A look back at the King of Pop’s career on the screen

FILM Michael Jackson

In the austere confines of a German war room, Adolf Hitler attends a briefing with his generals. They have bad news for him.

“Mein Fuhrer. Michael … Michael Jackson has died after going into cardiac arrest. The King of Pop is officially dead.”

Hitler is apoplectic with rage. Turns out he’s Michael’s biggest fan. His tickets for the singer’s new live show are useless. “No one can replace MJ,” he grieves, “not even that little girl Justin Timberlake.”

The scene comes from one of the many parodies of the German film Downfall, in which internet yuksters switch out the subtitles of the film with words — hopefully humorous — of their own. This one’s been doing the rounds since Jackson’s death on June 25 2009, the latest example of his impact on our visually driven pop culture.

Unlike any performer before him, Jackson was always in the spotlight. His TV image may not have been as essential to his career as his music, but it certainly maximized it. By age 11, he was lead vocalist (with brother Jermaine) of The Jackson 5 and making his network debut. His performance on ABC’s The Hollywood Palace included dance moves that host Diana Ross said she “would get arrested for doing.” But when Little Michael twitched his hips or sang about love affairs, it was regarded as harmlessly cute.

Two months after the ABC gig, The Jackson 5 put on a more sanitized routine for The Ed Sullivan Show. It’s no coincidence that the group’s first four singles were all No. 1 smashes. Sure, songs like “I Want You Back” and “ABC” had great hooks, but the Jacksons’ on-screen performances helped to cement their presence in the national imagination.

In 1972, the prodigy had his first brush with movies, singing the soulful theme tune for Ben, a film about a psychic pet rat gone bad. While the rodent was seriously lacking in social skills, the record-buying public hardly cared that Jackson’s single and same-titled album were inspired by a horror movie. In isolation, the ballad was a catchy song about love and friendship. The music mattered more than its less pleasant associations. It wouldn’t be the last time that fans concentrated on the songs of Michael Jackson and not the strange circumstances in which he made music.

By 1976 The Jacksons had switched to CBS Records. Backed by the might of this entertainment behemoth, they got more royalties and creative control, their own prime-time show, and increasingly ambitious music videos. These pop flicks culminated in 1980’s “Can You Feel It,” in which the group towered over a city as giant elemental beings, sprinkling disco-pixie dust on the children of the world.

In 1978 Michael made his movie acting debut in The Wiz, a funky update of The Wizard of Oz. Jackson was the innocent, straw-brained scarecrow, and he proved to be one of the film’s saving graces. The Wiz wilted at the box office, but Jackson was recognized as having genuine acting talent.

The big budget, high spectacle music videos combined with Jackson’s safe, cozy image helped get him on MTV when other black artists like Rick James could not. Just as the ’60s variety shows had boosted The Jackson 5’s sales, videos like “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” helped Jackson’s Thriller album to become the best selling of all time. Most important of all was the 14-minute, John Landis-directed “Thriller” video. When the film premiered in 1984, it was an event, a must-see that brought new viewers to MTV and, with the single, boosted album sales by an estimated 14 million copies over the next six months.

No matter how convoluted or over-the-top the videos were, they had a beginning, a middle, and an end, with a cinematic attention to imagery, sound, visual effects, and choreography. The ultimate expression of this was Francis Ford Coppola’s Captain EO, a $30 million, 17-minute narrative film starring Jackson, which Disney park visitors flocked to see in the ’80s and ’90s.

In many ways, Jackson was a perfect icon for the ’80s, but the opening of his ’88 movie Moonwalker, where leather-clad kids lip-synched “Bad” (opening line: “your butt is mine”), gave the public a clue as to what lay ahead. Five years later the self-coronated King of Pop was facing child sex-abuse allegations. The media that had helped turn him into a superstar was now calling him Wacko Jacko and shedding light on the scandal.

Although no criminal charges were ever brought against him, Jackson paid a $22 million out-of-court settlement, and his career was never as strong again, despite some incredible concert tours and attempts to refresh the public’s memory about his heyday with a HIStory greatest hits collection. He was no longer cute, cozy, or remotely safe.

“Ghosts” was a response to the hassles Jackson was getting from the press and public. In this 38-minute video directed by Stan Winston, a group of townsfolk visit a creepy mansion inhabited by the “weirdo” Michael Jackson. The singer proceeds to indulge in masquerade, high-energy dance numbers, and even a feigned death and resurrection, all in attempts to shock and scare the intruders. The film attempts to revisit the glories of the “Thriller” vid, with dusty dead people shaking their bony booties around a ballroom. But where “Thriller” is held together by a geeky respect for the horror genre, “Ghosts” relies on fake-looking ’90s CGI. Jackson wanted to top “Thriller;” instead he got stuck with Haunted Mansion: The Musical.

Just when everyone seemed ready to forgive and forget Jackson’s purported immorality, a documentary called Living with Michael Jackson was broadcast. An unsuspecting Jackson invited journalist Martin Bashir into his home in an attempt to reconnect with the public; Bashir focused on Jackson’s abusive childhood and his obsession with children, the way he invited them into his bedroom, and sometimes shared a bed with them. Several more accusations of child sex abuse followed (he was acquitted of all charges).

Bashir’s home country of Britain was to host the singer’s big comeback, a run of 50 engagements at London’s O2 Arena. Despite Jackson’s death just before the shows began, enough rehearsals and behind-the-scenes clips were gathered to make a new movie, This Is It. This rockumentary amazed crowds in ways that the performer couldn’t in his later years because of the press backlash he faced. Once again, the music is the focus rather than the three-ring media circus around Michael Jackson.

Now, the Downfall parody’s angry-little Hitler can breathe a sigh of relief. He’ll get a chance to see the King of Pop in concert after all.

FILM The Botany of Desire

The Botany of Desire shows how plants get us to unwittingly do their bidding

Humans aren’t the only creatures on the planet who get horny. Plants can be sex-nuts too. In The Botany of Desire, cannabis growers separate male from female plants. The frustrated ladies produce fulsome mounds of sticky resin, eager to attract pollen. Then the growers harvest the resin for, ahem, medical purposes.

Cannabis is a complex plant that has fascinated us for centuries. This film explores that fascination from the plant’s point of view. Interviewee Michael Pollan hypothesizes that in order to propagate itself, the plant has allied itself with our race. It uses its psychotropic properties to make us go to extraordinary lengths — even risking incarceration — to grow it.

Pollan compares us to bees, which unwittingly help plants spread as they go about their business. Along with cannabis, he looks at tulips, apples, and potatoes. We desire each of these four plants for different reasons: tulips are pretty, apples are sweet, marijuana allows us to momentarily escape reality, and potatoes make good French fries.

Pollan’s investigation is part history lesson, part travelogue, part flight of fancy. He traces apple trees back to central Asia, in the country now known as Kazakhstan. Apples were slowly introduced to Europe and China through trade routes, eventually reaching the New World. The fruit became especially popular here because it could be used to make hard cider. More recently, a few “brands” of apple have been marketed because of their look or taste, leaving their bitter rivals to dwindle.

In another segment, Pollan takes us back to a period of “tulip fever” in 1630s Netherlands, when the price of a single Semper Augustus bulb sold for the equivalent of $15 million in today’s money. The tulip had adapted and mutated to become the most desirable flower in Europe, and if a bulb was scarce enough, speculators could drive its price sky high. When the bubble burst, the economy tanked. This was hardly the plant’s fault, but Dutch tulip bashers still vented their frustrations on any unlucky liliaceae they came across. Again, not a great win for the plant, but tulips have made a comeback since. (Cue glorious crane shots of rows of Dutch flowers, all grown according to color and type then shipped across the world to satisfy our desire for exquisite sights and scents.)

The Botany of Desire is based on Michael Pollan’s 2001 book of the same name. It looks at our world from the plants’ point of view in a clever, entertaining fashion. There are lots of attractively photographed images and the general tone of the film is friendly and informative.

About half an hour is devoted to each subject, with the author appearing as an enthusiastic interview subject instead of presenting his ideas directly to the audience. This gives Botany more of a TV documentary feel. Its caché is raised by Oscar-winner Frances McDormand, who narrates the film and helps the story flow. That flow is only lost when director Michael Schwarz strays from the busy bee analogy and touches on other aspects of the plants.

For example, we’re told that cannabis inspired the discovery and research of the brain’s own “marijuana,” anandamide. This effects appetite, pain, and memory. It’s interesting stuff and fine for a book that has room to meander, but in an overlong film like this one, a tighter focus would only improve it. The digressions detract from Pollan’s point — other species may not have conscious strategies but they can be ingenious, and they have made great achievements. Together we are part of a web of life. Whether it’s by limiting varieties of apples, outlawing cannabis, or trashing tulips, the evolutionary votes we cast effect the world around us in profound ways.

FILM REVIEW The Spiderwick Chronicles

The Spiderwick Chronicles

Starring Freddie Highmore, Mary-Louise Parker, Nick Nolte

Directed by Mark Waters

Rated PG

Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi have made a pretty mint out of their series of Spiderwick books, micro-thin hardbacks with high price tags and fine line drawings of goblins and fairies.

Collected together, the books tell the story of Jared, Simon, and Mallory Grace, three children who end up in a creepy house in the middle of nowhere. They find a book written by their Uncle Spiderwick, charting the lives and horrible habits of the fantastical creatures around them.

At first glance, the slim volumes seem unlikely candidates for a Hollywood fantasy movie. After bombastic adaptations of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia and A Series of Unfortunate Events, is there really a market for even more kids’ fantasy?

Or will audiences, as one Spiderwick movie reviewer put it, begin suffering from “fantasy fatigue”?

The answers of course are yes and yes.

It’s happened before, after all, with other genres. Hollywood producers see a trend, snap up the rights to a literary property, and hope the genre element will be enough to pull in the crowds.

Cecil B. DeMille’s success launched many biblical epic imitators; George Lucas’ melting pot repackaging of war movies, westerns, and comic books in Star Wars led to a decade of B-movie space operas. Filmmakers like Roger Corman and Dino De Laurentiis recycled Lucas’ already-recycled ideas and missed the point: The concepts mattered, not the sci-fi trappings.

With Spiderwick the film, the same thing seems to be happening.

It’s a movie of extremes — the first act breaks the cardinal rule of show, don’t tell, giving us far too much information about the feelings and lives of the Grace family through stodgy dialogue. The refreshingly down-to-earth children of the book are replaced by characters who talk like psychology majors.

Simon (Freddie Highmore) explains, “I’m a pacifist. I don’t do conflict.” Uh, thanks for the information on your character, kid. How about giving it to us in a way that doesn’t sound like it’s scripted?

All right, these are New Yorkers so we expect them to vocalize, but these are the kind of children who end a discussion by saying, “end of discussion.” Yet they use brawn, not brains, when fighting the monsters that besiege their house.

The young actors do their best with the material — particularly Highmore in two distinct roles — and there are likeable barely-there cameos by Nick Nolte and Andrew McCarthy. Mary-Louise Parker, who’s normally a strong actress, is the only thesp out of her depth. She misses opportunities to add complexity to her portrayal of a mom who should be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

When the goblins and sylphs start appearing, Spiderwick goes to the opposite end of the show-don’t-tell spectrum. We are shown almost everything in convincing Technicolor CGI.

There’s a steady pace, a tight running time, and a tear-jerking ending that contrasts the children’s loss of their dad (he’s separated from mom) with their Auntie’s loss of her own father. The audience learns that by looking at things in a different way, you can get a second chance in life, and the children learn that there’s nothing more satisfying than sweet, vicious vengeance.

So what’s to be done to stop the fantasy bubble from bursting the way the sci-fi one did in the ’80s, or the western one did in the ’70s? A refreshingly different approach always helps, and once in a while, an inevitable gem will slip through despite the worst intentions of the Hollywood studios.

Bridge to Terabithia was a surprisingly restrained, child-friendly guide to dealing with loneliness and bereavement. The Golden Compass was a much-hyped primer to the work of Philip Pullman, an author with a healthy skepticism of organized religion. Like the late Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, The Golden Compass encouraged readers to question blind faith. The latter was bashed by critics like Bill Donohue, president of the Christian League, as “bait for the books.” In his opinion, the dumbed-down, family-friendly flick might lead kids to read the novels and start thinking for themselves.

The best children’s fantasy books balance the teen appeal of adventure fiction and the strange and wonderful ideas that encourage imaginative thought. By watering down the ideas and highlighting the adventure, Hollywood may fill its movie theaters, but without the ideas that made the books intriguing in the first place, the snotty special effects will get fatiguing very quickly.

Fortunately, we’ll always have the books when the next movie bubble bursts.

FILM REVIEW Persepolis

Persepolis

Voices of Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux

Directed by Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Parannaud

Rated PG-13

Persepolis should be a Hollywood marketing drone’s worst nightmare.

It’s the autobiography of uncompromising Iranian writer Marjane Satrapi; it contains too many mature themes for typical pre-teen animation audiences. Its simple art and comic-book origins may put off the older set, too. But it’s an easier sell than you might think: It transcends its medium and tells an engaging story of universal truths in a fast-moving, amiable way.

The story centers on Satrapi’s family life as she grows up in Tehran in the 1970s and ’80s. After the tyrannical Shah is deposed, the people rejoice and gleeful kids play torture games in the street. In this climate of optimism, the fine line between church and state narrows and Islamic dogma steadily restricts the freedoms of its citizens. Tehran becomes a cheerless place that only a Charleston County deputy could love. It’s forbidden to play cards, drink alcohol, hold hands with your boyfriend in public, or generally misbehave.

If Amy Hutto lived in Tehran, she’d be public enemy No. 1.

Some of Satrapi’s neighbors and relatives are imprisoned or executed for their communist sympathies. As if that doesn’t make life hard enough for the outspoken Satrapi and her liberal parents, the city also has the crap bombed out of it during an eight-year war with Iraq. The Iranian government uses the resulting climate of fear to further impinge the civil liberties of its people while they try to continue their lives as normal. As Satrapi’s uninhibited grandma (Danielle Darrieux) puts it, “fear lulls us to sleep. It makes us cowards as well.”

Somehow Satrapi maintains her freedom of spirit, challenging the Islamic Guardians who ensure that women keep their heads covered with chadors and their faces unsullied by makeup. She headbangs to Iron Maiden, attends parties, and continues to speak her mind until it’s not safe any more.

Her parents ship her off to Austria where she discovers sex, drugs, and destitution. Europe has all the freedoms that Iran lacks, but people take it for granted and Satrapi doesn’t find the integrity and solidarity she’s used to back home. “In the West,” she says, “you can die in the street and nobody cares.”

Back home she gets married and learns the value of maintaining her identity and integrity. That serves her well when she moves to France, ready to start a new life as an artist. The animation in this film is Simpsons-simple and stays true to Satrapi’s original comic books (she finds the term “graphic novels” pretentious). The characters have no detailed expressions, just a bump for a nose, a line for a mouth, and pupils like little black beans bouncing around their saucepan eyes.

It’s amazing how much story and emotion is conveyed with such a direct approach. The most effective scenes use silhouettes to show epic events in Iran’s history — riots, battles, executions. We watch the countryside turn from verdant landscape to blasted heath. Satrapi describes walking in Tehran as being “like walking in a cemetery.”

The political asides and mini-history lessons never get in the way of Satrapi’s life story, and the film takes a singularly candid look at a girl’s coming of age — her fantasies, her confusion as she tries to find an identity for herself, and the physical changes she undergoes.

In a clever scene, puberty hits her all at once as she undergoes an awkward transformation from girl to young woman. In moments like this, Satrapi’s self-effacing humor is enhanced by filmmaker Vincent Parannaud’s gift for slapstick and visual comedy, which helps to keep the movie from grinding to a navel-gazing halt.

With Hollywood shying away from a serious examination of the injustices of Islamic fundamentalism, Persepolis is a small, unassuming piece of entertainment with some big statements to make about not just gaining your freedom but what to do with it once it’s won.

FILM REVIEW Rambo

Rambo

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Paul Schulze

Directed by Sylvester Stallone

Rated R

The world has changed considerably since the last time John Rambo stomped onto movie screens in 1988. His mortal enemy, Soviet Russia, has crumbled. He’s been mercilessly spoofed in movies like Hot Shots Part Deux. Headbands and mullets are the stuff of comedy, not military action. But have audience tastes really changed that much in the intervening years? Have our action hero expectations come full circle?

Rambo — the fourth film in the First Blood franchise — is a loud, exciting, efficiently directed combat movie and the most concise of the series. Not that the Vietnam vet ever stopped to smell the roses, but this is the wrong place to look for narrative twists or witty dialogue. Rambo doesn’t even have a catchphrase or a worthy speech to make. He’s too busy blowing shit up.

The lofty speeches are reserved for a group of missionaries who are trying to bring medical aid and some good old-fashioned Bible schoolin’ to Burmese peasants. They’re led by Dr. Michael Burnett, portrayed by Paul Schulze (Father Phil in The Sopranos). He believes violence is not the solution to settling Burma’s civil unrest. Burnett is accompanied by Sarah Miller (Julie Benz, who played Darla in Buffy). Miller believes “trying to save a life isn’t wasting your life.” Whether it’s because of her platitudes or her naivety, Rambo agrees to take the do-gooders from Thailand to Burma. When the missionaries are attacked, Rambo comes to the rescue with a group of mercenaries. Dozens of unnamed bad guys are killed. And that’s about it.

Judging by the few barely intelligible words that Sylvester Stallone does utter, the lack of a big speech might not be a bad thing. Nevertheless, he’s very effective as the stone-cold Rambo, who isn’t in the mood for a chat. In this movie, he’s a bloody behemoth, crushing every obstacle in his path. His every bootstep makes a resounding crunch on the jungle floor. He causes so much destruction that in New York, he’d be videotaped and codenamed Cloverfield.

Instead, Stallone, who also co-writes and directs, has chosen to plonk his box office monster in Burma, far off the CNN radar, where a true-life war between military forces and Karen rebels has raged for six decades and life is cheaper than a pair of Crocs. Casablanca opened with newsreel-style footage, too, but here the ploy fails; after such graphic images of human suffering, any action flick would seem frivolous. Rambo compensates by upping the visceral violence. The movie’s hardly begun before someone explodes in a burst of gore, and that’s a mere prelude to the carnage to come. It’s a fine screw-you to critics who complain about actioners that show violence without its consequences, but its nastiness prevents the film from working as a piece of entertainment. It’s no date movie, unless your date’s Dick Cheney.

In the ’80s, such realistic depictions of war were just a wicked twinkle in the eyes of Stallone and his writer-director peers, busily trying to top each others’ action set pieces. The First Blood films escalated from the story of a man against an unreasonable rural police chief to a man against a Russian tank division. Standing tall on a heap of possum-playing foreign extras, Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were more icons than actors, the bastard children of tough guys like John Wayne and Charleston Heston with Charles Bronson as midwife.

We needed those icons. The threat of nuclear war cast a gloom over our existence and the presence of those larger-than-life, muscle-bound Mr. Fix-Its was reassuring. Rambo became such a cozy figure that he got a spin-off cartoon and a toy line. The “support our troops” speeches of his movies may seem overblown now, but back then they were heartfelt. Novelist David Morell made sure there was some rhyme to the violence, but it was facile stuff all the same.

When the Soviet threat faded, we relaxed a little. It was time to lighten up, ask questions first, and shoot later. By then, screenwriter Shane Black had introduced wisecracking characters like Martin Riggs (played by Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon) and Joe Hallenbeck (Bruce Willis in The Last Boy Scout). These guys were as psychopathic as Rambo, but they had vulnerable spots too. Will Smith and Nicolas Cage later personified friendly guys who just happened to be reluctant heroes.

Now the threat of a Soviet-sponsored armageddon has been replaced by a terrorist-led apocalypse. Our enemies aren’t so easy to identify this time — in fact, they’re more anonymous than all those Russian guards that Rambo used to blow away.

Plus we have a generation of youths experiencing war, and eager for some mindless on-screen action. No wonder Jason Bourne (a character created in the ’80s) has raked in so much cash with his three movies; the character kills with ruthless efficiency and rarely emotes. Bruce Willis has returned for another Die Hard, with less quips this time. Even the devil-may-care James Bond got a gritty revamp, recast as more of a vengeful assassin than a dashing playboy spy.

So Rambo’s back to symbolize our dark times, indestructible as ever. The theme hasn’t changed. Warriors — real and fictional — are necessary, whether we approve of their bone-crunching tactics or not.

FILM REVIEW The Orphanage

The Orphanage

Starring Belen Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Príncep

Directed by J.A. Bayona

Rated R (with English subtitles)

The Orphanage creeps into American multiplexes with an endorsement from Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro, but it doesn’t really need one. It’s an effective, desperately unsettling ghost story that shows Hollywood how a horror movie should be done.

Above all, The Orphanage proves that it doesn’t take a whole load of CGI or a histrionic music score to create an atmosphere of psychological terror. Less is more.

Simon (Roger Príncep) is a cute 7-year-old boy with an even cuter mom (Laura, played by Belen Rueda). Simon, Laura, and her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) move into an old dark house that used to be Laura’s orphanage when she was a girl.

Now it’s creaky, foreboding, and beset by thunderstorms.

As is customary, things go bump in the night.

Simon is adopted, and he gets lonely while he waits for his parents to reopen the orphanage and bring in some new kids with special needs. Like a lot of bored, friendless sprogs, Simon invents some imaginary chums — or are they the ghosts of past orphans?

The movie revolves around Rueda’s performance as she goes from loving mother to tortured soul when her son goes missing at the orphanage’s re-opening party.

Is a mysterious, hatchet-wielding old lady responsible? Is it the specter of Tomas, a deformed little boy who was shut away in the house? Or is Laura going loopy?

Rueda’s excellent. She evokes the weariness of a put-upon parent and a whiff of psychosis without losing the sympathy of the audience.

Cayo is equally believable as Carlos, the family pragmatist. When Laura invites a medium into the house, Carlos refuses to acknowledge the eerie voices of the children they hear. He’s the down-to-earth type whose reasoning fails to track down Simon. Laura’s only choice is to take the medium’s advice and go beyond reason, exploring the ethereal instead.

So far, so derivative — there are shades of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Poltergeist, and del Toro’s own orphanage ghost tale, The Devil’s Backbone. There’s also a nice homage to 1963’s The Haunting when something crawls into bed beside Laura ­— and it ain’t her husband.

Fortunately, this film doesn’t just rehash its predecessors to deliver its frights. It adds new twists, it’s beautifully shot, and it’s told with an obvious love for the genre that’s obviously lacking in standard U.S. examples. There’s only one dump-in-your-drawers shock in the movie. The rest is a subtle exercise in tension and utter creepiness.

This kind of film only works if the audience cares about the main characters. It’s a credit to the actors and first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona that the distraught parents’ plight is always engrossing.

One particularly effective scene takes place outside the orphanage, in a meeting for bereaved moms and dads who’ve glimpsed their children long after death. The supporting cast and the look of the film build a sense of realism that makes the supernatural elements easier to swallow.

By tapping into our too-real fears of losing a loved one, The Orphanage becomes more than a series of frights. It can be charming and poignant as well. Although there are Spanish subtitles, these rarely distract from the flow of a film that relies on rich visuals to propel its narrative.

Its flaws lie in its attempts to compete with Hollywood: The music is occasionally overblown, there’s a clichéd underwater dream sequence, and the use of a deformed child as a way to perturb the audience isn’t exactly PC.

But these minor missteps never detract from the film’s scary, emotionally gripping atmosphere, making it required viewing for mainstream horror directors and discerning film fans alike.

They Are Marshall

The Great Debaters

Starring Denzel Washington, Nate Parker, Forest Whitaker

Directed by Denzel Washington

Rated PG-13

Here’s the premise of the latest biopic, The Great Debaters: A teacher takes a group of mismatched underdog schoolkids facing racial prejudice and helps them gain acceptance by competing against out-of-their-league rivals.

Sound familiar? It should. That in-a-nutshell précis could describe dozens of Hollywood films, including 2000’s Remember the Titans. In that movie, Denzel Washington played the sage and acerbic Coach Boone armed with an array of motivational bon mots. In Debaters, the dependable actor is back in much the same role, although the sport of choice this time is debating, not football.

This may seem like a sad reflection on the paucity of fresh roles for African-American actors, but Washington is also the director and co-producer of The Great Debaters. He is the decider. Freshness is up to him. Even so, while it may not be the most original movie at the multiplex, it’s a tale worth telling.

In the mid-1930s Wiley College, a tiny African-American college in Marshall, Texas, the debate team begins a winning streak so strong that it makes Harvard sit up and take notice. The four-person team is led by the headstrong Henry Lowe (Nate Parker) and Hamilton Burgess (Jermaine Williams), with Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett) and James Farmer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker) in reserve. Lowe rebels against coach Tolson’s my-way-or-the-highway methods. Booke loves Lowe but hates his drinking. The 14-year-old Farmer is jealous of his teammates’ budding romance.

In his own inscrutable way, Tolsen teaches his students about peaceful coexistence and social politics, using the powerful words of Langston Hughes, Gordon Parks et al. to prove the pen is mightier than the pig farmer. Despite various interpersonal ups and downs, the passionate pupils are so successful that they’re invited to compete against out-of-their-league Ivy League rivals.

On paper, this must have seemed like a great project. Drama thrives on conflict and argument, so what could be more dramatic than a debating team spending its entire time arguing?

Unfortunately, the film imitates other, better movies in its attempts to gain mainstream acceptance. When Tolsen refers to the roots of the word “denigrate” (derived from the Latin “denigrare” to “blacken”), he hearkens back to a similar, far more powerful word-bashing scene in Malcolm X. As an antagonistic Texas sheriff, John Heard summons the spirit of Rod Steiger from In the Heat of the Night, with a similar sweatiness and a squeaky Southern drawl.

Nevertheless, the leads are charismatic enough to make us care about them. The talky stuff is broken up by subplots involving Texas discrimination, union-breaking, and rural life, and there are enough visual moments to prevent the film from becoming an endless stream of righteous talk.

Even so, the aggrandized debates are a scriptwriter’s dream come true — they’re an excuse to put opinions about war, independent thought, and social politics into the mouths of babes.

Although the film shows how the times were a-changing in the ’30s, with the seeds sown for postwar civil disobedience, there’s a relevant 21st-century context too: anti-authoritarianism, whether violent or non-violent, is okay if you don’t agree with what The Man is doing.

As a director, Washington keeps the story moving with the minimum of pomp. There’s a pleasing sequence where James Farmer Jr. shoots amateur footage of country life — field workers, a boy getting his hair cut — that draws from the WPA photography of the era.

There are also some fun parallels made between debating and acting — the team has to stand on a “hot spot” and perform. The kids learn to project their voices and their contentions are carefully rehearsed.

The Great Debaters won’t astound, but it’s uplifting and enjoyable enough.

FILM REVIEW The Merkin Man

Ah, the Lowcountry. Land of simple elegance and picturesque luster.

What a perfect place for a TV special like Devin Dukes’ Gettin’ Around the Lowcountry, a short film similar to public TV-style magazine shows, that visits charming locales for in-depth looks at South Carolina’s most colorful inhabitants.

In this case, that inhabitant is the merkin man.

A merkin is a pubic “wig” popularized in the 15th-18th centuries by prostitutes who needed something to cover up their “public” parts oozing with sores symptomatic of syphilis.

These days, merkins have resurfaced as “body furniture” for the kinky set.

Dukes’ 20-minute program boasts no kink. It doesn’t intend to, anyway. Instead, a perky reporter by the name of Rose Chase-Pinckney interviews Justice P. Courtney, a down-home merkin maker who uses Spanish moss to weave his wares.

According to Courtney, they’re still required in the Lowcountry, because we’re the tops when it comes to syphilis. Our medical techniques aren’t on a par with the rest of the country.

The twitching, tattooed bald guy declares that Charleston moss is the best in the world — pure, rich, and unique. He gets the moss from trees with a shotgun and smokes out the redbugs.

“They’re not good for down there,” he explains with a downward glance.

After the moss is killed, dried, and shined, a couple of ladies named Gert and Shirl cut patterns in the shape of the “landing strip” and the “Jimmy Buffet,” which are especially popular.

All of Courtney’s wigs, however, are selling like jelly rolls.

Maybe that’s because they’re “made with love for a world gone mad with syphilis.”

In case you haven’t guessed, Dukes’ video is a spoof in lightweight human-interest programming of the kind found all the time on public television and cable-access channels. Dukes premiered the video on Dec. 15 at the Walnut Hill Barn on Johns Island.

In Gettin’ Around the Lowcountry, the actors are earnest and professional, lampooning cottage industries run by canny Southerners. As Justice, Danny Hawkins leads the way with a mixture of natural acting and wide-eyed wonder. Lonnie Hubbard is memorable as Justice’s business partner (and third cousin), who’s bemused but delighted to be making money out of moss. Laurin McCarley and Madeline Dukes, as Gert and Shirl, add a feeling of documentary realism.

As the writer, producer, and director, Dukes knows some of the best comedy comes from treating a silly subject in a serious manner. He captures the pace and undemanding composition of a typical ETV program well.

Actually, Dukes might be on to something. A real life merkin (made of human hair) costs more than $300. Though Spanish moss may not be the best material, a rural business based on $19.95 pubic wigs could be a gold mine.

FILM PREVIEW The Guestworker

The Guestworker
Shown at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art
Fri. Oct. 12, 2007
Room 309, Simons Center for the Arts
54 St. Philip St.
Free
(843) 953-5680

In her films, Cynthia Hill prefers to let her subjects do the talking. We follow them through the day, seeing the world through their eyes.

With her 2006 film The Guestworker, Hill gives us a glimpse into the hard, low-paid lives of laborers on Wester Farms in North Carolina. It took Hill three years to complete the production, and with it, the filmmaker is more or less saying a long goodbye to the world of traditional farming, using time-honored documentary techniques to make her point.

And it’s a world that Hill knows well. The filmmaker, who was raised in the rural town of Pink Hill, N.C., says creative urges were nullified, not nurtured, in the agricultural dependent community. “The idea of doing anything artistic wasn’t just discouraged. It wasn’t even a possibility,” says Hill.

Convinced that she needed a good stable job, she enrolled in pharmacy school because of the high salaries of pharmacy graduates. “It’s not necessarily the route filmmakers take,” she admits. But at the school there was a whole communications department within the pharmacy program with a studio and professional video equipment.

Hill began making health education videos and found that she enjoyed the filmmaking process. “It was nice to have a creative side,” she says. “I was 23, and I hadn’t thought I could do that.”

For her first major documentary, Tobacco Money Feeds My Family, Hill turned her attention to the plight of tobacco farmers. While the smoking ban may be good for our lungs, for tobacco farmers it sucks. In the film, Hill shows how important the much maligned crop is to the farmers — and their families — in Lenoir County, N.C. By exploring their lives and their communities, Hill also examines her own upbringing — her family worked in the tobacco fields when she was young.

These days, farmers have a difficult time finding U.S. residents who are willing to work their fingers to the bone for a few hundred bucks a week. No one wants the work. As a result, these farms are allowed to hire guest workers. Which brings us to Don Candelario Gonzalez Moreno, a 65-year-old participant of the government’s H2A worker program and the protagonist of the edifying 50-minute documentary, The Guestworker.

Hill uses glossy video to capture life on Wester Farms, but there’s no attempt to beautify the agrarian landscape or overdramatize the intensity of the labor. The closest she gets to editorializing is juxtaposing images of a farmer eating a family meal in his house with those of the guestworkers’ shoddier living conditions. But her directorial voice is always distinct — she cares about the workers and highlights their humanity.

“I don’t necessarily make my films for any audience,” says Hill, who is on a 10-day tour to discuss The Guestworker and introduce screenings of the film. Nevertheless, she appreciates the value of watching one of her projects with a group of people and responding to the way they laugh, groan, or shuffle their butts in the middle of a scene. “There’s an immediate feedback you don’t get when it’s on TV. And it’s great to be on the road … I feel like a rock star. All I need are some groupies.”

After the tour, Hill will return to two other projects she’s developing. One is a film about domestic violence that she was brought on board to work on; the other is a deeply personal exploration of religion in her home town. Raised in a Pentecostal Holiness household with a preacher for an uncle, she knows a thing or two about the heavy impact religion can have on small communities.

“I find the whole filmmaking process invigorating,” she says. “It can also be tiresome, disappointing, frustrating — especially the fundraising process.” But for Hill, all of that hard work is justified when she’s granted access to environments, like that of the guest laborers on Wester Farms and the tobacco farmers in Lenoir County, which society doesn’t usually get to see. “That’s a great privilege. Then to share it, to watch it with others … That’s an honor.”

The Projectionist

The Projectionist

Before I became a wide-eyed American immigrant, I got my USA 101 the same way as most people around the world — from Hollywood movies, sitcoms, superhero comics, and Uncle Sam’s military policy. When I moved from England I knew that there were certain things I needed to fit in: credit card debt, a garage full of junk, a hunting license, and a den or basement to retreat to in my dotage.

Wracking up the debt was easy. So was amassing the junk, and I’ve been invited to go night fishing with a lady called Big Marge. So far, the basement has eluded me. A basement is a place to go when the rat race gets too fierce, when family life seems too mundane. It’s a space for all that extra junk that won’t fit in the garage, and an oasis of calm in which to clear one’s thoughts.

For Gordon Brinckle, it’s all those things and a movie theatre too. The Projectionist delves into his life and the contents of his cellar.

For past exhibitions, The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art has been transformed into a juke joint, a Chinese laundry, and a weird organic-looking structure where the outside of the building oozed in. Its current exhibition is something more dazzling and unusual, based around a photographic project by Kendall Messick. The subject is Brinckle (pronounced Brinkley), Messick’s old neighbor in Delaware. As a boy, the artist remembers visiting Brinckle’s house and seeing a movie theatre in the basement. When Messick came home years later and found that his neighbor had continued to tweak, improve, and utilize the theatre, he started to photograph the elderly man.

Messick shot black-and-white photographs upstairs in the “real world,” capturing the sedentary life of Brinckle and his wife, Dot. The downstairs images explode into color, showing the rich red and blue interior of The Shalimar Theatre. There’s a box office, marble figurines, animal statuettes, and trimmings taken from the designer’s dream version of a larger-than-life ’30s movie theatre.

To tell Brinckle’s complete story, Messick shot a documentary video that covers his life and work, from a boyhood fascination with projectors to a fulfillment of his vision. After the biopic was done, Messick decided to take half of the theatre out of the basement and on tour. Halsey is its second stop. Now you can see the theatre and watch the doc in the reconstructed proscenium.

While that’s a great way to start the show, the real treasures are on the second floor of the gallery. Some of Brinckle’s relics, programs, handmade stamps, and projection equipment are displayed in glass cases. The photographs on the walls contrast shots of the Shalimar’s colorful showman with candid glimpses of elderly life. They capture the effort it takes to wash, get dressed, and walk from one room to another. This is the heart of The Projectionist — the hardship and neglect of our elderly citizens. How many of them have been forgotten or underappreciated, Messick asks, and how many have fantasy worlds tucked in some corner of the house?

It’s when we enter that fantasy world that the photos really mesmerize. They’re beautifully lit, three-dimensional, and full of life. Ironically, the only thing that lets the exhibition down is the projection of the documentary — the colors bleed, the image wobbles occasionally, and Messick’s gorgeous source film loses some of its luster. Messick says that this can’t be rectified without spending thousands of dollars on digital equipment and an operator, impossible in a show that he believes is already stretching the gallery’s budget.

The so-so projection is a minor grumble when faced with such all-round splendor, and the photography succeeds in telling the real story of Brinckle’s amazing 92-year life.

Messick would like to take the show to England. While it would have to work hard to compete with all the other U.S. cultural exports, this one would give a much clearer picture of Americans’ ingenuity, humor, and indefatigable resolve to follow their passions.

FILM REVIEW ‌ Fascist Filmmaking

America: Freedom to Fascism

What does an audience expect from a movie? Not all of them have to be feature length. The movie industry was built around silent one-reelers, generally 10 minutes long. Does a movie have to tell a story? Not really; impressionistic documentaries get by on mood and visuals, not narrative. It doesn’t even have to have a central concept or character — a number of anthology movies, telling multiple stories bound only by a loose theme.

A movie can mean many different things, but surely it has to have the illusion of movement. After all, the word is short for “moving picture.” Yet Derek Jarman’s Blue is a memorable example of a feature that held one static image. It made the grade as a piece of visual art and a movie too.

Aaron Russo’s two hour documentary America: Freedom to Fascism, currently striking fear into the hearts of theatergoers nationwide, should be a movie — it has a main character (Russo himself), an informative point of view (Russo’s), and even a beginning, middle, and end (written by Russo). But it doesn’t feel like a real movie.

America focuses on the lack of a written law that requires us to pay income tax. As Russo develops this idea, interviewing lawyers, politicians, and authors who can’t find that law, he also examines the Federal Reserve. He learns from his eager interviewees that the 16th Amendment was never ratified by Congress, and that the IRS can be heavy-handed when it collects its debts.

From there, Russo decides that income tax is an instrument of totalitarianism. A small cartel of bankers control the government and media, we’re living in a police state, the Iraq War is an attempt by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England to control oil interests, and within a few years we could all be implanted with electronic chips to track our spending and our lives.

America touches on a lot of hot topics, including the effects globalization has had on our nation’s labor force, the weakening value of the dollar, the Real ID Act (standardizing federally approved IDs), and the erosion of civil liberties after 9/11. But that’s all it does — touch on them. Russo tries to pack so much into his opus that he comes across as a guy on a soapbox, running off on tangents. One minute we’re shown a list of Bush’s latest Executive Orders; the next an IRS raid is reenacted with a photo and a couple of handheld video shots.

America‘s producer, director, editor, and star Russo’s a smart, witty guy with a decades-long track record. As he tells the audience on more than one occasion, he’s an award-winning film producer (his most notable credit is 1983’s hit comedy Trading Places). At his best, he uses every conceivable cinematic trick to engage the audience — stirring slo-mo shots of the American flag, snappy soundbites, a conspiratorial tone (“we’d discovered a government secret!”), and some investigative-style scenes where he roves with a camera crew. It’s as if he’s seen how powerful and effective well-made documentaries can be and has taken a little from each of them. Unfortunately, the rest of America is in a very messy state.

Apart from its wayward focus, Russo’s lack of an objective producer or distributor is the real problem here. There’s no one to channel his enthusiasm, or edit out personal opinions that don’t really add anything to the debate. “Most politicians will sell their souls for a dollar,” he tells us. Gee, really? Wiser heads might also have restrained Russo’s heavy hand as he juxtaposed his ideas with shots of gangsters and the Soviet flag.

There have been some great semi-professional video documentaries doing the rounds recently, but few of them collect the thoughts of one guy in such a muddled way as this. By creating and distributing his movie himself, Russo will get a lot of personal satisfaction out of the project, but it won’t have as much impact as it could have with a few executive orders of its own. As it stands, with a corner-cutting budget, heavy reliance on text, and myopically opinionated editing, it’s the filmic equivalent of the authoritarianism that Russo fears so much.

FEATURE ‌ Enter the Gryphon

by Nick Smith June 28, 2006

Newsflash: Charleston isn’t the center of the moviemaking universe. We don’t have Wilmington’s soundstages, LA’s production infrastructure, or New Orleans’ progressive tax breaks. So it’s no surprise that according to the Screen Actors Guild, no major movies are presently lensing in this state and none are planned for the near future.

Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in the presence of a Hollywood producer would agree it’s a good thing that we’re off the big studios’ radar. Yet a great deal of movie crewmembers and actors live here, working on projects nationwide while retaining their Chucktown homes.

Now a new group of producers plans to tap into the local talent pool and develop projects locally. They’re director Craig Hadley, animator Kem Welch, ad men Rich Carnahan and Eric Vincent, and independent producer Richard Almes. Combined, they make up the Charleston-based Gryphonpix Entertainment.

All five are seasoned businessmen, approaching the venture from a commercial standpoint rather than that of a starry-eyed bunch making pretty movies for fun. There ain’t much that’s pretty in their first feature film. The Interview is an unabashedly torrid tale of kidnapping, serial murder, and revenge that’s as upfront about its selling points as any Bruckheimer bunkum.

“The group read The Interview and said it was the perfect first screenplay for them,” says Hadley, who wrote the film and is directing it. “Our experienced Hollywood production manager Peter Wentworth said it was very marketable.” But instead of going ahead and shooting it, GPX bided its time, letting the project simmer for nine months before bringing it to a boil.

“We decided to shoot a prepromotional trailer,” Hadley explains, “showing some of the minor characters and the action they do that’s integral to the story.” As the main characters haven’t been cast yet, that gave local actors Michael Easler, Trevor Erickson, and Myra Denue a chance to shine in a martial arts sequence and a “sexy erotic dance” scene. The week-long shoot cost about $3,000 and enabled investors and the press to watch GPX at work, “so they could visit a film set and see that this is the real deal, not some guy with a camcorder and two flashlights.”

The filmmakers squeezed as many bells and whistles as they could into their promo, inviting respected Director of Photography Andy Montejo up from Orlando with a Steadicam rig to shoot the action. The hard work paid off — GPX landed a couple of investors and is on its way to securing a $675,000 budget for The Interview. Principal photography starts in January of next year, whether the cash is all there or not.

In order to offset costs and give their project a bigger-budget sheen, the founders have called in a lot of favors. Montejo visited Charleston on his own dime, bringing his equipment and camera assistant as a favor to his old friend Hadley. Vincent storyboarded the scenes. Almes convinced local facility company PDA to light the set and provide more equipment. It seems that the partners’ contacts and resources make up for any shortfalls in blockbuster movie-making experience.

GPX has tapped into another resource — the network of filmmakers frustrated with having to constantly travel out of state. From Trident Tech students to veteran independent producers like Wentworth, they share a passion for moviemaking that makes them eager to lend a hand (or a spare camera).

With the teaser trailer wrapped, the group will spend the rest of the year securing investors, educating them about South Carolina’s film-related tax incentives and the profitability of features. Even a box office flop stands a reasonable chance of recouping its costs on DVD — it just might take a while. For impatient backers, there are other ways to distribute a film; the internet has opened up a whole new way to separate movie buffs from their moolah as video streaming and downloading hardware improves.

“For $5, people will be able to view our film on the net,” says Hadley. “For $20 they can get a downloadable version to burn onto disk, and for a bit more they can order a professionally packaged DVD. That’s where the real money is.”

Without a finished product, GPX is focusing on awareness-raising and developing other films, from the family-friendly Abra-Ca-Diaper to Chainsaw Nuns. And while the money-minded Gryphon guys are shooting their movie on HD video to keep costs down, the creative part of their job brightens their business dealings.

“I’m living a lifelong dream,” says Rich Carnahan, sounding like a giddy schoolboy on summer break. “Who doesn’t want this kind of opportunity?”

Carnahan’s determined to extend that opportunity to the entire local community. “You shouldn’t want to make movies by yourself. A lot of skeptics out there say we can’t do this because it hasn’t been done like this before, or that so many people have tried to do this and failed.” Carnahan admits that it’s been difficult to get a good start because of that skepticism. “But people want this to work, it’ll do good for the area, provide them with jobs. We’re genuinely excited about making movies; we talk about it every day.”