Rick's Reel Recommendations #3: 3 Films on "Touching Grass"

RICK'S REEL RECOMMENDATION | COLUMN | WHENUA | TOUCHING GRASS

Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickylaitheokayperson | Contributing Columnist

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These films are in a Letterboxd list here: https://boxd.it/FSXre/detail

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Ever since David Lynch passed away in January, I have been primed to register my surroundings in each day as obliquely as his work did. What I mean by this can be expressed through a quote from my favourite film of his, the magnificent Blue Velvet (1986): “It’s a strange world, isn’t it?” Seems obvious, no? But I encourage you, the reader, during the next time you consciously scamper outdoors to “touch grass”, to really think about the strangeness of everything around us, and to never take said strangeness for granted. Rows of identical apartments, warm tarmac, slightly open windows, power-lines draped overhead, invisible signals from one pocket to another, and the thousands of things happening – good and terrible – that we can’t see. All of this is very, very strange. Here are three films that elicit this feeling to some extent.

Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (Michel Gondry, 2005)

Twenty years on from ‘05, I understand if recent polarised responses to Dave Chappelle and especially Kanye West would sour the water here. But I hope you can look past that. For those who appreciate live music, community spirit, grassroots activity, and perhaps even a more innocent relic of what we’ve lost along the way, I highly recommend this concert documentary of the time Chappelle – at his peak charm as a narrator – organised a one-day hip-hop festival in Brooklyn, also inviting locals from his hometown Ohio to bus between states and join the celebration. Besides the great music, there are interviews with older, Caucasian folks, a freestyling waiter, a university marching band, the owners and renovators of the now-demolished Broken Angel House that the show was staged in front of, and clever cuts between the final performance and the basement rehearsal, where Chappelle and the stage musicians are experimenting with timing to get the routine just right. There was a thirty-minute stretch of this where I could not stop grinning ear to ear. You can even spot a young J. Cole in the crowd at one point!

Janet Planet (Annie Baker, 2023)

I took a chance on this one at the film fest last year, and loved it so much even before realising the director was Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker, acclaimed for ‘comedies of the mundane’. Janet Planet sees life through 11-year-old Lacy, in the rural, humid blaze of a Western Massachusetts summer, observing her eccentric mother’s links to three even stranger house guests. What makes this so charming and grounding isn’t just the atmospherics – the noise, the chirping, the swishing trees – but the downplayed humour. Lacy, always adorable, reminds me of the characters in the Peanuts comic strip; blank expressions, but a distinct face. She doesn’t quite understand the tenets of adulthood just yet, and why these annoying guests captivate her mother so much, but she is also precocious enough to listen to her gut feeling about each of them. Certain auteurs – like Céline Sciamma for Petite Maman, or Tyler Taormina for Christmas Eve in Miller Point – have been approaching the child’s gaze with sensitivity; they often recognise that something important might be happening, but they don’t yet know why. Or as Bob Dylan sang six decades ago: ‘Something is happening, and you don’t know what it is’.

Stand By for Tape Back-Up (Ross Sutherland, 2015)

English poet Ross Sutherland performs a spoken word monologue – some prose, some verse – while scrubbing back and forth along an old VHS tape recording that reminds him of his late granddad, and therefore, death. The nostalgic images that Sutherland mines for personal meaning, again and again until the analogue warping and grain cloud the picture, include: a freeze-frame of Bill Murray with his mouth agape in horror in ‘Ghostbusters’ (1984), a ‘say-what-you-see’ interpretation of the ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ opening, the music video for Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ (1982), and an episode of the UK Channel 4’s ‘The Crystal Maze’ which he keeps poignantly winding back to the start before a contestant fails a timed challenge, just to give her one more chance to get it right. This is one for the sentimentalists, for sure – it’s a very serious, vulnerable reflection of how we emote online now through recontextualised fragments of other media, and makes you think about the importance of keeping your raw feelings intact. ‘If you want to believe in something, stop looking at it.’

[This film is free to watch on Vimeo, and takes just an hour of your day!]