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June 27-July 3, 2002 screen picks Screen Picks
Philadelphia Stories (Tue., July 2, 9 p.m.; Sat., July 6, 10 p.m., WYBE-TV Ch. 35) In addition to Civil Disobedience, a humorous sketch of revolution, parking-style, near the Philadelphia airport, and Recovery Mural, Sloan Seale and Dorothea Braemer's portrait of drug rehab center New Jerusalem Now, this week's installment features Nathalie Applewhite's Picture Me an Enemy. Six years in the making, this bracing half-hour doc tells the stories of Natasa Borcanin and Tahija Vikalo, both women who emigrated from the former Yugoslavia and landed in Philadelphia. Vikalo is a Bosnian Muslim, Borcanin a half-Serb, half-Croat atheist, but Enemy purposefully uncovers far more similarities than differences. Borcanin recalls she'd watch TV and see the same shot used to represent Bosnian corpses in one report and Serbian corpses in another, and scorns the accuracy of either claim: Corpses make no claims on nationality. Picture Me an Enemy complicates as often as it depicts; when Vikalo recalls fleeing gunfire, the film inserts black-and-white footage of her sprinting down a peaceful street, a smile on her face. The result reconfigures simplistic definitions of victimhood -- on the one hand, Vikalo recalls how her mother had chunks blown out of her body by an explosion; on the other, how they've learned to joke about her being "80 percent invalid." Without pushing for transcendence, the film finds a balance between reportage and expressionism. Should the film pique your interest, mark your calendar for Sept. 19, when it will screen again at International House along with a Q&A discussion.
P.O.V.: Boomtown (Tue., July 2, 10 p.m.) In documentary, sometimes the best view is through a pinhole. Boomtown focuses on a stretch of highway not far from Seattle, where fireworks stands line the road in each direction. Manned by Indians of the Suquamish nation, the stands are both dreams and burdens, financial opportunities and potential liabilities. Interviewing vendors who've been in business for decades, and some who are just starting out, director Bryan Gunnar Cole approaches the issue of how Indians survive in America and how culture is kept alive by hook or by crook. (The irony of subsisting on an industry whose biggest day is the Fourth of July hardly goes unnoticed.) Unlike larger retailers, the Indian merchants are stuck with their unsold stock at the end of the season, so every day is a gamble, and even the successful ones dread the next bad year. Still, that doesn't stop newcomers -- one impatient woman urges her husband to "get this hustle on" as they pore over order sheets. ("Big Bad Ass" is one choice option.) The pun in the title is sure ironic, as is the nod to industrial overkill. But in the end, the people in Boomtown are just getting by; irony is just a fringe benefit Philly Boy (Fri., June 28, 7:30 p.m., Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org)
Starship Troopers ($27.95 DVD) You never know how time will change your reaction to a movie. Re-watching my beloved Starship Troopers a few weeks ago, I was surprised to find Paul Verhoeven's satiric masterpiece both less funny and more involving than before. Suddenly, the film's vision of a society which trades individualism for efficiency in the face of an alien threat didn't seem quite so science-fictional. Though the featurette accompanying this well-appointed double-disc set overstates the extent to which "every major critic" missed the irony in Verhoeven's presentation on the film's initial release, there's no question that a vast number of supposed authorities completely missed the boat (including, most amusingly, Washington Post critic and Dirty White Boys author Stephen Hunter.) There's no question that Verhoeven is fascinated by, even a bit intoxicated with, the allure of fascism, but it's hard to believe all but the biggest dope could miss the film's almost ham-handed camp -- unless they seriously believe a child of World War II could quote from Triumph of the Will without irony. Verhoeven and writer Ed Neumeier's thesis, stated in an audio commentary reprised from the old single-disc edition, is simple: "War makes fascists of us all." For anyone who missed it before, now would be an excellent time to pick up on that point.
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