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Hot Docs Day Two!

My festival going is off to a quiet start. It takes a while for me to get revved to see ten hours of movies a day, so today I am only catching two joints: Nursery University and Beautiful Losers.

Since 9/11 the population of pre-school age children in New York City has risen by 30%, mostly among upper-middle class and wealthy white families. Who knows what this will mean for the city's future, but in the present day this crap load of rich white babies is wrecking havoc upon the New York's congested nursery schools. The most respected nursery schools command tuition of up to $20'000 per year and still see more than a 10-1 ratio of applicants to available spots. I know. It's fucked. Just wait till you see people conducting school tours boasting of their swimming pools, tennis classes, and yoga instruction. . . for kids under five years of age. Barf.

Thankfully directors Marc Simon and Matthew Makar follow subjects who are very open about the subject and even realize how laughable the entire process is while fighting to be a part of it. Five families are followed as they run the pre-school admissions gauntlet. It provides a bit of wider range of experiences, but I felt it was perhaps a little too much. For a doc that is only ninety minutes long, the middle drags a lot more than it should. It could use a little fat trimming still, but Nursery University remains a humourous, touching, and unique look at a phenomenon that does not seem to exist anywhere else.

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Next up was Beautiful Losers, Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard's look at ten artists who grew out of the Alleged Gallery in the 90s. Their stories weave in and out of each others' through a series of interviews and histories with Shepard Fairey, Margaret Kilgallen, Mike Mills, Harmony Korine, Ed Templeton, and more. It is a slick, amusing, and interesting micro-history of a scene that has been fractured by successes of the artists, but is far from over. The people involved are great storytellers, and the art is terrific. My one gripe with the film is that it is extremely light on context. A lot of attention is paid to the contributions of the DIY cultures of skateboarding and punk rock, but there is virtually no acknowledgment of the contributions made by graffiti and hip hop culture. For a bunch of untrained kids who were empowered to make art by seeing street art, graff, and tagging, this seems like a huge oversight. One artist mentions how seeing Style Wars as a kid blew his mind, but that is about it. And if you do not happen to be familiar with that 1983 PBS documentary on hip hop and graff culture, that reference is probably going to fly by you. That is a relatively mild complaint about a film I really enjoyed, however, but it is a slight that deserves mention.

I bowed out of the late show because there was a UFC pay-per-view on and everyone knows that documentaries are for pussies.

Posted on 04/22/08 by: Aaron 03:18 PM