Sound Taste

Sleep Dealer at BAM

Sleep Dealer, the border sci-fi film I wrote about here and here is screening tomorrow in Brooklyn as part of Sundance at BAM series.

I'd recommend you go see it, but scoring tix might be difficult. According to the BAM website, you can no longer buy tickets online, but "a limited number of tickets may be released at the box office on the day of the screening."

This weekend director Alex Rivera told me that he scored a distribution deal with Maya Entertainment (which I would have known if I'd read the story here). He added that the film should be released next February, which he said "feels like a long time away." Funny to hear him say that when the film itself took the better part of a decade to make.

So, if you can't catch it at BAM, stay tuned for the wider release. And the film's website also lets you sign up for a mailing list that'll alert you to other screenings.

To Boldly Go

Just as a friend thought enough of my post about the Cali Supremes decision on gay marriage and Latinos to re-post it in its entirety, I can't say that I can improve on mole333's post over at the fabulous Culture Kitchen. Nothing like the meeting of geekery and social justice.

Now that the California Supreme Court (all but ONE of whose judges were appointed by Republican Governors, mind you) has declared marriage equality Constituional, we can congratulate George Takei (better known as Mr. Sulu in the original Star Trek) and Brad Altman for their upcoming marriage.

Photo from George Takei.com.

I should note that when non-controversial (which often means "safe-seeming to your Average American) do controversial things, it breaks barriers better than when controversial people do controversial things. The death of Rock Hudson from AIDS made it acceptable in America to die of AIDS. That may sound strange to many, but before Rock Hudson died of AIDS, I remember many people who died suddenly "after an illness" and no one would dare speak the name of the illness. It may have been Magic Johnson who made it okay to LIVE with AIDS in America, but Rock Hudson taught America to accept AIDS as something we didn't have to speak of in mere whispers.

Perhaps the marriage of likeable (and "safe-seeming to the average American") George Takei and his parnter of 21 years (longer term than the vast majority of "traditional" marriages) can break down barriers better than the marriage of someone like Ellen DeGeneres could.

Congratulations to George and Brad.

Congrats indeed. They're going early, but many are following.

Junot footnote

On a Facebook group called Junot Diaz Appreciation (I'm a fan but taking a break from joining more groups), there's a link to a just-post-Pulitzer interview with el escritor on an Amazon site called Omnivoracious.

One question references my piece "Why Wao's Pulitzer Matters:"

Amazon.com: I read online that "Diaz is not the first Latino to win the prize, but he is certainly the first cat from the streets to do so." How does that make you feel?

Diaz: I didn't have an easy childhood (who ever does?). I grew up super-poor, welfare, section 8 and food stamps all the way, in a community where us boys worried all the time about getting jumped and where mad people got recruited by the military. My mother was raising five kids on an income that didn't break ten grand a couple of years. She cleaned houses for people a lot better off than us and I still have this image of her on her hands and knees cleaning bathrooms. I'm as nerdy as they come, a deep lover of books, but those long hard years marked me as deeply as that river marked Conrad and maybe that's what the writer means when they say that I'm "from the street." If that's what the writer's getting at then I'll take it, I've no interest in erasing my particular version of the "American Experience." But if this is some hollow ghetto glorification... I didn't think I was so cool when I only had three shirts in high school and had to repeat twice a week. I didn't feel too "street" then. I felt like a goddamn loser.

For the record, "cat from the streets" was my rendering of tiguere. So no, no ghetto glorification going on, especially since I think Díaz is often read as ghetto by ig'nant folks when he's speaking multi-culturally and multi-lingually, at registers all over the cultural map.

But the real reason to read the shorty online interview is because it features a preview of the science-fiction vein Díaz is mining for a book currently called Dark America. A short scene atop a transport, where assorted Travelers hang on to the precarious handholds on the roof despite fast speeds and trash bombs from overpasses, is much as one sees in buses all over the world.

Score another one for the coming canon of brown sci-fi, finally seeing us in the future.

[tiger = tiguere image via solarnavigator.net; bus in India pix via Excellence in Mediocrity blog]

Review: Sleep Dealer @ ND/NF

Full disclosure up front: I've known Alex a long time, have seen this project develop over several years and have a weakness for brown sci-fi. All that said, this movie is a must-see. If you missed the New Directors/New Films screenings, you might still catch it at your local multiplex soon -- Alex mentioned at the post-screening Q&A that he's likely days from signing a distribution deal.

It is, as my screening partner Roberto put it, a cross between El Norte and The Matrix. Yeah, if Neo had been more racially determinate and Morpheus hadn't been quickly relegated to second banana status. But I digress.

Yes, there are lots of visual and plot point footnotes telescoping through the movie -- e.g. a ships-through-canyons chase straight outta the 1st Star Wars -- but this one's more than a sum of its parts. And even though some of the geopolitical and cultural allusions are up-to-the-moment -- water wars, robotization of military, browning of the military, indigenous resistance movements, the marketability of personal stories, the escalating humiliations of reality TV -- I think the basic characters and storyline will withstand the test of time.

I won't repeat the plot. For that, you can see my original preview. But I want to make a couple of quick observations on the three main characters and on the possibilities of rascuache sci-fi.

Memo, our protagonist, is the archetypal hero figure, who must leave home to find out his true path. But he is also the typical (yet atypically hot) nerd, who turns to technogeekery (he has a "Hackeando para principiantes" book on his desk) as an escape from an environment he sees as limited.

His brother criticizes him for wanting so badly to leave, to separate from the family, its home and its traditions, but in the end, Memo reconciles his family's lesson to value the past with his desire to go beyond the present. The movie hits the right endnote, giving us a Memo who has realized that his path is to "seguirme conectando... y luchando." To connect (hacking into the system through his nodes as well as reaching others) and to struggle.

Rudy, the soldier antagonist-turned-comrade, now has a clearer path to find his true purpose. In the pre-Sundance cut I saw, having Chicano Rudy side with Oaxacan Memo seemed arbitrarily based on their brownness. Now, Rudy's regrets, the trauma of the soldier who cannot entirely dehumanize his "target," and feels moved to make amends, is more credible.

And while Rudy ends up sacrificing his ability to go home again, the fact that he takes a bus South is supposed to tell us he is content with his choice, and that he may end up advising the EMLA (The Maya Water Liberation Army), whose grafitti is sprinkled all over Tijuana.

The character I still have qualms about is the conduit and love object, Luz. While she is a key connector (she serves as Memo's coyotek and unwittingly connects him to Rudy), her job as writer/blogger is depicted as a sort of emotional vampirism. She sells her memories of meeting others to an internet public hungry for stories of "the real," and has her sales uptick only when Rudy orders "custom memories," assigns her to get information on Memo (SPOILER), the son of his first kill.

The question around this character becomes, whose stories do we have a right to tell? What responsibility does the writer have to the people who are the "subjects," whose stories we tell? If we are both involved in a story and I tell it, am I usurping your right to speak? Heady, heavy questions, especially in the age of the tell-all blog and the fake memoir. Who knows, maybe I just feel implicated.

As for aesthetics. How the hell they made this movie on $2.5M is beyond me. The DP, Lisa Rinzler, deserves a medal for her beautiful landscapes and textured harsh lights of Third World nightlife. And the effects might not withstand a frame-by-frame examination, but from my mid-theater seat, they looked pretty darn good, expressing the story, not substituting for it.

Some of the footage was cheated by using snippets of documentary (chillingly, the scenes seen through soldiers' POV of destroying "targets," including people, are taken from soldier-shot footage of current conflicts found on the internet and in "Farenheit 9/11"). And some of the TV images were cannibalized from Alex's earlier shorts. Bricolage, baby!

[Jacob Vargas in "Jarhead" via imdb.com; "Sleep Dealer" still via Criticas]

"Sleep Dealer" at New Directors/New Films

"The Near Future. Like Tomorrow." (tag line from Sleep Dealer)

Friday is the hometown premiere of Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer, at New Directors/New Films. If you recall from my pre-Sundance preview a few months back, the movie is a "rascuache sci-fi" border dystopia about plug-in maquilas, aqua-terrorism and robot soldiers.

Aside from winning two prizes at Sundance -- the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize (for film on science/technology) -- the movie's been getting highlighted in just about every local article on New Films/New Directors.

Today, Tony Scott at the NYT says the film is "exhuberantly entertaining" and calls Alex, ahem, "brilliant." And indieWIRE's Steve Ramos wrote after the Sundance screening that the movie is a "nervy combination of social politics with future shock storytelling." Some of the earlier reviews (see, for example, Variety's) faulted some story glitches and the less-than-million-dollar effects, but I'm hoping for a happy medium (at the stage I saw the movie, there were some story holes Alex promised to work on).

This week's NY Mag has Sleep Dealer as one of four films it highlighted in a pull-out graphic-plus-blurb feature. Note that three of the films NY Mag chose here are Latin@merican, without the usual "New Latin Cinema" label.

But for an oft-repeated yet worth repeating plaint about how Hollywood keeps having Latin American/Spanish-speaking stand in for Latino (why Spanish Javier Bardem and Mexican Gael Garcia Bernal are the hottest "Latino" actors and three Mexican "amigos" are the hottest "Latino" directors), check Jim Mendiola's post about La Misma Luna, which apparently broke Spanish-language three-day weekend box office records with a $2.8M take.

As for Sleep Dealer, I'll be watching it Friday night, and will report back on the finished version. I think tickets are still available, if not for Friday, then for the Saturday 5:30 pm MoMA screening. You can check here.

[Tijuana sky picture from "Sleep Dealer" shoot via Mark Russell's blog; "Sleep Dealer" still via NHK]