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The mockumentary cometh | page 1, 2
Unfortunately for the dismal "Drop Dead Gorgeous," the film closely approximates the setting, plot and structure of Christopher Guest's astonishing "Waiting for Guffman." Both mockumentaries take place in Midwestern small towns, showcase amateur singers and dancers, lampoon patriotic displays and tackle the subject of hubris. Where "Waiting for Guffman" was sophisticated and subtle, "Drop Dead Gorgeous" is obvious and mean, gleaning cheap laughs by making fun of retarded people, boiling love of country down to beauty pageants with themes like "Amer-I-Can" and idiotically posing an anorexic girl in a wig and a wheelchair to lip synch to Melissa Manchester's "Don't Cry Out Loud." "Guffman," which tells the story of a civic pageant in Blaine, Mo., called "Red, White and Blaine," works because it opens its jabs up to larger human concerns. Fred Willard's amateur thespian isn't a self-centered blowhard because he lives in a small town; he's a self-centered blowhard who happens to live in a small town. When he finishes his pageant audition and he needs to move a stool out of the way, he asks the judges, "Strike it?" adding that he and his wife have worked with the director before "so we know all the terms already going in." And then there's the heart-breaking Eugene Levy as the town dentist. Charmingly talentless, he aspires to entertain, telling the camera, "People ask me, 'You must have been the class clown.' And I say, 'No, I wasn't. But I sat beside the class clown and I studied him.'" And in that moment, Levy hints at a world where people imagine who they could be. Where "Drop Dead Gorgeous" reduces its satire to ridiculing a town full of simps, "Waiting for Guffman" hints at larger human dreams -- pinpointing the inherent sadness of yearning for talent, excellence and escape. And that isn't mockery. That is actuality. Sarah Vowell Sarah Vowell's column appears on the Arts & Entertainment site every other Wednesday.
I had been watching all the aforementioned mockumentaries when I happened to come across one of my favorite documentaries -- the Maysles Brothers' classic account of the Rolling Stones' 1969 tour, "Gimme Shelter" -- while flipping through cable channels. For days I'd been watching fictional student filmmakers get killed, a bad beauty pageant talent competition, Bob Roberts turn lefty folk tunes into right-wing anthems ("The Times Are Changin' Back"), suffering Spinal Tap lyrics that seemed funnier when I was 17 and listening to Eugene Levy sing. The whole week was an argument against art. In those films, art kills, maims, lies and disappoints. But "Gimme Shelter," even with the Altamont ugliness in the film's second half, is an argument for art, not to mention the hubris it takes to make works of art. If mockumentaries are about cutting egos down, a documentary like "Gimme Shelter" is meant to showcase them. For who is more egomaniacal than Mick Jagger, and what could be more egomaniacal than a tape of Mick Jagger watching footage of himself onstage? In one mesmerizing scene, the Stones sit around a recording studio listening to a tape of "Wild Horses." As Mick listens to his own singing, so soft and sure and slow, the camera hangs on his face to the point that it seems impossible, not to mention unfair, that any one human being could be that beautiful and that talented. Watching it, the only thing I could think of was I believe in this. Beyond mocking, beyond ridicule or jest. When the song ends, Mick claps -- for himself. And why shouldn't he? He's a pretty man singing a pretty song. And that's the documentary truth.
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