deadCENTER '10: Everything But The Bicycle Thief

In the dead center of the country and the calendar year, Oklahoma City's aptly named deadCENTER Film Festival is one of those sneaky regional festivals that you wouldn't necessarily think by its locale would be built around a passionate and thriving film community, feature consistently solid programming (full disclosure: they invited a documentary I co-directed in 2007), and offer surprise events, colorful guests and, frankly, the best excuse to come to Oklahoma—for me, three out of the last four years.

This being deadCENTER number 10, it's fitting that the traditional decade anniversary gift is aluminum since it's a substance shared with a running motif of this year's festival: bicycles. The festival kicked off on Wednesday night with 2,250 turning up for a block party in the middle of Automobile Alley, which included an en plein air screening of The Birth of Big Air. Don't be fooled by the fact that Jackass co-founder Jeff Tremaine directed this compelling, appreciably hour-long doc portrait of two-wheeled daredevil Mat Hoffman, as there are no scrotum staplings or other gross-out antics to sully an otherwise mature, straightforward appreciation of the Edmond, OK native. (deadCENTER takes pride in showcasing local talent, whether in front of or behind the camera.)

In the mid-'80s, Hoffman took the BMX trick-riding circuit by storm, winning the obligatory amateur competitions before dominating the pro league practically overnight. In jaw-dropping archival footage and gushy interviews with impressed colleagues, family members and friends (including Tony Hawk, the late Evel Knievel and co-producer Spike Jonze, who was 12 when he started riding bikes with Tremaine, and a teenager when he met Hoffman), the film chronicles how this humble half-pipe gladiator inadvertently gave birth to the X Games and other extreme sports when he schemed to build a homemade ramp gigantic enough to clear 20 feet of air. When he realized pedaling power wasn't going to build enough acceleration, a reconfigured weedeater engine was installed, and eventually a buddy would tow him from behind a motorcycle. Past the glory of having pushed the boundaries of the human body, Hoffman's story is most remarkable when you get past the countless concussions, broken bones, surgeries and—no kidding—self-suture jobs, and realize this dedicated family man wasn't making a nickel off a dangerously gnarly pursuit he was unstoppably driven to do.

After the screening, Jonze and Hoffman were brought out to do a Q&A to discuss their more than two decades of friendship and mutual respect, during which an awkward tween girl took the microphone and told Jonze, "You changed my life. I love you." But that wasn't nearly as strange as when, reportedly, a balding man with shoulder-length curly "lockses" and too-tight, gaudily bright bicycle wear gave Jonze an autographed photo of himself, the titular subject of Jeremy Lamberton's doc portrait Biker Fox. Born as Frank P. DeLarzelere III, the hyperactive 50-something eccentric and muscle-car parts salesman is a bit of a Tulsa legend, if only in his own mind. He's an avid conservationist and fitness guru who lost at least 80 pounds from bicycling, which is both his favorite hobby and the activity that has instigated his numerous arrests. The guy may want to spread joy and goodwill to others, but he's severely prone to such road rage as antagonizing drivers and throwing his bike (the latter of which becomes a point of contention in a trumped-up charge by cops).

In his downtime, we witness his unorthodox love for wildlife. He feeds packs of feral raccoons on his porch and even in his living room, toys with wasps and flies, allows a crow to eat off of his back, and films motivational testimonials with a cardinal on his shoulder. (Much of the footage was shot by Biker himself.) Imagine a blend of Napoleon Dynamite and Grizzly Man's Timothy Treadwell, speaking in Bill Paxton's pinched voice, and you might understand why the film skates that uneasy line between laughing with and laughing at. The dude is clearly a kook, very watchably so. In night-vision cam, he discusses why he can only sleep in a pitch black room with no clocks, and a howlingly funny, extended sequence features him distractedly taking work calls while feeling the sing-along, headbanging spirit of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs." In his words, which riled up the audience during a late night screening, "We rock and roll down here in Oklahoma, man!"

It's easy to be hypersensitive to the comic intentions of the filmmaker, as Biker is self-consciously performing in front of the camera, but then Lamberton occasionally juxtaposes his half-naked antics with audio footage that sounds unguarded. In its defense, however, when Biker's deaf assistant is introduced early on, signing and unintelligibly speaking to the camera, some audience members idiotically laughed, but it felt like their inappropriate reaction, not something they'd been given license to do. Nowhere else in the film did that discomfort come on so strong, partly because Biker's life philosophy is one in which I believe he'd want us to be entertained by his dorky front-flips, psychedelic green-screen home movies and preternatural ability to startle coyotes. Though the film's final 20 minutes can be a bit exasperating (intentional?) as it suddenly takes on an episodic structure, only reaffirming our subject's peculiarities while teasing to have multiple endings, it's still a raucous and scruffily cinematic work (a monologue during a lightning storm is inspired in its lo-fi textures) that promotes the flying of one's freak flag and the importance of showing backbone. "You gotta work 12, 14 hour days to be somebody," Biker lectures. "Think about that."

Completing the silver-spoked trifecta, Friday night's Mixtape Shorts got in gear with Lucy Kreutz's Bicycle Cowboy, an uneven but cute enough slapstick ode to silent B&W westerns, about a handlebar mustached cowpoke who anachronistically rides on a banana seat, not a saddle. Among the program block's best were Mr. Hypnotism, Okie Noodling cult filmmaker Bradley Beesley's drolly entertaining doc about "professional" hypnotist and self-admitted grifter Dr. Ron Dante, who besides making millions as a con artist, was once married to Lana Turner and also convicted for attempting to kill a stage rival. Publicist-turned-filmmaker Jessica Edwards' Seltzer Works is an appropriately bubbly, beautifully filmed delight about Brooklyn's last seltzer filler, a part-celebration and part-eulogy of an old-school New York pleasure that should—at the very least—bring third-generation bottler Kenny Gomberg some thirsty new business.

Most anticipated of all from this set was the world premiere of George Salisbury and Wayne Coyne's Blastula: The Making of Embryonic, a behind-the-scenes short doc concerning 2009's amazing album from hometown legends The Flaming Lips. Jamming in multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd's home while children played nearby, the fabulously freaky avant-rockers can be seen working through some of the most whacked-out, cryptic songs they've recorded since 1997's four-simultaneously-played-CDs experiment "Zaireeka" (and maybe even their early, druggiest of post-punk days). When we're allowed to be a fly on the wall as the band works through prototypes of what would end up on the record, the film plays like an apolitical, neo-psychedelic version of Godard's Sympathy for the Devil, just as frustrating in that we never get the satisfaction of hearing a song completed. But when Coyne and his bandmates give talking-head bytes on their creative methodologies, they all come off as charming idiot savants, totally unable to explain in useful, tangible terms how they put together one of last year's finest.

Posted by ahillis at June 12, 2010 6:01 PM