Day Twenty-Nine, Part Two: Unconvention

(Note: the above photo was taken by a colleague of mine at the Wake student magazine.)

The Republican National Convention kicked off this school year with a bang, and the first weeks of the semester were saturated with talk of police brutality, journalists being arrested, anarchists throwing benches through bank windows, and so on. I only participated in a small way: I wasn't tear gassed or arrested and I didn't see any of that happen, because my friend Kris and I went to St. Paul on the first day of the convention, when things were still relatively calm. We saw people wearing black and bandannas over their faces marching and yelling "Whose streets? Our streets!" but we mostly just wandered around, people-watching. We did carry signs supporting Obama and universal health care--and got the finger or belligerent comments from a few passersby--but we were pretty separate from the main protests, which were mostly anti-war and far-left-leaning.

I know people, mostly student reporters who are my classmates in the journalism school, who were tear gassed or detained by police. But until I saw Unconvention, a "mixtape" that pieces together various independent news sources' footage from that week, it didn't really hit home just how scary and intense it was, and how close Kris and I came to getting in trouble. We were completely peaceful and tried to avoid angry clusters of people, but the film showed people getting pushed around and/or arrested just for sitting in a park, or "crossing police lines" by stepping off a curb. A woman told a story of how her fellow journalist was shoved to the ground, injured, and arrested simply for videotaping other people getting arrested. Just before we left St. Paul that day, we were walking near a large group of young anarchists marching with a yellow "Don't tread on me" flag. Footage in the film from that day showed what looked like that same group running in terror as police threw tear gas canisters and marched along in their riot gear. If we hadn't peeled off from the group and gone to catch the bus back to campus--it was hot and we had been there for several hours--we probably would have been in that group. We could easily have been caught up in one of the mass arrests of huge groups of people, just because we happened to be there.

Though I'm sure there were arrests of people who were being legitimately violent, the police brutality shown on film seemed almost completely uncalled for. I don't know how police are trained or what the riot cops were specifically told for the RNC, but it seems to me that tear gas and pepper spray should be used only if necessary, not on peaceful protestors or helpless individuals like the girl in this video. It sickened me to think of how the entire debacle has more or less been forgotten. At least the Republicans didn't win, but that doesn't change the horrible conduct of police and local officials who denied that such things were going on.

The screening of this film (at the film fest) really got interesting after it ended and the director stood up for a Q&A. Legitimate questions about his filmmaking process quickly deteriorated into a shouting match between him and three or four extremely loud and belligerent older men, all of whom seemed to be extreme leftists still furious about the RNC. Which is understandable, but they attacked the director and his attempts to be balanced and find "assholes" on both sides of the issue, seeing that as disrespectful to the protestors and too kind to the cops. The director admitted that he did not take part in the protests at all, explaining that he wanted to be as unbiased as possible in making the movie. But that wasn't a good enough explanation for the angry audience members (who did seem to be a vocal minority, judging by the eye-rolls and amazed laughter of the people sitting near me and the attempts to shush the shouters). They saw his film as trying to interpret and sterilize a hugely significant event that to them remains very personal and painful. I'm sure the horror of being shoved around by police, tear gassed and pepper sprayed, arrested and (in some cases) charged with felonies doesn't go away overnight. Despite that, though, I can't help wishing I'd been more involved in the RNC. I wish I'd been marching proudly with some of those protestors, that I'd learned firsthand what it's like to be tear gassed. I'm almost never in the thick of things, just as I wasn't actually at the riots last night. I have my own stories of the RNC and I recognize its importance, but it could have been a major event of my college years and my life. Instead, all I have are other people's memories.

Day Twenty-Nine: Anchorman

This morning, back in my apartment as news about last night's riots came in and rain drizzled outside, all I wanted to do was huddle under a blanket and watch Anchorman. It's the perfect movie to lie back and enjoy mindlessly, cracking up at the countless hilarious lines that have become classic to college boys since it came out. Sure, it's dumb, but it's well done. It's genuinely hilarious and has a fairly unique plot. Its random absurdity makes it more than just another series of sexist, racist, homophobic jokes, partly because it makes fun of the kind of dimwitted, chauvinist guys who laugh at that stuff.

I didn't always love Anchorman. When I first saw it with my dad and sister, all three of us hated it. When I was in high school, we would spend lazy Sunday afternoons at the North Towne theater, a musty basement complex that showed late-run movies for a dollar. It's now defunct--my hometown once had five theaters and now only has two huge, identical multiplexes--and although I hadn't been there in two or three years, I miss it. I saw the re-release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs there as a little kid, and I saw my first PG-13 movie there: Batman and Robin, which we actually left early because my mom accidentally sat in a seat without a back and fell and hurt herself. Though I love my place of employment, Showplace 16, and I've worked there long enough for it to learn its quirks, there's still nothing like seeing a movie in a crappy dollar theater.

Anyway, my dad and sister and I would drive across town to catch matinees almost every Sunday, and we always saw the most terrible movies--the ones we wouldn't pay full price for but didn't mind seeing cheaply. Anchorman was by no means the worst of the bunch, but for some reason we all despised it. I remember thinking it was stupid and boring. Four or five years later, I'm not sure why. Maybe I just hadn't yet developed the sense of humor that now allows me to crack up at lines like "I know what you're thinking, and the answer is yes. I have a nickname for my penis." I still do this occasionally, but I used to be especially bad about hating something just because dumb guys liked it and latching onto that hatred with ferocity. In elementary school, I yelled at boys for being too obsessed with their Game Boys and yo-yos; in high school, I glared and shook my head when my guy friends quoted Anchorman or South Park. Then one night freshman year, I got sucked into watching it one weekend night with other kids on my floor, and found it hilarious. And watching it three or four times since then, I find that it just gets funnier every time. The classic lines actually get better with familiarity. I may turn up my nose and watch foreign films and acclaimed independents, but I'm as susceptible to ridiculous humor as the next person. I'm in a glass case of emoootiiooonnn!

Day Twenty-Eight: Bring It On

I watched Bring It On yesterday but didn't get a chance to blog about it until today. Last night...got kind of out of hand. I spent the early evening strolling around Dinkytown and frat row taking pictures of all the kids who had been drinking since early morning for Spring Jam, the U's annual Greek-centric block party thing. When the headliner for the night's concert, Talib Kweli, canceled, my friends and I headed to their place in Dinkytown. The streets and liquor stores were full of drunk kids. Back at the apartment, we were just relaxing until someone broke out a bottle of Patron, and things got crazy fast. Only random texts and phone calls indicated the real insanity going on a few blocks away: bonfires in the streets, a clash with the police that involved tear gas and rubber bullets, a frat house apparently on fire (although the news reports I've seen today don't mention that, so maybe it was a just a rumor). Though the whole incident is mostly laughable to me (as far as I know no one was hurt seriously, although the TV news reports did show some tear gas canister wounds), it's still a little weird to shift from that intensity back to a shiny, peppy '90s movie about cheerleading, in which the first line is "I'm sexy! I'm cute! I'm popular to boot!" I like Bring It On; parts of it are funny and it's definitely entertaining. It's almost laughably tame and artless compared to sharper, funnier teen chick flicks like Mean Girls and Clueless, but it agreeably passes the time for an hour and a half.

I didn't see Bring It On when it came out. My first viewing of it came freshman year, when a bunch of the girls from our floor crowded into a dorm room to watch it, squeezing onto beds and beanbag chairs. More than the movie itself, I remember the fact that we were interrupted midway by a trio of nerdy kids from one of the arts floors, who were apparently wandering around and were happy to find a captive audience for things like a puppet show of stuffed animals they were carrying around. They were definitely strange, but we didn't mind, and the funny thing is that they kind of became friends with us all, and one of the guys even dated a girl who lived in that room for over a year. If for nothing else, I value the friendship with that guy because he and his weird friend that also hung around on our floor would always rope us into watching movies I'd never heard of--much artier fare than Bring It On, like Me and You and Everyone We Know and American Splendor--and they always turned out to be wonderful. I like the privacy of having my own room, being able to cook for myself, and so on, but I miss the days when you could always find something to do because everyone would always just be sitting around watching movies, dancing or listening to music, having random conversations, and occasionally drinking cheap rum or vodka in little huddles behind closed doors.

Anyway, Bring It On obviously has no pertinent associations about the first time I watched it; what it reminds me of is my own short stint as a cheerleader. In fifth grade, I tried out for the elementary school squad kind of on a whim, with my friend and neighbor. I didn't make it, but because it was elementary school I got to be on the "spirit squad," who still cheered but didn't get to wear a uniform, and then before we even had a game, enough girls quit to make room for me among the real cheerleaders. I've never been very athletic or coordinated, and I remember being a little annoyed at times with the bossy sixth grade girls who kind of controlled the rest of us, but I remember really enjoying being a cheerleader. Again, this was elementary school, so we didn't have a whole lot to do--certainly nothing like the complicated pyramids and gymnastics of Bring It On's cheerleaders--but I liked doing all of our cheers, and the little dance routines we did at halftime. Our basketball team that year was pretty good; there were a few kids who, to us at least, were superstars, and they made it to the semifinals. There was a pep rally, and I remember being really proud as the cheerleaders marched in among all the kids and teachers forced to go to the assembly, our hands behind our back with elbows pointed out as we always did while walking. Of course, back in class I got taken down a peg as the boys sneered and made fun of me, but I really did enjoy it. But then that was it: I never had any desire to cheer even just the next year, when a couple of my friends were on the middle school squad. Two years later, people who hadn't known me in fifth grade were openly shocked that I had been a cheerleader; it was something of an anomaly for bookish, determinedly nonconformist me. What's funny is that even though this was a year or two before Bring It On came out, we did our halftime routine to the same song, "Get Ready for This," that the movie's Toros use, and sometimes we would do the cheer from "Mickey," which plays during the credits and outtakes at the end of the movie. I guess cheerleading is just pretty stereotypical and easy to mock--but I'm still glad I did it for that one year.

Day Twenty-Seven: Mysterious Skin

Spring has come to Minneapolis, making it a lot harder to justify sitting inside and watching movies. That's my excuse for yesterday, anyway, when I spent much of my free time strolling around in the sun with friends or entertaining them at my place. The night before I spent with the band I'm promoting this semester, setting up for and photographing a gig of theirs. Tonight, with no obligations and the shouts of Spring Jammers echoing outside, I could finally catch up somewhat. Mysterious Skin may not have been the best movie to get back on track with, however; though it's very good, it was also extremely dark and depressing. I may have to watch something especially lighthearted now to keep from going to be in this state of uneasy sadness.

Although I really liked Brady Corbet's character and the child abuse storyline was both mesmerizing and frightening, the most interesting parts to me were those following Joseph Gordon-Levitt's life working on the street. It reminded me a lot of River Phoenix's character in My Own Private Idaho. Gay prostitution scenes in movies take on an added depth of emotion (to me, anyway) because of the implication that these men, many of them shy and friendly and outwardly "normal," have to hide their sexual preference as this secret, sneaking shame. The scene in which an older man takes the young hustler home and undresses to reveal that he's covered with lesions from AIDS was particularly wrenching. Though many parts of the movie were moving, this was the scene that brought tears to my eyes: a dying man asking only for his back to be rubbed, to have some human contact. Movies and books about the early days of AIDS are interesting and depressing to me, as I think about what it must have been like to have to worry about a rapidly spreading, deadly disease that was dismissed by mainstream America, just at the time when gay men were beginning to be more open and enjoy the freedom of promiscuity. It's not the only thing to hold against him, but the main reason I'll always have a grudge against Ronald Reagan is his refusal to acknowledge AIDS as a major national problem. His personal belief that homosexuality is a sin kept him from taking a stand against an epidemic. Only when straight people started dying did Reagan and the rest of the mainstream give AIDS attention. That remains unconscionable to me.

Watching the movie, though I was involved in the plot, I couldn't help but think about what an intense, difficult role this must have been for Joseph Gordon-Levitt. But that's not unusual for him: he's been in several dark independent films, including the excellent Brick. I always look forward to seeing him in movies, and I hope he keeps taking these challenging roles.

Day Twenty-Four, Part Two: No One Said It Would Be Easy

My second film fest movie was the one I'd known about longest and was most looking forward to at the festival. It's a documentary all about Cloud Cult, which in my opinion is the best Twin Cities-based band currently recording and performing, and which has become one of my favorite bands in the last year. It was almost exactly a year ago, in fact, that I first saw them in concert. I had known about them and half-intended to check them out for a while, and when I saw they were performing at First Ave I decided to give them a listen. I bought tickets to the concert after listening to two songs on their Myspace, something I have never done before or since.

Cloud Cult's music is just amazing--beautiful, raw, heartfelt, inspiring. It comes from a place that I think few artists allow themselves to convey: deep pain and grief arising from the lead singer and lyricist's loss of his two-year-old son, as well as general confusion about our place in the world and the cosmos, and hope that there is a plan and a pattern. Their lyrics have been a definite inspiration to me in the past year. Certain lines I repeat to myself: "'Please send us a miracle so I know that there is meaning.' He said, 'I think that it's a miracle just to be breathing.'" "You came up from the ground--from a million little pieces; have you found where your place is?" "Suck up, suck up and take your medicine. It's a good day, it's a good day to face the hard things." I've been considering getting a tattoo of the lyric "take your medicine" for almost a year--I remember telling people about it when I studied abroad in Rome last summer--because I feel like I could use a reminder of the message that I'm only a small part of this giant fabric, that countless people have it worse than I do, and that I need to face up to my problems and my past and take what comes to me.

Though I knew a little about Cloud Cult's back story--specifically, the death of lead singer Craig Minowa's son and their environmental focus--the film went into detail about how the band formed and how they work. I didn't know that the lineup I've seen them perform with twice is a relatively recent development, and that the band started as a solo project and for a while was a three-piece group. I didn't know that even the band members themselves, and the filmmakers, treat Craig Minowa like an enigmatic, insane genius. I didn't know--though I could have guessed--that their music has been especially important to people who have experienced loss, and that the band has received many letters from fans who have been touched specifically in that way. Most of all, the film celebrates their wonderful music, and it made me desperately want to see them in concert a third time--which is why I'm glad I have tickets to see them in a week and a half.

Day Twenty-Four: My Neighbor Totoro

My first introduction to Hayao Miyazaki came when I was a freshman in high school, before I had any real idea of being a film nerd or majoring in film studies. My good friend Sonya--whom I still credit with a lot of the comradeship and encouragement that made me love film--asked me to see Spirited Away at our local arthouse theater (now closed), and I agreed despite not knowing anything about it. The film's mythical, shapeshifting creatures and long stretches of strange images accompanied by haunting music were new to me, and I remember being unsure of how to feel as Sonya and I sat in the theater while melancholy music played over the end credits. A few days later, I mentioned the film to a classmate who worked at that theater, and she said, "Oh, I loved that movie!" She paused and laughed. "That was a weird movie."

That kind of confused enchantment is a little less complex and ambiguous in Miyazaki's much earlier film My Neighbor Totoro, which is more uniformly cheerful and delightful, but the theme of young girls interacting with fantastic spirits and creatures is the same. And there's still a slightly gloomy undercurrent: the main characters' mostly cheerful lives are overshadowed by the fact that their mother is hospitalized with a mysterious ailment. It's kind of a common theme in kids' movies like this one: alien creatures stepping into a child's life to fill the void left by a missing parent (like Elliot's dad leaving the family in E.T., or Bastian's mother being dead in The Neverending Story). Maybe it's just because I'm most familiar with Miyazaki through Spirited Away, in which nothing is as it seems, but I felt a slight sense of menace throughout the film, expecting seemingly friendly characters to reveal themselves as monsters, or for the sullen neighbor boy to be harboring a dark secret (apparently he was just shy). Despite that slightly disturbing undertone, though, and even with the beautiful animation, My Neighbor Totoro is at heart a pleasant kids' movie about lovely fantasies coming true, and a very enjoyable watch.

Day Twenty-Three: Chalk

I watched Chalk a while ago, but I decided to revisit it. It's one of the few mockumentaries I've seen besides the Christopher Guest movies, but it has more in common with The Office than with those movies. The Office is hands-down my favorite TV show--I've watched every episode at least twice--and it shares with Chalk the funny characters who take themselves way too seriously, in situations that feel very real because they're so boring and awkward. This movie, though a few parts go off into silly fantasy that doesn't fully work, looks and feels so authentic.

That's what I loved about this movie the first time I saw it. There are laugh-out-loud lines and moments, but what makes this movie work is the fact that it actually gets it, gets what high school is really like. Teen movies, even the best ones, never get it. Their high schools are populated by good-looking twentysomething actors, stratified into cliques and focused on events like prom. Obviously there are different social groups in high school, and events like prom are the source of much discussion and emotion. But what those other movies are too busy focusing on silly romances or overly serious dramas to see is the day-to-day drudgery that really is high school. And that's what Chalk captures so perfectly, from the very beginning: kids goofing off in class, cracking up at nothing, cell phones going off, hysterical assistant principals breaking up hallway fights, dead-eyed kids staring at teachers or sliding into class a few seconds late. From my time as a teacher's assistant for a few different teachers, copying and stapling endless worksheets and packets, I can vouch that the messing around with the copier and wondering about codes to punch into it are true to life.

I made my sister watch Chalk shortly after I did, and she agreed that it's the closest representation of our high school, Auburn, we've ever seen. This movie has no popular blonde kids; everyone's just sort of awkward and greasy. Most teen movies show "nerds" with thick glasses, precocious wardrobes, and a ridiculous knowledge of science and mechanics; this one accurately depicts them as mumbly, scraggly-haired, and probably obsessed with medieval weapons. Things could happen at the school in Chalk like someone setting fire to the bathroom soap dispensers (which happened last year at Auburn) or drive-by shootings in the school parking lot (the most recent of which occurred this morning). Chalk does focus on the teachers, so it doesn't have a chance to saddle the students with inauthenticity, but it's definitely as true to life, or at least to Auburn, as I've ever seen, and that's refreshing.