ON FILM : Prom night fun and evils of war
Posted on Friday, April 14, 2006
A few recent DVD releases deserve more time and space than we can give them at this time. All of them should be available through the usual channels. If you can’t find them locally, try the Internet.
The latest from Matson Films, the New York-based distribution company owned in part by Little Rock native Richard Matson, is The World’s Best Prom ($ 19. 98 ) a documentary by Chris Talbott and Ari Vena (otherwise known as the OVO art collective ) about the annual extravaganza held in Racine, Wis., when students from seven local high schools not only hold their proms on the same night but later converge on a central location for a televised postprom super party that’s sponsored by the city, managed by the Rotary Club, and has a tradition that reaches back five decades.
Couples arrive in pimped-out cars, limos and other extravagant modes of transportation (one year, a couple showed up on the back of an elephant ) and walk an Academy Awards-style red carpet as a crowd cheers from a grandstand. Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey played this prom, which locals cheerfully describe as “the best thing about Racine.” Focusing on three seniors who cut across the spectrum of student life — academically challenged quarterback Ben whose older brother provides a poor example; overachieving, arty Tonya, attending the prom with her ex-boyfriend who has declared he will not be speaking to her after the prom (“ I think he’s lying, ” she slyly says ); and Dori, a mildly disillusioned Catholic schoolgirl whose dreams of glamour are drastically discounted on prom night.
While prom is widely regarded as a rite of passage in which the realization never contends with the anticipated ideal, The World’s Best Prom, with its gentle, deeply in- terested interrogatory style, reveals the genuine sweetness of these kids. When Dori says of the Prom King that “it’s nice he got elected, because his lung collapsed a few months ago,” the remark is more touching than comic.
While it would have been easy to find in this Wisconsin town’s tradition a festival of cheese, The World’s Best Prom draws us into the lives of its subjects and makes us care about them. The four-years-later epilogue, in which we catch up on how the kids are doing, is a welcome coda.
SEVEN BEAUTIES I meant to write about Lina Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties when it was released last year as part of the five-disc Lina Wertmuller Collection ($ 99. 98 ). I’ve got a second chance with Koch Lorber’s digitally remastered double-disc edition of the 1976 film about petty Italian thief Pasqualino (a wonderful Giancarlo Gianni ) who — after bungling a murder and sexually assaulting mental patients — finds himself in a Nazi concentration camp near the end of WWII.
The commandant is a large, cruel woman who Pasqualino rightly understands has the power of life and death over him. In some of the most agonizing and uncomfortable “comic” scenes ever committed to film, he attempts to seduce her.
Wertmuller obviously intended the film to conflate the Italian code of machismo with the atrocities of war — Pasqualino is vain and petty, paying lip service to the idea of honor. Seven Beauties is a complex and often challenging film that ought to be mandatory viewing for anyone who believes Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful — which was obviously influenced by the Wertmuller film — is a charming, lifeaffirming work of art. WINTER SOLDIER While it won’t be released until May 30, I want to alert you to Winter Soldier (1972 ). It is not a film many people have seen although it was screened at Cannes in 1972, it didn’t receive any sort of national theatrical release until last year.
It was offered to — and turned down by — ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS at the height of the Vietnam War, but, for reasons that quickly become obvious, it was deemed unacceptable for prime time. Only in 2004 did it receive a new life. Ironically it was revived by opponents of John Kerry’s presidential campaign.
For Kerry was one of 125 honorably discharged Vietnam veterans who testified in the “Winter Soldier Investigation,” an event conducted by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in a conference room in a Detroit Howard Johnson motel in early 1971, about a month after the news of the My Lai massacre surfaced.
A f ilmmaking collective of 18 anonymous filmmakers shot and assembled this footage of the hearing, a crushing catalog of eyewitness accounts of atrocities that belied the official assertion that My Lai was an aberration.
As grave, preternaturally composed speakers recite the litany of war crimes they witnessed — prisoners being bound with wire and tossed from aircraft, peasants slaughtered for sport, the collecting of ears as trophies — one feels assaulted by the depressing barbarity of which mankind continues to be capable. E-mail: pmartin@arkansasonline. com
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