The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
6 — Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Written, directed and produced
by Wes Hurley (“Fallen Jewel”),
“Potato Dreams of America” has
been years in the making. The film,
based on real events in Hurley’s life,
has had different iterations, including
a short, “Little Potato,” which won
the documentary short Jury Prize at
SXSW in 2020, and a VR short entitled
“Potato Dreams.” But the runup to
this film goes beyond its previous
forms: Through its autobiographical
format, the audience gets to see how
film shaped the life of a young Hurley
— and his proxy character Potato —
throughout his life.
Despite my initial misconception,
the title doesn’t refer to dreams that
are potato-based, but instead the
action of dreaming done by Potato —
his mother Lena’s pet name for him
(the character’s actual name is Vasily,
but since he is billed and referred to
as Potato, I’m going to refer to him
as such). The film follows the titular
Potato and his mother through their
immigration from Russia to America
and
his
coming-of-age-while-
coming-out-as-gay
experiences,
using different actors and different
filmmaking styles to tell it.
The first part of the film takes
place in 1985 Russia. This portion uses
obvious sets, bright colors, dramatic
orchestral scores and caricatures
— think Wes Anderson — to tell the
story of Hurley’s Russian childhood
in notably unaccented English. The
character billed as “Russian Potato”
(Hersh Powers, “Sadie”) and his
mother, billed as “Young Lena” (Sera
Barbieri, “Lightning”) navigate the
conservative landscape of the Soviet
Union (and the new freedoms that
come once the Iron Curtain falls)
through a fond attachment to movies
and quick comedic timing. Their love
for films makes its way into their joy
for finding a third “renegade” channel
on their TV that plays American
movies and the fact that Lena briefly
moves in with a man solely so she and
Potato can experience his color TV.
This first part is staged almost like a
play, with creative filmmaking choices
that give this perception of childhood
an almost whimsical feel. In an
opening scene, a young Potato frames
his arguing parents with his thumbs
and forefingers, as a sort of imagination
sequence. This instance of domestic
abuse turns into a choreographed
stage fight with a toddler-aged Potato
watching from the audience.
A moment where someone at
school tells him to “take Jesus with
him” prompts him to do just that:
Potato creates an imaginary friend
equivalent
of
Jesus
(Jonathan
Bennett, “Mean Girls”) and takes
him by the hand into his apartment
(truly, no one warned me that the love
interest from “Mean Girls” would
be playing a goofy, long-haired Jesus
who yells at the TV and gives Potato
bad advice). When his mother reads
an advertisement to become a mail-
order bride, the background behind
the window becomes the stage for an
infomercial-type advertisement that
is meant to take place in Lena’s head:
“Are you tired of Russian men?” And
as Lena wretchedly observes how she
feels stuck — “Don’t you feel the walls
closing in?” — it’s accompanied by
rumbling and falling debris.
This brings us to the next part,
where Lena’s participation in the
mail-order bride program lands them
the opportunity to come to America
to live with a man named John (Dan
Lauria, “The Wonder Years”). As
they head to Seattle, Wash., to live
with John, however, the film takes
an abrupt turn. The filmmaking
becomes more conventional, the
cartoonish sets disappear and the
actors for Potato and Lena change
— Tyler Bocock (in his feature film
debut) takes over as “American
Potato” and Marya Sea Kaminski
(“Pacific Aggression”) takes over as
“American Lena.” These two new
actors have heavy Russian accents,
making it clear that this is no longer a
staged and exaggerated recreation but
instead a more standard narrative.
The new location brings new
challenges for both Potato and
Lena: the classic fish-out-of-water
immigrant story, the going-to-a-new-
school story, the coming out story.
More importantly, though, there’s
the addition of John, the stepfather,
who holds the threat of sending them
back to Russia over their heads if their
“values” don’t seem to align with his.
The conflict is clear: If John were to
discover Potato’s sexual orientation,
they would be forced out of America.
In this context, John holds all of the
cards.
While the staged sequences in
Russia find humorous moments in
their unconventionality — like, say, an
ostentatious, glittery dance number
that features the Virgin Mary tossing
Baby Jesus to a backup dancer — the
second part focuses on the subtle
and sometimes unfunny comedy of
everyday life, like a funny sequence
where Potato tries to work up the
nerve to check out a film from the
“Gay and Lesbian” section of the video
store. It also finds the beauty in their
new home, with beautiful shots of the
Seattle skyline.
Not many people know Selma
Blair. She has been, by her own words,
“a supporting actress.” And maybe
that’s why seeing her stripped raw
in her documentary “Introducing,
Selma Blair” means so much. In
the documentary, she’s the main
character — a real, living, breathing
person who finally has the camera’s
attention.
Unfortunately,
though,
when the camera is on her, it’s not for
something funny or happy like her
role in “Legally Blonde.” Instead, it’s
devastating and honest, because she is
showing the audience she handles her
Multiple Sclerosis.
What makes “Introducing, Selma
Blair” so compelling is that no holds
are barred. Honestly, I didn’t know
much about MS prior to viewing this
documentary but learning about it
through Blair’s experience is truly
shattering. Blair allows the audience
to follow every step of her journey
in which she reveals the good and
the bad. Viewers get the fun, playful
moments of her life, most of which
center around her son Arthur, but
also the moments of sheer exhaustion,
unbearable
pain
and
continual
hopelessness. The jarring, abrupt
shifts
between
those
extremes
provide the most meaningful glimpses
into Blair’s life. One moment she could
be jumping and laughing as she plays
dodgeball with her son and the next
moment has her in bed, so tired from
playing she cannot move.
The film shifts in tone when it moves
from Blair’s day-to-day moments to
her progression through her stem cell
transplant treatment, from preliminary
chemotherapy
to
engraftment.
The cell phone videos of Blair in the
hospital, combined with traditional
documentary footage, are tear-jerking
in a way that few things can be.
We see the emotional effects of the
chemo in her visceral sadness and the
physical effects of her treatment, the
way that her body swells and she feels
a pain that overtakes her. The audience
is privy to a moving flashback where
she explains that she had asked Arthur
if there was anything that made him
nervous about her treatment, and he
had answered that he didn’t want
her to lose her hair; she said, “Well
then, I’ll just have you cut it, so that
it’s not so surprising to you.” After the
flashback, “Introducing, Selma Blair”
moves to a tender scene of Arthur
shaving her head with tendrils of hair
encircling them both on the floor.
In another clip, she winks at the
camera as she administers her own
injections. The camera follows her as
she enters the hospital for a period of
isolation. There’s a moment where
the nurses, holding the stem cells
that will be transplanted, are singing
and saying a prayer as Blair’s eyes
are closed tightly, internally praying
alongside them that the transplant
will work. These glimpses into her
experience — into her life — paint a
picture of who she is, what she has
gone through and how strong she is
for overcoming it all. The audience
can never understand her pain, but
by viewing this documentary, we are
able to educate ourselves on MS and,
more importantly, the people who
persevere through it.
There isn’t a “happily ever after”
once the treatment is over, and this
offers a realistic understanding of
Blair’s experiences. Following the
treatment, she is disheartened that
her recovery hasn’t happened in the
way she expected.
“I think I thought I was cured,”
she says in a voiceover, as she,
overwhelmed and crying, struggles
to let herself into her hotel room after
being discharged. In one of the most
honest, melancholy sequences, Blair
comes to the realization that her son
(who had been living with his father
while she was undergoing treatment)
could potentially continue to live only
with his father: “I don’t feel like I have
to hold onto anything anymore,” she
sobs. And then the scene cuts to Arthur
bringing her flowers — another abrupt
shift that only emphasizes her pain.
Every moment of “Introducing,
Selma Blair” is unchoreographed.
Every moment is painfully real —
sometimes so intimate that I felt like
the audience should perhaps look
away and let her exist without our
eyes on her.
The documentary closes with Blair
still recovering. “I’m really depressed …
I’m really struggling,” she says. “But at
the same time, I realize … everyone is.”
She reaches some semblance of
closure even if she’s not fully there
yet. And when the credits begin to
roll, the audience wonders how she’s
doing now. We hope that she’s happy
and healthy … content in her own
existence. The documentary does just
as its name suggests: It introduces us
to Selma Blair as the person she really
is, featuring the good, the bad and
everything in between.
Dan
Chiasson’s
new
poetry
collection “The Math Campers” is not
a volume that can be read passively. In
fact, the very style and construction of
the collection demand the participation
of the reader. Instead of including
dozens of different short poems, which
is the norm for most poetry collections,
“The Math Campers” contains several
long-form poems over 20 pages long.
Instead of wrapping up every poem
nicely in one page, the poems take shape
over time and space, meaning that
the reader must make a concentrated
effort to maintain focus. This can be
difficult because the poems often have
no clear beginning, middle or end.
Freed from the constraints of linear
narrative,
Chiasson
experiments
with form and function. Lesser poets,
perhaps, would get lost in the myriad
voices and seemingly rambling trains of
thought Chiasson incorporates, but he
proves himself to have a true mastery of
language and his own writing style.
As just one example of Chiasson’s
playfulness with form, much of the
first part of the collection, “Must
We Mean What We Say,” is written
in a back-and-forth quasi-epistolary
format. Chiasson alternates between
lyric form — “The sky was impossible,
/ then our heads turned. / The noon
midnight came / it came to us one by
one.” — and prose — “He viewed the
Druidical majesty of the eclipse from
the stone steps of Memorial Church,
and it was then, a source confirms,
that he knew all about New England.”
While at times the dialogue of
the narrator and the unnamed
correspondent seems grounded in
reality, with details like “It was already
November when he wrote again” and
“Before the correspondence slowed
that fall,” the end of the poem calls
this reality into question in a way that
makes the reader want to go back and
read it from the beginning.
The narrator writes, “It was
painful to imagine that someone I
had imagined had imagined me, and
could simply stop, leaving me stranded,
without oxygen, like an astronaut alone
in deep space.” Suddenly a mysterious
and often philosophical back-and-forth
between two unknown characters
becomes a meditation on the nature
of reality itself. Chiasson asks us if
we even exist if we do not exist in the
minds of others: “Now, since he was
gone, I was gone, and since I was gone,
he was gone.”
After indirectly posing this question,
Chiasson proceeds to directly involve
the reader. He transitions to the use of
“you,” a subtle grammatical shift that
could be overlooked because it is often
used as a general term instead of a
specific one, especially in the context of
a poetry collection. However, Chiasson
quickly makes it clear that he means
you, the person literally reading his
words at that instant. He is wittily
self-referential, writing, “By the way: I
know what you know about me. / And
by I, I mean me, the author, Dan.”
He goes on to speak in an even
more direct way to the reader, creating
intimate moments that shock you into
understanding. These are not just
vague allusions to the author-reader
relationship; Chiasson is specific
and pointed, asking, “if the reader
will please turn over / her hands to
expose her palms / I will do so too and
together, stranger / together we shall
contemplate enormity.”
Chiasson’s careful manipulation
of reality and exploitation of the
author-reader relationship create a
space where the reader is an active
participant in the poetry. We never
know when the author will turn to
us and expect us to contemplate our
relationship with him next. As a result,
we are always on edge, waiting to be
written into the poem once again.
At some point, we realize that the
initial question — do we exist only if
someone else is imagining us? — is
answered by our own participation
in the poetry. Chiasson writes, “if
the reader will now step away from
the page / if the reader will now step
away from the screen / together we
will ponder who imagined whom,”
thus implicating us, the reader, in the
central philosophical question.
By
digging
deeper
into
the
complexities of the author-reader
relationship — the pact that is made
between reader and author to agree to
a shared reality, the relinquishment of
the reader’s own reality and yielding
to the author’s — Chiasson manages
to take us one step further into his
philosophical meditation by making
the reader a participant. Focusing
solely on Chiasson’s philosophical
overtones would be a disservice to his
writing, however. He is also incredibly
talented in the most basic poetic
skillset: simply creating beautiful and
moving turns of phrase.
SXSW Online 2021: ‘Potato Dreams of America’ brings joy in its creativity
SXSW Online 2021: ‘Introducing, Selma Blair’ offers a different look at an actress’s life
‘The Math Campers’ demands
that you question your reality
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com
KARI ANDERSON
Senior Arts Editor
SABRIYA IMAMI
Daily Film Beat Editor
EMILIA FERRANTE
Daily Arts Writer
SXSW
puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com
By Jerry Edelstein
©2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
03/24/21
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
03/24/21
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
Release Date: Wednesday, March 24, 2021
ACROSS
1 Concerning
6 Letters replacing
a list
9 Afternoon snooze
12 Nighttime party
14 Soccer
tiebreaker,
perhaps
17 County on the
English Channel
18 Canyon
namesake of dry
California winds
19 Tree with elastic
wood
20 *Matches with
known outcomes
22 Hi-__ TV
23 What “X” may
mean
24 Music center?
25 Dennis the
Menace, for one
28 Beloved
30 Monk’s title
33 Cultural setting
36 Black and blue?
39 H or O, in H2O
41 Contrasting
ornaments
42 Roald Dahl title
heroine
43 Submitted, as a
manuscript
44 Kvetching sounds
45 Weakens
48 Give voice to
49 __ Lingus
51 Partner in a 2020
peace agreement
with Isr.
53 Quite a ways
away
56 *Music group’s
lead violinist,
casually
61 Anger
62 Imagining
63 Photo taken
backwards?
65 Marine Corps
motto, briefly,
and a hint to
the answers to
starred clues
66 Thrills
67 General on a
menu
68 Fair-hiring letters
69 Flair
DOWN
1 Syrian leader
2 W.C. Fields
persona
3 *Fast-food
alternatives to
burgers
4 RN workplaces
5 Sailing danger
6 Ancient mystic
7 Jazz trumpeter
Jones
8 Meeting group
9 Biblical boater
10 Bee, to Opie
11 School orgs.
13 Leave
15 Name seen on
one’s way to the
penthouse?
16 License plates
21 Marked on a
ballot
26 “La Bohème”
role
27 Banana covering
29 Hunk’s pride
30 *Like half a
chance
31 APR-reducing
loan
32 Pt. of AAA
33 Office notice
34 “Now __ me
down to sleep ... ”
35 Being severely
criticized
37 Numbered rds.
38 Novelist Jaffe
40 Diner check
46 Aussie parrot,
briefly
47 Mournful
49 33-Down
demand,
perhaps
50 Luncheon end?
52 “... or __!”
54 Cartoon
mermaid
55 Actress
Witherspoon
56 Punch deliverer
57 March time
58 San __: Italian
resort
59 Recon target
60 Sniggler’s catch
64 Map line: Abbr.
SUDOKU
7
3
2
8
5
9
8
3
4
6
5
6
7
2
9
4
3
9
6
7
4
2
3
6
5
4
8
6
3
9
1
7
“Hey! Whadya
want from
me!?”
“And I know
these stars
will... bleed?”
03/17/21
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
prologue”: “The
10 Namesake of a
12 Sand transporter
25 Park carriage, or
45 Wears down
flipped with joy
WHISPER