FILM ... with Tim Milfull
Last Train Home (M)
Director: Lixin Fan
Rating: 4/5 90-minutes, screening from 17 March
In the two years leading up to 2007, Lixin Fan worked as the sound man and associate producer on Up the Yangtze, a Canadian documentary that charted the human impact of the Three Gorges Dam project in China.
In this sublimely poetic film, documentary maker Yung Chang made a beautiful, tragic story about little people making huge sacrifices for the greater good. Now, in his first feature documentary, Last Train Home, Lixin follows a similar path, examining one of the greatest annual human migrations in history. Each Chinese New Year, more than 130-million itinerant workers catch all manner of transport back to their home towns to visit their families for a few weeks. The resulting jam of humanity is something to behold, and is only complicated when factors like the weather intervene.
Over a period of a year, Lixin followed one family as they made the journeys back and forth from the mundane factory work in the big city to the poverty of their homes. Changhua and Sugin Zhang made significant sacrifices in early adulthood to be able to offer their children opportunities that they had missed out upon.
Working long hours in back-breaking jobs, they hope – like many of their peers – to see their children have better lives. But as their daughter, Qin nears the end of high school, the pair realise that she seems headed for a similar fate to their own.
Demonstrating the skill and patience of a veteran documentary maker, Lixin captures much of the emotional impacts that geographical dislocation has upon this fractured family. The desperation and frustration of both parents and child are palpable and heartbreaking, and treated with utmost respect by those recording their lives. This is truly a beautiful and touching human story.
Fail mark for public schooling
Waiting for “Superman” (PG)
Director: Davis Guggenheim
Rating: 4/5 111-minutes, screening from 17 March
Just over 10 years ago, Davis Guggenheim went into several Washington primary schools to examine the experience of first-graders as they made the transition from carefree childhood to the first step towards being an adult.
The resulting documentary, The First Year, won a couple of awards and propelled Guggenheim towards perhaps the most dramatic production of his career: An Inconvenient Truth. Recently, as his own children neared school age, Guggenheim realised that the public system he had most vehemently defended a decade before might not actually make the grade for his own children.
He subsequently faced his own inconvenient truth – placing his kids in the public system was not really an option.
As he set out to find an appropriate private alternative, Guggenheim decided to see what exactly has gone wrong with the public school system in the United States, and the result is Waiting for “Superman”.
As he uncovers a raft of nightmarish statistics about inevitable failure in many schools, and some abhorrent descriptions of these institutions as “academic sinkholes” and “drop-out factories”, Guggenheim follows the stories of five children who are searching for a route away from the inevitability of their educational futures by applying for scholarships at “charter” or independent public schools. Supported by their hardworking, low-income parents, all of these kids passionately embrace the hope of a better education, and count down the days to the various lotteries that will allocate scholarships.
Waiting for “Superman” is a devastating indictment of teachers’ unions, endemic bureaucracy and incompetence, and wilful negligence; this documentary serves as an abject lesson for parents and administrators alike, for the United States is rapidly falling behind the rest of the world in terms of education. All of this was hard enough to digest, without the heartbreaking emotional trauma awaiting Guggenheim’s five subjects.
THE BINGE....
Mangaificent breasts
Big Tits Zombie (MA15+) now available through Madman
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (MA15+) now available through Madman
Lemmy (MA15+) now available through Hopscotch
Gainsbourg (M) available through Hopscotch from 17 March
With such a title, you’re not really going to have any misconceptions if you pick up Big Tits Zombie from the shelves – this is really going to be one for the hard-core zombie tragics. And after all, director, Takao Nakano has already made films like Sumo Vixens and Sexual Parasite: Killer Pussy so zombies and breasts should come as no surprise. Based on popular manga, and featuring performances by several Japanese porn actresses, everything about this film is what you might expect, and certainly brings nothing new to the genre, or anything else for that matter. This is one for the cult followers. Oh, and if it makes any difference, the DVD comes with old-style 3D glasses!)
I’ll confess to my relative ignorance about Joan Rivers before watching this documentary about her, other than being aware of her reputation for smoky-voiced controversy and an extraordinary devotion to plastic surgery.
But Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (above)sheds a different light on one of the hardest working 75-year-olds in the business.
Following Rivers over a year, this film offers a surprisingly sensitive view of such a publicly caustic figure.
And just quickly before I finish up for this issue of The Binge, I think aficionados of the heavy metal band Motörhead will be keen to pick up the Hopscotch doco, Lemmy, which examines the life of Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister. With the tagline, 49% Motherfucker. 51% Son of a Bitch., the DVD’s extras offer a significant chunk of Motörhead performances and an extended session with Metallica.
Finally, Gainsbourg dramatises the life of legendary French singer-songwriter, actor and director, Serge Gainsbourg; based on the graphic novel by Joann Sfar, the film recently picked up three Césars in France.
