Every year at NaFF, there are one or two documentaries that really stand out in my head as the most socially and politically relevant films I know I'll see all year. A couple years ago, it was Milk in the Land: Ballad of an American Drink, which I've cited multiple times in this blog since seeing it (it is as fascinating content-wise as it is style-wise). And last year it was Flow: For the Love of Water. Those two films are about food politics and ecological consciousness as it pertains to consumerism-- topics near and dear to my heart.

This year's V.I.P. film, however, touches on concerns that I see relevant to the project of blogging and participation in digital internet media -- a thing that's also sucked up a very large portion of my thinking life. RiP: A Remix Manifesto is really and truly toppled, ass over teakettle, all the monuments to copyright law that I'd built in my head. It's a shame that the audience for this film consisted of only 7 people, because its argument is one that, if we are to move forward as a culture, creatively speaking, we simply must reexamine how we understand the concept of "intellectual property" before we lose all ability to add branches to that family tree that has been cultivated and nurtured by eons of creative minds before us.

Let it be stated that there is nothing new under the sun. And therefore, the concept of intellectual property is inevitably fallacious. Even my saying there is nothing new under the sun is so terribly un-new that it's attained aphoristic status.

Please allow me to refrain from any and all Star Trek cliches.

Let's face it: William Shatner is deserving of nearly every second of the mocking he's ever gotten. The hamfisted, stilted delivery of every word of Kirk dialogue ever spoken cemented his placement in the firmament of cheesy '70s actors long ago. And the Priceline ads. Oh, the Priceline ads. And, for that matter, oh, every other instance of tonal weirdness that he has contributed to his career. But the thing about Shatner is that one can never be perfectly certain as to when he figured out that the real value of his celebrity is that it's very difficult to tell if he's in on every joke made at his expense.

There are many remarkable aspects of William Shatner's Gonzo Ballet. Among them:

• The Kirk-inspired acid green and red costumes all the dancers wear
• That Nashville's own Purple Onion (a suggestively named porn shop I never visited in all the years I lived here-- pitty) is thanked in the credits. I just want to know... nevermind.
• That the ballet itself is actually good
  
• That it's really hard to decide whether Shatner's album Has Been sucks or is the very manna of genius
  
• That so many notable artistic talents have lent their efforts to both the album and the ballet
• Shatner's opening joke in response to Margo Sappington's request to use his album to make a ballet: "Well, I thought, I haven't danced in years!"
  

Has Been was originally a collaboratively conceived venture featuring the lyrical stylings of Shatner and the musical talents of Ben Folds. Somehow, these two managed to talk the likes of Aimee Mann and Henry Rollins into performing with Shatner on the album and the sum total is, well, campy as all get-out but also very winning in its (seemingly?) earnest commitment. And then Gonzo Ballet is the documentary that follows the conception and execution of Sappington's full-length ballet choreographed to the album, Common People.

Shatner's appearance at the film's showing last night has been the talk of NaFF for weeks now. While I was there during the actual red carpet walk, I was watching another movie (Sita Sings the Blues which was great, but about which I may not have time to post) and didn't see much of the Shatner hoopla. But I was able to sneak back this afternoon for the second showing and it was well worth the little murmur of buzz it's getting-- if for no other reason than it's just so darn good-hearted.

The production quality is low and it's really a rather superficial exploration, but Gonzo Ballet does manage to tweak a little nerve of artistic inquiry. In the watching, one never really is sure when the line between earnestness and irony dissolves. All the folks involved in this collection of projects, from the album itself, to the ballet to the documentary about the album and ballet are most certainly interested in creating valid art that won't make them laughing stocks. Except they're all, including Shatner himself, using Shatner as source material. And that Shatner is connotatively laden as a target of derision is unavoidable. So, the movie then becomes a document of how Shatner has reclaimed -- or maybe claimed for the first time -- his own artistic integrity.

See, now? God knows why anyone thought to make this documentary. But yet again, it is this license to weirdness that makes the breadth of NaFF showings so rewarding.

Oh, and P.S. Watch this short. It preceded Gonzo Ballet and is very ominous and very smartly executed. *Almost* the best part.

Me & Jon & the romantic comedy

A couple of years ago, I put up a rare post containing one of my own poems. It contains the line, "I find it humbling that I'm the same dumb fool for love I was 10 years ago." That might be the most unmitigated moment of autobiography I've ever included in a poem. And my poems tend to be not much more than heavily coded navel-gazing. So maybe it's merely the least obfuscating line of autobiography I've ever written.

Most of the time, I feel like I've pitched my emotional pup-tent somewhere approaching the more neurotic end of the self-awareness spectrum. Like anyone, I miss stuff and feel side-swiped when someone makes an astute observation of me that I did not anticipate. But I suppose I feel so knocked asunder by those observations because it's my own lack of anticipation itself that is rare. So, because I plumb my own psychic depths with some regularity, you'd think I'd have an easier time breaking problematic behavior patterns than some folks who can't or choose not to even see their own metronomic zigs and zags. But this is not the case. In other words, I find it humbling that I'm the same dumb fool for love I always was and probably always will be. I also find it comically ironic that I consider my snarky, bitchy, irreverent self to be no kinda romantic.

Last night, Jon and I went to go see 500 Days of Summer on opening night of The Nashville Film Festival. This little movie's going to have a smallish roll-out in July and, if it catches on, it may well pick up a wider distribution. And it might well catch on. It's a tilted, wistful romantic comedy of the Garden State/The Last Kiss/Wristcutters ilk. It's the sort of film for which I can't really help but begrudgingly offer up my affection, despite my knee-jerk dismissal of its genre. It has a happy-ish ending that still allows for more romantic strife in the offing. It has a skinny, brown-haired, unconventionally sexy male lead who can play soulful without coming off as effete (A Frankenstein's monster made from Zach Braff, Patrick Fugit and Joseph Gordon-Levitt parts would probably be not all that far off from adolescent me's masturbatory fantasy of all that is desirable in a boy.) And it has the overall tone of a Matthea Harvey poem: amused despair at the human condition. I don't know. Something in that salmagundi is what makes a romantic comedy palatable in my estimation. And so, I pretty much hearted this movie in spite of my much-cultivated scoffing cynicism.

Admittedly, it's Gordon-Levitt who works me over for everything I'm worth, in this movie, as in all others. Whether he's fucking a john up the ass as a rent boy in (the near-flawless) Mysterious Skin or slurring through his luscious drunken squint to give us a karaoke rendition of "Here Comes Your Man," (a song that pulled me from the depths of many a funk my senior year in high school) he inspires more affection in me than I knew I could have for a total stranger. I think it's his deep-down command of his physical instrument that I find so compelling. Few men as young as he (seemingly instinctively) understand their own bodily rhythms so well as to be able to shape them to each character's specifications without losing that great settled-into-the-bones aspect of real man. 500 Days in particular really does make the most of this gift. Oh, yes, we are treated to a tonally spot-on "I just got laid" choreographed dance sequence. Not since Ferris Bueller has such an ebullient expression of a character's physicality worked so well. Because sometimes it really is okay, even necessary, to let your movie indulge in that sort of celebration, even if you are a "serious actor."

However, what is truly noteworthy about this cute little film (and it is cute-- whether you interpret that word to mean something complimentary or derogatory) is that it seems to have found a wormhole in the art of making a narrative character arc. It's plot, according to the tagline, is this: "Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't." But that's only the half of it. It's more like: "Boy meets girl. Boy projects soulmate fantasy onto girl. Girl knows better. Boy gets heart broken. Boy suffers. Boy gets drunk. Boy makes an ass of himself. Boy quits his futureless job. Boy refuses to give up hope in spite of girl's straightforward rejection. Boy malingers. Boy begins to heal. Boy hits on new girl. Boy projects soulmate fantasy onto new girl. Boy hasn't learned a damn thing." In landing Tom, Gordon-Levitt's character, squarely back where he started, the film does something really fairly unusual. It shows us an example of such a deeply ingrained, problematic behavior pattern that does not get resolved and yet this ending is no less satisfying for doing so. In fact, it contains the thing that is absent from virtually every happily-ever-after ending: an acknowledgment that even the smartest, most self-aware folks are pretty much resigned to being the same dumb fools for love they always were forever after. In terms of genre conventions, this ending is notable because, really, it subverts the usual model in which the hero learns, grows and changes via the vehicle of plot-driven conflict. In terms of being a reflection of the human experience, this ending most certainly feels like home, if your home was a stylized land, populated with people wearing nostalgic Doris Day dresses and in which you get to make out on the model beds in IKEA, that is.

So, watching this movie with Jon was a complicated experience. Jon and I have had a rough year in the history of us. Last year at this time, I was dating someone and trying to forge a distance from Jon and this year, he's doing the same to me. Which isn't to say that I'm not dating anyone this year-- it's just that trying to keep him at bay was so harrowing that I figured I'd be better served henceforth by keeping a slot open for him on my dance card. A late-in-the-evening, hair-unfurled, heels-kicked-to-the-sidelines slot, but a slot nonetheless

And, nonetheless, we rail against each other and we cling to each other. This jackass (a term of endearment. I think.) has been my closest friend for the last 5 years. However, we did not speak, email, text or gchat for nearly three months in the very recent past. And until Thursday night, we had not set eyes on each other even once since last April's film festival. (Ahem. Unless you count a couple Skype-related indiscretions, that is. *cough* Skype is evil.) Simply put, we are not a couple. We've never been a couple. We could never be a couple. And yet we cleave to each other through petty argument after petty argument, through other lovers, through senseless beat-your-head-against-a-wall frustration that we simply do not process emotional information in similar ways. And the unspent sexual component hangs heavy between us. Yeah, surprise. There's that.

So, upon our first in-person meeting in a year, we went to see a sweet romantic comedy about unbreakable behavioral patterns. Our conversation afterwards was tense and a more than a little mournful. We both know we can no longer reach the level of intimate connection with each other that we've come to depend upon and yet we are utterly flummoxed in trying to delineate the parameters of how our friendship will continue from here on out-- if it will continue at all. Our post-movie conversation also had an ironic twinge that did not go without notice: hilariously, we both identified, to a certain degree, with Tom, with regard to each other. At different moments, I think, either one or the other of us has been the willing supplicant, wishing the other would just go ahead and fall in love already. At the same time, though, we've both always been aware of a element of wrongness about our closeness. We pick at each other too much. We are too quick to find ourselves annoyed with the other. We lug a list of past slights and fights into each new skirmish. There is some underlying fundamental level on which we just don't get each other. We know this. We've exhausted our capacity to discuss it, rationally and irrationally.

So, why, then, can we not just knock each others' names off that damn dance card? Why can't two not-idiotic, thoughtful (if neurotic) people jump off this Ferris wheel of relatively self-defeating patterned behavior? Because we're the same dumb fools for love we were five years ago, that's why.

Learning the lesson that identifies your foibles is one thing. Deciding whether to embrace those foibles or eradicate them is something different. Completely. So then, it is, no doubt, that moment at the end of 500 Days, when the decision washes over Tom's ever-expressive face, his choice to own his peccadilloes rather than transcend them is what earns him, as a character in a completely not-earth-shattering movie, my respect. To do otherwise would be swimming upstream. Or so I tell myself.

N.B. Sorry, Jon, for airing dirty laundry. Please don't kick my ass.