Nannette Burstein’s American Teen has become ubiquitous since its Sundance premiere, both on the festival circuit and, thanks to a poster carefully calibrated to target Gen X nostalgia, online. Its title suggests a wishful universality, but in fact, when looked at alongside two less-lauded films about American teens against which it screened here in Silver Spring, its document of five white high school seniors in a semi-rural suburb of Indiana seems as niche as it gets.
World premiering here on Friday before beginning a run on HBO Monday night, Hard Times at Douglas High is a fly-on-the-wall work of activism documenting a year in the life of an all-black Baltimore high school, as teachers, students and administrators struggle to comply with No Child Left Behind. Made by the directors of the seminal reality series An American Family, it makes visible the reverberations of blind bureaucracy on living and breathing institutions, making the home and personal lives of its students a spectre, but not a direct concern. Taking the inverse tactic, Going on 13’s intimate portrait of four girls passing through puberty (or, “puberey”, as one subject refers to it early on) over the course of four years in a barely middle-class Northern California community touches on the institutions that contain their lives only incidentally. Seen together in a single weekend, each of the three seem to say less about age than the variables of fate as played out through place and race.
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Spike Lee physically showed up to accept the Guggenheim Honor from the SilverDocs film festival tonight, but mentally, for much of the evening, he seemed to be elsewhere. Maybe his recent squabbles with Clint Eastwood have taken a toll, but when asked to talk about his non-fiction films by Denver Post film critic Lisa Kennedy, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker was virtually unresponsive. Only two subjects seemed to draw out Lee’s fierce, super-quotable Frankenstein.
One was Tyler Perry, who Lee didn’t quite slam, but definitely dissed by implication. “I’d love to see a great film about Martin Luther King,” Lee said. “But I can’t do everything.” He paused as a smile crept across his face. “I gotta leave something for Tyler Perry.” This got the desired affect from the audience––laughs, claps, a few stray “ooooh!”s––and then Lee offered cryptic clarification. “I made the movie Bamboozled,” he said, as if that’s facetious evidence enough that the master of the modern minstrel show would be the appropriate director for a serious film about Dr. King.
The only other subject that could jolt Lee out of his slumping stupor on stage was Barack Obama, to which all conversational roads seemed to lead. …Read more
Tuesday was a travel day, after a final, sleepless night in Las Vegas (a note on that: if you love cinema but happen to be in proverbial Sin City when CineVegas is *not* in session, you must go to karaoke at Ellis Island. This is surely not intended as a slight on the programmers or filmmakers involved in the festival, but the karaoke video that accompanies “Bohemian Rapsody” in that casino bar is as least as good as the majority of short films to which my fellow jurors and I gave prizes. Lest you wonder if I’m joking, I can only say that there’s something about spending four straight days in a casino that makes distinctions between irony and sincerity seem meaningless.)
Anyway. The trip from The Palms to my hotel in Silver Spring, Maryland was exactly 12 hours door to door. I intended to watch a screener of Andrew Jacobs’ Four Seasons Lodge after checking in, but ended up spending two hours looking at Cyd Charisse clips on YouTube, and by the time I put the screener on I had to turn it off almost immediately in order to crash. I only mention this because I went back to it Wednesday morning before a screening of Seaview, and it seems worth noting that it was a total accident that I spent my first day at SilverDocs watching two consecutive films about the refugees of international atrocities struggling to form a community within resorts that have seen better days.
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Sorry for the double-shot of Spike Lee news today — Karina gave us word earlier on his being honored by SilverDocs — but at least I’ve managed to squeeze an obligatory Uwe Boll mention into the post, too. Now you’re probably wondering: what could the director of Do the Right Thing possibly have in common with the director of BloodRayne? Well, here’s your answer: they’re both encouraging the democratization of movies.
Lee is doing so more intentionally, though, by teaming up with Nokia in order to “direct” a film entirely shot by everyday people on their cell phones. According to Reuters, the film will consist of three acts, each made by a separate cameraphonographer (my lame term for the competing cell-phone filmmakers). And according to Lee, there’s no need for you to be trained in the craft to enter:
“Aspiring filmmakers no longer have to go to film school to make great work. With a simple mobile phone, almost anyone can now become a filmmaker.”
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I’ve been making plans travel plans for the next couple of months this week, and it looks like in mid-June I’ll be making my first trip to SilverDocs. And look: they’ve just made their first major program announcement:
Spike Lee, the Oscar-nominated director of Do the Right Thing, will be honored at this year’s Silverdocs film festival for his documentary work including When the Levees Broke, on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, organizers said on Wednesday.
Lee will screen excepts from his documentary works and discuss his career on June 19 at the Charles Guggenheim Symposium, which recognizes top documentary filmmakers and is a centerpiece of the June 16-23 festival.
More from Reuters and at the SilverDocs website. I’ll be in town from the 17th-23; will you?
