May 10th – May 16th
Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth — When evaluating documentary film, it is sometimes difficult to separate the subject matter from the filmmaking. If you have an affinity for the subject matter, it can sometimes cloud the evaluation of the filmmaking. Of course, you cannot separate the subject from the filmmaker. A great documentary film will often be able to draw the viewer in to the subject, even if they were initially indifferent.
This documentary left me frustrated. Harlan Ellison, the writer, provides an interesting subject. But ultimately, I thought that this film failed in drawing in a general audience. Sure, Ellison fans or a general science fiction literature fans would eat it up. But I didn’t feel like a general audience is going to get a lot from it.
Aside from several obtuse readings by Ellison himself along with the adoration of a younger generation of peers, I didn’t really get a sense of why his writing was so important and adored.
On several occasions, the filmmakers present an idea before abruptly dropping it. There are titles that inform the audience that Ellison stopped talking to his sister after the death of their parents, a title that suggests his stint in the Army was fraught with difficulty, and a title that suggests that he was quite the ladies man in the 70′s. But then those ideas are abruptly dropped. What happened with his sister? Why was his stint in the Army a difficult one? Who says he was a ladies man, besides himself? Then later on, we get a reading from a Star Trek episode that he wrote. But any footage of the actual episode is not to be seen. Towards the end, his wife is described as the person who makes his demons disappear. The notion that behind every great man is a great woman is introduced. This is just demeaning. All we see of her, in a very brief appearance, is someone who appears to a timid handmaiden. I don’t get that she is a hero for putting up with him–she just seems broken.
Ellison comes off as a self-consciously exhausting curmudgeon. He is like a precocious child performing for the camera. And, at this point, like a precocious child who has grown up, lost much of his youthful adorability, but still demands the attention. He is predictably contrarian…which isn’t all that contrarian at all. He even comes off as a bit of a Luddite–taking incongruous stances against special effects and television.
At least Neil Gaiman, who appears throughout and who turns out to be a more interesting figure in the doc, recognizes it for what it is. It’s a performance. It’s shtick. And that’s fine. The artist can be evaluated apart from his personality. But this documentary, which amounts to little more than a masturbatorial appraisal of the man, did nothing to draw me in to its subject.
Whip It — I really hate when I watch a movie and it starts skipping or freezing up. It’s one thing when it just won’t play. Then you can just move onto something else. It’s another thing when it plays, but only very roughly. I ended up missing only about 5 minutes of this one. Not the end of the world and probably not the most crucial 5 minutes of the film either, but still enough to really bring me out of it on a couple of occasions.
That being said, I still quite liked Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut. A film like this really demonstrates the dearth of decent female-centric movies. It doesn’t come off as a feminist tract. But it also doesn’t try to elevate women to the level of angels. It presents its women as interesting people. It respects both a “girly” notion of femininity and a version that isn’t afraid to let the elbows fly. While it does make roller derby look pretty cool, it also doesn’t fall into the trap of hateful mockery in the beauty pageant segments. As Bliss Cavendar/Babe Ruthless, Ellen Page sincerely embodies this dichotomy.
I love the matter-of-fact way in which we learn that Bliss’s best friend is smart and headed to an Ivy League school. She’s not some brainy pariah. I love that Bliss’s mom (Marcia Gay Harden) enjoys beauty pageants but works as a mail carrier. And while it may be a little on the nose, I like that the roller derby team doesn’t care about winning nearly as much as having fun.
