Film Review: Diggers

Diggers is a small, intimate movie that captures a snap-shot of life in South Shore, Long Island in 1976. There's a golden, harvest hue to the interiors, and faded plaids and feathered hairstyles donned by the characters that give the film a subtle seventies look. There's no glitz and mirrored disco balls, in fact, I don't think there's even a disco hit on the soundtrack. In other words, the decoration is authentically the 1970s, but without manufactured plasticity or nostalgia.

Times are changing, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter reiterate that message on television, and for the thirty-somethings native to this isolated area of New York, they see it in everything. I can't recommend Diggers as a particularly moving story, for somewhere in between the layers of mundane family experiences, and close chats among friends, you get the sense early on that this movie isn't meaning to plunge us into a tale with an overarching moral or lesson. Instead, it's a slow picture of what the characters' lives feel like; it's the last remaining piece of small town life in South Shore, before priorities among friends, family, and career get rearranged.

Written by Ken Marino (co-creator of MTV's The State), the story follows a group of South Shore "diggers," clam diggers that have spent their lifetimes on ramshackle boats raking clams for a living. But when a competing corporation usurps digging waters, the locals are left penniless. A brother and sister, played by Paul Rudd and Maura Tierney, are coping with their father's death, a man who sustained his family by digging. He's the concrete image that symbolizes an era past. He was the last remnant of local industry, and the last of a generation that maintained a small town lifestyle. Frankie (Ken Marino), a friend to the family and father of five, is out of work too. The film has a pungent scent of frustration, depression, and confusion. Beneath those layers of discomfort the characters know they are skilled workers, good fathers and mothers, and good friends. Though the world is moving fast ahead of them, and the only way they can keep up is to change themselves.

Here's a bit of a spoiler, but by the film's end nothing revolutionary does change for the folks in South Shore. Lackadaisically, the afternoons come and go, the evenings twittered away at a local bar, and not much urgency graces their day. The characters don't show us how they're going to change the future, there's no action-plan set forth; but they give us a peaceful picture of a small world on the cusp of non-existence.

Diggers was released by Magnolia Pictures and is available on DVD now. Check out the film's official website for details.

F'd Up

I admit I can't claim to have known who Mike Daisy was before my friend forwarded this to me this morning. However, as this presents the increasingly relevant issue of the intersection between performance art, theater, and mass media, I decided it was worth posting to this site.

What would you do if you were performing in a show and THIS happened to you?

(You can read more about the performance on the 4/20/07 blog entry on Mike Daisy's website, located here.)

Had this happened ten or twenty years ago, word of the incident most likely would have been limited to regional press and those who were actually there to witness it. Consequently, the event itself might have simply gone away without anyone noticing. But with the advent of YouTube, everything has been recorded faithfully for the world to see, thus turning an evening of live theater into a mass-distributed mini-document(ary) for general consumption. But, that's not the issue here. I mean-- is anyone else just generally disturbed by what happened??? Seriously, who ARE these people that they would have the gall to get up and actually interefere with the performance, no matter how offended or disgruntled they might have been? It's one thing to be offended by a performance and walk out; that's totally someone's prerogative to do so. But, to storm in and actually destroy the performance at hand? That's equally as offensive-- both to the artist and to the audience members who are actually enjoying themselves. There is, after all, something known as theater etiquette. Where were these people raised? In a barn? Truly incredible.

So Many Movies! So Close!

Hey, Kids:

The Tribeca Film Festival is gearing up to descend upon Gotham in just a couple of days. It's going to be all-out movie madness all over town for serious cineastes, celebrity oglers, and hipsters/poseurs alike!

I'll update the site as often as I can with short reviews of films seen, celebrity sightings, and overall impressions of the festival as it goes on. Hope to see you there!

Remembering (and Recuperating) the IT Girl, Clara Bow

Hello all! Please excuse my late introduction, I somehow lost track of time when Scarlet Cinema first got up and running. But I'm very happy to participate and really think the blog looks great. Bravo Pamela and to everyone else for their contributions thus far.

As I am a PhD student in the Cinema and Media Studies Program at UCLA, we have access to the wonderful and vast UCLA Film and Television Archive and I am a member of the student graduate film club The Crank (see our spring screening schedule at Link to other Website . We program films from the archive collection every Wednesday in the James Bridgers Theater at UCLA, and this past week we screened Dorothy Arzner's The Wild Party starring the lovely and popular Hollywood star of the late 1920s, Clara Bow, in her sound debut. Seeing Bow speak on the big screen once again reminded me of all the rumors that Bow did not make the transition to sound cinema because her supposed-heavy "Brooklyn" accent and that she was plagued with mental health issues that resulted in her dismal from Paramount Studios. Yet when one views this film, anyone can see that Bow had an emotive voice that matched her kinetic and vivacious screen persona cultivated in silent films. Skillfully directed by Dorothy Arzner (herself the sole major female director working in Hollywood during the 1920s and 1930s), Bow shines as Stella Ames, the wild party girl who learns to appreciate the opportunity of education under the tutelage (and love) of her professor (played by Fredric March).

How did the rumors supercede the actual events of Bow's career and life as a Hollywood actress struggling to make the transition to sound films in the late 1920s? In my doctoral research about female stars of the 1930s using their contract labor to earn professional agency in the Hollywood studio system, I have come across archival documents underscoring Bow's shrewd business knowlege, which she utilized in her astoundingly successful comeback in 1933 at Fox studios. For her triumphant comeback in the hugely successful lurid melodrama Call Her Savage (1933), Bow was mobilized her star power in order to muscle increased creative autonomy and a lucrative salary in a two-picture deal. She received $75,000 per film, plus script, director, and costar approval and she demanded a closed set during filming. Moreover, once the film grossed $800,000, Bow would receive an additional $25,000. Afterwards, Bow filmed the deligthful circus film Hoopla and then decided to retire--she had proven herself as an actress and sucess in Hollywood.

It seems striking to me that her career and legacy as an actress has been so misunderstood. But as her biographer David Stenn has noted, perhaps the issue is really about access to and the preservation of her films. The silents like It have been far more available while her early Paramount talkies (most of which suffer from predictable stories and odd staging due to early sound technology) and her Fox comeback films (denied re-release after the 1934 Production Code for their sexual, adult themes) remained widely unseen since the early 1930s. So much of our conception of film history has been shaped by what films survived the test of time and more importantly, what has been in circulation and seen. Whatever the reason, it was very satisfying to see the lovely Ms. Bow on the big screen in her own element last Wednesday, and hopefully cinefiles and film students will be able to see more of her. This will no doubt help reclaim and recuperate her image from a victim to a talented actress and charismatic film star who left an indeliable mark on twentieth century American culture.

Pearl the Landlord

I've been laughing my ass off at Will Ferrell and little Pearl nonstop. Enjoy!

The University of Chicago Graduate Cinema Conference

The Graduate Student Conference last Saturday at the University of Chicago was surprisingly awesome, and I only almost fell asleep once! (It was after lunch, and after nearly 4 hours of lecture in a dim, quiet room.) "Animation and The Cinema" was the topic, and it drew in scholars from USC, Harvard, UT-Austin, Brock and York Universities in Canada, and of course, a fine helping of U of Chi grad students.

The night before kicked off the event with screenings of Max Fleischer's Swing You Sinners, the Quay Brothers' Street of Crocodiles (my favorite of the bunch), Jan Svankmajer's Faust, a delightfully creepy play of wooden puppets coming to life among live humans; and The Mascot (Fetiche) a French claymation/live-action piece from 1934 about a stuffed dog that gets trampled in the hectic Paris streets in search of an orange to bring back to his keeper, a little girl.

Saturday lectures began at 10:00 am and concluded at 6:30pm after the keynote address from Assistant Professor Nic Sammond of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. After his presentation ("The Thing Is, Or, Animation, Alterity, and Indifference") I heard murmurs from bigger minds than mine questioning his definition of the "optical unconscious," but you say tomato. The grist of the conference, however, was from the home team heroes, the U of C PhD candidates, who are going to kick Tom Gunning's ass (in the figurative, scholarly, and v. respectful sense, of course) in the next decade with their own scholarship.

Top favorites include Andrew Johnston's presentation of clowns in cinema, "The Anatomy of Mirth: Clowns, Performance, and the Animated Body"; Julie Turnock's dissection of special effects in 60s and 70s American cinema, "Heavy Light: Animating with the Optical Printer in the 1960s and 1970s"; and the ever intense Inga Pollman's "Non-organic Living Pictures: Richter's and Eggling's Scrolls, and Rythmus 21," a thesis that would have to be presented to me again to share an ounce of its complexity. An honorable mention goes out to Peter Alilunas (UT-Austin), whose paper on the future of both live action and animation filmmaking is questioned in an industry that continues to be dominated by the CGI phenomenon.

Here's a portion of the Quay Brothers' Street of Crocodiles put to a Tool song. Turn the sound off and watch. It'll give you a good idea of the film.