THE GEM & CENTURY THEATRES

OPENING FEBRUARY 23

To

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Based on the true story of Patsy Cline's friendship
with an adoring fan, Always... Patsy Cline
is a heartfelt comedy featuring over 20
of (line's most memorable songs.

1/2 PRICE PERFORMANCES THROUGH MARCH 5!

The Purple Rose Theatre Company Production of

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"Yoop it up for Escanaba,
a Gem of a comedy."

-Michael H. Margolin, Detroit News

"Some comedies have laughs
by the dozen. Escanaba has
them by the gross."

-Martin F. Kohn, Detroit Free Press

A Hilarious Comedy

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from page 74

something quite different at the center.
We're used to such powerful and
personal storytelling styles in fiction
film, yet when it comes to documen-
taries, a certain set of fixed but unwrit-
ten rules are assumed to be in place.
We expect documentaries to solve
mysteries, not create them. We often
refer to them as "cinema verite," or
"true cinema," implying that because a
film is nonfiction, it will present us
with a single, unassailable truth. But
what is a filmmaker — a brilliant and
honest one — to do when the "truth"
becomes less and less absolute and
obvious as he gazes deeper and deeper
into his subject?
Gates of Heaven began when Morris
spotted a newspaper headline that read
"450 Dead Pets Go to Napa." He
knew there was a story in there.
But what he couldn't have known
then was that the real story — the true
subject of Gates of Heaven and, in fact,
of all of Morris' nonfiction films —
would turn out to be the surprises his
human subjects unexpectedly revealed
about themselves as they spoke, spon-
taneously and almost unprompted,
into Morris' unblinking lens.
At the heart of Errol Morris' artistry
is the seemingly simple art of listening;
he asks his subjects questions, and then
he lets them speak as long as they like.
Eventually, as Morris has put it, "they
tell you what you want to hear."
Among those who have revealed
themselves to Morris since 1978 have
been the residents of a small, decided-
ly downscale community in Florida
whose casual ruminations about turkey
hunting, suicide and the origin of the
Everglades put the calculated ramblings
of most theologians to shame (Vernon,
Florida, 1980); Randall Adams, an
unjustly imprisoned convict who lan-
guished on Texas' death row until
Morris began to pay attention to his
claims of.innocence, resulting in a film
which caused his conviction to be over-
thrown and his life to be saved (The
Thin Blue Line, 1988); and Stephen
Hawking, who communicated with
Morris electronically as he sat in his
wheelchair at Oxford, from which he
explored the outer reaches of the uni-
verse (A Brief History of Time, 1992).
With his remarkable Fast, Cheap
and Out of Control (1998), Morris
made a courageous and startling leap
by interweaving the obsessions of four
very different people — a mole-rat
photographer, a topiary gardener, a
robot scientist and a lion tamer —
and fashioning out of their stories a
triumphant view of humanity's need
to somehow make sense, and even art,

out of a seemingly chaotic universe.
With this film, Morris took the
nonfiction cinema to a place it had
never been. He saw several truths
through the eyes of his interviewees
and created from them a truth of his
own — a vision of individual human
courage that is the result of the com-
bined power of editing, cinematogra-
phy, music and intuition.
Morris' newest film, Mr. Death: The
Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr, could
be seen as the darker side of the lives cele-
brated in Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.
While the subjects of the latter are
determined to use their curiosity and
enthusiasm to bring something
ennobling to a world that often makes
that difficult, Fred Leuchter rejects the
objective truth that exists irrefutably in
front of him, and creates his own
bizarrely labyrinthine "reality" by declar-
ing that the Holocaust never happened.
Morris, of course, is less interested
in Leuchter's horrifyingly stupid —
and wrong — conclusions than he is
in the process by which Leuchter
reached them. The human capacity for
self-deception and rationalization
seems to run almost as deep as our
need to discover, to reveal, to create.
By showing us the process by which
human beings get where they are —
for better or worse — Morris is tack-
ling the most important subjects of
all: what it means to be human, and
consequently what it means to be
responsible for our choices.
That in the face of such weighty
achievement Errol Morris manages to
demonstrate a deeply profound sense
of humor and irony in his films is all
the more amazing.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the
filmmaker who has most consistently
refused to condescend to his audiences
should be less famous than filmmakers
who have done the opposite.
Unlike his own characterization of his
cinematic subjects' testimony, Morris
may not always tell us "what we want to
hear." Yet that is exactly why we ignore
his brilliant and crystalline reflection of
ourselves at our own peril.

❑

The Detroit Film Theatre
screens the following Errol
Morris films on consecutive
Mondays at 7:30 p.m.: Vernon,
Florida on Feb. 21; The Thin
Blue Line on Feb. 28; A Brief
History of Time on March 6; Fast,
Cheap and Out of Control on
March 13. Tickets are $5.50.
(313) 833-3237.

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