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In my mid to late 20s I got into a routine of covering the deadCENTER film festival in the summers, thanks to Colin Newman's multi-contributor blog OKC.NET and the PR man for the festival Rob Crissinger. I developed a good rapport with Crissinger and he would send me stories; from the Three 6 Mafia to the veteran war reporter, I didn't know who I would get to meet next. 

I post this partly because I was surprised at how much I got out of talking to Mike Boettcher, who for ABC covered wars in the Middle East and elsewhere for over 33 years, stretching back to the conflict in El Salvador. ABC allowed him to keep his footage off the Afghan war when Boettcher asked. He asked because he was tired of going into a story and having to leave. He would do something bigger, that lasted longer. And what struck me about this project, a documentary called 'The Hornet's Nest, was the therapy function behind it. This is a documentary about a difficult mission, one across a terrain that flummoxed the Russians, and one where we see first rate American soldiers and medics die. At the festival combat veterans watched, and sometimes said the names of their comrades out loud. Boettcher told me the soldier tends to isolate when he returns home--and as a war reporter he did the same thing. So the collective emotional feeling I experienced in the theater felt akin to something out of ancient Greece more than a documentary. A passion that is systemically and consciously kept out of the main public American space.  It's a witness and an acknowledgment of veterans suffering ( see the 22 veteran suicides a day at the time of this reporting). Mike's own 33 years of repressing years of combat led to a bad spell of drinking, sleepless nights, where he finally confessed to needing counseling to his boss. 

Boettcher's goal is not to isolate. Indeed one marine after seeing the movie asked if he could follow it on tour. Yet when Boettcher walked up to Starbucks for our interview I was struck by his rugged confidence, capability, but also the open-ness of the healing, the vulnerability that didn't conceal trauma, but hinted at a therapy purpose behind the eyes. Maybe for this reason I like the photo I snapped of him as much as the profile, one I got more into writing the ore I realized the goals behind the effort to compile and distribute the film. 

And the big picture, too. The  more we forget about what actually happens at war the more we risk rushing into unnecessary armed conflict--a risk to our democracy overall. 

Mike Boettcher at deadCENTER

 In September of 2015 I did a story for Nondoc about a women's wrestling match. The orchestrator of the whole thing was a local musician and artists that we all knew, Balthazar Henley. In the after night of one of our interviews she told me how one could almost get by as an artist with the after school arts programs. There was another female wrestler to interview that was crazy smart so we ended up talking long after the wrestling interview. The event itself was a success. There was a lot of swagger, mock nastiness and Camp.

This story came back for the poet at the Scissortail festival who promoted it, Gary Worth Moody, a real Santa Fe resident as well as a falconer, cowboy and co-winner of the New Mexico/Arizona Book Award in poetry had words for it on Facebook. I went and saw him read his poems and they totally knocked me out in a Cormac McCarthy way. I couldn't believe he liked my women's wrestler story, or that this what he would choose in advertising my writing. But his comments are indicative of exactly what I was trying to do with my reporting.

"One of the programs that will be presented at this year's Scissortail ... that I find especially intriguing is the work of Daniel Marroquin. Daniel works in journalism and film and as a teacher. I've read a bit of his journalism and am impressed with his ability to enter into the world of others, and lift to the surface the humanity of his subject(s)."

--Gary Worth Moody  (2022)

https://nondoc.com/2015/09/17/wrestlers-to-trade-blows-this-weekend/

"Danny Marroquin’s written thoughts on a variety of film [is] the rare anomaly among so much film writing found online.  Thoughtful, probing, intensely analytical and striving to find a fresh angle on films that were either summarily dismissed by audiences and critics (shades of the toxic, binary love-it/hate-it syndrome) or weren’t fully explored at first, Marroquin’s writing balances a keen emotional sensibility with a ferociously academic approach.  His writing blends the heart and the head in ways that make it possible to appreciate films like Paul Thomas Anderson’s roundly praised The Master or Nicolas Winding Refn’s thoroughly dismissed Only God Forgives in new and exciting ways. ... 

Marroquin’s writing springs from a specific place, unpolluted by the advent of a brave new world, and a hope that whatever form cinema takes, however much turmoil technology introduces, there is still room — and necessity — for approaching films as the works of art they are. 

-- Preston Jones, The Ft. Worth Star Telegram 

In 2012-2015 I had the privilege to watch a ton of movies and then write about them as they happened. As it happened, the films happened to me. This  is how I understand Pauline Kael went about her work, totally experientially, though I am not actually as familiar with her reviews as I should be. My writings at this time were more influenced by Richard Brody's aspirational work on The New Yorker blog. I remember thinking about his exciting essays when something opened up in my writing permanently when I was thinking about Sarah Polley's 'Away from Her.' I include the essay on her films later down the line because I see it as a transitional point in my writing, for whatever reason. Film opening up my writing is something that couldn't have happened without the obscure, passionate and erudite and young people who hovered around OKC.NET during those years. One of my editors has been a Best Girl crew person on 'Minari' since, we had a life coach and SEO expert, the son of a .com success story, slackers, comedians guest reviewing, and a preservation activist/professional photographer who was a key figure in Oklahoma City culture. For whatever reason this site didn't have a regular film reviewer, and because it was a blog I could experiment and go longer, trying to find more "probing" things to say. On a Daily or Alt Weekly the arts writers will hold on to a film beat job for a lifetime, so it's not likely I would've been able to review films anywhere else if this rag-tag blog never existed.

I'm including Harmony Korine and PT Anderson here for the collision of interests that their work represents, or the impulse, the impulse toward social comment, and the drive toward pure art. The films break narrative in an attempt at arresting artistic sensations. There is hardly a long plot or script to make sense of in Spring Breakers and the focus on what the images are doing, often almost as stills in a tripical dreamland, or very moody, emotion inducing music. PT Anderson likewise makes conversations go on so long, sometimes intelligibly, making it hard to follow Thomas Pynchon's conspiracy theories and the one thing we can hang onto is Johnny Greenwood's great score or a tone-setting Can tune. The murky, colorful, hazy pallet of Inherent Vice enchants, and voices come in from out of nowhere, Katherine Waterston, that hypnotize us and pain a world like no other. Yet these strange landscapes are right out of  American reality. There's a clear hippies vs. the straights tension in Inherent Vice that makes loud, colorful comedy of the straights who are in fact the real villains, participating in a vertical integration scheme that's even beyond their comprehension: Marty Short's coke snorting dentist, Crocker Fenway's suave but ignorant and vulnerable patriarchy, and the real estate baron who can't take the pressure of going AWOL from his job exploiting cheap house prices. The girls in Harmony's Spring Breakers end up being the real exploiters, in their neon bikini, and their brainwashed-dumb mantras ("Pretend it's a video game"; "spring break, spring break"), a loud and colorful joke but representing a deadlly serious social force that puts an end to Gucci Mane and his people in their own home at end of film. In Inherent Vice it's a gentle saxophone player who is exploited, in Spring Breakers it's the rapper, that one time of year when a minority group gets exploited culturally and beyond. (Note: James Franco's "Alien" from another planet would just be another Al had rap not been invented before him. Harmony knows the joke, but he strangely plays the part of dumb dumb with intense conviction making the movie even more interesting. .... When I saw it, almost alone in theaters, I remember being really pulverized it, almost similar to seeing The Thin Red Line by Malick for the first time. Like I'd seen a vision that traversed different realms. I was probably easy on the film in the official review due to an intoxication, what images and music and inspired actors can do, But I quite liked seeing the James Joyce sense of sin/instensity parallel right when the film opened. It's since become a kind of cult classic, and it definitely has its imitators. As with Inherent Vice, I'm not sure that it has its proper following, or that it deserves one. But I really like it. The experience of seeing it with my friend Kameron on opening weekend was memorable. We talked about it afterward and accepted that we didn't know everything about it.

 I reviewed The Master more intensely but by the time Inherent Vice came around I was able to identify germane plot points with more clarity and I like the ending of this review. PTA unknowingly giving me a movie I could try to decode, one that would play the final part in sharpening my essay writing from a clunkiness. I also note a thing in the review that hints at my lukewarmness  on Pynchon's style of writing. Virtuosic though it is, genius no doubt, but PT has given Pynchon a warmth of sentiment and storytelling that for me is an improvement on the original. But this may reflect my bias, PTA being my favorite director.

Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Inherent Vice'  

Harmony Korine's 'Spring Breakers' 

Somewhere in my true magical wilderness of youth at the MI Dollar Movies 5 I saw Sarah Polley in the film 'Go.' Outside of 'Pulp Fiction' this adult movie was the epitome of cool. I would never have guessed the hip actress in that movie would be the directorial author of two films I did deep dives on in 2012, 'Take this Waltz' and 'Away from Her'. I had seen 'Away from Her' before 2012, but it was after seeing a festival showing of Take This Waltz that I gave it a second spin. 

I found the fluid way the movie swept through different older people's memories and emotions to be a kind of miracle. It was a powerful movie to watch, so I made a lot of the review trying to figure out who this person was who had this extrasensory perception to make a movie beyond her years. So the piece has a weird biographical break once I get to the second film. (I think what I was also moved by was its rareness in the film culture, where the cult of self, swaggering camera, paint by the numbers violent conflict, and a kind of aggressive style of storytelling prevails in films more than in novels). This was a quietly observed story about something ordinary that was in fact extraordinary. 

Polley would later go on to make an acclaimed documentary about her family history, 'The Stories We Tell', expanding even further the scope of her technique. Just last week (April of 2022) I heard Polley on Elvis Mitchell's The Treatment and I had no idea she'd been away from the game for 10 years because of  a bad concussion. Nor did I know as a child she was endangered physically on a Terry Gilliam set (a situation made more emotionally fraught when her parents were Monty Python fanatics). She discusses all of this assuredly, intellectually, passionately, with amused good humor, and cooly on the Elvis radio show, while promoting her book--yet another project expanding her range of capabilities. This is a talent who should have a career as fruitful as your PTAs and Damien Chazelles, the fellas who always seem to have a project on cue. But we'll be happy for what we have of Polley's and be glad she's back in the creative mode. 

Earlier I mentioned that her two films, one I liked more than the other, opened up something in my writing, so why I'm fond enough of them to include here. It was the sensitivity and delicacy of 'Away from Her' that inspired me, its almost angelic vision toward people with frailties. And then in ''Take this Waltz'' it was the way the director regarded the drunk character played by Sarah Silverman (compassion, an extra angle in a film where we thought the POV was set). In so being moved by the latter example I learned in the moment that I could write abut a film and enjoy what was good in it, and critique what I might think was a little slower or less compelling. This prompted one of my readers to say that she couldn't tell whether I liked a movie or not when she read the reviews. ... Finally, I was more open to using a restrained but still noticeable lyricism in writing about movies after experiencing 'Away from Her', and being open to more expansive thoughts like love and memory in the way they bind a film to its characters--who are experiencing those things. I could be this way with films too, open, if I wanted to access their more mysterious and meaningful depths. 

Two Films by Sarah Polley