Sundance London 2012 - THE HOUSE I LIVE IN

Eugene Jarecki's Sundance award winning documentary, THE HOUSE I LIVE IN, is a powerful and insightful examination of the US war in drugs. Inspired by the family history of his family friend and employee, Nani Jeter, Jarecki comes to the topic with fresh eyes and enquiring heart.  He interviews everyone from cops, judges and prison officers, to dealers, addicts and their families.  He brings in medical experts and historians of social policy.  Most prominently, Jarecki brings in investigative journalist turned screenwriter, David Simon, the man who created The Wire. 

I came the this documentary a little complacent that because of obsessive viewing of The Wire and reading in this subject, I wasn't going to learn anything new.  But I was wrong.  Where Simon gave us a deep and penetrating analysis of once city, from he Senator down to the kid on the corner, savagely indicting current policy, Jarecki takes a broader view.  He traces the war's origins to the early decades of the last century, when drug use was criminalised to provide enforcement agents with a hook upon which to arrest elements in society that were an economic threat.  And, then, with the urbanisation of the black population, the situation was compounded by housing policy that concentrated the "target" populations and made a simplistic policing policy of low level arrests easy and efficient to organise.  

The irony is that policies that were once either designed, or had the unintended consequence of marginalising the urban black poor, are now capturing the rural white poor, as disenfranchised blue collar workers are turning to meth.  Simon in particular makes a strong case for the war on drugs as basically as a class war, in which Americans rendered economic valueless are conveniently rounded up and incarcerated.  It's powerful stuff, even more so when an historian compares the marginalization of these people to the marginalization  of the Jews in 1930s Germany.

It's testament to the intelligence of his documentary that that parallel isn't pushed too far.  But after two hours witnessing the futility of a policy that takes people with no economic opportunity and further punishes them, we need as provocative an ending.  The result is a documentary that is in the best tradition of agitprop, well organised enough for the viewer with no prior knowledge but with enough new material for the armchair specialist.

THE HOUSE I LIVE IN played Sundance 2012 where it won the Grand Jury Prize - Documentary. It also played Sundance London.

Runtime - 117 minutes. US rating - R.

TEETH - fascinating, if mis-marketed

So everybody told me TEETH was a wicked satire of those dogmatic American evangelical Christian teens who make a cult out of biological ignorance and chastity. And I suppose the movie does start off as a comedy, but instead of a knowing, witty satire, it was more dead-pan and goofy. We meet a pretty teenage girl called Dawn and she's lecturing kids to keep it in their pants, right up to the point where she meets a sensitive Christian boy called Tobey. We get some quietly funny, goofy scenes in which they try and play down the obvious sexual tension, and it all ends with them making out. At which point, Dawn's mutated body puts up a rapier-like defense as her vagina dentata do for Tobey's manhood, and indeed, his sorry little life.

Now, I expected this scene to be played for broad laughs, and it's true that there is a lame attempt at gross-out comedy. But my overwhelming emotion for most of TEETH was pity. I think this is because Jess Weixler, who plays Dawn, is such a good actress and plays it so straight, that I actually began to sympathise with her. After all, she's a genuinely nice kid, who is learning that she's a mutant, and having to cope with a mother who's terminally ill and a psycho-sexually fucked up brother at the same time. In the scene where she finally enjoys sexual pleasure I was seriously happy for her!

So, while I did laugh out loud a lot during TEETH, I actually found it far more emotionally rewarding than, say, SEVERANCE. But I didn't quite get a handle on what writer-director Mithell Liechtenstein was trying to say. He starts by mocking the Christian teens for their distorted picture of sexual relations but in the end doesn't he present something equally warped, and alarmingly close to the fundamentalist view that teenage girls need to be protected from the predatory sexual instincts of teenage boys?

TEETH played Sundance, Berlin and Frightfest 2007. It was released earlier in 2008 in the US, Singapore, France and Hong Kong and is currently on release in the UK.