| Movie Review: We Pedal Uphill Written by: Gesina Phillips Cinema Village, located on East 12th Street in Manhattan, is admittedly not the most impressive movie theatre in New York. It’s a small venue, seating 310 people at a time in three different auditoriums. However, it retains an art-house sort of charm with its offering of indie and underground films. This theatre is where I found myself on a Saturday night, purchasing a ticket to see We Pedal Uphill: Stories from the States. It was rather later than I had originally attended to arrive at the theatre, as my friend had run late. I gave him a joking hard time for this, but shut my mouth as soon as I see aw a sign announcing that the director, Roland Tec, would be present at two showings during the film’s week-long run.; As luck would have it, our showing was one of those two. We proceeded upstairs to the largest auditorium, took our seats, and were soon swept up in a nearly two hour examination of America during the Bush administration. The film is a collection of thirteen vignettes set in as many different states, all of which seek to characterize the atmosphere of the United States under the Bush administration. Each scene is independent of the others in content, but they are all united by their picture of American life. The first involves a liberal shock jock on the Denver, COolorado airwaves whose views make him a potential target of violence. The short, meticulously directed scene sets the tone for those that follow and the audience is allowed to process this style as the opening credits appear. The film continues with a dozen other brief pieces, dealing with contemporary subjects from the corporate world to homosexuality. These depictions of modern life in brief attempt to show a paranoid country increasingly divided along lines such as race and class. A Disney executive makes classist assumptions about a park worker, and a man who rescued people in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and is cold toward the man who drives all day in order to thank him. The age of terror clearly shows through in scenes reminiscent of the McCarthy era in terms of misinformation and mistrust of the government. In terms of cinematography, the film is true to its indie roots. Scenes are shot in stark relief rather than the airbrushed perfection of multimillion dollar Hollywood blockbusters. The subjects treated profit from this, as it lends an air of reality to each story. The viewer is in the same room as the frightened Mississippi mother and the greedy prison directors, which makes their stories all the more believable. In its initial stages, the film was called An American Quilt in Film—an apt name considering its handmade atmosphere and patchwork of states and topics. When the credits rolled and the lights went up in the theatre, Roland Tec entered for a Q&A session. As it turned out, there were several cast members in the audience as well. They stood at the front of the theatre with Tec as he took reactions and questions from the audience. When asked, he told the viewers that the film was begun in order to “try to understand” America in troubling times. Though the initial focus was on republican-voting states, the film soon “evolved and took on a life of its own.” States Tec: Tec adds, “I found that the red state/blue state dichotomy is kind of a false one.” It is this ambiguity of politics that characterizes the entire film, forming a cohesive portrait of the climate of America at the threshold of a new millennium. Warnings: language, drug use. |
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