Not Actually Playin' Possum...

This is just a quick, sad little footnote on this whole "living in California" thing.

I have moved to an area where I am apparently surrounded by opossums. Being a fan of marsupials, and not being daunted at all (like some outright wusses are) by crazy-looking varmints with mouthfuls of scary, sharp teeth -- not to mention being a longtime fan of king 'possum Pogo his'self -- I am very pleased at this thought. I like being surrounded by 'possums.

Except, every possum I have seen thus far is dead. Like, laying in the road struck by a vehicle dead.

#5 was tonight on the way home. "Hey, what's that laying by those cars?," I asked as the sun was just starting to go down on our day. Drawing closer, the blood spatter surrounding the unknown creature's body was made readily apparent. "Oh, it's another possum," I said almost nonchalantly, like I was now almost expecting any dead creature in our neighborhood to turn out to be a 'possum. "That's a possum alright," Jen replied, almost with the same tone. I finished the thought with "That's number 5."

The first week I started working, I passed a dead possum along Frontera, the access road near our home. I watched it's then noxious body erode and disintegrate slowly over the passing few weeks, until at last, there was little to mark its existence on this earth except for a small patch of fur adhered stubbornly to the pavement. There was no cleanup crew to pick it up and protect the national health, nor did I ever actually see anything in the way of scavenging insects or larger creatures taking advantage of the free meal. It just slowly went away.

Since that opening salvo of sadness, which I naturally turned into an opportunity to muse on the subject of mortality, I have stumbled upon two other 'possum bodies on my walks to and from work, and the fourth was seen out on the freeway heading into L.A. I would be overjoyed to actually encounter a live creature on my journeys, never having seen one outside of a zoo, books or television, but with the addition of #5 to the List of Dead Local Marsupials, I am starting to wonder. Are there actually live opossums to be seen around here, or is someone playing with my head? Am I trapped in a psychological game wherein I am just assuming opossums are a local creature, and some secret fiend is keeping two steps ahead of me with a bag of dead 'possums slung over his back, from which he occasionally draws a specimen, which he then artfully arranges before my path?

It's hard to tell, and not actually being a paranoid person makes it difficult to buy even my own conspiracy theory. After all, why would anyone want to mess with my head concerning opossums when I have never even betrayed the slightest voicing over their appearance in this area? What good would it serve anyone to play this game? Surely no one would go to this sort of length just to convince me that I am surrounded by opossums. Besides, I have made it clear that it makes me immeasurably happy through this evidence that I might actually have the creatures sharing my neighborhood. So, maybe this "secret fiend" is more of a "friend," trying to make my feel pleasant and warm. Only, if this were the case, why would they do it by throwing dead specimens of the creatures I adore constantly in my path?

No, this is mere coincidence. It is just pure chance, and it is only a combination of nature's constancy and my eternal vigilance for odd sights and happenings that allows me to have run across or even consider these scenarios. Mere coincidence and pure chance.

And that is exactly what "they" want me to think...

This Is Now, And "That Was Then, This Is Now" Was Then... (Pt. 1)

So much of the time, one’s opinion of a particular movie ties in directly into what we are going through at that particular time and place. One (such as myself) can endeavor to remain unaffected by his surroundings and personal drama when viewing a movie, making a sincere attempt at attacking each film from the same mental standpoint. This, though, is not always possible. As the unfortunately popular saying goes, and one for which I shall, just this once, substitute the not-actually-obscene slang laid within it to lessen its stupidity, *blank* happens. We have what we would consider a bad day, we decide to go and see a movie to cheer us up, we quickly find it’s not always possible to achieve this nor is it all that easy to forget recent tragedy or upsetting news, and we often take it out on the absolutely innocent film that we ourselves volunteered to enter while encumbered by our crushing grief or whiny sulkiness. Sure, the film might actually be a genuine “Grade Z” piece of crap, but having a bad day on top of it, depending on a person’s center or sense of humor, can just exacerbate the problem.

The first time I went to Short Circuit back in 1986, I had recently broken up with a girlfriend, and I somehow decided during this comedy in which a robot becomes wholly sentient and helps Steve Gutenberg get laid, that I was deeply in love with Ally Sheedy. Yes, she may have been the object of the Gute's desire, but it actually was me that she got through a rough patch. I must be accurate, though: the girlfriend didn’t really break up with me. She just stopped coming around or calling… disappearing from my presence really, which is, for me, actually worse than a real breakup, since I am a person who definitely requires some form of closure – in business, war, art or love. Regardless of the circumstances of the split, Ally was the girl for me that night at the movies. And, outside of my perverted sense of romance that evening (not that my sense of romance isn't normally perverted from the center at any given point), I also felt the movie was the funniest thing I had seen in ages. I sorely needed a laugh during this rough patch, and the film provided a brace of them for me. I rolled in the aisles at the same time that I struggled in inner turmoil and self-doubt within my seat.

Two weeks later, I wasn’t laughing. I took in another showing of Short Circuit, and I was mortified at how little I enjoyed the second go-around. Without the immediate presence of personal crisis suffocating my ability to critique properly (though that wasn’t even a concern at that time in my life), making me desperate for any form of entertainment outside of my pain, a merely mediocre Hollywood product almost became unendurable. Every laugh now seemed far too telegraphed, every punchline fell dead to the ground and was then obliterated by the now annoying Johnny Number Five’s treads, and Fisher Stevens’ role as the Indian scientist became far too stereotyped, obnoxious and outright racist to me. And Sheedy? While I still appreciated her on a purely physical level, I had moved on with my emotions. As it turned out, I wasn’t that attached to the real-life girl who had caused the initial burst of desperation, and had already staked my tent elsewhere by the time of that second showing.

And my feelings towards Short Circuit are still tied fast to that second showing. I cannot shake those two moments in time: that first visit where it seemed John Badham had saved my very existence with a stupid robot comedy, and that second, vastly different experience where I felt betrayed by both my own eyes and my critical value system.

I have felt often as I finally worked out a lifetime of watching movies on paper and online that I should give every film that I am rating a fair shake. Review each film fresh, and from the emotional center from which I am currently writing, creating and working. Don't toss stars at films that earned them years ago in my mind, far before I really had any sort of faculties for judgment (not that I do now, but, oh well...) There is a difference between the way a five-year old dinosaur enthusiast sees a film and the way a bratty thirteen-year old with divorce issues sees a film and the way a 23-year old on the make for chicks sees a film. They can all be the same person, as I am describing here, but the viewpoints and motives are all dissimilar. The big change between watching a film at those junctures in my life and now is that the 2008 version of me will take into account the viewpoints that came before, making full use of each memory, and analyzing knowledge of old or recurring biases or obsessions. It is not just film review. It is a review of the way I used to view film compared against the present day.

But I don't think Short Circuit will ever stand up to a modern viewing. I sincerely believe that a fresh showing would be useless at this point; I will not ever be able to separate that film from that period, and how I felt on those occasions. This is the problem with memory: you stick hard to certain moments, whether they are fond ones or not. Despite the evidence damning you to forever be wildly incorrect or inaccurate about something, because the moments surrounding that “something" have become part of your essence, and perhaps have continued to influence you throughout life, you stick to them like they were the last life preserver off the Titanic. My memories of Short Circuit have been something of an ongoing jolt to the groin of the fickleness of my own opinion. And that is definitely a feeling I do not wish to lose.

(To be continued soon...)

Ignorance Isn't Bliss, But, Medically Speaking, Sometimes It's All You've Got

There was a definite point, as I lay there in the hospital emergency room with various and sundry tubes sticking out of my body, where I calmed down and realized that I was not going to die. At least, not that particular day.

It may have been when the nice intern ran me through a series of basic tests like finger-squeezing and whatnot, and I passed them at about a 95% rate. (I kind of screwed up the test on my peripheral vision with my right eye -- I guessed two fingers, not one.) The pain in my arm, chest and side -- ALL LEFT -- had not died down, but as I zipped through these basic medical checkpoints, I started to realize that I still had all of my faculties, and I started to worry less about launching into a mid-afternoon stroke. For a person like me -- who is wired for the day about two minutes before waking up -- this has an extremely lightening effect.

But, I was still in pain. And had been for three days running. It started with the left arm forearm on Monday, the left side and shoulder on Tuesday, and then minor chest pains (far to the left, mind you) on Wednesday morning. Tuesday night, not having told Jen about any of this pain, I slept about 2.45 hours, because I was also getting sharp pains in my left calf and toes. I started freaking out, but I also held back on letting Jen into the Rik's Secret Pain Club because, in the way that I approach many of life's aches and pains, I always have the sense that it will pass. Maybe it's just gas, I tell myself, or maybe it will work itself out.

There is a precedent from about a dozen years ago, where I left work in the middle of the day because my chest was hurting immensely, and to the point where I couldn't breathe properly and I almost passed out on the floor at the news agency. My pal Don rushed me to the emergency room at my request, but I was doomed to not dying then either. Two days earlier, I had a 45-pound box of baseball cards escape my grip as I reached for it on a shelf about four feet above me, and it slammed into my chest corner-first. It hurt, but then it went away like a toe-stub after a few minutes. But, what I had done was crack the cartilage in my chest, which only started to bother me greatly once I started to try and lift about a hundred of those 45-pound boxes. The wound started to tear more internally, and thus, the pain and the subsequent visit. A couple days off and a lot of painkillers for a couple weeks, and I was better.

There was no 45-pound box setting up this most recent visit, but there was something else lurking about the place (i.e. me): I had thrown my back out in a major way two weekends before. The pain in my very lower back caused me to miss a pair of workdays, and the only way I could even bear sitting up was to keep a heating pad on there constantly. The last time I threw out the back this bad was two years ago, and the sciatica in my leg was so bad that my left toes were completely numb for about six weeks, and my little left toe didn't recover for a full four beyond that. Pains shot up and down my left leg for what seemed to be the entire Bush administration (which has been far too long indeed).

Going to a ridiculous excuse for a doctor -- all cool bedside manner, no actual healing ability (never go to an M.D. who runs his practice in a Hawaiian shirt and golf shoes) -- obviously didn't help at all. And on my second visit to him two weeks later, he had forgotten every detail I had told him before. He wanted to run electrodes underneath the flesh of my leg down to my toes in what he described as a very painful test. I took what meds Dr. Frankenberry would give me and ignored the situation until it went away. Which it did. The back healed, and the sciatica went bye-bye.

And after running through the nice intern's Q&A here in my latest foray into losing all of my money, I started to calm down and realize that, once again, I would be faced with dealing with the pain on my own terms. I got the results of the EKG they ran on me, and my heart was just fine. No heart attack involved, not even a taste. I would walk out of the hospital on my own power, and well into my 43rd year, I would yet again not stay a single night in a hospital. They will tell me to take what I had already been taking for the pain: ibuprofen and acetaminophen. "Yes," I tell them, "I will make an appointment to see a normal doctor" -- nay, attempt to establish a rapport with a normal doctor -- and he will likely tell me that I have high cholesterol, and take this, and watch out for this in your diet, and gee I'm glad you are getting all of that exercise each day but also try this. And, oh, here's something for the pain.

And I will take a couple of those pain-ridding pills, and I won't like the woozy effect they give me, and I will stop taking them after two days. Why? Because, even in pain, I have to be in control. I will ignore the arm and the side and the leg, keep heating the back, watch how I sit at desks (including when writing bits like this), and stretch everything at opportune moments of relative peace in the valley. Eventually, I will heal through ignorance.

Which is more than Dr. Frankenberry ever did...

Gamera Vs. All Mankind: Act III: Act 2

Cleaning up around here at the Pylon has meant finding piles of unfinished posts that either went half completed or only partially written, or were simply a collection of scrawled title ideas without any text to back them up, nor were many of these scraps encumbered by even the slightest little reminder of what the hell I wanted to write about anyway at the time of their scrawling.

And somewhere deep, deep in the Archives of Pylonic Things Unpublished, there was a post that truly should have been. Back in May 2007, I finished reworking the third act for the animated short upon which my brother Mark and I were then deep in production: Gamera Vs. All Mankind. On November 10, 2006, I had posted on my main website, Cinema For Space Lovers, the initial rough version of the first two acts of our unique kaiju opera, assembled to fulfill an assumed birthday request by my pal Leif. On that very same day, seventeen months ago, wintry elsewhere but still clad in late autumn sunshine here, I also posted my libretto for the first two acts here on the Pylon. [Click here to read that initial post.] And after that May follow-up, the Gamera project has for all intents and purposes, ran out of the fuel needed to allow a giant flying turtle lift-off, let alone that needed to allow him to roar along in monstrous harmony.

Time passes, other ideas and plans take your attention, and family matters and the other affairs of real life loomed far larger for my brother and I than a silly, completely not-for-profit, vanity project. Not that everything we do is not silly in some manner (we are, after all, Silly 'N Serious Productions), but the project's focus seemed to dwindle infinitely once we posted that first, exhausting (especially for Mark) installment. My attempt to jump-start the project anew by drastically reworking my first attempt at writing the third act didn't really take, and since around June, Gamera has been grounded.

But, in reviewing the project's status this morning, I discovered two things: 1) I haven't done crap to the Space Lovers website for equally as long, and 2) I never posted the lyrics for Act III. I thought I had posted them, but a search within Blogger revealed this to be a misnomer on my part. So, I spent much of my time since 5 a.m. reworking Space Lovers, practically relearning how to use the Bravenet website wizard in the process. It wasn't too difficult; my options are very limited at the moment on that site, due to my not wishing to spend undue amounts of cash on getting full service there before I have actually designed the look to my liking (something else I have been methodically putting off until later for two years now). Since I now regularly deal with ftp sites and online website updates, it only took a few minutes to get reacquainted with those options.

And so the site has been updated. Act III lyrics have been added, bad links were removed, new links were added, and I also accepted the first person to sign my Guestbook there (none of my friends have bothered to do that, so special thanks to my first guest, writer Chrissy McVay). There is a look and a purpose that I wish the site to attain in the future, but that will still have to wait. In the interim, it will chiefly continue to hold that first rough draft of Gamera, as well as the now updated, fully laid out libretto.

If you haven't seen Gamera Vs. All Mankind yet, please check it out, sign my Guestbook, or leave your comments here on this post with your opinions, good or bad. (Let me anticipate some of them, due to things people have said before: "I can't understand what they are singing! It's hard to follow what they are singing!" Yes, I know, the voices are synthesized through a computer program. To get the most out of your viewing, resize the window showing the film to half of your screen, and then open another half-screened window showing just the lyrics page, and then read along while you watch. It's very easy to do with just a modicum of browser experience.)

I don't know if we will ever get around to completing the film. I am hard at work on a different film now, and my brother has his musical projects and wondrous fatherhood taking up his time. Plus, we both have careers that eat up our attention. Maybe we will wend our way back to Gamera someday, but if not, please take some time and enjoy the modest trifle we have put together for your entertainment. For a short while, and an even longer "post"-while, we enjoyed making it.

Recently Rated Movies #61 (but not really): Moontide (1942)

A couple months ago, I started an experiment. Not a really awe-inspiring one, but merely something that was to allow me to write about more films in a shorter period. Just a simple little experiment. Trying desperately to keep up with the massive nature of my movie-watching habits, I started a regular series of entries that actually sought to capture the true nature of blogging: that blog posts were really meant to represent an online version of journal entries. I have stated from the beginning of this particular portal of mine (nearly three years ago -- sheesh!) that the purpose of it was to serve as exactly that: a working notebook for me to place my thoughts and theories on film and film history.

And then that notebook, the Cinema 4 Pylon, turned into a veritable essay fest. Caught up in a deathless writing fervor, my posts grew longer and longer, as I became ever more comfortable with my online voice. It was a voice, I might add, for which I had been seeking for the past twenty years or so, and perhaps the truth of that is it was always waiting there in me, I just needed the right (write?) vehicle to scare it out of me. I don't care what anyone really thinks of this voice; after all, this is my notebook, and comments on here, while appreciated or at least listened to with a keenly attentive ear, are not the point. All I know is that I have found a voice, and this is where it lives.

Naturally, because I am the sort of bastard that doesn't let sleeping dogs snore, I had to poke that voice with a stick. I started that series of posts called the Waking Into A Dream Journal. I did not explain this to my small and relatively attentive audience of friends. I just put up the first post, and let it fly. The idea was to write immediately about whatever movie (possibly, eventually, it could even be about books, TV, music or comics) I happened to watch as I arose for the day, with the text punched out swiftly before I left out the door on the way to work. They were to be short, possibly scatterbrained pieces, composed primarily of notes I made mentally as I watched the film, and often loaded top to bottom with the sort of throwaway jokes that normally get weeded out were I to shape these notes into a more cohesive post.

In fact, the original intent was for the entries to be entirely stream of consciousness, and it wasn't supposed to matter whether it made sense or not. The point was that when you first wake up in the morning, your head is still all full of "dream stuff," or you could even possibly still be partially asleep, and thus, whatever you watched first thing that morning would take on elements of that dream-state. In fact, I would have been most happy were I to have entered a blissful bout of "automatic writing" in the Waking Into A Dream Journal entries. Reaching this state would have proven to be the purest case of the "notebook" aspect I had originally envisioned for this site.

And it all went awry. It worked, somewhat, for a little while. I was able to incorporate some dream logic into the posts, or if not, I was able to at least expound upon what I remembered from my dreams and crash it up against whatever crappy film I was forcing myself to watch that morning. Often, though, I would only watch part of a film before using what time I had left before work to knock out a quick, rambling paragraph. Oh, yes, the structure. I was trying to keep each entry down to a single paragraph to force my hand at keeping things brief, and each sentence or thought was to be separated by double-hyphens or ellipses. On top of this, the entire thing was to be written in lower-case letters only -- no capitals at all, though I could use italics to make a point. Each entry was to resemble a pack of notes, and nothing more.

This lack of a need to keep things grammatically correct, and the ability to put up just a few slapdash words before jumping to the next thought was freeing to a large degree, but I found myself wishing to complete the damn thing each time. To stretch it out to what would be its natural length in my head, and I would often go off to work rewriting it, even though I was not planning on doing so later. The hyphen and/or ellipse plan grew to be uncomfortable to me, as did the lack of capitals and other punctuation, especially for a guy who finds himself constantly editing the work of others. Often, I would start off a post at a rapid pace, only to find myself reverting to my true form halfway through, and then I would have to go over my tracks to render things to their "Neanderthal" self, and it would knock the wind right out of my sails every single time. The final blow came when I spent a couple of hours randomly checking out some other blogs on Blogger, and whenever I encountered a site that was regularly written even partially in this style -- 1 long, undefined paragraph, hyphens and ellipses all over the place, separating extremely random, not even half thought-through material -- I found it massively annoying. After one especially egregious example of this (a political knitting site, nonetheless, which could have been cool if the style didn't give me a migraine), I decided instantly to drop the whole matter.

And so, I am back to posting individual movie reviews in the Pylon's Recently Rated Movies section. I've done this all along, but more attention to more films will now be focused here, at least until I decide to rework the Dream Journal into a new form. This is a sad state of affairs for the film Moontide, though, a tough little slice-of-wharf-life from 1942, which I knocked through early Saturday morning, which I would have then followed up by writing about it that now-extinct style.

Besotted by its lovely nighttime and seaside scenes with Jean Gabin and Ida Lupino slowly realizing how these two sad excuses for normality are really all they need to continue through life (Gabin is a tough-guy sailor drunkard who is being framed for murder by his manipulative best friend; Lupino is the suicide case he rescues and then can't seem to let get away), I would have told you of the recurring dream I have where I am smoking cigarettes with Ms. Lupino in a car in a dramatically altered version of They Drive By Night. Things start to turn all steamy, with the requisite number of period-appropriate face-slaps, but at the point that the real action begins, Ms. Lupino turns into porn star Taylor Rain, who bears absolutely no resemblance to Ms. Lupino whatsoever. (In fact, Ms. Rain bears a striking similarity to an old friend of mine, of whom I have never had cause to dream directly, so perhaps Ms. Rain is a more, shall we say, "willing" stand-in for this person. Go ahead... call me crude and lascivious. I can't help what and whom I dream about...)

Naturally, once things really get going, I wake up. I did not actually have this dream the morning before I watched Moontide, but it has happened numerous times, and it does reflect somewhat on my willingness to watch Ida Lupino movies, no matter the style or subject matter. I would then launch into the dream I actually did have that night, one of a burning circus tent and an endless stream of charging, frightened animals pouring through the flaps of the tent, all of which I try vainly to corral, suffering many bites, stomps and scratches along the way. Taking far too much space to reflect upon what this all meant, I would no doubt give short shrift to Moontide's excellent turn by the incredible Claude Rains, who plays the quiet, bespectacled fellow who holds the key to the happiness of Lupino and Gabin, in a solid supporting part he knocked out before Now, Voyager and Casablanca. I would also take little time to muse on the comforting notion of invented family that rises suddenly from the gathering of this disparate group of wharf-rats, and that, while the storyline is pulpy beyond salvation, it is this very feeling of friendship and familial duty that gives the film its purpose, and saves it ultimately for the viewer.

And all of this would be surrounded by a stew of double-hyphens and ellipses and lower-case preposterousness that would serve to bring a migraine to even the worst language abuser on the worst run board in Internet-Land.

...aren't you glad that i don't fool around like that -- i mean -- anymore... ?

Moontide
Director: Archie Mayo // 1942, Twentieth Century Fox
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

Recently Rated Movies #60: The Right Girl in the Wrong Film

Girl On A Motorcycle
aka La Motocyclette aka Naked Under Leather
Director: Jack Cardiff // 1968, French-British
Cinema 4 Rating: 5

I think that I finally understand Marianne Faithfull…

About a week ago, I was overjoyed that I was able to see on What’s My Line? an old 1967 appearance by the famous English model Jean Shrimpton, if for no other reason than it made more vivid in my mind the references to her which I have run across in books, movies and music for the past thirty years or so. Certainly, at any moment that I wished, I could go online or to the library and simply look up as much information on Miss Shrimpton as I could care to have… but that’s not the way the game works…

The game works on chance encounters, on trivial missteps, on taking corners at the right time, and on making connections that may have been apparent to others all along but do not make sense to you until you have made just the right connection. I had seen pictures of Miss Shrimpton over the years, and knew much about her. But until I saw her appear as the Mystery Guest on Line, I didn’t really understand her appeal. Suddenly, another portion of the ‘60s, the decade in which I was born, became rock solid in my mind, and another step towards understanding the mindset of those times become much firmer perch on which I might trod casually.

It has always been, for reasons truly odd to even myself, important for me to make connections in this way. While I do take heed when people recommend items of note within their own interests to me, or if they seek to inform of some mindless ort of knowledge which might help further whatever quest in which I might currently be involved, I have always preferred seeking out my own answers in most cases. What’s more fun? Someone telling you that there is a new band that you simply must hear, or stumbling onto these band through your own, often misguided, devices. And much of the time, I downright blunder into these answers or discoveries. But whether by need, purpose or by accident, I always relish that moment when something becomes clearer to me in this manner.

This might seem like an odd way to start a post about seeing an old movie starring Marianne Faithfull, but it’s the way that I need to start it. The movie, Girl on a Motorcycle, in which Marianne zips about on a motorbike for an hour and a half reflecting on her adulterous affair with the devilishly handsome Alain Delon, isn’t even a very good movie. It’s not even a merely good one. It’s pretentious, vain, has Delon (whom I normally admire) sleepwalking through what is actually a glorified cameo, and the film is mired with a score of scenes in which the use of filters on the lens stands in for clever cinematography. That it was directed by the Oscar-winning lensman Jack Cardiff (and former crony of The Archers) is only slightly surprising, because when he isn’t busy going all psychedelic with his camera, the work is very sharp and well-designed. Overall, it’s the very definition of what made me hate the more arty or self-consciously hip films of the ‘60s and early ‘70s so sharply as a youth (a feeling with which I obviously have been able to come to grips, and am able to now judge each movie individually on its own merits, no matter the time period.)

So, what’s worthwhile here if everything else is wrong with the film? Faithfull, that’s what. Because at no point in its 94 minutes did I feel like I was wasting my time with the girl, not with Marianne pouring herself into a tight leather suit and taking to the road for about 73 of those 94 minutes. (Just guessing…) Perhaps she was not even all that great an actress at that very nubile point in her life. What she does on the screen in this movie is breathe, and through her every breath comes more than enough zest and energy to carry one off to follow the lovely girl wherever she might ride. This urge is increased in measure by the fact that Master Cardiff makes no bones about filming his star provocatively, with his camera capturing at least a score of close-ups on her leather-clad rear and groin, not to mention teasing flashes of her bared breasts from time to time. If its not a score, or if its even more – whatever the count, it’s enough to make one check the movie guide to make sure this film actually isn’t one of Russ Meyer’s calmer moments.

In fact, what the film could use is a solid dose of Meyer’s raunch and humor. Instead, it is quite clear where this film is heading from the start (and no, I have never even gotten remotely near a copy of the novel which forms the film’s source material, so there is no way I could have known going in what I was in for), and the film is all the more insufferable for not giving its heroine a way out of the tragedy that looms over her. Why motorcycles always had to spell cinematic doom for their riders (especially in those days) is something I have never understood. Is it payback for daring to dream of easy freedom? And the bike doesn’t represent Faithfull’s character’s dream of freedom is only aided by the bike, which merely is used to carry her away from her wimp schoolteacher husband, who loves her easily and outright, and into the arms of a caddish man who doesn’t care for her except as a sexual and masochistic conquest. Her character is merely another silly girl – in a long, sad line of silly movie girls -- who doesn’t really know what she wants, and simply longs for the man who treats her worst. If her ultimate tragedy is to destroy her so she can find freedom within a death that takes her away from the living tragedy the film’s creators placed her in, then they are being misogynistic on multiple levels.

But Faithfull’s presence more than makes up for the story’s bountiful missteps, because the strength of the film is that we get to see her at this very vital early stage of her long career: when she was the sexual partner to Mick Jagger and creative muse and sometimes partner to the rest of the Stones, when she greeted cops at a drug bust wearing only a fur rug, and when she released her own series of groundbreaking albums. (To this point, I own exactly one song by her, her early '80s title track for Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind, wonderfully croaked by the then vocally altered, middle-aged Faithfull.) We see a rising star at the peak of her youthful exuberance and cheekiness, and even if the film itself is no good, you just can’t stop watching her because of this. She will spend ten straight minutes zipping across the Swiss and German landscapes, muttering half-baked dialogue in a voiceover, and for some strange reason, I will keep watching this nonsense.

And only for her. Because, finally, due to my viewing Girl on a Motorcycle more than forty years after its release, I made the connection within my head. A line now runs from Marianne Faithfull to the rest of the clutter in there, and she is no longer just a name I know because I know a lot about people connected to her. Because, finally, I think that I understand her…

Spout Mavens Disc #8: Africa Unite (2007)

Africa Unite
Director: Stephanie Black // 2007// Documentary
Cinema 4 Rating: 7

I didn’t really think about it at the time, but in retrospect, it almost seems like the arrival of the Africa Unite screener from Spout in late January was an intentional tie-in to the annual Black History month held the following month. After all, watching it and reviewing it would, if things went the normal course, cause my own review to be placed up on Spout in that month of African-American celebration. I, myself, am not, to the best of my knowledge, of that particular descent, except perhaps in the manner that we all are of this planet descended eventually by way of that continental plate. But this does not mean that I don’t have any great interest in this very important, and generally neglected, aspect of the history books. It’s just that I was thinking, at the time of its arrival, as Africa Unite being a mere “concert film.”

Unfortunately, circumstance precluded a viewing of the screener occurring in my household until just last night, the final night of Black History Month, and just after I had found myself caught up in its celebration throughout the previous couple of weeks – purely by accident. Spike Lee’s Bamboozled showed up in my mailbox from Netflix, although I had already seen the film a couple of times, and had quite forgotten it was still in my queue after I had already seen it on cable so many months before. I took a nap one night, and awoke to find Jen watching Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s exemplary PBS series African-American Lives, mainly because it was the only thing interesting she could find on television. A most intriguing twenty minutes of the tail end of that episode found me watching the whole of its next showing, and then recording its next two-hour installment, so captivating is its take on both African-American culture – and American culture in general. Finally, our first trip to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach found ourselves also taking in the African Heritage Festival being held in its open areas, where I was able to peruse firsthand much of the segregationist signage and openly racist commercial products of the twentieth century (as well as catch up on my George Washington Carver knowledge).

And still, I didn’t think to include Africa Unite in this mix, believing it to be pretty much a straightforward concert built around the 60th birthday celebration of the late reggae superstar Bob Marley. A listing of the names in the credits was enough to make me believe this, featuring a plethora of Bob’s many similarly surnamed offspring and widow Rita, as well as listing the Fugees’ gorgeous Lauryn Hill in the mix, as well as a few other world music stars, like Angelique Kidjo (who is marvelous in her brief footage). The other reason for my misconception is my need to not be influenced by packaging and outside critical opinions. Thus, I did not read the three paragraphs on the back of the DVD, which would have illuminated me as to the actual contents of the film.

Not that I would have necessarily sought this movie out apart from getting a copy of it from Spout, but if I had run into it eventually, I would have been surprised (as I was last night upon watching it) that it isn’t that standard “concert film” of which I assumed it to be. Because, what I found myself really faced with was both a sobering lesson in the damages that colonialism wrought upon the people of the continent, and also the stirrings of a surge of hope that perhaps the youth of Africa, by uniting (hence the title) -- beyond any of the borders laid down upon them when their continent was sliced into digestible sections by European rule and plunder – as one people, they can rise above the many problems that keep it a second-class citizen – poverty, disease (especially the ravaging menace of HIV), and the war that divides numerous African nations internally – even in the third world. Danny Glover, a producer here and celebrity promoter of the concert and cause, delivers a stirring speech a third of the way through that makes one wish he would quit the bad movies in which he has largely been mired for the last few years and use his fame to fight even more for his personal and political beliefs.

There are concert sequences to be had (and perhaps too few of them), but at least half of the film is dedicated to laying out the foundation of the “united Africa” vision, included old newsreel footage from the ‘30s through the ‘70s. Especially interesting to me, after some thirty years of hearing Marley and his ilk sing the praises of Haile Selassie, was to be given the opportunity to learn more about the man -- though they would say “living god,” an appellation with which I personally hold zero faith -- who inspired them. Hearing his name invoked in song, or singing along with Rastafarian phrasing is one thing; to be able to see large sections of film footage about the late Ethiopian emperor and groundbreaking African leader, and to allow him to become an actual once-living being in one’s mind, is a very powerful thing indeed. Combined with explanations and film footage about the Belgian Congo and other colonial clashes with the rightful citizenry of the various lands, it all helps the viewer put a political context to the music at last. Sure, one could do the footwork on their own and discover this information, but most people – even those who would most benefit from its discovery – won’t go that far. Better to use the allure of some grand music and famous musicians, including one of the most famous in the history of entertainment, to help open people’s minds to the possibilities in store for Africa.

My one major gripe with the film is that it could have easily been a half hour longer, by pumping up the live music portions for that extra time. Sure, the full DVD apparently comes with “Over 45 Minutes of Complete Concert” footage as a bonus feature, but knowing this without readily available access does me no good, and as I have now seen the film and only have a minor interest in reggae, I will likely never see this footage. (And did Lauryn Hill actually go all the way to Ethiopia for this conference and not perform?)

Sure, this Africa Unite thing could all be a pipe dream (or a spliff dream, given we are speaking here of reggae), since the plan hinges on people from tribes from many disparate regions actually getting along and working together. It’s one thing to say “Hey, we are all going to get along!” but it’s another thing to practice it. You might also cynically state, “This cooperation never really works here; why should it there?” But the game of the cynic (and I have often been lumped into their company throughout my life, and sometimes rightfully) is a tired one, especially in a situation such as this, where sometimes the hope of brighter days ahead is all that carries these people forward through the pain that sometimes can overtake reality. It’s one of the reasons I can never wholly discount the faith that others place on their religious beliefs, despite my own atheism, because if there is something that allows people some sort of hope for the future – whether it be political or personal freedom, or even a belief in what I consider to be a fantasy afterlife – and it makes them happier and better people to belief this, then so be it. Whether or not I agree with the tenets of Rastafari is beside the point. As long as this dream for a united Africa is achieved through non-violence and the democratically derived consent of the vast majority of its peoples, anyone of any faith (or lack of it) can speak up to bring it to fruition.

And Africa needs a whole lot of people believing in the same dream to help it reach that brighter future. Africa Unite is a good starting primer on this dream.