Steven Rubio's Online Life

dear zachary: a letter to a son about his father (kurt kuenne, 2008)

This is the fifth bonus film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Bonus Week 5 is called "Past Hosts Week":

When Benjamin Milot took on hosting duties as the third host in LSC 4 he created a theme to honor past hosts' favorite movies that he kept going up until LSC 7, sometimes combining the theme with his own favorite movies list as the current host.

This bonus challenge is to watch a movie from one of our past three hosts favorite movies lists. Monsieur Flynn's (LSC 1) is here, kurt k's (LSC 2-3) is here, and Benjamin Milot's (LSC 4-8) is here.

I didn't expect to like Dear Zachary. I knew it was highly regarded, and it felt like a regular inhabitant of the myriad Letterboxd lists I have of films to watch. But it looked to be a true crime documentary, and I imagined something like the things that turn up regularly on television programs like Dateline NBC: a voyeuristic account of a real tragedy involving real people. It's true, my sense of those programs is biased in useless ways, since I don't watch them and so don't actually know if my description of them is accurate. I still don't know.

But Kurt Kuenne is up to something different with his film, something more personal, something that rejects voyeurism to focus on the real tragedy and the real people. Most obviously, Kuenne was a childhood friend of the victim, Andrew Bagby. He couldn't treat the story dispassionately, because he was among the mourners. He dealt with it in his own way ... he was a filmmaker.

The story took a turn when the woman accused of Andrew's murder, an ex-girlfriend named Shirley Turner, announced that she was pregnant with her and Andrew's child. That child, when born, was named Zachary, which helped provide a focus for Kuenne. He would make a film about his friend, one that his son could watch in the future to see what kind of a man his father was. It wasn't hard to get people to agree to be interviewed, because Andrew was universally liked.

The story takes further turns that I will avoid here in the name of spoiler prevention. Suffice to say that the case overall resulted in changes to Canadian law.

The point is, the personal experiences of Kuenne and Andrew's family, friends, and colleagues raise the film above something you watch on a Friday night to pass the time. Dear Zachary carries an emotional wallop that I wasn't expecting.

Here is a short film about the aftermath. Do not watch unless you have already seen Dear Zachary.

tiny tim: king for a day (johan von sydow, 2020)

This is the fifteenth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 15 is called "Different Drums Week":

Think outside the box: wear a giant papier-mâché head and front a band. Don't conform: master an other-worldy-sounding instrument. Blaze a new trail: start singing metal in your 90s. Be unexpected: bring pop to the opera and opera to the club. Embrace the unconventional: start a one-man band. Stray from the beaten path: become the greatest, worst singer ever.

This week's challenge is to march to the beat of your own drum by watching a film that marries documentary and decidedly non-mainstream music in a swirl of sound and storytelling that converges outside the popular consciousness. Thankfully, Mike Sean has curated a handy selection of fitting novelties on his delightfully esoteric Different Drums: Documentaries on Musical Curiosities list.

Johan von Sydow takes a stylistic kitchen-sink approach to his documentary on the singer Tiny Tim. He blends old performance footage with animated recreations, interviews with relevant people in Tiny's life and voice-over narration taken from Tiny's diary read by Weird Al Yankovic. There is a lot of love for Tiny Tim in the movie ... the film wants us to embrace the eccentricities in the man's life, wants to show us the art behind the man's presentation. We hear from avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas, and are reminded that Bob Dylan and John Lennon were fans.

There is no attempt to offer a complete version of Tiny's life. The film's short running time (78 minutes) helps ensure this, since von Sydow is covering the entire length of Tiny's life and needs to squeeze in what von Sydow thinks is important. We don't know what von Sydow is leaving out. The movie isn't merely a gloss on Tiny Tim. We see the ups and downs of his private life, including his three marriages (one of the interviewees is his daughter), but I never lost the feeling that something was being left out.

The film ends with a marvelous anecdote that I can't resist spoiling. The legendary Wavy Gravy, who knew everyone in Greenwich Village during Tiny's formative years, tells a story about he and Tiny Tim catching a ride with Neal Cassady. As Wavy tells the story, we see an animated representation.

We were driving up the west side highway in New York ... with Neal Cassady driving the car, and Neal and Tiny singing Bing Crosby duets as we drove along. Every now and then he'd go, "Oh Mr. Cassady, not so fast!" "Oh relax, Tiny, everything's cool! I'm just gonna roll this joint and drive with my knee.

Perhaps it helps if you know me a little bit. The idea of Wavy Gravy, Tiny Tim, and Neal Cassady together in a car makes my day.

the endless summer (bruce brown, 1966)

This is the eleventh film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 11 is called "The Four Seasons Week":

The four seasons are a great way to convey the passage of time or set a specific mood for a film. For this reason, they are commonly used in movie titles. Filmmakers like Bergman, Ozu, and Rohmer used them frequently, and Kim Ki-duk covered all four in the great Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring. I've (Wade McCormick) made a list with several examples, but there may be others out there for you to discover. Importantly, The word must be referring to the actual season, so Palm Springs or Anatomy of a Fall don't count. Translated or alternate titles like Лето (Leto) or The Green Ray (released in North America as Summer) are also allowed. Speaking of translations, feel free to debate the meaning of Fall in the title Legends of the Fall, which has been translated in multiple ways and is unclear if it's supposed to refer to the season. If you're not feeling seasonal, you could also watch Jersey Boys, which is about The Four Seasons.

This week's seasonal challenge is to watch a previously unseen film whose title includes a season.

I cheated a bit here. I saw this back in the 60s, but my memory of it is so faint, I figured I could treat it as "unseen". The Endless Summer is historically important for a variety of reasons. That Bruce Brown got a feature film out of this project is remarkable in itself, traveling the world with little money and inexpensive cameras. The movie is often credited with bringing surfing to the masses, and it's certainly more appealing than Gidget or Beach Party movies. The Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. It spawned a sequel, and is still fondly remembered.

All of which is nice, but the film doesn't really stand up to its reputation. Certainly, it remains a cult classic for surf fans. And it's not hard to put yourself back in the 60s when the film came out and imagine that the narration was charming. But it's mostly clunky, and I know that's part of the charm, but it gets tiring, and the way natives are talked about is borderline imperialist. Meanwhile, the music, which is in the surf music genre, is practically non-stop and it, too, gets tiring. Finally, the footage of actual surfing is indeed impressive, as the surfers perform unbelievable feats. But after an hour-and-a-half, even the surfing gets repetitive ... there's only so many times you can watch surfers riding waves before even that becomes mundane.

film fatales #211: ed and pauline (christian bruno and natalija vekic, 2014)

Brief (18 minutes) look at the story of the Cinema Guild in Berkeley in the 1950s. Fun for fans of Pauline Kael. Doesn't include anything new, but us Kael fans don't care.

koyaanisqatsi (godfrey reggio, 1982)

I'd say this was a one-of-a-kind documentary, but since it's the first film in a trilogy, I guess that's not true. Koyaanisqatsi washes over you, abetted by the score by Philip Glass, and I imagine a sizable number of its adherents have seen it at least once while stoned. The world of the film represents "life out of balance". I am too much a slave of narrative to truly appreciate a movie like this, which has no dialogue or narration, just visuals and music. Reggio uses time lapse photography extensively here, and some of the effects are admittedly amazing. But it's largely a humorless vision of modern life, and a tough slog even with its short running time. I wouldn't call it slow cinema ... Glass' score is often pulsating, and the time-lapse effects present almost constant motion. But I don't know that Reggio needed 86 minutes to get across whatever point he is making. #448 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of all time.

let it be (michael lindsay-hogg, 1970)

It's about expectations. The basic footage for Let It Be was filmed in January of 1969. The film was released in 1970. Between the time it was filmed and the time it was released, the Beatles recorded and released Abbey Road, and then, in April of 1970, announced they were breaking up. The album and film Let It Be came out a month later. Thus, expectations were that the film would document the falling apart of the beloved group. That the film was recorded more than a year before the breakup, that the Beatles, having mostly finished Let It Be, then made Abbey Road, all factors that argued against the resulting film as being the story of a breakup, well, expectations ... all audiences of the film knew was that the band was finished.

Then, 50 years later, Peter Jackson, given access to all of the footage, created a massive 8-hour version, called Get Back. The take on Jackson's take was that it showed the Beatles in a much happier place than the original documentary. Since few people had seen Let It Be over the decades, we took Jackson's word for the positive feels, and indeed, Get Back is much more than a film about a band in crisis.

This inspired Jackson and Michael Lindsay-Hogg to finally re-release Let It Be. As he had with Get Back, Jackson used technology to clean up the audio and video ... it's been more than 50 years since I saw Let It Be on its release, but it's easy to imagine that the film has never looked or sounded better. But where Get Back was a reworking of the footage, the Let It Be re-release is "just" the original film, cleaned up.

But our expectations have changed. Get Back convinced us that the Beatles weren't in such a bad place at that time, and now we go into Let It Be looking, not for signs of a breakup, but for signs of a great band working together. And, of course, it's there. But again, as far as the basics of the film are concerned, nothing has changed. Only our expectations have changed.

Does Let It Be stand up? Sure. There are some great songs, fun moments, and the rooftop concert is iconic. Is it a great film, the way A Hard Day's Night is a great film? Not even close. Lindsay-Hogg takes his fly-on-the-wall techniques to an extreme, never stopping to explain anything. So the film begins with the band rehearsing on a sound stage ... later, the recording switches to Apple headquarters. We now know this is because the sound stage wasn't working for the band, but Lindsay-Hogg doesn't provide us with this context. Similarly, Billy Preston turns up, adding keyboards and spirit to the sessions, but Lindsay-Hogg makes no comment on this important difference in the band and the music. Let It Be without context invites us to insert our expectations into the experience, and so the film seems much different in 2024 than it did in 1970.

chambre 12, hôtel de suède (claude ventura and xavier villetard, 1993)

Quirky documentary made for French TV gives us Claude Ventura, returning to the sites where Godard's Breathless was filmed more than 30 years prior. Ventura wants to understand more about the film, so he rents a room, Chambre 12, at the Hôtel de Suède, where the famous long sequence with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg takes place. The hotel is about to be demolished.

Ventura works like a detective, trying to get at the truth of the making of Breathless (it was never clear to me exactly what co-director Xavier Villetard had to do with all of this). We aren't sure just why this matters to Ventura, but his obsession is clear. Those of us who love Breathless want to learn more about that classic film ... it's why we watch this documentary ... Ventura's personalizing of the process is part of what makes the film quirky. I don't know that it adds much depth for the viewer, and I don't imagine someone unfamiliar with Breathless will find anything of interest here.

Ventura works his way through the past. He interviews as many still-living participants as he can: Belmondo, Raoul Coutard, Claude Chabrol, and others. Twice he calls Godard himself on the phone and tries to get the director to talk about Breathless; twice Godard declines and hangs up the phone. Ventura searches out the film's locations, obviously including the hotel room where he stays. He even travels to Geneva, where Godard spent his formative years. He tracks down an old friend who now owns a bookstore. We learn a bit more about Godard, just as throughout this film, we learn a bit about Godard and a bit about the making of Breathless.

But Chambre 12 doesn't really serve as much of an introduction to Breathless. It's a film about our obsessions with the movies of our past, and I found it intriguing. And of course it's not a traditional documentary, for how could one make anything traditional in relation to Breathless?

african-american directors series: symbiopsychotaxiplasm: take one (willliam greaves, 1968)

This film is as hard to describe as it is to pronounce its title. Letterboxd and the IMDB classify it as a documentary. Writer/director William Greaves produced more than 200 documentaries, and in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm he is the on-screen director and writer of the film, as himself. The actors all appear as themselves ... the only one you might recognize is Susan Anspach, two years before Five Easy Pieces. In the film, Greaves is making a movie with the actors ... the crew also appear in the film, and we see the process of filmmaking. We see the same scene over and over ... it seems to serve as a screen test for the various actors. The best equivalent I can come up with is Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up.

There is no real narrative thrust to the film, and the cinéma vérité appearance adds to the documentary feel. But I don't know ... sometimes it feels about as "real" as Curb Your Enthusiasm. Wikipedia describes it thusly: "Greaves creates a circular meta-documentary about a documentary, a documentary about a documentary and a documentary documenting a documentary about a documentary."

You can't make this stuff up. The IMDB tells us that "William Greaves believed that he had made a masterpiece, and that the only place to première it was the Cannes Film Festival. So he carried the print to France himself, where it was screened for programmers. However, the projectionist made the mistake of showing the reels out of order. The film was turned down. Greaves came home, figured he had made a mistake, and put the film in his closet." It appears to have mostly stayed in that closet until the early 90s, when it was shown once or twice. Steve Buscemi saw it and loved it ... Steven Soderberg soon joined the list of admirers. The film was finally re-released in 2005. It was named to the Slate Black Film Canon, and is #627 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of all time.

film fatales #200: bergman island (marie nyreröd, 2006)

A bit of an oddity, and a real pleasure for Bergman fans, Bergman Island is an edit of three television interviews Marie Nyreröd conducted with Ingmar Bergman at his home on the isolated island of Fårö. Bergman was in his 80s, and Nyreröd is a congenial and astute interviewers. The film is good for what it is, as we watch and listen to one of cinema's greats. Nonetheless, it's not overwhelming as a film ... Nyreröd has cut the original three interviews down by approximately half, and while the two walk around the island and inside Bergman's house, essentially this is two talking heads. Interesting because of the subject matter, worth a look, but otherwise nothing special.

film fatales #197: the eternal memory (maite alberdi, 2023)

I kicked off Women's History Month with this Oscar-nominated documentary from Chilean director Maite Alberdi (The Mole Agent), about the impact of Alzheimer’s on Chilean journalist Augusto Góngora, and his wife and caretaker, actress Paulina Urrutia. It's a very intimate look at the couple ... apparently, Alberdi tried to convince Urrutia to make a film, she resisted, but Góngora wanted to proceed, willing to get his story out.

Alberdi chooses a non-chronological approach. We see footage of Góngora and Urrutia, available because they were public figures. There are also home movies (with two kids). Alberdi picks up the story a few years into Góngora's illness, a proverbial fly on the wall with her camera. Both Góngora and Urrutia were used to cameras because of their work, which made the inevitable intrusions more tolerable, and there is little feeling of exploitation.

The movie is both heartbreaking and inspiring. The love the couple has for each other is palpable, and if Alzheimer's has yet to be conquered, the two manage a life together, and interact with the outside world until COVID drives everyone indoors (Alberdi has said that Góngora's health got worse when he couldn't interact socially with others). In the earlier years, Góngora is aware of his situation, even making light of it at one point. This makes his deterioration even sadder, until he's not sure he recognizes his wife.

Alberdi connects this personal story to a social need to work with collective memory. Góngora began his time as a journalist during the Pinochet dictatorship, and he was dedicated to making the truth public whenever possible. As his disease progresses, Góngora's memory of those times fade, but Chileans collectively remember eternally.