Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy (1988)

LIGHTNING OVER BRADDOCK: A RUSTBOWL FANTASY produced, directed and edited by Tony Buba camera by Brady Lewis music by Stephen Pellegrino distributed by Zeitgeist Films Running time: 80 minutes This film has no rating FROM THE FILMMAKER'S WEB SITE http://www.braddockfilms.com/films/lightning.shtml Lightning Over Braddock is as eccentric a picture of America as has emerged in the last two decades. Like Buba's earlier short films, it chronicles the decline of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a hard-luck town which once flourished as "Pittsburgh's shopping center." It concerns a director (Buba, playing himself) trying, without much success, to make a movie with a crazy street hustler named Sal, who considers himself responsible for Buba's (modest) success. Like Errol Morris, Buba has a fascination with the idiocyncratic details of daily life, and uses his formidable sense of humor to document the decay of industrial America. Lightning Over Braddock, Buba's magnum opus, might have its tongue in its cheek but its heart is always firmly in the right place. “A triumph of pragmatic populism with a cast of union organizers, street hustlers, and Buba himself, should be required viewing at every Sundance seminar; this ‘rustbowl fantasy’ is one of the few regional movies to successfully and unsentimentally peel off the national smile button.” — J. Hoberman, The Village Voice NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=950DE3DD1F30F93BA35750C0A96F948260 Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy (1988) New York Times March 8, 1989 Review/Film; Boswell of the Rust Belt By Janet Maslin Tony Buba, the director of ''Lightning Over Braddock: a Rustbowl Fantasy,'' seems particularly fond of the television reports about him that have aired on various Pittsburgh stations, so fond that he includes snippets of them in his film. For one thing, Mr. Buba no doubt likes being known as Braddock's Boswell, the premier (if only) film maker to have devoted his career to immortalizing this Pennsylvania steel-mill community now in an advanced state of decline. For another, the sameness of the television reports surely amuses Mr. Buba, whose own approach owes nothing to anyone else's. ''Lightning Over Braddock'' assembles a variety of daydreams about Braddock, which is Mr. Buba's hometown, and intermingles them with hard glimpses of reality. Drawing from several of the earlier short films he has made about this impoverished Pittsburgh suburb, Mr. Buba is able to make his new film span more than a decade, as well as the full range of his imagination. The local characters who ramble through the film are at least as erratic as any of Mr. Buba's inventions, particularly Sweet Sal Caru, who starts out as this project's leading man and leaves in a huff during the course of filming. Before he goes, though, Mr. Caru is enlisted to play characters including Rambo and Gandhi, the latter riding through the streets of Braddock in a red convertible before finding himself under fire. Between impersonations, the fast-talking Sal berates Mr. Buba endlessly and otherwise makes himself a major comic figure in a landscape badly in need of giants. But Mr. Caru, like Braddock itself, finally seems in dire straits. Mr. Buba's ideals color his film even when the material is at its most whimsically disorganized, which is most of the time. A clip from an earlier film, ''Mill Hunk Herald,'' in which a local musician performs ''Jumpin' Jack Flash'' is included here without sound, for instance, because the idea of paying $15,000 (three times the annual per-capita income in Braddock) for permission to use the song deeply offended the director's sensibilities. If Sacco and Vanzetti are at the gates of heaven and learn that Mr. Buba has allowed such a thing, he announces, they'll never let him in. IMDB USER REVIEW http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097752/ A wonderful little film, 7 June 2005 Author: jpr198 from United States The director of this film, Tony Buba, actually visited my college while I was studying as a film major. I have to admit, when I first heard that an independent filmmaker was coming in for a visit, my first thought was of a pretentious intellectual lecturing us on the bankruptcy of the current crop of Hollywood films before boring us to death with a lackluster film of his own. Thankfully, that couldn't have been further from the truth. I won't talk at length at Buba himself, except to say that he was a very nice, articulate guy who spoke with us and came off as a man who truly loved film and was proud and happy to be a director – and that, for better or worse, he never compromised by making a movie he wasn't in love with and responsible for every step of the way. However, Lighting Over Braddock doesn't need to be defended as merely the work of a nice guy - it's a wonderful little film in its own right. In some ways, it feels like a cross between Roger and Me and Adaptation, as Buba tells a story of... himself, trying to film a documentary about the economic downfall of his hometown, while he's being constantly interrupted by a series of comic fantasies (including a bizarre parody of a "Devo" music video and another where he explains why he couldn't get the copyrights to "Jumpin' Jack Flash" by the Rolling Stones) and a former actor of his named Sweet Sal who demands to be a part of this new film. On one level, the movie is simply a lot of energetic fun, moving from one sketch to the next quickly and generating a lot of humor from the absurdity of what's happening. Yet at the same time the movie never forgets the plight of the steel workers that are losing their jobs as a major plant in the area closes, and the movie largely focuses on Buba's sense of helplessness and anger, manifested in his frequent daydreams. How can he make a movie that articulates his anger towards the corporate fat cats screwing over the working class average Joe, while at the time keeping the movie entertaining enough that someone will want to watch it? And how can he get rid of Sweet Sal, constantly insisting that he's the real star of the piece? The humor of Lightning Over Braddock is clever without seeming gimmicky, Buba is a wonderful main character, his creative impulses torn between his wandering imagination and righteous anger, and Sweet Sal is a memorable, one of a kind joker, doing everything he can to stay in the picture for another five minutes. I highly enjoyed this film; it's a shame that when your run-of-the-mill vapid Hollywood blockbuster is available on DVD in bare-bones, special edition, and super special edition flavors Lightning Over Braddock can only be seen if a print somehow makes its way to your school or local film theater. Oh well – if it does play nearby you, make sure to check it out.

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