Movies: silent with monkeys, Romanian with a gory abortion, and biopic with Tina!

This past weekend involved a lot of movies. Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness on Friday night with Miriam and Nick; 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days on Saturday night with Miriam and Andy; and What’s Love Got to Do With It, crashed out at home on Sunday night. Impossible to rank or compare the three. Saturday was also supposed to include a Bert Williams double short with commentary at MoMA, but Miriam and Andy and I waited on the uptown A/C/E platform at 14th Street for a long time before wondering if something was amiss, then we walked all the way to the other end of the platform to read the ONE SIGN explaining that the E was running on the V from West Fourth, and by then it was pretty much too late. But we’d been dubious anyway, since it was two shorts introduced by someone who’d just written a book, for a total of a 75 minute program comprised of about a half hour of film and a lot of talking. The odds of the speaker being fabulous were slim, and the odds of her being awful were pretty good. I think the Jim Henson showcase at BAM was probably the only incredible program like that that I’ve ever been to--but of course, that was Jane Henson, Jerry Nelson, Carroll Spinney, and Jerry Juhl!!!* Big Bird vs. someone who wrote an academic book about a long-dead vaudville performer? So we went to the IFC Center and saw 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, an incredibly disturbing fabulous Romanian movie about an illegal abortion. About as far from a Bert Williams double feature as you could get.

What’s Love Got to Do With It was as amazing as Tiara promised it would be, and brings my recent library-sponsored in-house musician biopic festival to an end: Ray, Walk the Line, and Ms. Turner.* (Plus I’m Not There, which was not library-sponsored or in-house and may not count, being too meta or something.)

But Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness was… not the best of the three, nor the most entertaining, but… the biggest. A 1927 silent, accompanied by the fabulous Alloy Orchestra, it was almost a PBS special but not at all, or maybe it was the first original super-dramatic savage PBS special starring faux Laotians (played by Laotian actors, living a weird western vision of native life in the jungle in Thailand in the 1920's). The guy who introduced it said that directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack set out to make a “new kind of documentary” with Chang; “we’d call it fiction.” The same team made King Kong in 1933, and there does appear to be some kind of progression there.

I realized about half an hour into Chang that this probably would have been the first time most of the original audience would ever have seen live footage of so many animals, which explains why there’s so much of it. The mother of the family central to the plot (Chantui, according to IMDb) seems to have much more affection for Bimbo, the family’s pet monkey, than she has for her infant child. This could reflect western views about Laotian people, but more likely is just an excuse for more wildlife. That's what it seems like, anyway. The movie actually doesn’t venture too much into “savage” stereotypes, although we noted that the intertitles reflected the weird language of “savages” everywhere, including spaghetti westerns and Dr. Who aliens: lots of “O my brothers” and “O chief.” There were also plenty of seemingly random (though of course very deep) Buddha references sprinkled throughout. However, it was NOT Broken Blossoms;*** the Asian characters actually all appeared to be genuinely Asian! And they weren't stupid, or conquered, which was nice. The whole movie tried hard to focus on the relationship between Man and Nature, and it hit some good notes, in between the gratuitous animal footage.

So yeah—too much animal footage. The advertised elephant stampede and their preliminary travels are endless, although the baby elephant is cute. There are also too many tigers and leopards. Plus there is a mama bear and a baby bear, an anteater and a baby anteater, animals upon animals upon animals. It is a drama of the wilderness, I suppose. So many monkeys swinging around in trees, picking fleas off each other, knocking down coconuts… not a movie I need to see again, but I’m glad I saw it.

Now I’m going to read a book.



* the Jim Henson stuff is touring now!


** by the way--wikipedia's list of biopics is remarkable.

*** Broken Blossoms: