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rmjon23
Reviews
Raymond Lewis: L.A. Legend (2022)
Wonderful doc on a legend who was blackballed
This was really terrific blue collar documentarian work by Ryan Polomski about a playground/high school/college legend on the court, Raymond Lewis.
Lewis could have been one of the legendary NBA scorers, but he was blackballed. Polomski's doc shows how it all went down. Lewis was as naive about money and race in the NBA at the time, 1973, as he was a wizard on the court. He didn't get a lawyer and the 76ers ripped him off. Then, when he was torching everyone in training camp, including Doug Collins, who was taken ahead of him in the draft, he wanted his contract re-negotiated and the 76ers refused.
It was all downhill for Ray from then on. He develpoed a bad attitude, rightly so. But he kept trying out with other teams. He'd play well but get cut. Were these teams colluding to make sure it didn't LOOK like Ray was being blackballed? I mean: probably. But who knows.
His life spirals down. It's tragic, really. So much talent and it was not seen by NBA fans.
Cum on Feel the Noize (2017)
One wonders which audience was this aimed at
Clips that didn't cost the producers much and the absolute lamest voice-over imaginable, with vast numbers of basic ideas not discussed and bands not even shown, barely cited: all of this made this lifelong metal lover recoil in embarrassment...unless the producers just wanted to make money off that horde of gullible metal fan base that will watch anything "about" metal.
Or: this could have been aimed at people who don't listen to metal, but want to understand something about it. In that sense, it's a sociological document.
The editing was atrocious: meandering, with very little idea of what the film wants to say about how "rock became metal." At the end, they say it's become evermore diverse through the years (true!), and it celebrates that diversity while also being a music about individuality, personal freedom and loyalty to a genre that's always been marginalized.
If you're a hardcore metal head, it's been a long, long, long time since you heard your favorite bands on the same radio that everyone else listens to. This is but one sense in which metal is a substitute for traditional religion among many of its followers. One must seek their favorite bands now. Sabbath/Zep/Purple have long been relegated to "classic rock", which says painfully too much, I won't even go into it here. This last idea - about metal as religion that provides community and a sense of the transcendent - is addressed for about 20 seconds...
That metal's themes and lyrics address that which society has always repressed? This gets touched upon, but only lightly before moving on. Quite superficial!
I could easily make a list of 25-30 ideas about the music that could have been addressed in a deeper way and made this film much more interesting, but that's not what this film is about: it's about producing CONTENT about metal that only takes up 90 minutes. This film reminds me of the joke about the guy who took a speed reading course, with the final exam being about War and Peace, which he read in 15 minutes and declared, "It's about Russia."
There was a short segment about Michael Schenker, one of my all-time favorite guitarists. He's speaking in German about a part of his career that is known to anybody who if a fan of his...but what is the context for someone who wants to know more about how "rock became metal"? There is no context.
This documentary casts such a wide net it's almost absurd. I'm still waiting for a well-made doc on how guitarists were always the primary movers and makers and shakers of the music, with interviews both with the great guitarists and those writers - some academics who are exceedingly articulate, knowledgable and thoughtful about the music - also weighing in. In this as-yet-unmade doc, there's a POV and the possibility of some great rhetoric and ideas about virtuosity, theatricality, genre, and gender.
Suffice to say, this ain't it. Come On Feel The Noize is for the couch-potato metalhead consumer who will watch anything having to do with metal, or for people who know nothing about it, but want to feel, after 90 minutes, like they now understand something about it. To save time, read the Wikipedia page on "heavy metal."
Crafting a Nation (2013)
very seductive 90 minute ad
I wanted to like this film, but it turned into a long, very well-made advertisement aimed at white guys in their 30s who might have enough cash and collateral to start their own microbrewery, and somehow this AD winnowed its way into Netflix streaming.
Very little about craft beer - except it's way better than AB/InBev and Coors (and it is!) - but a REAL documentary would address how fascistic the monster corporate beer companies that make yellow fizzy-water have been toward the artisans trying to get their stuff distributed. Among other things.
The folksy music seems designed to to keep you hypnotized and ready to shell out for all the capital you'll need to try to make a go in the craft brewing game.
Very little historical context, too repetitive, but it looks really good and the sentiments about craft brews and sociality and culture and sustainability seem true enough. But yea: glossy ad.
Night Train (1999)
Virtuoso camera effects!
Writer-director Les Bernstien comes from a technical background specializing in special camera effects, so here's a neo-noir ultra-low-budget flick that shines mostly due to Bernstien's appreciation and magnificent facility with hard-core German Expressionist sets and mattes and camera angles, and classic film noir lighting and camera tricks. (Parts of the film almost look like classic avant-garde films of the 30s and 40s.) This is all in the service of a story set in some latter-day Dantean hell circle, or Tijuana, Mexico. The b&w film stock reminded me of Jarmusch's Dead Man, and the overall style and tone of this film resides somewhere in the area between Touch of Evil/Kiss Me, Deadly, and Sin City. The story is ultra-lurid to the point of an almost cartoonish otherworld ala Sin City, but it's really Tijuana, and most of the actors aren't actors. And there's also a b&w documentary look to it, esp. in the street scenes. And there's a Bukowski-ish alcohol-sodden, disease-ridden nightmare quality that I found really creepazoid. What a unique film! What a terrific, seamy, virtuoso display of classic expressionist lighting and camera effects! Not for everyone, mind you...and the spoken tracks are dubbed in. Weird, weird, weird wonderful film for a certain small percentage of film noir buffs.
Rush of the Palms (2001)
engaging Samuel Beckett-ish b&w noir
I enjoyed this film. Loftus managed to pull off something that I had vague thoughts about in the past: a combination of elements from the classic noir cycle, particularly the psychological claustrophobia of characters caught up in a vast, spiderweb-deterministic world and the existential world of Samuel Beckett.
Yea, verily I say unto you that I was impressed by the film. Too bad it's received such poor distribution to this date...
While I was free-associating vis a vis "what this reminds me of" in the midst of watching this film I first thought of the German playwright Friederich Durrenmatt's Conversation At Night With A Despised Character, and yes, Reservoir Dogs. (By the end, I feel it's NOTHING like Reservoir Dogs. But: it does feel very much like a "guy's" film.)
I'm particularly drawn to a narrative that yields multiple "rich"
interpretations,something with which Palms succeeds wonderfully. I like how Loftus played with the three offstage characters of The Boss, the woman, and "her son". (Is/was Loftus Catholic?) I liked the slowly building paranoia, the oneiristic aspects (esp. Billy's opening dream, where right off you have characters concerned with interpretation in a film that itself will challenge the interpretive chops of the viewer), the multiple miscommunications and misunderstandings, the shattering of character stereotypes, the Beckett-like waiting for something to happen (Beckett: "I can't go on. I'll go on.") and the "talk" which must fill their time, the inner logic of the hypocrisy of hanging a man - unless he's black, 'cuz Cletus has some sort of warped social conscience and historical memory - combined with the almost William S. Burroughs-like satire on colors of corpses. Writer/director Michael Loftus has lots of ideas here...
The lack of personal AGENCY of the two characters, combined with a pathetic likeableness in each, gave me a strong feeling of lost souls irretrievably doomed. And then the director doesn't let us visually witness their demise. What's great about this (to me, at least), is that I feel I've watched a film in which chaos and indeterminacy rule in its universe, yet the strong feeling of noir determinacy operates for Cletus and Billy...it leaves me feeling mentally in disarray, unmoored, a feeling I like. (But I'm afraid most folk don't like this; they want everything wrapped up in neat little bundles. I'm afraid Joe 12-pack [inflation] can't stand more than a dash of indeterminacy. I'd be interested to hear the views of others on this.)
I realize some of my interpretations may not correspond with what Loftus was trying to convey; nevertheless I'm ready to argue about the film, from a post-structuralist framework (EX: Roland Barthes' _The Death of the Author_, etc) about "valid", "conventional" and - usually the most interesting - "overinterpretations". Any takers?
Even though this film runs only 27 mins or so, there's enough stark black and white noirishly-lit images with odd camera angles and an engaging script to merit a repeat viewing from me. If I ever get the chance. How lucky I was to catch this.