As per tradition, Tribeca overlaps with the last week of classes, so school obligations will ensure these updates (which I’ll be providing every other day until the fest’s conclusion) are never as comprehensive as I’d like them to be. That being said, I anticipate being able to get to a fair percentage of the 120 features being offered this year. In keeping with the festival’s eclectic tradition, the first two movies I’ll be covering online could not be more different.
The opening segments of Christopher Bell’s “Bigger, Stronger, Faster” inspire some major skepticism. A film by an admitted gym rat, about his steroid ingesting gym rat brothers, it at first seems like a de facto apology for their actions. Taking a page out of Michael Moore’s playbook, the filmmaker visits all sorts of selectively chosen experts who decry the outlandish fear mongering in the mainstream media’s portrait of the dangers of steroid use. At the same time, he makes some of its strongest opponents, like U.S. Rep Henry Waxman, one of the lead voices on the issue in Congress, look completely foolish.
Fortunately, in spite of the fun and games Bell recognizes the larger issue at hand. He shifts focus from the steroid issue to the broader concern it signifies: the American public’s obsession with the “perfect” image, in all of its forms. Rather than serving as an immature apologia for a subculture of musclemen and power lifting, the film interrogates the reasons those involved feel so propelled to change their bodies, very often at steep personal cost. To do so, the filmmaker takes the audience on a journey through everything from pop culture’s most familiar macho imagery to an exploration of his own family and the complex reasons his brothers have gone on the drugs. Improbably, in spite of the superficial opening, Bell reveals himself to be a perceptive observer of society and the man behind the first documentary in some time that ought to really make you think.
Plays Wed April 30 at 4pm at AMC Village VII and Sat May 3 at 9:30pm, AMC 19th St. East
Daniel Myrick, co-director of “The Blair Witch Project,” returns to big screens with “The Objective,” a rather similar enterprise. It sacrifices the woods of Maryland for the Afghani desert, the filmmaker protagonists for American troops and the cheap black and white aesthetic for slightly more aesthetically pleasing color DV, but the underlying premise remains the same. A group is hopelessly lost in a mysterious setting and subsequently tormented by unexplained supernatural phenomena. The concept works a bit better here, as the filmmaker’s casting ability has improved exponentially (the star is Jonas Bell, so memorable in “The Killing of John Lennon,” the first of this year’s two Mark David Chapman films) and within the low budget parameters his FX team creates some creepy otherworldly imagery that facilitates the characters’ mental debilitation. Unfortunately, the movie otherwise suffers from its lack of funds. Visually, it too often resembles behind the scenes footage rather than a polished finished project. One would be hard pressed to fault its maker for his financial constraints, but their evidence throughout the film makes it difficult to become fully involved in the proceedings. Also, the entire project too often smacks of conceptual repetition, even if it does, as previously noted, on the whole improve on Myrick’s widely overrated (though historically significant) debut.
Plays Wed April 30 at 4:45pm, AMC Village VII
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