Documentaries have replaced
domestically produced feature length fiction films as the staple of this year's
festival.
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Punch Like A Girl/A Ring of Their Own: The
growing sport of female boxing gets a long overdue spotlight in two flashy docs
that demonstrate that gals with ring moxie can still muster a surprising amount
of feminist worthy sisterhood. Maya Gallus and Justine Pimlott's focus on the
Canadian amateur clubs springing up around Toronto, Punch Like a Girl,
alternates the efforts of Savoy "Kapow" Howe to establish her city's
first all-female boxing gym with several impressive bouts as Howe, who
moonlights as a teacher, explains why this ancient sport, long mythologized as
a path out of the ghetto for generations of hungry men, has now become a
platform for female empowerment. Howe confesses her personal inability to
muster a "killer instinct" in the ring, an instinct vigorously
demonstrated by Mary Bennett, an Asian Canadian professional nurse who boasts
of using her knowledge of human anatomy to deliver disabling knockout punches
to the kidneys of her female opponents, including Howe.
Michael Penland's A Ring of
Their Own shows a happily coupled lesbian duo – Anne-Marie Saccurato and
Angel Bovee – helping each other survive in the financially challenging wild
west of women's pro boxing. The couple describe how much they depend on each
other to stay focused in a sport where there are few paydays and where
scheduled bouts may vanish like deer in the forest if an opponent gets wind of
your prowess. The arc of the film follows Saccurato's preparation for her
biggest fight: a ten round brawl against a more experienced Canadian. The film
ends on an exciting display of female pugilistic fireworks as we meet some
articulate and very sexy role models for a generation of young women truly
stretching their boundaries. (Roxie/6-24)
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Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon: Jeffrey
Schwarz's immensely entertaining doc tells the wildly improbable tale of a
little blonde boy who grew up to be a male porn star in order to please his Hollywood
producer daddy. It's the story of little Jack Stillman, whose Beverly Hills
family had shed its Jewish roots to become good media savvy Episcopalians.
Everything in his world pushed a kid, who thought he was skinny with an odd
shaped head, to be something he wasn't. Getting an early taste of the spotlight
as a TV child sidekick, young Jack desperately tried to succeed in show
business, and finally did, but only by slipping almost accidentally into the
burgeoning male erotic film business. Porn directors didn't care a wit about
his line readings, but they loved that he could cum over and over without a fluffer.
Adopting the screen name "Wrangler," swiping it literally off a belt
buckle, the young stud became an erotic star when the movies were still shot on
film and their makers still cared about art. Schwarz has some revealing
insights about Wrangler from pioneering director Joe Gage, whose wildly popular
Kansas City Trucking Co. trilogy facilitated the now ubiquitous macho
male porn image.
Members of Wrangler's celebrity fan
club (including playwright Robert Patrick) explain why it was so important in
the early 70's to have a non-sissy image to worship. The films led to personal appearances
--where Wrangler surprised his horny fans with a comedy act that featured a
disarming, self-deprecating wit – product tie-ins: his enormous cock becomes a
plastic bedroom accessory – and finally a bond with veteran singer Margaret
Whiting that, to everybody's amazement, leads to wedding bells. (Victoria/6-21)
Polymath, or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R.
Delaney, Gentleman:
"I think of myself as the
world's most ordinary, dull, boring black faggot." After watching Fred
Barney Taylor's sophisticated reconstruction of the life of popular queer
science fiction novelist Samuel R. Delaney I very much doubt that the boring is
word to describe this ultimate New Yorker's sixty-four-years and counting.
Actually counting is an apt word since Delaney (son of a successful Harlem
funeral parlor owner) makes a startling use of numbers: in the first act he
describes the prodigious amounts of anonymous sex he was having as a young
closeted writer – Delaney (who seems to have had sex on the brain even more
than Jack Wrangler) estimates that he's had fifty thousand male contacts, and
that he still logs in a hundred or more a year: he slyly notes that young men
have a thing for pudgy seniors with Santa style beards.
Polymath is broken up into
digressive chapters in which Delaney uses his fiction as a jumping off point
for his distinct philosophy. Filmmaker Taylor makes good use of some amazing
home movie footage of the younger Delaney. Ultimately this is a soulful man
whose chronicle climaxes with a tearful moment on a New York commuter train as
he explains to his traveling companions why it was so important for him to have
his students speak up in class. (Roxie/6-20)
Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell:
At some point in Matt Wolf's loving essay devoted to the most talented
musician/composer you've probably never heard of, a friend describes the late
genius as an ahead of his time synthesizer of serious experimental tunes and
disco dance beats, as the inventor of his own genre: "Buddhist bubblegum."
The son of sober Iowan parents, who
had no idea he was gay, a troubled, acne prone musical prodigy, Arthur Russell
(his Christian name was Charles but he hated the dismissive nickname
"Chuck") would flee the cornfields after graduation from high school,
wind up in a San Francisco spiritual commune where he would buddy up with Allen
Ginsberg, later flee to the bohemian and sexually charged badlands of lower
Manhattan where he would blaze a serendipitous musical trail between Philip
Glass and Studio 54. His career cut short by AIDS in 1992, Russell's hundreds
of compositions, such as Is It All Over My Face, have captured a new
generation of Internet fans. (Roxie-6-21)