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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
DREAMS WITH SHARP TEETH I expected Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a portrait of the legendary and prolific writer Harlan Ellison, to be zany, funny, outrageous, and fascinating. After all, Ellison is a notorious character – brilliant, vengeful, unafraid to be completely himself and to speak his mind. The documentary was everything I’d expected, but it surprised me in two ways. First, Dreams is a profound, and profoundly inspiring, study of what it means to be a writer, and the ways that writing and life converge and interrelate. Director Erik Nelson begins the film with a quote from Mario Vargas Llosa: “Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.” To Ellison, writing is a job like any other. He compares it to being a plumber. Once, in the 1970s, he got out his typewriter in the middle of a bookstore and started working until he’d finished a story – he wanted people to see what writers do, that they are not just performing magic on some distant mountaintop. In other interviews, though, Ellison describes a ghostly process of abandoning a work in progress, then decades later, writing a new story and finding that the abandoned fragments fit in the new work seamlessly. For Ellison, a diehard atheist, magic and hard work coexist in the writing process, sometimes comfortably and sometimes disturbingly. As I was leaving the screening, the man in front of me turned to his friend and said, “Well, that will be inspiring to anyone who’s not stupid.” He started talking about his own struggles with writing, the choice to live life on one’s own terms, and how Ellison was willing to defend his opinions, his life, and his work, even if no one else agreed with him. It’s not that disliking the film would be a sign of stupidity. It’s that Harlan Ellison’s life and work – and the comprehensive interview footage shown here – offer much needed instructions on how to abide an anti-intellectual culture of conformity and ignorance. Ellison, a self-described “little Jew from Ohio,” says, “When you’ve been made an outsider, you are always angry.” Second, the film is a triumph of editing, with each quote, interview, and sequence judiciously chosen and paced for maximum effect. Nelson worked on his study of Ellison for five years, but he was a fan since high school. The celebrities and critics interviewed – including Robin Williams, Neil Gaiman, and Josh Olson (who wrote the screenplay for David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence) – all describe the ways that Harlan Ellison, the man, and his spectacular oeuvre are somehow one and the same, creating a world together. Nelson maps that world, addressing Ellison’s writing process with surprising depth for a film.
Dreams with Sharp Teeth will appeal to fans of Ellison who have followed
his long and star-studded career, and to writers who have never read his work.
And probably to anyone who’s not stupid. Elizabeth Bachner
DVD Extras:
The extras will appeal mostly to
Ellison’s admirers. The disc includes six readings of works by Ellison himself,
and as in the film, he speaks to the camera (perhaps having memorized all of the
text by heart). The highlights include one of the best short stories you may
ever hear, “Prince Myshkin, and Hold the Relish,” about a quick-witted and
philosophical conversation at a deli, and a shorter story called “The Silence.”
There is also footage from the Writer Guild’s screening of the documentary,
which includes appearances from Ellison and other interviewees like Ron Moore
and Josh Olson. The most mixed extra is a candid kitchen table conversation
between friends Ellison and Neil Gaiman chatting over pizza. When the former
tells one of his great stories, like his first trip to a Hollywood studio in the
‘60s that went awry, it’s as entertaining as anything in the film. When he
pontificates about adding a new room or tower to his castle of a home, it’s less
than magnetic. Jack Gattanella
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