Backyard (1984) – directed by Ross McElwee, starring Ross McElwee and Dr. Ross McElwee

(I had the south on my brain – I felt like sitting in the south, outside, for a bit. I thought of Ross McElwee, who made the pretty great “Sherman’s March”. I poked around the library and found another movie of his whose title also refers to a specific location in the south, “Backyard”. )

Ross McElwee, returning from a northern college, is back at the family home in Charlotte, North Carolina. He has brought his moving picture camera with him.

The movie begins with a still picture of the Ross McElwee, who is the director of “Backyard”, and his father, Dr. Ross McElwee. The doctor is wearing a pale southern suit and has graying hair. Ross is wearing running shoes and has a beard. They look good and kind of like the same white man playing two very different parts. Ross is holding his camera in the picture. He’s holding it like some people, in still pictures, hold a fish or a gun or a baby – like an important piece of information. The two men are, ever so slightly, leaning away from each other.

Over the still image, Ross tells us that his father disapproves of his career path - a career path that involves that moving image camera. I think about the doctor sending his son off to college in the north and then the son returns with a camera - a camera that is, for the most part, pointed directly at the doctor’s face. It is hard to match up values sometimes.

After the still photos, we move in real time around the house, the backyard, the country club, the hospital. Ross films himself and other people who work or reside around these places. There are banal activities, racism, celebrations, rides on golf carts and work. There is not much talking or explaining so we mostly get to know people by what they do.

The doctor goes to work a lot. At work, he cuts into people’s bodies and fixes their organs. It is hard to argue against the value of that career. When the doctor comes home, he sees his son sitting in a chair filming his backyard.

There is the African American couple, the Staffords. Lucille Stafford cooks and cleans for the McElwees and Melvin Stafford takes care out their backyard. We see them working more than the doctor works since “the backyard” is where they work. The Staffords seem more comfortable being filmed that the young white people who periodically show up in he frame, whose working lives are not shown but who often request sandwiches. I think they are students.

There is a neighbour seated on a chair in a thicket behind a fence. He is wearing a suit. His self-appointed job is to keep himself hidden and his eyes on a house in the distance. He is anticipating a mid-day break-in. There have been a few break-ins around the affluent neighborhood in the backyard and he thinks he might catch the criminals if he waits. His job is the one that, technically, most resembles Ross’s job.

It is not an easy day in the south, but it is intimate and complicated and quiet and interesting. All of these good things were established right away in the first moving image scene of the movie. In this scene, Ross films himself, alone, playing the family piano. The piano is out of tune and Ross plays it kind of badly. It is not like he has his tongue sticking while he tries to make an ugly face - it is him trying to be good and failing. It's pleasurable and even strangely soothing to watch him play with sincerity and mistakes and without frustration. It is not an apologetic scene - just one with a lot of information about Ross and maybe of what is to follow. If there is bad behavior or human mistakes caught with his moving picture camera, it will not be too surprising if some of them are his.

Robin Hood (2010) - directed by Ridley Scott, starring Russell Crowe

(My friend Lauren Bride invited me to the movies. She suggested “Robin Hood” or “Babies.” We decided on “Robin Hood” because it was summertime. At the theatre, when I saw Russell Crowe’s head on the poster, I was a little disappointed. He always plays the mightiest of virtuous white men, sort of like Doris Day but not as funny and more prone to unwanted and overly serious advice giving. I might have picked “Babies” had I known. How could such a can’t-play-anything-but-a-virtuous-man play Robin Hood? I also somehow made the mistake of picturing the time period being 1990s, and the stage, Hollywood - the time of Kevin Costner and well-laundered cloaks. So I was a little startled when the movie opened in the deep past. I think probably no one else was startled. Throughout the movie, Lauren and I whispered jokes to each other. When we walked home, we didn’t mention the movie. We talked about other things.)

I had no thoughts about this movie – other than an attempt at historical accuracy and a grittier aesthetic doesn't add much to this big story that keeps collectively getting better (this movie excepted) 600 years after its origin. Also, it's a war movie (?) starring a virtuous and victorious Russell Crowe (?).

But a month later, on an airplane, after reading an article on perceptual illusions, I fell asleep and had a dream that David Foster Wallace and Russell Crowe were on a panel together. Russell Crowe had his Robin Hood outfit on and his hat in his hands. He looked nervous. He had lost some weight and was finally sweating in all the wrong places. He kept looking at David Foster Wallace, and then, back at the audience. David Foster Wallace was relaxed and in jeans, looking out into the seated crowd. Neither of them were talking. The less they talked, the more nervous Russell Crowe got. Russell Crowe wanted to defend himself, to tell people he was a virtuous and good man, but no one was asking any questions. We all just sat there. It was different from that time I saw Russell Crowe on Oprah, when he gave her a book for her Oprah’s book club, “The Magus”.

If you really want to steal from the rich and give to the poor, it's good to remember that your trial probably won’t come for a long time - if ever. You'll have to be patient with being misunderstood, even by people you love. You may be glorified for the wrong reasons and disrespected at all the right parties. Understanding someone can take a very long time.

But it can be interesting to be misunderstood, and being misunderstood lets you be more flexible. Flexibility is important if you want to be an effective element in the big story rather than the respected author of your own story. It can be really fun to see how much one can affect the big story, becoming any character that proves most useful. And fun to observe what story we all begin to understand collectively.

When I woke up from my David Foster Wallace / Russell Crowe dream, there were a lot of people in line for the airplane washroom in the back and no one in line for the one in first class. A stewardess sent me back when I attempted to go to the one in first class, rolling her eyes at this move that had been tried a million times before. Sometimes it's harder to change the big story than to be a hero of your own making.

The Elephant in the Living Room (2010) - by Michael Webber, starring Terry Brumfield and Tim Harrison

(The closest cinema to where I'm staying in San Francisco is called Roxie Theater. Roxie Theater was playing a movie I hadn't heard of: "The Elephant in the Living Room." I looked around but it seemed like all the other nearby cinemas were playing movies for kids. I thought: maybe June is when kids watch movies. So I went around the corner and bought a ticket. It was being presented by the United Film Festival as part of their "Animal Rights" program. The director of the festival and the director of “The Elephant in the Living Room” sat down in the narrow line of blue seats with the audience when the movie began. )

The narrative of "The Elephant in the Living Room" is sort of: “There is a lion in my backyard - and it is getting bigger!” It focuses on people who keep animals like pythons and tigers in their homes, and what happens when the pythons and tigers grow larger than the people. Sometimes the people dump the animals in the suburban wilds. Sometimes they keep them.

We mostly see Ohio. We mostly look at two characters: The Man with a lion, and The Officer from the state. The Man, a big soft spoken one who looks a bit like his lion, was given the baby lion when he had a broken back and depression. He says the love helped him to survive. But then the baby lion grew up and became a big lion in a small cage. And then they were stuck there, the lion in the cage and The Man who made the cage.

The Officer, with the mustache and the baseball cap, is sincerely hoping to untangle the love/cage problem for the lion and The Man - and for Ohio. He is brave and kind and he is good at his job. He really wants to do the right thing. He catches cougars found in peoples' backyards. He tries to find better places for them. He buys the most poisonous snake at the Underground Snake Convention so that no one else buys it. But snakes make a lot of babies and he cannot buy all of them. The Officer is exhausted. Cases like these have just been increasing every year since the mid 90s and he doesn't know why. (My theory - that monkey on "Friends" is to blame).

The Officer doesn't see an end to the problem. The few exotic animal santuaries in America are mostly over capacity. He is starting to question his role and what side he is on. We see a pleasing shock in his eyes when a new idea occurs to him - maybe, he thinks, he should not try to capture the dangerous animals in the suburban wilds. Maybe he should let them run free.

I thought of the movie The Matrix Reloaded (Matrix #2) - the humans being kept in cages by computers and the growing number of humans who escape, then are hunted down by the computers. I had recently picked it out of a sale bin at Walgreens. The bin was under a helium balloon that said “Papa Navedaz!"

The Matrix2 doesn't work so well. I think it is because everything started off with too much value. When everything has equal value, it's hard to know what to focus on. Like, here are the proper names in the movie: The One, The Architect, The Key-maker, Zion, Trinity, Morpheus, Persephone, The Oracle. That is a lot of value! Midway through, I had a real longing for some garbage – or at least a mortal. I wanted The Farter, The Fuck up, The Mistake, The Girl Who Couldn’t Fly.

You have to be a real magician to take only value and double it. Sometimes it is easier to make a movie that begins with lowlier proper nouns and then move them towards value. "The Elephant in the Living Room" starts in the middle of nowhere and moves towards value. Apart from some seriously problematic music choices, the movie is funny and sweet and occasionally brushes against epic. It is really interesting to see men working together to solve the old love/cage problem as though it is a new problem. Since we are only starting from Ohio and not from the olden times, it looks kind of like a problem that men have only just discovered. It is as though, from this perspective, we are watching a mass male entry into the nurturing arts and its complications. They are beginning with snakes and tarantulas. It's a hard-won pleasure to catch a glimpse of The Man's heart of gold or see that The Officer may in fact be "The One". And it is a surprise when we can see the vague but convincing outlines of a possible apocalyptic scenario (where these animals first take over the suburban wilds and then, all of America) - originating in Ohio! At least more surprising than seeing one originate in place called Zion.

For a good apocalyptic movie scenario, you really need at least a few elements without so much consistent value . The good ones are like a magnifying glass on the thriving life, boredom and absurdity of a regular day. To our delight or pain, we watch as things randomly, and with great speed, move in and out of meaning, value and existence. It is like a bird lands on your shoulder just as the convenience store goes up in flames - you don't know what the fuck is going on, but you know something is happening. Our human brains lag behind the action, working hard to make meaning from the chaos. It is what we do best.

Whatever Works (2009) - written & directed by Woody Allen, starring Larry David

(I had run out of Woody Allen movies to watch. As far as I could see, there was one left, there on the video store shelf, “Whatever Works”. It didn't look good: the prematurely balding Larry David in a “what can you do?” shrug on the cover. Not a trace of pleasure on his face. I had vague memories that a pretty teenager-woman who looks off into outer space was also involved. All one can really think when contemplating the box without much information is, “Please, Woody Allen, please don’t let this movie be about how that man who has a facial expression kind of like yours ends up having sex with a late teenager even though he is initially unwilling.” This is not the kind of story that reliably gets better the more you tell it. The DVD case looked as desirable as a half smoked cigarette on the sidewalk. I picked it up. And when I walked home with it under my arm, confident of a little bit of pleasure, I thought - how bad could it be?)


One might put the Larry David doll next to Woody Allen doll on the shelf, if one was trying to clean up and organize one's collectibles – even though the Woody Allen doll was made with plastic and hand-sewn doll clothes in 1977 and the Larry David doll was made with rubber in 2009. But it turns out that if you put the Larry David man in a Woody Allen movie, it is very hard not to pay attention to their flaming differences.

As someone said - don’t judge the performer, judge the performance. But if I judge the Larry David performance in this Woody Allen movie, everyone loses. If I judge the performer, Larry David, then Larry David wins. Who knew? When Larry David is playing Woody Allen, he plays a physicist genius who is wise to (through his superior intellect) the meaninglessness of the human condition - as though, in the 21st century, only a genius (and a physicist??) could entertain a vision of this nature. The meaninglessness that LD as WA has to contend with is epic and profound. He also fights with imbeciles, homophobes and religious fundamentalists. He does his best to cope.

The character's stance as enlightened-nihilist-filled-with-despair seems like it's from another time, like, another time from a long time ago, especially in forced comparison to the Larry David who created Seinfield and Curb Your Enthusiasm, a man who gleefully pours sugar on his meaningless breakfast cereal and rubs his hands together with delight before digging in. When LD is the LD character on Curb Your Enthusiasm, he fights with children, kindly doctors and Ted Danson – all of whom are a little bit smarter and more morally developed than old LD. It is the others who do their best to cope with him while he dances to escape their frustrated clutches and exasperated glares. LD as LD passionately takes up positions on matters of the pettiest nature. His joy in this endeavor cannot be hidden and his pleasure at playing the villain is transparent. Seeing Larry David play the Woody Allen character reminds one that the Woody Allen character is always the hero, no matter how flawed.

Man-impressions aside, the most damning problem regards the old fourth wall. In the opening sequence the LD as WA points out the camera to his dumber-than-him friends and talks about the viewers at home watching them. Of course, no one else can see the camera except for this genius. Now, playing the (now simple) breaking-the-fourth-wall game with LD can make a director look pretty silly. Maybe WA talked directly to the camera while inside a fictional narrative while LD was in diapers (or at least.. um, in business school) but somewhere around 2009, on the set of Curb Your Enthusiasm, near the end of the season, LD as LD strolled past the forth wall and the fifth while whistling a bad tune and waving at Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol didn't wave back. Larry David kept smiling.

Maybe if LD walked around talking about what a genius he was, he wouldn’t have run into a problem like being in this movie and making Woody Allen look bad.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) - directed by Tony Richardson, based on a story by Alan Sillitoe

( I was thinking recently about people's different motivations for working so hard at what they do. I suddenly wanted to watch a sports movie. I asked my boyfriend’s mother, Susan Glouberman - a psychoanalyst who shares some of my movie tastes, if "Chariots of Fire" was worth seeing. She said no, but that "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" might be worth seeing. Most things “worth seeing” fall out of my mind pretty quickly but the words "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" proved to pulse in the brain like a Jenny Holzer truism repeating across Times Square - right up until I landed at the video store. I asked the video store employees if they had it. I explained that I didn’t know what kind of movie it was, who made it, or in what country, so I wasn’t sure where to look. They said it was a “Kitchen Sink drama”. And I said, oh, ok. I immediately pictured someone eating their dinner over the kitchen sink because life is urgent and not easy and maybe because there is no kitchen table - but that there is value in "drama". These thoughts took me to the U.K. before I knew that we were there. )


Angry boy's working class father dies. His mother’s boyfriend moves in shortly after. The family receives a $500 pension from father’s no-good employer. The mother is briefly lifted from her own anger and hardship and buys new things for everyone. The angry boy secretly burns his share of the money out of loyalty?anger?disgust?. He engages in petty theft as a leisure activity and, later, he steals money from a bakery. He is caught and sent to a progressive boys' reform prison run by an upper class benevolent father figure. The angry boy shows some talent in long distance running. The benevolent father figure encourages the angry boy, tells the angry boy that maybe with the help of his talent and a little hard work, he could lift himself out of his current position in life. We are led to believe that the angry boy excels at running because of where he comes from - his genius has its origins in a family that has always had to run away from the people who run things.

The movie leads to the climax which is the beginning of a long distance race between the boys from the reform school and a group of private school boys. Right before the race, there is a pleasurable scene with the upper class jock kids on one side of a change room and the working class delinquents on the other. The upper class kids are polite and soft spoken, the working class kids rambunctious and charming. It is like seeing boys and girls meet for the first time on the dance floor after being separated by their different schools - charged and excited, filled with prejudice and curiosity.

As the race began, I wondered if the angry boy would win or lose. I thought about what needed to happen for the movie and it wasn't obvious to me. Because it is a long distance race, there is plenty of time before we know what makes this movie "worth seeing". What happens with this time is stylistically similar to the potential-suicide scene in "It’s a Wonderful Life" when Jimmy Stewart is standing on the bridge in the snow, trying to decide if he should kill himself or not. They both involve collaged bits of dialogue, from the first parts of the movies, over a man's pained face.

Some of this collaged movie-memory-dialogue in "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" slows the angry boy down - some of it make him race ahead, leading the pack. You start to understand that it is not as though these movie-memory-dialogues are encouraging or discouraging - it is that, like Jimmy Stewart, he is making a decision. He is deciding if he should win or not. When we see this, we also remember how hard the decision is.

Sometimes, it is not good to win because "winning" implies you are partaking in someone else's game. Sometimes it is hard to leave the people you know behind and it is also hard to admit value to things that have been denied to you in the "loser" phase. Sometimes you are not fooled by the side of winning and its promised rewards, even while you are not fooled by the downsides of the world you are coming from. Sometimes it is really hard to win, even if you can.

Too bad for him, he has too much time to think.

Birdemic (2008) - written, directed and produced by James Nguyen

(My friend Amy C Lam sent me a link to a download of this movie. She was in The Netherlands when she sent it but I don’t know if that has anything to do with it. She said it was made with ten thousand dollars and was “all kinds of reality”. I watched about ten minutes on my computer, then downloaded it to my television where I watched the whole thing. I fast-forwarded through some of the initial driving scenes out of impatience. I fast-forwarded the Karaoke-esque dancing scene, and the making-out in their underwear scene out of discomfort. Once the digital and angry American eagles came, I didn’t fast-forward anything.)


Ok, so you only have ten thousand dollars and you’re going to make a movie. One way to go is the “Incredibly Resourceful and Innovative” route. Like, there’s Jean Cocteau’s "Orpheus" that employs a lot of Parisian eye trickery, the kind of no-money-lots-of-art special effects that convincingly show a lady from the "other side" walking out of a mirror (that's actually a pool) and Orpheus walking out of hell (hell being the film projection of an earlier take).

Another way to go is the “Think Big, Pay Very Little” method, acquiring absolutely all the things that a high budget movie has, but just have them be very low quality. If you go with this method, you might as well go all out and use one of the best movies of all time – like Hitchcock’s “The Birds” as a cinematic starting point (and point of comparison), and throw in a strong environmentalist message.

This is what that looks like:

There is a brown haired man. He is a bit stiff and can’t dance. We think maybe he is popular but not conceited, but for sure he doesn’t think only about sex like some men. He was in computer software developing, but then turned to sales. Today, he made his biggest sale. It was for one million dollars. He is feeling good. On the street he runs into a blond fashion model. They went to high school together but she doesn’t remember. She has to go – she is on her way to a fashion model audition. It looks like they’re in a really small town, so we wonder what kind of audition this is, but maybe they are in Los Angeles. She is a fashion model, but her mother would like her to have a back-up plan, like real-estate agent. The brunette and the blond go on a date. The date is like being at a wedding and listening to a small town fashion model and computer software salesman talk about what they want out of life. Sometimes we can see how interesting they are to each other because it is like the entire background is blurred out and the only sharp thing is them. The brunette goes back to work and thinks about how to do innovative green business. The brunette then goes home and buys solar panels for his house for nineteen thousand dollars. It turns out the blond’s best friend and the brunette’s best friend are also dating. No one is surprised by this, after all, it is a small world. They all go on a double date. For the double date they see “An Inconvenient Truth”. The best-friend couple have sex afterwards. They are always having sex. The brunette is introduced to the blond's mother. It is like we are at that wedding again. Then, there is another date, this one is out of town at the Art & Pumpkin Festival. It turns out that the brunette is not only interested in the blond’s looks and that the blond is not only interested in the brunette’s money. This is where we watch the man and the woman make out in their underpants.

After that happens, digital eagles start banging against their motel window. The blond and brunette wait there till it stops. Then they run to another motel room next to theirs where another man and woman stand. The tall man in this room happens to be wearing army fatigue pants and has a machine gun. The women smile friendly at each other. The brunette explains that they need help getting out of there cause the eagles are crazy and he can’t find his car keys. They all leave together in a van. After that, it gets interesting.

For example:
“I couldn’t handle fighting in Iraq anymore. Why can’t we just give peace a chance?”
“I have to go now, it sounds like a mountain lion is coming. You should go too”
“Are you saying global warming is causing the eagles to go crazy?” A: “I’m a scientist, I can’t speculate but.. (7 minute speech)…”.

I don’t know what was happening in the head of the person who made this. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be funny or if it’s supposed to be serious... or what. But besides my inability to comprehend the intentions of the director, and besides the fact that it’s kind of a horror movie, Birdemic somehow made me feel good. It’s also very relaxing, especially when the angry birds come. It’s a rare example of how the “Think Big, Pay Very Little” method can really make you contemplate why people make things. And that sometimes that method can even create meaning and give you a whole new kind of feeling.

The intentions of a director and the specific creative context of a movie's production have always been hard to puzzle out. And now, with the increasing accessibility of movie-making tools, the increasing plethora of moving images, and the ever multiplying moving-image-viewing-stations, it makes the "identifying a director's intentions and creative context game" a harder game to win. Seeing value or meaning in anything is sometimes rare – sometimes that is good enough.

If this movie was presented at a museum it should be looped on four different screens all playing at different stages of the movie. There, I think an audience would, for the most part, be drawn to contemplating the nature of what acting is, why people makes things, what normal is, what it means to be part of "reality", and the challenges and rewards of bringing politics into “entertainment”.

At Five in the Afternoon (2003) - written and directed by Samira Makhmalbaf

(I watched Samira Makhmalbaf’s third feature length movie at home recently on my breaking-down television. Samira Makhmalbaf’s first feature, “The Apple”, is one of my favourites. It's set in Iran and is about twin sisters who are physically let out of the locked gate of their home for the first time in their eleven years by a calm and persistent social worker. The girls roam around the neighbourhood together like delighted aliens. The father who had kept them behind the gate is shown simply as a religious man with a blind wife who was doing what he thought was best. “At Five in the Afternoon” also involves two female characters who live with a religious father figure. The father here is also simply doing what he thinks is best. He is an old man and the girls are women. The father, again, wants to protect them, but he is running out of locations - struggling to find a place for them all where “God still lives”. There is no gate – no house and the woman are not prisoners. They live as refugees moving from “ruins” to “ruins” with a horse drawn cart in a devastated Afghanistan. Like “The Apple”, it is an incredibly pleasurable movie.)

Apart from the chores of finding food, water and shelter, the main character Nogreh stands most frequently at a back doorway between a religious meeting place and a city street. She slips her sky blue burqa behind her head like a superhero cape and replaces her modest shoes with well worn high heels and heads off to a school she secretly attends with girls who have less strict fathers than hers. At her school, there are “elections” to see which girl should be “president”. Nogreh has entered the race. She spends a great deal of the movie asking others and herself how change can happen in her country, how a woman like her could become president. She wants to see the speeches that successful presidential candidates in other countries wrote – “the speeches that made people vote for them”. Her questions are searching and practical, she is starting from the beginning.

There is one scene where Nogreh descends down an outdoor staircase with her high heels, her sky blue cape and sun umbrella. Behind her are ruins where her father rests. She stops ten steps above a French soldier standing alone at the bottom of the ruins. Nogreh’s friend, Poet, bikes up and begins to act as translator. The French soldier is told by Poet that Nogreh is Afghanistan’s future president. The French soldier immediately brings his body to attention and salutes Nogreh with sincere respect.

I understand the soldier, I understand that if you are in a foreign country (or even in your own neighborhood), it is often hard to know what is what. It looks like the French solider is both prepared to understand this is a game and prepared to understand that this is true. How could he possibly know for sure? It is hard even for the girl, whose narrative this is, to know what is possible. But he responds with conviction and respect. The soldier and Nogreh have entered into a situation that is either a game or a new beginning - none of us are sure which.

When Shakespeare wrote "All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players” in 1599, theatrical stages were in fewer numbers and in more collectively agreed upon locations than presently. Though teasing with “reality”, it was clearly a metaphor.

In 2010, the world is literally very often a stage – the stage part comes in and out of focus in random locations all around the world with the help of tiny video cameras and big, cheap ones. It is now more likely to be true that the sand box we are sitting in or the war zone we are negotiating can literally turn into a stage before you know it.

Shakespeare’s line is still an effective metaphor because though the world is often a stage, it is not always. And though sometimes we are pretending, we are not always. We know both things are possible, at the same time or alternatively, and depending on where one is standing. We can see the metaphor and/or the literal, the play fighting and/or the war, the posturing and/or the effective stabs at action.

There are some great movie makers who are smart about these co-existing perspectives: Agnes Varda, Charlie Kaufman, Ben Stiller with “Tropic Thunder". But Samira Makhmalbaf knows better than anyone how to make art while the world's random and occasionally painfully real theatrical stages coming in and out of focus. She is a genius at saying tangible and concrete things that shift freely between "the stage" and "the reality" - and at knowing how true to life this looks now.

Even woven into the heart of Samira Makhmalbaf's narrative is the hopeful and searching question - could these poetic metaphors of empowerment also be true? Her main character, Nogreh, asks herself: Am I playing or is this real? The answer, of course, is "Yes".