EDWARD vs. JACOB: Twi-harder

Craig Detweiler — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:55:45 -0800

Forget swine flu. The most intense virus sweeping teens is Twilight. Feverish anticipation for the second part of The Twilight Saga: New Moon has been brewing for months. The most dedicated fans, “Twi-hards,” have taken to the streets of Los Angeles, camping out for days before the second installment of the teen vampire saga opened. Despite blistering reviews from film critics, Thursday's midnight screening set a sales record. It is enroute to being one of the biggest opening weekends in cinema history.

Those who’ve read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series are predisposed to swoon for the tortured teen vampire, Edward Cullen. His radiant appearance, sparkling in the sunlight, echoes David Bowie’s androgynous “Diamond Dogs.” Edward defends Bella Swan with such ferocity, taming his own blood-lust to protect her life. Robert Pattinson brought minimal screen experience (he plays Cedric Diggory in the Harry Potter series) to the role. But Edward’s pale skin and private suffering suited the London-born actor. Pattinson even contributed a couple of songs (‘Never Think’ and ‘Let Me Sign’) to the Twilight soundtrack.

What’s the secret of Twilight’s success? Stephenie Meyer found a perfect vehicle to explore sexual anxiety—teenage vampires. Bella and Edward can only be together as long as their passions don’t consume them. When Edward slips into Bella’s bedroom in the first Twilight film, only Edward’s self-restraint saves them. Holding hands and lying in the grass will have to suffice. Meyer’s modest Mormon roots actually suit our post-sexual era. The Twilight series makes abstinence excruciatingly attractive. At last, a steamy novel of dangerous, forbidden love that every parent can love.

Tween girls may be drawn to the androgynous Edward, but surely, over time, they will come to embrace Taylor Lautner’s washboard abs as Jacob. Give me a hearty, Native American werewolf over a fey British vampire every time. I’m committed to Team Jacob.

I’ve been to Jacob and the wolves’ native lands in La Push, Washington. The home of the Quileute tribe has a raw, rugged beauty. Massive waves crash against rocky James Island. Mist hangs in the air. It is isolated, remote, set apart. It is also horribly depressed. Economic opportunities are almost non-existent. La Push is primed for stories and legends compared to the more pedestrian Forks, Washington. Yet, Forks has cranked up numerous ways for Twilight’s fans to tour the area.

I wonder how the Native American community feels about Twilight? Stephenie Meyer places imported vampires in opposition to indigenous wolves. That’s a new twist on an old American story. But she also trades upon longstanding stereotypes of Native peoples as magical, mystical, and attuned to nature. There’s nothing ‘new’ about that moon.

So what kinds of portraits are worthy of Native American Heritage month? Two captivating alternatives arrived in Los Angeles this week. Evan Adams, the star of Smoke Signals, spoke on the Pepperdine campus on Wednesday night. Evan explodes all kinds of stereotypes, as a gay, Canadian, Native American actor who is also a medical doctor! I screened the smart and subtle film based upon Sherman Alexie’s wry stories on Tuesday morning. Amongst Evan Adams’ funniest lines as Thomas Builds-a-Fire in Smoke Signals, “The only thing more pathetic than Indians on TV is Indians watching Indians on TV.”

Sherman Alexie loaned his considerable cachet to the re-release of the classic 1961 film, The Exiles. It arrived as a special 2 disc DVD on Tuesday. The Exiles is a poetic portrait of Native Americans rambling around downtown Los Angeles. Director Kent Mackenzie led a crew of recent USC grads through a couple years of intermittent filming. Milestone Films teamed with USC and UCLA archivists to restore this truly indie film. What a luminescent, black and white time capsule they’ve uncovered. These exiles are still trying to find their place in the City of the Angels.

Documenting Los Angeles

Brett McCracken — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:02:08 -0800

Los Angeles is without a doubt the most visually documented city in the world. But it is also one of the least known or truly understood. What is this place we call L.A.? Besides all the Hollywood stuff, what is its history and culture? How do we make sense of it amidst all the glittered sidewalks, scientologists, palm trees, car chases, sunset strips and skid rows?

This is one of the questions raised each year at the City of Angels Film Festival, held in Hollywood’s Director’s Guild theater and hosted by various Christian universities and organizations in the Los Angeles area. The festival, which got its start after the Rodney King riots brought the city to its knees in 1992, is a distinctly L.A. festival that has always focused on films with spiritual vitality and in recent years has also probed deeper into the heart of the place of L.A.

This was evidenced last night at the opening night of this year’s festival. The films screened—The Garden (a 2008 best documentary Oscar nominee) and The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie’s recently restored, largely forgotten classic from 1962)—are both very vivid documents of the city of L.A. They are not just films set in this city, but films about this city; and watching them reminded me of why I love living here so much, and why I love cinema.

The Garden documents the struggle of immigrant farmers in South Central L.A., whose community garden was repossessed by the city a few years ago, setting off a firestorm of controversy and protest that (among other things) brought out celeb activists like Daryl Hannah and Zack de la Rocha. The film is a raw and unpretentious documentary (though not without clear political allegiances) that presents us with the oft-unseen plight of the immigrant communities of urban Los Angeles. Say what you will about the politics of the film, but as a thoroughly “L.A.” time capsule of a specific episode in this city’s storied history, the film is a treasure.

The Exiles is even more of a treasure. This 1962 film—unseen by all but the luckiest few filmgoers—has recently been resurrected, restored, and will soon be released on DVD. A classic of the American New Wave, with strongly neo-realist tendencies, The Exiles brings us back to a time and place (a community of Native Americans in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of downtown L.A. circa 1960) that is now completely vanished from this city’s history. Few remember this place, and watching this film it’s hard to imagine that this world ever really existed in the first place. It’s haunting, gripping, visceral. The black and white photography of “urban exile” Native Americans living one 12-hour, frolicsome night in beatnik bars, expressionist streets and dizzying neon capitalism is a singular gem of cinematic historical documentation.

These films reminded me that, of all its other merits, cinema at its best can offer us unparalleled archival access to the concrete people, places, and circumstances of an always-moving, forever changing world. The “taking in of truth” that the camera provides us, organized by the curator hands of filmmakers with vision, opens up the reality and objective thing-ness of what otherwise are only abstract memory mirages or arbitrary imaginings of “how things were.”

the Exiles

EDWARD vs. JACOB: Twi-harder

Documenting Los Angeles