Diary of a Times Square Thief

Klaas Bense | 2008 | 60 min | Netherlands

It's not that this film is totally incompetent, it's just that it lies to you. Director Klaas Bense begins his story with the Ebay purchase of an ostensibly mysterious diary written by a young man in early 1980s New York. The writer worked in the Times Square Hotel, a former flophouse, and detailed his many run ins with its colourful characters, as well as his own creative struggles, and his petty thefts of patrons and strangers.

Bense travels to New York to track down the names mentioned in the diary in the hopes of tracing the steps back to the writer. He interviews current residents of the Times Square Hotel, now a hip downtown address, and rations out a few details regarding the era, city, and building we are to believe he is investigating.

The greater issue with the film arises when Bense does "find" the writer and interviews him. The diarist is a wonderful and engaging storyteller, but he does let slip one detail: he is the Ebay seller of the diary. The director was in direct contact with him from the original moment of purchase. The film's narrative is a sham, and the lack of detail in tracking down the other interviewees is not a mistake, but a purposeful omission.

Even if it were not for this detail the film would be clumsy, too thin on information, and too in love with itself to be a success. But, since it erodes all credibility and structure within the film, considering that detail as I left the theatre made me furious.

TSADT Podcast Episode 03

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LOADS of reviews from the Hot Docs documentary film festival this time around. We talk about Best Worst Movie, Black Wave, Art and Copy, Objectified, A Hard Name, Rembrandt's J'Accuse, Ghost Bird, Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same, and Prom Night in Mississippi. We also manage to fit in some talk of this year's Cannes line-up, the upcoming Tetsuo sequel, and more Wolverine lameness.

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Objectified

Gary Hustwit | 2009 | 75 mins | USA

In a piece he wrote for Frieze Magazine, director Gary Hustwit says of his previous film, Helvetica, that while design aficionados have known the subjects of his latest film for decades, the average viewer has never heard of these marvelous characters, whose passion became his secret weapon. ‘Where did you find these people?’, non-designers ask [him]. ‘They’re so passionate!’ Unfortunately, passionate though they were, the design megastars interviewed in Objectified don't quite measure up to their Helvetica counterparts.

It is indeed fascinating to realise that just about everything we come into contact with in our lives is designed by someone, and there are a tonne of big names here to talk about how they shape our world. There's Apple's Jonathan Ive (who admits he's a bit obsessive in his passion for putting together our computers and iphones), the legendary and compelling Dieter Rams of Braun (pictured above), several folks from IDEO (one of whom is credited with designing the very first laptop ever, a very neat gizmo indeed), Chris Bangle (the former chief designer of BMW) and several others. Notably hilarious is Rob Walker, who writes the "Consumed" column for the New York Times Sunday mag.

Considering the who's-who of design that this film is packed with, it's actually surprising that there aren't more "holy shit, he designed THAT THING" revelatory moments about the universally iconic items these people have had a hand in creating. It's as though the film gets lost in discussing design in the abstract (and even the usefulness and meaning of designed objects in the abstract) without linking it to the actual things we really use, know and love. The interviews about Apple's design sense come closest to bringing it back down to earth, but it's not quite enough.

The film looks good (as any film about design should) and Hustwit is clearly a skilled interviewer, but Objectified lacks the magic that made Helvetica such a standout in 2007.

Vashti Bunyan: From Here to Before

Kieran Evans | 2008 | 89 mins | UK

Singer/songwriter, Vashti Bunyan's 1970 release, Just Another Diamond Day is a document in song of her journey by horse-drawn cart in search of Skype, the artist commune established by folkie and star of Jacques Demy's under appreciated, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Donovan. The album was originally released in very limited qualities, and sold poorly. Vashti gave up on music, and went on to live a 'normal' life, raising a family, and not giving much more thought to her music career. But then 30 years later, the album was re-released in 2000, and found to have a devoted following. With this new found old success, Vashti set out on a tour supporting the re-release, and recorded a new album, shortly after.

In Vashti Bunyan: From Here to Before, Kieran Evans travels with Vashti to many of the stops that she and her boyfriend made back in the late '60s in their horse and cart. The landscapes are gorgeous, and while it was a lovely time for them, I'm sure; when they arrive at each new location, there inevitably isn't much of a story to tell about it. Stories of being asked to get off of someone's land, the purchasing of their horse and cart, their struggles with poverty, etc. are all fine and part of an interesting story, but not one that can sustain a feature-length runtime.

Vashti Bunyan: From Here to There would have been a much fuller and more satisfying film if more time had been given to performance footage (there's not much here, and what of it there is is rather flat) or to have spent some time on the years between the release and the re-release of the album. It would have been fascinating to see what shaped Vashti from restless hippy goddamn super babe in the '60s to the warm, well spoken, and lovely woman now in her 60s that we watch retrace her steps of nearly forty years ago.

Orgasm Inc.

Liz Canner | 2009 | 73 min | US

Although Orgasm Inc. is ostensibly about the pharmaceutical race for the "female Viagra," it is really about the larger issue of the commodification of female sexual health and pleasure. The latest boogeyman coming from under the beds of the pharmaceutical giants is that of Female Sexual Dysfunction, or FSD. Orgasm Inc. peels away the layers of how the term originated and the shakey science behind the figures thrown around regarding it. Do forty-three percent of women actually suffer from FSD, or are drug companies creating a problem where none exists?

This feature investigates the key players behind the term's popularization and hype building, as well as those attempting to defuse it. Doctors, clinicians, therapists, and sex educators are all given a voice in the documentary, and the story unfolds over nine years, allowing larger developments in drugs and outreach to be explored.

Like several presentations at Hot Docs, this feature's weakest point is that is was never meant to be seen in a large theatre. The picture and sound were both of lower quality than they should have been for the setting. However, I'm sure it will be considerably easier on the eyes and ears for the intended television and home video audience.

The picture was thought provoking and the issues within are not covered as often as they should be. Certainly those people interested in pushing FSD are far more recognizable personalities than those fighting it. Orgasm Inc. is definitely worth a watch and a conversation when this makes it to a broadcast or video release.

Art & Copy

Doug Pray | 2009 | 88 mins | USA

Watching giants in any industry talk about taking risks, breaking down walls and being revolutionary is interesting, but its especially fascinating in an industry as much maligned as advertising. Indeed, even the titans interviewed in Art & Copy would agree that 99% of the 5,000 ads that an average person sees every day are crap. Still, they strive to make the mind-blowing ones, and most of them apparently do it by being wildly eccentric nut jobs, bless 'em.

We get to meet the man who created the Apple 1984 commercial (it's Lee Clow, the guy in the photo, above), the guys who came up with "just do it" and "got milk?", the woman who invented the "Me generation" or the guy who took Tommy Hilfiger from unknown upstart to multi-billionaire nearly overnight. Doug Pray is careful to reproduce most of the important campaigns, which are a treat to watch, especially when it comes to the harder to find ads (such as the profoundly disturbing "Daisy" ad used for Lyndon B. Johnson's presidential campaign).

When George Lois (the guy behind the Hilfiger ads) says he doesn't remember ever failing in his life, because the moment you start to analyze your failures, you're fucked, the entire business is neatly encapsulated. It really can take a lot of persistence and thick skin to get through the hundreds of layers of bullshit client requests and setbacks to get an idea as simple and undeniably effective as "where's the beef?" approved.

Doug Prey's tribute to the art of advertising is slick, stylish, and very compelling in this Mad Men-obsessed moment in time. It only suffers from one major problem. The project was initially conceived by The One Club, an organization dedicated to celebrating excellence in advertising, which wanted to do something to showcase its own hall of famers. While the members of The One Club's hall of fame truly are some of the biggest and most important names in advertising, they don't comprise an exhaustive list, and some omissions are really noticeable. A discussion of branding that doesn't even mention the cola wars seems odd. Indeed, Coca Cola only obliquely makes it into the film as part of the soundtrack, which at one point plays "I'd like to teach the world to sing", one of Coke's most famous campaigns. I guess nobody from McCann-Erickson circa 1971 is in The One Club's hall of fame?

Necrobusiness

Richard Solarz & Fredrik von Krusenstjerna | 2008 | 95 mins | Sweden

It's springtime and documentaries are in the air again. I kicked off my Hot Docs experience this year with Necrobusiness, a doc with very compelling and grizzly premise. Everyone knows that the funeral business is a racket designed to make bereaved people part with as much money as possible during a time when they're neither capable of thinking straight nor interested in bargaining. Still, the high cost of coffins is nothing compared to the horrific reality of Poland's death industry.

Investigative journalist Monika Sieradzka begins her journey in the mid-sized city of Lódz, Poland, where she's trying to get an interview with a prominent funeral director, Witold Skrzydlewski, after an attempt is made on his life. The man accused of trying to kill him is a local medical examiner named Tomalski who appears to have at one point been a business associate of his victim's.

As Sieradzka digs deeper into the tangle of partnerships between Skrzydlewski, Tomalski and a third man, Sumera (a dodgy florist with secret agent-esque delusions) she uncovers that what at first seemed like a straightforward feud between an odd triad of business partners is a disturbing city-wide conspiracy of murder and betrayal. Sieradzka narrates the film in the first person, which works to frame the unwieldy goings-on, but she ends up being a much too central figure in a story that's really not about her.

The film shifts between murder mystery and courtroom drama as we watch Tomalski's trial mushroom into a massive case involving a dozen defendants. Ambulance dispatchers confess to delaying service and paramedics confess to "letting patients die" in order to rack up a body count for Skrzydlewski's massive funeral monopoly in exchange for gifts and bribes. Murder, corruption and profiteering are only the tip of the iceberg in this truly bizarre tale.

The story is so horrifying and the characters such caricatures of "shady businessmen" that one almost forgets it's a documentary. Even the initial setup (a funeral director, a florist and a pathologist get into an argument...) seems like the start of a joke. Necrobusiness certainly has some hilarious moments, but it feels wrong to laugh at a film about people whose death certificates were being filled out by attending physicians while they were still struggling for air in the back of an ambulance. With greedy men like these you'll need to take out a cash advance or two to bury a loved one. What is the world coming to? Worth seeing (as a cautionary tale about not making the mistake of dying in Poland).