If you were in a supermarket checkout line this week you might have noticed that TV Guide features four separate covers of the Beatles in honor of their performance at Shea Stadium 40 years ago. I was born in the 60s and grew up with the Beatles, but if I see one more anniversary tribute to them with one more batch of never-before-seen photos I may puke. We have a new war and a new Nixon to deal with, and if the 60s counterculture taught us anything, it was the value of living in the here and now.
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To judge from this lineup, the 60s explosion of radical idealism has become a ball and chain for the current generation of underground filmmakers. The less imaginative are content to drag the ball around, though left-wing documentarian Stephen Marshall (Aftermath: Unanswered Questions From 9/11) at least makes an effort to clobber someone with it. This Revolution, his first attempt at drama, transposes the plot of Wexler’s Medium Cool to last summer’s Republican National Convention, and the process proves so easy you have to wonder whether the Vietnam war taught us anything at all. Wexler documented the police kicking ass during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, then integrated the footage into a narrative about a TV cameraman (Robert Forster) who falls in love with a black woman and her young son. Marshall melds real footage of RNC protests and a fictional story about a disillusioned cameraman (Nathan Crooker), just returned from Iraq, whose cable news network sends him into the streets of Manhattan to get footage of anarchists plotting convention mischief; the romance involves a Hispanic woman (Rosario Dawson) who’s been radicalized against the war by her husband’s death in Baghdad.
Equally illuminating, though more of a grind to sit through, is Ears, Open. Eyeballs, Click. Director Canaan Brumley’s status as an ex-navy man and civilian barber at Camp Pendleton helped him get this close-quarters document of Platoon 1141 being whipped into shape, and like Wiseman’s Basic Training (which followed army recruits at Fort Polk, Kentucky), Ears, Open. is rigorously objective, dispensing with narration and talking heads to present an undiluted record of the experience. The most riveting scenes capture the drill sergeants’ psychological warfare against the recruits, which is every bit as fierce as in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, but Brumley is also admirably attentive to the numbing aspects of camp life: one long low-angle shot shows nothing but the men’s feet in the shower, slapping around in cheap flip-flops. The movie originally screened at 155 minutes, then 96, and Brumley has finally settled on 115. It still feels long, but I’m sure boot camp feels a hell of a lot longer.
Directed and written by Stephen Marshall
Ears, Open. Eyeballs, Click. ★★ (Worth seeing)
Directed by Canaan Brumley
Bound to Lose ★ (Has redeeming facet)
Directed by Sam Wainwright Douglas and Paul Lovelace
Live Feaky! Die Freaky! ★★ (Worth seeing)
Directed by John Roecker
Captain Milkshake ★★ (Worth seeing)
Directed and written by Richard Crawford
