fourfour

The best woman

 

Ugh, this week, right? For the sake of posting something, anything, here is Editta Sherman, who in my opinion, stole the show in Bill Cunningham, New York (not an easy thing to do from an also-amazing man who happens to be the subject of said documentary!). The self-aggrandizing that is so popular in our culture and that I tend to loathe in most people is endearing here. I guess when you've been around for 96 years, you've at last earned the right to toot your own horn. A legend and a fixture, indeed.

You should probably see this

For work, I devised an alternate Christmas viewing canon, full of weird shit like Tim & Eric's Awesome Show Great Job! Chrimbus Special, The Anna Nicole Show holiday special (Cousin Shelly for life!), The Monster's Christmas and Silent Night, Deadly Night, Part 2. I love all of these and look forward to watching them every year. One new addition to my perennial favorites is George King's Ten Thousand Points of Light. It's 30 minutes of tacky Christmas insanity (which is the best kind of Christmas insanity, in my experience), as it documents the final years that this family in suburban Atlanta named the Townsends crammed lights and Christmas shit in every corner of their house and then let people walk through it.

It's shot on VHS and better for it, as the blurred picture gives it a home-move vibe and gives you the strange sensation of remembering something you never experienced (weirdly, when B. of STFU, Parents introduced this to me, I initially felt like I'd heard of it before, but in actuality had not).

Anyway, here's the trailer.

 

I highly suggest you get on this this now, but I plead my case further after the jump.

Everything amazing in Céline: 3 Boys and a New Show

How could I resist? How could you?

Your new hero

 

Randy Senna is an arcade-game enthusiast and collector that some call "eccentric" (like Philly.com) and some call a hoarder (like the show Hoarders, on which he'll appear next week). A few years ago, he basically commissioned a documentary about himself and his now-closed old-timey game spot on the Wildwood, NJ boardwalk called Flipper's Fascination. The doc lost funding (or something), but its directors, Steve Loff and Prichard Smith, released about 30 minutes of some 107 hours of footage they shot on YouTube in 2008. No one paid much attention, which is perfect in a way (it's like interactive destitution) but also kind of a shame because it's amazing and kind of pre-Jersey craze zeitgeisty and still relevant, I think. If nothing else, there is a really amazing improvised series/movie that is just dying to come out of this or something like it (really, I think Christopher Guest could tear the shit up).

My favorite of all the segments is above, but the one of people just eating boardwalk food is stellar, as is the one about Darlene, who rides a Jazzy, eagerly shows just how false her teeth are, shares a story about her being mistaken for a man and wears vomit on her shirt seemingly just for kicks. The best (and by that I mean most despicable) thing about the one above is that it upholds a great Wildwood tradition. In it, a foreign employee of Randy's is repeatedly referred to as "Pumpkin," which seems kind of...off. Maybe racist and/or homophobic? At one point, after the kid protests being called this, Randy's mother says, "I could call ya worse!" And then, you're almost certain about what she means. Anytime someone says something off color in Wildwood, there's always someone else to prove that your worst suspicions are the correct suspicions.

New favorite thing alert

 

This is from the HBO doc Bobby Fischer: Against the World. The kid's smackdown on the interviewer's creepiness is graceful and effortless. Bravo.

Jumping the Sinai

Keeping with Monday's religious theme, here's a recommendation that you check out Louis Theroux's latest Westboro Baptist Church doc, America's Most Hated Family in Crisis, which recently on the BBC. Watch while it's still up on YouTube in its entirety (that is, if you haven't already). It's so brilliant and more hilarious than you probably expect. More than ever, the WBC is a carnival freak show. Its entire angle for attention is exploiting how its members' beliefs differ from the rest of the world, while said members piss on the very idea of diversity. They seem simultaneously hyper-aware of what they're doing, and clueless of its ridiculousness. For this reason (and also because of their several Weird Al-esque reinterpretations of Lady Gaga songs), the WBC have crossed over from outwardly threatening to campy. They have jumped the Sinai.

America's Most Hated Family in Crisis is embedded below, with a few additional thoughts a bit further down...

 

A great way to start the week: finger and smile exercises

The clip above comes from Frederick Wiseman's brilliant documentary The Store, which chronicles the 1982 Christmas season at the Dallas Neiman Marcus store and corporate headquarters. Everyone in it is either insane or wearing something completely ridiculous or trying to buy something completely ridiculous or devious about getting their mitts on other people's money (sometimes, all four categories apply to a single person). Wiseman makes really still documenatries that are more impressionistic scene collages about a given subject (the zoo, public housing, high school, Aspen, etc.) than they are definitive narrative accounts (there is an utter lack of voice-overs and expository interviews). Sometimes, this makes his movies feel a little boring or slow, but The Store is full of so many weirdos that it's never less than fascinating. It's two hours of joy. My favorite part of the clip above (two minutes of two hours of joy) is the old ladies smiling repeatedly as their souls frown definitively.

Also, this Daily Beast piece has another great clip from The Store -- an employee receives a particularly naughty birthday greeting from a dude in a chicken suit who goes on and on and on. Amazing.

Neglected in '10: Best Worst Movie

For the next several days, I'll be touching on stuff that happened and/or was released last year that I never got around to writing about. We all need ways to make our year-to-year transition easier -- this is mine.

I didn't write about Best Worst Movie last fall when it finally came out on DVD, because here's probably not much more to say about it. It is as acclaimed as Troll 2 is critically reviled (0% on the Tomatometer and holding!). But just try to stop me upon reflection! Much like my favorite movie of '10, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Best Worst Movie is a documentary whose appeal is not limited by its subject -- it is a good movie, period. I'm apathetic about Troll 2 as a film (I've seen better worst movies!), but I'm fascinated with it as a piece of media and a phenomenon. Best Worst Movie documents it as such in more detail than it probably deserves, and is better for it. This is a film about bad movies, in general. It is about those who understand them and those who most certainly don't (one person we meet in the latter category refers to Troll 2 as "cultic"). One of the biggest of several laughs here comes when Troll 2 star George Hardy hosts a screening in his small hometown to people who clearly don't give a shit about garbage cinema. Here's my favorite reaction after the movie is over:

That woman needs to understand that you don't piss on hospitality! Clearly, she's learned nothing.

Neglected in '10: The I Think We're Alone Now commentaries

For the next several days, I'll be touching on stuff that happened and/or was released last year that I never got around to writing about. We all need ways to make our year-to-year transition easier -- this is mine.

I Think We're Alone Now, a film that follows a middle-aged man with Asperger's and a younger, intersex woman who are united through their (current!) love of '80s flash-in-the-pan teen pop sensation Tiffany, is one of my favorite documentaries of all time (it's just behind Paris Is Burning and Living Dolls on my list). I've said so much about it already, but that was before I listened to the commentaries on the DVD of the film that was released several months after I wrote about it.

Wow.

Both Jeff (Asperger's) and Kelly (intersex) provide their own commentary tracks, which work as both updates on their lives and opportunities for meta-voyeurism, as these people (who were followed in the first place because of their unique world views) look at themselves in the mirror of documentary filmmaking and report back. If you found the movie (or the likes of it) exploitative and off-putting, you will find this encouraged stream-of-consciousness harrowing; if you loved the opportunity to visit with people who are clearly like no one else on this earth, you'll love these tracks just as much. Jeff's is the drier of the commentaries (he calls it a "voice over" for whatever reason). He does, though, reveal that Tiffany has Asperger's and that Alyssa Milano has the "rare combination" of both Asperger's and sociopathy. (By the way, both Tiffany and Alyssa have filed restraining orders against Jeff for separate instances.) He says that Kelly tried to kill herself after Tiffany got married (a tidbit that is probably best not revealed regarding your silent competitor for the title of Biggest Tiffany Fan of All Time) and that Tiffany once said to him, "There are a lot of things that we talk about that shouldn’t be heard by most people." This may very well be true, but he takes it as a compliment. Whoops.

Kelly's track is something of a goldmine of good quotes...

Catfish/bullshit

Below is a possible explanation (based on inisder knowledge!) for the air of bullshit that arrives with the new "documentary" Catfish. Also, I spoil the entire film. Ha.