ARCHIE'S BETTY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Personal Search for the "real" Archie delights

Archie's Betty (2015)
Dir. Gerald Peary

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Who in their right mind didn't read Archie Comics? Millions upon millions of fans all over the world dove into the world of this loveable carrot-topped high school student who lusted after the mega-hot brunette Veronica, but who alas, couldn't always see the forest for the trees - that the best romantic bet was (the equally hot) blonde Betty.

Dappled with a lovely array of supporting characters, Archie comics presented a riotously funny and culturally astute world of average clean-cut teenage life in post-War America. Keeping a happy non-political microscope trained upon these kids, we were able to follow their adventures all the way through the Korean War, Vietnam War, the Cold War, massive social upheavals, student unrest, the civil rights and all those turbulent anti-war/anti-draft movements. If you slavishly devoted yourself to Archie comics, you'd ever know any of that stuff was happening anyway. Archie provided a safe haven for all.

The villains, if they can even be called that, included the conceited rich boy Reggie and the teachers/administrators of the sleepy Riverdale high school. Even the latter weren't really villains in any traditional sense, they just wanted the kids to stop goofing off and do well in school.

No Red Skull, Doc-Ock or Doctor Doom plagued the kids of Riverdale.

For me, I restricted my Archie reading to the Saturday colour comic pages and daily B/W strips in the newspaper. Being a snob even back then, I'd never be caught dead actually buying Archie in any comic book store. Those purchases were left up to my little sister. I would, however, read all her Archie comics in a tantalizing closet of shame (replete with Portnoy-inspired Mounds wrappers for added intimacies).

For years, though, I harboured a grudge against Archie. All the comic books in our family home were stored in cardboard boxes in the basement. During a horrendous sewer flood, my Dad insanely tried to save as many of my comic boxes as possible. Some of them "drowned" forever. Alas, poor, desperate Dad couldn't distinguish between what was painstakingly marked on the boxes in bold, black felt. Upon surveying what was saved, I discovered that all my precious Golden Age Marvels - most of which would have increased in value (to the tune of thousands of dollars) - were lost forever. What remained were several boxes of my sister's Archie Comics.

The aforementioned tragic event occurred 25 years ago and remained as a black stain upon my heart the whole time. Luckily, filmmaker/critic Gerald Peary's sweetly obsessive feature documentary, Archie's Betty, was what finally restored my faith in the ageless carrot-top of Riverdale.

Before succumbing to his eventual dotage, Peary chose to embark upon an incredible journey with his co-producer Shaun Clancy to seek out the real-life inspirations for original cartoonist Bob Montana's Archie comics. And yes, they're out there. They exist. Archie and all his friends are living, breathing entities. (Well, some more living and breathing than others, but surely you catch my drift here.)

Using a nice array of archival materials, graphics, personal reminiscence and interviews, Archie's Betty proves to be a lovely, nostalgic journey into the very thing which captured (and continues to capture) the imaginations of loyal readers and aficionados numbering in the mega-millions. What's especially engaging is that the picture is rooted in Peary's own personal obsession with Archie. As such, the picture has a gentle rag-tag quality with Peary himself narrating the story. Playing beautifully with the fanboy aesthetic, he's crafted a fine documentary which sprints along nicely with the sprightly cutting of editors Aleksandar Sasha Lekic and David Reeder.

He spins the true-life yarn of a young Jewish kid (Peary himself), the first in his family to be born in America. He discovered Archie comics on trips with his Dad to the local Flat-Top-styling barbershop in his hometown. Peary's parents, having fled the horrors of Jew-hating Nazis and Pogrom-happy Russian Cossacks, hilariously and ironically lived in a variety of American locales in which they were the only Jews for hundreds of miles. (In a contemporary context this is not unlike being the only Muslims living in Alpena, Arkansas.)

Here, the geeky, bookish, movie-loving Peary (who eventually became one of America's most esteemed film critics) found plenty of laughs, solace and boners (mostly over Betty). Acting on a good tip, Peary begins his pilgrimage to Montana's hometown - Haverhill, Mass. Peary's obsession leads him (and us) on a Willard-like quest up the big river known as America. Seeking neither Col. Walter E. Kurtz, nor the Heart of Darkness, Peary ferrets out all of Archie artist/scribe Bob Montana's old girlfriends, pals and acquaintances.

Mysteries abound. Some folks clearly seem to be inspirations for the beloved comic book, others appear to be amalgams. Many are still living. Some are dead and here Peary must place a Deerstalker cap upon his brainy, fevered noggin to piece together the lives of those who've joined the late Montana in the clouds of comic book Heaven.

What drives Peary like a cattle stampede in a John Ford western, is Betty - Blonde Betty - the love of Peary's early manhood. the real-life Betty - Archie's Betty. This is the most compelling and deeply moving search of all and the results are guaranteed to open the ocular sluices.

The journey will be a treat for all, but none more so than Archie fans young and old. In fact, Peary's film is so delightfully and humorously reverent, that it will no doubt add even more lucre into the gaping, bottomless maw of Archie Comic Publications Inc. And yes, the film not only helped me make peace with my Archie enmity, but thanks to one of Peary's interview subjects, the Archie expert Natalie Pendergast, I learn that her perspective is one that must have been shared by generations galore. As she explains:

"Before I knew anything about comic book theory or the scholarship of the comic and graphic novel, I was first a huge fan of Archie comics as a young child. As a girl I felt like I could relate much more to the characters. because of the scenarios - romantic, focusing on problems with friends, parents, school difficulties and what-not."

I thought about my little sister, over forty years ago and even my young teenage daughter now, at least ten years younger than the astute Pendergast, and the generations upon generations of young women who sought out Archie for those things that were more familiar than the usual macho posturing of comics. Hearing Peary's tales and then experiencing as he finds real-life inspirations for these characters, made me think of my own deeply submerged love for Archie.

I look at those rescued boxes of 40 year old Archie comics differently now. I sometimes even open the lids and reach into the treasures within and enjoy them now, not just in a closet, but openly and delightedly as I share them with my own little girl who now has the real thing to cherish in addition to her huge collection of thick, paperback-bound Archie comic compilations.

If anything, Archie's Betty places Bob Montana and the Archie Comic Publication's work within the context of being based on real people and as such, continues to speak to kids of all ages, all over the world, for God knows how many more generations.

Or, as Archie oft said, "Fantastic!"

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Archie's Betty is currently in platform release in the USA in cinemas, cinematheques film festivals and comic book conventions. Feel free to visit the official website for more information HERE and to buy it on DVD click HERE.

In Canada, the official Canuck premiere will be in early 2016 as
a theatrical engagement at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto.

FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES: THE STORY OF AMERICAN FILM CRITICISM - Review by Greg Klymkiw - Veteran Boston film critic Gerald Peary has generated a fun, fascinating, breezy, well-made and superbly structured history of film criticism in America that will not only inform, but entertain.

For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009)
dir. Gerald Peary
Starring: Patricia Clarkson (Narrator), Roger Ebert, Jim Hoberman, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Jami Bernard, Rex Reed, Elvis Mitchell, Harlan Jacobson, Pauline Kael, Bosley Crowther, David D'Arcy, Molly Haskell, Leonard Maltin, Janet Maslin, John Powers, Richard Schickel, Michael Wilmington Lisa Schwarzbaum, David Sterrit, Mike Szymanski, Lisa Nesselson, B Ruby Rich, A.O, Scott, Kenneth Turan, Karina Longworth, Harry Knowles

****

By Greg Klymkiw

In a day and age when an alternative weekly like The Village Voice fires Jim Hoberman, one of the world's greatest living film critics and, like so many other publications, replaces him with young, underpaid, know-nothing-to-know-little scribes straight out of journalism school and/or publications of dubious merit and/or their basements in a pathetic attempt to woo young readers to bolster their demographics and dwindling readership, it's clear that one of the noblest literary traditions is, like most everything in this world, under attack.

Given that corporate bottom lines are destroying the very fabric of civilization, it's especially disheartening to see publications of supposed repute, like The Voice, once a bastion of quality, playing by the same rules as institutions they built their foundations on decimating as a matter of course. It's especially disingenuous of The Voice to remove all vestiges of serious discourse from their pages when the company's fortunes are, these days, rooted in ancillary enterprises like Backpage.com which earns its huge profits by providing an easy outlet to exploit women who, in many cases, are victims of sexual slavery.

Canada is certainly not immune from this horrendous move to strip away serious film criticism from its pages, but as per usual, it's just taking longer up here in the Great White North since it's a country that's almost never properly aligned behind the eight-ball. It's not long coming, though. In recent years, Canada's largest daily newspaper, The Toronto Star, relegated another of the world's great film critics, Geoff Pevere, to a subordinate beat in the entertainment department and now, his writing appears not to grace the pages at all. We're left there with the mediocre meanderings of a genial, readable, but ineffectual veteran, a passel of utterly bland know-nothings and worst of all, ever-shrinking column inches/word-counts.

Even film criticism in the United Kingdom, that bastion of all things cultural, has not been spared from this new trend. Recently, The Guardian had one of the best film sections in the world, but internal restructuring led to the loss of regular columns from such brilliant film writers as David Thomson and Anne Billson. (Well, they do have Peter Bradshaw first-stringing, but that's hardly what one would call a win-win situation for readers seeking top drawer film writing.)

I suppose my near-insane love of film - right from early childhood, is part of why these recent changes in the landscape so alarm and depress me. Yes, I was clearly out of my mind. When most kids - especially of the Canadian variety - were hip-checking each other on skating rinks and slap-shotting their hockey pucks into the teeth of goal tenders, I sat in dark movie theatres, in front of the TV and in my bedroom with my nose burrowed into all manner of reading material (everything from comics to classic literature and yes, film criticism.

I started to read film criticism at about the age of eight (give or take a year). In Winnipeg, there was a great store that carried almost every English language periodical known to man and it was there that I spent long hours perusing every movie magazine I could, including the once-great, but now-dreadful trade publication Variety (which, incidentally, is now on the chopping block and, like many other publications, turfed one of its best critics).

I also fondly remember the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) had a local movie review program every Saturday morning on their AM service and during a phone-in trivia quiz at age 12, I won a copy of V.F. Perkins's great book Film as Film which was probably my first real taste of "serious" approaches to watching movies. It was also around this time I discovered the inimitable Pauline Kael and scoured the pages of the New Yorker weekly for her insightful and, often downright hilarious film reviews.

It is, based upon the aforementioned geek memories, probably no surprise that I wondered when someone was ever going to make a documentary film that examined the art and history of film criticism. I am pleased to report that this prayer, if you will, has been answered.

The veteran Boston-based film critic Gerald Peary took the plunge and has generated a fun and fascinating feature documentary focusing on this very subject. For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism takes us from about ten years after the dawn of cinema when scribes began writing about cinema through to the aforementioned contemporary sad state of the medium of film reportage and reviewing.

For the Love of Movies is an apt title. Sure, everyone loves the movies, but who REALLY, REALLY, REALLY loves the movies? Nine times out of ten, it's the best filmmakers and the best film critics. What's great about Peary's movie, first and foremost, is that it DOES manage to have its cake and eat it too. Anyone who is passionate and pathetically geek-like about the movies - in particular, the scope and breadth of movie history - will be fascinated, delighted, tantalized and instilled with enough gooseflesh to last a lifetime. For the rest of the plebes, it's a breezy, well-made, superbly structured history of film criticism in America that will not only inform, but entertain.

One of the reasons this picture works so well is Peary's superb writing. People often forget that documentaries are more than just getting the right footage, the best interviews and choosing a good topic - someone actually has to WRITE the film. In this case, Peary is ideal. Even as a film critic, he's endowed with a punchy, humorous and knowledgable writing style which he puts to great use here.

Blending skilful research with clear writing, the narration he's created for the great actress Patricia Clarkson to intone over the film is always first-rate - guiding us in all the right directions, gently delivering subtle slanting to always place us in the right time and delivering the necessary perspective to move us from section to section.

This is another superb part of the writing - the various title cards and arrangement/progression of the sections. What Peary's script finally achieves is an extremely strong narrative arc with all the necessary twists, turns and connective tissue to keep an audience firmly gripped with the subject matter, the subjects themselves and the genuine story of American Film Criticism. Working with a fine team of editors is also part of the "writing" process and the cutting of the film is one of its major attributes.

As a director, Peary has lined up interviews with a who's who of America's finest critics. We hear about their beginnings, their process as writers, their loves and inspirations. All of this is woven into a historical narrative and we get various critics' perspectives on the art, the history and even many of the greats who have long since passed on. Peary's film includes some utterly amazing footage of Pauline Kael and my only regret is that it was so cool to see that I almost wish someone could eventually just cobble together every existing piece of Kael on camera and just let it play, unexpurgated.

For me, the current state of film criticism (and media in general) is a sad one, but Peary spins a wonderful, positive, forward-looking perspective that managed to temper even my normal curmudgeonly dismissal of some of those youngsters who are taking up the torches of the tried and true. A good part of this actually unfolds in Peary's film at an earlier juncture when we learn about the new voices of film criticism in the 60s, 70s and early 80s that challenged the status quo of traditional mainstream criticism and, in a sense, mirrored the excitement of the very movies the writers were covering during that special time in film history.

My only minor quibble with the film is the lack of attention paid to American critics-turned-filmmakers like Peter Bogdanovich and Paul Schrader. I'll charitably assume those two just decided - for whatever reasons - to not be involved. That said, a documentary connecting film criticism with filmmaking and perhaps covering the entire history of those who both wrote about film and made them - world wide (the Russian theorists, the nouvelle vague guys and, of course the Americans) - is a documentary waiting to unleash itself upon the world.

For those living in Toronto, the gorgeous, new Hot Docs Bloor Cinema will be hosting two screenings March 25 and March 26. On March 25, Director Gerald Peary will be in attendance to introduce his film and participate in a post-screening panel discussion moderated by film journalist Jason Anderson. The panel includes local film critics Liam Lacey (The Globe and Mail), Adam Nayman (The Grid, Cinema Scope Magazine, Metro News), Norm Wilner (NOW Magazine), and Kiva Reardon (Torontoist, Diegetic Sound).On March 26, Peary will be present to introduce and do a Q and A. The Bloor Hot Docs Cinema is located at 506 Bloor Street West. Tickets are $11 ($8 with discount card; $6 with membership) and are available in advance at the box office or online HERE. Copies of the film on DVD can be purchased directly from the film's website HERE.

Here's a clip:

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ORDER ANYTHING FROM AMAZON BY USING THE LINKS ABOVE OR BELOW. CLICKING ON THEM AND THEN CLICKING THROUGH TO ANYTHING WILL ALLOW YOU TO ORDER AND IN SO DOING, SUPPORT THE ONGING MAINTENANCE OF THE FILM CORNER. BUY MOVIES HERE FOR SOMEONE YOU LOVE! OR HELL, BE SELFISH, AND BUY THEM JUST FOR YOURSELF

AMAZON.CA

AMAZON.COM

AMAZON.UK