Vol 13 No. 35, May 13 - May 19 2004

-FILM-

ON SCREEN Not Funded by Ramtha. The Agronomist dir. Jonathan Demme Opens Fri May 14. It's been a long time since Jonathan Demme has made a good film, and it's been even longer since he made what could be called a "Jonathan Demme film." The Agronomist is a return to mid-1980s Something Wild-era Demme, in the unlikely form of a nonfiction film. It's a portrait of Jean Dominique, a journalistic force in Haiti who spent the last few decades of his life dodging the bullets of various government agencies and bringing honest investigative reportage to the people through Radio Haiti, the country's only source of mass communication not controlled by the state. The subject provides Demme with the kind of electric, exaggerated personalities he needs to fully explore his strange brand of hipster humanism. It also plays directly to his biggest strength, which is shifting tonally from goofball comedy to vivid pathos and frightening suspense. Watching Dominique's electric presence take control of the screen, it's easy to see how this man could have galvanized a nation even under the brutally repressive governments he has seen in his lifetime. Documentaries were invented to record men like this (and I should say that his wife is just as amazing), because otherwise no one would believe they had ever existed. Dominique is too much larger than life to be a fictional creation: He's too passionate, too funny, too optimistic for any actor to play him credibly. Dominique makes the film riveting, but Demme's use of the great man's biography (which begins in agronomy, hence the title) to tell the tragic history of his country makes it important. Anyone wondering about the effects United States foreign policy has on the rest of the world should use Haiti as a case study. Every ounce of positive influence is balanced out by destruction and neglect, and The Agronomist deals with both sides on social, political, and personal levels. ADAM HART What the #$*! Do We Know?! dir. William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, Mark Vicente Opens Fri May 14. I never got around to figuring out what a quantum leap is, but now I think I know: It's when you make a short jump from quantum mechanics to New Age self-help kookiness. That's what happens in this ungainly, inane film, which purports to be about quantum physics but is really about the power of positive thinking, with a midlife-crisis plot (starring Marlee Matlin) and some childish cartoon figures and a series of talking heads who can't stop using the word "paradigm." And an "adorable" black boy who cocks his head cutely like those annoying children on Barney, and asks repeatedly, "Just how far down the rabbit hole [significant pause] do you want to go?" Too bad, because physics is really fucking interesting, especially when applied to questions of perception, of how the world seems as opposed to how it is. What the #$*! tends to pose good questions about the nature of reality and its knowability, and then gets all vague about answers, on the premise that quantum mechanics refuses to strip away your agency, like scientific materialism does, or for that matter, religion. But about a third of the way into the film, the arguments start to tilt hard to the spiritual, with references to considering yourself through the eyes of an all-seeing Observer. As it happens, this language is shared by Ramtha's School of Enlightenment, the school in Yelm, Washington, led by J. Z. Knight, who claims to channel a 35,000-year-old being from Atlantis. And Knight herself commands a great deal of What the #$*!''s screen time, looking like Tammy Faye in soft focus. I've read various claims of the filmmakers' connections to Ramtha, of the scientist talking-heads' connection to Ramtha (although their non-Ramtha credentials are trotted out at film's end to keep us credulous), of possible Ramtha funding, which, if true, pretty much stamps out anything of interest the film has to offer. I'm still interested in quantum mechanics, though. Maybe I'll get a book out of the library. But I'll check the scientist's spiritual credentials first. EMILY HALL Monty Python's The Life of Brian dir. Terry Jones Opens Fri May 14. Now that Mel Gibson's brutal declaration of faith has come and gone, it's time for a film filled with far more Christianity. A film that inspires not with whips but with mockery. Now is the time for a return of Monty Python's The Life of Brian. Originally released (with all the expected controversy) in 1979, The Life of Brian has been puffed and polished for its 25th anniversary. And though it's not quite as funny as The Holy Grail, the film still holds up; smart, quick, and untroubled by the possibility of offending, Python's slapping about of organized religion may be the perfect afterwash to Gibson's epic. The story: Brian Cohen (Graham Chapman), born just a few doors down from Christ on the same day, lives a painfully bland existence in Jerusalem. It is a life filled with new prophets sermonizing and ragged blasphemers being stoned. The Pythons treat the sermons with surprising reverence; the stonings are treated as a sporting event--both tones, reverence and sniping, are used throughout The Life of Brian, which makes for a bit of a tightrope for the group to tread across. That the film stays balanced is a big part of why it's still relevant 25 years later. It's also why it remains funny; by gleefully mocking any and all--from religious epics to radical left organizations, the brainwashed masses to Roman names--The Life of Brian is what a religious movie should be: spiritual and questioning, with a garnish of spite. BRADLEY STEINBACHER

Linking? Use This URL! THE ARGONOMIST: Jonathan Demme becomes relevant again. Recently in Film: Genre Swapping 'The Trilogy' Transcends Its Gimmick (05/06/04) By On Screen Husky Brand Jeans (05/06/04) By Be Cruel, Stay in School Mean Girls Is Happily Uneven (04/29/04) By Emily Hall More...