Going Through Splat and Kekexili: Mountain Patrol

Going Through Splat: The Life and Work of Stewart Stern
Directed by Jon Ward

ONE SCREENING ONLY Sunday, May 29 6:00pm The Egyptian

SEE IT! This is a “5” on your ballot! Stern will be there for a Q&A after the film; I’ve seen him at audience Q&As before, and he’s great!

At the very beginning of Going Through Splat, we hear someone, in a choked, scratchy voice, singing “It Ain’t Necessarily So” from Porgy and Bess. The haunted, genderless voice seems to emanate from an old 78 record that’s playing in the next world.

“Li'l David was small, but oh my
Li'l David was small, but oh my
He fought big Goliath
who lay down and dieth
Li'l David was small, but oh my”

The singer turns out to be Stewart Stern, the screenwriter for Sybil and Rebel Without a Cause, and in his voice the show tune sounds like the spiritual that the Gershwins intended it to be.

This is the first of several incandescent moments in local filmmaker Jon Ward’s extraordinary documentary about Stern’s life and times. Stern’s lifelong fixation with Peter Pan mythology becomes a recurring motif: at one point, there’s footage of Stern, as an adult, attached to a harness in an empty theatre so that he could fly around the way Peter Pan did. In Splat’s most powerful segment, we’re shown part of a 1932 home movie called Pirate, featuring the young Stern as he swashbuckles about, while in voice-over, he tells us the J.M. Barrie connection to his most iconic film: “James Dean is Peter Pan, Natalie Wood is Wendy, and Sal Mineo is all the Lost Boys rolled into one.” (I kept wondering what Finding Neverland might have been like if Stern had written it.)

After winning an Emmy in the late 1970s for Sybil, Stern pretty much stopped writing screenplays. He felt he couldn’t go on, and there are perceptive comments from him and The Usual Suspects’ Christopher McQuarrie as to why. Going Through Splat is the best, most accurate movie about writer’s block that I have seen.

Kekexili: Mountain Patrol
Directed by Lu Chuan

Wednesday, May 25, 7:00 PM Neptune Theatre

Friday, May 27, 4:45 PM Egyptian Theatre

The Chinese drama Kekexili: Mountain Patrol depicts the cruel fates in store for Tibetan volunteers who go into remote wilderness to save rare antelopes from poachers.

There are lots of shots of animal carcasses and one bunny rabbit eaten raw in close-up. I’m glad that Columbia Pictures made this movie, if only for their Asian market. I hope they decide to release it here. It towers over—subtly, of course—most of what the studio makes for its U.S. market.

The saviors are perfectly human. So are the villains—poor farmers who need the antelope skins to survive economically. A journalist accompanies the Patrol as an impartial observer. He learns, in due time, much about himself, the harsh splendor of the wild, and the issue of poaching vs. preservation as seen from both sides.

Thoughtful and unflinching—recommended.