The Man’s Got Vision; Help Him Share It

I want you to help me get rid of some of my money. Seriously. The catch is this: To help me get rid of my money, you’ve got to be willing to part with some of yours. Don’t worry: This isn’t some Internet scam or pyramid scheme. It’s all legit. So, please, hear me out. Hear me all the way out. Let me explain.

I want you to donate money, even just a little, to Steven Boone. Boone is one of the authors of the blog Big Media Vandalism and a contributor to sites such as The House Next Door. In addition, he’s a “micro-budget filmmaker” who has made mostly “esoteric” shorts that can be found on Vimeo. (I recommend “Wolf City High and Low” and “Notes for a David Lynch Adaptation of Moonwalk” if you want a taste of Boone’s creativity.) Up to now, Boone has made his films using “borrowed, broken and public computers,” and that’s been fine. But as he approaches the creation of an ambitious film series he’s calling “The Best of Everything,” he figures he needs his own dependable equipment. And that’s where you (and I) come in. Please, keep reading.

Boone is attempting to raise $3,500 to purchase a computer (with editing software), a camera and a microphone. But here’s the deal: The deadline for donations is July 19, less than a month away, and if the full $3,500 isn’t in the pot, Boone isn’t taking a dime of it. That’s why even though I’ve already made my donation, my offering is effectively an empty gesture unless more people can chip in and help Boone reach the $3,500 mark. (As of publication, he’s got a long way to go.)

Beyond the Game: The Two Escobars

If one of the things that June 17, 1994 reminded us is that we can’t watch professional athletes on the playing field and know what kind of people they are, The Two Escobars offers the equally important reminder that no amount of media coverage can provide us with a clear understanding of what these athletes are going through. The latest release in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series opens with shots of the Colombian soccer team looking less than enthusiastic as they walk onto the pitch in front of a passionate capacity crowd at the Rose Bowl for a crucial match against the United States in the 1994 World Cup. To most, the Colombians look as if they’re feeling the pressure of having been upset by Romania in their opening game, and they are. They also look as if they’re suffering an unfamiliar lack of confidence, and that’s probably right, too. But there’s something else there, something that’s more difficult to detect because it’s not something most of us expect to find at a soccer game. That something else is fear, real fear – the fear of losing something much more significant than a game. To spot that fear, you have to be able to crawl inside the minds of the Colombian players, to understand where they come from, what they’re playing for and what they stand to lose. To see that fear, you have to see beyond sports. That’s what The Two Escobars does so well.

Directed by Jeff and Michael Zimbalist, The Two Escobars is less a sports documentary than a gritty South American crime saga. It’s The Godfather by way of Che Guevara as written by Tom Clancy and adapted for the screen by David Simon. It’s packed with assassinations, government corruption, drug trafficking, money laundering, militia wars, kidnapping and terrorism. There’s enough here for a miniseries. Instead it’s a taut 100-minute powerhouse overflowing with so much compelling archival footage that you figure the Zimbalists grew up clipping newspaper articles and storing them in shoeboxes underneath their beds, just waiting for their chance to tell this story. The impressive density and complexity of The Two Escobars is occasionally overwhelming, particularly in the early going when we’re assaulted with overlapping narrative voices (in Spanish, with English subtitles) that have a habit of referring to names we’re still trying to associate with faces. But the longer we watch, the more it makes sense, both logically and emotionally. Watching this film is a little like staring at Picasso’s Guernica: The whole is impossible to comprehend at once, so instead we understand it in pieces until the big picture paints itself in our minds as some kind of subconscious panorama that we could never quite describe in words.

Home on the Range: Sweetgrass

The camera watches the sheep. The sheep stare back. And stare. And stare. And stare. That’s the design of two shots that come along early in Sweetgrass. And even though there aren’t many shots quite like those in this unfortunately hard to find documentary, those compositions are surprisingly indicative of the film as a whole. Sweetgrass is an observant picture made up of noticeably lengthy shots that often redefine themselves as they unfold. In those previous examples, the initial humor of looking into the eyes of dumb-fascinated sheep eventually gives way to an unanticipated reverence for nature’s beauty, which then gives way to a feeling of unremarkable indifference. These are contradictory reactions, but within Sweetgrass they prove to be warmly compatible. If the blank expressions of the glassy-eyed grass-chomping sheep make you giggle, you get this film’s charm. If at the same time the sheep somehow touch you with their awkward elegance, you’re still right. Filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor have crafted a picture that is at once gritty, poetic and procedural. That’s what’s neat about it.

There’s also this: Whereas so many documentaries feel like long-form journalism (not that there’s anything wrong with that), Sweetgrass is cinema. It’s without omniscient narration, talking-head interviews or any other cues that might help explain what’s going on. It’s an experience, not a lecture. It’s something to feel, not something to learn. Sweetgrass shows – not tells – the experience of two cowboys taking their sheep through public land in Montana to fatten up on mountain grass. We watch this unfold with the knowledge that this all occurs in the Absaroka Beartooth range in the not-so-distant past, but that’s the extent of the film’s clearly defined context. Other details, such as the number of years that cowboys (er, shepherds) have been doing this sort of thing, and the number of weeks that a sheep-drive takes, aren’t provided until the closing credits, which is why I won’t provide that context now. The filmmakers’ choice not to chart the passing of time was in part a casualty of their approach, compiling their footage over several years and mashing it up into one narrative arc. Nevertheless, the decision to plop us into the middle of this wilderness adventure with scant explanation is a clearly conscious one. We’re not meant to know. We’re expected to discover. Sweetgrass isn’t esoteric so much as it’s nebulous.

Bitter Reality (TV): June 17, 1994

We are a nation of ambulance chasers and rubberneckers. We are a society drawn to sensationalism. We are America. We take sports too seriously. We take life and death too lightly. All too often, we obsess over scoreboard points while missing the point. We are shameful but unashamed. We know our faults and tend to accept them, even celebrate them. We are Americans. In this context, Brett Morgen’s contribution to ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” documentary series is the embarrassing portrait of America that we shouldn’t need but that we wholly deserve. It’s titled June 17, 1994, after the date of the events it chronicles, but it’s as much a mirror to our present as it is a snapshot of our past. Catch a few minutes here or there and you’ll think Morgen’s film is about a crazy day in sports history in which the New York Rangers celebrated their Stanley Cup victory with a parade, and the Knicks took on the Rockets in the NBA Finals, and the World Cup kicked off in Chicago, and Arnold Palmer played his final round at a U.S. Open and, not to be outdone, O.J. Simpson led police (and transfixed Americans) in a low-speed chase down a Los Angeles freeway. But all of that is just the setting of June 17, 1994; its subject is something else. It’s the story of us.

Morgen’s documentary, which is easily one of the finest of the “30 for 30” series, is a condemnation of America’s confused value system cleverly disguised as a leisurely trip down memory lane. Its greatest strength is its gracefulness, challenging thoughtful viewers without resorting to didacticism or heavy-handedness. Preach? Morgen wouldn’t dream of it. His film is void of traditional narration and talking-head interviews. In their place is a vibrant collage of news footage from that fateful day 16 years ago – stuff that aired, like Tom Brokaw’s bewildered coverage of Simpson’s quasi-escape attempt, and stuff that didn’t, like the multitude of clips showing news personalities chatting with their producers and cameramen, feverously trying to determine what to make of Simpson’s apparent admission-by-flight and how to cover it. In individual snippets, this footage is familiar (the white Ford Bronco cruising down I-5) or unremarkable (a Rangers fan in Manhattan showing off his freshly-inked Stanley Cup tattoo). In sum, however, it’s sobering, clearly exposing the unhealthy significance we place on sports (“Now I can die in peace,” says a 10-or-so kid of the Rangers’ victory) and the flippancy we often exhibit in the face of real-life tragedy, as if it’s a gladiatorial event offered up for our entertainment (the sight of people cheering the Simpson motorcade was disturbing in 1994 and it’s even more disquieting now that we know exactly what Simpson was running from).

The Conversations: Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve

Today things spring back to life at The Cooler with news that the latest edition of The Conversations is live at The House Next Door. This time Ed Howard and I take on a pair of classics from 1950: Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve. We compare the films, particularly their direction. We analyze the main characters and wonder whether they reflect modern Hollywood all too well. We puzzle over a painting hanging in the background (someone solve the mystery!). We celebrate some of the terrific dialogue. It is, I think, a fun conversation. But it would be enhanced by your input. So when you have time, please head on over to The House Next Door, give the piece a read and join the conversation!