Good With What You’ve Got

  • July 26, 2009 1:53 am

Southbounders- Rollin and Next Step

One of my favorite things about Netflix is the availability of small, independent narratives on Instant View. I stumbled across Southbounders last night which was so spot on for thru hiking the AT (Appalachian Trail)– it felt like a documentary.

The story is simple to the point of purity (life has a tendency to be rather anti-climatic) and production was interesting as seasonal changes are a framework for the story. (They had two camera crews during production summer/fall and progressed locations southerly all the way to Springer Mountain, Georgia.)

Southbounding on the AT is pretty rare, not to mention a solo female thru-hiker. I had a chuckle because the main character, her trail name being “Next Step” was avoiding medical school at Northwestern (the degree granting organization that gave me a BA), which sufficiently annoyed her father.

That's me with the glasses. I look like one of the junior high kids I took on the trail.

That's me with the glasses. I look like one of the junior high kids I took on the trail.

My folks always thought the trail was pretty good for me and at one point I announced I was quitting college to be a trail guide in North Carolina, of course I was 19 and calling from a pay phone at the Walasi-Yi Center near Blairsville, Georgia and no doubt making decisions on the thrill of the backpacking life.

It’s easy to get sucked in. The film is a total nostalgia piece for me, and definitely a tight little feature length for using what you’ve got.

The narrative is driven by trail journals that are left at each shelter, I was only able to track down one of my trail notebooks– which is mostly cartoons and observations. But I had two quotes in it:

“You have a destiny.”

“It’s really stupid to worship the work of your own hands.”

Chicken or Steak

  • July 19, 2009 12:39 pm

Rachel Getting MarriedWhile I have been dining, impromptu singing, running up and down urban beaches this summer, I’ve kept a shaky, handheld record of my friends and our adventures. Snapping every toast, recording every song, filming every low, breaking wave. 

I like remembering things with a lot of motion and elements. Photos are nice sure, but an audio recording of my daughter singing “I Am the Walrus” or a moving image of a stranger practicing thai chi with prayer flags have a lot more punch. 

I love handheld work. Maybe it’s because growing up in the 1990s Blair Witch, MTV’s Real World and Reality Bites were these kind of staples that classified the “I don’t have enough money for a tripod” productions. Rachel Getting Married had this awesome, home movie feel. And while each shot was carefully calibrated– the feel of moving through each intricate doorway, hallway, passage way of the country home was intimate. Intimate the way a small wedding should be. 

If you have ever flipped through your friends wedding photos there’s always photos of girls in curlers, pictures of the catering feast and sloppy late night shots of strangers dancing with one too many. These were the photos I always liked. Weddings have this tendency to become so manufactured perfect dress, crisp monograms, chicken breasts beat until they’re flat and lifeless. I always hated the posed pictures: groom kisses bride on cheek, bridal party line up on staircase, mutual wedding cake feeding. 

I like that this film never goes there– there meaning that perfect every-girl wedding. It’s lovely and whoever is responsible for planning a faux wedding to be shot has an eye for elements that make journey dreamlike. This sounds contrary to the almost documentary piece I am describing, but somehow the two are reconciled and beautifully packaged. 

While I was not particularly blown away by the story (recovering addict sister on hiatus from rehab for sister’s wedding and lots of feelings and storming out of houses ensues) the aesthetic is one I will remember, and refer to. 

——————

From Filmmaking Magazine, Winter 1998: 

Handheld Hell 

Thanks to the trendiness of handheld camera-work, most filmmakers assume they have some leeway when it comes to cinematography. “Fashion aside, it’s probably a good idea to spring for a tripod. I’ve seen some incredibly bad camerawork, and I feel sometimes it’s done on purpose, like handheld stuff that makes you want to vomit,” complains Rosenberg. And Blush comments, “Handheld is a big staple. It’s like, ‘My film is very cinema verite,’ when you know that the filmmaker couldn’t afford a tripod. It’s all about motivation. Is there a reason why this film has lots of shaky cinematography? If so, great, but if not, you’ve got to make the time to lock your shot down. Not everything can be justified as art.”

So how do you get good handheld camerawork? According to Nick Gomez, director of the upcoming illtown as well as Laws of Gravity, the film that boasts perhaps the best use of handheld camerawork in recent years (and which may be responsible for the technique’s continued popularity), the key is getting the right cinematographer. Gomez explains: “I knew that Laws of Gravity would be handheld, so I put out the word that I needed a good handheld D.P. Jean de Segonzac’s name kept coming up. While he didn’t have a lot of dramatic experience he did have experience in documentary filmmaking.”

Gomez notes that there’s a common misapprehension regarding the skills to shoot handheld. “D.P.s are very macho about handheld cinematography — they all want to put the cameras on their shoulders and prove that they can do it. But some can’t. It takes a special kind of skill, and either you have that sense of composition and grace or you don’t.”

———

For the record, my handheld skills should have me in the DP time-out corner with a Dunce cap. 

We brunettes of the Non-white persuasion

  • July 17, 2009 5:54 pm

 

http://www.tvguide.com/celebrities/salma-hayek/photos/173604/13

Via tvguide.com

I was having a chuckle this week of who I get compared to in the looks department. They’re never white women. In high school, Wes Anderson’s Rushmore was shot near my house, and my classmates flocked to work as extras in his film. For a while, I was often asked if I had played the role of Margaret Yang in the film- to which a high school version of me bares a striking similarity.

And while I certainly grew up in close proximity to a golf course, attended a National Blue Ribbon public school, drove an Acura Integra for my first car– I realized I merely identified with being “white” because of my economic background– as opposed to my family heritage. My father is white. My mother was raised in Honduras but is Colombian. 

This gave me a vaguely exotic look, which for whatever reason caused my school peers in about 5th grad to ask if I was Chinese and then proceed to make “slanted eyes” at me. (I guess this is excused via the recent Miley Cyrus debacle.) 

Until my arrival in Chicago I had not done too much meditating on my race. Recently, I was workshopping with a producer from WBEZ. She bemoaned all of her volunteers and interns being from Brown and University of Chicago and wanted to know how to pull in someone else. I think during the workshop people looked to me as some sort of a “diversity story”– but, as I mentioned at the start of this entry, I’m merely a token. The opportunities available were plenty.

As I started working more around Chicago, I noticed things like… in the museum community minorities were typically security and food service on the museum premiss. Or, the the bus run in my North Shore neighborhood that appears to only be used by minority women working as maids and nannies. 

I don’t have much of a heritage associate with my mother’s half of the family. Mainly, I had a few trips to Honduras that usually included a large house party complete with a visiting mariachi band competing with the sound of cadged parrots that my grandmother kept. But returning to the class issue again the trips to Honduras were in the best parts of Tegupicgalpa and I stayed in a gorgeous house with tropical greenery and an open air area with hammocks. 

So I’m noticing things in film now. The way minority women are treated. And I have to say they’re a tad fetishized. I am no stranger to that treatment. I attended a small private college in Northeast Georgia, where I met a male classmate that was so fascinated by “colored women” as he put it, he would chase down the handfull of us attending school there. 

I was so young, I thought how novel. I’m old now, and I think– how creepy. The want for an exotic woman. And she indeed has a prominent role in screenplays. This woman. I think of Penelope Cruz as being this tiny-voiced muse who makes funny expressions, but does her character go beyond that? Or let’s just take a Penelope Cruz archetype and place her in the film Spanglish. The spanish maid winning the heart of Adam Sandler’s character, who is less than charmed with his strong, independent blond wife. 

Via amctv.com

 

Or on 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy’s fascination and crazy love for Elisa, the medical assistant who is played by Selma Hayek Of course, she’s poor and working two jobs. Mad Men goes there Paul Kinsey brings his black girlfriend to a house party and Joan chastises him as trying to make a statement, rile things up– a faux societal rebellion. Or even better, why is Don Draper’s wife the pinnacle of entitled blond farm girls, and yet he slinks away with brunettes, Jewish women and even waves off a Chinese call girl “not tonight.” A muted exoticism. 

 

Where is the blond muse/mistress/second class lady? I am only conjuring a frightening Glenn Close, but maybe you can help me on this one. I can’t help but conjure the Foucault books from high school debate analyzing sex and power structures. I don’t know if it’s so much about exoticism and a preference for a certain look as it is… a woman from the “wrong side of the tracks” someone who needs a man to save her. Very Disney Princess like. 

Returning to the Margaret Yang episode– I was reading this funny essay in Shameless Magazine: Wes Anderson: The Ultimate Heartbreaker.

You’ll see what I mean.