Here Comes the Sweeney
I've never seen The Sweeney, the landmark seventies British TV series which basically consisted of car chases and John Thaw screaming at people ("shut it!!"), but the name of the show came from Cockney rhyming-slang for the police "flying squad" ("Sweeney Todd," and so on). I thought of that last night during the screening of Detroit: Ruin of a City, by Michael Chanan and George Steinmetz. The workers striking at the River Rouge and other places apparently organized flying squads for protection against police and strikebreaking goons. So now you know.

Detroit played at the Rackham Ampitheater on the U-M Campus at 8:30, and I thought it'd be just me and a few curious onlookers. I arrived in the brisk evening air to find everybody in the fucking world milling about in the lobby. The original showing had "sold out" and they'd scheduled another one for 10:30. I decided to try that one, went home, had a beer, watched part of The McKenzie Break, and returned to barely squeeze into the second showing.

Mmmph. I actually don't know all that much about Detroit history, what I do know mainly coming from Heather Ann Thompson's Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. A lot of the footage was really interesting, especially the stuff shot by a local workers' film organization trying to even out the media balance in the 1930s, and I actually didn't know that the whole "Devil's Night" thing (referenced in The Crow and, if I'm not mistaken, that Judgement Night movie) comes from Detroit. Other than that, it was a bit of a wash. It was shot mostly on a camcorder as one of these Louis Theroux-type, post-ironic observers of American culture offers a variety of bon mots while being driven around the city by a couple of old Motown salts (apart from George Steinmetz, I actually don't remember the names). The editing was probably choppier than it needed to be--if intentional, it was incredibly pretentious; if not, they should have done a better job. And how'd a movie like this manage to snag Michael Nyman to handle the soundtrack? All in all, it was nowhere near worth coming back for the second showing. I'll think better next time before I go to anything associated with something entitled "Ruins of Modernity."

Oh, and Francine Prose read from her latest, A Changed Man, at the Liberty Street Borders just before the movie (not that the two were related). I enjoyed her novel The Blue Angel, and looked forward to the reading, but found I could only stay a few minutes as those readings inevitably give off such a whiff of sadness and gloom that I become even more depressed than usual by listening to them. So it was off to the Film section to "browse" through the latest TimeOut film guide. They didn't seem to like Picnic at Hanging Rock as much as I did, but they do admit the sheer awesomeness of Death Line (available at Liberty Street Video on DVD under the title Raw Meat).