I Cover the Waterfront (Film Festival): Day One
The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls – Here’s one thing I’ve learned about the WFF – they do not
show bad documentaries. Every documentary I’ve seen there has been somewhere between good and excellent. I don’t know how they do it, but every year, the documentary slate is exemplary.
show bad documentaries. Every documentary I’ve seen there has been somewhere between good and excellent. I don’t know how they do it, but every year, the documentary slate is exemplary.This doc introduces America to the Topp Twins – an incredibly popular comedy duo in New Zealand. They are also middle-aged lesbian twin country-western singers, who’ve been selling out shows since the early 80’s. It sounds like I’m making this up, but I assure you, the Topp Twins are real.
Jools and Linda Topp are absolutely adorable – they just radiate this joy when they’re on stage, or meeting the fans, or talking about performing. They’re very sweet and positive, and they sort of draw you in. The weird thing is, when they show clips of their performances, I really don’t get it. This isn’t a criticism of the movie at all, but the actual Topp shows seem to be that really broad style of humor where the fact that they’re wearing costumes is supposed to be funny in and of itself. It’s like those British sitcoms you see at midnight on PBS whenever they burn through the good shows like Fawlty Towers that only had twelve episodes. And it’s a cultural thing, I get that. I just assumed that all New Zealand comedy was like Flight of the Conchords.
But when the Topps talk to the cameras about their lives or their characters or their families, they are absolutely hilarious. And their songs are ridiculously catchy – I’ve been walking around with the title song in my head since Friday. You can’t not love these two once they just start talking. The footage of their first tour (where they actually traveled across New Zealand by tractor) is just fantastic.
It’s cute and funny, but when the filmmakers reveal Jools’ breast cancer diagnosis, you’ll be surprised at how emotionally invested you are. There’s a chemotherapy scene that is not exploitative but is just incredibly stark and powerful. For something that spends most of its runtime as light entertainment, it’s a real emotional punch.
I don’t really get their act, but I love the Topp Twins.
Taylor’s Way – There’s an interesting game going on in this movie. It’s this close to playing out like an uninspired romantic comedy, but something is off and you’ll be on the edge of your seat waiting for the moment when it’s going to go horribly wrong.
After a fight with her boyfriend, Taylor meets the offbeat Wyatt in a Canadian bar. They hit it off, and she comes back to the RV where he lives. When she falls asleep, he drives North and when she wakes up, she finds herself in a national park with nobody around except the guy she just met. He’s a soil researcher, and he has to spend all day taking samples. You can sort of imagine somebody pitching this premise with Matthew McConaughey and, I don’t know, whoever the current version of Renee Zellweger is. You know, she’s still in her dress and she tries to walk back to the main road in high heels, which doesn’t work and eventually they sort of bond even though she’s bitchy and he’s flaky. They could totally sell that!But that’s not how it plays out. So much of it seems innocent and almost cute, but there’s an air of menace. It’s legitimately creepy to be sitting there and just wanting the inevitable turn to come along and get it over with so you can stop feeling so damn nervous. I can’t really say where the tipoff is – you can’t really point to one thing. Wyatt comes off as creepy, but he seems less so after a while, which in Hollywood semiotics is how you know he’s growing as a person. I don’t know what it is, but something’s not right, and it stays not right.
Two things to note. First off, at a film festival, everybody applauds at the end of the movie. That’s just how it goes. Nobody applauded at the end of Taylor’s Way, because we would have looked like awful, awful people. I talked to other people who really enjoyed it, but they has the same sick feeling I did the whole time. It isn’t one of those movies where you immediately go and tell other people that they need to catch the next showing, because they too will be traumatized. I really loved the movie, but I would have felt bad about dragging an innocent person into it.
The other thing I want to mention is that Makinna Ridgway, who plays Taylor, is a star in the making. She doesn’t have many credits to her name, but she’s absolutely magnetic. It’s not just that she’s beautiful (though she is), because pretty girls are a dime a dozen in the movies. She just has this presence – she pulls focus in just about every scene. It’s just going to be a question of whether she gets cast as the hot girl who doesn’t get to do anything in an action movie, or whether she breaks out with something clever and original like this.
Secrets of the Tribe – This movie is the one I talked about most over the weekend, because it blew my mind. Another in the Waterfront tradition of winning documentaries, Tribe is a story of academic infighting in the anthropology community. I know that doesn’t sound fascinating, but bear with me.
There’s a tribe in the Amazon Basin called the Yanomami. They’re about as untouched by society
as a people can be. So they’ve attracted plenty of attention from anthropologists since the 60’s. And everybody who lives among them basically just screws up their culture. The thing you have to understand is that every anthropologist who’s lived studied them hates every other anthropologist who has studied them, and all of them have their own misdeeds to answer for.
as a people can be. So they’ve attracted plenty of attention from anthropologists since the 60’s. And everybody who lives among them basically just screws up their culture. The thing you have to understand is that every anthropologist who’s lived studied them hates every other anthropologist who has studied them, and all of them have their own misdeeds to answer for.First, you just had people who manipulated data to prove a series of alarming hypotheses. (A protein-rich diet is more likely to turn a person into a murdered. But that’s OK, because committing murder makes a male more attractive to the opposite sex.) And then there was the man who married a pre-teen girl while he lived there (which is common in their culture). Another introduced the concept of prostitution to the tribe. Yet another decided that machetes would help them cut down trees faster than their stone axes, only to have them discover that the machetes also helped them kill each other faster.
My favorite, and I mean this in the loosest possible sense, was the linguist, Lizot, sent by the French government to catalog the Yanomami language. His findings revealed a surprising diversity of terms for masturbation and anal sex in their language. Eventually it was discovered that Lizot was a pedophile who sexually abused most of the tribe.
There are some interesting interviews with the modern-day Yanomami – they still live in mud huts without electricity, but their language now seems to be modern Spanish and at least one of them is wearing a hockey jersey in his interview. Secrets of the Tribe is interesting, upsetting, and weirdly hilarious. There’s something about a bunch of anthropologists who all hate each other that’s really funny to me. It’s fascinating and highly recommended.
Tomorrow, I’ll have reviews of TUG (shot in West Michigan), Norman, and His and Hers.
