Terminal USA, Idi Amin Dada

Terminal USA (1993). Dir. Jon Moritsugu.

Fractured punkrock drug abusing Asian-American sitcom. That’s not actually a complete sentence, but somehow better captures the fragmentary insanity of the film than a well-composed grammatical sentence.

Moritsugu (director of a number of scuzzy, punk, degenerate, not to mention awesome, films like Hippy Porn and Mod Fuck Explosion) creates a world where musical cues are subverted, the tinny sitcom music and laugh track that accompany the familial encounters between drug addict mother, moral burn-out and degenerate younger son, closeted gay older son, all-american dad (complete with John Wayne-ish gunplay!), and slutty social climber sister.

The story (such as it is) takes place over what is most likely one day in the black hole lives of an Asian-American family. Wielding the building blocks of situational comedy like a bat with nails driven through it, dialogue is delivered stilted and unevenly. Devoid of positive emotion the family seethes with the terminal disease of american-ism: insane desire for success/pleasure, the approval of society at the expense of authentic emotion, and the propensity to implosive self-destruction in the guise of individuality.

This film is about flaws, flaws in life, expectations, sex, drugs, and relations between humans. Highly recommended.

General Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait (1974). Dir. Barbet Schroeder.

This documentary feels like 2/3 of a complete doc, but nonetheless incredibly artful and chillingly allows the General to make much of the case against himself. What is missing is a complete and contexted picture of Uganda, the critical voice of the filmmaker feels tacked on; incomplete and incapable of competing with the interview footage.

The music, performed at least partly by the General himself, is a standout aspect of the film.

This film would be a monolithic success at 50 minutes, or paired with another more traditional doc on Idi Amin.

All in all a crushingly emotive trip, even when the filmmakers cannot restrain themselves and let certain sequences play for far too long (see the scene of General Amin describing the wildlife on the river-boat). What I would have liked is a more complete critical and incisive eye towards the overall shape of the documentary on the part of the filmmakers. It would have made all the difference, along with creating a greater presence in their own subject… I felt like I could always see the shadow of the filmmakers themselves, but their voice is only present in the negative space; when truly their placement needed to be far more foregrounded. The voices that sometimes pass from beyond the edges of the frame deserves to be contextualized in just the same manner as the ostensible subject of the documentary itself.