The Rake Magazine

Author: Brandon Root

  • Transgendered Germans and Hair Metal

    From now until August 31st, Hedwig and the Angry Inch will be playing at the Jungle Theater. Featuring a cast of local talent, including Jairus Abts as Hedwig and Ann Michels as her husband Yitzhak, the production is most comfortable during the music numbers and flounders some during monologues. Though shrill and sluggish at times, it builds toward an emotionally fulfilling conclusion.

    The Obie-winning musical is a 4th-wall breaking fusion of rock songs and monologues featuring the heartbreaking story of Hedwig, an "internationally ignored" rock goddess and victim of a botched sex change operation in East Berlin. Left with an "angry inch," the story chronicles her rise and fall in a thought-provoking search for acceptance and individuality.

    For the most part, the show’s worst gaffes are made up for by the great music. Abts plays Hedwig more pathetically washed up than resigned, delivering one-liners often not for comedy, but to underline the character’s disdain for himself and the audience. This "walling-in" of Hedwig is made worse by an ill-executed "German" accent, which careens around the world from Europe to Minnesota. The result makes Hedwig more of a caricature than someone to be identified with. I was hoping for ’80s hair-metal Scorpions, but the result is more Max Mosley and the BDSM porn dungeon, which is to the detriment of the show. Thankfully, the dopey accent is dropped almost entirely during the musical numbers and Abts is noticeably more comfortable. His forceful baritone is able to shine, though his limited range feels a bit constricting at times. Michels also shines during the musical sections, her effortless soprano emphasized by great sound design. Like Abts, Michels is weakest when the music isn’t playing and her monotone portrayal of Yitzhak is, at times, really painful.

    Visually, the production is masterful. The light design is clever without overshadowing the performances and builds the intensity of the climax until its breaking point. Near the end, Yitzhak flings a stack of paper at the audience, the harsh strobe light making tangible the simmering, tumultuous anger of the show before its satisfying conclusion. When the lights return, the paper turns out to be bingo cards. Points for attention to detail.

    The production isn’t perfect, but by the end you’ll find yourself tapping your foot along with the band and thrusting your arms skyward like the rest of the audience. The silly, 4th-wall-breaking energy is thrilling, and the Jungle is intimate enough to make it work. If you have any interest in the sweet harmony musicals and hair metal can create, this one is well worth your time.

  • Gonzo

    To be honest, I didn’t know who Hunter S. Thompson was until after he killed himself. It was a miserable year in college. Bush had slithered his way into the White House for the second time and winter at Carleton seemed even more bitter than usual. Our anger had given way to numb depression as we shuffled about our lives. Not that I was alive then, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had lost something over the past 40 years. In the ’60s and ’70s, Hunter S. Thompson embodied the kind of restless anger the country needed during the Bush years. What happened? Along with our parents, somehow we became the generation of complacency. You can understand my surprise when my very same criticism was leveled at the audience not by Thompson, but by Pat Buchanan. Wait a second! Pat Buchanan is in a documentary about Hunter S. Thompson? Gonzo, a documentary by Alex Gibney, is full of surprises. If you are a fan, or even if you’re not, this one is not to be missed.

    Far from the star-struck mythology that often follows other famous suicides (see: Kurt Cobain), I was pleased you actually get a sense of who Thompson was, and it wasn’t always flattering. The truth is, Thompson was kind of a douche. Through a mixture of interviews, stock footage, film clips, and reenactments, the film is a surprisingly earnest and deeply fascinating celebration of his life. In roughly chronological order the film proceeds through the events that shaped America, and Thompson along with it. It can be hard to lose yourself in a documentary the same way as a good film, but the seamless mash-up of material and tight pacing makes it easy.

    Like Buchanan, the film features a number of high profile interviews ranging from Jimmy Carter to George McGovern to the co-founder and publisher of Rolling Stone. I was struck by not only the extraordinary effort on the part of the filmmaker, but also the exceptional influence he must have had to bring together such an unusual cross-section of American culture 30-40 years after landmarks such as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.


    Even though the film sort of putters out towards the end, and could have trimmed some things down here and there, it is well worth your time. I think its greatest contribution is, without question, its immediacy. In the stock footage of RFK, you can hear Obama’s voice. In Nixon, you can feel the repugnant sleaze of the Bush years. In Thompson, however, was a voice we now need more than ever.

    Want a good example of modern gonzo? Check out the Rolling Stone coverage of the Michael Jackson trial. It was angry, subjective, judgmental, and struck me as one of the most honest things I had ever read.

    See also Max Ross’ The world is full of downers…which is maybe why Gonzo took so many uppers.

  • The Man Behind Bigger, Stronger, Faster

    Thanks for taking the time
    to talk to The Rake. I throughly enjoyed the film.
    How did you get into film, particularly documentary film making?

    Well, it’s interesting, I didn’t
    ever want to make a documentary, but my brothers and I had been talking
    about the whole steroid issue, and I was already a filmmaker at the
    USC film school. I was also probably the only filmmaker who is
    a power lifter (I can bench press 500 lbs) so between lifting weights
    and making movies and it was the kind of the time to put them both together
    I guess.

    When did you decide that
    this was a documentary you wanted to make?

    Part of it came from talking
    to my brother Smelly about this guy in the locker room. He was
    laughing that this guy Andrew was on the juice and we started think,
    well maybe there’s more to this and we started discussing it.
    Before that my producer Alex and I were discussing doing a film together
    about the subculture of bodybuilding and body obsession but we really
    didn’t have our finger on what the subject matter would be, something
    to do with the gym you know? But it all kind of came together
    to be about steroids and American culture through talking to my brothers
    and talking to my producer.

    Tell me about the process
    of making the film, how did you bring people on board? How did
    you initially finance the film?

    Well it’s pretty simple, Alex
    Buono our producer worked out in Gold’s Gym with me and we were talking
    about this project. I was actually selling memberships there just
    to pay the bills (as a filmmaker you’re not always on the top of the
    world money wise) so it basically came about that he wanted to produce
    it. So I went over to his house basically every day and a friend
    Tamsin Rawady who is a documentary filmmaker got attached to the idea
    as well. We all started to develop the idea together as a team
    so we spent about 3 months writing the treatment and my producer Alex
    gave it to his agent rob who also represents Jim Czarnecki, the producer
    of Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11. Jim read the treatment
    and fell in love with it so he got on board to produce as well, but
    he lives in New York so he was more of a supervising producer.
    From there we basically went out and started raising money and Jim kind
    of served as our insurance policy to get the film done on time and make
    it all happen.

    How did the film change
    from inception to the final cut? Are their interviews you wanted
    to get but couldn’t? Any additional points you wanted to make?

    You know it’s funny from the
    original treatment to the final cut the film changed a lot and I’ll
    tell you the original treatment was so well written and thought out
    so the question was: how can we get this on film? So we went through
    this whole process of interviewing all these people and we thought a
    movie about steroids just wouldn’t cut it so we set it up to be about
    cheating in general. After awhile we realized that the steroid
    issue was so big and complex that we had to come back to it so we ended
    up cutting the film back so it ended up pretty close to the original
    treatment. As far as interviews, we obviously wanted to interview
    Arnold [Schwarzenegger], Hulk Hogan, and Sylvester Stallone but a lot
    of times there are some things people don’t want to talk about.
    It was something we just had to put our heads together and figure out
    how to tell the story without actually having those interviews.

    This film puts you
    and your family under a lot of scrutiny, how did you initially pitch
    the film to them? How do you think they will be impacted by the
    film’s release?

    Um, I used completely hidden
    cameras and they don’t know that I made the movie [laughs]. Basically
    my brothers wanted to talk, they had a story they wanted to tell and
    in talking to my mom I just said, "Hey, you know I want to do this
    movie about steroids," and she said, "Oh, so you want to involve
    your brothers, so I guess you’re going to talk about how you guys are
    all natural even though everyone else is taking steroids." I
    told her that there were actually a lot of things in the movie that
    she probably wouldn’t like and she said, "Yeah, I’m fine with everything,
    I don’t really care."

    You
    know I would always ask my mom to be in my projects and if I told her
    I needed someone to play the crook she would be like, "No I’m not
    going to be in it!" Now that I finally get her to be in one
    of my movies it’s actually quite a bit different different than she
    expected. I think in the end that if you really watch the movie,
    she likes the way it helps our family communicate.

    I was really struck by how
    exhaustive the film was in terms of the number of interviews you did,
    the lengths to which you went to make one point another, are there parts
    of the film that you would have liked to include but couldn’t for lack
    of time? What ended up on the cutting room floor?

    We had a cut that I thought
    was actually really good, it was 2 hours and 15 minutes which is really
    long for a documentary. You know I was watching Bowling for Columbine
    and noticed they could have cut a minute here and a minute there and
    put in other stuff. So when I tried to pack the documentary full
    of stuff at like an hour and 49 minutes it was way too full. Even
    now it’s kind of a dizzying pace but it’s just the right tone and you
    don’t get too confused. What I didn’t realize when I was first
    making the movie was that sometimes you just need to breath, you need
    a couple beats for people to digest the information."

    What’s next for you?
    Any more projects in the works?

    I’m working on a TV pilot about
    Gold’s Gym basically, it’s sort of the office with wacky characters
    that I’ve met in the gym over the years and the little situations that
    have come about. I’m also working on a documentary tackling the
    subject of obesity.