Eyes of the Mothman (2011) - 3/4

Something about the legend of the mothman, often classified amongst cryptozoological legends like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, that stimulates a degree of seriousness not reserved for those others. There have been several films on Bigfoot and Nessie, most of them silly and of very poor quality. The mothman, however, inspired The Mothman Prophecies (2000), one of the most elegant, mysterious, and mature horror movies since The Haunting (1960). And when one watches the various documentaries on Bigfoot and Nessie, where cryptozoologists build upon one another’s loose, largely invented or at least misconstrued data, and then a documentary like Eyes of the Mothman, one can see why there is such a difference. Because the mothman is not just a creature, it’s a protracted series of events that seem to contain some undeniable reality.

Eyes of the Mothman, much like The Mothan Prophecies, is an elegant and evolved work. The genteel shots of the local environments, the poetic voice of narrator Richard Pait that suggests honesty and patience, and the quotes from poets like Tennyson are the earliest cues that this is not the ordinary conspiracy/UFO documentary. As Eyes scrutinizes Point Pleasant from the Revolutionary War through TNT stockpiling, the mothman events and up to the present, the cues are confirmed. Eyes’s two-and-a-half hour runtime is intimidating, but ultimately justified by the breadth of research.

Eyes begins with the local folklore of Revolutionary War-era Chief Cornstalk’s supposed curse on the land. The anthropological scrutiny of the curse is given objectively: Native curses were land-based rather than individual-based, for various reasons. This grounding is not the basis for the remainder of the documentary, but serves two perhaps opposes purposes. The first is to start in mystery, the possibility of something spiritual or unnatural. The other is to show a small town prone to self-mythologizing. Director Pellowski deserves credit for allowing both suggestions to coexist.

Next is a fretting discussion of the World War TNT stockpiles in the Point Pleasant wilderness. Local ponds were frequently contaminated and mutant fish have been discovered. Eyes has its weaknesses on issues of science. The professor interviewed casually remarks that intelligent life has only been on earth for two-thousand years. That would make Socrates a feces-flinging primate. So rather than involve real biologists in the discussion, the possibility that the mothman is a genetic mutation is glibly implied without scrutiny. Again, this grounding has two purposes. For one, the vastly unpredictable worlds of biology and chemistry gives a natural alternative to Native curses. But Pellowski is also showing a small town distrustful of outsiders, including—if not especially—its own government.

Eyes thankfully plunges from there right into the peculiar phenomena of the mothman sightings. The rashes, swollen eyes, and psychological disturbances of the sightings are described by actual sufferers or other Point Pleasant locals. The relationship to the TNT stockpiles takes on some credibility. Some biologists did then and still now suggest witnesses only saw a particularly large, foreign crane—perhaps a mutant one.

Point Pleasant's situation develops from the mothman sightings into UFO sightings, visitations by men in black, the appearance of a strange man known as ‘Indrid Cold’—an innately creepy name, I think—the prophecies of things to come, and finally the collapse of the bridge. Following that particular tragedy, all the weird phenomena stops. Either the mass hysteria has been blown away by genuine tragedy, or there was a real and occult trajectory to the strange events.

The complexity of the series of events encompassed by the rubric ‘mothman’ is highly fascinating in itself, of course. There is just so much more to the Point Pleasant events than the mothman sightings. But what’s more interesting is how Eyes presents the mothman sightings as a real community event. Locals describe hanging around an area known for sightings, hoping to see the mothman. One even says it was like going to the drive-in. They were afraid of it, and yet they loved it. The mothman brought excitement in a boring town. The men in black brought a feeling of significance and importance. The bridge tragedy brought sense, one way or another.

Eyes never makes a statement. The complex mixture of genuine, confused, fudged, and then outright invented data is presented by Pellowski with honesty and integrity, albeit passively. Pellowski shows a certain reluctance to engage in open skepticism or criticism. The interviews also fail to engage any critics, but instead some unrelated ‘paranormal investigators.’ But the patient comprehensiveness of Eyes gives the intelligent viewer room to ponder. If there is any overarching point to Eyes, it is that the one consistent point amongst all witnesses, the strange, red eyes, suggest some reality to the events. But if there is any lasting value to be derived from this documentary, it is the scrutiny of a small town’s obsessions, collective neuroses, and mythologizing imagination.

Big River Man (2009) - 3/4

Sometimes the only way we can deal with impressive but utterly irrational things humans do is by mythologizing them. We transform these people into heroes. We have to rationalize their actions some way, so we impose significance where there may just be none. I'm not sure how intentional it is, but Big River Man ends up being an investigation of just that phenomenon.

The 'Big River Man' is Martin Strel, a middle-aged, overweight Slovenian man who suddenly decided to dedicate his life, or what's left of it, to endurance swimming. He's also carved out a rather unique niche in endurance swimming: he likes to swim in heavily-polluted rivers. He set a record by swimming the Yangtze, the world's most polluted river. So polluted was it, the narration tells us, he had to have his blood cleaned by machine every day because human kidneys can't handle that level of toxicity. It's not clear why Strel does this. This isn't the fault of the documentarian. Rather, it's the fault of Martin Strel. He doesn't know why he does what he does. Strel just seems to have an irrational urge to suffer and take risks. Strel's son, also his publicist, claims Strel is trying to bring attention to environmental issues. Did I note Strel's son is a publicist? The documentary undermines his claims by showing him making up statements to heroize his father's exploits. Strel, on the other hand, rarely has anything to say about his exploits: he just does them.

Big River Man's focus is on Strel's latest and most extreme swim yet: swimming the Amazon, from Peru to Brazil. It takes 70 days of swimming a several dozen miles every day. Making things even more difficult, Strel doesn't lose any weight in preparation and refuses to quit his heavy drinking. Even while swimming, his water bottles are actually filled with whiskey. It's as if he desires the event to be as agonizing an ordeal as possible. He seems to stack the odds against himself, as if desiring failure. But he's an obsessive man. He has trouble to walk each evening when he emerges from the river, yet he only sleeps for four hours each night and sometimes wants to swim even at night. The film tracks the increasingly alarming conditions of Strel's body and mind. One of the most disturbing moments is when his head is infested with some parasite and he's pretty much lost his mind, he starts hooking his head up to batteries and shocking himself. He also begins taking off swimming without telling his party, putting himself and the expedition at great risk. They ask him why. He says he doesn't know.

His odd behaviour begins to affect some crew members, particularly his navigator, a young Wisconsin fisherman. He begins reflecting on Strel as a Christ figure and explaining that the river is purgatory. Most of his ranting is annoying, but seems genuine. This struck me as one of the most interesting moments in the film, because it illustrates what I say in the first paragraph: the attempt to make sense of the irrational. The navigator believes Strel is a real hero, suffering for mankind, just like Jesus. Really, Strel is a disturbed man and if he had died in that river, his son and the navigator should both have been charged with negligent manslaughter. In fact, Strel nearly does die; at the end of the expedition he is in a nearly catatonic state.

Big River Man thus ends up being more sociologically rather than psychologically interesting. The psychology is absent because Strel has nothing to offer: he is presented as pure action and that's probably how he presents himself quite purposely. Sociologically, the heroizing and the mystic fervor that overtakes both Strel and his navigator are very fascinating. It's even revealing about the religious mind. Many of the Catholic saints, particularly St. Francis of Assisi, seemed to share Strel's madness and they too had their personal hagiographers.

I found myself wondering less, "What makes this man do this?" and more "What makes this man worthy of a documentary?" Well, his exploits are admittedly quite remarkable. But he's no hero. No more than Alain Robert, the man who climbs skycrapers without any climbing aids other than chalk dust. Both of these people risk their lives for totally self-interested achievements. Their activities yield nothing of value for humanity. As for himself, Strel squanders all the money he makes from the exploit on gambling very quickly and I wonder if he even cares about what he achieved. This makes the whole expedition seem strangely nihilistic.

Maringouin certainly gets some good footage, as well as some inane footage, and stumbles onto interesting points. However, the organization reveals a certain confusion regarding just what the film is about. The title would indicate it's about Strel, but his inscrutibility leaves his documentarian out to dry and the audience occasionally very bored. I recall checking the time--sometime I rarely do during movies--and being dismayed to find it was only five minutes since I had last checked the time. Still, while no-one studies weirdos as well as Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, Big River Man is a good and fascinating look at a madman heroized by the confused.

3/4

Love the Beast (2009) - 3.5/4

Is Eric Bana's passion for his car strong enough to carry a whole film? Why yes, it is. I don't particularly care about Eric Bana and I have never had any interest in cars or racing. But Love the Beast, Bana's documentary about his relationship with his 1976 Falcon coupe, makes me care by bringing me into that world and developing a sort of narrative between these two characters. There are even subplots.

We begin by learning how Bana came to own the car and how he and his friends devoted so much time into keeping it running all these years. He carefully describes the significance it has had in his relationships with his friends. One might think that the car just has sentimental value for that reason, but as the documentary moves along through interviews with Jay Leno (an avid car collector), Jeremy Clarkson, and Dr. Phil McGraw, Bana makes the point that the machine is like a person, its flaws making it a unique entity with a psychosymbiotic connection to its long-time owner. And with that comes responsibilities.

Love the Beast then follows Bana's attempts to race his car, its damage, and his contemplation of whether it is worth his while to repair it or not. In some ways, it is like seeing a man puzzling over whether a damaged relationship is worth salvaging. Bana's advisors urge him to repair it. Clarkson in particular is adamant. McGraw offers some interesting ideas about Bana's relationship with the car and why it is imperative he repair it, ideas I would go so far as to call insights.

As a Canadian who previously had just about no knowledge of this world of Australian racing, '70s car culture, or Eric Bana for that matter, there is something anthropologically fascinating about Love the Beast. It presents its world sympathetically, to be sure, but despite Bana's involvement, his look at himself and this world is not manipulative at all; his objectivity allows the viewer to watch and form their own opinions. I learned a thing or two watching Love the Beast, not just intellectually, but emotionally. I can now comprehend car-lovers, even if I'll never be one. And that's what good films should do, leave us a little wiser about ourselves. And wisdom is not just understanding one another, it's understanding one another compassionately.

The Possessed (2009) - 0/4

For the first time since I've been reviewing films, I have left a film before it was over. The Possessed immediately strikes one as a harmless documentary in the style of "Unsolved Mysteries", with reenactments and real interviews intercut. The more one watches, however, the more one is assailed with morally objectionable material until I became too offended to watch on.

The story itself is an interesting one and I had previously read about it on the rather entertaining website www.mysteriouspeople.com. Mary Roff, a disturbed woman subject to seizures and quasi-religious mania dies in her adult years. Lurancy Vennum, an unrelated girl who was two-years-old at the time of Roff's death later begins exhibiting similar behaviour and claims to be Mary Roff. The film debates over whether it is possession or some sort of retroactive reincarnation. The title tells you what side the film falls on.

That the documentary falls on any side at all is the first of its problems. The filmmaker/interviewer is Christopher Saint-Booth, a bizarre-looking hippie who dresses like a cowboy resembling Johnny Legend circa 1985 sans coolness. He buys into all of this crap, unsurprisingly. This might not be a problem for me in a harmless haunting documentary, but this documentary is dealing with troubled people--almost all young ladies--who need help and that help is certainly not the Catholic Church nor a Crystal Healing Bed!

You see, for Saint-Booth to make his points, like a lawyer of sorts, he references related cases as if these precedents are solid proof. He references the case of Anneliese Michel as if it's a proven precedent of possession. Actually, the case of Anneliese Michel went to court and the exorcists were charged with manslaughter![1] And here's the moral crux: Saint-Booth also references the cases of some still-living people who believe they were possessed. They used to cut their arms, were obsessed with their own blood, and sometimes tore their own skin away. The fact that Lurancy Vennum also did this, Saint-Booth concludes, shows that she too was possessed. Actually, it shows they all had the same psychological issues and they were in desperate need of real treatment, not wackjob charlatans. Unfortunately, Saint-Booth encourages their manner of reasoning and that is what makes this documentary thoroughly objectionable.

He began to interview a young man who had been exorcised by his mother, a religious fanatic who clearly had seen The Exorcist way too many times, because the exorcism she videotaped showed her speaking lines from the film verbatim. That's when I turned the documentary off. This is an ignorant, irresponsible, morally bankrupt documentary from which you will learn nothing you can't read online.[2] The parallel cases are somewhat interesting, as they were recent and I'd never heard of them before; but they were sadly mishandled by an agenda-driven believer.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anneliese_Michel
2. http://www.mysteriouspeople.com/Lurancy_Vennum.htm