The Olympics: Instant narrative!

I don't know anything about Olympics TV coverage outside the U.S. (Never got a TV in Hong Kong. D'oh!) And I know the American coverage is shamelessly U.S.-centric. But it is also an amazing work of media craft. Think about it: How many people care about any of these sports or know who these athletes are in years that aren't divisible by four? And yet by the second week of the Games, how many will stay home to watch a medal race or rush online to check out gymnastics results? The producers, writers, videographers and crew get us absorbed in this stuff from a dead stop. Granted, the "print" (online) media help, but this doesn't happen by itself.

Then again, maybe it's really about something else.

Review: The Exiles

The Exiles, a 1961 feature about young American Indians living in downtown Los Angeles, throws us into the underworld of America's seemingly orderly postwar existence. Made by recent USC film grad Kent MacKenzie on a tiny budget, it's rough around the edges technically and lacks a conventional story arc. But like a great documentary, The Exiles draws its life from the small glimpses of the world in which it takes place.

The Indians, who left reservations to find a better (or just different) life in the city, mostly waste their days with little money and no goals. They live on Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles, a residential area that soon afterward went under the wrecking ball to make way for office towers. The Exiles explores nearly 24 hours in their lives and is based on stories that real Indians in the area told the filmmakers. They mostly play themselves, in the real settings of their lives, with what seems to be some documentary footage added in.

It's depressing to watch these young people throw away their lives, but as with Charles Burnett's 1977 Killer of Sheep (Burnett helped to restore and release The Exiles), the realistic vision of a little-known world is fascinating. This is a side of Los Angeles, just minutes from Hollywood's backlots, that has rarely been seen on film. And though MacKenzie doesn't achieve quite the sheer beauty of Burnett's work, there are some gorgeous shots, and the velvety blacks of his night shots are wonderful. The film is like a motion version of gritty street photography by the likes of Weegee and William Klein (though with a slightly different tone from their New York scenes), evoking the harsh midcentury American city.

The world in which the Indians live is like that of John Rechy's novel, City of Night: The mixed underbelly of a society obsessed with homogeneity. I don't know whether there were enough Indians in 196o Los Angeles to fill most of the seats in a string of bars, but even though they do in this film, the scenes aren't homogeneous. There are glimpses of the sorts of polyglot night settings found in Rechy's work and that of the Beats.

One sequence in particular stunned me: In a downtown bar packed mostly with Indians late at night, a tough-looking young white man and a petite Asian man talk, dance, and put their arms around each other. It's a strange combination of fight and flirtation, like magnets attracting and repelling each other. They seemed a bit edgy about being watched by the rest of the bar (and the camera?) but also relishing it as already rejected street queers will. I don't know what the circumstances of the filming were, but they seem so natural that it's hard to believe they're actors. In addition, the pairing is so unlikely -- if the filmmakers had just wanted to show that homosexuals mixed with Indians, why not two white men? -- that it seems as if the crew might have simply found them there at the bar.

Could that bar have been a distant ancestor of the clubs I knew in L.A. in the 1980s? I mean this in the sense that one bar will close and its denizens will move on to another, and younger members will join the crowd, to be joined later by another generation, but always overlapping. In 1960, would that have been me in that rough-and-tumble mixed bar?

Yet I think the way I saw that scene went beyond my literal affinity to those dancing men. Few people today would see The Exiles from the perspective of that era's insiders, the white suburbanites watching Perry Como at night. Yes, we're outsiders as we watch it, not being people of that era, and with the distance of time we recognize the cultural blinders inherent in the omniscient narration about Native Americans at the beginning of The Exiles. But following the late Sixties, we're all seeking a place in the margins, or we're nostalgic about a time of life when we were nearer the edge implied by the sharp line between neon and velvety night sky. Rechy and Bukowski won the battle of images. We may not be a society of outsiders, but perhaps more remarkably, we share a culture of self-aware exile.

Review: Wall-E

I was keeping my thoughts to myself about Wall-E, which we saw weeks ago, but a friend told me today how much he and his son enjoyed it, and I found I had more to say than I thought.

Wall-E is better than Monsters Inc. Which is to say it's the best film Pixar's ever made, and just to let you know, in my opinion nothing else from Pixar even came close to Monsters Inc. The adventures of Sulley and Boo were strange, clever, touching, and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful. Wall-E is simultaneously massive and intimate, clanky and graceful, wildly imagined and comfortingly familiar.

(OK, at this point, if you don't know what the movie's about and you still want to see it, just go. There's no big "surprise" in it, but I went in nearly blind and I wish I'd gone in a little more blind.)

So, when I rave, I'm talking here mostly about the first part of the movie, because this is a film that takes place in two distinct settings, where the tone of the story and the whole design of the universe are very different. For the most part, one has humans and the other doesn't, because the humans have forced themselves off Earth by essentially littering it to death. (A clever and simple way to bring an environmental message home to the young audience.) They all (?) live on one big spaceship that's like a huge cruise ship, fully automated to the point where they literally don't have to lift a finger.

Who's left behind to clean up the mess? Wall-E, a rusty little trash compactor with legs, arms, eyes, ears, and maybe ... a heart? Of course he has a heart! But this movie isn't a simple Disney anthropomorphic romance. Wall-E is is deeply lonely, even though he has a tiny sidekick (a cockroach) and a home overflowing with pieces of junk that catch his eye as he compacts all day long. It's a grim landscape, all the more so because we know it's New York City.

The girl who suddenly shakes up Wall-E's life is a true femme fatale, a far more advanced robot on a no-nonsense mission. As in Monsters Inc., which paired a middle-aged man with a young girl in an unlikely platonic friendship, Pixar throws us a curve with this robot romance. It's like a chaste crush between ten-year-olds, with all the awkwardness and wonder that implies. Conveyed with virtually no dialog, the romance is as elemental as can be. This is the real heart of the film, which, given its unique context, could have used a tagline from Elvis Costello: "Who's making lover's lane safe again for lovers?"

The film's glow dims a little as the action moves out to where the humans are. The story gets less original, the animation less expressive, the messages less subtle. But Wall-E's journey to the spaceship shows off the sheer scale of this film, a movie that literally has the universe as its stage. The power of Wall-E is in its visuals. Thirteen years after Toy Story, Pixar's animators have achieved the confidence and finesse to render an abandoned New York that's more evocative than the settings of most live-action films. (It helped that they turned to master cinematographer Roger Deakins as a consultant on angles and lighting. And the vintage music and Thomas Newman's score make it all shimmer more brightly.) Wall-E's world is like the Sunday afternoon of all history, quiet and hazy and sadly languid. It's exquisitely imaginative and crushingly banal at the same time.

So although Wall-E eventually retreats from this initial darkness, the wordless emotions of its first half hour linger long after the cheery Disney ending. It's animation that truly takes us beyond our own perspective rather than just having other creatures act out a typical journey or success story.

The user-generated content conundrum

My friend Charles and I have been corresponding lately about whether something like YouTube can ever make money. What kicked it off was a report by TDG that said user-generated content would make up almost half of all video streams on the Internet between now and 2013, but deliver only 4 percent of the online video ad revenue. That may sound pretty dire, but Charles, who knows something about this, confirmed that advertisers are still skittish about having their ads placed with these kinds of videos. They're too unpredictable in terms of taste and subject matter.

Now there's this blog post by someone from WatchMojo, who makes the novel suggestion that Google just eliminate all that unprofitable user-generated content, or UGC, from YouTube.

It's become fashionable to dismiss user-generated content as "crap." At least this commentator acknowledges that user-generated content is why YouTube exists in the first place. If I want to watch "high-quality" content, I'll go to TV, or newspaper sites, or Yahoo News. But guess what? TV's not that good! Sure, it conforms to commercial standards of image and audio quality, but the "content" of the content, as it were, is often devoid of ideas. Certainly of new ideas. That's why we needed YouTube in the first place.

The problem with talking about UGC is that it's impossible to generalize. The only thing one UGC clip has in common with another is that it it's not commercially produced. Even apart from the problem of advertising on unpredictable UGC videos, it's difficult for "experts" to praise this content as a general class. In fact, the overall language of the mainstream media defies attempts to praise even individual user-generated works, because the mainstream media doesn't officially value the qualities that are frequently most valuable in UGC: utter inanity, inside jokes about the UGC universe, a subtle sense of intimacy.

And, of course, a lot of what we hear about online content in the mainstream media (I mean, consumers as well as reporters like me who are in the "pitch stream," as it were) is driven by business considerations. And the fact is, 99.99 percent of user-creators have no economic interest in getting the word out about the value of their content, let alone the means to get the word out in mainstream media channels. Now, folks like MojoVideo are in an awkward position here. In a way, they have the potential to be ad-friendly, but they have a huge mountain to climb if they want to compete with the established studios and networks in perception and brand awareness. At the same time, their content has neither the spontaneity nor the street cred of video that comes from the average Joe. Yet the Internet must have room for something other than mainstream TV and movies, and the peculiar charms of amateur video.

IAST: The Exiles

I am SO there. This looks like a good article about the movie; I just stopped reading. SF: Castro Theatre, Aug. 1-7.

Quick take: Weerasethakul shorts

Thai director Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul seems to be on a one-man crusade to free our minds. He constantly challenges assumptions about cinematic tone, setting, storytelling and more. That practice was on glorious display in Mysterious Objects, the program of shorts presented at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Sunday.

Surprising audiences is an art filmmaker's job. But Weerasethakul does it in such gentle, lighthearted ways that there's never a sense he's throwing something out there and leaving it up to us to figure it out. There are hard things to figure out in some of his films, but his work is always accessible at some level. Most important, there's an underlying sense of play that lightens the whole experience. Some of these shorts would be perfect tools for teaching students to think outside the box.

The Anthem (2006) is most stunning in this respect. Like the feature Tropical Malady, it consists of two parts, in this case a conversation followed by ... an indoor sporting event? The idea of the short, apparently, is some imaginary alternative to playing the national anthem before movies, which is traditionally done in Thailand. Weerasethakul creates a strange combination of many elements with such flair and energy that we're easily taken along for the ride.

Another highlight was Ghost of Asia (2004), a co-production by Weerasethakul and Christelle Lheureux as a tribute to the creative spirits of people lost in the 2004 Asian tsunami. Children "direct" an actor/ghost in frantic beach activities. It's not what you'd expect a post-mortem tribute to look like. My Mother's Garden (2007) is a dreamy combination of animation and eye-popping organically inspired jewelry. Worldly Desires (2005) is a meditation on filmmaking (specifically, the making of Tropical Malady) and wilderness. It was the longest work in the program and also the most challenging. Is the jungle the world's most elaborate backlot, or are humans a species that hunts images instead of prey?

It was a rare chance to check out little-known work by someone I think is on the leading edge of film. If not for Michael Guillen of The Evening Class, I wouldn't have known it was happening. Sunday's was actually the second of two sets, but according to Guillen and others who attended both, it was the better of the two.

Quick take: Were the World Mine

A lot of movies start out with appealing gimmicks but then wear out their welcomes, failing to make good on what looked so promising or come up with anything else. Were the World Mine, a low-budget independent musical homegrown in Chicago, works the opposite way. Its flaws, namely uneven acting and a screenplay that's sometimes too obvious, are glaring as the movie gets started. But after the story of a prep-school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream starts to pick up steam, those shortcomings mostly fade into the background. The fusing of the play and film, along with world-class songs by Chicago-based newcomer Jessica Fogle, lifts Were the World Mine on a magic carpet. The key actors, including Archie-like lead Tanner Cohen, Christian Stolte as the gruff rugby coach, and especially Wendy Robie as the ultimate drama teacher, are excellent. The production values are impressive for such an independent film, showing what a difference a few touches like good sound mixing can make. Unabashedly gay yet capturing Shakespeare's universal themes, Were the World Mine is funny, often moving, and ultimately uplifting.