Documentaries
**
Highly Recommended **
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant
Child, dir by
Tamra Davis © 2009
360/365
Film Festival. Loved this view into the personality and style of Basquiat.
Marion Woodman: Dancing in the
Flames, dir by
Adam Greydon Reid, © 2009
360/365
Film Festival. U.S. premier of this Canadian film. The filmmaker was present
for a Q&A.This was my introduction to Marion Woodman.
An
American Journey: In Robert Frank’s Footsteps, dir by Philippe Seclier © 2009 B
Dryden
Theatre. In English and French, with subtitles. “In contemporary photography,
everybody agrees there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ The
Americans,
Robert Frank’s 1958 photographic manifesto.” So, this filmmaker did for that
book what Deidre Lynch did with Dorthea Lange’s photographs in Photos
to Send: Retracing Dorthea Lange’s Steps in Ireland (which I saw it in 2002, and
rate higher than this, but this is still highly recommended).
Seclier
tracks down Sid Kaplan, Frank’s first printer, in NYC, and visits the following,
and more:
• The Finlen Hotel in Butte,
MT, where he gets the current proprietor to take him up to THE room to see the
current view out the window where Frank made one of his most famous photographs.
• Jay, NY where he shows to
various townspeople the iconic Independence Day 1956 photograph from the book.
Everyone says, “Why, that boy in the front is one of the Crowenshilds.” Then he
finds James Crowenshild, who confirms. James was completely unaware that his
photograph (he was a young boy, that day in 1956) was in this famous book. {Bob wonders if this reveals a
sort of class divide: inside-outside-the-art-world.}
• Jno Cook, author of The
Robert Frank Coloring Book.
Please
see one of the terrific images from The
Robert Frank Coloring Book at the end of this document.
Waiting for “Superman,” dir by Davis Guggenheim ©
2009
360/365
Film Festival. Producer Lesley Chilcott was in attendance.
Davis
Guggenheim and Lesley Chilcott are also the director and producer of the
Academy Award®-winning An Inconvenient Truth.
This
film featured educators Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone, Michelle
Rhee, Chancellor of the Washington D.C. schools, and
Bill
Strickland of Pittsburgh. The whole public education situation today is scary
and sad.
The Atheism Tapes, with Jonathan Miller.
In
the summer of 2003, Jonathan Miller started filming a BBC series, Atheism:
A Rough History of Disbelief. This two-disc DVD contains some
of the conversations that ended up on the cutting room floor.
I
only had time to listen to three of the six interviews, but I found them very
interesting. (See Movie Quotes, below.)
War Photographer: James Nachtwey, dir by Christian Frei ©
2001 B
DVD.
Bob got interested in this photographer (born 1948, went to Dartmouth). First,
Bob got the book, and then realized he could get this DVD. I previewed it with
him. I thought it would be great for his students. It shows James working with
his darkroom technician, asking questions like, ‘Do you think you can do
something more with the sky [in terms of burning and dodging]?’ Then, when the
technician brings out the next print and puts it up: ‘Yeah, I think you’re on
the right track.’ (But of course, it’s still not good enough, and it’s back to
the darkroom!)
{One of the very few good films about photography.}
American Experience: Joan Baez
This
first aired on PBS in 2009, I think, but I didn’t happen upon it until it was
repeated in 2010. I don’t think Joan Baez was particularly good looking in her
prime (although Bob recalls her sister Mimi being ‘a real knockout’). But now
in her 60s, with her short gray hair, I think she is very beautiful. She came by her
peace activism naturally (her parents began attending the Quaker Meeting when
she was a young girl).
Inside
Job, dir by
Charles Ferguson © 2010 B
This
was about Credit Default Swaps and Collateral Debt Obligations and
securitization of mortgages, and deregulation of the financial industry, and
all the things that got our country (and world) into big trouble. It also
highlighted the conflict of interest issue that academics (typically those in
economics or business fields) face. For example, Berkeley professor Laura Tyson
"defended bailed-out banks for not disclosing how they used their TARP
funds, refusing to answer any questions regarding the use of that money, and
continuing to pay shareholder dividends using bailout dollars.” Is she a
disinterested party? Well, as it turns out, she receives $350,000 per year to
sit on Morgan Stanley’s board of directors, and they took $10 billion in bailout
money from the US government. Then there is Fred Mishkin who was paid big bucks
to write a paper for the Chamber of Commerce of Iceland on ‘Financial Stability
in Iceland.’ The filmmaker noticed that the name of that paper, in Fred’s
Curriculum Vitae, which is available online, was shown as ‘Financial Instability in Iceland.’ Did
the collapse of Iceland’s economy (within two years of the publication of that
paper) account for this “mistake” on the CV, or was it a typo? Fred pleads the
latter, when confronted with the facts, in the film. Mishkin is a professor at
Columbia Business School, and was a member of the Board of Governors of the
Federal Reserve System from 2006 to 2008.
Gasland, written and dir by Josh Fox
© 2010 B
At
The Little, with a Q&A afterwards (via Skype) with the director. (The movie
had just been short-listed for an Oscar nomination for feature documentary, and
Josh Fox was in NYC doing talk show interviews.) Fox set off to make this movie
after he was asked to lease his Pennsylvania property for natural gas drilling.
The Marcellus Shale, dubbed by energy companies as the “Saudia Arabia of
natural gas,” ran underneath that part of PA. Lawmakers in Albany voted on this
issue in late 2010, and we learned from Josh Fox that he sent DVDs to most of
the lawmakers prior to their vote. They voted for a moratorium until the issue
of drinking water could be studied more carefully.
Crude:
The Real Price of Oil, dir by Joe Berlinger © 2009 B
Dryden
Theatre. This director made other documentaries that I liked, two of them being
Paradise
Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (see my 1998 list) and
Paradise Lost 2 (see
my 2008 list).
Crude chronicles Ecuadoreans who sued Texaco (which
is now owned by Chevron), saying the companies’ practices at the Lago Agrio oil
field resulted in the contamination of their drinking and bathing water. In
May, 2010, Chevron subpoenaed all the raw footage (more than 600 hours), and a
district court upheld their right to do this. In July, the Second Circuit U.S.
Court of Appeals narrowed that order, which was at least a partial victory for
Berlinger.
The
Cove, dir by
Louie Psihoyos (rhymes with Sequoias) © 2009 B
There
is a specific cove in Taiji, Japan where approximately 23,000 dolphins are
killed every year. Former dolphin trainer Ric O’ Barry is part of this
documentary. He is the man who captured and trained the first five dolphins who
played Flipper in the international television sensation. O'Barry made a
radical transition from training dolphins in captivity to assertively combating
the captivity industry soon after Kathy, one of the Flipper dolphins, died.
According to O'Barry, she died in his arms in what he believed was a suicide.
[Wikipedia] At Taiji, live dolphins are
procured for international aquariums, and the other dolphins that were rounded
up are slaughtered for meat. Which is more than unfortunate, as whale and
dolphin meat contains high levels of mercury and PCB's.
** Also Worth Seeing **
The
Art of the Steal,
dir by Don Argott © 2009 B
Not
a great documentary, but we did learn about the politics involved with the
Barnes Collection, a premier collection of Cezzannes and Matisses and more, in
Philadelphia. Barnes’ will was very specific, about nothing being moved from
where he had it displayed, and nothing being lent out. And yet … Within a few
years, it will be moved to a major art museum in central Philadelphia.
Still Bill, dir by Alex Vlack and
Damani Baker © 2009
360/365
Film Festival.
“It’s
O.K. to head out for wonderful, but on your way to wonderful you’re going to
have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, take a good look
around and get used to it because that may be as far as you’re going to go.” In
the film, songwriter Bill Withers, who hails from Slab Fork, WV, says that this
is the advice he has given his kids. He’s a very laid-back, practical guy, I
believe, after seeing this documentary. Some of his well-known songs are “Lean
on Me” and “Ain’t No Sunshine.”
Ghost
Bird, dir by
Scott Crocker © 2009 B
Dryden.
We saw this with Ezra on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. It walked us through
the Ivory-billed woodpecker controversy. In 1999, after no credible sightings
of the bird since the 1920s, a reputable birder claimed to have seen it in the
swamps of the Singer Tract near Brinkley, AR. Soon after, a local happened to
catch the flight of a bird on video. That footage was analyzed by experts, who
became convinced this was, indeed, the Ivory-billed (and not the Pileated).
Slowly, though, some ornithologists began to have misgivings. The white
markings seen in the video really seemed to be more in keeping with the
Pileated. Also: Why did no dead trees have the characteristic holes made by the
Ivory-billed? Locals were interviewed about the sudden fame of their town, and
those clips were sprinkled judiciously throughout, and provided comic relief.
This movie was pretty good. In Bob’s opinion this was an example of managing to
make a documentary with very little material a.k.a. Art.
Collapse, dir by Chris Smith © 2009 B
Dryden
Theatre. I need to see this again to even begin to digest it. Chris Smith
previously directed American Movie, The Pool (see my 2009 list),
and
The Yes Men. To
get a description of this current movie, see “Reviews I Liked.”
** Could Have Skipped **
The Oath, dir by Laura Poitras © 2010
360/365
Film Festival.
Unfortunately,
I didn’t really get what this film was about.
What’s
the Matter With Kansas? dir by Joe Winston © 2009 B
Dryden
Theatre. Based on the 2004 book by Thomas Frank. If I were the filmmaker, I
would have concluded ‘we don’t have enough here to make a movie.’ I have just
read a review of this movie that speaks for me, so I have excerpted it. See
‘Reviews I Liked,’ below.
***************************************************
Feature Films
** Highly Recommended **
Mad Men, Season 4. TV.
We don’t get the AMC channel, but my friend Judy
Crump (her husband, actually!) recorded this whole season for me. Every two
weeks I had another two episodes to look forward to. It was great! Now, when
the DVD gets to the libraries next Spring, I will be able to revisit the
season, watching the commentary and extras.
Rachel,
Rachel, dir by
Paul Newman © 1968
Dryden Theatre. Bob and I had seen this when it came
out, and it was intriguing to see what I had forgotten, and what I had
remembered. Scenes I now found memorable—Rachel playing cards at a table in the
yard with her mother, Rachel smoking on the porch and then being invited in by
Jonas, who bought the undertaking business from her father—I had not remembered
from first viewing.
This was Paul Newman’s first directing effort, and
he was directing his wife Joanne Woodward in the lead. It was based on the
novel by Margaret Laurence, A Jest of God. Woodward, Newman, and screenwriter
Stewart Stern were each nominated for Academy Awards in their respective
categories.
The
Secret in their Eyes, dir by Juan José Campanella © 2009 B
Storyline: “Retired Argentinian federal justice
agent Benjamín Espósito is writing a novel, using an old closed case as the
source material. That case is the brutal rape and murder of Liliana Coloto. In
addition to seeing the extreme grief of the victim's husband Ricardo Morales,
Benjamín, his assistant Pablo Sandoval, and newly hired department chief Irene
Menéndez-Hastings were personally affected by the case as Benjamín and Pablo
tracked the killer, hence the reason why the unsatisfactory ending to the case
has always bothered him.”
{Bob’s Ten Best, 2010.}
The Ghost
Writer, co-written and dir by Roman Polanski © 2010 B
We saw this on the weekday evening that The Little
was having its annual members-free night. Bob was glad that yet another Roman
Polanski did not disappoint.
10 Rillington Place, dir by Richard Fleischer ©
1971
Dryden
Theatre. Based on the book Ten Rillington Place, by Ludovic Kennedy. This is
the story of John Reginald Halliday Christie, one of modern-day Britain’s most
disturbed serial killers. Fleischer (son of Max Fleischer, the pioneer
animator) directed Compulsion (1959) and The
Boston Strangler
(1968) prior to this film. I saw this in January, and I can say in December
that the film is unforgettable, visually. The two main characters were played
by Richard Attenborough and John Hurt. It was shot partially on location at 6 Rillington
Place, the 3-flat immediately next door to Christie’s, and identical to it.
Over a period of years, Christie murdered, and disposed of the bodies of, seven
women in this house (most while living there with his wife!) The film does not
get into what led him to these crimes. However, apparently the book does get into that. Psychiatrists
eventually diagnosed him as suffering from Hysterical Personality Disorder.
Also (from the program notes): “His father was distant, and a strict
disciplinarian, which left young Christie to the overbearing and stifling
authority of his mother and four sisters. As Christie once said, ‘they were
always bossing me about.’”
Milk, dir by Gus Van Sant © 2008
DVD.
I finally got around to seeing this. We loved the documentary when we saw it
about in about 1979. This is a great companion piece.
The
Social Network,
dir by David Fincher © 2010 B
Tagline:
You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.
Not
the kind of film you’d turn to over and over again, but definitely one of my
favorite films of 2010.
David
Edelstein, or Fresh Air, said, “I didn't hate the movie. I kind of liked it.
…[But] this new social network is shown as being rooted in betrayal, in greed,
in sexism, in naked class envy ... It's a good business saga, but I'm mystified
by how many people think it's a groundbreaking movie about a turning point
in American culture."
The King’s Speech, dir by Tom Hooper © 2010 B
Later,
by watching Tom Hooper and Colin Firth on Charlie Rose, I learned that the
screenwriter David Seidler himself had a stammer, and used to listen to King
George VI on the radio, and used to think, “If the King can overcome a stammer,
so can I.” After he found out that the speech therapist Lionel Logue had kept diaries,
he wrote to the palace proposing his film project. The Queen Mother replied,
“Please, not in my lifetime. The memories are still too painful.” Little did he
know she would live to be 101 and he would have to wait another 30 years.
We
loved this movie.
** Also Worth Seeing **
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, dir by Jacques Tati © 1953
The
Dryden Theatre did a Jacques Tati series, and unfortunately, this is the only
one I was able to get to. I now look forward to The
Illusionist
(French: L'Illusionniste), by the director of The
Triplets of Belleville. The main character in The Illusionist is an animated version of
Tati. New 35mm restored print.
Mao’s
Last Dancer,
directed by Bruce Beresford © 2009 B
From
the Australian director of Driving Miss Daisy. Based on the autobiography
by Li Cunxin, who was plucked at age 11 (in 1972) from a remote Chinese village
by Madame Mao’s cultural delegates, and taken to Beijing to study ballet. Li
comes to the US on a cultural exchange in 1981, and dilemmas ensue.
Lawrence
of Arabia, dir
by David Lean © 1962 B
Library
DVD. I didn’t understand this at all when I first saw it (1963). Now it made
more sense to me. Especially in conjunction with the biography of Gertrude Bell
that I was reading about the same time. Stars Peter O’Toole (T.E. Lawrence),
Alec Guiness (King Faisal), and Anthony Quinn (Auda abu Tayi). Based on The
Seven Pillars Of
Wisdom, by Major T.E.Lawrence, an
autobiographical account of his time in World War I under the command of Prince
Faisal and his campaigns against the Turks.
Full
Metal Jacket,
dir by Stanley Kubrick © 1987 B
Dryden
Theatre. Another classic that we finally got around to seeing. Apparently this
came out within six months of Platoon (another that I have never
seen). Based on the book The Short Timers, by Gustav Hasford. Trivia
from imdb: Former US Marine Corps Drill Instructor R. Lee Ermey was not
originally hired to play Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, but rather as a consultant for
the Marine Corps boot camp portion of the film. He performed a demonstration on
videotape in which he yelled obscene insults and abuse for 15 minutes without
stopping, repeating himself or even flinching—despite being continuously pelted
with tennis balls and oranges. Stanley Kubrick was so impressed that he cast
Ermey as Hartman.
Get
Low, dir by
Aaron Schneider © 2010 B
Star
vehicle for Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Bill Murray. The movie is based on the true story of Felix
"Bush" Breazeale, a Tennessee recluse who staged his own funeral in
1938, apparently because he wanted to know what people would say about him when
he was dead. But, the hook for the movie is that he’s haunted by a youthful trespass.
This was the director’s first feature film. He was quoted in The
New York Times:
“It’s the kind of role where you want to blur the line between the legend and
gravitas of the character, and the legend and gravitas of the performer. Our
list of actors was short: Our list was Robert Duvall.”
Fantastic
Mr. Fox, dir by
Wes Anderson © 2009 B
Mr.
Fox is voiced by George Clooney, and Mrs. Fox by Meryl Streep. Ezra loved this
Roald Dahl book about the fox family, and the farmers Bean, Bunce, and Boggis,
when he was little. He loved the film, too, and recommended it to us.
Up, dir by Pete Docter and Bob
Peterson © 2009 B
Animated
adventure-comedy. A second wonderful example of today’s remarkable animation.
Thanks to Ezra for recommending this one, as well. This (like Wall-E, which I haven't yet seen)
is a product of Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios. I took the
following from imdb, as it is quite a good summary:
"By tying thousands of balloon to his home,
78-year-old Carl Fredricksen sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream to see the
wilds of South America. Right after lifting off, however, he learns he isn't
alone on his journey, since Russell, a wilderness explorer 70 years his junior,
has inadvertently become a stowaway on the trip."
In
Bruges, written
and dir by Martin McDonagh (c) 2008 B
Library
DVD. We saw this with Eva, Herman, and Ezra the day after
Thanksgiving.
There were some funny lines, and the acting was also
good.
Brendan Gleeson played Ken. He made his film breakthrough in
Braveheart (1995), which I have yet to
see. He has called
In Bruges, "a real test of our
acting ability." Colin Farrell played
the
other hit man, Ray. Both men got nominated for Golden Globes, and
Farrell
won that award. A quote from Colin Farrell: "I do have
the
ability to explore life and to be over the moon at the smallest
thing—a
few pints and a craic in the pub and I'm in heaven. But I
have
a melancholy side to me as well. Acting allows me to feel things,
it
kind of buys me human experience. And I don't mean this as acting
as
higher cause, because it's not, but it does kind of have a higher
awareness
emotionally."
Akeelah and the Bee, written and dir by Doug
Atchison © 2006
Library
DVD. Keke Palmer (who hails from a town just south of Chicago) absolutely lit
up the screen in her role as 11-yr-old Akeelah Anderson. I watched this because
the president of our neighborhood association this past year, inspired by this
film, has been instrumental in getting the local schools involved in a spelling
bee.
The
Apartment, dir
by Billy Wilder © 1960 B
Dryden
Theatre. Was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, and won 5, including Best
Picture. When Baxter finally declares his love for Miss Kubelik, her reply is
the now-famous final line of the film: “Shut up and deal.” Stars Jack Lemmon,
Shirley MacLaine, and Fred McMurray.
Rififi, dir by Jules Dassin © 1955 B
Library
DVD. This is a classic. See Roger Ebert’s glowing review, in “Reviews I Liked.”
* I Might Have Skipped These
*
The Kids Are All Right, dir by Lisa Cholondenko
I
hated her film High Art, and I wasn’t all that crazy
about this, either. Cholodenko co-wrote the script with Stuart Blumberg, who
had this to say: "Lisa and I had been friends for a long time. We both
sort of represented two different sides to the same question. Lisa had
considered having a child with a sperm donor and I had been a sperm donor in college,
and we kind of wondered what would happen down the road if all those people
met."
Winter's
Bone, written
and dir by Debra Granik B
This
film came with great credentials. It was the recipient of the Grand Jury Prize
for Drama and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance. But, I wasn’t
that crazy about it. (Bob liked it much better than I did.) It is based on the
novel by Daniel Woodrell, and it was filmed entirely on location in the
Ozarks of Southwestern Missouri.
17
year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) sets out to track down her father, who
put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared. Ree’s younger
brother and sister, and catatonic mother, depend on her. There are meth labs
involved, and other unsavory stuff. The filmmaker said in an interview: “The
audiences responding to this film are saying: it is curious and rich and
interesting for us to see life in this other part of this really vast country.”
And I agree with that.
The Devil Wears Prada, dir by David Frankel © 2006
Library
DVD. Anna Wintour is the basis for Miranda Priestley's character in the book
that this film was based on. Lauren Weisberger, the writer of the book, worked
for her at one time. I liked nothing about this film, although it has a catchy
name. Others thought so, too. There’s The Devil
Wears Nada,
apparently a soft porn film loosely based on the film. Then there was a TV show
that named one of its episodes The Dare-Devil Wears Prada.
*******************************************
Movie Quotes
*******************************************
From
Collapse
“We
are all collectively responsible for what may be the greatest preventable
holocaust in the history of planet Earth.”
– Michael Ruppert
From
Lawrence
of Arabia
Bartender
(after Lawrence enters with a dirty Bedouin): This is a bar for British
officers!
T.E.
Lawrence: That’s all right. We’re not particular.
From
Fantastic
Mr. Fox
Mrs.
Fox: If what I think is happening IS happening - it better not be.
From
The
Apartment
Kirkeby:
Premium-wise and billing-wise, we are eighteen percent ahead of last year,
October-wise.
C.C.
Baxter: That's the way it crumbles... cookie-wise.
Printed
on the movie posters: “Movie-wise, there has never been anything like
it—laugh-wise, love-wise, or otherwise-wise!”
From
The
Atheism Tapes
Colin McGinn
Why
is it wrong to steal? It's either intrinsically a sound moral rule or it can't
be given soundness and legitimacy from an external command. [Think about] the
idea that morality can only have a foundation if it's based on God's commands,
God's desires, God's wishes.
Suppose
we have the rule, It's right to murder. And somebody says, 'That's not right!
Murder is wrong!' and somebody replies, 'But God says it's right to murder.'
That doesn't convince you that it's right to murder. He can't make something
right just by saying it's right. If that were true, we'd have no reason to
respect God's morality. What God has to do is reflect what's right, in his
commandments. So, that's what he does.
It
can't be a matter of God's free decision or whim what's right and wrong. People
can see that morality is what it is. They know what they ought to do. But human
beings are weak. To prevent guilt, you need something to make you do what you
know is right. God gives you an extra motive to do what's right; morality gives
you a motive, but it is rather fragile, intermittent, and easily broken. But,
if you've got the idea of God there, it gives it more power. And then you can
do what you know is right more easily, more regularly. And that's perfectly
sensible. But, there's a corrupting part to the conception of God, which is:
you're doing something good because God will reward you and think well of you.
It's
hard for people to accept that we are alone, and nobody cares. God satisfies a
deep craving in the human soul for communion with something outside the self.
No one spends a lot of time trying to prove to others that the Greek gods don't
exist. You just decide they don't, and that's the end of the story for you.
Once you decide there isn't a God, there's not much point inveighing against
it, unless you think some huge harm is being done.
Daniel Dennett, author of Darwin's
Dangerous Idea.
In
spite of Darwin's best efforts, the implications were there for anyone to draw.
He's talking about us. Our minds. Our conscience, our soul. Every-thing is made
up of little ratchets. It's all just mechanical, and blind, and purposeless at
the bottom. This was the great inversion, because, until then, the idea that
there was something like a life force, or something like a soul that was
completely distinct from matter, and that it somehow informed and controlled
and guided creative processes—thinking processes, moral reasoning, and so
forth—this top-down idea about morality and self and soul was very plausible.
After Darwin, people could see that maybe the soul could be replaced with some
of those ratchets. And that's a very threatening idea.
It
was Darwin that broke the dam. Because, before Darwin, there really wasn't a very
good answer to the question, 'How did this come to be? This bird with this
wonderful wing; how did it come into existence, if not by some divine act of
creation?'
Yes,
we have a soul, but it's mechanical. But it's still a soul. It still does the
work that the soul was supposed to do. It is the seat of reason. It is the seat
of moral responsibility. It's why we are appropriate objects of punishment when
we do evil things. It's just not a mysterious lump of wonder stuff which will
outlive us. Yes. We do have to give that up. The natural appeal of a soul that
goes on living is undeniable.
Arthur Miller
The
church militant: They've added that lethal mixture of religion and nationalism
to the programs that they sell. The reason it's lethal is because to believe in
a religion means you don't believe in a different religion. You can't believe
in two religions. You can believe in one, and the other ones are wrong. And
deserves to be combated, and destroyed. It's implicit in the whole idea of
religious belief, I think in the normal way that religious belief is thought
of.
The
immortality notion is simply past my capacity to really believe in.
*******************************************
Reviews or Descriptions I
Liked
*******************************************
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant
Child
Rochester
has renamed its Spring film festival (“360|365 George Eastman House Film
Festival”), and has given it the tag line, ‘Film was born here.’
They
did a nice catalog in 2010, and these were the descriptions that got me to go
to the Basquiat and Marion Woodman films:
Jean-Michel
Basquiat’s meteoritic rise within the elite, international art world and brief
career is legendary. His bebop-meets-graffiti style was completely against the
grain of the popular minimalist movement of
the
time. Director Tamra Davis (Billy Madison, CB4, Half
Baked) has
crafted a portrait of her friend that goes well beyond the traditional bio-pic.
Expertly mixing footage that Davis personally shot when Basquiat was 25 years
old with contemporary interviews, and other archival materials, yields an
honest assessment of fame, creativity, racism, and illumination.
“Our
planet is shedding its outworn skin,” says Marion Woodman, a renowned Jungian
psychologist and author who believes without death, there is no birth. Perhaps
best-known for her groundbreaking work on feminine psychology and addiction via
her books ‘Addiction to Perfection,’ ‘The Owl was a Baker's Daughter,’ ‘Bone:
Dying into Life,’ and ‘The Pregnant Virgin,’ she is one of the western world’s
most important wisdom keepers. Through the use of stunning animation from
Academy Award®-winning animator Faith Hubley, filmmaker Adam Greydon Reid
merges Marion’s inner and outer lives together and transmits a core truth of
what it is to be human.
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday
Jacques
Tati was born Jacques Tatischeff in 1907. A great sportsman, his teammates
appreciated his talent in miming the rugby matches they had just played. But
Tati dreamed of cinema. He was fascinated by American slapstick, W.C. Fields,
and particularly Buster Keaton.
It
is not a comedy of hilarity but a comedy of memory, nostalgia, fondness and
good cheer. There are some real laughs in it, but Mr.
Hulot's Holiday
gives us something rarer, an amused affection for human nature—so odd, so
valuable, so particular.
- Roger Ebert, Nov. 10, 1996
In
his too-short trousers, striped socks, pipe, and umbrella, Hulot was a French
counterpart to silent comedy personae like Chaplin and Keaton.
- Dinah Holtzman, Assistant Film Programmer at The
Dryden
The Ghost Writer
The
Ghost (Ewan McGregor) senses something's not right from the minute he gets the
lucrative assignment to complete Adam Lang's (Pierce Brosnan) autobiography.
For starters, the previous ghostwriter, a longtime aide to the ex-Prime
Minister, is dead—an apparent suicide victim. As Lang becomes engulfed in a
scandal over his administration's harsh counterterrorism tactics, the
ghost-writer digs into the charismatic politician's past, discovering clues
that he may be hiding something far more shocking than the current allegations
against him.
Collapse
Excerpted
from: http://www.indiewire.com/article/
all_fall_down_chris_smiths_collapse/
Michael C. Ruppert, an ex-LAPD officer with a shady,
half-sketched past involving assassination attempts and run-ins with the CIA,
arrives onscreen bursting at the seams to share the long-gestating grand
unified theory of impending global meltdown he’s been peddling in lectures,
newsletters, and blogs for years. … Ruppert, bald, mustachioed, gruff,
chain-smoking, and forcefully eloquent, pays immediate dividends as a
documentary subject by cleanly and ably linking the warnings of the peak oil
and sustainability movements to the nefarious politicking of recent wars and
bailouts. He singlehandedly distills the lessons of films like American Casino, Crude Awakening, and Food, Inc, as well as any number of
Bush-era war docs, into a coherent systemic vision. … Smith plays with belief
throughout Collapse,
never going so far as to undermine Ruppert, but never fully endorsing him
either, accomplishing this careful straddling via smart structuring and careful
inclusions that reveal Michael’s character simultaneous to the unspooling of
his ideas.
- Jeff Reichert (November 6,
2009)
What’s the Matter With Kansas?
Excerpted
from: http://www.offoffoff.com/film/2009/
whats_the_matter_with_kansas.php
It
isn't asking "What is wrong with these people?"—far from it. The
title really means, let's look into the matter of Kansas. How have the people
there changed?
The film doesn't present this question clearly, even
though the subject is stated up front in Thomas Frank's outstanding 2004 book.
His essential question is: How did Kansas turn from a New Deal liberal state to
a Bush-era conservative state? Why, when farms, factories, businesses and downtowns
are vanishing, do an increasingly impoverished people in Kansas identify with
the party of the rich and vote seemingly against themselves?
The book's answer has something to do with an
essential change in how America thinks about class. With the disappearance of
the 20th-century economy, class is no longer economic—workers vs. owners. It is
cultural. The rhetorical attacks on latte-drinking, Volvo-driving,
homosexual-loving East Coast and West Coast liberals make sense to people
there—especially the
working class. In opposition to these faraway "elites," Kansans are
able to see themselves as the besieged but valiant keepers of American
"values."
…
There's no way filmmakers Laura Cohen and Joe Winston
could have resisted the crusty sculptor, even though they should have. Why?
Because they were committed to telling their story through characters, not
ideas. This is in keeping with the current vogue in documentary making—talking
heads are boring, interviews are meddling, narrators are arrogantly trying to
tell you what to think. Didacticism is tyranny! Only life stories are valid
stories. The only thing a documentarian does is stand quietly in a corner and
hold a camera while the magic happens.
Put a loudmouth oddball in front of a camera, and,
presto, you have a character. But a character in what movie? In a movie about
oddballs. What's the matter with Kansas is that it has a lot of weirdos making
sculptures?
Let's think about the answer to that question—it is
the title of the movie, after all. What is the matter with Kansas? Most of the movie is
about evangelicals who are scared of evolution-teachers and the ACLU. So the
simple answer to "What's the Matter with Kansas?" must be either
1. the evangelicals are ruining it, or
2. the forces of evil are at work and the evangelicals
are saving it.
Which one is the message of the film? Both. Neither.
It doesn't matter—the film has no message. It is a film about the filmmakers'
commitment to being in Kansas — not about the question that is the title of
their film. Although they have done an arduous job of dropping in and
documenting life in a faraway state, I doubt they could answer that question
themselves. The film certainly doesn't.
- by Joshua Tanzer, Aug 20, 2009
Crude
“Had
Michael Moore wanted to make a serious movie about capitalism, he would have
made Crude. Joe Berlinger’s scorched-earth documentary and
David-and-Goliath drama offers more than a few eco-outraged observations on the
not-so-free enterprise system: As the film very eloquently implies, when the
greater good is defined as profits, and a lack of culpability is proportionate
to your number of shareholders, well . . . a lot of petroleum-soaked chickens
will be coming home to roost.”
- John Anderson, The Washington Post
Ghost
Bird
Done right, a documentary should be able to take a
subject that never really interested you and make it feel like your lifelong
passion. Such is the case with Scott Crocker’s absorbing Ghost
Bird. [T]he
interviewees...want to believe the ivory-bill exists as much as anyone. The
problem, we learn, is that the ivory-bill funding is money that’s being
diverted from efforts to save dwindling species that still have a chance. ...
[D]rawers and drawers of taxidermied specimens provide surreal, damning
evidence of the irreversible damage we’ve done.
-
Dayna Papaleo, City Newspaper
Rififi
The modern heist movie was invented in Paris in 1954
by Jules Dassin, with Rififi and Jean-Pierre Melville,
with Bob le Flambeur. Dassin built his film around a 28-minute
safe-cracking sequence that is the father of all later movies in which thieves
carry out complicated robberies. Working across Paris at the same time,
Melville's film, which translates as "Bob the High Roller," perfected
the plot in which a veteran criminal gathers a group of specialists to make a
big score. The Melville picture was remade twice as Ocean's
Eleven, and
echoes of the Dassin can be found from Kubrick's The
Killing to
Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. They both owe something to
John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), which has the general
idea but not the attention to detail.
Rififi was called by Francois
Truffaut the best film noir he'd ever seen (it was based, he added, on the
worst noir novel he'd ever read). Dassin's inspiration was to expand the
safe-cracking job, which is negligible in the book, into a breathless sequence
that occupies a fourth of the running time and is played entirely without words
or music. So meticulous is the construction and so specific the detail of this
scene that it's said the Paris police briefly banned the movie because they
feared it was an instructional guide.
There is something else unique about the heist
scene: It is the centerpiece of the film, not the climax. In a modern heist
film, like The Score (2001), the execution of the
robbery fills most of the third act. Rififi is more interested in the
human element, and plays as a parabola, with the heist at the top before the
characters descend to collect their wages of sin. After the heist there is
still a kidnapping to go.
- Roger Ebert, Sept 1, 2002, Chicago
Sun-Times
*******************************************
Movie Miscellany
*******************************************
See my discussion of An
American Journey, where I mention The
Robert Frank Coloring Book. The image below is #15, "Butte, Montana,"
snagged from
http://jnocook.net/frank/rfcolor1.htm
The
author, Jno Cook, grants permission to copy, distribute and/or modify this
document under the terms and license of Creative Commons, which I found
interesting. I quote:
You
are free: to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, to make derivative works, to make commercial
use of the work under the following conditions:
Attribution.
You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Share
Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the
resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
For
any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of
this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the
copyright holder. Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the
above.
Total
freedom is both the dream of every artist and a promise of catastrophe. If free
verse, as Robert Frost said, is like playing tennis with the net down, then
free filmmaking means no white lines and no court: just an umpire, a few
players, and a load of balls.
- Anthony Lane, The New
Yorker, July 12
& 19, 2010, in a review of “Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno,” a documentary directed by
Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea
Alison Bechdel's comic strip popularized what is now
known as the Bechdel test, also known as the Bechdel/Wallace test, the Bechdel
rule, or Bechdel's law. Bechdel credits her friend Liz Wallace for the test,
which appears in a 1985 strip entitled "The Rule," in which a
character says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following
requirements:
1. It has to have at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something other than a man.
I read that right after seeing In Bruges. I don’t think it passed
the Bechdel test.
Next
January [2011] Mr. Duvall will celebrate his 80th birthday. He has been a
Hollywood actor for 48 years, having moved from stage to screen in 1962 as Boo
Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. He is among a handful of
A-list actors who have neared or reached 80 while suffering little to no career
slowdown. Clint Eastwood is 80. Michael Caine is 77. Morgan Freeman and Anthony
Hopkins are both in their early 70s. With Gene Hackman, 80, retired, the list
pretty much stops there.
- Jonah Weiner, July 25, 2010, The
New York Times
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