DWF ’12: Dig (short)

For David, a Holocaust survivor studying philosophy, Nietzsche is bound to be a difficult figure to approach.  Particularly vexing are the passages his study group is chewing on: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”  Maybe so, but sometimes the abyss really has it coming.  Nietzsche’s questions cease being philosophical when David confronts the old National Socialist who killed his family in Joshua Caldwell’s short film Dig (trailer here), which screens during this year’s Dances with Films.

It is 1962.  Having survived concentration camps, David is now a reasonably well liked American college student.  Yet, when he observes Heinrich Berger walking into the diner, he is shaken to the core.  The next time viewers see Berger, he is trussed up in the back seat of David’s car, headed out to the desert.  The student has brought a gun and a shovel, which he intends for Berger to use.  However, being intimately acquainted with death, Berger is more comfortable than David in its company, launching into a verbal cat-and-mouse game with the understandably emotional young man.

Aaron Himelstein is actually quite compelling as the deeply conflicted David.  Indeed, it is an impossible situation to imagine one’s self in.  Nonetheless, one cannot help wondering if the character’s agitated state is right for the story or whether a sense of resignation, recognizing the inadequacies of his planned actions yet proceeding just the same, would have better made its points about the limits of justice.  It certainly would have produced a more existential film.

Regardless, Aronofsky regular Mark Margolis is eerily effective as the stone cold evil Berger, while Himelstein viscerally conveys the grief and anguish of his victim.  Granted, the Nietzsche prologue is hardly subtle, but Dig is in no way exploitative.  Painting a dark picture of a morally problematic universe, it is a pretty ambitious short film (executive produced by CSI creator Anthony E. Zuiker).  Not exactly uplifting, but quite cinematic, it screens this coming Tuesday (6/5) as part of Fusion Shorts-Group 2 at the 2012 edition of Dances with Films.

DWF ’12: Fuzz Track City

It is time to kick it analog style with a detective who does not own a cell phone.  Frankly, Murphy Dunn does not care how people take his throw back style.  He just isn’t in a customer service frame of mind throughout Steve Hicks’ Fuzz Track City (trailer here), which screens during this year’s Dances with Films.

Donning his leather jacket amid the Southern California summer, Dunn is suffering from serious “June gloom.”  Still grieving his late mentor-partner “Shakey,” Dunn has also recently separated from his suddenly pregnant wife, Al Jackson.  Dunn’s veneration of the old school Shakey has him stuck in the 1970’s, but in way, that makes him the perfect gumshoe to track down a mysterious 45 single.  It is not exactly a case he formerly accepts.  However, it is apparently intertwined with the disappearance of his former high school guidance counselor’s son.  In retrospect, Dawn Lockwood might not have given Dunn the best counseling, but he still has a school boy crush on her.

Just knowing one-hit-wonder Zack Lee and his British New Wave thugs are desperate to find the privately pressed garage rock McGuffin is enough to give most of the game away.  Nonetheless, FTC’s retro vinyl love is pretty cool, as are the frequent nods to 1970’s era action movies.  Dunn clearly owes a debt to “The Dude,” but he is more of a loser than a slacker, which at least makes him a fairly distinctive protagonist.

Indeed, Todd Robert Anderson is rather engaging as the shaggy dog detective, playing the born-loser part scrupulously straight.  He also serves as the film’s heart, convincingly pining for Jackson, mourning Shakey, and sort of-kind of taking not-as-tough-as-she-thinks-she-is aspiring musician waitress Jo under his wing.  It is also nice to see Dee “E.T., Cujo” Wallace [formerly Stone] as Dunn’s mature fantasy client.

Frankly, FTC is not exactly a love letter to Los Angeles, but it digs rock and has a fair handle on the record collector’s mindset.  The mystery might not be mysterious, but it moves along at a breezy tempo, sprinkling in a fair number of laughs along the way.  Admittedly, it is not a great movie, but it is an enjoyable one.  It deserves a look-see from the right crowd when it screens next Monday (6/4) as part of the 2012 edition of Dances with Films, appropriately enough in Hollywood.

DWF ’12: Crocodile in the Yangtze

Years from now, when historians ask who lost China, the answer might be ebay.  After dominating the American online auction market through scrappy tenacity, they approached the Chinese market like a hidebound IBM.  Jack Ma was the man who laughed all the way to the bank.  The unlikely story of Ma’s dominance of Chinese e-commerce is told by westerner who witnessed it from the inside.  Ma’s former PR honcho Porter Erisman documents the rise of the Chinese internet powerhouse Alibaba in the metaphorically titled Crocodile in the Yangtze, which screens this Saturday as part of the 2012 edition of Dances with Films.

In 1995 English teacher Jack Ma did not look like a prospective billionaire, but he got the internet before just about anyone in China.  In fact, his first venture, China Pages, was too early.  He was still far ahead of the curve when he started his B2B site, Alibaba, with seventeen employees in his apartment.  American expat Erisman signed on just as China’s legion of small manufactures started embracing its potential.  However, the internet bubble threatened to engulf the momentum Ma had generated.  Like so many short-lived start-ups, Alibaba boasted more users and publicity than revenue.  Actually, it did not have any revenue.

As it happened, in contrast to its ill-fated contemporaries, Alibaba offered a service that customers were willing to pay for.  Much to the surprise of many analysts, Ma’s company survived and ultimately thrived.  Yet, in proper visionary fashion, Ma anticipated a coming war with ebay.  Strangely though, the American company ignored the lessons of its own success, banking on the benefits of integration into its global platform, while ignoring the specifics of the local market.  This would be a hundred million dollar mistake, several times over.

On one hand, Crocodile is a quite invigorating underdog business success story.  Despite facing several existential crises, Alibaba and its Taobao person-to-person e-marketplace carried the day.  Yet, there is a darker side to the tale Erisman deals with rather perfunctorily.  As part of its grand strategy, Alibaba aligned itself with Yahoo China, just as the search engine was taking heat for ratting out an independent journalist to the Communist regime.  Erisman shows footage of Ma the good soldier parroting the Yahoo company line to the effect that they might not like local laws, but they must obey them nonetheless.  Yet, this begs the obvious but unasked question: does Ma really dislike these laws and would he advocate liberalizing them?  If so, what would an enormously wealthy individual such as himself be willing to do within the system towards that end?

Here and there, Erisman extols the internet as an instrument of openness and information dissemination in the formerly closed China, which is true to an extent, but ignores the great lengths the Chinese government has gone to monitor, censor, and block the free flow of the internet.  One also wonders about the privacy of the Facebook-like innovations that helped put Taobao over the top.

Clearly, Erisman is too close to Ma to push him on any political questions, but he is unusually lucky to have such a wealth of video records of company events, including that fateful day one in Ma’s apartment.  Frankly, the drive to document Alibaba, including even brainstorming sessions between Erisman and his boss, might strike some viewers as a bit odd.  Yet, they clearly provide a tenor of the times, both good and bad, during each stage of the company’s development.  As a result, the understandable reliance on videotaped corporate history is not always particularly cinematic, but it certainly gives the film a you-are-there vibe.

There are a ton of objects lessons in Crocodile, regardless whether you consider Ma a charismatic business genius or a sell out to the oppressive power structure (hearing the local Communist Party boss laud him as an exemplary “entrepreneur” possibly supports either conclusion).  Frankly, every e-commerce enterprise should study it frame by frame.  After all, Alibaba’s IPO lived up to expectations, unlike the fizzle of certain social network.  Highly topical and instructive, if frustratingly cautious, Crocodile is well worth seeing this Saturday morning (6/2) when it screens as a selection of this year’s Dances with Films, in Hollywood, USA.

DWF ’12: Attack of the Bat Monsters

Technically, there is only one bat monster in Francis Gordon’s latest B-movie, but it would hardly be the first time the zero-budget mogul delivered slightly less than promised.  It will certainly attack though, rest assured.  By hook or by crook, his cast and crew will pound out his next drive-in programmer in Attack of the Bats (trailer here), Graham Kelly Greene’s affectionate love letter to campy late 1950’s and early 1960’s monster movie-making, an alumni selection returning to officially open the 2012 Dances with Films this Thursday.

Attack is not about Roger Corman per se, but it would not have been made without his example.  Gordon is definitely a grindhouse showman in the Corman mold.  He is convinced he can fix anything in the editing room as long as they follow his cardinal rule: “when the monster’s dead, the movie is over.”  Paralleling the genesis of Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors, Gordon wrapped production on his latest film early, but he still has three paid-up days in the southern California rock quarry he does not intend to waste. 

Suddenly, AD Chuck Grayson is rushing about lining up a screenwriter (the least important part), a pseudo-star, and a new monster (that would be the biggie).  The beatnik poet Bobby Barnstone and his Barnstone method of Benzedrine-fueled stream-of-consciousness screenwriting looks like the best bet for generating fast pages.  They don’t have to be good after all.  Larry “The Cat Creature” Meeker, Jr. seems to have fallen on hard enough times he would consider a Francis Gordon movie and a former creature making colleague has just been fired by a major studio.  However, he still harbors bad feelings over The Snake Woman, a Gordon production so notorious, the mere mention of the title sucks the air out of rooms.

All the Corman motifs are present and accounted for, including spaced-out beatniks, a jazzy soundtrack, and a ridiculously cheesy monster.  What sets Attack apart from thematically similar B-movie pastiches is Greene’s confidence in the behind-the-scenes story.  There will be no real life monsters or aliens invading their set, just the union goon extras from a studio gladiator movie sent to run the crew out of the quarry ahead of schedule.

Attack had its world premiere at DWF back in 2000.  Frankly, the fact that the film has yet to develop its own cult following is downright mystifying, because it really delivers the goods.  Greene knows the Corman lore inside-out and his cast of not exactly household names is way funnier than you would expect.  There is also a real edge to his dialogue, as when Gordon indignantly defends his honor by declaring he always pays his taxes and pays-off his unions.  Indeed, what more could one ask of a good Hollywood citizen?

There are some hilarious supporting assists here, particularly Robert Bassetti as Barnstone and Douglas Taylor as Meeker, Jr.  Fred Ballard is also pitch-perfect as the prickly Gordon, while Michael Dalmon gamely holds the madness together as the put-upon Grayson.

Without question, Attack is generously stocked with goofy humor, but it can also be quite sly.  Yet, there is a real heart beneath the bedlam that cares about its characters, precisely because on some level they also care about the B-movies they are churning out, despite being fully aware of their schlockiness.  A completely satisfying, all-around good show, Attack of the Bat Monsters is ripe for re/discovery when it opens this year’s Dances with Films this coming Thursday night (5/31) in Hollywood, USA.