Documentaries
“Square Grouper”: A hilarious, tragic tale of Florida ganja
When weed was king: "Square Grouper" recalls the mellow, pre-coke era of the Sunshine State's drug trade
Miami-based documentary filmmaker Billy Corben is halfway between a journalist and a cultural archaeologist, excavating the history of a region that seems to have no history, and to scarcely be a place at all. Corben may always be best known for “Cocaine Cowboys,” his exhaustive and frequently hair-raising survey of the insane Florida drug wars of the 1980s, but his new film “Square Groupers,” which looks back to a mellower time and a more benevolent drug, is altogether a droller, drier work, infused with the spirit of Elmore Leonard and Jimmy Buffett. (The title refers to the famous but apocryphal notion that Florida fisherman occasionally caught bales of marijuana dumped overboard by smugglers.)
Corben’s cinematic style is largely about scene-setting, conversation and juxtaposition: His team digs up amazing vintage news footage, he interviews survivors of the era in question (frequently in prison uniforms, or with a cold beverage in hand) and just enough atmosphere is created to convey how a sleepy, sun-baked Southern state turned into a criminal paradise. If “Cocaine Cowboys” was an epic, ironic yarn of murder and madness and the building of a boomtown built largely on drug money, “Square Groupers” is a more rueful tale. As it should be, since the 1970s crackdown on pot smugglers and dealers depicted here marked the beginning of an especially pernicious era of anti-drug hysteria led by federal law enforcement authorities. (Furthermore, while I’m in favor of legalizing and licensing drugs, let’s not pretend that there’s any real relationship between marijuana and cocaine; they’re roughly as similar as Pinot Grigio and OxyContin.)
“Square Groupers” begins with a section on the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church, a legendary Miami hippie-meets-Rasta cult movement of the ’70s that combined fundamentalist Christian doctrine with limitless amounts of high-grade Jamaican ganja. Originally, the Coptics had good success using the First Amendment’s religion clause as a shield, even buying a mansion on Star Island, off Miami Beach. But since they were not merely smoking immense amounts of dope but also dealing it by the thousands of kilos, the Feds ultimately crushed them, which led to further abuses like the prosecution of the “Black Tuna Gang,” in reality just a couple of transplanted Philadelphia businessmen turned mid-level Miami weed merchants.
Those stories are alternately hilarious and terrifying — the Black Tuna defendants wound up serving ridiculously long prison sentences on trumped-up charges — but I almost wish Corben had spent more time in Everglades City, a flyspeck fishing village 80 miles west of Miami that’s his final stop. This waterlogged but intensely colorful little town on the edge of Everglades National Park is where the Wild West meets the Caribbean. As South Florida’s commercial fishing industry began to fade, virtually the entire town turned to pot smuggling. Everglades City is like a certain mode of Southern fiction come to life; one nearly toothless local tells Corben’s camera that running dope opened up the world to him. He’d never been out of the county, and suddenly he was making weekly boat trips to Colombia, learning a little Spanish, getting to know an entirely new class of women.
“Square Groupers” is now playing at the Cinema Village in New York and the O Cinema in Miami. It’s available April 19 on DVD and April 22 on VOD and from Netflix.
The tyranny of pink
The author behind a new documentary tells Salon how breast cancer got cute and where Susan G. Komen lost its way
A still from "Pink Ribbons, Inc." Why wait for October for breast cancer awareness? There couldn’t be a more perfect moment for director Lea Pool’s new documentary “Pink Ribbons Inc.” — a searing, passionate and deeply human examination of the warping of a cause.
It’s been a shaky year for the pink. In January, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the undisputed center of the breast cancer universe in its be-ribboned, Schiaparelli-hued incarnation, made the spectacular misstep of attempting to withdraw funding for breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood. Though the howls of public outrage forced the foundation to back off – and prompted the resignation of its vice president for public policy, Karen Handel — the debacle was just the latest and most grotesque move from an organization ostensibly devoted to women’s health. There was the ill-advised, high-profile partnership with Kentucky Fried Chicken, a name not exactly synonymous with good health. There was a saturation of merchandising, including a perfume of questionable toxicity. No wonder registrations for this year’s Race for the Cure are down, as Komen continues to be dogged by questions about its integrity.
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Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.
Male grooming: The movie
From beard contests to ball cream, Morgan Spurlock's "Mansome" goofs through modern-day male narcissism
Jack Passion in "Mansome" American men are bewildered about their place in the cosmos, or so we have been told repeatedly over the last 20 years. They don’t know whether to thread their eyebrows or wield a welding torch, and end up trying to do both at once (which is inadvisable). As comedian Adam Carolla laments in a scene from Morgan Spurlock’s documentary “Mansome,” the old-time certainties of gender identity have melted away: Women are flying fighter jets and men work at the hair salon; there are no longer “chick jobs and guy jobs.”
Continue Reading CloseGorgeous saga, global crisis
"Last Call at the Oasis" paints a haunting, even poetic, portrait of the global water crisis. Will anyone listen?
Here’s the short version of humanity’s relationship with water, as delivered by hydrologist Jay Famiglietti in Jessica Yu’s compelling and often gorgeous documentary “Last Call at the Oasis”: “We’re screwed.” Yes, we should all install low-flush toilets and plant gardens that require less watering, but conservation is simply insufficient to cope with a global fresh-water crisis that involves many interlocking factors: overpopulation and overdevelopment, depletion of groundwater, climate change, and widespread contamination.
Continue Reading ClosePick of the week: An early-’60s hipster time capsule
Pick of the week: Shirley Clarke's once-banned "The Connection" is a lean, mean saga of jazz, junk and rebellion
A time capsule loaded with smack from the bohemian underbelly of JFK-era America, Shirley Clarke’s 1961 film “The Connection” is an illustration of how much things change, and how much they stay the same. I’d be stretching to call “The Connection” a great film — it’s mannered and edgy, in a way that’s partly deliberate but also distinctive to its period — but it’s an important one in cultural and historic terms, despite being largely unknown. Watching this ensemble drama about a multiracial group of New York jazz musicians and beat philosophers in a run-down apartment, waiting for their drug dealer to show up, is like traveling back 50 years in time, only to encounter the same people you might meet on the street today (at least, in certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, San Francisco, Austin and so on). At one point, the characters even debate the illusory distinctions between “hipsters” and “squares.”
Continue Reading Close“Whores’ Glory”: A riveting, humane prostitution documentary
Pick of the week: The astonishing documentary "Whores' Glory" explores the lives of sex workers around the world
A still from "Whores' Glory" Prostitution isn’t just the world’s oldest profession. It’s also a longtime focus of cultural obsession, across many historical periods and on every continent, from the poetry of Catullus to the woodblock prints of 19th-century Japan. There’s such a long history of male artists, writers and filmmakers who depict prostitution in erotic, romantic and sentimental terms that it’s only natural to approach Austrian documentarian Michael Glawogger’s “Whores’ Glory” with suspicion. Indeed, in the film’s opening scene, Glawogger’s camera directly engages the lurid allure of sex work, showing a group of scantily clad young women in a Bangkok brothel called the Fish Tank as they try to attract clients: Pretending to make out with each other, pressing their breasts and buttocks against the window, using a laser pointer to pick out likely-looking men on the street. But those are just the opening moments of a long journey, a daring, novelistic and unforgettable account of the real lives of female prostitutes in three very different countries and social contexts.
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