NBFF 2015: ART HOUSE

The Wharton Esherick House in Art House.

Space by de/sign

By Miranda Inganni

Many artists strive to construct a safe and stimulating space in which they can freely create. Director Don Freeman captures nearly a dozen of such places in his film, Art House.

Based on the book Artist’s Handmade Houses by Michael Gotkin, Freeman travels through the US -- and through the past 100 or so years -- documenting places like Byrdclife Arts Colony in New York (the oldest arts colony in the States), to Eliphante, Michael Khan and Leda Livant’s home built over the course of nearly 30 years in Cornville, Arizona. Some of these residences have been lovingly preserved and/or are still being used as workshops. Meanwhile others, like the Wharton Esherick Museum in Pensylvania with its seemingly living staircase, have been converted into museums. Whether open to the public or gifted with National Historic Landmark status, Art Housegives viewers a glimpse into these infrequently-viewed locales.

Freeman uses vintage photographs throughout, as well as interviews with surviving relatives or disciples of the artists and commentary by writer Alastair Gordon. So many of these artists were looking to bring other artists back to nature and to integrate nature into everyday life. And so many of their abodes seem to do just that very successfully!

Unfortunately, the music is a distraction to the images more often than not, and the cross fades from one still shot to the next happen too quickly for the viewer to fully realize what object or scene she or he is seeing.

As Gordon states in the beginning of the film, “It’s about making a perfect life.” Exploring these eleven dwellings all in one film, despite its distractions, allows one to imagine for a moment that perfection each of the designers were trying to create.

 

 

Art House screens at the Newport Beach Film Festival April 29, 5 p.m., Edwards Big Newport. For more information: Art House.

 

 

 

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NBFF 2015: REPARATION

 

Bob (Marc Menchaca) and Lucy (Virginia Newcomb) in Reparation.

Charlotte sometimes dreams

By Miranda Inganni

Bob (Marc Menchaca) has recently found his way out of a military mental hospital, partially thanks to a young boy, Ralph (Brody Behr), his imaginary friend and initially constant companion. Having forgotten the last three years of his life, Bob wanders through farms and vales. During his first job, he meets Lucy (Virginia Newcomb), a free-spirited gal whose favorite treatment for anything uncomfortable and/or unfamiliar is to yell at the problem and then quickly hush it away. Suppression at its best!

Speaking of suppressed, Bob and Lucy hit it off, but not without completely ignoring the fact that they never bother to share any personal information about themselves to each other. Eventually, they settle down in a quaint farming town where they raise their daughter, Charlotte (Dale Dye Thomas). Their idyllic life is irreparably interrupted when Jerome (John Huertas) shows up claiming to be Bob’s best friend from their Air Force days where they were Security Police. This unexpected and uninvited guest throws the family off-kilter. Bob’s forgotten memories begin to appear in Charlotte’s nightmares. Charlotte in turn expertly sketches the images which jolt Bob’s amnesia.

So, is it better or healthier to sometimes let sleeping dogs lie? Should one risk physical and/or mental trauma from recalling what one’s own brain has blocked one from remembering out of self-preservation? While the concept of daughter assuming father’s horrific memories utilized in Reparation is an interesting one, the movie never attempts to ask why Charlotte might be the receptacle for Bob’s repressed thoughts. What DNA trickery is this?

Although the dialogue could be stronger in certain places, Reparation does a nice job of building suspense and the script, co-written by director Kyle Ham and Steve Timm, includes a few refreshingly unexpected twists and turns, albeit not necessarily coming to a satisfying conclusion.


Reparation screens at the Newport Beach Film Festival April 30, 8 p.m., Regency South Coast Village. For more information: Reparation.

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NBFF 2015: CALAMITY JANE

Martha Canary/Calamity Jane (Kay Campbell) in Calamity Jane: Wild West Legend.

Martha, thy dreary

By Miranda Inganni

Calamity Jane, nee Martha Canary, was born in 1852 (most likely) in Missouri. According to Greg Monro’s film, her unstable childhood included the 8 year-old Martha traveling the Oregon Trail with her family, her parents’ subsequent deaths and Martha and her siblings being sent to an orphanage. First adopted at age 12, Martha was soon sent away for bad behavior. Where she went and/or what she did is not fully known. What historians do know is that Martha joined the Newton-Jenney Party into the Black Hills in 1875. Dressed in men’s attire, when reporters found out that Martha was a she, the public’s interest grew, leading to many articles, dime novels and even an autobiographical pamphlet Martha dictated (as she had no formal education) for publication. We also know that in 1876 she travelled to Deadwood, South Dakota, along with Wild Bill Hickock, though the full extent of their relationship is unknown.

Martha was daring and caring (as long as we are not talking about Native Americans). Not only was she a professional scout in the Wild West, she helped nurse smallpox sufferers back to health in Deadwood in the late 1870s. She was also, by all accounts, a raging alcoholic. She had two children, who were placed in foster care, and despite her infamy, died destitute in 1903 at the age of 51.

Told with reenactments -- with Kay Campbell playing the titular character, vintage photographs and lots of moving shots of pastoral and pristine rolling hills, wind-swept plains, and mountain ranges, director Monro’s film also employs many “experts,” most of whom rely heavily on hypothetical phrases such as, “I imagine… ,” or “it was possible… .” They make many suppositions about Martha and her family.

Martha was known for her colorful stories, but many of the tales about her life are unsubstantiated. Historical facts have disproved many of the musings about Calamity Jane. Unfortunately, Monro’s Calamity Jane is just as colorful yet unreliable as Martha’s own history. Monro tries to straddle the line between fact and fiction, but just can’t seem to ride it out.

 

 

Calamity Jane: Wild West Legend screens at the Newport Beach Film Festival April 26, 2:45 p.m. For more information: Calamity Jane.

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NEWPORT BEACH 2012: THE WAR AROUND US

Sherine Tadros in The War Around Us.

There will be no shelter here

By Ed Rampell

One of the hardest hitting documentaries I’ve seen in years, Abdallah Omeish’s The War Around Us deserves not only distribution so audiences can see it, but also an Oscar nomination.

The War Around Us is the true story of the only two international journalists reporting from the war zone, as Israel bombarded and invaded Gaza in late 2008. Al Jazeera’s Cairo-born, Arab-American Ayman Mohyeldin and Arab-British Sherine Tadros were on the ground in Gaza City during the Israeli military operation that resulted, according to this gripping documentary, in the highest number of Palestinians killed in a single day since 1948.

The dynamic duo of Mohyeldin and Tadros does yeoman work reporting on the war’s consequences on a largely civilian population for the Arab network, and provide a window on the conflict to the outside world. The doc alleges that the Israeli Defense Forces committed war crimes against noncombatants, including unarmed women, children and elders, including the use of white phosphorus, which an Israeli spokesman denies, although eyewitnesses, including human rights activists, confirm it. During the conflagration, as hospitals are filled beyond the bursting point and basics such as electricity, water and even cheeseburgers, are cut off, a U.N. compound is bombarded by the IDF.

The War Around Us is a gripping reminder that war is hell, and of a specific conflict most of us have forgotten about. Of course, the poor Palestinians remember it, but this doc would have benefitted from providing more context as to why the Israelis did what they did, and the roles that the change in U.S. administrations (from the Bush to the Obama regime) and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s alleged corruption played in this devastation -- so heroically chronicled by Mohyeldin and Tadros.   

  

  

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NEWPORT BEACH 2012: UNDER AFRICAN SKIES



Paul Simon in Under African Skies.

Sounds of defiance

By Ed Rampell

Joe Berlinger’s complicated two-hour documentary Under African Skies has, on the one hand, a sonorous soundtrack featuring Paul Simon and his African Graceland band. On the other hand, the doc deals with a complex issue: The role of art and politics. When the better half of Simon and Garfunkel flew to Johannesburg to record tracks for an album mixing American pop and the South African sound, he ran afoul of a cultural boycott supported by the U.N. and African National Congress against the tyrannical apartheid regime, enforced in those gloomy days before Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

Twenty five years later Simon reunites with his onetime African bandmates and the doc examines the controversial role Simon played then and its resonance today. In crucial scenes the aging Simon meets one of the ANC revolutionaries who condemned the musician in the 1980s for breaking a boycott intended to strangle the segregationist state. Simon continues to decry the way politicians use artists and insists on the right of talents to express themselves. Who’s right? Having triumphed over apartheid, the ANC activist can afford to be magnanimous.

In any case, the music, featuring Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Simon, etc., is extraordinary, and creates a musical mélange that’s the dialectical opposite of apartheid.         

  



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NEWPORT BEACH 2012: CAROL CHANNING

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Carol Channing in Carol Channing: Larger than Life.

Gentlemen prefer talent

By Ed Rampell

Watching Dori Berinstein’s delightful documentary Carol Channing: Larger Than Life is a sheer joy. The now 91-year-old performer who embodied Broadway with her original onstage incarnations of Lorelei Lee in Gentleman Prefer Blondes and the eponymous matchmaker in Hello Dolly! is a force of nature.

This nonfiction biopic traces Channing from her 1921 birth into a Christian Science family in Seattle and upbringing in San Francisco to her debut onstage, TV appearances from Steve Allen to Laugh In, and movie career. In addition to the ever hilarious Channing herself, the doc’s talking heads include Betty Garrett, Jerry Herman, Lily Tomlin, Bruce Vilanch, Tommy Tune, etc. Channing’s second husband, Harry Kullijian-- a childhood sweetheart who reappeared late in life -- co-stars. (However, the film sweeps under the carpet Channing’s disastrous long first marriage and how her career conflicted with motherhood.)

You don’t have to be a fan of Channing or of musical theater to be swept away by this feel good ode to the Great White Way’s eternal nightingale. Cinema wasn’t the medium that most favored the entertainer with those flying saucer eyes, lips as red as Dorothy’s ruby slippers and blonde tresses -- Marilyn Monroe and Barbra Streisand portrayed Lorelei and Dolly onscreen. But this doc finally makes Channing -- Oscar-nominated for 1967’s Thoroughly Modern Millie-- the movie star she deserves to be, too.      

  

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NEWPORT BEACH 2012: WORTH THE WEIGHT



LaShawna (Constance Reese) and Miles (Tommy Snider) in Worth the Weight.

Fat chance

By Ed Rampell

Worth the Weight is in the tradition of Paddy Chayefsky’s 1955  film, Marty, a realistic look at love among ordinary people. Like Ernest Borgnine as the Bronx butcher in that Best Picture Oscar winner, Robbie Kaller plays a meaty plebian character yearning for romance. Sam is a washed up university athlete whose football injury put the kibosh on his NFL and college aspirations, leading to enormous weight gain and an unglamorous bowling alley career.

Weighing an estimated 411 Sam enters into a weight loss contest with his roommate and friends where he also meets Cassie (Jillian Leigh), an attractive trainer (not “a coach!”) at “Fat Cutters.” Leigh renders an intriguing character study, as a young woman ensnared in an unsatisfying romance with pretentious poet Stephan (Bryan Bellamo), who contrasts sharply with the earthy, good natured Sam. What’s a woman to do?

This romantic comedy’s supporting cast includes Constance Reese as LaShawna, who lights up every scene she’s in as the girlfriend of quirky Miles (Tommy Snider). Coincidentally, Reese portrayed Michelle Obama in a musical about the First Family -- this film’s theme is a perfect fit for the First Lady’s anti-obesity campaign.

Director Ryan Sage’s feature debut, which won the Beverly Hills Film Festival’s Audience Award, is also an excellent example of low budget indies shot with DV cameras.



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