Monday, August 4, 2008

The Pied Piper of Hützovina


Every documentary filmmaker has to be at least slightly in love with their subject. You don't have to subscribe to Albert Maysles' "love is all you need" approach to filmmaking, but some kind of love - ranging from universal human empathy to the kind of obsession it sometimes takes to get a film made - is pretty much a requirement.

In
The Pied Piper of Hützovina (which I watched via the excellent new on-line rental service Jaman), director Pavla Fleischer takes that to 11. The film is about Eugene Hütz, frontman of the band Gogol Bordello. He's a Ukrainian-born, New York-based punk rocker obsessed with understanding his Roma heritage and reviving Gypsy music. He's also impossibly charismatic - the kind of guy women flutter to like moths to a flame.

Fleischer is one of those moths. She meets Hütz by chance on a car ride in Eastern Europe, falls head over heels, and decides that making a film about him would be a good way to get close to him. This we learn in her somewhat rueful narration over shaky video of that fateful car ride. Young Pavla looks so in love, we just know her fall is going to be harsh.

A year later, Fleischer has gotten Hütz to agree to the film project - a road trip through Ukraine and Russia to explore his roots and meet his musical heroes. But when she and her camera crew meet up with him to start the journey, it quickly becomes clear that Hütz has his own agenda and
wants no part of her romantic plan.

To Fleischer's credit, she perseveres, and the film she ends up with isn't bad at all, if a little thin. Hütz delivers on the charisma part, jamming with Roma musicians in the Carpathian mountains, speaking seriously and emotionally about his passion for their music and culture, and arranging visits with various official keepers of the Gypsy music flame, not all of which go the way he expects. But there isn't much of an arc here; he's a guy with a guitar, on a quickie trip, with no goal and little at stake. So the story becomes as much Fleischer's as Hütz's: her disappointment, her attempts to stay connected and rescue her film. She doesn't protect herself or soft-pedal any of it, and her charm and honesty help us forgive the self-indulgence of using filmmaking as a seduction strategy.

I'm sure Fleischer learned a lot in the course of making this film: don't let your personal feelings cloud your judgment as a filmmaker; when you're directing in the field, don't dance until you're finished shooting; think through your structure and scenes before you shoot, or you'll end up having to put yourself in the film to recue it; etc.

She rescued her film pretty well. But on her next project, I bet she'll go easier on the love.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

High Tech Soul


OK, so I'm doing research. And at the moment, this involves watching a bunch of films about dance music and nightclubs. So tonight I'm watching High Tech Soul, which bills itself as "the first documentary to tackle the deep roots of techno music."

What a mess! Clip after clip after clip, no thesis, no story development, and the organizational style of a high-school class presentation. Of absolutely no interest anyone but the most committed fans. I am 25 minutes into the film and there has not yet been a music sequence used as anything more than a few seconds of b-roll. I've heard about the history of Detroit (the first nine minutes), and seen a series of brief clips about DJs, promoters, etc. I still don't know what makes techno techno, what makes it exciting, how it relates to its musical forebears, or why I should care at all.

The best film I've seen about a subgenre of popular music is Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, which addresses both fans and non-fans, doesn't take itself too seriously, and at the same time tries to answer all the common questions about the genre. In comparison, High Tech Soul is strictly amateur hour.

Friday, August 1, 2008

Party Monster: The Shockumentary


These days, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato are kings of reality TV, producing such shows as "Sex Change Hospital" and "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal." But they started out as documentary filmmakers, getting their first major attention with a doc and then a feature film about New York's king of the "Club Kids," Michael Alig, who's now doing 10-to-20 for killing a fellow partyer. The feature-film version of Party Monster, starring Macaulay Culkin, is better known, but here at Doc-a-Day, we believe fact is more interesting than fiction, so we looked at Party Monster: The Shockumentary, released in 1998.

The story is a familiar one: gay kid comes to New York from the midwest, drops out of college, gets involved in the downtown party scene, the drugs flow, bad shit happens, and it all ends in tears. Lou Reed built a career on songs about this type of thing, and you can save some time by getting a copy of Transformer and forgetting about this derivative 80s scene.

But I guess if you came along in the 80s, as Bailey and Barbato did, you missed the whole Warhol Factory thing, and this was all you had. And what thin gruel it is. Party Monster feels long at 57 minutes not just because the Club Kids are unidimensional, but because it tells a story that everybody already knows. The film provides no perspective or insight, and lets barely coherent drug addicts - including Alig himself - prattle on and on. There is no art in this film, no metaphor, no psychological insight; just a predictable tabloid story without a single surprise. We've seen it all before on Geraldo, where the Club Kids were apparently frequent guests. Party Monster treads the same ground, scratching no deeper than insights such as "they wanted to make fun of consumer culture and be part of it at the same time." There is a story to be told here, but Bailey and Barbato weren't interested in exploring it. They were just practicing for their brilliant career as reality kings.