An Artist Puts Herself in Her Work in Robert Morgan's Stopmotion with Aisling Franciosi

STOPMOTION 

(Robert Morgan, 2023, UK, 93 minutes) 

"She's the brains and I'm the hands."--a daughter explains her role in her mother's life

For his beautiful and terrifying debut feature, UK filmmaker Robert Morgan builds his film around the painstaking animation technique of the title. 

It's the same technique that brought Rankin/Bass's holiday perennial Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to sweet and fuzzy life in 1964, delighting generations of children, though it has also powered the terrifying visions of Czechoslovakia's Jan Švankmajer, Poland's Walerian Borowczyk, and England's American-born Brothers Quay, prolific shorts makers who have similarly melded live action with stop-motion in their features.

These are some of the best known stop-motion animators, but they're hardly alone, even if it isn't exactly a crowded field. With the proliferation of CGI, stop-motion has come to seem like an increasingly archaic art, though it's something most anyone can do--if they have the patience. It's a technical skill, too, but it requires the kind of preternatural patience most human beings lack. Case in point: Oscar-winning special effects supervisor Phil Tippett, who took 30 years to make 2021's horrifying and hilarious Mad God, his sole feature. Granted, he was busy working on various Star Wars and Jurassic Parks at the time, but he never gave up on his passion project. 

That's the milieu in which Ella Blake (Aisling Franciosi, an Irish actress who has an affinity for the dark side) grew up. 

Morgan provides no backstory, and nor does he need to. If Ella ever had a live-in father, he's long gone and doesn't merit a single mention. An electrifying opening sequence combines strobe-light effects with red and green colored gels (or the appearance of colored gels) to present this lovely young lady as both angel and demon. Aren't we all, in a sense? It's just that life, and the way it unfolds, can push us in more of one direction than the other. That's definitely the case for Ella. 

Though she should be on her own, this fully-grown adult lives with her domineering mother, Suzanne (veteran TV actress Stella Gonet), a stop-motion animator. It's possible Ella spent her youth simply watching Suzanne work--or trying to stay out of her way--but she now serves as her hands since arthritis has rendered them too rigid to move her one-eyed creatures by millimeters, photographing and cataloguing each movement in the process. Ella, in other words, is also an artist, but her mother doesn't see it that way; viewing her more as a tool or an extension of her own body. 

As the film begins, Ella is still somewhat autonomous. She has an attentive boyfriend, Tom (Poldark's Tom York), who works in a realtor's office, and a social circle that includes his party girl sister, Polly (The Witcher's Therica Wilson-Read), who works at an ad agency, but she lacks any close friends. Though Tom fancies himself a musician, it's mostly wishful thinking.  

At home, though, Ella also waits on her mother hand and foot, doing all of the things Suzanne can no longer do for herself, like cooking dinner and cutting her steak. This marks the beginning of the film's meat motif. Raw, cooked, sliced and diced--there's a lot of it in Stopmotion--serving as a reminder that humans are essentially meat, or as a certain Arizona band once put it, we're meat puppets; a notion this film takes literally.

Instead of praising her daughter for her loyalty and dedication, Suzanne consistently berates her, maintaining her dominance by convincing Ella she has no ideas of her own, and that if she does, they're surely worthless. Ella isn't convinced that the plot of her mother's latest film, which revolves around a community of Cyclopes, is especially compelling, but she keeps it to herself and does everything Suzanne asks of her exactly as instructed.

Morgan never explains why Suzanne doesn't hire a home health aid or other professional to help her around the flat, and it's another one of those questions that doesn't necessitate a definitive answer. It's possible she can't afford it on her cult filmmaker's salary. It's also possible that she's enough of a lonely, miserable narcissist--unlike Ella, she has no social circle whatsoever--that she prefers to boss her only daughter around. 

I wouldn't say that Ella grins and bears her mother's abuse. The look on her face says it all; but we see more of her unhappiness than Suzanne ever does. 

If her mother is a fairly one-dimensional character, though well played by Gonet, Ella has to reveal several facets over the course of the film, and Franciosi makes full use of her expressive face, effectively building from the subtle to the extreme, which also made her perfect for The Nightingale, Jennifer Kent's revenge thriller follow-up to The Babadook, in which Aisling lived up to the precedent set by the consistently-excellent Australian actress Essie Davis.

When Suzanne suffers a stroke that lands her in a coma, Ella is finally on her own, but she doesn't see her newfound freedom as a gift. There wouldn't be much of a film if she did. In fact, her first thought is to continue working on her mother's project. When this plan goes awry, Tom suggests she get her own place, since the bad vibes left in Suzanne's wake are doing a number on her psyche. Using his connections, he lines up a spacious, if gloomy flat for her in a mostly-abandoned council estate. Though it's so run-down the elevator is on the blink, the estate recalls the modern, if eerie complex in Andrew Haigh's ghost story All of Us Strangers, which only ever appeared to be inhabited by the two men at the heart of the story. 

There's only one other person here, too. The less said about this individual, who may or may not be a tenant, the better. Basically, they live in the area, they have a lot of free time, and they're curious about Ella's vocation, so she explains how stop-motion works, concluding, "I like it, and I'm good at it, and it feels like I'm bringing something to life." Boy, does she ever. 

Though the change in location represents a chance at a new start, Ella is stymied for ideas until the guest tells her a story about a girl being chased through the woods by a scary figure. Ella becomes so taken with the concept that she builds an entire film around it. Though her mother worked primarily with felt, Ella starts out with mortician's wax until the guest suggests meat, dubbing the girl's nemesis the Ash Man after sprinkling ashes over his meat-covered armature. Though the perils of meat--rot, maggots, stench--would be obvious to any sane person, Ella's tenuous grasp on sanity deteriorates as she loses herself in her work to the exclusion of everything else.

If Franciosi appears in every scene, Morgan alternates between Ella's actions and her visions. The further she plunges into her film, the more it invades her consciousness, and the more he shows what she imagines, making minimal distinction between the two. The use of the girl, the man, and the house in the woods recalls 2018's The Wolf House by Chilean animators Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña (as with Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room, they filmed the entire thing in a museum). I have no idea if it served as inspiration, but there are similar ideas and techniques at work. 

Though it isn't unusual for stop-motion animators to contribute sequences to live-action films, much as the Brothers Quay did for Julie Taymor's Frida and León and Cociña did more recently for Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid, Morgan handled, or at least supervised, the animation in Stopmotion himself, making the film a sort of warped self-portrait. Any kind of work this exacting, repetitive, and time-consuming could do a number on one's mental health, an idea taken in an entirely different direction in Ann Oren's portrait of a first-time Foley artist in last year's criminally overlooked Piaffe. But what if the artist's parent is also a tyrant? Chances are things won't end well. As Ella acknowledges late in the game, "I'm scared of what will happen if I carry on. And scared of what will happen if I don't." 

Nonetheless, moments of normalcy flicker into life, most instigated by the kind, if slightly thick Tom, even as Ella becomes dismissive and condescending to everyone except her new neighbor, a figure nearly as domineering as her mother but in a much less threatening form. It's as if Ella were taking on some of Suzanne's worst traits. 

Not to give too much away, but she doesn't become Suzanne any more than Carrie becomes her tyrannical mother in Stephen King's novel or Brian De Palma's movie. She's both better and worse, stronger and weaker than the person who made her, and her life and her film eventually converge. Though it's possible it's all in her head, a coda suggests otherwise.

For all the ways Stopmotion reminded me of other films--films I quite like, mind you--like Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio and Prano Bailey-Bond's Censor, his first feature doesn't look or sound exactly like anyone else's. In addition to Nocturama DP Léo Hinstin's disorienting cinematography, which grows especially wiggy in a club sequence, composer Lola de la Mata's sound design incorporates haunting choral music with Gialloesque whistling, squeaky hinges, and other unsettling noises. 

It can be hard to grow up as the child of an artist, not least when that artist attempts to create you in their image, while never allowing you to completely develop your own identity or pursue your own interests. They would prefer that you stretch their canvases, clean their paint brushes, or type their manuscripts, much like Gina James, who dutifully typed up all of her mother's New Yorker film reviews since Pauline Kael refused to do it herself (to be fair, Ms. James seems to have turned out just fine). 

It can be handy for an artist to have full-time, unpaid help. It's also a great way to create a monster who will destroy everyone who enters their lair.

Stopmotion is now playing in Seattle at the Meridian. It comes to Shudder on May 31. Images from IFC Films via Collider (Aisling Franciosi), Samuel Dole/IFC Films/Shudder (Franciosi and Ella's creation), Flickering Myth (Franciosi and Tom York), and First Showing (poster image).

Love Is a Sleigh Ride to Hell in Ethan Coen's Lesbian Crime Caper Drive-Away Dolls

DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS 

(Ethan Coen, USA, 2024, rated R, 84 minutes) 

I said, when I go down to Florida way

There ain't no kind of sexual healing that I would not, should not, or could not do 

Said this right here

--Butthole Surfers, 

"Moving to Florida" (1984)

Ethan Coen's solo narrative debut represents a return to the screwball comedies he and his older brother, Joel, made on and off, starting with 1987's Raising Arizona (I wouldn't describe their first feature, Blood Simple, as a comedy, though it certainly has comic elements). Ethan turned 33 that year; he's 69 now. 

Times have changed a lot since then, and even if Drive-Away Dolls captures the feel of their previous work, it's unlikely that the brothers would have built a film around two hot-to-trot, twentysomething lesbians in the 1980s. 

Granted, Margaret Qualley's twangy Texas transplant Jamie is more--way more--sexually expressive than her buttoned-down, drily amusing roommate Marian (Bad Education's Geraldine Viswanathan, an Australian actress of Indian and Swiss descent), but they're both on the make in their own unique ways. Just because they're both queer, and unconflicted about their sexual orientation doesn't mean they aren't very different people. It's a staple of comedies, romantic comedies especially, since time immemorial, though it's less true of Emma Seligman's 2023 lesbian comedy Bottoms, to which I'll be returning, because the two films share significant similarities. 

If Marian needs Jamie to keep her staid, office-drone life interesting--even if she often finds her exasperating--Jamie needs Marian to keep her grounded. Marian hasn't dated anyone since a bad breakup a few years before, whereas Jamie is the love 'em and leave 'em type. Throughout the film, she's often pictured having enthusiastic sex with women she barely knows. These scenes are more graphic, though not what I would consider exploitative, than you might expect from a Coen joint.

If you've seen any of Qualley's work to date, including last year's S&M thriller Sanctuary, you'll know she has few qualms about nudity. Like her mother, Andie MacDowell, she divides her time between modeling and acting, and models tend to be more comfortable with nudity than actresses, in part because it's a requirement of the job--if not full nudity then states of undress that come close--and Qualley has several nude scenes in the film, while Viswanathan has none. It's also possible that the latter doesn't share her exhibitionist tendencies, but it doesn't matter; it fits their characters. 

After introducing the Philadelphia-based lives of these longtime friends, Ethan plunks them on the road. Jamie comes up with the idea of driving a car to Florida to escape their cares. In her case, one of those cares includes her obnoxious ex, Sukie (Lady Bird's Beanie Feldstein, who has been out since at least 2019). She shares her excitable nature, except hers is of the more pessimistic kind. She's also extremely bitter about their breakup. 

Upon working out an arrangement with surly drive-away car coordinator Curlie (played amusingly by Bill Camp), the road trip begins.

Unbeknownst to the women, there's cargo in the trunk that the Chief (Rustin Oscar nominee Colman Domingo) has tasked his goons, Arliss (a bald Joey Slotnik) and Flint (C.J. Wilson), with delivering to Tallahassee, except Jamie and Marian beat them to the vehicle, and Curlie doesn't know about the cargo--a hyper-violent prologue with Pedro Pascal represents our introduction to a mysterious suitcase that recalls the mysterious suitcases of noir and noir-adjacent predecessors from Kiss Me Deadly to Pulp Fiction. 

Jamie and Marian accept Curlie's assignment to deliver the car to Florida in 24 hours, except the former is chronically allergic to commitment, and side trips ensue to seedy motels, lesbian bars, and an afterparty with a women's soccer team where she hooks up with willing players, while Marian, for the most part, bides her time with a book--Henry James's comic novella The Europeans, to be precise. If the goons are bumbling idiots, the Chief shares her interest in classic literature. In his case: James's The Golden Bowl. 

Whether Ethan, who co-wrote the screenplay with his wife, editor and producer Tricia Cooke (The Big Lebowski), intends any significance by these novels--The Europeans revolves around a visit by two siblings to New England--I couldn't say, but it isn't uncharacteristic for a Coen film to feature a literate or urbane bad guy...even if they're also a coldblooded killer. 

The director makes sure we know how much danger the Chief and his gun-toting minions represent through the torture they order or inflict on Curlie and Pascal's Collector. If the violence is intense, it's so over-the-top--in a Tex Avery meets Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner way--that I was more amused than offended. In an unusual coincidence, Bottoms revolves around a high school fight club founded by two hot-to-trot teen lesbians desperate to lose their virginity. That film is predicated on violence. Unlike this one, however, it's not especially sexy, which is weird because it's essentially a teen sex comedy. Better than Bob Clark's infamous Porky's to be sure, but surprisingly timid when it comes to sex. Much like Drive-Away Dolls, though, game performances from Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri save the day. 

Naturally, everyone left standing in Drive-Away Dolls ends up in Tallahassee--including Matt Damon's conservative senator, who also covets the suitcase--and it's what I would both hope and expect from a screwball comedy/crime caper. If I have a problem with the film, and I do, it's that the screenplay could've used another pass. Too many lines that were clearly intended to be funny land with a thud, despite the cast's best efforts, but it's a minor complaint, because it's a fast-moving film that even makes time for leisurely interludes, some featuring Miley Cyrus as a plaster caster, that recall Jeremy Blake's painterly interludes for P.T. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, but rendered in a more psychedelic sixties--if digitally-constructed--manner. 

Another problem: the way Ethan keeps reminding us that these women are lesbians. And that they're horny. We know. We really know. Bottoms used the same playbook, even as its maker is a 28-year-old queer woman who grew up in a more enlightened era. I wouldn't say that Ethan, who has been married to Cooke since 1990, is revealing any prejudices through these single-minded portrayals, though; it's probably just meant to be funny. 

I suspect that he and Cooke genuinely like these characters. To quote Ethan in a recent interview with the AP, "Tricia's queer and sweet and I'm straight and stupid. That could be the slogan of the movie: 'Straight and stupid.' Me and Joel couldn't do that because we're both straight and stupid." Fair enough, but it's still possible for a lesbian to have interests other than being a lesbian (and reading one book). 

Then again, the portrayals of lesbians on screen, especially prior to Rose Troche's 1994 rom-com Go Fish, which they have cited as an inspiration, didn't used to be quite so freewheeling, so I get that we've reached the stage of queer representation in which coming out to friends and family, struggling with homophobic relatives and discriminatory authority figures, and other indignities can be considered things of the cinematic past.

The soundtrack, assembled by music supervisor Tiffany Anders, provides a definitive high point. Anders, the daughter of Allison Anders--who nearly made the film as Drive-Away Dykes in 2002--served as music supervisor for Reservation Dogs and Beef, and she's very good at what she does. If you're fond of Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain," you'll be in seventh heaven since guitarist Eddie Hazel's otherworldly opus plays throughout each interlude. If you're not, you may tire of it quickly. It's also possible you're insane. 

If I didn't love Drive-Away Dolls as much I expected to once I first watched the trailer--prior to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes it was slated for 2023--I definitely had a good time. In every way, it's the exact opposite of Joel Coen's black-and-white directorial debut, The Tragedy of Macbeth, with Denzel Washington and his wife, Frances McDormand, which I loved (believe me, it helps to see it on the big screen; I'm not convinced that epic Apple films like Macbeth and Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon benefit from streaming, though it seems likely to have expanded their audiences). 

I'm not interested in taking sides either. If I prefer Macbeth to Drive-Away Dolls, it's due primarily to personal preference, since they don't have much in common. The former is more serious and more artfully shot (by Inside Llewyn Davis's Bruno Delbonnel), but if anything, we're as lucky to get to enjoy the Coen Brothers together as separately, in which they reveal strikingly different, yet equally appealing sides of their personas. As long as they continue making the films they want to make: I'll be watching them.

 

Ethan Coen's true solo directorial (not narrative) debut was 2022's Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind. Drive-Away Dolls opens at the Meridian, Pacific Place, AMC 10, and other area theaters on Fri, Feb 23. Images from the IMDb (Geraldine Viswanathan and Margaret Qualley), Patti Perret/Orion Pictures/TNS via The Lantern (Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Senott in Bottoms), Screen Rant (Beanie Feldstein), Frameline (T.J. Wilson, Colman Domingo, and Joey Slotnik), and Wikipedia (Funkadelic's 1971 Maggot Brain).  

It's Just Me and the Boys: Isaac Julien's 1991 Queer-Punk Anthem Young Soul Rebels

YOUNG SOUL REBELS

(Isaac Julien, UK/Germany/France/Spain, 1991, 105 minutes) 

"I'll make tonight so funky, even the white boys will shake a leg."--Chris (Valentine Nonyela) 

Isaac Julien's sole narrative feature, Young Soul Rebels, uses the form of a murder mystery to explore what it meant to be Black and queer/queer-friendly during London's punk era. Though the genre was associated with young people, like pirate radio disc jockeys Chris (Valentine Nonyela) and Caz (Mo Sesay), its most prominent practitioners, like the Sex Pistols, were white and straight. As the title attests, Chris and Caz, both men of color, prefer soul, but the spirit of punk infuses their DIY approach to music promotion--and life. 

There's no guarantee that a film that opens with a great song will live up to it, but it's something that always puts me at ease. Set during June 1977, the film opens with Parliament's "P. Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)" before segueing into X-Ray Spex's "Identity," and instantly, I felt I was in good hands--even if I was a little irked that Julien didn't let the P-Funk number play out in its entirety (to be fair, it's over seven minutes long). From there, he segues into Chris's patter during "Soul Patrol," making it clear that the soundtrack's diegetic selections come primarily from the duo's radio show. 

That same year, X-Ray Spex, a punk band led by a woman of color when that wasn't the norm, released their debut, Germfree Adolescents (Julien also includes "Oh, Bondage! Up Yours" and Funkadelic's "One Nation Under a Groove"). At the time, the country was celebrating the Queen's Silver Jubilee, as acidly immortalized by the 'Pistols on the single "God Save the Queen" and in Derek Jarman's Jubilee, which featured the all-female, take-no-prisoners Slits. One part of the country was the same as it ever was, and the other--Black, queer, anti-corporate, and/or underemployed--felt disenfranchised and excluded. What had the Queen ever done for them? 

The film proper begins with Chris and Caz's friend TJ, also Black, carrying a boombox playing a recording of an episode of "Soul Patrol." 

He enters a cruiser's park at night where he meets a leather-clad white man, face unseen, who comes on to him (at that point, TJ presses "record" on his player). At first things seem okay, and then they're not when the man attacks him, grabs his boombox, and runs away. Unintentionally or otherwise, the sequence recalls William Friedkin's 1980 Cruising, not least because the leather man will reappear later. 

TJ doesn't survive the attack, and Chris and Caz are devastated. The same thing could have easily happened to Caz, who is gay. However unsteadily, life goes on. Chris longs to go legit. Radio shows and club nights are fun, but he wants to make the move to commercial radio, so he uses his chutzpah to charm DJ Jeff Kane (Ray Shell, an American actor/musician who has performed with Magazine and appears in The Apple), a soul DJ at the BBC-like Metropolitan, and his associate, Tracy (vibrant then-newcomer Sophie Okonedo, most recently of Slow Horses), a production assistant.

Though the cops investigate the murder, they do so with minimal efficiency and maximum disrespect as they ask Chris, Caz, and the friends at the garage from which they broadcast their show, including Carlton (future Oz star Eamonn Walker), questions about TJ. Not all of these young men are gay--and the garage workers prefer reggae--but all are Black. Many are also of West Indian descent and the accents, combined with the retro London slang, run hot and heavy. (Early on, I enabled closed captioning, because I didn't want to miss a word.) If you caught 1980's Babylon or Steve McQueen's 2020 Windrush anthology Small Axe, you'll feel right at home. 

Despite the fact that a homophobic murderer is on the loose and that the National Front is on the rise--as exemplified by the skinheads skulking around the council flats with their old man suspenders and Doc Martens--this isn't a grim picture. The soundtrack of bangers keeps it bumping--other acts include the Blackbyrds, Roy Ayers, the Heptones, Sylvester, Junior Murvin, and the O'Jays--but so do the moments of unadulterated joy, like Chris dressing up for a night on the town or teaching his younger sister and her friends dance moves, and Chris and Caz playing funk sides for a receptive crowd. That last sequence reminded me of the Lover's Rock section of Small Axe as the music melts everyone's cares away, at least for one night. 

While Chris cozies up to Tracy for business and pleasure, Caz connects with the socialist-leaning, Melvillesque-named Billibud (Jason Durr), a white, leather-clad punk he meets at one of their club nights. The two men even reconnect in the same park where TJ met his maker. Could Billibud be the killer? Or is it Ken (Dorian Healy), the white, anorak-clad automobile enthusiast who hangs around the garage? We never see him in leather, but there's something off about the guy. Meanwhile, Julien uses POV shots to make it clear that someone is keeping an eye on both Chris and Caz. 

Though Julien set Young Soul Rebels in the 1970s, Chris soon finds himself grappling with a very 1990s conundrum: selling out. With Tracy's pull, he has a shot at a steady paycheck, but only if he whitens up his act. He doesn't want success on those terms; he just wants to be himself and to get his own place. Caz, meanwhile, wants things to continue as they are.

Things start to go very wrong right around the time Chris finds the recording of TJ's attack. From the start, Julien suggests that the man watching the duo might even be one of the cops who hassled them at the garage. Though not every white person in the film is terrible, every cop is a racist asshole, and it's hard to imagine that they'll do the right thing if they get their hands on the tape. 

Everything comes to a head at an anti-Jubilee gathering in the park attended by energetic punks, aggressive skinheads, and a smattering of Black youth, like Tracy and Chris and Caz, who are on the outs by that point--though true soul brothers can only stay mad at each other for so long. 

If Julien eventually identifies TJ's murderer, the mystery framework proves the film's least successful aspect, more so in awkward execution than noble intent, but it's a savvy move to use genre trappings to explore a subculture, and in the end, music saves Chris and Caz as surely as it brought them together in the first place. The cops, the skinheads, the royalists, and all the other bad stuff remains bad, but they still have each other, and the final sequence suggests that they aren't as alone as they once were.

When Roger Ebert reviewed the film for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1991, he gave it a measly two stars, but when Peter Bradshaw reviewed Strand Releasing's new 4K reissue for The Guardian in 2023, he gave it four. I believe the latter hits closer to the mark. 

In addition to Young Soul Rebels, Isaac Julien, MBE, is a documentarian (Looking for Langston, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask), installation artist, film professor, and founder of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective. For all his prestigious accolades, his sole narrative feature proves that he also knew--and presumably still knows--how to have a good time, even when telling a heartfelt story rooted in identity politics and intersectionality. 

That playful side of his persona also factors into Jane Giles and Ali Caterall's SCALA!!!, a boisterous documentary about the infamous, all-night King's Cross movie palace that taught Black, queer, and otherwise outsider musicians, actors, and filmmakers, like Isaac Julien and Steve McQueen, that there was a place for them in the United Kingdom. After making the festival rounds in 2023, it should, much like this revival of Young Soul Rebels, be coming to US theaters and/or streaming services later this year.  

If you hear any noise 

It's just me and the boys.

--Bernie Worrell, George Clinton, and Bootsy Collins

Young Soul Rebels plays Northwest Film Forum Feb 14 - 21. Images from Rotten Tomatoes (Valentine Nonyela and Mo Sesay), BlogTO (Mo Sesay and Jason Durr), Out Film CT (Nonyela, Eamonn Walker, and Gary McDonald), and BFI (Nonyela and Sophie Okonedo and Julien on the set).

Stranger Flashback: Beware of Mr. Baker

This is a revived version of a Line Out post from 2013 (without any notice, The Stranger purged every single post from the internet some time after they pulled the plug on their music blog in 2014).

FILM/TV Mar 3, 2013 at 12:03 pm 

The Asshole Glory of Ginger Baker KATHY FENNESSY

BEWARE OF MR. BAKER
(Jay Bulger, 2012, US, 92 minutes)

Instead of a hagiography filled with kind words from old chums, boxer-turned-filmmaker Jay Bulger's documentary, Beware of Mr. Baker, revels in opportunities to present drummer Ginger Baker in all his asshole glory.

It's a disrespectful, attention-generating approach that suits its cantankerous subject like one of his fashionable sheepskin coats from the 1960s. According to an IMDb user who caught the film at a London screening, the "fractious Q&A...ended with shouting, swearing, recriminations all round, and Jay Bulger seemingly storming off stage."

About Bond, Baker says, "He was a fat guy" (everyone was fat compared to Baker).

Unfortunately, Bulger films himself as if he were part of the profile—no wonder Baker, who now lives in South Africa, smacked him in the face with his cane in the instantly-infamous opening sequence. When you've got a larger-than-life subject at your disposal, get the fuck out of the way. Let the guy narrate, let his friends and enemies narrate oral history-style, or drop the narration altogether (the better documentaries don't need it).

After that unsteady start, Bulger rights the ship by stepping aside and letting the 73-year-old musician tell the story in his own nicotine-stained drawl, starting with his childhood in war-torn Britain. The minute he heard jazz drummer Max Roach, he says, he found something "I could relate to." When he wasn't getting into brawls, he was tapping out rhythms on his desk until he found his way to a drum kit, and that was the beginning of that. 

Alongside the archival material, Bulger adds expressive, painterly animated sequences to bring the past to life. It's a wise move, since the semi-abstract look of the art aligns with Baker's interest in jazz and African music.

By 20, he was a husband, a father, a heroin addict, and the percussive anchor in a series of increasingly popular outfits, including Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated and the Graham Bond Organization. At this point, other speakers enter the fray, like singer-bassist Jack Bruce and Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts. While Baker praises Bruce as a "fucking brilliant player"—until he switched from stand-up bass to bass guitar—he dismisses strutting front man Mick Jagger as a "stupid little cunt."

Femi Kuti appears in the film to talk about Baker's association with his father.

From there, Baker talks about Cream, the power trio he formed with Bruce and guitarist Eric Clapton. The band made a significant impression on Neil Peart of Rush, Bill Ward of Black Sabbath, and Stewart Copeland of the Police, who are all effusive in their praise. Baker sums up Cream's appeal succinctly: "We were fucking good." (He's right; they were.)

Alas, the tension between Baker and Bruce, who amassed more writing royalties, would eventually reach a breaking point, after which he and Clapton segued to Blind Faith with singer-keyboard player Steve Winwood and bass player Ric Grech. Though that outfit had an even shorter run, Baker calls Clapton "the best friend I've got on this planet."

Bulger concludes by documenting Baker's drum battles with jazz legends Elvin Jones and Art Blakey, his work with Nigerian dynamo Fela Kuti, and his obsession with polo ponies, who appear to have received more attention than any of his wives and children. Yet there's something strangely endearing about the man. Though he insults Bulger throughout the film with pithy lines, like "For fuck's sake" and "Don't try to be an intellectual dickhead," his bone-deep respect for the drums always shines through.

Dave Segal liked it, too.

Beware of Mr. Baker, which premiered in Seattle at SIFF in 2012, plays the Grand Illusion Cinema through Mar 7. Vivendi Entertainment releases the DVD on May 14. Image of Ginger Baker from Rotten Tomatoes.  

Stranger Flashback: The Music and Movies of the L.A. Rebellion at Northwest Film Forum

This is a revived version of a Line Out post (The Stranger purged them from the internet some time after they pulled the plug on their music blog in 2014).

FILM/TV Mar 13, 2013 at 12:44 pm 

The Music and Movies of the L.A. Rebellion 

KATHY FENNESSY

The L.A. Rebellion, which Stranger staffer Charles Mudede wrote about here, was an African American film movement that took place primarily in the 1970s and 1980s (Mudede will also be participating in the Cinema Salon that takes place this Saturday at the Northwest Film Forum at 6pm).

It wasn't about music, but music was part of it. Unlike the funk-powered blaxploitation films of the era, these filmmakers turned to blues, jazz, and gospel to ground narratives about community and work—or lack thereof.

To describe funk as a more commercial genre wouldn't be quite fair, but the L.A. Rebellion directors weren't thinking about radio airplay, drive-ins, and soundtrack recordings in the same way. Curtis Mayfield's Superfly soundtrack, for instance, still remains better known than the 1972 drama for which he did some of his finest work (or maybe that's just me; I have the record—my Dad had the record—but I still haven't seen photographer-turned-filmmaker Gordon Parks, Jr.'s movie).

The L.A. Rebellion series, which runs March 1-24, began at the Northwest Film Forum with screenings of films I'd seen before, like Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust and Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding, and films I couldn't work into my schedule, like Haile Gerima's Bush Mama, but I found time for Saturday's Cinema Salon and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts, for which Burnett was in attendance (he was also at Friday's screening of My Brother's Wedding).

When an audience member asked about the music in 1984's Bless Their Little Hearts, on which he served as writer and cinematographer, Burnett admitted that he didn't know the details (I heard what sounded like a Nina Simone song at one point, but didn't recognize the rest of the uncredited material).

Burnett then recounted his experience with his first film, 1977's Killer of Sheep, which was held up for 30 years due to music rights issues. For Seattle Film Blog, I wrote, "The use of Paul Robeson songs on the soundtrack, including 'The House I Live In' provides a link with the silent films of Oscar Micheaux." Once the film cleared those hurdles—after six years and $150,000—Milestone made it available for home-video and theatrical screenings (the DVD includes My Brother’s Wedding).

Given the chance to do it again, Burnett says he would've cleared the rights first, except both Killer of Sheep and Bless Their Little Hearts were student films, even if their quality belies those origins. It's not too surprising that young directors in the 1970s, even two associated with UCLA's prestigious film program, wouldn't know all the ins and outs of music licensing (or have the means to pay someone to sort it out for them). One way or the other: Burnett refused to remove even a single song.

At the Q&A on Saturday, Fantagraphics co-founder Gary Groth declared Killer of Sheep's living room scene, in which Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) and his wife (Kaycee Moore from Bless Their Little Hearts and Daughters of the Dust) dance to Dinah Washington, as one of his favorites. He also praised the (more volatile) kitchen scene in Hearts, in which Moore proves she should've been a bigger star. Burnett acknowledged that he didn't know why some actors hit it big, while others didn't, concluding somewhat enigmatically, "She was an interesting woman..."

I haven't seen the other films in the series, so I can't speak to their use of music, but Larry Clark's Passing Through revolves around an ex-con saxophone player portrayed by Nathaniel Taylor (fresh off a run as as "Rollo" on Sanford and Son). The 1977 film, which screens this Friday in a new 35mm print, features a Horace Tapscott score, a performance from the Pan African People's Arkestra, and musical selections from Eric Dolphy, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Sun Ra.

Not to be confused with the Larry Clark who made Kids and Wassup Rockers, this Clark has another estimable music credit to his name: he helped to shoot Mel Stuart's utterly amazing Wattstax, which captured Richard Pryor, Isaac Hayes, and the Staple Singers at the height of their musical and comedic powers.

The music continues when author, musician, and A&R guy Pat Thomas (Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975) returns to Seattle for the final Cinema Salon on March 23. Pat is a friend who always has something of interest to say, and in this case, he'll be exploring the connections between the Black Power movement and the L.A. Rebellion. He's also been living in Los Angeles for the past year while working on a book project for Fantagraphics. Pat will be joined by Black Panther member Ron Johnson and Seattle University professor Gary Perry.

For more information about the series, please see the NWFF site. Images from Charles Burnett's Facebook account (early portrait), Establishing Shot (My Brother's Wedding), and Movie Poster Shop (Killer of Sheep).