Every Little Step was essentially a sports film, in the same sense that Spellbound was a sports film. It watched a group of contestants as they were whittled down from thousands to tens, and then to the individual cast members of "A Chorus Line", which is a musical about actors auditioning to get into the chorus of a musical, telling their stories and fears. The musical itself is mainly based on an extended tape interview that the writer/director did with a bunch of his friends, where he got them to sit around with a jug of cheap red wine and talk about their experiences.
I've never seen "A Chorus Line", and now I kinda want to. That should count as a success on the part of the documentary, right?
Anyway, intercut with talking heads of the those involved with the original show and footage from old TV interviews was the audition process. Some of the original people were involved -- the actor who played Connie was the choreographer, and had a say on who played her part in the new version, for example. And they did some very clever editing, cutting together different actors delivering the same speeches or different parts of the same song. And then there was the devastating, "You were more vulnerable today; can you give us a reading that's more like what we saw at your original audition, four months ago?" And the actor, who in voice-over tells us how she has no idea what she did differently four months ago, grits her teeth, smiles, and says, "Okay!"
There were actors whose bravado made you want to give them a smack upside the head, and others who told you that they needed the job because they'd run out of unemployment... but that their friend was competing for the same role, and they'd be happy for her if she got it instead. And one of the actors reminded me a lot of a young Sandra Bullock.
I thought that the film-maker did some things that I wouldn't do -- we saw them going through the cards, and could see the names and faces as the selectors went, "No, no, no, definite no, maybe, no...," which would be mortifying if you were in the audience with your family. But I guess the job of an actor consists of a series of humiliating defeats until they get the triumph of a "yes"; and there seems to be no shortage of people who want to go through that.
I'd happily watch this again.
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Mock Up On Mu was... problematic for me. It was kind of a documentary about the connections between L Ron Hubbard, Lockheed Martin, the Jet Propulsion Lab, and Alistair Crowley (among other things), but done in a really odd way -- actors acting out scenes, with different dialogue dubbed over the top (which contained frequent movie quotations), and extensive use of clips from other old movies.
I think I would have gotten more out of a more straightforward documentary; but I daresay that this was more fun for them to make. I won't be seeking it out again, though.
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Next was Blind Loves, a Czech film about the love lives of four blind people. It's an odd film, in that it's not completely a documentary -- there were a number of sequences that were obviously acted extrapolations of their situation, and a number of other scenes that could be documentary or acting.
For example, there was one sequence where a blind woman talks about what they'll do if their child is sighted to her blind husband. "If she's born blind, we'll know what she'll like," they say, and talk about how their family never taught them how to navigate the city. And we see her giving birth in a hospital, which might or might not be documentary; and then we see her with a (sighted) seven-year-old, going to a movie and getting them to describe what is going on, and then taking them ice-skating.
Lots of lovely moments, like the couple described above putting up a Christmas tree, and working out whether the fairy lights are on be holding the bulbs and seeing if they're warming up. Or the music teacher and his wife, who wish each other a happy New Year, and then carefully reach out with their glasses to try to clink them together.
Not knowing what was real and what was acted was a little frustrating. But then again, people can always see that there's a camera there in documentaries, so how un-acted is a regular documentary? Overall, I liked this movie.
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The lovely Richard and Kate had a spare ticket, so I got a much better seat for We Live In Public than I would otherwise have had. This film was basically about a guy who managed to make a lot of money during the initial internet boom, and then parleyed that money into fleeting fame. (You can tell it was fleeting, because I can't think of his name -- Google says Josh Harris.)
He started the first internet tv network (which didn't work because bandwidth was too low to support streaming media at the time, and eventually went bankrupt); he used that money to set up "Quiet", an installation where over 100 artists lived in a bunker where everything was free, from the breakfast bar to the gun range, but there was no privacy -- the toilets had no walls, the shower was surrounded by clear plastic, and each of the "pods" where people slept had a camera and a TV -- so anyone could watch you at any time. Harris also had people fill out an invasive questionnaire, and agree to submit to frequent interrogations. Unsurprisingly, things went a bit feral, until the experiment was closed down a month later by city authorities worried that this was a millennial cult.
He then got a girlfriend (one of the personalities from the failed internet TV station), and spent six months of his life under total surveillance. This had some good points -- we saw the woman saying, "Did anyone see where I put my wallet?" and then checking the chat stream to find out where it was, and Harris recounted saying aloud that he was hungry, someone asking in chat whether he'd like pizza, and then a pizza appearing at the door.
But the girlfriend talked about how arguments became less about resolving things, and more about playing to the audience and winning over those lurking in chat. They broke up, and then Harris ended up broke; he sold the apartment, and fled to an apple orchard to work there for a while.
There was more -- a failed bid to get someone to buy his idea of a personalised TV station, fleeing his creditors to Ethiopia, his disastrous family life (asked to come home to his mother's death-bed, he sent a self-aggrandising video instead... which arrived after his mother died). But one of the main themes of the movie was people's desire for fame, and their willingness to trade their privacy and dignity for it; and how people don't think about stuff that they post online being public forever.
In a weird way, it reminded me of all the Star/Idol/Survivor series, and all the other outlets where people try to get people to notice them. There's always someone who wants people to pay attention to them.
On the other hand -- with so many people clamouring for attention, most people who are just talking about the crappiness of their day to friends are probably safe from everyone but advertisers and other data aggregators. Except... I know that random people have googled prospective bosses that they might be getting, and found out that they are heavily involved with Christian groups, which might have coloured their interactions if the person had got the job. And there are things like the Boxy saga, where responding to discussion of a random video she made caused a young woman's life to take a turn for the awful.
I wonder whether people becoming more identifiable on-line will make them less jackassish. I mean, some of it is not being face-to-face with the person you're making miserable, but there's also a lot of dickery that goes on when people feel safely anonymous. But on the other hand, it's probably not going to get any harder to throw up sock-puppets and fake accounts to be an idiot in, if that's what you're inclined to do.
An interesting documentary, and it sounds like there will be some cool stuff on the DVD, so I'll probably try and see that when it comes out.
* * *
Finally, Paper Soldier. This was nominally about the Russian race to put the first man into space; but it was more about the gradual disintegration of one of the doctors assessing the potential astronauts, as he becomes less and less convinced that the danger he's helping put these young pilots in is worth it. There's a strange disconnect between his vision of glorious space liners and moon bases, and the unrelenting grey, muddy cold of the cosmonaut base.
He's also cheating on his wife (who is also a doctor) with at least two women at the base; a native of the region, and a security officer. All of them seem seriously devoted to him; all the more so, perhaps, because of his seeming indifference to them. We see the rockets launching in the background, and muddy camels in the foreground, and the doctor hallucinates about his parents, who died in prison camps out here under the reign of Stalin. I thought that the interactions between the two main women in his life was interesting.
It was a complicated story, not helped by frustrating subtitles -- I can understand that it was difficult, since there were often several threads of dialogue going on, but there were several bits that the translator appeared to think were no important, and so didn't bother to translate, and there were times when we got the translation that was higher in the mix, but the characters who were talking onscreen didn't get translated. It made me feel like I was missing quite a bit.
A good film, but not as enjoyable as some other films I've seen. I'm not sure I'd seek it out again.
Posted by svend at July 27, 2009 9:03 AM