SHOW OF THE WEEK: Scrap (Nov. 6, 9 p.m., documentary Channel)
Beauty and meaning can sometimes be found in the most unlikely of places. That’s certainly part of the takeaway from “Scrap, ” a documentary by Stacey Tenenbaum about what happens to everyday objects that have outlived their usefulness in the eyes of society.
The answer is quite a lot.
The film, gorgeously visualized by director of photography Katerine Giguére and edited by Howard Goldberg, takes us to places around the world to where people with a passion for the past are bringing everything from massive ships to old phone boxes back to life.
Even in cases where the scrap isn’t being reused — like the Old Car City USA in White, Georgia, where venerable old vehicles are being reclaimed by the forest around them — the caretakers of all this discarded metal have a reverence for its place in history and the lives of the people it once served.
In that way, “Scrap” is a profoundly human film.
Take John Lopez, a sculptor and rancher in Lemmon, South Dakota. His vocation for creating striking works of art out of discarded farm machinery and other bits of metal grew from his desire to create a memorial to a beloved aunt who died in a car crash by sculpting an angel from found objects.
To him, the things he uses to create tigers, bison, horses and other majestic animals are indivisible from the people who once used them.
“I’m hoping my sculpture can honour those people who worked so hard,” he says. “They worked their fingers to the bone.”
Then there’s Tchely Hyung-Chul Shin, principal of French and South Korean company Shinslab Architecture, who creates buildings out of the remains of junked ships. In “Scrap,” we watch him oversee the dismantling of a massive cargo ship in Gijon, Spain, the hunks of its hull to be turned into a church in Seoul.
“Something that was dead comes back to life in another form, like a type of resurrection,” Shin says in the film.
He’s not the only one to speak of scrap as if it were an animate object.
Tony Inglis of Unicorn Restorations in Merstham, England, describes the old phone boxes he restores as soldiers or sentries who stood on street corners in all kinds of weather. “To see it go, it’s like seeing an old servant go,” he says.
For Ed Metka, who maintains about 30 rusting trolley cars in a secret U.S. location in the hopes of seeing them ride the rails again, the old cars are a reminder of his childhood and the beloved wife he recently lost.
And then there are some for whom scrap has a more practical meaning.
Fah Boonsoong in Bangkok, Thailand, lives in part of the fuselage of an old jumbo jet with her family of seven adults and eight children, providing for them with the money she makes from tourists who come to take photographs of themselves with the plane.
And in Delhi, India, for the people who toil at Namo eWaste, taking apart old phones, TVs and other consumer goods, the scrap is an unsentimental source of sustenance.
Saumya Khandelwal, who photographs the Namo workers, hopes the pictures that result convince people to engage more with the objects in their lives and perhaps even reject our current culture of using things and throwing them away.
It’s a message echoed by director Tenenbaum, who says in a news release that she hopes people “will be compelled to buy more things that are built to last and can be easily repaired, reused and restored.”
But please don’t make the mistake of thinking that “Scrap” is merely a message film. It has a meditative, even spiritual quality at times, finding art in unlikely places.
Short Takes
Spector (Nov. 4, Crave)
With the absolute glut of true crime docuseries out there — remember the days when shows like “The Jinx” and “Making a Murderer” felt like events and not just same old, same old? — anything that’s just an overhyped repetition of the facts of a case isn’t going to get my attention. Luckily, based on the two episodes I watched, “Spector” rises above by going beyond the morning in February 2003 that famed music producer Phil Spector shot and killed actor Lana Clarkson inside his Alhambra, Calif., mansion. Directed by Sheena M. Joyce and Don Argott, the series gives us a good grasp of Spector’s significance to the music industry before he descended into paranoid seclusion in his California castle, with a warts-and-all portrait of a disturbed genius. More importantly, it also gives a sense of who Clarkson was, certainly more than the “B-list actress” label affixed to her in the days after her murder.
Dangerous Liaisons (Nov. 6, 9 p.m., Starz/Crave)
Anyone who saw the 1988 movie version of “Dangerous Liaisons” would come away with an impression of the ruthlessness of French aristocrats the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich) and, especially, the Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close). This prequel, also inspired by the 18th-century novel, purports to show how Valmont and Merteuil, here played by Alice Englert and Nicholas Denton, became the vain, manipulative older versions of themselves. Part of the answer is supposedly that they were once passionately in love, but we’re thrown into the love story of Camille and Pascal, as they were then known, rather abruptly and disorientingly in the first episode and, to be honest, I found it less than thrilling. Things don’t really get interesting until Lesley Manville, playing a different Marquise de Merteuil, shows up to coach Camille in the deceitful ways of the French aristocratic world. Camille, a reluctant prostitute, has thrown herself on the mercy of the first marquise after learning that she is just one of Pascal’s many lovers, most of them rich older women able to keep him in a style befitting his social climbing ways. Camille, to me, is more interesting as a woman figuring out how to bend society to her will than as the devoted lover of Valmont. Whether that interest can be maintained through eight episodes, I can’t say, since I was given access to only two. Carice van Houten of “Game of Thrones” also appears as someone from Camille’s past.
Also debuting on Crave this week, its Ho-Ho-Holiday Hub (Nov. 1), featuring Christmas and Hanukkah episodes of TV series and holiday movies; the David Cronenberg film “Crimes of the Future” (Nov. 4); and the special “Broken: The Toxic Culture of Canadian Gymnastics” (Nov. 5).
Odds and Ends
PHOTO CREDIT: Parisa Taghizadeh/Amazon Content Services
It’s hard to have missed the hype over the film “My Policeman,” one of a couple of recent movie starring roles for pop star Harry Styles. Here, he plays a police officer married to a teacher (Emma Corrin) but having an affair with a museum curator (David Dawson) in 1950s Britain, when homosexuality was considered a crime. The movie makes its streaming debut on Prime Video on Nov. 4.
Among the usual overabundance of new Netflix content is the movie “The Takeover” (Nov. 1); sports/true crime series “The Final Score” (Nov. 2), about murdered Colombian soccer player Andres Escobar; true-crime docuseries “Killer Sally” (Nov. 2); comedy series “Blockbuster” (Nov. 3), about the last Blockbuster Video store in America; Season 2 of “Enola Holmes” (Nov. 4), starring Millie Bobby Brown of “Stranger Things”; new luxury real estate reality show “Buying Beverly Hills” (Nov. 4); and the documentary “Orgasm Inc.: The story of OneTaste” (Nov. 5).
Apple TV Plus offerings include the documentary “Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me”; the Jennifer Lawrence film “Causeway” and Season 2 of the series “The Mosquito Coast,” all debuting Nov. 4.
Pamela Anderson takes a break from Hollywood to return to Vancouver and restore the waterfront property she bought from her grandmother in “Pamela’s Garden of Eden” (Nov. 3, 10 p.m., HGTV).
Last but not least, CBC Gem has the docuseries “My Life as a Rolling Stone” (Nov. 4), with each episode described as an intimate portrait of one of the core band members: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and the late Charlie Watts.
NOTE: The listings here are in Eastern Standard Time and I’ve verified the times where possible, but it’s always best to check listings for your own area. The selection of programs reviewed reflects what I’m given access to by networks and streamers, whether reviews are embargoed, how many shows I have time to watch and my own personal taste. The Odds and Ends section includes shows that I have not watched.
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