If Pressure Cooker were a work of fiction, you’d know exactly how it would end before you got there and every stop along the way. Real life is a lot more uncertain, though, and real life is what Pressure Cooker is all about. A group of kids from Philadelphia’s Frankford HS face the very real problem of what to do with the rest of their lives. It’s not an easy question for most young people to answer but these kids come from a tough neighborhood where opportunity doesn’t do a whole lot of knocking and if you want to go to college, well…there are only so many sports scholarships available.
There is another route, however, and Wilma Stephenson is doing her darndest to pave the way to it for as many students as possible in the culinary arts program she teaches. There are a lot of jobs in food but there’s no shortage of competition in this area, either, and if Stephenson’s students aren’t up to the task, no one can say she didn’t give them a chance. Stephenson is tough and forceful, aggressive enough to make a drill sargeant blush, outrageously funny, and unapologetic for her abrasiveness. It’s this fierceness that keeps her pushing her students and gets them inspired to push themselves. Stephenson is simultaneously the teacher you always feared and the teacher you always wanted and after you’ve seen how she operates and why, you’ll wish you had her for a teacher even if you haven’t been in school for a long, long time.
In addition to their instructor, Pressure Cooker focuses its eye on three of the young people in her class and their lives within and without the school walls. Erica spends much of her time caring for her blind sister. Tyree plays football. Fatoumata lives with a controlling immigrant father. It would be easy to reduce these kids to the usual inspirational-movie stereotypes, but the filmmakers handle their stories with a light touch, allowing the viewer to see them as something more than archetypical characters filling a predetermined slot. When the time comes for them to compete for a scholarship that gives them the chance to follow a dream in a very real way, you’ll ache for their victory as much as if you knew them.
All of the stories are told well; instead of heavy-handed moralizing or the sort of obvious emotional manipulation that works for a while but leaves you feeling vaguely foolish afterwards, Pressure Cooker gives you the chance to explore these lives and these circumstances, follow the drama (and the fun, there’s that, too) without pinning you down into a narrow slot of expectations. Nobody’s perfect, nobody’s entirely saintly, proving yet again that showing people as they actually are is just about always more interesting than reducing them to cliches.
Pressure Cooker plays at Northwest Film Forum July 10 – July 16.
Also at NWFF: Objectified, from the makers or Helvetica, the documentary that proved that a typeface could make the focus of a fascinating documentary. This time around they’re looking at industrial design and the ways it overtly and subtly influences both our buying deciions and our lives and also probing the conflict between consumer culture and environmental and economic realities.
The Grand Illusion pays tribute to the two Burts–Lancaster and Reynolds–with screenings of two great films. First is Reynolds in Deliverance, the famed thriller in which four city slicker friends go into the countryside and find more trouble than they’d even imagined. The edge of your seat excitement of the story is perfectly carried by an outstanding cast that also includes Ned Beatty, Jon Voight and Ronny Cox. Next is Burt Lancaster in one of his best performances as The Swimmer, playing a man driven by a desire he doesn’t understand himself to take on the quest of going home from a party by swimming each of the pools that for a trail there, reaching deeper and deeper into his troubled soul with each stroke.
Go outdoors for a few flicks at Fremont Outdoor Cinema. Saturday night see Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Monday check out Army of Darkness
More SIFF 2009 selections play around town: The Hurt Locker is a gripping tale of Army bomb squard technicians trying to make Baghdad a safer place for everyone by searching and disabling roadside bombs, a job with zero tolerance for error. With stakes this high, the tension is beyond intense. It’s at the Egyptian.
The action in local filmmaker Lynn Shelton’s Humpday isn’t quite so life and death but there’s definitely some tension in this tale of two straight male friends who decide to make a film together for The Stranger‘s popular amateur porn series. At the Harvard Exit.
And if you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to get to either the Harvard Exit or Metro Cinemas for Moon, a fantastically acted and directed sci fi drama whose central mystery is a mediation on the very nature of identity.
The Muppets make mayhem with Tim Curry in Muppets Treasure Island, midnight at the Egyptian.
