Sunday, October 18, 2009

Night at the Movies!

This weekend was the kickoff of the 8th Annual S.F. Documentary Film Festival held at the Mission's Roxie Cinema and Maia and I pulled a double-header tonight and caught Cat Ladies and What's the Matter With Kansas?. Though both were clearly documentaries they also could fall under the sub-genre of "tragic documentary", as both made me want to curl up and bawl in an alley. I don't need a filmmaker to remind me that we live in an enormously F'd up world.

Cat Ladies is exactly what you might expect of a movie with that title: a biographical look into the lives of women who horde cats. Normal people (yes, I realize "normality" is subjective and I'm only using it here to make a point) don't horde cats, as you'd imagine, and each of the subjects had some trauma or another in their pasts to usher them into that lifestyle. One thing they all have in common is crushing loneliness, but it's difficult to feel too sorry for them when they're blind to the fact that their hording is mostly what repels people, thus injecting them into a perpetual cycle of isolation. Meow.

What's the Matter With Kansas? is based off of Thomas Frank's book by the same name that explores how Kansas went from being one of the most radically liberal states in the Union in the 19th century to becoming the volatile cauldron of working-class, right-wing, evangelical Christian, Republican voters it was at the end of the 20th century. Well, that's what the movie would be doing if it hewed closely to the book, as I thought it would. However, the documentary version doesn't do a sufficient job linking Kansas's economic and agricultural stagnation with the rise of the evangelical right, as Frank did well in his book. Instead, What's the Matter becomes just another look inside dysfunctional right wing families at the caricatures of reasoning human beings that are created in such a crucible. On a positive note, if you ever want to see the hilarious insides of Petersburg, Kentucky's Creation Museum, but don't want to actually ever get within a thousand miles of the place, this film allows you to live vicariously through the eyes of a vacuous gaggle of home schooled future Jerry Falwell wannabes and listen as a man with a Ph.D. in astrophysics explains just why the widely supported model for how stars and planets form is wrong and God is the answer for everything, all with his head lodged deeply in his ass.

--Matt

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