CH-CH-CH-CHANGES (TURN AND FACE THE STRAIN)

Body Modification as Spiritual/Aesthetic Renewal in Jason Gary and Greg Jacobson’s documentary, Modify

Modify is a compelling, if one-sided, expose on the increasingly extreme nature of body augmentation and the lifestyles that have sprung up around the practice. Unfortunately for those seeking a worthy narrative (though fortunately for those accustomed to the Youtube Shuffle), it’s more interesting as a gallery of harrowing surgical procedures, liberated self-hood, performance footage and archival curios than as a coherent history of the movement or libertarian argument against those who’d police or disparage it. Interview subjects include a man transforming himself (as far as current technological ingenuity allows) into a tiger via an artificial cleft lip and metal studs in place of whiskers, as well as a handful of industry pioneers who’ve innovated techniques for implants (horns, studs, and various geometric shapes submerged underneath the skin in various locations around the body) and genital piercings. Segments explaining these complex (often ingenious) procedures are of greatest interest: the image of a man splayed across an examination chair, inserting tiny metal balls into his own shaft is not easily forgotten. While it’s nice for those normally offered as colorful extras in film and television to be given a platform for public self-definition, there isn’t much in the way of balance; the filmmakers continually swat at an oppressive status quo that registers as far too distant to create genuine tension. It’s the film’s glaring weakness that its earnest philosophical and aesthetic claims lack polemical depth.

Modify / USA / 2005 / Color / 85 min. / Directed by Jason Gary and Greg Jacobson/ Interview Subjects: Dr. Gary Alter, Allen Falkner, Dr. Julio Garcia, Steve Haworth, Masuimi Max, Fakir Musafar and Erik ‘The Lizard Man’ Sprague

RECLAIMING THE HAMBURGER

Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan mine the catacombs of American Agriculture in Food, Inc.

This documentary detailing the coup by which Big Business overtook the American diet does an admirable job in presenting an easily digestible history of agro-business, following characters both tragic (the grieving mother-turned-food-advocate whose son was killed by tainted hamburger) and comic (an organic, free-range farmer fond of non sequiturs) as it attempts to persuade audiences to re-commandeer their eating habits and restore a healthier, more ethical method of sustenance in the national culture.

Executive produced by Eric Schlosser, author of the classic Fast Food Nation, and with Michael Pollan (of Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food fame) acting as special consultant (both appear extensively as interview subjects and narrators), the film has a substantial pedigree, prominently featuring two of the most visible crusaders for the betterment of the American digestive system. And the natural/healthy foods movements could not have better spokespersons: both men are cool-headed and impassionate in their presentation, as well as exhaustive researchers and unequivocal, plain speakers. That Schlosser is seen devouring a hamburger (“Still my favorite meal,” he says) in the first half hour of the film goes a long way toward dispelling notions of elitism on the part of the filmmakers and their subjects. If anything, the work of Pollan, Schlosser and director Robert Kenner is one of outraged populism, and, unlike the work of Michael Moore, just may be effective in changing minds. Their persistence is never offensively articulated, their confidence is always unwavering and their scholarly insights unimpeachable. With a bit of luck, the other columns of the green movement will unearth similarly engaging and effective figureheads instead of relying on automakers and oil companies to bring a diluted version of their message to the public. They may be short on answers, but at this point the asking of their questions is a worthy enough achievement.

However brilliant its two guides, the film itself suffers from hyperextension, as it fails in truly ruminating on each of its proposed topics. Divided into upsettingly brief chapters, the film surveys a riveting amount of material, but merely skims the surface in most of its presentations. Covering everything from immigrants’ rights to federal oversight and the history of McDonalds, the through line of the film is the rise of multinational corporations and the increasingly nefarious tactics they’ve employed to keep us hooked on the shit they serve while keeping us out of the kitchen. Lawsuits, lobbying and loopholes in immigration policy all contribute to the maintenance of the stronghold that multinational food manufactures hold on the chain of food from the field to the table. That this is the subject of a (semi-)major American motion picture is nothing short of heroic, even if the digital effects employed throughout (an unflattering byproduct of Moore Syndrome) are annoying, the basic decency of the work is unquestionable. If mildly clever digital cartoons (including businessmen on a conveyor belt being ratcheted ominously toward Ma and Pa’s farm) make the difference between Joe Six Pack seeing the movie or staying home, then it would be foolish to say they detract from the film itself. They may annoy, but they do not undermine the message.

Those familiar with the written work (or video lectures and interviews) of Schlosser and Pollan may not find much new here, but Food, Inc. functions well as a square-one document, providing enough information and gung-ho spirit for audiences to leave the theater equipped and primed for action. Fittingly, as the film closes, a series of titles implore audiences to act by shopping at farmer’s markets, eating foods in season and contacting their legislators. This section embodies both the virtue and the flaw of the entire enterprise: the zippy graphics swirl, drop, fade and disappear text across the screen like an eager PowerPoint presentation yet convey useful, pressing information. Could be worse, considering the precedent set by Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock in the past decade, in which the documentary feature has been the most popular and lucrative that it’s ever been. The braying of their contemporaries only underscores how valuable the practiced oratory of Schlosser and Pollan is to the effectiveness of the film.

As with most recent agitprop documentaries, the best Food, Inc. can do is inspire audiences to pursue a more thorough familiarity with the subject via literature or political involvement and consequently become activists in their own right. A documentary like this pleads for its own irrelevance, and rightfully so.

Food, Inc. / USA / 2008 / Color / 94 min. / Directed by Robert Kenner

KISS KISS BANG BANG

Contemporary Children’s Cinema vs. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Unlike just about everything that passes for children’s entertainment these days, 1968’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is both gloriously weird and genuinely mischievous. While nothing in the film offers up the sublime in quite the same manner as Pixar’s remarkable run of animated films of the past fifteen years (the safest bet for a high water mark in contemporary children’s entertainment), this film, about a crackpot inventor, his adorable kids and their customized jalopy (the onomatopoeically christened Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) redeems its utter lack of sophistication through the sheer glee it generates by simply being odd. But just like a small child’s recitation of a personal narrative, the film loses its way easily and often, strains sweetness too often, is prone to gaps in logic, and is occasionally frustrating in its inability to get to the point. That it is also capable of a jouissance nearly unthinkable in today’s market of kiddie entertainment – unforgivably congested with bratty miscreants and cuddly icons-in-waiting bound for fast food containers – mutes its comparatively trivial shortcomings.

Moreover, the film’s utter lack of willpower and restraint gradually become assets; it is as petulant and impulsive as its target audiences, and for this Chitty Chitty Bang Bang should be applauded and revived. In a brassy confluence of style, the film’s authors managed to find common ground between the absurdism of postwar British Humor, the French le fantastique, and Grimm’s fairytales, with American Tall Tales thrown in for good measure. This isn’t to say that each genre is explicitly pursued through the narrative, or that overt stylistic hallmarks can be easily pinpointed, but merely that the filmmakers successfully drew upon preexisting ideas and themes to such a dizzying extent that they produced something as familiar as it was (and is) bizarre.

Children’s entertainment has since dedicated itself to retellings of folk and classical mythology, or attempts at ironic pop hipness. The former works well with apprehensive parents keen on wholesome entertainment (while boasting a patina of esteem), while the latter is intent on blurring the line between entertainment for children and adults (the “something for everyone” family film.) If adults are to enjoy fare like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, they are forced to indulge more completely the inner tyke; as such films boast no innuendos or cultural allusions with which to stoke the pop culture-infused data banks of the post-pubescent set. Ironically, it could easily be argued that this strategy ingratiates such films with adults even more so than their entendre-packed counterparts, because an escape from the oppressions of adulthood is one virtue that children’s entertainment has to offer the beleaguered parents of its target demographic. Cast in this light, it’s not hard to understand why a bizarre (and, more importantly, innocent) fantasy like Spongebob Squarepants has experienced such enduring success. Likewise, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a considerable box office success in its day, and while plenty of the snide patter that has since been marketed to children has exceeded its modest financial success, it’s not likely that these works will endure as even minor works in the history of children’s films. Instead, the plastic chotchkies bearing the likenesses of their protagonists will exist in landfills far longer than the films themselves will survive in the cultural imagination.

The plodding first half of Chitty details the life of a hapless, widowed inventor, Caractacus Potts, (played by Dick Van Dyke) and his affectionate, precocious children struggling to make ends meet in rural Great Britain. That Van Dyke’s distinctly American accent is at odds with his children’s cockney delivery barely registers as just one of the film’s thousand inconsistencies. The few satisfactory scenes in film’s first act all involve Potts' inventions, which include an elaborate Rube Goldberg-like Breakfast machine, an overeager hair cutter, a jet pack, and musical lollipops, the very things that provoke and inflame the child’s imagination. These few ingenious sight gags aside, the first hour or so of the film lack much of interest, but as Van Dyke (keeping a promise to his beloved children) restores an old jalopy for a jaunt to the beach, the film comes to life when the full capabilities of the car announce themselves in a scene of inventively staged, rotating rear-projection. As the car spreads wings and takes flight (naturally escaping from pirates), the family (accompanied by the confection heiress Truly Scrumptious [the unmemorable Sally Ann Howes]) find themselves immersed in a fantasy world, and the audience in a wonderfully goofy frolic.

Though handsomely (if often clumsily) directed by British television veteran Ken Hughes, the film’s overall spirit could more properly be attributed to co-writer Roald Dahl, who deviated noticeably from Fleming’s source novel. Dahl’s trademark brand of dark, yet winsome humor permeates the film’s far more interesting second half, though an early scene set in a candy factory calls his Willy Wonka books to mind. Hughes’ realization of his and Dahl’s screenplay benefits immensely from an aesthetic program which relies heavily on techniques borrowed from the various New Waves gaining traction worldwide at the time of the film’s production: grand, unmotivated tracking shots, quick zooms, wide angle lenses and a quicker approach to editing. The aesthetic eccentricity gives the film a roughhewn, chaotic quality that breathes life into even the most tedious subplots while reaffirming the narrative’s more radical impulses. The anarchic glee of the film is equal parts The Beatles’ Help!, and Tex Avery animation. If the film can claim a single inspiration, it would be that of Richard Lester, whose punchy delivery and schoolboy’s wit feel their way into each scene of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with nary a smirk or wink. The film is at its best when its idiosyncrasies pass by unassumingly, suffused with a characteristically dry British grin and a bouncy rhythm.

As the story-within-the-story develops, the Baron of Vulgaria and his wife, the child-hating Baroness, kidnap all the children, the grandfather, Ms. Scrumptious and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang itself at various points. A collector of wonderful machines, the Baron dispatches two classic bumbling henchmen (variation of the silent film villains fond of tying damsels to train tracks) to procure the car for his collection. The sequences in which our heroes trek through Vulgaria and the Baron’s palace are the highlights of the film. As each of Hughes and Dahl’s creative impulses crescendo, Caractacus masquerades about the palace as a staggering marionette (a ruse designed to distract the Baron) while simultaneously staging a revolt of slave children imprisoned in Vulgarian sewers. The children occupy the palace and assault the distinguished Vulgarian gentry in a gesture of juvenile anarchy reminiscent of the Jean Vigo classic Zero for Conduit. That a film designed for young people can embody the spirit of a classic film without lazy homage intended to tickle the pedantic, cinephilic synapses of older moviegoers, is an odd notion currently, but Chitty Chitty Bang Bang succeeds in nodding to the Vigo masterpiece without attempting to supplant it. Hughes and Dahl don’t see the recurrence as clever, another odd notion in today’s climate of aggregate references and juxtaposition. The slightly altered and certainly modest extension of a narrative situation or creative idea apparently belongs to a bygone era, perhaps because it leaves open the possibility that the creators themselves are not in on the joke, or deceptively expect to pass the transgression by a dopey audience. Today, both audience and filmmaker seek to be on the same page, that is, both in on the joke. The self-consciousness of this attitude masks needless, counterproductive guilt, and has done nothing but detract from the formerly easygoing nature of popular entertainment, becoming especially pervasive (and proportionately repellant) in work made for children.

Late in the film, audiences are also treated to one of cinema’s most memorable maniacs: Robert Helpmann’s Child Catcher, a villain authentically menacing, yet such a caricatured oddity that he fails to evoke real horror. The performance is worthy of canonization as Helpmann’s wide-eyed snarl provokes squeamishness in even the most hardened adults. Something of a dandy, the long snouted Child Catcher is the court officer responsible for sniffing out hidden children in Vulgaria so they may be apprehended and punished by the evil Baroness. Swinging his noise about in search of a child’s scent while merrily prancing through the streets of Vulgaria, the Child Catcher embodies sexual perversion and cold-blooded innocence in equal measure. A forerunner to both Pee Wee Herman and Danny DeVito’s Penguin, the Child Catcher’s anguished squeals – as he is visited by revenge at the film’s end – rival Peter Lorre’s plea for clemency before the makeshift court at the end of Fritz Lang’s M. If the film is granted one legacy let it be this character, who could equally be at ease in an episode of Star Trek, a Tolkien adaptation or a reworking of Alice in Wonderland.

The Child Catcher’s subplot, in which helpless children are tucked away in the attics, sewers and basements of Eastern Europe, pursued by half-crazed monsters, is loaded from a historical perspective, but the goofiness of the overall plot and the film’s pretzelling of time (the Baron’s court borrows elements from at least three centuries of aristocratic European décor and hosts a kind of stateless, pan-European nobility), prevent the adult viewer from pursuing strands of allegory too far.

Sadly, the film sags to lifelessness during nearly of its musical numbers, which grind the viewer’s nerves to tatters through a combination of maudlin sentimentality and poor craftsmanship (a similar blight on the adaptation, three years after this picture, of Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.) Exceptions of note include the title song, which is far too charming to ever be cloying, and one of the later numbers featuring a duet between the Baron and Baroness: as the two skip through a ditty of rosy-cheeked marital affection, the Baron attempts increasingly ambitious methods of murdering his wife – including a vintage trapdoor and a faulty chandelier – who cheerfully reappears ceaselessly as though spun from a Looney Tunes sketch. Had there been a few more scenes of such saccharine/macabre antics laced throughout the picture, it would be an irreproachable masterpiece. As is, warts and all, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang beats the hell out of the competition, even forty years later.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang / UK / 1968 / Color / 144 min. / Directed by Ken Hughes / Written by Mr. Hughes and Roald Dahl, from the book by Ian Fleming / Starring: Dick Van Dyke, Sally Anne Howes and Lionel Jeffries