When it comes to film subgenres, one of the more peculiar (to me, at least) has to do with children in poverty. International in scope and dubbed the transglobal children's street film by at least one person, it includes such harrowing works as Los Olvidados (Mexico) and Pixote and City of God (Brazil), as well as the comparatively prettified Salaam Bombay (India). Now director Ramin Bahrani and his co-screenwriter Bahareh Azimi have added another outstanding work to the subgenre—and their look at children in poverty is set close to home in Willets Point, Queens, the threatened "Iron Triangle" industrial zone right by Shea Stadium and LaGuardia Airport.
Chop Shop, poetic and touching like Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, is currently running at the Film Forum, where Bahrani will hold Q&As at the 8 pm screenings tonight and tomorrow night. I strongly recommend seeing this movie, which draws on young local talents Alejandro Polanco and Isamar Gonzales in the lead roles and also features a strong supporting cast including Ahmad Razvi. Chop Shop's story of how siblings Alejandro and Isamar (pictured) fare in this world is thoroughly absorbing. The Willets Point setting, virtually a character in itself, reminded me of locales in the documentary Manufactured Landscapes as well as takes on capitalism in Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn and Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.
Come to think of it, I'd like to know how the film has gone over in Willets Point.
"Over his long career as a vile televangelist building an empire of bigotry from the donations of poor people, Falwell has supported South African apartheid, called AIDS an invention of Jesus to punish gays, attacked Martin Luther King and U.S. civil rights, and blamed 9/11 on feminists and homosexuals."--Wonkette
Listen to it...soak in the convivial vibes...hear how clearly Vonnegut's prose comes across when read aloud...note his genius for creating and latching onto clever extended metaphors...and also notice when Vonnegut makes what could be one of the great literary Freudian slips when he pronounces his narrator's name with a T instead of a D.
KURT VONNEGUT, JR. (1922-2007). If you knew me when I was a teen, you'll probably remember my enthusiasm for the writings of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I made my way through his books (extreme rarities excepted) and recommended them to just about everyone who meant anything to me. When I took my first fiction writing course in college and the teacher asked the students to identify their favorite short story writers, Vonnegut was one of the two authors I mentioned.
Yes, I was like that young man in the key party scene of The Ice Storm. (I hope I got that reference right.) It was "Vonnegut this, Vonnegut that" for much of the time with me. And I was not alone. By the time I'd become part of the cult of Vonnegut, he had already written about how young admirers had flocked to be in his presence. And, as I recall, he was not very happy about that form of hero worship.
My feeling about Vonnegut not being thrilled about hearing from fans was a major roadblock that kept me from acting on my strong desire to let him know how much his writing meant to me. I figured I'd be just one among thousands and thousands who had already given him that message. I'd only be a redundancy.
My conflict between wanting to thank Vonnegut and not wanting to bother him was never stronger than at a millennial function for Forbes that Vonnegut attended with his wife, the photographer Jill Krementz. Angling for shots, she kept on bumping into me, but I just couldn't bring myself to bump into her husband and become yet another in the long line of people who had told him how much Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) had meant to them.
Over the years, I also--somehow--got it in my head that he would really enjoy getting a CD of The Boswell Sisters, a close harmony vocal group popular when he was a kid. I wanted to send him one as a "thank you" but I never got around to confirming his address. Just days ago I was thinking about going ahead with that plan. At the time, he must have been fading away. So it goes, as he would put it.
My first exposure to Vonnegut was seeing the edited-for-TV movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five when it was broadcast on network TV against Helter Skelter. I was immensely attracted to the movie's blend of sardonic humor and immense sympathy for its characters. Vonnegut didn't feel he had the best of luck with movies--and he didn't always admire his own books--but, I learned, he was pleased with the film version of Slaughterhouse-Five, which was largely in tune with his literary style and point of view.
In essay after essay and story after intertwined story, politically engaged and expressing himself in clear and simple prose that could be readily understood by a wide readership, Vonnegut portrayed humanity as frail and vulnerable and pathetic yet capable of beauty--and perenially at the mercy not only of nature but of policies and technologies of its own making. It staggers and still baffles me that a writer with such a message could also be one of the most censored in American history--I can't think of any vision that could be more relevant in this era. In the words of his great character, science fiction writer Kilgore Trout: "We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane."
(That was actually my high school yearbook quote, but only now--and I mean right now, as I write this--am I beginning to appreciate its wisdom.)
So much has been written and will be written about Vonnegut and his work that I'll simply limit the rest of this post to what might be some relatively obscure observations.
Two of Vonnegut's rules of writing (gleaned, I recall, from IBM ads!): Include a villain in your stories* and use periods instead of semicolons.
I think I've read that Vonnegut didn't like the film version of his play Happy Birthday, Wanda June, but I was very pleasantly surprised by the gorgeous print briefly screened at the Film Forum.
The Vonnegut-inspired television drama Between Time and Timbuktu can be seen at the Museum of Television and Radio (MTR) in midtown Manhattan.
In his May 10, 2004 essay "Cold Turkey," Vonnegut likened the United States, in its panicky dependence on diminishing oil reserves, to an addict lashing out in fear of not getting another fix. Nearly three years later, his message remains as clear and urgent and unheeded as ever.
When it comes to film subgenres, one of the more peculiar (to me, at least) has to do with children in poverty. International in scope and dubbed the transglobal children's street film by at least one person, it includes such harrowing works as Los Olvidados (Mexico) and Pixote and City of God (Brazil), as well as the comparatively prettified Salaam Bombay (India). Now director Ramin Bahrani and his co-screenwriter Bahareh Azimi have added another outstanding work to the subgenre—and their look at children in poverty is set close to home in Willets Point, Queens, the threatened "Iron Triangle" industrial zone right by Shea Stadium and LaGuardia Airport. 
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