MaryDan's 2010 Movie List

MaryDan's 2010 Movie List

B indicates Bob saw it too; Bob's comments are in {curly brackets}

Documentaries

** Highly Recommended **

360/365 Film Festival. Loved this view into the personality and style of Basquiat.

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.

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.

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.)

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 **

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.

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.”

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.

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 **

360/365 Film Festival.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really get what this film was about.

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.

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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.

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.

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.}

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.

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.’”

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.

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."

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 **

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Movie Quotes

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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.

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Reviews or Descriptions I Liked

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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

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Movie Miscellany

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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:

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Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

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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