The Screengrab : melvin van peebles

Screengrab Review: "American Swing"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The great thing about Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart's documentary American Swing, about the New York "swingers' club" Plato's Retreat and its owner and public face, Larry Levenson, is that it puts a warm, human face on a time and a subculture that, seen from today's not-so-distant perspective, could easily be treated as a visit to the Bizarro World. The time is the late 1970s and pre-AIDS 1980s, when the values of the counterculture and the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s had trickled down to more conservative and apolitical members of the middle class--people who saw themselves as basically stable members of traditional society but who saw other people casting off such societal constraints as pre-marital abstinence and post-marital monogamy and felt that they'd been missing out. They wanted a little hedonism in their lives. Originally located on Manhattan's Upper West Side, in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel--the same location that had previously housed the Continental Baths, the gay bathhouse that achieved its measure of immortality when it was decreed that every article ever written about Bette Midler would mention that she got her start there--the members-only club had a sauna, a jacuzzi, a swimming pool, a buffet, and a dance floor with a live DJ. Because it was conceived as a "straight" equivalent to the bathhouses and other places in the city where gay men were hooking up, its policy prohibited sex between men, though women were cordially invited to go nuts.

What makes this scene seem liberating, in the movie's telling, is how friendly it all was, and how nonjudgemental everyone seems to have been in their attitudes towards their fellow swingers. Plato's, one witness says, revived the concept of the orgy and made it a reality for "the man on the street." Imperfect bodies were tolerated, even embraced, while men paraded around nude but for their socks and shoes, achieving what someone calls "that stag film look." The movie includes first-hand reminiscences from several Plato's regulars, including a few celebrities, including Buck Henry (who says that he went more often than he would have if friends weren't constantly flying in from the West Coast who demanded that he take them there, presumably because they'd already seen the Statue of Liberty) and Melvin Van Peebles, who fondly remembers the warm reception accorded to an overweight couple who took to the dance floor nude and who were so heavy that they made the DJ's turntable bounce. Professor Irwin Corey, looking like Renfield at ninety, claims to have never seen any ugly people at Plato's, which is clearly a judgement call. It would be easy to make fun of some of the people seen here talking about how they let their hair down at Plato's, but the movie treats them very tenderly. They certainly come across better than such defenders of civilization as Phil Donahue, David Susskind, and Stanley Siegel, who are shown in vintage TV clips, doing their best to grill Larry Levenson and get him to break down and admit that he was sent here by the devil to tarnish our precious Judeo-Christian nation and all it stands for. Levenson's affable candor and eagerness to be understood--listening to these shrill folks denounce him, he looks a little hurt when he doesn't look bewildered, as if he were wondering if they know that tbe target of their vitriol is right there in the room with them--just makes the TV hosts look borderline insane. They'd have gotten more traction grilling Barney Fife about his role in the assassination of JFK.

If a tragic hero can also be a sweet schlub from the outer boroughs, then American Swing makes a pretty good case for Levenson as a tragic hero. The "king of swing" was a big, beefy guy with a toothy smile and the air of someone who might at any minute ask you to tell him about the rabbits again. Plato's homey air seems to have been a direct emanation of Larry's personality. He comes across as a completely uncynical, even romantic guy who had a roving dick and no capacity for hypocrisy. (Someone says that Larry would fall in love with every woman he had sex with even if he had sex with ten women in one night, and he was perfectly capable of having sex with ten women in one night.) Fred J. Lincoln, a porn film entrepreneur who played Weasel in the original, Wes Craven Last House on the Left, and who took charge of the club as it turned, he says, from a grocery store to a supermarket, breaks up as he recalls "that horrible food" at Plato's and shakes his head as he thinks of Larry: "He was so proud of his buffet." Larry's home touch is evident in the hilarious commercials that were made to air on local TV. In one, Larry and a blonde stare at an off-screen cue card that must have attached to the side of a giant tortoise and race through their lines like zombies on speed. Another boasts the official Plato's Retreat jingle, which has lyrics about how "the pleasure and fun/ will keep you feeling young", which are suitable for a McDonald's. It's with no small degree of evident pride that one club member recalls that when the club changed locations in 1980, it was directly across from a McDonald's.

Things had to go bad, and they did in pretty much all the ways you'd expect, starting with Larry's relationship with Mary, his steady woman friend in the early days of the club. In the time-honored tradition of people trying to keep a doomed relationship alive until it turns into what they'd prefer it to be, Mary did her best to play the queen to Mary's king of Plato's, even though she, unlike Larry, had no special quarters to which to retreat; when she'd hook up with some guy or guys, Larry would wander around, muttering that she was "upset" about something. Larry, meanwhile, was going on talk shows and explaining that although he loved her and considered himself to be faithful to her so long as he only had sex with other women while inside the club, there was no way that one woman could give him everything he needed, while Mary sometimes sat beside him, her face cracking. (This is probably Larry's real low moment, though his blindness to Mary's unhappiness seems to be a product more of lack of imagination than of cruelty.) Things went into a tailspin when Mary had an affair with her chauffeur, lighting a fuse that ended with Larry in the hospital after a mysterious physical assault and Mary on the road to a sanitarium. Some time after that, the IRS came calling, and when their agents asked to see the books, the bookkeeper promptly forked them over. She says now that she didn't know that the nice visitors were IRS agents, implying that she was just being neighborly and would have shown the books to anyone who wandered in and asked politely. When she finally did figure out what was going on, she reacted by blurting out, in front of the agents, "We're dead!", indicating that she'd be a lot of fun to play poker with. While the IRS prepared its brief against Larry, the bookkeeper and her husband disappeared. Larry's bodyguard says that he assumed that they were on the run and in fear for their lives, then tears up laughing as he recalls that he turned on the TV one say and saw them competing on the game show Card Sharks.

Larry wound up doing a stint in the pen and returned to his throne at Plato's, but the magic was dying out, with "dying" being the operative word. The swingers' philosophy seemed increasingly out of step with the coming age of Reagan, but it was the AIDS virus that really tolled the bell for Plato's. As Dian Hanson, the porn magazine editor who appeared in Terry Zwigoff's Crumb puts it, it got to the point where "the people who cared about their lives stopped going to sex clubs." Those who kept going tended to be the hard-core, scary, and desperate to a nihilistic degree. Meanwhile, without the stabilizing influence of a steady girlfriend, Larry was falling prey to, in Al Goldstein's words, "All the women who wanted him for the money he didn't have and the drugs that he did have." He was also going on TV and assuring people that Plato's was a healthy environment, at one point playing Mr. Science and insisting that "because of the smell of chlorine in the air at Plato's Retreat, the AIDS virus doesn't have a chance." In the footage from this era, Larry shows the desperation of a man on the verge of losing the identity that's given his life meaning. On New Year's Eve, just as 1986 was about to arrive, Mayor Ed Koch's health department shut down Plato's, partly, says someone, so that the crackdowns on the gay bathhouses wouldn't appear discriminatory. Stripped of his king of swing crown, Larry seemed unable to move on while retaining his happy memories, like his former members who appear in the movie. Instead, he gained weight, started driving a cab, and expired of a heart attack in 1999, when he was 62. He might have been the only person to have ever stepped onto the premises at Plato's who thought that it could go on forever. "I think Plato's kind of died a natural death," says Annie Sprinkle, with a shrug. "Maybe it had a little help."

The Rep Report (October 24-30)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: A dependable highlight of the Museum of Modern Art's film programming, "To Save and Project: The Sixth MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation" (October 24–November 16) opens with Melvin Van Peebles's 1971 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Other seldom-seen, painstakingly restored and preserved items on the menu include Marco Ferreri's scandalous Dillinger Is Dead (1969); Ernst Lubitsch's 1025 version of Lady Windermere's Fan; the 1934 James Cagney-Bette Davis vehicle Jimmy the Gent; D. W. Griffith's Hearts of the World; Anthony Mann's Korean War classic Men in War, and the 1947 musical That Man of Mine, "featuring a young Ruby Dee, who will appear after the screening in a discussion with historian Pearl Bowser." All in all, "baadasssss" is putting it mildly.

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives pays tribute to one of the lesser known fixtures of the "Fifth Generation" of Chinese filmmakers, serving this fall as artist in residence at PFA, with "I Love Beijing: The Films of Ning Ying" (October 23, 2008 - October 27). Educated in Italy and employed by Bernardo Bertolucci as his assistant director on The Last Emperor, Ning began her own directing career in 1992 with For Fun, which, along with On the Beat (1993) and I Love Beijing (2000), form her "Beijing trilogy", films in which she considers the current state of her native country with an informed, ironic sensibility and great affection. The PFA will be showing all these films, as well as Ning's most recent feature, Perpetual Motion (2005) and her documentary Railroad of Hope (2001), with the director in attendance.

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

LIVING IN OBLIVION (1995)

Despite one of the cheesiest posters in cinema history (which, come to think of it, may itself be some kind of meta parody of the habitual cheesiness of zero-budget indiewood marketing campaigns), writer/director Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion more than earns its place on this list through its flawless depiction of the cast and crew of every single dentist-financed independent film of the ‘90s, from the taciturn sound guy in the hipster glasses (“Speeeed”) and the creepy, addled production assistant to the catty make-up girl and, yes, the ubiquitous dream sequence dwarf (played with simmering, hilarious contempt by Peter Dinklage in a breakthrough performance). The project, allegedly inspired by DiCillo’s enervating experience directing Brad Pitt in the indie misfire Johnny Suede, is a hilarious cautionary tale starring Steve Buscemi as a harried director afraid to admit his passion project might just be a colossal waste of time and money, James Le Gros as an insanely arrogant would-be movie star and Catherine Keener as an insecure actress whose slow disintegration over the course of multiple takes of an emotional scene is like a graduate course in on-camera acting.

DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY (1967)

Jim McBride's debut feature stars L. M. Kit Carson as a young aspiring filmmaker who begins compulsively shooting a documentary record of his life, a life that soon disappears under the weight of all that celluloid. A special kind of modern horror comedy, sort of like watching a mirror eat the world it's supposed to be reflecting. The inevitable remake, David Holzman's Blog, is still out there waiting to be made.

BAADASSSSS! (2003)

Mario Van Peebles makes some kind of history by playing his own father, Melvin, in the stirring tale of how dad managed to somehow pull together the pioneering X-rated art-blaxsploitation independent film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Wearing a '70s 'stache and chomping on his father's trademark stogie, Van Peebles actually gives a more exciting performance than he'd ever managed before (and a more appealing one than his dad had ever managed) while mining the chaos of no-budget filmmaking for some ripe comedy. (He also makes time to document the time that dad, having enlisted young Mario to appear in the film, ordered someone to shave ringworm scars in the sensitive lad's head.) Plus: Rainn Wilson's worst hair day ever! Adam West declares himself lustful! And Seinfeld's Uncle Leo in stereo!

DEMON LOVER DIARY (1980)

This lost classic (never officially released on home video in any form) is American Movie's evil twin. In 1975, MIT grad student and cinematographer Jeff Kreins agreed to shoot the horror flick Demon Lover for a pair of Midwestern factory workers looking to make a splash in the film world. (Financing for the film came in the form of insurance payments when one of the would-be Cravens cut off his finger on the job.) One of Kreins' conditions in agreeing to take on this task was that he be able to bring along his gal pal Joel DeMott so that she could film a cinema verite documentary on the making of Demon Lover. She couldn't have known at the time that she would be chronicling a harrowing descent into madness that literally ends with Kreins and DeMott fleeing in panic while gunshots are fired. The two would-be filmmakers at the documentary's center are bizarro dopplegangers of American Movie's Borchardt and Schank, but proving once again that life is stranger than fiction, co-director Donald G. Jackson went on to have a long if not distinguished directorial career, with credits including Lingerie Kickboxer and Hell Comes to Frogtown.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak

America the Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S. (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:45:00 GMT

SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG (1971) & BAADASSSSS! (2003)

In 1971, director Melvin Van Peebles, sick of Hollywood’s portrayal of African Americans, risked everything to present his own version of the black experience where, according to his own manifesto for the project, “niggers could walk out standing tall instead of avoiding each other's eyes.” For White America, the most shocking aspect of Van Peebles’ film was the fact that its hero, falsely-accused murder suspect Sweetback (played by the director himself) not only escapes “The Man,” but also takes out a few white cops along the way and, in the final credits, offers the warning: “Watch out - a baad assss nigger is coming to collect some dues." Unlike the “can’t we all just get along” sentiment of the Civil Rights Movement, Van Peebles’ film dared to publicly acknowledge the black community’s righteous indignation after 300 years of mistreatment at the hands of Caucasians (a still-shocking sentiment, as evidenced by the media’s recent saturation bombing of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America!” soundbite), influencing everything from the blaxploitation genre that followed directly on the heels of Sweetback’s box office success to the politicized rap of N.W.A. and Public Enemy and Mookie’s controversial decision to hurl a garbage can through the window of Sal’s Pizzeria in Spike Lee’s iconic Do The Right Thing (1989). But (as the director’s son and Sweetback co-star, Mario, dramatized in his own 2003 biopic, BAADASSSSS!), Van Peebles was more a social crusader than a wild-eyed militant, providing opportunity and experience to minorities both in front of and behind the camera...plus, he gave Earth, Wind & Fire their first big break, which all by itself helped to make America (and the world) a slightly better place to be.

HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. (1976)

Barbara Kopple's groundbreaking documentary on a bitterly contested coal miner's strike in Kentucky is widely cited as one of the finest examples of the form. Made in a year when miners' wages were at a then-record low, and mining company profits were at a then-record high, Harlan County U.S.A. not only captures the horrible conditions, dangerous nature (guns are everywhere in the film, a murder takes place, and Kopple is to this day convinced that she was meant to be killed by company blacklegs) and contentious rivalries of the mine work, but also shows the little triumphs, the conviviality, and the never-give-in determination for the people for whom this life is not an entertainment, but a reality. What is most appalling – and most damning of the "dirty capitalist system" bemoaned by coal minders in their century-old union songs – is the fact that now, over 30 years after the movie was completed, things have gotten even worse. The power of the unions, which could barely protect the workers of Harlan County then, would be almost completely shattered in the subsequent decades. The workers of today, now often illegal immigrants or unskilled workers paid barely more than minimum wage, still do some of the most dangerous industrial work imaginable, and there is no one left to protect them. So, watching Harlan County U.S.A. today, one still has to catch one's throat at the terrible injustice being done to the workers of 1976 – and try and comprehend the awful truth that since then, the situation has only continued to decline, and even the simple pride in the face of impossible struggle evidenced by the workers and their wives seems like a relic of an idealized past.

HESTER STREET (1975)

Like a number of entries on this list, Joan Micklin Silver's low-budget, independent hit was made in the 1970s, a time when a great many movies were examining time-honored American values and finding them wanting. Hester Street is a coming-to-America story about Jewish immigrants making new lives for themselves in the Lower East Side of New York in 1896, and what immediately sets it apart from earlier movies of this kind, such as Elia Kazan's America, America, is that it dares to suggest that what some of the newcomers have lost in their passage from the Old World is dearer than what they've gained. The central characters are Yekl, who quickly adopts the name Jake (Stephen Keats) and his wife, Gitl (Carol Kane), and what makes Gitl the heroine is that she, unlike Jake -- who practically welds his derby to his head and takes to making such pronouncement as, "I don't care for nobody, I'm an American fella!" -- recoils from the noise and bustle of the New World and cannot assimilate. Kane's eccentric, almost unearthly qualities, which would eventually make her a tremendous comedienne, are used very tenderly here; the fact that she can't quite fit in with her surroundings is proof of her value, she is rewarded with the attentions of a disgruntled fellow immigrant, Bernstein (Mel Howard), who gives voice to the filmmakers' objections to the crass vulgarity of American materialism, which Jake and his haughty new girlfriend Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh) embody. Gitl and Bernstein find happiness together while remaining too good for the place they've come to.

SERPICO (1973)

At a time when movies like Dirty Harry (and its sequel Magnum Force) were inviting audiences to cheer brutalist cops on the theory that "the system" was too sensitive to the rights of the accused to allow a good, rule-obeying cop to get anything done, this fact-based story (from back in the days when the phrase "inspired by a true story" meant that what you were seeing in the movie bore some actual relation to something that had actually happened in real life) invited the audience to save some of its sympathy for a good cop -- Frank Serpico, a NYPD officer played by Al Pacino -- who just wanted to do his job and stay honest while he did it but was hassled, probably set up to be killed, and ultimately run off the force by all the grafting bullies in the department who were so enthusiastically committed to their lives of corruption that they couldn't see him as anything but a freak, and, worse, a potential snitch. Serpico eventually served as a witness at the Knapp Commission investigating police corruption, though he did so reluctantly; he would have preferred to remain a cop, but it must be a bitch chasing rapists and murderers down dark alleys when you're never sure when the other cops running with you are going to take the opportunity to put a cap in your ass. Although the director, Sidney Lumet, sets a downbeat tone for the ending, Serpico was actually set at what could have been seen as a hopeful moment, with the Watergate hearings mirroring the Knapp Commission and when society seemed to be trying to run the rascals out of the halls of power. Eight years later, when Lumet made Prince of the City, another fact-based story about a corrupt NYPD detective who tries to cleanse his conscious by gathering information on crooked lawyers and judges, the idea that you have to be at least a little bit crooked to function in American society had become so well-accepted that Lumet reported that, well into filming, he and his screenwriter were still arguing about whether their tattletale protagonist deserved to be regarded as some kind of hero or just a dirty rat.

THE SEARCHERS (1956)

This movie, set in Texas in the 1860s and 1970s and starring John Wayne as the unrepentant Confederate veteran Ethan Edwards, is widely regarded as the greatest of all John Ford's Westerns by people who might regard that designation as synonymous with saying that it's the best movie ever made. It's a tribute to the heroic qualities that Wayne embodied, demanding as they do the viewer's respect without flinching from the qualities that went with them -- machismo, racism, and a capacity for sadism, all of them carried to the point, in the phrase used by more than one observer, of borderline psychosis. The Confederate Ethan's attitude towards the enslavement of black people is never made clear, but his searching for the niece who's been kidnapped by Comanches -- a chase fueled by his need to kill her, because by the time he's found her she'll have bedded down with and "become" Comanche herself, which he regards as a fate worse than death -- clearly provides him with the opportunity for a new, one-man race war, a war against the Indians that doesn't end when his enemies lie dead: he shoots out the eyes of a fallen nemesis, because according to the Indian's religion that will prevent him from entering Heaven. Ford, whose relation with Wayne was known to have had its prickly moments, taps into that side of his star who would later tell a Playboy interviewer that the Native Americans deserved to be wiped out for having been so "selfish" as to want to keep their land, and the result is something very strange to see: an apotheosis of a man at his most morally petty. In the end, Ethan returns the girl to civilization and, with all the surviving major characters gathered inside her family's house, is last seen walking away from its entrance. He's an iconic hero without who the American West could never have been tamed...and civilization can't wait until it knows it's seen the last of him.

Click here to read Part One and Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Confessions of an Ex-Doofus-Itchy-Footed Mutha"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Melvin Van Peebles has been well-established as a maverick independent filmmaker and provocateur since at least 1971's Sweet Sweetback's Badassss Song. His new film, Confessions of an Ex-Doofus-Itchy-Footed Mutha, confirms that he's also still got a way with titles. He also still has an admirable willingness to make a public jackass of himself and an impressive ability to coax other people into coming along for the ride. Aside from that, though, there isn't a lot else to say about this smeared-looking video fantasy, spun off from one of his old stage shows, Waltz of the Stork. There might have been a few things that should have been said to Van Peebles before he made it, but I don't know who would have been deputized to say them. When the man's own son, Mario, has signed off for a cameo appearance as a pirate, it's hard to say who might have been best qualified to stage an intervention.

Confessions makes full use of the quality that has always been Van Peebles's secret weapon and that has outweighted everything else he's ever brought to the table, which is his absolute and fearless shamelessness. The seventy-five-year-old auteur plays the vagabond hero from the time he's fourteen through his mid-forties. This conceit might have been fun if Van Peebles were an actor, but he's usually gotten by on being a presence, and aside from the occasional outbreak of eye-popping, face-pulling hamminess, he doesn't have any idea what to do with himself here except stand around looking slack, sad-eyed, and grizzled. (As for costuming, Van Peebles tends to favor either one of two looks, the funeral director and the rodeo clown.) It's less amusing that embarrassing to watch him stealing apples as if he were in an Our Gang comedy or acting out his character's sexual initiation and confirming that, however long ago Sweetback was, once a stud, always a stud. (Yes, there are sex scenes. Yes, you do get to see Melvin with his shirt off and snuggling with the ladies, though a body double arrives in the nick of time when things get steamy. And no, none of this is as bad as the scene with the apple: Van Peebles has to be one of the movies' least photogenic eaters this side of Mr. Creosote.) I understand that Van Peebles is so taken with himself and his legend that he thinks the last thing in the world he needs is some distance and perspective in relation to himself, but the fact remains that Mario Van Peebles's swaggering performance as his dad in his own movie BAADASSSSS! from a few years back was both the best work Mario's ever done in movies and the smartest performance ever given by someone purporting to play Melvin Van Peebles. It is indeed a tribute to Melvin Van Peebles's spirit that, at seventy-five, he's still getting movies made and trying to use them to raise hell. But anyone who cares about him ought to pay him the soundest tribute they can by pretending that his latest movie doesn't exist.