A Certain Slant of Light

Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game tells the story of Roger Sharpe, an avid pinball player in his college years at a large Midwestern university, who moved to New York City in the 1970s and discovered that it was almost impossible to find a pinball machine in the city. He eventually finds three pinball machines in the foyer of a porn store, and when he gets divorced and loses his job in short order, he spends hours playing pinball there… until the police raid the store and bust up the pinball machines.

The police came, it turns out, specifically for the pinball machines. Pinball had been illegal in New York ever since Fiorello La Guardia banned the game in the 1930s. Why? “Gambling,” he called it. “A game of chance.” “A way for the Mob to steal children’s lunch money.” Cities across the country followed suit.

Thus, Sharpe gets drawn into an attempt to overturn the city council’s pinball ban, which ends with Sharpe playing a demonstration pinball game in court to show that pinball is a game of skill, not chance. He makes a particularly difficult shot, and everyone cheers! People throw their hats in the air! The cranky anti-pinball councilman hugs Sharpe…

“Wait, wait, wait,” protests Roger Sharpe, the reenactment cutting back to a shot of modern-day Roger Sharpe, whose interviews have been interspersed throughout. “It wasn’t like that! Nobody acts like that!”

Back to the city council chamber, where the cranky anti-pinball councilman snaps, “I’ve seen enough.” He lumbers off, chats with the other council members, and - votes to overturn the pinball ban.

Pinball is one-quarter documentary, three-quarters biopic, and 100% delightful. I wasn’t sure at first about the ratio of love-story-to-pinball, but it actually really won me over, not least because it’s a somewhat unusual love story: divorced Roger Sharpe fell for a divorced woman six years his senior who already had an eleven-year-old son from her first marriage. The age difference is a non-issue, but Roger is understandably concerned about the emotional challenges of dating someone who has a kid. What happens if he gets sufficiently involved with the mother that he becomes a part of the son’s life, and the son gets attached to him, and then things don’t work out? “Would that make me a bad guy?” he muses to his coworkers.

“Oh, you’d be a bad guy,” says his coworker (the very gay art director at Gentleman’s Quarterly; a delight), “But what’s life without risk?”

Delighted to inform you that this movie won the Audience Choice award at the Heartland Film Festival. Nothing makes you feel like your vote counted like seeing your favorite movie of the festival win.

I almost fell asleep during Scrap, which sounds bad, but is possibly purposeful on the movie’s part. It’s an intentionally slow movie, not so much a documentary but a meditation on the way that stuff lingers on after it has supposedly been thrown out.

We visit a cemetery for old cars in Georgia, with trees growing up from 1930s Fords; a broken down airplane in Bangkok, now home to a poor family, which makes a decent living off money from the tourists who come to see the disassembled plane. A man who turns the rusting hulls of old ships into buildings. A recycling plant in India, where old electronics are broken down to their component parts. A sculptor in Iowa who turns scrap metal into tigers and trees and buffalo.

There is, perhaps, a message here, articulated by the photojournalist interviewed in India, who comments that she hopes her works help people have a more intentional relationship with items they see as disposable. But mostly this is a collection of images: long shots of the forest growing up through the cars, close-ups of the shattered glass in a classic red telephone booth awaiting refurbishment. An artist’s hand as he puts the final touches on the crown on that telephone box, dabbing on a yellow paint that dries to gold.

Confession time: I couldn’t resist Surprised by Oxford because the premise promised lots and lots of beautiful shots of Oxford, and in this respect the movie absolutely did not disappoint. In the post-screening Q&A (attended by the director, two producers, the lead actress, and the woman who wrote the memoir on which the film is based), one of the producers commented, “It’s hard to get an ugly shot of Oxford,” and he was extremely right.

Otherwise… well, look, I am simultaneously the perfect audience and the worst possible audience for this film. I love Oxford, I love the Inklings, I love C. S. Lewis in particular, and yes, the title is 100% a reference to Lewis’s memoir Surprised by Joy, and yes there is a pivotal moment in this film where Caro’s love interest/intellectual antagonist Kent takes her to a bookstore to dramatically introduce her to that book.

But I’m also not a Christian, and while it’s clearly possible to write a conversion narrative that appeals to non-believers (see above my love for C. S. Lewis, who is continually writing conversion narratives), for me this movie doesn’t quite manage it. The love story and the conversion narrative are too intertwined. Is Caro converting because she loves God, or because she loves Kent? Unclear.

Or, conversely, perhaps the love story and the conversion narrative are not intertwined enough. If Caro and Kent spent less time clanging against Caro’s emotional unavailability and more time having meaty intellectual arguments about the existence of God, there would have been more substance to both their relationship and Caro’s conversion.

Having said all of this - I do admire the movie’s ambition. It’s trying to do so many things, and it might have worked better if it had pulled back and tried to do less, but there is something to be said for being an ambitious mess rather than a small, safe, forgettable success.

Heartland Film Festival is here! And I kicked off the festival with Cat Daddies, a delightful documentary about men who are just really, really devoted to their cats.

It profiles eight men and their cats: an actor with four cats, a stuntman with a Maine Coon, a trucker whose cat travels the country with him (this is Tora, who is apparently cat internet famous), an entire station of firefighters and their beloved marmalade tom, and a homeless man who lives in New York with his cat Lucky, a darling tabby who he rescued as sad and sodden abandoned kitten.

I thought this last was particularly interesting because you almost never see homeless people included in stories like this - only in documentaries that are about being homeless. Here, David's primary identity is "cat lover," just like all the other guys in the documentary.

The documentary also notes, subtly but unmistakably, how few things straight American men are allowed to like. Beer! Sportsball! Dogs! All fine. But cats? None of these guys ever says straight out "I thought I couldn't like cats because it would make me a pussy" but you definitely get the sense that they all grew up thinking that liking cats was shameful, and remain slightly gobsmacked to discover that in fact they love cats.

The firefighter makes the masculinity connection explicit: I wish I had the exact quote but he says something like "Shouldn't masculinity including loving and protecting other creatures?"

Also, lots of adorable cat footage. It would have been worth it for that alone.

Alien on Stage: The Documentary is a documentary about a stage show of the movie Alien put on by a group of Dorset bus drivers as a replacement for their regular Christmas pantomime. The documentary directors caught a performance and were so enchanted that they decided to try to get the play an opportunity to play in London… which is how it ended up at the Leicester Square Theater in the West End, where it has played for one night only three years running, all proceeds to go to charity.

I’m not sure exactly at what point in this process the documentary directors actually started filming the documentary. Whenever it was, it’s an interesting case of a documentary where the involvement of the documentary creators clearly had a huge effect shaping the story! This is something I wonder about sometimes with documentaries (ironically, it’s worse when the directors try to be a discreet fly on the wall; the fact that they try to hide their presence makes me wonder about it more) so it was nice to see it acknowledged here, although this is definitely not a meta-documentary and has no interest in digging into, IDK, the Implications that this might have about the making of documentaries and doesn’t the act of documenting in itself change the thing being documented etc.

What it is interested in is the mechanics of putting on an amateur theater production (the parts about the special effects and the costumes, particular the Alien costume, are particularly fun), the reasons why the participants were interested in amateur theatrics, and just the overall fun of the stage show. It’s sold out in Leicester Square all three years it was performed, and the audience from the showing documented in this film is clearly having a rollicking good time watching it: it seems to have hit the sweet spot of “campy good fun” but also “good enough that it’s actually enjoyable to watch,” as campy good fun can only carry a performance so far.

***

And that wraps up Heartland Film Festival for this year! I picked out a particularly good slate this year: in the past there's generally been at least one dud each festival, but this year I enjoyed them all. (I had some reservations about Set!, but it was enjoyable to watch and I've gotten an ENORMOUS amount of conversational mileage out of the woman with the taxidermy in her tablescapes.)

My favorites were Belfast and Firebird (that one in particular haunts me). Definitely worth watching if you get a chance!

Set! is about competitive tablescaping, or, more specifically, about the yearly table-setting contest at the Orange County Fair. I thought that this might be a speed contest (how many tables can each contestant set accurately in five minutes! or whatever), but in fact it's an aesthetic contest: each contestant designs an extremely fancy table, as you might do for, say, a themed birthday party, except in this case this table is going to have absolutely no use at all except to be judged at the fair.

I can't entirely tell if the documentary was making fun of this pastime or if I personally, despite my best attempts to keep an open mind, was bringing the mockery in my heart. Several contestants earnestly explain that they are expressing themselves CREATIVELY and it's ART, but I just couldn't quite get behind spending six months designing an extremely fancy decorated table that no one is ever going to eat at, and in many cases no one would WANT to eat at, as for instance the table by the woman who is like, "The theme this year is international travel, which made me think of my safari in Africa, which made me think of poachers, so I am going to use many specimens from my taxidermy collection! Including a monkey over whose shoulder I will sling a pistol, because my theme is the REVENGE OF THE ANIMALS against the poachers. The table will be scattered with bullets and I will write the menu in blood."

(She does not ultimately write the menu in blood.)

In a previous year, she designed a New Year's table with little taxidermy mice sitting on the plates guzzling from tiny champagne bottles, and a taxidermy monkey in a top hat sitting atop a very tall centerpiece as a sort of ringmaster for the whole thing. WHO is going to want to eat a meal when there are TAXIDERMY MICE on the plates?

To be honest, I am puzzled why that particular contestant has decided that tablescaping is her metier, when is seems so obvious that she considers herself above the other contestants. "I don't want to be that bitch who walks around making catty comments about the other contestants' tables," she says, and then she does exactly that, including an extended spiel about the table put together by the unemployed guy who spent literally his last dollar completing his table. "I overheard him say that he bought his plates at the Dollar Store," she scoffs. "Maybe next year he should put a bit more effort in."

Upon reflection I think the fact that she feels above all the other contestants IS the appeal. It's also probably nice to tell herself that if she doesn't get a ribbon, it's because the judges were simply too bourgeois to get it.

There's also a woman who keeps all her tables on display year round in a special Table Room, which has run out of space, so at the end of the documentary the new table goes at the foot of the bed in the master bedroom (her husband gazes on resignedly). And then you've got the two women who hire a male belly dancer to dance when their waterobics class came to the table unveiling... actually they were great, I loved them and their entire waterobics class. They can stay. It's nice they've found a hobby they enjoy, I guess! I just don't understand... why... that one.

When I first posted about this year's Heartland Film Festival, I commented that Firebird, the gay Soviet pilot film "will probably break my heart but I want it anyway," and for the record I wish to state that I was absolutely right, it DID break my heart, not least because it turns out that it's based on a true story. The director read Sergey Fetisov's memoir of his love affair with fellow pilot Roman, and loved it so much he knew he had to make it into a film.

The story starts on a Soviet air force base in Estonia in 1977, where Sergey meets Roman, a darkly handsome "daring fighter pilot" (this is in the movie description and suggests more derring-do than the movie delivers, in case you were in this for the daring flight operations). They share a love of photography, and Sergey goes to Roman's room to develop some photographs, which of course involves Roman gently guiding his hand as he removes the photograph from the developing solution.

In general this movie is fantastic at those small meaningful touches: there's a really wonderful moment later on, their first kiss in the woods, when Roman reaches for Sergey and there's this little moment where Sergey flinches away and then leans into it, deciding he wants this to happen... And then later on they go skinny-dipping in the sea and have sex behind the rocks, because were ELSE are you going to get any privacy on a Soviet air force base?

(The filmmakers gave a little talk about the movie afterward, and the actor who plays Sergey commented that they did all the sea scenes on the very first day of a filming in a very chilly ocean. "They set up a little sauna on the beach," he noted. "No one in England would have thought of that, they would have said just get in and tough it out." He is British - the movie is in English, which surprised me at first, as I had the vague idea it would be in Estonian or Russian.)

Unfortunately, someone sees something, and anonymously denounces Roman. Roman denies everything, and steps up his courtship of Luisa, the girl who Sergey supposedly has a crush on, although it's clear that this is entirely a blind. I think Roman's relationship for Luisa is just a blind, too, although this is not entirely clear, and I kind of hope he loves her at least a little because he ends up marrying the poor girl.

Whatever his actual feelings for her, he does not treat her lovingly: a few years later he gets a transfer to Moscow, where Sergey is now studying acting, and he arranges things to leave Luisa behind in Estonia in hopes that he can reconnect with Sergey. Sergey is understandably resistant - he had to attend their wedding! where he was forced to put up with people condoling with him about the person he loved (Luisa, supposedly) marrying someone else! - but in the end of course he goes along with it, and they get an apartment together, which given the constant Soviet housing crisis must count as a minor miracle.

But then Luisa shows up! Sergey quarrels with Roman, and finally breaks off the relationship, except unfortunately he leaves the break-up letter in a place where Luisa finds it. She is understandably NOT thrilled that her husband has been cheating on her. Roman, beset on all sides, signs up to fight in Afghanistan. In his final letter, he tells Sergey, "I have to go to the one place where I still feel free: the sky."

Sergey receives this letter after Roman has already been killed in action. He goes to see Luisa, presumably because he's a glutton for punishment, because what good could possibly come of visiting Roman's grieving widow, who is also coping with the fact that maybe Roman never loved her, and rubbing her face in Roman's love affair with Sergey? Indeed, no good DOES come of it: Luisa is bitterly angry and tells Sergey that he meant nothing to Roman, which is cruel (and I very much suspect a projection: Luisa is afraid she meant nothing to Roman, so she casts that accusation outward), but then, so was Sergey's decision to visit.

So yes, in some ways it's a sad movie: the ending is sad, and their love affair is really hampered all throughout by the society that they live in. And yet there are lots of moments of real joy, too. During the Q&A, the director Peeter Rebane, who is Estonian and grew up in the Soviet Union, commented that he wanted to capture the Soviet Union as a colorful place where real people lived and loved and had joys as well as sorrows - a contrast to the tendency in western films to film the Soviet Union with a blue filter, everyone looking washed out and cadaverous.

And he succeeds. Yes, there's a lot of sadness in the story, but there's a lot of joy too: the scene where Sergey and Roman watch the ballet Firebird, their race out to swim and have sex in the Baltic, the party scenes, the sun-drenched trip to the Black Sea: all these things are glorious and alive.

Celine Sciamma's Petite Maman is a story about a girl suffering from a recent loss in the family who finds solace and friendship when she meets another girl her own age... who turns out to live in her very same house, but a few decades earlier.

"Wait," I said. "I wrote that book."

This is a real life version of that old saw about how if you give ten writers the same prompt, they'll come up with ten different stories, because Petite Maman is very different from The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball (although the similarities did delight me).

Sciamma is best known at this point for Portrait of a Lady on Fire. This is a very different story, although there's a definite aesthetic and thematic similarity: it's a quiet, contained story, a small cast in a house in a beautiful natural setting, and although unlike Portrait of a Lady on Fire it does have one important male character (Nelly's father), the main focus is on the female characters.

Our heroine is Nelly, an eight-year-old girl who has just lost her maternal grandmother. Nelly and her parents go to clear out her grandmother's home. This was also Nelly's mother Marion's home in childhood, and she reminisces to Nelly about those days: the panther she used to imagine in the shadows at the end of her bed, the hut she built in the woods behind the house.

But Nelly's mother - presumably crushed by grief, although the movie doesn't explain - ends up leaving after just one night. Nelly's father takes over the packing, and Nelly heads out into the woods... where she finds a girl building a hut.

The synopsis I read didn't mention the magical angle, which puzzled me, because it's not really a spoiler: Nelly figures it out almost at once, when a rain storm swoops in and the girl takes Nelly to her house (which is of course Nelly's grandma's house) for hot chocolate.

This is a quiet story, understated in its emotion, with a gentle eye for the details of its setting: the autumn color in the woods, the house as a family home and in the process of being taken apart till it's just an empty house again ("They decorated around the bureau," Nelly's father discovers, when he moves a heavy piece of furniture in the kitchen). The program director compared the movie to the works of Miyazaki, which is accurate, although the comparison is not exact: there's a very different feel to it than to, say, My Neighbor Totoro, which is probably the closest comparison. The magic here is so matter-of-fact it almost doesn't feel like magic.

( Spoilers )

Heartland Film Festival is back! I'm so excited! I've spent all morning going through the films they're screening and marking down all the ones I'd like to see, including:

Petite Maman, by Celine Sciamma (the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which I ALSO saw at the Heartland Film Festival, Before It Was Cool as the kids say); this one about two girls becoming friends and building a treehouse in the forest and it sounds absolutely delightful.

It's a Summer Film!, a Japanese film about a trio of teenage girls making the samurai film of their HEARTS. Again: doesn't that sound delightful? (The festival has a lot of serious films this year - indeed, it does every year - but this year I've really gone hard for "Does this sound like it will make my heart SING?")

Firebird, an Estonian film about gay Soviet airmen. YES. WANT. It will probably break my heart but I want it anyway.

Alien on Stage, a documentary about "bus drivers from rural England make an amateur stage show of Ridley Scott's "Alien" and accidentally take it to London's famous West End theatre district." I'm getting distinct wacky theater vibes from this description, and I LOVE wacky theater.

Set!, a documentary about competitive table setting, which is so eccentric that I fell in love with the idea instantly.

...All of this is quite a separate question from whether or not I will actually ATTEND these films. Well, okay, actually I did already by a ticket to Petite Maman, because that one is not available online - many of them do have online showings this year - I suppose I could always do the online showings for the ones where that's available... Except, let's be real, I will probably not get around to watching most of them if I don't have the discipline of an actual screen time in a literal movie theater. The Heartland Film Festival was entirely virtual last year and I went through the schedule with great excitement (there was a documentary about stuntwomen! and a Finnish movie about 70-year-old sisters on a madcap road trip!) and then didn't watch ANY of the movies. It just didn't feel like a festival to sit home and watch them alone.

There are two kinds of documentary: the Woman in Motion kind, where the filmmakers go around and interview lots of people and incorporate found footage, and then there are documentaries like Honeyland, where the filmmaker goes somewhere and films for a while and then stitches a movie together out of the footage.

I tend to prefer the first kind, partly because they tend to be more fast-paced, but also because I tend to be less awkwardly aware of the filmmaker. Or rather, in the first kind of documentary the camera crew’s presence is both more obvious and less invasive: if a camera crew goes to interview George Takei for an afternoon, for instance, you don’t feel that their presence is likely to have a big warping effect on his life, because it is just an afternoon and he’s George Takei.

A camera crew that sets up shop for months and months in a remote Macedonian village, on the other hand, is going to change things. In fact, a lot of the action in Honeyland arises from a new family that settles in the village for a few months: their presence completely changes Hatidze’s life. First the changes are positive: they give her companions other than her aged, dying mother. Then, the changes turn negative: the new people set up beehives of their own, and because they don’t leave enough honey when they harvest, their bees kill Hatidze’s.

Now, obviously a film crew is not going to set up a bunch of beehives, but all the same, their presence must have had a huge effect on Hatidze’s life - but they have no presence in the film. When Hatidze’s mother dies, and Hatidze is keening over the body, and the camera is about two feet from her face, I can’t help thinking about how the camera crew is right there, filming like a pack of vultures when the human thing to do would be to set aside the camera for a minute and try to comfort her.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that they did just that after they got their clip, but all the same, the lack of acknowledgment that the film crew is there creates an absence in the film that bothers me.

This is something that I’ve experienced with other documentaries, too, but I’ve never been able to put my finger on what bothered me before, which is why poor Honeyland is bearing the brunt of my realization. If the phantom film crew doesn’t bother you, it’s doing what it’s doing very well: recording the life of a beekeeper in a remote mountain village in Macedonian (it appears to be occupied only by Hatidze and her mother until the other family arrives) as she harvests not only her own hive, but the wild hives in the mountains around her.

The beekeeping scenes are all particularly well done. The documentary starts with a particularly stunning shot of Hatidze making her way along a narrow mountain ledge to harvest a hive that the bees have built up among the rocks.