Author Archives: basiltsiokos

Coming to theatres today, Friday, September 12: I AM ELEVEN

Genevieve Bailey’s exploration of the world from the perspective of pre-adolescents bowed at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2011, where it won an audience award. It has screened extensively since, making stops at Newport Beach, Cleveland, Stockholm, Montclair, Sao Paulo, and at several children’s fests.

As she explains at the outset of her film, Bailey, faced with a particularly difficult period in her life, looked backward to when she was eleven years old, a time when life was full of possibility and not yet tempered by the jadedness of adolescence. Taking inspiration and perhaps using it as a form of therapy, she set out on a trip around the world, visiting fifteen countries and interviewing countless tweens on a wide variety of topics, from love to racism, the environment to the future. Speaking directly to her camera, responses from more than 20 of these kids are assembled here. While some of the eleven-year-olds are memorable (notably the possibly autistic Billy), many of them, at the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, simply are not. There are just too many of them, offering too many essentially similar comments, in what ultimately feels like an extended vox pop segment. It’s understandable that festival audiences have embraced Bailey’s film – despite some early comments on bullying, it’s relentlessly feel-good and ultimately harmless – but at its heart it’s an overlong survey that offers the viewer little opportunity to truly connect with its parade of subjects – and I’m generally not a fan of survey approaches. Very late in the film – too late, with less than 10 minutes left – Bailey revisits a handful of the kids at a variety of older ages to demonstrate how quickly they’ve changed as adolescence colors their perceptions. It’s this brief sequence that seems to have led some viewers to make inapt comparisons to Michael Apted’s UP series. Perhaps if Bailey’s film had narrowed its perspective to far fewer subjects and instead allotted more time a to revisit them later in life, the reference could be justified, and might have yielded something more revelatory than what’s here – an acceptable, family-friendly documentary that offers surface insight into the experiences of preteens, but no real surprises.

Coming to theatres tomorrow, Friday, September 12: TAKE ME TO THE RIVER

Martin Shore’s love letter to the music of Memphis made its debut at SXSW this Spring, where it took home an audience award. Its fest circuit has also included Nashville, deadCENTER, Maine, Sonoma, and Documentary Edge.

Following in the footsteps of last year’s MUSCLE SHOALS, music industry producer Shore’s project celebrates the forgotten importance of Memphis soul music labels like Stax Records. He encourages an explicit link between that storied past and the present by uniting multiple generations of musicians to collaborate on a series of recording sessions here. Despite half-hearted attempts to contextualize the period sound within the racially segregated backdrop of the South, these performances serve as the audience-rousing go-to scenes, as the likes of Snoop Dogg, Al Kapone, and Lil P-Nut join forces with not quite as well-remembered as they should be performers of the past William Bell, Mavis Staples, and Skip Pitts – but there’s also some pleasure to be had in witnessing the more casual behind-the-scenes reunions of several of the music elders. It’s an overly slick production, but an often lively one, marred primarily by the awkward, cheesy, and entirely unnecessary presence of onscreen host and narrator Terrence Howard.

Newly available on DVD this week: I’M A PORN STAR

Charlie David’s look at a handful of men making a living in gay porn debuted at Vancouver’s Out on Screen last year. It’s screened at LGBT fests around the world, including Belgrade, New Zealand, Durban, Rio, Calgary, Tampa, Atlanta, Chicago, Mix Mexico, and Rochester’s ImageOut.

David, a personable Canadian actor/filmmaker known within gay film circles for projects like the TV series DANTE’S COVE and the film JUDAS KISS, takes a mildly graphic look behind the scenes of gay porn in this apparent webseries-turned-feature. Perhaps to fill out the feature length, David adds an extended introduction, breathlessly narrating an archivally-aided and not uninteresting condensed history of gay porn from the birth of film to the present day, a portion of the film that is stylistically completely different from the rest of the project. Once that’s dispensed with, he cuts together very conventionally shot profiles of four likeable working performers in gay porn – three who identify as straight (Johnny Rapid, Colby Jansen, and Rocco Reed) and one as gay (Brent Everett) – with additional commentary from a straight director and other crew. Young father Johnny describes his polar opposite approach to sex with men vs women; Colby reveals how he fell in love with and married a MTF performer, and his conflicting feelings around his wife having bottom surgery; Rocco, who also does straight porn, contrasts the opportunities for men in that realm; and Brent recounts the supportive role played by his parents and husband in his career. Talking heads dominate, as does incessant, distracting music, and frenetic editing that often leads to repetition in the interviews. Despite some occasionally interesting and refreshing soundbites from the stars about their fluid approach to sexuality, these technical deficiencies unfortunately compromise the doc as a whole.

Coming to PBS’s America ReFramed series tonight, Tuesday, September 9: THE LULU SESSIONS

S Casper Wong’s personal record of her ex-lover’s struggle with breast cancer debuted at the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival in 2011. It played a number of LGBT fests, including Boston, Inside Out, Austin, Seattle, Mix Copenhagen, Q Doc, and Vancouver, and Asian fests in NYC, Washington DC, and San Diego, among others.

Wong agrees to start filming LuLu from the moment that her friend calls to find out the results of a lump biopsy. Following her intermittently from treatment through death, Wong constructs a sometimes intriguing, non-chronological portrait of the foul-mouthed LuLu – ironically, we eventually find out, a cancer researcher – and of their complicated connection. Supporting her when LuLu’s apparently insane sisters reject her, theirs is a complex, enmeshed relationship that has taken on several permutations – mentor, lover, and friend – though neither is this as surprising to the viewer as it seems Wong thinks it will be, nor does it always translate into the most gripping footage. Add Wong’s excessive narration, and it makes for an uneven project, and one largely buoyed by the appealing LuLu.

Coming to VOD tomorrow, Tuesday, September 9: ELENA

Petra Costa’s meditation on family premiered at the Festival de Brasília in 2012. It went on to IDFA, SXSW, Hot Docs, Planete+ Doc, ZagrebDox, Havana, and Rooftop Films.

I included the film in my SXSW coverage here.