Frozen Toothpaste

Born into Brothels is about children growing up in a red light district in Calcutta (now Kolkatta), India. What I wasn’t expecting is the extensive amount of outside intervention that is really the story of the film. Some would see this as an intolerable rebuke of the documentarian’s principal directive: to document. This is to say nothing of the always-controversial prospect of paternalism, for which the film could also be blamed.

For quite some time, I’ve wanted to make a documentary who’s primary goal was to show that regardless of geography, color, language, or wealth, people all over the world are essentially and primarily people. That we all, every one of us, has problems and faults that can be understood by all other people. For the first half of the film, I wondered if Born in to Brothel’s goal wasn’t the same as that. For better or worse, in aggregate it’s about much more than that.

Arguably, the main character of the film isn’t the kids, or any specific kid, but the woman the children call “Zana Auntie.” Zana Auntie is never explicitly discussed in the course of the film, but by her accent and color I would hazard a guess that she’s British. What is clear is that she’s a photographer living in a red-light district in Calcutta who becomes close with some of the children there and decided to teach them about photography.

Through the first half of the film, one could mistake this for the film I always wanted to make. But the second half becomes much more about the goal of Zana Auntie to get the kids out of their neighborhood and what she sees as a dead-end life.

Here is where the specter of paternalism enters. Though the kids and their parents do from time to time appear genuinely interested in getting into a boarding school and away from their seedy neighborhood, it looks as if Zana Auntie’s really the only one pushing forward on this goal. Whether or not that, or anything, should be regarded and criticized as paternalism is not the topic of the film, but an interesting question in this context.

Without giving it all away, Zana Auntie faces an uphill climb to help these kids. Regardless of their sometimes troubled family lives, there are the added problem that poor everywhere face: an uphill climb to navigate the bureaucracy in their favor. This is made even worse because with mothers who are prostitutes nearly all schools want to avoid the kids. Criminal parents and what in America are called at-risk youths aren’t exactly the kind of pupils most headmasters seek.

Regardless of that whole story, the kids are indeed charming. They’re that mix of percosious and shy that makes most eight to twelve year olds either charming or a handful. Among them, the unquestionable star is Avijit.

Avijit’s father seems to be addicted to hash and generally appears to be a good-for-nothing, but Avijit assures us: “I still try to love him a little.” This and other similar lines cut through boundries and simply state what it means to be human. Perhaps it’s just me, but trying to “love him a little” is something I know well.

There’s no denying my affinity for the film. I don’t think it’s perfect, but it’s undoubtedly good. Like the picture’s the children take, some bits are unbelievably good and others are disappointingly flawed. On the whole, I can’t think of anything restraining me from recommending that you see Born Into Brothels as soon as you can.

Lake of Fire is filmed in black of white. It’s worth noting that like all films we term “black and white,” its actually rendered in various shades of grey. And Tony Kaye’s documentary about abortion in America is careful to show that the issue’s history and moral questions are not black and white.

Lake of Fire is also an epic. At over two and a half hours and packed with the grizzly extremes of both basic positions on the issues, it’s probably not for everyone. Views of aborted fetuses, especially those of around three months, are hard to see. So too is it difficult to see some of the most cold-blooded and calculated doctor-killers to emerge from the context of the religious right. But at no time does Mr. Kaye’s long-in-development documentary judge either of these troubling extremes.

Kaye’s style is a form of extreme naturalism that, wisely I believe, eschews narration and other forms to impute meaning on the events that it unfurls before the audience. Where Kaye stands on the issue is completely and mercifully unclear. It thus goes without saying that those looking for a defense of their position on the issue will find the film grating.

Everyone from the most extreme perspectives on the right and left are seen. Noam Chomsky, the famous leftist, mostly stands to raise questions. The always-difficult Peter Singer is there assert that yes, a fetus is a person, but a lesser one because it has no expressed desire to live. (Regardless of the logic of the statement, when first heard Singer’s cold rationalism is jarring.)

From the right, there’s Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry. And the coldness and certitude of the convicted doctor-killer Paul Hill can’t be missed. Perhaps most surprising to me was that Norma McCreevey — the “Roe” of Roe v. Wade — was there. And she’d become a card-carrying member of the pro-life movement. Maybe I was two young or inattentive when such a thing was news, but I was rather shocked.

Much of the film was shot around the peak of the turmoil of the early Clinton years. Were I to fault the film, which is truly artful and tender in it’s handling of a difficult issue, it’s that footage from different eras tends to run together. It can be hard to tell what events and interview are from the 1993-1996 era and which were shot when the film was resurrected around 2005. It’s minor problem that does little damage on an issue known for dead-lock and stasis, but it can be a distraction.

On the whole, it’s a great film and a difficult one. If there’s a central thesis, it may be that no stance on this issue is unassailable, no position safe from reasonable and difficult questions. The issue is fraught with moral dilemmas for all people and all positions on the issue, and Lake of Fire makes that point abundantly clear. The film’s comfort with the ambiguity of the issue can be hard to take, but it’s also just what the issue requires.

In her 1964 essay — if one can call an enumerated list an essay — ”Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag delineated what she called the Camp style. Though nearly every example she gives is obscure to me, the essential traits of camp are clear: it’s exaggerated, it’s methods overwhelm its message, and it thereby becomes a parody of itself.

“Raining McCain” (playable at right), is the most delightfully bad music video I’ve seen recently. And is the quintessences of camp.

Taking off on the idea of the the Obama Girl, who herself played with elements of camp, “the McCain Girls” have created a video so campy as to be perceived as parody or satire. I’m rather confident that it was neither, and in that lies it’s brilliance.

The video laden with elements that seem too comical to be true. The effects, especially call out for attention. Of the three McCain girls, the left-most is notable primarily for her outfit. Making the mistake of wearing colors too similar to the green screen on which the after-effects were laid, she regularly and unintentionally fades into and out of the background.

Other special effects are so silly as to require attention. At one point, the disembodied head of Senator McCain bounces around the screen behind the singing girls. At another point, while full-bodied McCains are falling from the sky, the lead singer takes the opportunity to douse her face in her favorite presidential candidate.

The singing too, of a rewritten version of “It’s Raining Men,” is problematic. Not only are the girls not given the benefit of the technology used by professional singers to improve harmonizing, but there are also notable times when they seem to forget the words. The effect is damning in a video that already feels campy.

All of these reasonable mistakes combine to create a video more funny that serious. Whose message is largely lost in the over-wrought and flawed execution of the concept. And which has gotten ever-increasing attention for its flawed execution and not it’s political messages. Unsurprisingly, the commenter seem rather confused as to rather the videos serious or satire. That, then, is perhaps the state of camp today.

As Ms. Sontag said,

One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (“camping”) is usually less satisfying.

The commenter’s mistake is made because in the last few decades fake camp has proliferated. One need only remember the recent Snakes on a Plane or the older True Lies to understand the proliferation of intentional camp.

But these are, indeed, less satisfying. Something that sets out to be “campy” is automatically cursed by its self-awareness. It comes across in the reception, which even for the relatively well-executed True Lies was mixed.

This is what makes “Raining McCain” so interesting. In an era where we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be genuine, serious, and deeply flawed, here come three woman to show us the glory of truly naïve camp. I, for one, am very grateful for them.

For the Bible Tells Me So, a recent documentary by Daniel Karslake is an interesting beast. Through at least the last twenty minutes, my eyes were wet and my nose was running. And though that’s surely a sign of something that’s emotionally resonant, I’m not without reservation in recommending it.

After the obligatory footage of traditional views of homosexuality, the film introduces a number of people. People who are easily understood as the ones we’ll soon find out are gay. There’s Gene Robinson, the man who has become the Anglican church’s first openly gay bishop. There’s Jake Reitan, who was raised in a Lutheran home. And Chrissy Gephardt — the daughter of Dick Gephardt, who was raised Catholic as per her mother’s parents wishes. And there’s Tonia Poteat whose parents are both ministers — if their faith was made clear I’ve forgotten it.

All of this goes through the typical patterns of denial, grief, acceptance, and love. And as I said earlier that did make me quite emotional even if it was a bit schmaltzy. And I enjoyed the lesson in liberal Bible scholarship that the film’s bank of scholars and theologians offer in a gentle and friendly way.

But at some points the film overextends this gentle friendly discussion of liberal Christianity and love and gets so preachy as to be off-putting. The first example is a clip — among the literally hundreds of clips from everywhere used in the film — from The West Wing. Despite being a fan of that show, Aaron Sorkin’s smug dialogue is hardly gentle. A fictional President Bartlett berating what has to be seen as a fictional Dr. Laura about the other wacky things the Bible says aside from Leviticus 18:22 — the clip’s on YouTube — is not exactly a natural fit with the detached gentleness that gave me such high hopes for the film.

This sin would be completely forgiven, did the film not then do the same thing again. Dropped in the middle of the otherwise live-action film is friendly cartoon in the style reminiscent of of The Fairly OddParents and narrated by that deep, in-every-cartoon voice of Don LaFontaine. It’s purpose: to answer the question “Is homosexuality a choice?” (The clunker of a clip is also on YouTube.) Though the point may need to be made in the film — a proposition I would tend to doubt — the way it’s made disrupts the whole flow of the film.

Nor does it help that the narrator gives a stern talking-to to an ignorant straight boy named “Christian,” who is flanked by two hip-looking and knowledgeable gay people. The whole thing, aside from feeling deeply out of place, can be easily interpreted as condescending.

And that sin reduces to the film to the one thing it didn’t need to do: comfort those already on the “right” side of the issue. To say that those ignorant people — who don’t know that Sodom and Gomorrah, as the film ably points out, probably had nothing to do with homosexuality — are really uneducated and need to be smartened up and rehabilitated.

One of the films many intelligent talking heads made the point perhaps as well as I can. The Right Reverend Richard Holloway warns that we should be careful about being “prejudiced against the prejudiced.” And if the film — and these segments in particular — are guilty of one sin it’s that they have the distinct feeling of being just that.

There’s certainly value a film that encourages those on the right side of any fight to keep fighting. My hope for For the Bible Tells Me So — and it’s stated goal — was that it could do more than that, that it might sway people who condemn homosexuality to if not change, at least think critically about their views. Having watched the film, I think it could do that, but has handicapped itself unnecessarily. Surely those who agree with the film’s message of love and liberal Christianity will be moved, but I fear that those who disagree may bristle at a few of the film’s rather ham-handed and strident bits. Certainly For the Bible Tells Me So is a good and perhaps necessary film, but I fear it’s not a great one.

Though I’m not in the habit of review relatively recent and well-known movies (that reason is articulated here), Ben Affleck’s directorial debut in Gone Baby Gone was so unexpected that I couldn’t ignore it. I, like the vast majority of people following along, have at times dismissed Mr. Affleck as a talentless hack who got lucky and didn’t deserve his fame. If Gone Baby Gone accomplished nothing else, it put such thoughts to rest in my mind.

Gone Baby Gone is about ugly things, the seedy underbelly of crime and criminality that so many people and films seem drawn to. But what exists in it is something deeper and more textured not only than I expected, but than I thought a crime movie could be.

Where it’s different than other crime movies is this: rather than giving us a clear resolution of justice or injustice triumphant, it asks baldly what justice means? Is it better, the film asks, for a good outcome that comes through unsavory means or a unsavory outcome that comes through righteous means?

And I’d have to argue, honestly, that neither Mystic River nor The Departed — both set in Boston and dealing with a similarly seedy underbelly — was so adept at raising and dealing with such important philosophical issues. Then, perhaps, they weren’t blessed with the skeptical part of my brain constantly asking if or when Mr. Affleck would make an obvious mistake.

The fundamentals of this whole conflict are hard to illuminate without exposing too much, so I’ll do my best to give you the beginning of the plot and leave aside the ending. Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) is a native of the depressed Boston neighborhood of Dorchester. With his girlfriend, played by Michelle Monaghan, he’s hired to tackle a missing child case. His participation is neither invited nor welcomed by the police, who seem convinced that they knows better how to tackle the case than this renegade private investigator.

But Mr. Kenzie knows his neighborhood and it’s characters better than the police, and he rubs his liaisons the wrong way on that point. Here, I must stop myself from elaborating the rest of the twisting and intricate plot.

I should also offer the warning that I’m a sucker for poetic lines. And the films beginning, a thesis statement of sorts, had me from the first beat. It’s contents:

I always believed it was the things you don’t choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in these things, like it was something they’d accomplished. The bodies around their souls, the cities wrapped around those. I lived on this block my whole life; most of these people have. When your job is to find people who are missing, it helps to know where they started. I find the people who started in the cracks and then fell through. This city can be hard. When I was young, I asked my priest how you could get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God said to His children. “You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.”

Whether you respect or loathe Mr. Affleck, I must strongly recommend that you make sure to give his directorial debut a try. It’s not an easy or a uplifting film. It’s a questioning one, but these are worthy questions and asked by a well-executed story.