Director has her own rhythm

You may never have heard of Darnell Martin, but you've probably seen her work as director of several episodes of Law and Order and other popular TV shows.  Television directors just don't get the same attention as film directors, and women in the business rarely get much attention except as actresses. She's been working in the business since the 1980s at first as second assistant camera on  Do the Right Thing, and as a writer, learning her craft with hands-on experience.

A couple of things about Martin are striking. When she made her1994 feature debut, I Like It Like That, she was the first African-American woman to direct a studio feature - certainly an attention-getting distinction, and she didn't want a big deal made of it.  She told American Visions magazine "It pisses me off . . . I wasn't thinking about trying to do something politically correct. I was trying to follow the human beats. My foremost interest in filmmaking is about character, about the environment of my characters. I wasn't trying to do a film about Latinos or women or anything like that. I just tried to make a film about people." 

Her feature films seem (at least to me) to have a documentary flair. The 2005 Their Eyes Were Watching God, based on a Zora Neale Hurston novel, tells us almost as much about life in an all-Black Florida town in the 1920s as about one woman's search for love and respect. And of course the 2008 Cadillac Records is rooted in the reality of 1950s Chicago blues, with all its raunchiness and exploitation. Several reviews seemed particularly vicious and petty, with complaints like "Beyoncé Knowles doesn't look anything like Etta James."  (Oh, please!) It's the music that matters, and the music is great in this overview of Chess Records and the movement of "race music" into the mainstream. Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle gets it: "A good general rule is that if one performance is good, credit the actor. But if everyone in the movie is doing excellent work, this is no coincidence. This is the product of superior direction."

Martin is identified as a pioneer of black film, which has a 100-year history in the United States - kind of funny when you think that she was born in 1964 in the Bronx. "There would be no Denzel Washington without Sidney Poitier and no Sidney Poitier without Paul Robeson . . . no Gina Prince-Bythewood without Darnell Martin" writes Nsenga K. Burton Ph.D. at http://www.theroot.com/views/celebrating-100-years-black-cinema-0 which is altogether worth reading.

Martin has not announced any upcoming film projects, but has scheduled a couple of episodes of Happy Town  and one of Mercy for 2010.

The lovable horrormeister

There are several endearing things about Stephen King. When he suspects there's a monster in the closet he opens the door to face it head on. His stories, even when they focus on boys and men, often include a brave and resourceful woman, or a little girl, as in the 1999 The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. A few of his novels could well be considered feminist.

With a new book just out from Simon & Schuster,UR, first available only on the Kindle e-reader, and the Pocket Books re-issue of the 1980 Danse Macabre it's a good time to look at this very prolific and very successful author. UR expands his suspicion (shared by many of us) that our technological toys have a dark side - the e-book reader opens worlds we didn't suspect and don't much like. It's not a new idea; Lewis Carroll did much the same; Alice's adventures in Wonderland were not entirely pleasant.
He has done it before with cars (Christine and From a Buick 8), household appliances (Maximum Overdrive), the cell phone (Cell) and exercise equipment (Stationary Bike). (Why he hasn't treated the home computer as a possible source of unspeakable horror is beyond me.)

Danse Macabre, a long-time favorite of mine, explores the horror theme in folktales and mythology for a University of Maine class on "Themes in Supernatural Literature." Pocket Books will publish a reprint with a 2010 foreword on February 23. It's one of the most accessible and entertaining treatments of the subject, and certainly worth reading now when our television and movie screens drip with the gore of romanticized werewolves, zombies and vampires.

King has been derided by many critics and sneered at both by literary authors whose work wasn't doing so well and by timid readers who preferred romantic fairy tales with guaranteed happy endings.

He doesn't always hit the bull's-eye, and sometimes the quality is all over the place in the same book. His work often seems to be produced by two distinct personalities, one a kid enamored of ripping yarns, the other a thoughtful, even spiritual, adult. It's a topic he has dealt with in Duma Key, The Dark Half and in his autobiographical On Writing, in which he discusses his years of addiction to drugs and booze.

In The Dark Half his writer protagonist is forced to confront his own demons and darkness. In Duma Key a construction worker loses his right arm, and gains artistic and psychic abilities which would be surprising anywhere but in a King book. Both have mesmerizing sections on the sources of creativity, as well as passages I'd just as soon skip on horrors and creepy crawlies. That's not because they scare me – they don't, in fact, I usually find them pretty amusing – but because they seem shallow next to his explorations of relationships and the psyche.
The latter gives us much of the weight of the horrific history of a pioneer Florida family, and some far more cheerful little gems on creation, titled How to Draw a Picture. They could just as well be called How to Write, or How to Live. Samples:
I: “Start with a blank surface.
IV: “Start with what you know, then reinvent it.”
XI: “Don't quit until the picture's complete. . . . Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter.”

Find lots more at his website, http://www.stephenking.com/index.html

Doc workers

For most of them it's a labor of love.  They know they won't get the audiences or the media coverage of feature films, or even be shown in many theaters. Many times documentary filmmakers don't even recoup the costs of production. They are not part of the Hollywood dream machine, letting us escape into the happy endings of romantic comedies or the cathartic adventures of fictional adventure and the supernatural.

Instead, they ask us to look at reality -- or at least the reality of the filmmaker -- and they're not popular with theater managers, who schedule films they think will attract young audiences looking for great special effects and lots of explosions.  In my community, we've had to lobby for theater showings of Michael Moore films, and we've had some success with that. The chain that runs the single multiplex in the county didn't think there was an audience for Moore's political films, but the manager responded to numerous requests and got respectable audiences.

The finalists in documentary features for this year's Academy Awards are Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, The Cove, Food, Inc., The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, and Which Way Home.

We've seen some of them at an underground venue, a monthly series run by a local woman who starts her fourth year of showings this month. She has tried showing a couple of feature films, but "they're just not wanted."  Her biggest audiences, 80-plus people, were for a locally made film by and about the Native Americans of the area and for Moore's Sicko. 

The opportunity to discuss films is as big a draw as the chance to see them, she says.  You don't get that in your living room unless you've invited a bunch of friends over for potluck and a DVD.  It makes me yearn for the big city art-house theaters with their lobby tables and espresso bars to encourage conversation.

The Cove, about a Japanese village where dolphins are ruthlessly captured for the tourist industry and killed for their meat, didn't do so well in the local showings, with an audience of only 12.  Perhaps that's because it's available on Netflix.

So is Food, Inc., which compares the pastoral image of farms promoted by the food industry with the reality of the industrial factories which dominate food production. 

The wider availability is reportedly affecting film festivals, a primary venue for the docs. A worldwide economic slump is certainly part of the reason for lower attendance, but another factor is the Internet.  Time- and cash-strapped distributors can find enough information on YouTube and other sites to make decisions without trekking to the festivals.

Which leaves the rest of us in small and rural communities to our own resources and their sometimes questionable legality. There are filmmakers who urge us to show their work to as many people as possible -- and others warn us that Interpol and the FBI are watching and we could be liable for steep fines. Maybe we should be lobbying for nominal distribution fees when our venues are the local senior center or a church.

Foodies expand beyond cookbooks

We've had a strong - perhaps unhealthy - focus on food for many years in this country, maybe because we have such an abundance and variety compared with most of the world. That focus has changed in the last few years from gourmet meals and the latest trendy recipes cooked up by the foodies to a concentration on local and healthy, driven in large part by authors like Alice Waters and Barbara Kingsolver.

The latest food guru is Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at the University of California Berkeley, who has just produced Food Rules. Some examples:

#19 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.

#36 Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

#47 Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.

#58 Do all your eating at a table.

#64: Break the rules once in a while.

His earlier books are In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, winner of the James Beard Award, and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which was named one of the ten best books of the year by both the New York Times and the Washington Post; a young readers' version of The Omnivore's Dilemma: the Secrets Behind What You Eat; Second Nature, The Botany of Desire, and A Place of My Own. Pollan appears in Food, Inc., a documentary film on the food industry, and The Botany of Desire, recently broadcast on PBS. He is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.

Pollan doesn't like the dependence on corn as an ingredient in many prepared foods, he does like local production and buying and farmers like Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms in Virginia, another foe of industrialized farming. There's a good recent interview with Salatin at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/31/food-industry-environment

Our damaging dependence on oil has much to do with the current shift in food concerns. It's estimated that much of what we eat travels 1500 miles to our tables, a huge consumption of energy that might be better used to heat and light our homes.

An epidemic of obesity is also a huge factor, with fast food being blamed for much of it. Morgan Spurlock's Super-size Me, about his very fattening month of eating only fast food, was a breakout hit at the 2004 Sundance Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.

This year, the Los Angeles Times says Robert Kenner's Oscar nominee Food, Inc., evokes the muckraking advocacy journalism of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. That's because some of the problems with early 20th century food production haven't gone away, he said. "It's shocking to see how far backward we've gone" in policing what we put in our mouths, he said.

A casualty of the new foods sensibility has been Gourmet magazine, shutting down after 70 years.

At the very least, the new food rules should give us second thoughts about what we snack on at the movies.