs!”). They recognize the cultural differences: “We would never think to do anything so embarrassing. Those Americans are crazy!” Redmon again returns to New Orleans and shows his footage from China in the streets during Mardi Gras. People are shocked about the wages and working conditions, others brush it off with blind acceptance. “It doesn’t matter—it’s all relative. In China, $1.50 is probably a great wage,” says one vacationing MBA student. No boycott was announced—no necklaces were removed in self-disgust. But I can say with certainty that I’ll never show my tits at Mardi Gras again.

¹ Some are made into creepy folk art, and John Lawson makes gaudy-beautiful plastic bead mosaics.

This weekend, Karl and I went to the Boston Independent Film Festival. Here’s a quick review of the first two movies we saw. More to come!

Don Gorske: Mac Daddy / 2005 / 16 minutes
In a Nutshell: A Portrait of Elizabeth Tashjian / 2005 / 80 minutes

The first movie we saw was about Wisconson-based obsessive Big Mac eater Don Gorske. It’s a short profile of Gorske, who ate his 20,000th Big Mac this year. He eats nothing for breakfast, nothing for lunch, then stops by McDonalds and picks up between 1 and 4 Big Macs for dinner. Every day. For the past 25 years. The director of this short saw him featured in Super Size Me last year, and she thought he could carry a short film on his own.

Gorske shows us his “McDonalds Museum,” which occupies a spare bedroom and most of the attic in his house. He has Ronald’s clown shoes, Big Mac containers from 1975, and hundreds of photos of himself in front of hundreds of McDonalds restaurants. He has all kinds of awards and newspaper clippings, including a Guinness Book of World Records entry. “Most of the people in this book [Guinness] are obsessive-compulsive,” he says, “so I guess I fit right in.” He says people call him John Lennon, because he has a Wisconsin version of Lennon’s hair and glasses, but he reminded me more of Forrest Gump.

And he reminded me that anyone could get famous by doing something, anything, with obsesive consistency. Etch another vote into the stone for long term projects, no matter how mundane.

From the McDonalds Museum, we go east to Connecticut, to the now-defunct Nut Museum in Old Lyme. Elizabeth Tashjian, now ninety-three, started the museum wheh she was in her fifties, and for thirty-odd years it was the outlet for her art projects. She researched nuts, painted nuts and painted paintings of nuts, wrote songs about nuts, collected nuts, and became an icon for nuts, appearing on many national TV shows and “weird news” briefs through the decades. Tashjian lived with her mother until she died (Tashjian was in her forties), then lived alone and penniless, but quite happy, in her mother’s mansion until recently. She was the sole curator, director, and historian of the Nut Museum, and her self-proclaimed title is Nut Culturist. On a visit to the museum, the camera shows that Tashjian is truly the main event: she’s as much a performance artist as a visual artist. She is very intelligent, charismatic, and entertaining. I was reminded of Little Edie in Grey Gardens. Tashjian is not as messy or flippant as Little Edie, but she radiates the same sort of creativity, and she represents a past generation of New England intellectual wealth that is now nearly extinct.

In 2002, Tashjian was found unconscious by a state social worker. She went into a coma. The state emptied her house and put it on the market (to cover back taxes), and her life’s work was donated to Connecticut College’s art department. To everyone’s surprise, she recovered a month later, and she was devestated by the news. She now lives in a nursing home and has been considered incapable of managing her own affiars. Her house was sold and remodeled, her heirloom nut trees torn down, and her chances of moving back to Old Lyme are all but gone. She has regained hope in her work, however, and she continues to persue her obsession. A retrospective of her work was held last year at Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, CT, and, of course, this docmentary premiered in February. It’s a touching story, well presented. It raises questions about how excentric artists fit, or don’t fit, into rural communities. It shows a sad reality that many older women without any family support face. But it’s also creatively inspiring: to see someone live such a free and rich life with so little, with so much energy. And she came into her prime after 50.

Related articles:
Big Mac fan eats 2 a day and stays slim
Wikipedia: Don Gorske
Resource Library Magazine: The Nut Museum: Visionary Art of Elizabeth Tashjian
The New Yorker: The Nut Lady Returns

In 2002, New York-based photographer Zana Brinski started a class called Kids with Cameras to teach the children of Calcutta’s red light district how to photograph and what constitutes an engaging image. She sent the kids out into the streets with cameras. She taught them to edit with their hearts. She taught the joy of making art and the practice of focus in chaotic urban back-alleys. The result of her work is a series of beautiful photos made by the children, a documentary film (Born Into Brothels), and a chance at a boarding school education for a handful of kids who would otherwise have no choices.
The film itself alternates between profiles of each student and glimpses of their lives, slideshows of their work backed by tabla music, scenes from the classroom, and the story of Brinski’s struggle to find schools for the children. “I know about what my mom does for work,” says one of the girls at the brothel, “and I don’t want to do it.” With mothers beaten and murdered by pimps, fathers drugged up and useless, and bitter grandmothers blasting them with demands and insults, these children have learned 1,000 lessons of suffering by the age of twelve. But their eyes filled with the hopes and curiosities of childhood. With no real path in front of them, they don’t have feelings of entitlement or inflated expectations of what life has to offer. Their photographs show a stark freedom, and they are stunning because of the colorful world around the children, the comfort they have with their subjects, and their natural desire to work hard. The kids soak up everything they can learn from Brinski; they apply themselves fully. And their spirit of caring and kindness in an uncaring and unkind environment is totally refreshing.
In locating schools for the children, Brinski faces a struggle against time, social stigmas, and often the children’s families. At the cusp of adolescence, facing increased pressure from their parents to make money for the family, you get a sense that things are about to get a lot worse for these children: they’ll be out on the line in less than a year, or dealing drugs. Brinski searches for months before finding a school that will accept children of sex workers. Once she does, she must push through webs of red tape, dig up birth certificates and ration cards, drag everyone to the clinic for HIV tests, stand in the passport lines for eight hours. But as she battles Indian bureaucracy and discrimination for the children, she leverages her American connections to build a non-profit to support their education. She finds galleries in India and New York for their photography, she gets their work into a Sotheby’s auction, and she wins a scholarship for one of the most talented students.
The parents—many of whom desire an education for their children—struggle to make ends meet on a daily basis and have neither time nor contacts to devote to this task. So Brinski’s footwork is ultimately her biggest contribution to the kids’ lives. Of the eight children, three are now in boarding schools. But the success of Born Into Brothels puts Brinski’s organization on the map. She now has the means to help more children. The Kids With Cameras School of Leadership and the Arts is scheduled to open its doors in Calcutta’s red light district next fall.

James Cameron: the new Jacques Cousteau.

This movie is the ride of the year! Michael Mann has outdone himself. He understands the whole formula of an action movie, yet it doesn’t feel formulaic. But all the elements are there: he has deep characters. He creates a continuum of bad guys, most of whom you can feel some sort of sympathy for. He has beautiful cinematography and colors and music, intensifying that grit and heat of LA—the ugly starkness of it, the anonymity of the big city. He has the dynamics worked out. This is not just a wall-to-wall blood and guts movie. There are long discussions, lots of strategy, lots of contemplation and character development as suspension builds, and a few violent outbursts here and there as it releases. It’s excellent. Go see it.

Just watched Francois Truffaut’s 1959 directorial debut, The 400 Blows.. wow, what an excellent movie. I usually don’t go in for B&W films, but Truffaut delivers in a big way. The 400 Blows is the story of Antoine Doinel, a mischevious kid growing up in 1950s Paris whose petty crimes get him into all kinds of trouble with his parents, his teachers, and eventually the law. I think Antoine is portrayed as a victim of circumstance, always assumed to be guilty and unable to defend himself properly. Toward the end of the film, he finally speaks frankly with a psychiatrist about what he’s done— of course he’s just exploring the world and pushing a few boundaries, but you see that he rarely (or never) intends to do harm. The movie is very well put together and engaging even for my modern-day taste. It conveys something so classic, so pure and simple about every day ife in 1950s Paris. Was life really like that back then, or is Truffaut romanticising it a bit? Aside from being a good story, could this be looked back on as a historical snapshot of the times? Having not been alive at the time I suppose I can’t say whether it’s accurate. But it looks nice.

I watched the Criterion version of In The Mood For Love over the weekend.

Words can’t really describe this movie, nor can the graphic above, taken from the movie’s not-so-great web site, which also won’t give you any idea how beautiful and sensual this movie is.

The textures throughout this movie are what put it beyond description. I think director Wong Kar-Wai and his DP have an amazing sense of color and composition; every shot looks like a painting to me. I kept wanting to reach out and touch the sets, they were so well lit and decorated with such lush textures. The colors are beautifully saturated throughout, but by no means overbearing. A spot of bright color here and there mostly, but in key scenes when the emotions run high, the whole screen is soaked in deep red. There’s a lot of sexuality in this movie, even though there are no traditional sex scenes, or even any kissing that I can remember.

Oh, and did I mention the music? The running musical theme is a simple violin line that is so nostalgic and classic with a Chinese twist. It is central to the vibe of this movie. Very nice.

The main characters, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, hardly touch each other as their love grows. There are frequent lingering moments: someone staring out the window longingly or smoking a cigarette. I think of these as the main characters’ attempts at escape, if only mentally. They’re wanting to make a different reality come true, a reality in which they can be together. The success is limited… so there’s a real sense of restraint to this movie that’s key. You see it in their clothes (all very fitted), in their mannerisms, and in their conversation. Yet it’s very relaxed in its pace. An interesting combination.

The patterns in this movie are SO GREAT. Everywhere: the wallpaper, the dresses, the ties. End papers. They remind me of The Royal Tenenbaums and Amelie.

I need to re-read my copy of Understanding Movies so I can write a real, coherent movie review (a valuable skill!)