Boy, those words stick
The intimate documentary Shut Up and Say Something gets inside poet Shane Koyczan’s enormous appeal.
SHUT UP AND SAY SOMETHING
A documentary by Melanie Wood. Rating unavailable
Shane Koyczan is a gifted wordsmith and 2
a mesmerizing performer who’s won international recognition inside a field that has produced, as fellow spoken-word artist Mike Mcgee points out in this brisk doc, maybe five famous names at best.
It’s an unlikely career. With its souvenir bebop rhythms and often substance-free wordplay, spoken word has been ripe for ridicule since the ’90s. Yet Koyczan has profited from his charisma and sensitivity, communicated through dispatches from the frontlines of his pain, which we know comes from a childhood blighted by abandonment and bullying. Melanie Wood’s film covers all of this efficiently enough with archival VHS video sitting alongside viral Youtube animations, Ted Talk clips, and footage of other auspicious moments from a soaring career, like the acclaimed Vancouver Opera collaboration Stickboy.
Of the collaborators who talk on-screen, the talented cellist Hannah Epperson bleeds sincerity and offers some of the more resonant descriptions of the Koyczan effect, although it’s the man himself who provides, in what amounts to a rolling 90-minute interview conducted by Stuart Gillies, the best insights into Shane Koyczan. If you’re a fan, this is all catnip.
Still, since this is a guy who’s already abundantly revealed himself through his public persona, you find yourself wondering if we really need to see how the sausage is made. (Or how it’s lost, as when he leaves an ipad containing five years of material on a train.) Shut Up and Say Something calls its own existence into question more than once in this way. What are we learning here except that Koyczan, all protestations about his social awkwardness aside, seems like a good hang?
We meet his grandmother, who raised Koyczan and remains the most important relationship in his life, and who reminds him, in one very funny moment, that his shit still (literally) stinks. The real meat of the film, however, is Koyczan’s reconciliation with his father. To our relief, given such a potentially disastrous scenario, Len Koyczan turns out to be a sweet and thoughtful man quite willing to take responsibility for his less admirable life choices (leading to a genuinely very moving, if perhaps unsettlingly invasive, final scene).
Being of Cree heritage, he also talks about residential school, addiction, and prison time, which is where the film leaves some inevitable questions unanswered. With its obstinately Koyczan-like focus on internal landscapes, Shut Up doesn’t seem too curious about the generational trauma we discover being replayed elsewhere, possibly, as with a half-sister and her own fractured family.
The film also reminds us, right off the very top, quite uncritically, that Koyczan’s international celebrity began with a blast of wishy-washy, hopedrunk nationalism at the 2010 Olympics. Furthermore, there’s no mention of the poet’s subsequent
disavowal of that piece, “We Are More”, in a 2015 Facebook post that describes Canada as a country “run by criminals and big business”. More of that, please!
But that’s me, I guess. If the film and its subject both tend to be assiduously apolitical, Shut Up still reminds us time and again that Shane Koyczan means something to a lot of good people. Throughout the film, this genuinely popular phenom is approached on the street or at book signings to receive tremulously delivered thanks for the impact of his words. Nobody can pretend that doesn’t say something, so with that I’ll shut up. > ADRIAN MACK
LOVE, CECIL
A documentary by Lisa Immordino Vreeland. Rating unavailable
Long-vanished worlds are invoked in this instantly 2 gripping portrait of the late Cecil Beaton, himself a master portraitist who captured souls with camera, brush, and pen. Love, Cecil makes the case that his best subject was always himself.
Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland, who previously profiled art patron Peggy Guggenheim and her own grandmother-in-law Diana Vreeland, digs deep into Beaton’s acerbic diaries, supported by copious interviews drawn from later in life. There’s a special emphasis on his youthful ascension, between the wars, as dream catcher to the Bright Young Things of the 1920s.
Born to a middle-class merchant in 1904, Beaton described himself as a bad student and a worse technician, but he was “horribly driven” and taught himself to use various-format cameras to bring out the best in his aristocratic betters, who found him an amusing mascot. His luminous and highly theatrical stagings displayed these flighty friends as they saw themselves: gorgeous artnouveau creatures from out of Aubrey Beardsley drawings or plays by Oscar Wilde.
In the early years, Beaton often depicted himself in women’s clothes and makeup, and did little to disguise his sexuality, although he did swoon for certain women. Leslie Caron, who got to know him when he designed sets and costumes for her
breakthrough, Gigi (he famously did the same for My Fair Lady), insists that he had a genuine romance with Greta Garbo, and even proposed marriage after she had retired from movies. Garbo laughed.
Other interview subjects, including ’60s fashion photog and cockney upstart David Bailey, decry Beaton’s incessant social climbing, while painter David Hockney is still grateful for his early patronage. Indeed, the aging cameraman bathed young Queen Elizabeth and other royals in the most ennobling light to be found on Earth. At the same time, he proved his mettle with little-seen street photography—a highlight in this nicely designed, 98-minute film—and in beautifully humanizing pictures of combat troops in the Second World War.
He needed that gravitas after dumb moves that saw him exiled from prewar glory at American Vogue, and he had other ups and downs. What emerges here is a charming, prickly, and deeply self-critical artiste who probably lacked love but put every shade of feeling into his work. Perhaps that’s why Beaton never fell entirely out of fashion. > KEN EISNER
C’EST LA VIE!
Starring Jean-pierre Bacri. In French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable
French writer-directors Olivier Nakache and 2
Éric Toledano had a worldwide hit with 2011’s The Intouchables, with Omar Sy as a reluctant Senegalese helpmate to quadriplegic François Cluzet. It has since been remade in Argentina (as Inseparables), with race taken out of the equation, and in Hollywood (The Upside), with Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston dropping the immigrant thing.
The original was a genial crowd-pleaser with some darker undercurrents, but it’s still surprising to find Nakache and Toledano turning out a comedy as calorie-free as C’est la Vie!—an export title that could have been applied to virtually any French movie ever made. The domestic Le Sens de la Fête is hard to translate, but something like Life of the Party would have been a smart nod to its central protagonist and main asset, deadpan sourpuss Jean-pierre Bacri, best-known for Look at Me and other bittersweet films directed by then wife Agnès Jaoui.
Here, he plays Max Angély, a long-time wedding planner who’s just about had it with parties, and with
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Although China is the key word 2
here, most of the hustling described in this brisk, 80-minute doc is being done by Americans. With its cool graphics and satellite-eye view of global chicanery, this is an easy sit for people who enjoyed the comic fictionalizing of The Big Short.
Produced by Alex Gibney, Mark Cuban, and others, The China Hustle was directed by doc veteran Josh Rothstein, guided by the circuitous adventures of investment gadfly Dan David, who wrote a book of the same name. The goateed, bearlike David first smelled a hustle after 2008’s massive financial collapse, which left investors scrambling. He found it bizarrely easy to “short” companies with Chinese connections—that is, to guess when stocks were hugely overvalued and to trade them before they sank.
Another investor, Carson Block, noticed how many “reverse mergers” were happening, with dubious Chinese companies getting attached to American outfits virtually dead but still listed on U.S. stock exchanges. He became particularly suspicious of a company called Orient Paper that claimed assets of at least $15 million. Unlike his colleagues, Block actually went to the plant in China and found a decrepit enterprise with a few rusty machines and piles of mouldy cardboard—an apt metaphor for the whole enterprise.
Propping up cardboard on this side of the water are respectableseeming Wall Street ratings outfits like Rodman & Renshaw, whose former figurehead, retired general Wesley Clark, appears here and then walks out when he realizes there’s no good way to spin what these companies do. Because there is zero oversight over such capitalist ventures in China—“the Wild West”, as one investor calls it—american counterparts simply accept whatever paperwork they’re handed, and the ratings giants rubber-stamp them, taking a cut from every transaction.
There is no incentive to investigate further, and same goes for the Federal Trade Commission, in Washington, D.C. Hustle follows David there, to a congressional hearing in which only Elizabeth Warren—surprise!— shows any interest in the reversemerger scam. Even talking heads critical of the movie’s muckraking stance admit that this boondoggle is now entangling banks and small investors across North America. Since the movie was finished, by the way, Trump has appointed a new head of the FTC: the lawyer who handled the IPO for the biggest bubble of all, Alibaba. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
> KEN EISNER