9:25 p.m. - 2009-04-05
Film Festival Roundup
This weekend Kia and I took in a couple of the Wisconsin Film Festival's offerings. On Saturday we took in Lake Tahoe, directed by Fernando Eimbcke. Today, we saw The Rock-afire Explosion, a documentary by Brett Whitcomb. Both proved to be enjoyable movie experiences.
Lake Tahoe was both brilliant and hilarious. About seven minutes into the film I was extremely jazzed, wondering what Eibcke would do next and vowing to find out even as I was anticipating the next scene and development in the film. The thing I really liked about it was, it reminded me more of (good) books than of other movies. The first half portrays a young man's Odyssean adventure as he tries to get his crashed car fixed in an eerily still small Mexican town. The young protagonist's impassive demeanor, mundane yet seemingly impossible task and various tragi-comic elements reminded me of nothing so much as Kafka's The Castle. As the film progresses and the family tragedy at its center is gradually revealed, a Raymond Carver-like ambience begins to dominate. Or maybe Barthelme. Or Fitzgerald, when he wrote the occasional really good short story. WHICHEVER, it was just a really good movie, by turns funny and touching, with a fairly slow but assured pace, not unlike a lot of Bunuel's work.
Rock-afire Explosion is a film about weird obsession. Granted, pretty much every obsession is weird on some level. But there's weird and there's Weird. And then there's WEIRD!!! The last is about where Rock-afire Explosion falls. In the nineteen-eighties, schlocky child-themed pizza parlors with animatronic animal rock bands accounted for about sixty percent of America's gross domestic product. Several of these businesses' young patrons became enamored of these animatronic bands even to the point of acting on their obsession well into adulthood. Interestingly, none of the three or four animatronic-obsessive former Showbiz Pizza patrons
interviewed seem actually deranged. Rather, they appear as gentle, sweet-natured, even self-aware nerds for whom the standard, six-inch Star Wars action figures just weren't actiony enough. No, the REAL derangement rests within the inventor of said animatronic animal rock musicians. There is of course a spooky Frankenstein quality to a man who designs and builds robot animal rock stars. But why stop there? Inventor-man delivers monologues so insane they would make Charlie Manson green with insanity envy. Plus, he appears stuck in the past, more so even than the animatronic-obsessives who try so hard to reclaim their childhoods. Much of the documentary consists of following Inventor-man through the ruins of his long defunct animatronic factory, the factory that he still visits frequently, if not daily. Ultimately, Rock-afire Explosion is an exploration of a certain kind of imagination, one that celebrates technological innovation even as it stifles ceativity. Overall it's also a hilarious movie, but it's the kind of hilarity that borders on the nightmarish.
BONUS: Kia's favorite part was when the inventor described a long defunct animatronic gorilla he had built that "beats his chest and recites Shakespeare".
