The Screengrab : phil nugentt

My Movie Studio: We Want Your Pitches

Phil Nugent — Mon, 19 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If you've been enjoying using this Internet thing to watch short films and sign anti-Uwe Boll petitions but have started wondering when it's going to begin impacting the way feature films actually get made, you might want to check out My Movie Studio. This is an Internet-based scheme designed to attract mobs of investors and unlikely sources of talent and bring them together in a plan to change the face of movies as we know it, or at least have some chuckles while perhaps making a few bucks. The site invites anyone who can come up with a dumb enough on-line pseud to set up a "pitch page" and describe their idea for a really cool movie. "Your Movie Pitch," as the rules lay it out, "is the plot of your movie, distilled to its most essential elements. Make it punchy. Make it specific. Give it a tone. Make it memorable. You can add anything you'd like to support your pitch: a synopsis, poster art, character art, storyboards, a longer treatment, a trailer you made with your friends, songs you think would be great in the soundtrack, original score by you—whatever you think will get people excited about your idea." Obviously, these should be "original" ideas; don't bother thinking up a user name just to post your suggestion that a Grand Theft Auto movie would be the shit. (Unless, of course, you happen to own the rights to Grand Theft Auto.) Also, obviously, "Your Movie Pitch should include invented characters, not the stars you’d like to see play them." Perhaps not so obviously, the site is not soliciting screenplays. The idea is to select three solid pitches that will then be developed by professional writers and directors. Who'll be doing the selecting? Investors, who are expected to pony up a hundred dollars apiece. The dream is that the site will raise six million dollars this way, and that will be enough to finance three feature films. The three people whose pitches are selected will each receive $25,000 to go with their on-screen story credit. (It costs nothing to log in and pitch.)

If parts of it sound a little Michel Gondryesque, it should be mentioned that the guys behind the site are serious men with an honorable history of chewing at the edges of the entertainment industry. Michael Bertin, who earned an MBA from the University of Chicago, is a critic for the Austin Chronicle and author (with Kevin Booth) of a biography of the late comic Bill Hicks; his co-founder, Glasgow Phillips is a past contributor to South Park and the lamented Might magazine who recorded his own attempts to redefine content providing in the 1990s in his lively memoir The Royal Nonesuch. My Movie Studio is based on the risky but intriguing notion of opening up the process by which movies get the green light. For Bertin and Phillips--and, according to their website, for the unnamed talent providers they hope to entice to come in on the projects--the excitement at this stage of the game is in waiting to see what kind of ideas are going to pour in over the transom. As for the investing side, Bertin writes, "A hundred bucks might seem like a decent chunk of change, but really, it's not much more than your monthly cable bill or maybe a ticket to a football game. But the cable company doesn't let you choose the programming and the football coaches don't let you call the plays. Then, at the end of the month or end of the game, nobody gives you any money back when the shows are good or the team wins. With this, the crowd is controlling the process and they are going to profit from it when it goes well."

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.

Tribeca Film Festival Reviews: "Pray the Devil Back to Hell"; "Fire Under the Snow"; "Milosovic on Trial"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Some of the documentaries at Tribeca this year feel like messages in a bottle sent from the recent past, efforts at preserving material that will be useful to those who eventually write the definitive histories. Pray to Send the Devil Back to Hell is a mixture of old news footage and fresh interviews dealing with the fifteen years of chaos and carnage that followed the declaration of civil war in Liberia in 1989. Ragged as the movie is, it makes for an inspiring viewing experience, and its tribute to the "women's peace movement" of Liberia succeeds in taking something that, at the time, may have seemed like a footnote to the big events and making the case that it was instrumental in bringing about many of the happier developments in this story. The women's peace movement grew out of the escalating sense of hopelessness that developed as President Charles Taylor and the "warlords" jockeying to replace him both used violent terror as their main tool in their battle for power. Things finally got bas enough that the Christian and Muslim women of Liberia, for the first time in their history, joined forces to campaign for peace through public protests and more intimate strategies, such as what one of them calls "sex strikes." The campaigners betray no hesitation in declaring themselves the representatives of peace by virtue of their gender, and united as a group against men, who they regard as "guilty" of supporting violence "either by commission or omission." As they see it, the men are the ones with the power in their society, and if they didn't want the bloodshed to continue, they could do something to stop it. Instead, they've used their power to bring war--and to approve the use of rape as a weapon in warfare.

Eventually, the popular support their movement picked up forced Taylor and the warlords to the bargaining table and helped set in motion the chain of events that eventually landed Taylor in U.N. custody, where he's currently being tried for war crimes. In his absence, the warlords gathered to hammer out a peace agreement, though some began to feel that the proceedings were being needlessly prolonged because the participants enjoyed the hotel accommodations they were given after years of sleeping on the ground in a war zone. Finally, Leymah Gbowee, the co-ordinator of the women's peace movement, marched her troops into the hallways and kick-started the process by having a tearful, screaming fit. The movie has its share of horror stories about what went on during the war, but nothing else so dramatically conveys what it must have been like to live in Liberia during that time as the sight of Leymah Gbowee, who is radiant and serenely composed in the new interview footage, having an angry, sobbing meltdown--the last desperate resort of someone who's already done so much against such insurmountable odds that this last stupid roadblock has her ready to pop her cork and spew lava. Always slow to recognize an invaluable resource when it's fallen into their laps, the male security forces first asked the women to leave, then asked if some of them could help them tackle the delegates who had started trying to escape the premises by jumping out the windows. The film ends with a jubilant sense of accomplishment. "We campaigned until the end of the night," recalls one smiling woman. "We campaigned until we forgot that we could be raped!"

Another documentary, Fire Under the Snow, records the heroism of Palder Gyatso, a Tibetan monk who spent 33 years in Chinese custody, enduring starvation and torture until he managed to escape the country in 1992. This one, which draws its quiet power from its subject's on-screen demonstration of same, is moving and ends more or less happily but with an undertone of sad resignation: its hero now lives in India as a free man, but is a living symbol of someone who cannot return home. The title character of Milosovic on Trial, the former Serbian president and, one imagines, possible future roommate of Charles Taylor's, ultimately failed to live long enough to see a verdict delivered in the war crimes trial that he did so much to pointlessly prolong, his death of natural causes in his cell having denied the world to chance to see him bust a move at the end of a rope. Milosovic's trial was a footnote to the story of war and genocide in the Balkans at the end of the twentieth century, and Milosovic on Trial, an admirably solid, straightforward, public-television-style summing-up, doesn't pretend to be more than that. It benefits greatly from its footage of Milosovic in the dock, putting in his bid to be remembered as the ideal face of arrogant, rock-stupid-and-proud-of-it institutional villainy. With his thick, smirking face and shock of white hair, he looks like the malignant love child of Archie Bunker and Elmer Fudd, and this does not seem inappropriate to either his character or his place in history. One witness who describes a moment when Milosovic told him that he didn't believe in the existence of the piece of paper that the man was waving in his face at the time says that it was his impression that the top Serb felt that "if he said something, that made it true." Thank God such blind idiot faith in one's own self-serving horseshit is unknown in our own corridors of power. The other big revelation in the film is that all the lawyers who work on war crimes trials appear to have awful-looking teeth. Whatever draws people to this difficult, frustrating line of work, it can't be that the the U.N. has such a terrific dental plan.

The Rep Report (May 2--8)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Though it's not clear just how widespread this information was among the average moviegoers of the day, in retrospect it's only become clearer and clearer that Jean-Luc Godard owned the 1960s. None of the gazillions of filmmakers who tried to copy or emulate him at the time found a way to do it without looking ridiculous, and Godard himself has spent the last forty-odd years wondering why nobody believes him when he insists that his later work is much better. Deal with it: Godard's sixties movies, which began with the 1959 Breathless and ended with the 1968 Weekend, which ends with the words "End of Cinema" and which was followed by, of course, more movies, amount to an enduring alternate history of their period, one caught on the fly, and seemingly composed and moods and signals snatched from the air. They are completely of their moment and haven't really dated, and they pointed in a direction that no one has really been able to follow, Godard included. Starting today and continuing through June 5, Film Forum has the whole kicking, biting, flirting package, including the first of Godard's post-Godardian films, the 1969 Le Gai Savoir, and Sympathy for the Devil, which really doesn't belong in this company but has to be included in any comprehensive salute to Godard and the 1960s, 'cause it's got Rolling Stones in it. If you're looking for a place to escape to as summer comes clanking in, this might be the place.

Peter Hutton is a landscape specialist with a moving camera. A former art student, he has traveled the world, sometimes while working as a merchant seaman, recording his visual impressions of Southeast Asia, of the sea, of New York City in the 1970s and Hungary in the 1980s and communal living in Southern California and the Hudson River Valley, turning out a string of transcendentally beautiful, singular films that document his way of seeing. From May 5 through the 26th, the Museum of Modern Artpresents a career retrospective of Hutton's work, which should be eye-opening even for the lucky folks who've managed to have seen some of it. It opens with a "conversation" between the filmmaker and writer Luc Sante.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Boy A"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The English film Boy A, one of the strongest dramatic features in this year's Tribeca Film Festival, is a sympathetic character study of a person that most of society would vote to flush: a twenty-four-year-old man (Andrew Garfield) who's just been released from prison after serving a fourteen-year sentence for a murder committed when he was ten years old. The movie, which is based on a novel by Jonathan Trigell, was directed by John Crowley from a script by Mark O'Rowe. They previously worked together on the Intermission, an invigorating jumble of a movie with a slew of characters colliding with each others as their storylines criss-crossed. Boy A has a smaller cast and a much tighter focus: everything comes down to the character who, during his trial, was turned by the tabloids into a monster known by the protective alias "Boy A." Preparing him for release into the world, his gently paternal counselor (Peter Mullen) christens him "Jack" and advises him to immediately start applying for as many jobs as he can, because "the more forms you fill out, the more real your name's going to become to you." The counselor tries his best to give "Jack" the right balance of tender concern and tough-minded direction, but there isn't much he can do about his charge's real problem. Having missed out on fourteen key years of social interaction, Jack is like a Martian trying to learn how to pass for human, and desperate to not give himself away in the process. (When a nice, approachable girl from his new workplace flirts with him, he doesn't know what to say except, "I love you.") In some important ways, he's still ten years old. When the counselor drives him to his new lodgings, he sticks his face out the window, checking out the sights and possibilities open to a free adult, and his face lights up in response to seeing a familiar yellow-and-red logo. "McDonald's!" he says in an awestruck voice.

Andrew Garfield gives a blessedly open and unguarded performance. He gives Jack a shy dignity; other people are impressed with Jack, because they mistake the concentration with which he's struggling to avoid putting a foot wrong as evidence that he has deeper things on his mind. The script errs a bit in giving the audience too many reasons to share in that admiration; it skirts the usual trap of making the potentially unsympathetic character a touch superhuman, as if it would be all right to lynch him if he were just average. And a subplot involving the counselor's son is rigged and hokey. But Crowley's sure touch with Garfield and the other actors, including Mullen and Katie Lyons as the girl from work) takes the curse off much of this. Garfield's performance alone does more to illuminate that there are aspects to the problem of "kids who kill" than is dreamt of in Dr. Phil's philosophy. The adult Jack doesn't experience self-pity or see himself as a marytr; he simply wants the chance to live some kind of life in which he's not defined by something that happened when he was, for all intents and purposes, a different, less fully formed being than he is now.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Guest of Cindy Sherman"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The documentary Guest of Cindy Sherman is the unchallenged hot-gossip item of the Tribeca festival. The film, which credits Paul H-O (that's "Paul Hasegawa-Overacker" to his mama) and Tom Donahue as co-directors, uses a lot of footage from Gallery Beat, a New York public-access show that Paul H-O starred in during the 1990s, applying a snarky, "in" tone to coverage of the local art scene. Over the years, Paul — I don't really feel comfortable acting as if I'm on a first-name basis with the guy, but I'd just feel silly calling him "H-O" — became an accepted fixture of the New York art scene from barging into galleries on opening nights and shoving a microphone into people's faces, which may say something about how small and in-bred the scene is, though some would probably insist that it says something about how important New York public access broadcasting was in its glory days. Anyway, after the art star Cindy Sherman agreed, to the surprise of everyone, Paul included, to appear on the show, she and Paul became a couple, to the flabbergasted bewilderment of everyone, Paul included. All seemed to be going well in Paul's world for quite a while, as well it might, considering that Sherman was rich, acclaimed, beautiful, sweetly nurturing, and to judge from the photographic evidence available here, has aged less in the past twenty years than Paul has in the last two. But Paul, who had tried to crash the scene by making his own career as an artist before public access called out his name, felt increasingly self-conscious about the fact that his significant other was a big, big deal and he was a measly little nobody. (To give him his due, it does sound as if this situation was brought to his attention through some pretty cringe-worthy slights.)

Work began on the film when the two were still together, and there must have been a point when Sherman at least gave the impression of wanting to encourage Paul to make it; otherwise, it seems doubtful that the filmmakers would have had such easy access to many of the interview subjects who've worked with, or for, Sherman. But by the time the documentary was finished they'd broken up--or, as Paul puts it, he was "downsized" out of her life--and in the movie itself, Paul muses that Sherman may have begun to feel differently about his little make-work film project after it dawned on her that someone might actually see it. The film attracted considerable buzz in the days leading up to its first Tribeca screening, and this past week Sherman herself sent out a disclaimer: "As my name is in the title and my work and self are so abundantly represented, I would like to counter any assumption that I am or wish to be personally associated with it. I am not a participant in any events related to the film's screenings in this festival or future presentations. I apologize to all those who participated, thinking they were doing me a favor in giving interviews and otherwise assisting in the fabrication of this film. Against my better judgment, it was clearly unwise to cooperate with the project at it's inception."

It's easy to sympathize with Sherman's queasiness over having her ex-boyfriend showing their home movies in theaters and charging admission, but it must be said that Guest of Cindy Sherman adds up to more than a public display of ungentlemanly behavior. Sherman herself actually comes out pretty well in it, both as a person and as a counterweight to the preening macho men with whom she competed for attention in the 1980s, such as Julian Schnabel (seen here in an especially ludicrous clip from an old British TV documentary) and Robert Longo (who's glimpsed in an old TV interview wearing a hairdo that looks like an H. R. Giger creation that's eating his head). Paul himself comes across as a likable jerk and a schnorrer, with a surprisingly sharp grasp of who the trendy, market-driven art scene of the '80s and '90s worked. (The falsest touch, and the part of the movie that most smells of bad faith, has nothing to do with Sherman and their relationship: it's an eleventh-inning lament that Paul delivers about the hollow, corrupted values of the art scene today. It's not that what he says is wrong so much as that nothing you've seen up to that point has convinced you that he ever actually cared that much about art for itself. I do believe that he cared about Sherman, though; the movie may feel painfully personal to those whose lives he documents, but it's in no way a slag job. And maybe because of the discretion that Paul himself shows in his depiction of Sherman, she retains her distance from the camera; at the end she seems attractive, likable, even hard to resist, but essentially, mysteriously unknowable, while Paul is happy to cariacture himself as an insecure party crasher who got lucky, for a while. For all its flair and smart talk, Guest of Cindy Sherman ends on a note of genuine sadness and loss.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:30:00 GMT

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind nicely sums up the excitement and frustration of the film festival experience. Inspired by the work of Howard Zinn but outreaching him in poetic resonance, this 58-minute film by John Gianvito is a thrilling, one-of-a-kind picture, and by all rights ought to be the election-year movie of 2008. What's frustrating about it is simply the possibility that it may not be widely seen (though the first three minutes have already made their way to YouTube; watching it can give you a taste of Gianvito's method but little sense of how powerful it is in its total cumulative effect). A noble and beautiful piece of work, it amounts to a chronological history tour of the American progressive tradition, as represented in tributes to the dead: gravestones and death markers for such figures as Crazy Horse, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Eugene V. Debs, Medgar Evers, I. F. Stone, Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, and on and on, as well as those killed in various clashes between striking workers and police. These images are intercut with nature photography, and the effect seems to be to suggest an ongoing, organic connection between some extraordinary lives and the physical environment these people were a part of. Ironically, despite its having been shot in so many graveyards, it gives you a deep, restorative sense of the continuing relevance of the American past. The movie only stumbles when Gianvito gives in to the temptation to make his point explicit with a climactic montage of contemporary political activists in the streets and a few bars of Paul Robeson singing "Joe Hill". The movie doesn't need these visual and aural cliches, and in this context, the sound of Robeson's voice is far less eloquent than the birds chirping and the tree leaves and bushes rustling in the breeze. Among the many striking quotes chisled in stone or set into plaques here, one stands out: the words of the martyred labor activist August Spies, who said, "The day will come when our silence will be more important than the voices you are throttling today." Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind makes you feel that these voices will never really be silent.

An interview with the director is featured here.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Redbelt"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

In his recent, attention-getting Village Voice article proclaiming himself to no longer be a "brain-dead liberal", David Mamet chided those who fail to appreciate how great it is here in the land of the free and who sit around trying to think up reasons to be dissatisfied with democratic capitalism, just so they can have something to be sore about. In Redbelt, Smiley Mamet's latest stab at writing and directing a movie, the hero, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a hard-working, incorruptable black man who's trying his damndest to make an honest living running a martial-arts academy that does its bit for society by training police officers in methods of self defense. But when we meet him, he's already in danger of going out of business, and then evil Hollywood types steal his technique of pitting combatants against each other after selecting one to be "handicapped" for the bout. Robbed of the only thing he has that may have monetary value so that these sharks can cheapen it by using it in circus-like arena ring competitions, he's ultimately reduced to agreeing to compete in one of the bouts in hopes of at least winning some prize money, and then he discovers that the contests are fixed. ("Whenever two guys are fighting for money," mewls the crooked promoter played by Ricky Jay, "the fight is never fair.") Does Mamet ever see any of the plays and movies he signs his name to, or is he so committed to the capitalist system that he has a bunch of cranks hired off park benches staffing a sweatshop where they grind this stuff out by the yard?

Chiwetal Ejifor brings his role a strong presence and the ability to convey complex thought and emotional storms going on beneath a placid surface. He deserves a lot of credit for not appearing ridiculous when his character pounds away at the jujitsu formula that appears to be his all-purpose mantra for life: "There is no situation you can't escape from. There is no situation you can't turn to your advantage." The movie only leaves him completely out to dry once, when Mamet, letting his hand (and his woman problem) show all too nakedly, has him bestow these wise words on a woman (Emily Mortimer) who's been raped, while demonstrating that with more skill and determination, she could have fought off her attacker. Although Mortimer is required to make a full-blown crazy-broad entrance, twitchy and paranoid and all but frothing at the mouth, it turns out that she's the movie's Good Woman; after Ejifor starts telling her what to do, she shuts her yap and gratefully concentrates on supporting him, while Ejifor's wife (Alice Braga), a "Brazilian princess" who worries about her business and dares to have doubts about whether her husband's noble principles will be enough to keep the lights turned on, throws in her lot with the rotten show business people who are conspiring against him. They include Tim Allen, insanely cast as a tough-guy movie star with a bad haircut, and Joe Mantegna, all too perfectly cast as the movie star's slimeball manager, who gives you the feeling that he could produce a line of male body oils from his pores and market it under the brand name "Dishonestee'." Having used these guys to establish that the world is totally rigged and everything's phony, Mamet then turns around and flatters the audience by insisting that the ticket-buying rubes the world over will still notice and appreciate true quality when they see it; when Ejifor and a bad guy get into a tussel in the corridor leading to the stage of the big fight, every head in the place ignores the glitz they've paid to get in to see and swivels to pay attention to the true jujitsu master in action. Mamet himself is the show-business equivalent of one of those politicians who've spent twenty-five years in Congress screaming about how you need to keep re-electing him in order to send a message to those out-of-touch Washington insiders.

Paul Scofield, 1922 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Paul Scofield has died, at the age of 86. He had been suffering from leukemia. Widely regarded as one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of his generation, Scofield had a richer career in the theater than in the movies, where his recessive, slightly chilly presence as much as his devotion to the stage may have prevented him from ever becoming a major star. Yet he won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his fourth film and second Hollywood-funded production, playing Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons (1966), director Fred Zinnemann Oscar-garlanded film version of Robert Bolt's play. (Scofield had earlier played the Nazi villain in John Frankenheimer's The Train, starring Burt Lancaster. Maybe he and Lancaster got on well, because one of his few other adventures in Hollywood hackwork came in the 1973 Lancaster vehicle Scorpio.) Scofield already had a Tony for the Broadway production of the play, in which he had made his American debut. Even after winning the Oscar, Scofield was mostly seen in movie theaters in filmed versions of plays, such as the movie of Peter Brooks's famously icy production of King Lear with Scofield in the title role, and Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, made in 1973 as part of Ely Landau's American Film Theater subscription series. In 1989, he appeared briefly as the King of France in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, and a year later he played Hamlet' father's ghost in Franco Zeffirelli's ill-advised film of the play with Mel Gibson in the lead. He also played the historian Mark Van Doren in Quiz Show (1994) and the witchfinding judge in the 1996 The Crucible. His final film role was as the voice of the horse, Boxer, in an ambitious 1999 TV movie version of Orwell's Animal Farm.

Forgotten Films: "Eat the Peach" (1986)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The 1986 comedy Eat the Peach has the kind of modest, unpredictable charm associated with the early films of the Scottish writer-director Bill Forsythe. Its unforced affection for its working class characters' oddball notions and offbeat tendencies also recalls such Jonathan Demme films as Melvin and Howard, which may have something to do with Demme's decision to lend his name as "presenter" of the finished film. It's set in a rural patch of Ireland so desolate and hungry that you wouldn't be surprised to notice Mad Max fighting punk bikers on the horizon. The hero, Vinnie (Stephen Brennan) and his affable sidekick and brother-in-law Arthur (Eamon Morrissey) are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, but they don't have any great enemies to battle, and after the local computer factory shuts down and the boss, having delivered a drunken tribute to the excellence of this beautiful land, returns to Japan, they don't even have day jobs. They repair to the bar, where they watch an Elvis Presley movie called Roustabout, in which the king rides his own hog around and around in a circular ramp called the Wall of Death. And soon the two men are busy slapping together a wooden version of the Wall of Death in Vinnie's backyard, while his small daughter looks in wonder and his wife Nora (Catherine Byrne) looks on in a kind of resigned despair. Soon they're taking on minor smuggling jobs to help subsidize the building of the wall; they tell themselves that when it's finished, there'll be a line of paying customers from all over, waiting to watch them ride it.

Peter Ormrod, who directed Eat the Peach, from a script that co-wrote with his producer, John Kelleher, based it on a true story that he just stumbled across; he was driving out in the middle of nowhere and damned if he didn't spot a Wall of Death out there. Having had the idea for the movie drop in his lap, he ran with it, and populated it with such characters as Boots (Niall Toibin), a big-talking promoter in J. R. Ewing regalia who tries to give the impression that he's been to America and learned the secrets of gasbag capitalism. But the movie, though whimsical, doesn't settle for being cute; it has something real to say about what it's like to be a man with leadership abilities and imagination who's trapped in an unwelcoming environment and has responsibilities he can barely meet. The movie's low-budget beauty and warm but aching humor give it links to contemporary Irish folklore. Ormrod himself had been working in television before making this movie, and after making it, he seems to have dropped off the face of the earth; it's the last thing on his IMDB page, where the "biography" section reads, in its entirety, "Used to be a pilot for now defunct Belgian airline Sabena where he served as captain before they shut down," though it doesn't say whether he did that before or after his fling as an auteur. Somebody should find out what the hell happened to the guy. Maybe there's a movie in it.