directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy
USA 2002
“OT: Our Town” is not going to win any
cinematography awards. Directed and shot by Scott Hamilton Kennedy, the
movie’s lighting scheme ranges from “blown out” to “extremely blown out” but
it’s obvious that Kennedy has more pragmatic concerns on his mind.
When Thornton Wilder penned “Our Town” about seventy years ago, his vision
of generic small town America was far from the big city and as lily white as
a Klan meeting in Nome, Alaska. That doesn’t prevent teachers Catherine
Borek and Karen Greene from convincing their students at Dominguez High
School in Compton, CA to stage their own (slightly updated) version of one
of the most frequently performed plays in the history of American theater.
Borek (who definitely gets top billing over Greene) has a tough sell on her
hands. The students complain that they don’t understand the corny “farm
lingo.” On a more fundamental level, many of the kids can’t connect to the
ideal nuclear family that is taken for granted in Wilder’s play, but which
they have never seen in real life. In sharp contrast to the usual political
marketing, the “typical” family for the students consists of absent fathers
and hard-working mothers and substitute mothers. Ebony Starr Norwood-Browne
(who plays the Stage Manager) tells of how her mother dropped her off at the
baby-sitter’s one day and simply never came back.
While Borek finds a way to peddle Wilder’s bucolic vision to inner-city
kids, Kennedy has his agenda as he goes to great lengths to depict Dominguez
High as far more than just a home for gang-bangers and NBA hopefuls (Tyson
Chandler of the Chicago Bulls makes a brief appearance in the film as he is
wrapping up his senior year.) The budding thespians have to fight hard to
squeeze even the most modest funding from a school that has no problem
shoveling big bucks into the sports teams: they don’t even secure a stage
until the day before the final performance.
The documentary about inner-city kids performing a play has become a
distinct sub-genre of its own in recent years (“Colors Straight Up” and “The
Hobart Shakespeareans” are two examples) and Kennedy’s movie hews to the
emerging formula: initial enthusiasm fades into chaos and near disaster but
everyone eventually unites to surmount all obstacles and deliver a
triumphant performance that pleases the parents even if it doesn’t send
Hollywood talent scouts scurrying to the phones.
Kennedy also gets considerable mileage from a 1977 TV broadcast of “Our
Town” featuring Hal Holbrook, Ned Beatty and even Mrs. Garrett (Charlotte
Rae). The TV version is like a time capsule, not daring to change a single
word or stage direction from Wilder’s original play, and the contrast shows
just how innovative Borek and her students are in changing the “Our Town” in
question from Grover’s Corners, NH to Compton, CA.
Theatrical Release: August 15, 2003 (USA)
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DVD Review: Mongrel Media - Region 1 - NTSC
Big thanks to Christopher Long for the Review!
| DVD Box Cover |
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CLICK to order from:
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| Distribution |
Mongrel Media Region 1 - NTSC |
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This film is also available on DVD
from Film Movement and available at Amazon.com:
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| Runtime | 76 min | |
| Video |
1.33:1 Original Aspect Ratio |
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NOTE: The Vertical axis represents the bits transferred per second. The Horizontal is the time in minutes. |
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| Audio | English | |
| Subtitles | None | |
| Features |
Release Information: Studio: Mongrel Media Aspect Ratio: Edition Details: none Chapters 12 |
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| Comments: |
This
non-progressive transfer shows several examples of combing. In
general, the transfer looks pretty lousy, but I don’t think you can
blame the distributor: the source material is the problem. The final
screen capture below shows an example both of (slight) combing and
the highly blown-out lighting that characterizes many scenes. I
guess that’s the penalty for “fly-on-the-wall” access to reality,
but you don’t have to be a grumpy aesthete like me to be put off by
it all. Still, the story is a winning one, and the cast of
characters in the movie are a whole lot more interesting than those
in Wilder’s play. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but it’s
still good material.
This DVD is released by Mongrel Media in Canada (as opposed to the DVD released in the USA by Film Movement), and is part of The Festival Collection, which adds two titles per month in Canada and is now up to 50+ titles. We hope to review many in the upcoming months. |
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Screen Captures
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Example of slight combing
and blown out lighting
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| DVD Box Cover |
|
CLICK to order from:
|
| Distribution |
Mongrel Media Region 1 - NTSC |
|
|
|
This film is also available on DVD
from Film Movement and available at Amazon.com:
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