Rid of Me

The dark side of Katie O’Grady.

(2011) Dramedy (Phase 4/Submarine) Katie O’Grady, Art Alexakis, Theresa Russell, John Keyser, Storm Lange, Melik Malkasian, Betty Moyer, John Breen, Orianna Herrman, Ritah Parrish, Melinda Chilton, Geno Romo, Angie Rutan, Julie Vhay, Cora Benesh, Emily Galash, Jana Lee Hamblin, Brendan Robinson, Leslie Taylor, Adrienne Vogel. Directed by James Westby

They say hell hath no fury as a woman scorned and there is some truth to that. However, if you’re the scorned woman, how do you get to the point where you become more furious than Hell itself?

Meris Canfield (O’Grady) seems to have a rock-solid marriage with her husband Mitch (Keyser). They have recently moved from Southern California to the small Oregon town where Mitch grew up. Everyone there seems to have married their high school sweetheart and mousy Meris suddenly becomes the odd woman out. Despite her best intentions, the snobby clique that Mitch was part of freeze her out and she realizes that they have more in common with Mitch than she does.

History can bite you in the ass in that regard and Mitch decides that he would have been better off with his high school girlfriend Briann (Lange) so he divorces Meris and it’s out with the old, in with the new. Or maybe out with the new, in with the old if you look at it a certain way.

In any case, Meris isn’t willing at first to give up – she still loves Mitch. But as she gets a job at a candy store and her obsessive and compulsive stalking of her ex grows more pathetic, she falls in with a bunch of punk girls. The Pacific Northwest, you might recall, was Ground Zero for the riot grrl movement and ladies are grown non-conformist out there.

As Meris becomes more enamored of the culture of these punks she begins to learn more about who she is as a person and more importantly, who she wants to be. What she wants is to be a great big middle finger to society and to her POS husband and his snooty friends who quite frankly are the sort of people that you really wish bad things would happen to.

This is all about Meris’ growth as a person and you need someone strong in the role – someone who can play mousy, conformist and something of a wanna-be Stepford Wife, but also someone who is just as comfortable as a street urchin/punk goddess/what are YOU looking at sort. O’Grady makes every phase of Meris’ development realistic and believable. I don’t know O’Grady’s work well but if this is any indication, you should keep a sharp eye out for any other movie she’s done.

My issue with the film lies with the director. Too many camera tricks, unnecessary zooms, and movement otherwise known as “Look Ma, I’m Directing” syndrome. That kind of thing can be a sign of a director who is lacking the confidence in his own abilities to tell a story and has to resort to all sorts of visual gimmickry to get noticed – trust me Mr. Westby, you’ve got what it takes. You don’t need to get all gimmicky on us to make the movie worth seeking out.

In any case, this is one of those films that you’ve probably never heard of but nonetheless is worthy of the attention of any film buff. This isn’t the kind of movie that reinvents the wheel, but O’Grady’s performance is simply put, unforgettable.

WHY RENT THIS: An extraordinary performance by O’Grady. Ruggedly nihilist.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Look ma, I’m directing!

FAMILY VALUES: Some foul language and suggestive material.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The movie was shot in Multnomah Village near Portland where director Westby has lived most of his life.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: None listed.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $11,740 on an unreported production budget.

COMPARISON SHOPPING: Trainspotting

FINAL RATING: 6/10

NEXT: Cold in July

Chasing Ice

Ice, ice baby

(2012) Documentary (Submarine Deluxe) James Balog, Svavar Jonatansson, Louie Psihoyos, Adam LeWinter, Kitty Boone, Jeff Orlowski, Tad Pfeffer, Suzanne Balog, Dennis Dimick, Emily Balog, Simone Balog, Sylvia Earle, Jason Box, Synte Peacock. Directed by Jeff Orlowski

The world is changing. That’s a given – our lives are sometimes too short a span to really notice it but I think most of us have noticed that the climate has been changing. Storms are becoming more severe; the summer of 2012 is one of the warmest ever recorded. Wildfires are becoming hotter and more frequent.

James Balog is a nature photographer with the National Geographic Society. He is one of the best in the world at it, having won numerous awards for his work which have for the most part dealt with deforestation and endangered species. He has recently become intrigued by ice and on a photo shoot in Iceland watched a massive glacier calve before his eyes.

Aware that scientists were recording that the glaciers were melting at a faster rate than previously recorded, he decided to document the event. To that end he set up the Extreme Ice Survey which raised funds through grants and Balog’s own personal  funds to set up cameras in Montana, Alaska, Greenland and Iceland (and eventually the Himalayas).

The challenges of doing this are severe. The equipment is delicate; setting up cameras designed to shoot photos once an hour for six months at a time in conditions that are as severe as any on the planet requires some innovative engineering (which doesn’t always work). Setting those cameras up requires sometimes precarious mounts which required some climbing skill. To make matters worse, Balog had some serious knee problems which eventually required four surgeries just for him to function.

But the results are worth it. Balog takes some stunning still photos of the ice which are just breathtaking while the video footage shot of the EIS team in these various locations show the stark beauty of the ice. Most importantly the time-lapse photos of the glaciers are terrifying and convincing – if you didn’t believe the scientific warnings before you will now. Of course if you listen to the airheads on Fox News you still might not.

Even more convincing is a massive calving sequence that was caught on videotape by the EIS of a glacier losing ice the size of Lower Manhattan and ten times the height of the Empire State Building. Watching the sequence literally took my breath away and left me with a pounding heart. It’s beautiful yes, but the implications for our world and our species is disturbing.

This is a movie that needs to be seen, to be shown in high schools and shown to government officials. The commentators at Fox News need to be nailed down into chairs and forced to watch it. America is the only industrialized nation on the planet that hasn’t adopted stricter carbon emission laws and it is our job as citizens not just of this nation but of the world to demand our congress do so. It behooves us to remember that we are stewards of our planet – not for those who came before but for those who come after. James Balog and Jeff Orlowski are well aware of that – and the evidence is on the screen.

REASONS TO GO: Incredible photography. Presents the argument for reducing carbon and carbon dioxide emissions concisely.

REASONS TO STAY: Only if you’re making a fortune in the oil industry and others that benefit from emitting carbons into the atmosphere.

FAMILY VALUES:  There are a few bad words uttered here and there.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Balog was the first photographer ever to be commissioned by the U.S. Postal Service to create a full set of stamps.

CRITICAL MASS: As of 12/18/12: Rotten Tomatoes: 96% positive reviews. Metacritic: 75/100. I would call it a critical success.

COMPARISON SHOPPING: An Inconvenient Truth

ICE AT NIGHT LOVERS: There is a sequence near the end of the movie when Balog takes pictures of ice on a bright moonlit night (he cheats a little with some well-placed lights) that is simply stunning.

FINAL RATING: 9.5/10

NEXT: The Vicious Kind

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey

Elmo and Friend

(2011) Documentary (Submarine Deluxe) Kevin Clash, Whoopi Goldberg, Frank Oz, Rosie O’Donnell, Joan Ganz Cooney, Fran Brill, Caroll Spinney, Martin P. Robinson, Bill Baretta, Jim Henson, Bob Keeshan, Kermit Love. Directed by Constance Marks and Phillip Shane

 

Dreams come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some dream of being an artist, or an astronaut or a hero. Other dreams are smaller than that – some in fact downright pint-sized. Some dreams come covered in fur and foam.

Ever since he was a kid in Baltimore, Kevin Clash dreamed of being a puppeteer. One look at Sesame Street and he was hooked. So much so that he made his own puppet – out of the lining of his father’s overcoat. Rather than getting a spanking, he got encouragement which I believe qualifies his parents for instant admission to heaven right there.

While most kids in his working class neighborhood were playing sports, Kevin was putting on puppet shows. His early shows caught the eye of a children’s show host in the Baltimore area and before long Kevin was performing on television.

After graduating high school, he went to New York City to work on the old Captain Kangaroo show as an onscreen actor and puppeteer but his heart still belonged to Jim Henson and the Muppets which were just starting to take off. Kevin had learned everything he knew from watching Sesame Street but he needed to know more.

For that he needed a mentor and he couldn’t have asked for a better one than Kermit Love. Love was one of Henson’s go-to guys in terms of building and designing Muppets and although the name recalls one of Henson’s other creations, Kermit the Frog was actually created by Henson years before he met Love.

Love encouraged the young African-American puppeteer and gave him good career advice throughout Clash’s career. With Love’s encouragement, Clash got to work as a puppeteer on a Sesame Street Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade float which led him to getting a gig on Sesame Street itself.

It was there when a frustrated senior puppeteer threw a furry red Muppet at Clash and said “See what you can do with him” that Elmo was born. With the piping high voice and the insatiable need for hugs, Clash immediately saw that Elmo represented love. Children all over the world responded to Elmo, realizing that he needed them as much as they needed him.

This would take a toll on Clash’s marriage and home life. Although his relationship with his daughter seems to be pretty good, he expresses regret that he missed a lot of her childhood. Unfortunately, not a lot of that is explored to any extent in the documentary. In fact, we don’t even learn when or why his marriage ended (although given the time demands on Clash and his insistence that he do everything Elmo-related himself the reasons seem somewhat clear).

In fact it could be said that the documentary doesn’t really deal with anything negative at all. We get a sense that Kevin had a difficult time in establishing his career, but it’s mostly glossed over. We are told he got teased as a child but we don’t get to hear what he thought about it.

Clash is an intensely private and shy person who doesn’t really like talking about himself which is awfully ironic because he plays a character who certainly isn’t shy about expressing his feelings and actually teaches kids how to express theirs. We never hear about how or even whether his ethnic background was an issue in his career – one thinks not, but his is the only African-American face we see among the puppeteers in the movie with the exception being an aspiring puppeteer – a young girl from Atlanta whom is looking for mentoring from Kevin the same way Kevin looked to Kermit Love.

The stories are heartwarming at times – enough so I probably rated the film a little bit higher than I would have normally. We see Kevin’s reaction to a dying child wanting to meet Elmo, or Kevin’s reaction to the death of Jim Henson – but there is little flesh added to the story. We hear the how, the who, the when, the what but rarely the why. It took the filmmakers six years to film this and it’s disheartening that I know little more about Kevin Clash than I could have read in his online bio.

On the surface, Kevin is a great subject for a documentary but this isn’t a great documentary. I would have liked to get inside Kevin’s head and heart a little bit more, find out more of the process that brought Elmo from felt and foam into flesh. In that sense, this film could have learned from Henson himself; the characters should be more than just what you see on the surface. They are made real by what animates them. I would have liked to have discovered more about what animates Kevin Clash.

REASONS TO GO: Genuinely heartwarming. A few tugs at the heartstrings.

REASONS TO STAY: The documentary structure asked some questions I wanted answers to late in the film and bounced back and forth in the linear timeline a bit too much.

FAMILY VALUES: There is a drug reference and a couple of mild swear words but okay for most Sesame Street-aged kids.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Bleibtreu provided the voice for Flynn Rider in the German version of Tangled.

HOME OR THEATER: Should probably be seen at home, although if it is playing in a local art house it wouldn’t hurt to give it a bit of support.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

TOMORROW: The Holly and the Quill begins!