Holier than Taos

A festival with an activist edge

Would anyone dispute that our Boston Film Festival each September doesn't stand for a lot? "Here are a bunch of new movies at the Copley Place." That's pretty much it. In contrast, the San Francisco Film Festival, which is running through May 6, offers a yearly retrospective of someone whose career was interrupted by the Hollywood Blacklist. Elia Kazan, stay clear while oppositional San Francisco celebrates left-wing filmmakers Cy Endfield, Abraham Polonsky, and, this year, activist actress Karen Morley.

Talk about activism: I've recently come from my second right-on year at the Taos Talking Picture Festival in New Mexico, which is about as ideologically alternative (and, occasionally, 1960s purple-pants time warp) as a fest can get. To begin, there was Boston's radical historian-in-residence, Howard Zinn, giving a soaring keynote speech to a turnaway crowd of 600 about "Untouched Dramas," key events in American history (the Ludlow Massacre, the Indian occupation of Alcatraz, the Mother Jones-led march of child laborers on Washington) that Bill Clinton's Hollywood won't dare touch. Then there was WBCN's former News Dissector, Danny Schechter, one of many impressive individuals brought in to promote media literacy to the teachers and students invited to the fest.

And there were the movies chosen, many of them American independents with passion and bite, dedicated in the Zinn way to promoting a "people's history" of the United States. Schechter paved the way with his own Beyond Life with Timothy Leary, a screen bio of the druggy psychologist whom Richard Nixon described as "the most dangerous man in America." David Riker's La Ciudad is a sometimes effective stab at American neo-realism, a black-and-white four-vignette story of impoverished Latin American laborers toiling about New York City. Cambridge filmmaker Nick Curzon's Super Chief, a feature documentary about an Indian election on a Minnesota reservation, proved a Taos favorite, precipitating cheering from the crowd for the noble Ojibwa populist candidates and jeering for Super Chief's turncoat Native villain.

Taos was my first chance to see the 1999 Academy Award Best Documentary nominee Regret To Inform, a disturbing, unforgettable, deeply bitter elegy to the widows left behind, both here and in Southeast Asia, after the war in Vietnam. Filmmaker Barbara Sonneborn (whose husband was an American soldier killed there) takes no prisoners in presenting a world in which American boys sent over there turn into no-longer-innocent rapists and murderers. Sonneborn's own psychic journey ends with her standing in a lush field in North Vietnam where her GI Joe was shot dead, guided by a Vietnamese woman who had fought there with the Vietcong.

My other favorite was On the Ropes, a poignant, Hoop Dreams-like tale of three hard-knocks residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant trying to find some dignity, grab some chunk of the American Dream, through amateur boxing. On the Ropes will be distributed by Fox Lorber, but everyone connected with the film, including co-director Brett Morgan, with whom I shared beers at a party, fears that few will come out to see a boxing documentary. I understand their concern, but anyone who bypasses On the Ropes will be making a dire mistake. I saw it with an audience of baggy-pants teens who ordinarily would never pay to see a documentary, and they were enraptured. Even the most pacifist, ban-boxing person will be mesmerized by the humanity of On the Ropes. Women, too, will relate to the trials and travails of Tyrene, welfare mother and fisticuffs champ.

And the failures of Taos?

The Red Violin, an overblown costume drama in which the title instrument passes hand-to-hand over the centuries: there's a patina of high art, but this is a disappointingly thin drama by filmmaker François Girard and (my friend) screenwriter Don McKellar, who had made real art in their previous collaboration, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould.

Girl, in which Lolita's Dominique Swain is the only legitimate element in a fake LA-standing-in-for-Portland-(Oregon) look at the alternative-music scene. Two moony songs from Summer Phoenix are too many songs.

The Last Movie, Dennis Hopper's 1971 acid-trip follow-up to Easy Rider, is still incoherent crapola after all these years. Hopper, who infamously trashed his beautiful home and made infinite enemies during his bad-vibes time dwelling in Taos in the late 1960s, did it again in 1999, not turning up as promised to receive the fest's Maverick Award. Dennis, Dennis: bad karma!

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There have been "Special Hollywood Issues" ad nauseam from every publication on earth, but the April 5 issue of the Nation did one right. "Ten notable people" were asked to write about a film they felt was truthful about the social and political reality of the US. Among the unexpected choices: Art Spiegelman with Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor; Edward W. Said with Five Easy Pieces; Kathleen Cleaver with American Heart. Much recommended: a round table about movies and politics with Warren Beatty, Alec Baldwin (articulate!), Danny Glover, Tim Robbins, etc. Back issues, at $4 each, are available c/o the Nation, 33 Irving Place, New York, New York 10003.