PFF: Waiting for Lightning Review

DC Shoes and Megaramp present the story of Megaramp founder and DC Shoes co-founder in a DC Shoes production of a Megaramp film brought to you through special promotional consideration by DC Shoes parent company Quicksilver in association with Monster Energy Drink the story of oh crap we've run out of money for the last ten minutes quick Bud Light will pick up the tab and do we still even need to do a movie?

I haven't seen The Greatest Movie Ever Sold yet, but it's hard to imagine it having less aggressive product-placement than this documentary. Even the trailer is constantly marked "DC Shoes." I actually liked DC Shoes before seeing this movie--their shoes were comfy, simple, and fit well. But having wasted one of my festival viewings being tricked into watching a 90-minute ad has made them join Nike on the list of brands I'll never wear again.

I'd be able to overlook the product-placement if the movie itself weren't already two movies forced together and failing to have a happy marriage.

The film is supposed to be about skateboarder Danny Way jumping the Great Wall of China in 2005. This represents the signal moment of his career, the pinnacle, where he pushes not only himself beyond what he had imagined was possible, but skateboarding as a sport. A technically massive undertaking that requires building a 120-foot-high ramp with a crew that doesn't speak the language of the project heads and where a half-inch imprecision could mean Way's death.

That's a story right there: how does something like this get off the ground, how does it come together, what drives a man to pursue such a thing, and, obviously, does he make it?

The problem is, that's not the movie, that's the frame that the movie keeps returning to, forever teasing a little more of the jump throughout so that when the jump finally arrives, not only does the outcome seem a given, I'm too bored to even care.

The movie we get instead is a VH1 Behind the Music-style biopic about Danny Way which involves equal parts archival footage of Way skating, talking heads, and recreations/dramatizations of what the talking heads are saying, usually with the players in the recreations wearing DC Shoes. Bad enough that the biopic follows the tragedy-passion-downfall-redemption arc of Behind the Music, and ignoring that all the interviewees speaking in elegiac terms of Danny throughout as though he died in the jump (which was the biggest giveaway that he did it successfully), the film fails to translate skateboarding to the layman.

I know I'm asking a lot of the documentary to make me understand the difference between good skateboarding and bad, to generate a literacy I would never otherwise have, but there is such a lost opportunity here. The talking heads keep returning to the fact that Way's the best out there, the best ever, and that was clear from day one, that watching him skate was an unrelenting shock. We don't want for videos of Way on the skateboard. He does some moves that are, yes, very impressive, but most of the videos are of him grinding an edge, getting vertical on a ramp, doing a kickflip or a turn. He may be doing these things very well, he may be demonstrating an obvious and unparalleled skill, but I don't know good from bad. All I saw was him doing skateboard things I've seen other skateboarders do too. I can't do them, but I don't know why him doing them was amazing.

I've seen documentaries inform me in exactly that way. Planet B-Boy made me understand breakdancing in ways I never did before and has allowed me to be truly impressed by what I see. Hell, even Wordplay made me understand the thrill of crossword puzzles. How can a skateboarding documentary actually make me care less about skateboarding after watching it?

A relentlessly frustrating film and probably the worst I'll see at the festival this year. On the upside, things can only get better.

2/5 stars

Philadelphia Film Fest

This will be a placeholder until I can update it with more, but until then, I'll be attending the 2012 Philadelphia Film Festival.

If my students put that in a paper, I'd tell them they'd written a sentence that says nothing.

Of course I'd be attending the Fest. I love movies, I love weird movies, and I even love just going to movies so the Fest is right up my street. Plus festivals are one of the rare venues where you can see short films which tend to be amazing in ways wholly unexpected.

What makes my going to the Fest this year significant is that, thanks to UWishUNu, the Philadelphia tourism blog, I won two silver badges for the Festival. They include free entry into every screening plus access to various parties and the Festival bar. If you're anything like me, you stopped reading after "entry into every screening" because who gives a toss about the rest?

I'll be posting about every movie I see, but I wanted to throw this post up beforehand just to express my gratitude to both UWishUNu and the Philadelphia Film Society for the passes. I'd be trying to see as many films as I could regardless, but that would have come down to what I could afford. Now it's all an issue of scheduling.

I'm going to nerd out so hard you don't even know.

V/H/S Review

V/H/S is a found-footage anthology horror film--two difficult forms that come together surprisingly well. I just got back from a preview and rather than post the trailer up at the top, I've posted the video of the song that closes the film for two reasons:

1. I love the Death Set and that song is among my favorite of theirs
2. Any advance information about this movie takes away some of the fun of it

I watched the trailer which made me check Wikipedia and thus I knew the backstory of everything in the movie

Check the archives. I never claimed to be smart.

If you want to see the trailer, click on the film's title, but frankly, even the brief clips there give away too much.

I'm not giving anything away when I say that it's a found-footage anthology film, though. The frame is a group of hooligans who videotape their various antics and are hired to get a videotape from a house. When they arrive, rather than find one tape, they find many and start watching them to figure out which tape they're supposed to leave with. The five tapes they watch--and that we thus watch--make up the rest of the film with short returns to the group in the house between tapes.

The five stories are:

1. A trio of guys, one with a hidden camera in his glasses, go bar-hopping to pick up girls.
2. A couple is making a video diary of their trip in the Southwest.
3. Four college-age kids go for a trip in the woods and bring a video camera.
4. A couple videochats with each other, the woman telling her boyfriend that she thinks her house is haunted.
5. Four guys go looking for a Halloween party in 1998. One is dressed as a Nannycam--a teddy bear with a camera hidden in its head.

I realize these are the thinnest of descriptions, barely even set-ups, but they're all I'm comfortable relating. The second piece was done by Ti West who blew me away last year with The Innkeepers and was a big reason I was excited about seeing this movie. Unfortunately, while good, it's also the weakest of the five--partly because it's too subtle, partly because the horror at its core is too mundane (although it is a nice dramatization of certain urban legends). There are hints of stress in the couple's relationship, but that can't be effectively explored in a short, and the found footage element isn't as interesting as it is in the others pieces. I would have preferred if this wasn't in the movie but was rather done for Masters of Horror. What is has right now isn't enough for a feature-length film, but could be fantastic at 45 minutes to an hour.

The other four shorts, and the frame itself, have the medium very tightly integrated into the story. Even the third story where it's just some kids taking a camera with them--which should sound as unambitious as the camera in the Ti West piece--ends up making the horror that emerges very uniquely video-based and visual. If anything, it reminds of the video game Slender

I don't want to say much more--that's a lie, actually. I want to talk about this movie in giddy, giggling terms. The film is just a fun, fun ride. Watching it makes me feel like the Halloween season has officially started. If I have any other criticisms, it's the same one that I have of Grindhouse: the affectation of artifacts being added to the film. In Grindhouse it was unnecessary film scratches and other elements to make it look like an old grindhouse movie. Here, it's video artifacts: digital hangups in the videochat, blue screens and static when cameras get hit. The artifacts are affectations and, curiously, decreased the manufactured reality of the clips. They seemed to shout, "You're watching a video!" which broke the spell. Fortunately, the pieces themselves were strong enough to overcome those moments.

V/H/S is available on Video On Demand, but has a limited theatrical release starting Friday, October 5th. Catch it in the theater if you get the chance. It'll be gone too quickly and that's where it's really effective--because that's where it's immersive. This is something you want to fall in to.

4 out of 5

Story Slam: Mission Impossible

An old tale from my Academy days.