Bowen’s Cinematic

Anvil! The Story of Anvil is structured as a faded underdog comeback story, think The Wrestler (which several scenes here coincidentally resemble) without the heavy, conscious pathos. As a teen, director Sacha Gervasi followed the titular Canadian band throughout the early 1980s, where they were said to have played a role in the evolution of metal, inspiring acts such as Metallica, who went on to achieve fame and stature, becoming key, obvious names in the story of their genre of choice. Anvil, on the other hand, I had to be look up to be sure I wasn’t falling for a joke. Gervasi has the raw materials for a condescending farce pitched, more or less, in real life, but he instead mounts a picture of fan worship, celebrating his characters, particularly guitarist/singer Lips Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner (I know, I know), and their present day pursuit of a ship that passed them nearly thirty years prior.

Many of us are taught that it’s courageous and honorable to risk failure in the pursuit of our desires, but Lips and Robb show that notion, the “American Dream”, to be one of many platitudes most of us feed our children, while they’re too young to be expected to actually make anything of them. Lips and Robb don’t risk failure; they wear it, breathe it, refusing to call their aspirations out for their potential idiocy. Anvil is a “go for it” picture that actually tests the inclination to go for it, and it contradicts what we’re fed by most pictures: That the heroes, or us, will conveniently succeed just as things get a teensy-weensy uncomfortable. Lips and Robb work menial, sub-middle class jobs with music as the bind that keeps them functioning. Robb is the brooder, with a skin clearly thinner than he’s attempting to suggest, and Lips is the outward projector, the default narrator, translating each fresh disappointment into a jumble of justification and self-delusion. Lips’ mantras, which recall a number of lines in a number of comedies, drive home just how distancing and cruel the resurgence of the pretend documentary has become, most popularly epitomized in NBC’s redo of The Office. Those entertainments (and there’s a number of TV shows predictably following The Office’s suit) spruce up material that’s redundant and broad with intimate bits of embarrassment with which we’re invited to feel superior, with a dash of contrived heart warmth at the end to excuse the mocking. Gervasi isn’t interested in irony; he sees Lips and Robb as heroes, as prototypical losers chasing the dream no matter how dispiriting its head start may be. The key to the picture’s appeal is that it allows us to understand that Lips and Robb are in sync with themselves and with one another in a way that most of us, smug and miserable, never are, only without shortchanging their own, differing, compromises and misery.

As a corrective to our general smart-assery and as testament to the potentially nourishing reassurance of fan worship, Anvil! The Story of Anvil is spare and pure and confidently straight-forward, with an unusually intense friendship between Lips and Robb at its center. But, as in other pictures taken with the music industry, we feel as if we’re missing something: the reality of the mutually beneficial/distrustful relationship between the business and the performers, and an acknowledgement of the probability that most struggling artists are only “everymen”, representative of our insecurities and wants, for as long as they have to be before graduating on to satisfying themselves – they’re one lucky turn from being just another star who sees the fans as consumers. Lips and Robb want a part of something they, and the movie, clearly partially despise, and that contradiction could use a bit of exploration.

An extended interview with Lars Ulrich of Metallica, an extra on the DVD that allows us to see Gervasi coaching him to get the stuff he clearly wants, is more revealing than anything in the proper picture. Ulrich touches on Anvil’s crazy/animal reputation, which Gervasi downplays in the movie, presumably in the interest of accessibility (so we “relate” to them). But this sprucing up is a cheat: seeing how the drugs, the opportunism, the bed hopping, meshed with the personalities of the broken, humble dreamers now looking into the camera could’ve given us an unsettling and even more coherent and moving exploration of our fantasies of success. This riskier side could have challenged our assumptions of “heroes”; that they must always be clean and unsullied and humble, and it could have contextualized the film with the truth that the dream in pursuit here is a dream that’s rooted (like many dreams), in addition to pride of creation, in sex and money and ego and power on tap. Ulrich, also in cut material, admits that of himself, his candor here, while distilled through the typical levels of rock star aloof (he has a way of sucking on his teeth when asked an especially to-the-point question, and you can spot him clearly manufacturing this eccentricity) is refreshing.

Another, potentially key, implication is omitted from the actual movie: that Reiner, the most gifted member of Anvil, was offered a number of gigs in now-legendary acts that he turned down out of loyalty to his band (this clarifies, to an extent, Lips’/Reiner’s clear sibling rivalry/mutual love, and adds nuance). As it is, Lips and Reiner’s altercations barely make sense – there seems to be a lack of coverage, or, more likely, deliberately missing footage that Gervasi cut to spare his heroes of the more exposing/embarrassing material. Gervasi’s impulse is understandable and even remarkable, but he’s underestimating the empathy these rag tag bad boys command: We would follow them anywhere, which points toward yet another, simpler, issue: we barely hear the music. We’re conditioned by the conventions of the “keep the band together” movie to expect a big blowout at the end, and that’s a cliché Anvil! The Story of Anvil would’ve done well to honor, and we assume that Gervasi is building toward just that, but the climax, which gives Lips and Robb just the nourishment they need to go on another thirty years, is a bit of a let down. It’s too tame; the guys, after airing decades of disappointments over however many months or years it took to make this picture, have earned the right to let their freak flag fly, to release their stifled energy, and to, for just a little longer, revel in having fleetingly become exactly what they’ve always wanted to be.

The number of writers and filmmakers befriending/aligning themselves with beautiful/dangerous surrogates is never-ending (Mailer, Capote, Von Sternberg, Hitchcock, Godard, etc, etc) and filmmaker James Toback, most frequently linked to Mailer and known for his hubris and self-promotion and gambling and consumption, is another in the tradition. A collector of novelty accomplices, Toback seems to have found in the ex-heavy-weight champ Mike Tyson the most succinct and perfect embodiment of his own world view, his part fantasy-lit world of ironically wounded, existential masculine poetry. Tyson looks to be the ultimate stereotypical white-man nightmare: built, vicious, painted for war, with a speed (seen in footage here) that remains startling, with that little-boy lisp that tempts one to chuckle – to forget the ferocity of the caged animal. It’s no mystery why so many writers get off on these types of symbiotic relationships: their subjects have on the outward – the danger, the mystery, the conflict, the paradox – what is primarily for them limited to the inward, what they compensate for in their power of their writing. And the subjects’ attraction to the writers is driven by an equal yearning – the writers lend them the complexity and glamour of the writer – the writer gives them the inward that everyone else perceives, perhaps correctly, not to exist at all. These two half public-beings, probably everything they are because of their resentment of missing the other half, manage to find one another.

I have a limited taste for Toback’s brand of willing art into existence, which I see more as a tending of reputation than any particular drive to create a great picture. There are moments of chaos in the pictures, which more recently include Two Girls and a Guy, Black and White, and When Will I Be Loved, that seem to point toward something legitimate -a prodding of social pressure, such as some of the racial combat in Black and White. And one respects, to an extent, Toback’s knock-a-script-out-in-two-hours carelessness, because the work, when it connects, has a tinge of danger – there is no self-censoring (Toback’s sex-race gymnastics are braver than, say, Spike Lee’s, the latter having cultural guilt and self-righteousness to fall back on, though I find most of Lee’s work more racist); but the lack of self-censoring is a shield in itself, a badge of honor to deflect from the sloppiness, and the price for every earned moment is that every other moment is almost entirely unwatchable or falls back on typically manly-man intellectual (the intellectual who desperately wants to be the manly man, and vice-versa) sexism.

Tyson is far and away the best James Toback picture I’ve seen; his obsessions fuse with his star’s seamlessly, effortlessly, and the picture has a humanity that is new to Toback’s work – that’s cleansing. Tyson satisfies Toback’s taste for extremity-as barometer-of-existence. Off the bat, Toback has the metaphor he wants, and so he eases back, simultaneously more focused and leisurely (opening split screens, which initially appear show-off, come to be justified – we’re seeing the slightly contradictory Tysons in conversation). There are maintenances of rep here too; one senses a certain self-congratulation from Toback for taking an unbiased portrait of such a divisive (at best) figure on, but that’s minimal, and is probably more from knowledge of Toback’s prior movies than anything else. The method here is simple and oft-used: several long takes of Tyson sitting on a couch talking of the various moments in his life with which you are primarily familiar. The prolonged exposure to Tyson’s iconic-defensive sing-song voice, a baby’s rasp if a baby could rasp, is jarring at first, we’re used to only hearing him in little clips from movies and in bits and pieces on ESPN, and Toback seems to have had that in mind, because something shocking happens: the voice becomes authentically beautiful, self-revealing in a way that is probably partially, but not totally, calculated (either that or Tyson is a powerful/resourceful actor, and needs to be contacted for more than self-parody).

Toback manages the most important feat of a documentary: to capture the nature of the subject and to reveal in that subject a larger meaning without compromising the subject or the meaning; without perverting non-fiction material to fit the more traditional/rational confines of fiction filmmaking. This unforced universality eluded the filmmakers of last year’s well-regarded Man on Wire; it was pleasurable, well-made with a number of the little art-film tricks that we enjoy – but the ultimate point of the picture, that we were supposed to glean some sort of carpe diem meaning from an egotistical showboat disinterested in anyone’s welfare apart from his own, was absurd and borderline offensive to the other people involved in the story. Toback puts us in his Tyson’s head, and remains there for the better part of ninety minutes, without letting us forget that this view is Tyson’s and Tyson’s alone – the monologue allows the fighter dignity, while still allowing that he is disturbed, and this points towards one of Toback’s favorite writer-ly themes: the man alone, trapped in his head, the man who attempted to purify and atone with indulgence left with nothing but the wreckage of the indulgence. Tyson paints himself as continually scared, vulnerable, and Toback contrasts him with early footage of a reaction to a heckling reporter, who he threatens to “fuck up the ass”. The cutting from past-to-present Tyson could have been glib, but Toback’s structure is subtler than he will probably get credit for – we’re seeing how we see Tyson and how Tyson sees Tyson, and this understanding comes to signify larger societal disconnections: race, class, sex.

Tyson is a refute to most documentaries, and to most broad mid-class pictures that feign empathy with another only to project their sensibility onto said other (such as the “magic negro” movies oft ridiculed). Toback’s white-upper-class envy/idolization of Tyson’s blunt power fuels both the curiosity and the energy of the picture, and steers it from pat sentimentality. I’ve heard concern, and was concerned myself, with Toback’s potential approach – one that could cheapen and trivialize events in Tyson’s life such as the rape conviction, but the director is true to the conceit of the picture and to the picture’s central object – you walk away believing that he probably thinks he’s innocent and, just as you accept that, Tyson blindsides with the hauntingly throw-away admission that he “took advantage of other girls”. This is, of course, a common ploy to the abuser, to admit just enough to allow the other side to forgive you – to understand that you understand, but Toback – a-manipulative sensation-junkie himself, doesn’t let Tyson off; this picture reaches an understanding of its subject by allowing the subject to grapple with himself in a public forum more controlled than the press, to use the justifiably derided media as a method of recovery. Many, accustomed to more pat/apologetic American views of film and media, will think Toback’s picture a cop-out, but it reaches toward something larger than apology, it strives towards a merging of those halves, a blurring of all the personal demons and limitations that hold us back – that keep us trapped, in unyielding mid-howl.

My only exposure to Confessions of a Superhero prior to watching it were a few glimpses of a few stills that showed a very tortured looking individual laying on a couch that may have been in a shrink’s office. Perhaps I should note that he was laying on a couch in a shrink’s office dressed as Superman, laying there, sprawled out, as if his costume were the most natural thing in the world, the only topic in fact, that wasn’t under consideration as he unburdened himself to an imaginary counselor. From this image I assumed Confessions of a Superhero to be a lark, probably mildly condescending, at best a not as good King of Kong.

I’m happy to admit that I’m mistaken; the inner torture that that image implies is respected and taken at face value. Confessions of a Superhero takes a subject that invites mockery and instead examines it with an empathy that ultimately becomes quite poignant. The film concerns superheroes for hire, people who populate the landmarks of Hollywood Blvd. dressed as iconic stars and movie characters, taking pictures for tips that are to carry them until they are, against considerable odds, “discovered” by a filmmaker. That they nurture this hope dressed as the most famous of the famous must be extra bittersweet, closer than ever to the life they are meant to be denied.

The film concerns four of these would be celebrities: The Hulk (Joseph McQueen) who took a bus to L.A. and immediately found himself camping in the mountains to evade the Rodney King riots; Superman (Christopher Dennis), who claims he’s the son of actress Sandy Dennis despite her family’s denial; Wonder Woman (Jennifer Gerht) perhaps the most clichéd of the bunch, a prom Queen from a small town in Tennessee with silver screen dreams; and, perhaps most interesting, Batman (Maxwell Allen), a troubled man with a mild George Clooney resemblance who may or may not have a criminal past more fitting a noir than a superhero movie.

We’re immediately struck, particularly with Batman and Superman, who appear to have a friendship, by how closely these people resemble their alter egos. Dennis is the most obsessive and, oddly, the most functional of the bunch, seemingly inheriting his character’s ceaseless optimism. He has a small apartment that serves as little more than a shrine to the Man of Steel, especially Christopher Reeve’s incarnation, who he does undoubtedly resemble. Though Margot Kidder isn’t lying when she says that it wouldn’t hurt some of these Supermen to go to the gym a few times a week, Dennis looks like Superman from the neck up and a Superman pencil from the neck down. Dennis has a longtime girlfriend who’s studying to be psychologist, and she’s the first to acknowledge the irony of their coupling.

Allen does indeed look a bit like George Clooney, or at least the kind of rough and tumble Clooney that could appear in a Frank Stallone film. Allen has a charisma, admittedly driven by possible insanity, that exudes a certain fascination, confessing to past murders as if they were unpaid parking tickets. Like Batman, Allen has anger issues, and doesn’t handle fans who forget to tip for his services very well. People like Batman are a threat to this street profession, as well as eventual ironic savior.

Wonder Woman is nursing a broken heart, having married someone she met a few weeks prior who shockingly turns out not to know her very well. Like many people who marry for thrill or novelty, the man appears to find Wonder Woman a lot more exciting on the street than in his home, and a certain bitterness and remoteness sets in. Wonder Woman suffers at home and through auditions, on the constant search for that safe feeling of understanding that eluded her in Tennessee and continues to elude her in L.A.

As moving as all of these people are, I found the Hulk’s impression to be the most lasting. McQueen describes the riots, his past homelessness and his promising gig in a Justin Lin film with an equal careful optimism. McQueen appears to be both the least and most guarded of the bunch: his huge angry costume seemingly mocking his open, vulnerable face.

I wonder how much the director, Mathew Ogens, shaped the material that he spent two years shooting here. All of the people, after hardship, don’t so much face a happy ending as a promising one, or at least promising enough to live to dress up another day. I hope the optimistic tides are legitimate and have lasted. It’s a mark of Ogens work that one leaves Confessions of a Superhero wondering such things. As absurd as these super-people can appear to be, we ultimately admire their courage.

★★★

If Werner Herzog speaks of “ecstatic truth”, then let it be said that Chuck Bowen speaks of “inner absurdity”. We all need some of it, or something in general to relieve us of thoughts of taking out the trash, getting our oil changed, or making sure that the Wheat Thins we’re about to eat aren’t stale. We need a bit of inner absurdity to mull over as we drink our first cup of coffee at work, or take our first meeting of the day, or to distract us from the fact that a date the previous night didn’t go too well, or that our marriage may not be what it used to be. We need something really God damn frivolous and stupid to pursue and consume us.

Those people who don’t have something, and there are more than a few, are to be pitied, regardless of financial success or sexual prowess. Or at least that’s what I tell myself, perhaps in an act of self-delusion. Let’s just say that, as someone who spends several hours a week watching movies, discussing them, and writing about a few of them at a time when I probably should be working, I had no trouble accepting that two men could spend hours, and travel thousands of miles, to ensure that they top one another for the highest known score on the iconic arcade machine Donkey Kong.

Billy Mitchell is the first man and reigning champion of the game since 1984, when he effortlessly stomped the supposed master, Steve Sanders, who was revealed to be lying about his ability. Steve’s highest score is something in the 200,000s, Billy tops it to the tune of 850,000 points. The early photos of the event, featured in Life, show Billy to be the personification of the cliche of the typical gawky gamer: pale, underfed, thrilled at the fame that a normally laughed off addiction is affording him. The King of Kong’s opening scenes are succinct and thrilling, and prepare us for an American Splendor style examination of the impassioned geek. But the joy of The King of Kong is how it plays us every bit as confidently as Billy.

Fast forward to a few years ago, and to Billy as an altogether different kind of man. He’s the famed geek made good, the sorta sexy Geek: George Lucas reborn as the lead singer of Journey who sells used cars on the side. Billy’s confidence and style have grown over the years, nurtured by the Kong victory. He’s a successful businessman, running a lucrative Buffalo wings sauce company. He’s married to the sort of amply endowed young lady that I’m sure was just a whiff of fevered imagination in those all night soda and arcade sessions of his teens. But most importantly, he’s still the world record holder in Donkey Kong.

Enter Steve Wiebe, who’s set up in the film as Billy’s polar opposite. Steve was your garden variety acceptable American teen: sharp, decent looking, and capable in sports. We notice immediately though that Steve, like Billy, doesn’t neatly fit our country’s convenient peg of expectation. Billy’s ironic geek vengeance: socially sharper and more conniving than you’d expect. Steve, the one who’s supposed to be all Aw shucks charm and confidence, is sensitive and insecure; broken by one adult disappointment after another. Steve is unemployed when we meet him, and playing Mr. Mom to a house of several kids and a wife who seems to be in a state of perpetual irritation with him. Even Steve’s friends, who speak of him highly, seem to be hiding something: they speak of him almost as you’d speak of someone who’s sick or dying. They mean well, but they, like Steve himself, have written him off. Steve, in his hopelessness, looks up the Donkey Kong record and sets out to beat it.

I’ve described roughly the first twenty minutes of The King of Kong, and if you think I’m projecting pathos for the sake of punching up my own writing, you are mistaken. The film starts out as a lark, but becomes something surprisingly tender and moving. Even Mitchell, who is ultimately cast as the villain, is vulnerable and human, willing to stoop to low, pathetic means to guard his precious score like a bird’s egg. We learn that Mitchell essentially has the score keeper’s association in his pocket and can seemingly bend the standards and rules of the existing record at his will. The Ref means well but comes off as a clueless goat in awe of Billy, and a protege of Mitchell’s, a pasty little toad called Brian Kuh, withholds from Steve crucial evidence of Mitchell’s one-upsmanship, evidence that, I might add, wasn’t deemed acceptable when it could have helped Steve.

I did just write “pasty little toad”, a phrase notably lacking in something I try to imbue in all of my reviews: empathy. And I’ve been looking forward to typing the phrase since finishing the film last night. The King of Kong, which sounds absurd on paper and in theory, whips you into a surprising, anticipatory fever. Steve beats the record early on, and Billy screws him over. Steve beats the record again, and again it’s discounted. Finally, a showdown is scheduled, a showdown that will determine which score is to go into the Guinness Book of World Records.

Steve travels some three thousand miles to play, and we wait as the stubborn, insecure, unreachable Billy remains largely off-screen, with only Steve Sanders (whose since become Billy’s closest friend) to act as spokesperson and preserver of Billy’s image. We wait, and wait, and we laugh when director Seth Gordon plugs the 1980s howler “You’re the Best Around” from The Karate Kid. It’s a testament to Gordon that we aren’t laughing AT these guys, we’re laughing at the fact that this story has truly morphed into a real life Karate Kid, only one in which we’re actively rooting for the more Johnnyish of the competitors. The Geek, for once, is the holder of all the cards.

The showdown? Be prepared. The film has a No Country for Old Men ending, elusive and disappointing. But is it exactly? Regardless of who you’re rooting for, the geeks have undoubtedly inherited the Earth, if for only 80 glorious minutes.

★★★½

There are many moments of piercing human ache in Bukowski: Born Into This, but I think the key scene to the film, and to understanding its subject, occurs about forty-five minutes in. Charles Bukowski is sitting in a beat up plush chair, reading a poem for one of the cameras that seemed to follow him around quite a bit. The poem begins explicit and raw, detailing two lovers washing one another’s genitalia in the shower, and becomes something unexpectedly intimate and beautiful, transcendent even, and I’m reluctant to use that word after Allen lampooned it so in Annie Hall. And there’s something else, Bukowski, the legendary, acne chewed, chain drinking, chain smoking hardass, begins to cry.

“I’m getting sentimental in my old age”, he says, embarrassed, trying to turn the whole thing into a joke. Unless Bukowski happens to be a brilliant actor, which wouldn’t surprise me, this isn’t some canned moment designed to pump up the film, it’s alive and vulnerable, just like Bukowski’s work. John Dullaghan, the director of Bukowski: Born Into This, has an unexpected wealth of material here: readings, conversations with wives, family, co-workers. This film is blunt, candid, economic, and absolutely wonderful.

I’ve known of Bukowski in that distant Great Writers We Don’t Actually Read kind of way for most of my life, starting with a review I read early on of his Barfly. A cursory mention of the man appeared in the film Sideways and reminded me that I wanted to check him out. I saw Factotum, an adaptation of his second novel, early last year. Then I caught a portion of Born Into This around the same time on a movie channel, and the power of the footage finally inspired me to pick up a damn book. The library I frequent only had one volume: a collection of poetry called Slouching Toward Nirvana, one of his posthumously published works.

I read it over the next two nights, and drove to a book store and picked up a couple of novels in his “Chinaski” series: Post Office and Women. I was hooked: shaked and moved, by the man’s words. Bukowski pulls off something in his work that I normally don’t buy: the hard drinking man who does little, sleeps and screws a lot, and that’s somehow reflective of the fucked up world we live in. For most writers this is glossier porn, for Bukowski it begins as some sort of wet dream: the kind a man working a thankless job in a post office might have, and becomes something altogether more searching and dark. The drinking, the fucking, the smoking, the perpetual unemployment, it’s all a shell game in Bukowski’s work. His stories, his novels, his incredible poetry, are all about that brief, fleeting hope for some sort of human connection; a connection that’s best understood by understanding all of the taboo substances that are a part of our everyday lives: cum, shit, flatulence, saliva. The man’s words punch through in brief, curt bursts, an SOS from Hell.

Born Into This captures this and more. Bukowski is allowed to be brilliant, allowed to be vulnerable, but the film doesn’t shortchange the paranoia and violence either. There’s another moment where Bukowski, very drunk, accuses his last wife of being unfaithful, and disrespectful. He curses her, tells her he’s gonna get a Jewish lawyer to deal with her, and viciously kicks her off the couch. Linda Lee Bukowski, the wife in question, matter of factly tells us that she never took that again, and that is that. Later on we see footage of Bukowski’s marriage to Linda, and, again he begins to cry. Born Into This gets the contradiction of any man much less a great one, and it doesn’t burden us with explanation. The film gets that most art, whether its much good or not, is usually the work of the wounded; a cry for forgiveness or acceptance, or for the simple acknowledgement that its creator is as entitled to draw air as those that more settled in their own skin.

Bukowski himself would’ve probably ended this review two paragraphs ago, he notoriously hated movies, but there’s one more episode I wish to share. Linda Lee sits over Charles’ grave and recalls his last breaths after succumbing to leukemia at the age of 74. She gets to the breath part, about to describe the change of expression in his face and the lifting of the pain he probably felt all of his life, and stops, and turns her head sideways. She pauses, holding it in, and resumes the story. It is one of the most graceful handlings of hurt I’ve ever seen in life or film, as graceful as her troubled husband’s work, and almost as extraordinary. Charles, you’re forgiven sir.

★★★★