Hot Docs 2010: FREETIME MACHOS

Freetime Machos (2010) dir. Mika Ronkainen
Documentary

***

By Alan Bacchus

A hapless Finnish Rugby team, affectionately known as "the northern most Rugby team in the world," provides the background and entry point for this very pleasing cinematic take on the fragility of the male ego.

Every domesticated man loses a bit of his mojo when he gets married, finds a girlfriend, has kids or "settles down" in whatever shape or form. For the machos in this film, rugby becomes a way of reclaiming one's machismo in a sport where aggression, strength, stamina and guile are essential skills.

Director Mika Ronkainen presents us with an underachieving, ragtag bunch of wannabes who never seem to succeed, charting their season of failure on the pitch. Off the field, we get to know these guys on the road and in the Finnish sauna as they revert to various forms of base male behaviour and sex talk. Amongst his Bad News Bears are Matti and Mikko, one married, one not, and both quietly jealous of what the other doesn't have. Mikko, the married one, mentors Matti on relationships, and all lessons of life and sex, of which Matti is sadly deficient ― a Dumb and Dumber dynamic with some palpable homoerotic tension, which Ronkainen exploits admirably as deadpan humour.

The British coach, Roger, attracts the most compassion. Despite the Sisyphean task of winning ballgames, his professionalism and determination are inspiring. The back-story of his employment with Nokia, which brought him from the UK to Finland, and now, with organizational cutbacks, threatens his employment, emphasizes with poignancy the overarching theme of the loss of manhood.

And so, like great sports films, Freetime Machos is not about rugby, but the need to reclaim one's confidence and respectability in the face of emasculation, which these men find themselves facing every day.

"Freetime Machos" is playing this week at Toronto's Hot Docs Festival

Hot Docs 2010: LIFE WITH MURDER

A Life With Murder (2010) dir. John Kastner
Documentary

***1/2

By Alan Bacchus

A number of great documentaries have been about true crime, and the conflicts facing the Jenkins’ family do not get more complex and fascinating than this.

Ten years ago humble suburban parents of two, Brian and Leslie Jenkins suffered the worst possible crime. In the middle of the afternoon, their teenaged daughter Jennifer was found shot, lying dead by multiple bullet wounds in the basement of their own home – a home invasion perhaps? Armed robbery? After a detailed investigation Jenkins’ son and Jennifer's older brother Mason was arrested and convicted for the murder.

Ten years later, Mason still pleads his innocence and hs parents continue to believe him despite being ostracized and shunned by mostly everyone in their community. Now, Mason is granted visitation rights which means the family can be reunited in a domesticated (though monitored) prison setting just like 'old times'.

Like some of the best true crime documentaries, ‘Dear Zachary’, ‘The Thin Blue Line’, ‘Paradise Lost,’ Kastner parses out his information carefully. Mason comes off as a normal guy – by our first impression we’re actually shocked that he could even be accused of murder. But with the overwhelming evidence stacked up against him, the idea of the trying to have a regular conversation with niceties and pleasantries knowing they're talking to the convicted murderer of their daughter is frightening.

Intercut with the present Kastner goes back to retrace the steps of the case and with Mason’s parents reliving the grisly details of the murder. Kastner even gets his hands on the police interrogation tapes of Mason and his parents being questioned mere days after the murder. The energy and emotional reactions expressed are astoundingly raw, a rare omniscient glimpse into the reactions of people to such heinous tragedy.

As we learn more about the case and see how guilty Mason looks, Kastner puts lays out this earth-shattering conundrum right in front of his parents to face.

Their reactions are not as one would think, and with a twist not even the most melodramatic mystery novel plotting could make believable. It’s a head scratching decision these normal people are forced to make? Disown their own son and thus completely destroy what’s left of their family, or perhaps forgive and try to find some semblance of a functional life together. After all, we have only one life on this earth and their choice remarkably allows them to maintain their sanity, their family, however sorrowful and tragic, and most of important of all, inner peace.

“A Life With Murder” is currently playing at the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto

Hot Docs 2010: THIEVES BY LAW

Thieves by Law (2010) dir. Alexander Gentelev
Documentary

***

By Alan Bacchus

The mysterious Russian Mob is possibly more infamous and feared than the Italian Mafia or the Japanese Yakuza. We were first enlightened to some of the traditions of this most nefarious organization in David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. Now, Russian-Israeli filmmaker Alexander Gentelev offers us some intimate firsthand accounts of these "Thieves By Law," an enlightening and entertainment doc with equal parts shock value and ironic humour.

Gentelev first gives us an adequate summary of the birth of the Russian mob in the Stalinist gulags of the '30s, from which a culture of crime with its own detailed codes of conduct and traditions evolved. We learn about the world within the prison, the brutality and attrition of its prisoners, which became the training ground for the country's criminal organizations. Of course, as we know from Eastern Promises, mob hierarchy is expressed in the tattoos on the prisoners, a form of identification or badges of honour. These characters were scary in Cronenberg's movie and the real guys don't disappoint.

It wasn't until the fall of the Communism that these gangsters flourished, exploiting the fledgling free market capitalism to expand their wealth and influence throughout the country. By the end of the' 90s, the Thieves by Law (the equivalent term to La Cosa Nostra) seemed to be in everyone's pocket and by the end of this millennium, escalated their targets from small businesses to the nation's most influential politicians.

The men Gentelev interviews to bring forth this information are a group of surprisingly frank, yet approachable, Tony Montanas, semi-retirees from the racket who have settled down in far-flung locales such as Paris and Israel, but each with a wealth of hard-line horror stories and tall tales of extortion, torture and murder. The most jaw dropping is the account of one of the men who frequently brought homeless people dressed up as businessmen to his meetings, whom he would decapitate if necessary to prove his commitment to his threats.

The deadpan honesty and even likeability of these folks in contrast to their grisly stories make for an oddly ironic and unintentionally humorous tone. That, combined with the low rent visuals and likely unintentional Borat-like music, adds even more working class Russian flavour to this quirky film.

Hot Docs 2010: MARWENCOL

Marwencol (2010) dir. Jeff Malmberg
Documentary

***

By Alan Bacchus

The title of this film certainly doesn't roll off the tongue. In fact, it's a made up word by the film's subject, Mark Hogancamp, an extraordinary artist who has created his own life by proxy in a made-up town named after his three favourite people: "Ma(rk)-Wen(dy)-Col(leen)."

In August 2000, Hogancamp suffered a horrific assault at the hands of four strangers, a beating that left him brain damaged and near death. His lengthy recovery, which had him relearn how to walk and talk, also inspired some latent artistic talents. Though his physical strength returned, his mental and social capacities were stunted.

As such, a deep fear of socialization prevented him from having a fulfilling life. And so, out of this despair was born a new world completely fabricated by Mark: a European village stuck perpetually in WWII, inhabited entirely by action figure dolls. Hogancamp courageously allows director Jeff Malmberg to point his camera right into his brain and witness this unorthodox form of physical and psychological therapy.

Malmberg is smart about how he parses out his information. As he introduces Mark to us, we see him as a slow simpleton with a weird fetish for G.I. Joes and military re-enactments. His dioramas, including proxy versions of himself, his friends and even his attackers, are all carefully set-up and staged with savant-like detail and precision. That's our first reaction, but the longer we look at these creations a wholly unique form of art starts to emerge.

Mark's photography of his inanimate characters miraculously takes on a life of its own. In another great documentary from this year ― Leon Gasts' Smash His Camera ― a photographer succinctly summarized the art of photography. It's the easiest form of art to create, but the most difficult to master. Lighting and decoration aside, the art of photography is not born from the manipulation of physical elements, but the ability of someone to capture the essence of emotion in an instant through the undiscriminating eye of the camera. Hogancamp has this gift.

Mark's journey eventually leaves his small town when his photographs are discovered by a New York art magazine, which not only publishes his photographs, but sets him up with his own gallery show. This means leaving his town, and for the first time, engaging in social behaviour, which completes his therapy and becomes the emotional climax for the film.

Unfortunately, if anything, Marwencol the documentary is only as good as Mark's photography. While Malmberg captures the photography of Hogancamp's art adequately enough for us to see the genius in his work, it lacks its own artistic panache that would elevate the film to its own level of greatness.

That said, Mark Hogancamp is one of the strangest and unique artists I've come across in a while, which is enough to render Malmberg's film a special creation unto itself.