Our Lady of Perpetual Hell

…That is how an early L.A. screening of Erik Nelson’s Dreams With Sharp Teeth was billed, and it is as good a description of what this film is as anything. There are few moments in this film when Ellison isn’t unruly. Hell, there are probably few moments in his life when he isn’t unruly.

Co-presented by Toronto After Dark, this film was at the top of my list of my what-to-see list when I was planning my schedule for Hot Docs this year.

I was introduced to Ellison’s work by Stephen King, in his non-fiction look at genre fiction in literature and film, Danse Macabre (1981)… pronounced “McBare” by those who’ve read it and if you are a fan of horror fiction and haven’t read it, WTF is going through that noggin of yours?! Here. That very book has played a major role in my life for reasons like the one I just cited–see pp. 242-247. In the early- to mid-80s I went through a major speculative fiction phase and Ellison’s work was a major part of it.

So I knew what to expect when I sat down last night to watch this portrait of the artist as an angry man. I knew to expect to be thrilled by this man’s mastery of the language (peppered with expletives more foul and frequent than even my own), both tickled and spurred by his rage against the various kinds of stupidity accepted by our society, and delighted by his confrontational fearlessness. I adore the mouthy little bastard!

That goiter was fucking nasty, though. If’n I’d been eating popcorn, it’d've put me off it. Pah!

Described by some critics as more hagiography than biography, Nelson’s portrait of Ellison is presented through the subject’s own words (not just conversations but also readings from his work) as well as those of friends, colleagues, and critics (see the list of thank-yous at the end of the review I linked to at the beginning of this post–that article is very good!). We see him at home–in the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars (curiously but accurately named) in the Santa Monica hills–and on the road for speaking engagements, yelling at drivers as he’s walking across the street, yelling at pedestrians as he’s driving down the street, at Pink’s, and always he is on on on and I am laughing laughing laughing–‘If you had to live with me 24/7, you’d put a gun in your mouth… or my mouth,’ he says.

And if it is too affectionate a portrayal of the subject, then so be it. I don’t blame Nelson. I mean, I wouldn’t wanna risk getting thrown down an elevator shaft, either.

Wednesday was full enough that I didn’t get a chance to do any writing between screenings. I had brunch at Future Bakery with an old friend and then we went to a screening of Second Skin. After that, we parted and I went on to The English Surgeon, The Black List, and then finished the night with Stranded, I’ve come from a plane that crashed in the mountains. Then, on Thursday, it was lunch with another friend–this time at St. Lawrence Market–then he went back to work and I went on to see Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?, Mechanical Love, and one of the films to which I have most been looking forward: Dreams With Sharp Teeth.

But it is late and I wanna go to bed, so just a little right now…

Second Skin, directed by Juan Carlos Piñeiro Escoriaza, is a look at a handful of M(assively)M(ultiplayer)O(online)R(role)P(playing)G(amers) and the role the games, themselves, play in their lives. The games featured are World of Warcraft and Everquest and, yes, I’ve heard of them but this is the first time I’ve ever clapped eyes on them. My experience in this realm began and ended with Pong.

It was a very familiar sensation that settled over me as the subjects began to explain how they felt about gaming and we saw the players sinking into their virtual world. It came as no surprise, then, when, later in the film, we were introduced to Liz Woolley–the founder of Online Gamers Anonymous–who was trying to help self-admitted game-addicted Dan, who has lost his job, his health, his home, and his friends. Liz blames her own son’s suicide on his gaming addiction and has set out to help others. Now, bear in mind that I have all kindsa trouble not with what she is trying to do but how she is trying to do it. So I wasn’t surprised to see her fail.

We are introduced to lots of couples who met via the community of online gamers. Folks who met virtually–as the characters they play in the games–before they met in the real world as their real selves. The relationships that are the focus of the film, however, don’t seem all that stable or strong to me because the individuals seem so emotionally immature. The cutting between the real people and their avatars is almost cruel in that you go from a handsome, swashbuckling hero in the game to a bespectacled nerd with a bad haircut, crooked teeth, and a cheesy goatee at the computer. I mean, we’re talkin’ living clichés, here!

Of course, what exactly constitutes their “real” selves is in question. Some of the gamers do believe that they are more their “real” selves online. To an outsider like me, that is extremely sad. But I realize that their perspective is very different from my own so what do I know? I mean, there seemed to be a lot of gamers in the audience and they reacted very positively to the film. I get the feeling we’re only getting part of the picture, though. I’m pretty sure there must be gamers who aren’t as loserish as these folks seemed to me to be–people who are able to function as responsible adults in the real world and still find time to devote to this hobby.

Believe the coincidence or not, but I followed the film about folks intentionally falling from absurd heights to someone trying not to fall from absurd heights.

Man on Wire is James Marsh’s fabulous portrait of Philippe Petit’s infamous 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers. Crime? Performance art? Stunt? Coup? All of the above?

Marsh combines vintage footage (much of which has never been seen before–in fact, he was the one who had it developed for the first time) and stills with re-creations and present-day interviews with the principals to tell a remarkable tale from a more innocent time. Juggling these different techniques for telling the story, he has as deft a hand with film as Petit has with the high-wire (and juggling and sleight of hand). And both men are expert storytellers. At last, at this year’s festival, I have finally run across a filmmaker who is doing something interesting with the documentary form. Films like this one are why I’m here.

The film tells the story from the moment the idea of the WTC wire-walk struck Petit through the plotting of how to do it and the training he did to prepare for it to the actual carrying out of the plan and its aftermath. Late in the film, someone remarks that an illegal walk like this one could never happen today–‘You would be shot!’–and I must say that at the beginning of the film, when we see re-creations of the preparation for the illegal ‘coup’ (as they called it), that thought had occurred to me, too, as I watched a bow and arrow set smuggled into the towers inside an architect’s cardboard tube and the wires get packed in a big wooden box that was put into a wheeled garbage container that the imposters (dressed as WTC employees and construction workers) took, unquestioned, into the guts of the towers. This just couldn’t happen anymore. That it happened at the WTC makes that fact even more pointed, of course. Marsh may not mention the ultimate fate of the towers in his film, but the subtext of that is there–whether he wants it or not.

This film is deeply intelligent and entertaining, it is astounding and funny, daring and beautiful, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Well, after much frustration, I have finally found a suitable nesting place where I can sit down with a coffee (and a nosh) and get free wireless access. Not sure why that’s harder to find in Tronna than it is in Sarnia. Go figger. Anyhow, my li’l EEEPC and I are sitting in the Aroma Espresso Bar, just next door to the Bloor Cinema, waiting for the box office to open so I can pick up my tix for two of tonight’s screenings, and I thought I could tell you a bit about the film I just saw this afternoon.

It’s called 20 Seconds of Joy, and it’s about Norwegian BASE jumper Karina Hollekim. Directed by Swede Jens Hoffmann, the film covers about five years of Karina’s life as an extreme athlete (she is also into freeskiing and skydiving but the focus of the film is her BASE jumping).

The film follows the charismatic and beautiful and complicated Karina all over the world, and, as you might imagine, the cinematography is breathtaking. We peer over the edges of fjords and mesas along with the folks who are bound and determined to throw themselves off, and if you have any hint of vertigo, you should probably skip this one. Hoffman typically set up about five cameras to capture each jump–including a helmet-mounted camera. It is spectacular and I am so happy I was able to see it on a big screen.

Hoffman talks not only with Karina and her fellow jumpers but also her family and friends. Most express how difficult to deal with her jumping is for them. She is mostly unconcerned about that and, luckily for her, they do seem to understand. There is discussion about Karina’s childhood—made difficult by a car accident which put her mom into a coma. Once she recovered from the coma, her mom had no short-term memory, and Karina found herself—at a young age—in the position of being the caretaker rather than the child. So she grew up fast and she grew up strong, and she constantly set challenges for herself. BASE jumping is a way of putting life’s challenges into perspective, I guess… I mean, if you can corral your fear of your own death and hurl yourself into the abyss off a thousand-metre cliff, then I guess losing a job or facing financial difficulties isn’t all that scary, y’know? Seems a bit extreme to me, but, hey, we’ve all got our own ways of dealing with life, I guess.

There is a turning point in the film which, Hoffman told us at the “long haul” panel on Saturday, came right at the end of the scheduled shoot. He decided to keep shooting, though, because he didn’t want that event as the end of the film. Wise choice.

See it on the big screen if you can!

“Is it still cheating if everyone’s doing it?”, the tagline for Chris Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster asks. Bell, despite being against using steroids himself, appears to think it isn’t. The thought that kept running through my mind as I watched his film was, “Boy, somebody around here sure has watched a lotta Michael Moore films!” And, honestly, I enjoyed Bell’s film as much as I enjoy most Moore films, so it’s not necessarily a knock against him. It is, then, a first-person documentary that uses wit and irony to deliver its message–which is that steroid use amongst pro athletes is rampant, has been going on for years, has negatively affected only a tiny percentage of users, and has no proven longterm health effects. Like Moore, his opinion is made pretty clear. His thesis is that steroid use is the American thang to do–with “win at all costs” being the way he believes Americans feel. He manages to find some less-than-stellar representatives for the other side of the argument (like the amazingly clueless California Rep. Henry Waxman, who is one leading the anti-roid charge but knows less about the subject than his unseen offscreen assistant does) but–that said–he does also let his steroid-using brothers (nick’d “Mad Dog” and “Smelly”) stand as representatives of those who are pro-roid even though the Bell boys are not necessarily positive role models (nor are many of the other pro athletes he looks at). And it all revolves around him. Very moorish. Still, it’s quite entertaining and the crowd loved it. As an aside, after I’d picked up my ticket for the screening and got in line to get into the Bloor Cinema, I noticed, beside me and off to the side of the lineup, a very familiar-looking face. Ben Johnson. (Briefly) The World’s Fastest Man. I decided against asking him for advice on how I could improve my own plodding running pace.

Cynthia Lester’s My Mother’s Garden feels like a companion piece to last year’s 7 Dumpsters and a Corpse, made with considerably less charm and wit. Like that film and Bell’s, it is also a first-person documentary but egregiously so. It is meant to be a portrait of her mother, who suffers from a hoarding disorder that means her bungalow in L.A. has so much stuff (read: garbage) in it that you have to climb in through a window and there is no floor to walk on inside–you walk on the piles of garbage that appear to be at least a couple feet deep in places. There are rats–living and dead. Old toys, clothes she bought at garage sales, rotten food. It is appalling, yes. In fact, action has to be taken because her long-suffering neighbours have finally called the city. So Eugenia Lester’s four children–who lived with their mother’s eccentricities when they were growing up and who each bear the psychological scars–return to their childhood home to start the spadework to dung the place out so that their mother isn’t evicted. What I don’t like about this film is Cynthia’s habit of training her hand-held camera on herself. I was put off by it, frankly. Her mother’s condition is difficult to witness and the inability to get treatment for her is heartbreaking, and her daughter’s reaction to the events of the film could better be delivered, I think, in voiceover (if necessary at all… which is debatable). I also think she is grasping too far for an explanation for her mother’s condition–blaming consumer-driven society, at least in part, for her mother’s disorder. I don’t buy that. So to speak.

Now, I don’t walk out of films very often, but an hour or so into the midnight screening of Alison Murray’s Carny, I gave up and, clutching my jacket and bag to my chest, slunk out the door. I wasn’t the first to leave. You’d think that if you were going to make a documentary about travelling carnival workers, you’d manage to find a few actually interesting characters to focus on.

Okay, it was a full day of film on Sunday, starting with a discussion panel and followed by three screenings.

The panel–at my old stomping grounds of Innis Town Hall (where I fell in love with film in first year university)–was about “long haul” documentaries. Those are the docs that take years to make. No particularly surprising insights there, except that the tendency seems to be for filmmakers who are this invested in their stories to want to keep shooting until there is a “happy ending”. Which ain’t always possible. I was hoping to hear about what it was like to try to maintain interest in their subject for so long, how greatly (or little) it ran roughshod over the rest of their lives during the extended shoot/edit, but, aside from the financial impact that self-financing such an enterprise can wreak on a filmmaker’s family, there wasn’t much said about that.

My first screening of the day was my second choice for that timeslot. I’d decided I couldn’t get all the way from the Royal to the Cumberland in time to see Junior, so Three Miles North of Molkom hadda be sacrificed and I went to see Her Name is Sabine at the Bader instead. (Naturally, the guy I ended up in line behind at the Junior screening… had just come from Three Miles North of Molkom!! [insert eyeball roll here] Anyhow, I ended up at French filmmaker Sandrine Bonnaire’s beautiful and heartbreaking portrait of her little sister Sabine, instead: Her Name is Sabine.

Sabine, we are told (and we see in videos shot during her childhood) has always been unusual. When she was a child, her parents never knew what, exactly, was the cause of her troubled grasp of reality. It isn’t until the end of Sandrine’s film that we learn that her sister was eventually (in her late 30s) diagnosed as psychoinfantile with autistic behaviour. The film introduces us to Sabine at approximately age 37, where she is living in a private hospice that cares for special needs clients in western France. Her behaviour is startling–moments of clarity interspersed with trance-like periods, an inability to concentrate on anything for more than a brief time, and a constant desire to lie down and do nothing but stare blankly. When sister Sandrine cuts to videos shot on holidays when Sabine and her siblings where younger, we see Sabine–while still noticeably outre–laughing and interacting and communicating in a way that makes her present state even more frightening. She had been cared for by her mother for years, until her sisters all moved away from home and a brother died and she started to act out. She was no longer getting the attention that she once had, when her siblings were around. A little bit of violence and contrariness at first, and then, when it began to be directed at her mother, the family had to do something. She was hospitalized for 5 years and, when she was released, she was a mere shadow of the person her family had known. She went from periods of almost catatonic behaviour to unbidden screaming and biting and hitting and then back again. Now, whether this devolution was a natural progression (if that’s the right word to use) of her (as yet undiagnosed) condition or whether it was a result of her hospitalization or the massive amounts of drugs she was on, it is hard to say. No decision about that is made by her sister Sandrine’s film. But we are left with Sandrine taking Sabine under her care again. The emotional climax of the film (at least for me) is when Sandrine shows Sabine a dvd she has created from video footage she shot on their vacation in NYC when Sabine was just a teen. Sabine sits on the couch, watching herself 20 years younger–interacting, conversing, enjoying herself, behaving practically the same as any other teen in her position might–and present-day Sabine bursts into tears (as do I). I don’t know if she is crying because some part of her understands what she once was/once had and what’s she’s lost, but that is (obviously) how I read the scene. It is a remarkably beautiful portrait by her sister in directorial debut.

Junior, a film by Montreal filmmakers Isabelle Lavigne and Stéphane Thibault, focuses on four Quebec Major Junior Hockey League players over the course of a season. What’s interesting about the film is that there is no on-ice footage. We don’t actually see any hockey. We just see the boys’ lives off the ice. And how 99% revolves around that one little bit we don’t see. The pressure on these kids (aged 16-20) is unworldly, and they are faced with making decisions that could make an adult shiver. I mean, would you want to be given 5 minutes to make a life-altering decision when you were a teenager? The burden of expectations (their coaches’, their agents’, their teammates’, their families’, their own) weigh heavily on their (occasionally dislocated) shoulders and emotions bubble to the surface now and again to remind you that, jeez, these guys are still just kids. The filmmakers were given remarkable access to the kids’ lives and the team’s dressing room over the season, and they produced a film that gives those of us who merely stand at the end of the rink and cheer on our boys another level of understanding of what’s going on before, during, and after the game.

My day finished with a screening of Dance With a Serial Killer. Nigel Williams (U.K.) tells the story of French detective Jean-François Abgrall’s 5-year hunt for a serial killer who struck all over the country. It started in 1989–before the days of “C.S.I.”-type investigations–so think of last year’s Zodiac (a fictionalized recount of the search for the Zodiac serial killer in ’70s San Francisco, by David Fincher) and picture it as a documentary. Old-fashioned policework–lots of legwork, lots of interviews, lots of time with seemingly little progress. And, like the Zodiac investigation, the lead detective had a pretty good idea who the killer was. It was just a matter of producing the necessary evidence. The story starts on a crowded beach in northern France, where a sunbather is brutally stabbed to death for no discernable reason. Young detective Abgrall gets a faxed alert when the body is discovered and begins his investigation. Little does he know it will end up taking him all over the country, will last for years, and he will know in his heart who the killer is and still be faced with what appears to be an airtight alibi. The film’s pace is slow but that suits the subject matter. The story is familiar, but the hunt for a serial killer is a subject that is always fascinating to me. It is a story of obsession–on the parts of both hunter and hunted.