Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

In Their Own Voices (Thu., Jan. 13, 7:30 p.m., $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6575 / Precious Places (Sun., Jan. 16, 2—7 p.m., free, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St. By definition, there's no such thing as filmed oral history. Once you turn on the camera, you cut into the storyteller's power to define his or her imaginative space. A great storyteller takes you away, and a camera can only show where you are. But two upcoming films use the notion of oral history to create composite portraits of Philadelphia communities: Filmon Mebrahtu's In Their Own Voices, a short documentary that precedes Thursday's I-House screening of Abderrahmane Sissako's Life on Earth, and Scribe Video Center's Precious Places project, whose results will be screened on Sunday afternoon at the Prince Music Theater.

Born in Eritrea, Mebrahtu has been filming Philadelphia's African community for several years, fashioning his footage into short portraits, and those portraits into the mosaic films In Their Own Voices and last year's Rencontrer (To Meet). (Both films are available on a DVD at www.reelvoices.org.) In Rencontrer, the six subjects were connected by happenstance; Mebrahtu often seized on a chance meeting to bridge one story and the next. In Voices the connections are invisible, but no less profound. Each of the film's four subjects is an artist who uses his craft to express a longing for his homeland and the pain of separation. There's Mamady Doumbouya, who makes Africa-shaped clocks for friends; as he puts a sheet of wood to the jigsaw, his hands trace the continent's coastline from memory, but he confesses, "my heart bleeds every time I etch the boundaries" between nations. Mustapha Saccoh, a reggae singer from Sierra Leone, recalls recording an antiwar anthem that became a song of celebration, reaching his country after the violence had subsided.

The Precious Places Community History Project is both wider-ranging and more intimate. Each of the 20 documentaries was conceived by a neighborhood group to document a place with significance to their community; filming took place on May 1 with help from Scribe facilitators. The Frankford Group Ministry collects oral histories and physical evidence suggesting that Campbell AME Church may have been a stop on the Underground Railroad, while North Philadelphia's Friends Neighborhood Guild documents the history of the Friends Housing Cooperative, whose vision of collective, mixed-race living has faded over the years. There's a portrait of a Latino community garden called Las Parcelas and a brief history of Tacony and its founder, Henry Disston, and those are just the four I previewed. Who knows what else is in store? Marking Scribe's 20th anniversary, the Precious Places project suggests that there are as many stories to tell as there are communities to tell them, and perhaps many more.

Mikey and Nicky ($29.95 DVD) Speaking of Philadelphia stories, Elaine May's jittery 1976 film is set entirely on the streets of Philadelphia, although people who've only seen the city in its post-deficit glory will hardly recognize the grungy streets and desolate alleys; a bar at Second and South looks more like a roadside dive in some Midwestern industrial town. But it's a safe bet no one watches Mikey and Nicky for the scenery. As the film's on-and-off cinematographer Victor Kemper recalls in an interview on Home Vision's well-appointed disc, May was almost comically unaware of the mechanics of filming, insisting that Kemper keep the camera "running" for 15-minute takes when no roll of film lasts longer than 10. May's focus, to a monomaniacal extent, was the actors, and with Peter Falk and John Cassavetes in the title roles, who could blame her? According to Jonathan Rosenbaum's liner notes, one of the reasons May took over a year to edit the movie — a delay which prompted Paramount to release the film in an unfinished version without May's consent — was that she toyed with the idea of using the best possible take of every single line, continuity be damned.

The production, as Kemper and producer Michael Hausman recall, often veered off the rails; despite May's background as a writer, she gave the actors so much freedom to improvise that, Hausman says, the script was no more than "very soft butter." Playing an alcoholic gangster who's down to his last IOU, Cassavetes was so unrestrained that in the movie's opening sequence, he threw a liquor bottle out of a hotel window and struck a pedestrian below. After that, Hausman says, they knew to be ready for anything.

Buttery it isn't, but Mikey and Nicky has a softness which contrasts with the characters' hard-boiled exteriors. Mikey (Falk) tends to his bedraggled lifelong friend with touching tenderness, soothing his ulcer with half-and-half and talking him out of his crippling delusions. But he's also a bitter, petty man who lets minor slights fester to the point where he's willing to turn Nicky over to the men who want to kill him. Blind to his friend's betrayal, Nicky unintentionally dodges his would-be assassin (hapless Ned Beatty), shifting moods and locations so rapidly it's all Mikey can to do to keep his bosses one step behind. Situated at the point where comedy's smile twists into tragedy's frown, Mikey and Nicky is a pitch-black farce overlaid with sorrow, or perhaps the other way around.

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle ($27.95 DVD) A word of warning: If, every time you're hard up for an evening's activities, you jokingly suggest, "Let's watch Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," you're eventually going to end up watching Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Luckily, the movie's scattershot stoner silliness is offset by the pitch-perfect pairing of John Cho and Kal Penn and by jokes that undermine the lily-white conventions of the frat-boy romp. Despite what you might have read, Harold and Kumar is more a twist on the formula than a full-on subversion of it. It's not unusual for buddy-movie heroes to end up in jail unfairly, but they're not usually pulled over by a racist cop who makes fun of their names.

In a sense, it's the movie's modesty that's most affecting. It's true that Harold and Kumar assimilates its nonwhite protagonists into a genre that has historically stereotyped and marginalized them — commercials advertised, "starring the Asian guy from American Pie and the Indian guy from Van Wilder" — but it's aware that even stereotypes can be a boon to an audience hungry for representation. When Harold says that Sixteen Candles, with its notorious caricature of a Chinese exchange student, is his favorite movie, you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, but his endorsement is entirely sincere. (I've known Asian-Americans who don't share his enthusiasm.) Harold and Kumar doesn't need to argue its protagonists' place in the spotlight; the assertive power of film makes such arguments obsolete. All anyone who thinks you can't make a stoner comedy with Korean and Indian lead actors has to do is open his eyes. More truthful to the Garden State's racial makeup than, say, Garden State, Harold and Kumar features a pricelessly disturbing cameo from Neil Patrick Harris and a Wilson Phillips joke that made me laugh harder than anything since Anchorman.