John Menick Blog | Archive for ‘Curating’

On April 7 at 7:30 at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, two films I programmed will be screening as part of the Côté court 2006. The festival as a whole looks fantastic, but here are the details on the two films:

The Beaver Trilogy (2001)

The Beaver Trilogy starts as a documentary, circa 1979, where director Trent Harris and his camera meet the young Groovin’ Gary in a Salt Lake City parking lot. Gary is a homegrown ham looking for an audience, and he charms the cameraman into attending his drag show at the local high school. With a lot of pageantry and Olivia Newton-John tracks, the show ends and so does the first segment, but after a few moments, the film circles back to where it started. Again, the same parking lot and camera crew, but this time shot in low-fi black-and-white video, with a young Sean Penn playing a fictionalized Groovin’ Gary. After watching the not-yet-famous Hollywood actor channel the ambitious Gary, the film stops and starts once more, this time as a fiction film with Crispin Glover playing a confused and repressed Gary. At once a crazed meditation on the impossibility of recovering the past, and an unpretentious portrayal of one of the most endearing people in the state of Utah, The Beaver Trilogy is the docudrama’s low-budget answer to the Technicolor metaphysics of Vertigo.

Perfumed Nightmare (1978)

A rare find, and a bit of a cult classic, this unselfconscious DIY film feels as if it makes itself up as it goes, and with almost no script and no money, Kidlat Tahimik manages to make the Philippines’ anti-colonialist answer to the Odyssey. The director stars as a Filipino cab driver that relocates to Paris and Germany in order to help an American businessman run his gumball machine, but Perfumed Nightmare’s plot is a ruse. The real story is in the background, in the jungles of the Philippines and the streets of 1970s Paris, where change is everything and the future threatens the very existence of films like this one.