I was delighted to learn (via Jezebel) of the convergence of two of my favorite things: Amanda the uber-confident editor-in-chief of the MTV reality series "the Paper" and goofy YouTube lipsyncing. In this clip, she delivers a rant close to any film lover's heart.
ENGLISH SURGEON Directed by Geoffrey Smith (Australia)
This BBC-produced documentary follows neurosurgeon Dr. Henry Marsh who for
15 years has dedicated his vacation time to flying to Kiev,
Ukraine and doing pro bono consultations and surgeries. Marsh was
inspired to the cause after being invited to lecture at a KGB hospital
and seeing the immense suffering borne from out of date equipment and
grossly off-base diagnoses. He has a friend and local point person in
Dr. Igor Kurilets who is trying to start a university for neurosurgery
in Kiev, who in this film are part comedy team, part support system to a highly specified calling.The
film is oddly reminiscent (though diametrically opposed in tone) of last year's Romanian black comedy 12:08
East of Bucharest. The two films
slyly observe the day to day ironies for people living in a once
closed, communist society as it transitions into something else that is
still undefined. We see the doctors struggle to secure the space, equipment and support staff
to serve the patients he has lined up for surgery. The solution Kurilets finds is to take up in the former KGB hospital where
just a few years prior political dissidents had been imprisoned and
administered shock treatment.
Filmed
over the course of just two weeks we see Marsh toggle back in forth in
his own mind between a hero figure haunted by the death of a child he
was unable to save early in his career and an unfeeling godhead. In one uncomfortable
scene a young woman who has less than two years to live is left
helplessly watching the two doctors go back and forth (in English) over
how much bad news to give her while she sits helplessly awaiting a
translation. Ultimately deciding not to tell her she's dying until she can summon her mother to join her from Moscow.
English Surgeon effectively
confronts the idealized notion of service and just who are the people
who dedicate their lives to helping people in need. It's rarely the
starlets like Angelina Jolie and more likely to be people with some kind of extreme
emotional damage who have funneled their obsession and needs into a
positive outlet.
While I recommend the
film whole-heartedly I must take offense with the disclaimer in the
press notes explicitly stating this is not "a medical film". There is a
20-minute stretch of graphic brain surgery that is not for the faint of
heart (which is to say, I nearly threw up and came close to passing out
several times). In the scene a patient with a progressed brain tumor
becomes dehydrated and begins to have spasms during his operation (in
which only local aesthetic has been used). Still in Motion likened
the scene to Roy Scheider's open heart surgery in All That Jazz, a
scene that also makes me feel light-headed, delicate flower that I
apparently am.
The film took the Best
International Feature Documentary honor at Hot Docs and has been
acquired by ITVS. Official site.
1,000 JOURNALS Directed by Andrea
Kreuzhage (USA)
Producer Andrea
Kreuzhage (SLC Punk!, Bookies) makes her directorial debut with this
documentary about a conceptual art piece conceived by a man who goes by
the moniker "Someguy". With the stated goal of encouraging more people
to consider themselves as artists, he started a website (as all San
Francisco-based conceptual art pieces do) and took sign ups for the
titular 1,000 journals he then circulated around the world. People are
tasked with leaving their mark, scanning the pages to upload to the
website and then passing the journal along. Once filled, the journals
will be on display at an art gallery in San Francisco. But human nature
being largely lazy and insecure,
the bulk of the journals go completely off the radar almost immediately
and only one is ever returned completed to Someguy.
Kreuzhage
has some predictable first-time directing hiccups in crafting a through
storyline for the film. I'm reminded of Alexandra Lipsitz's documentary
Air Guitar Nation where the subject matter is compelling enough but the
director had trouble connecting the participants' passion for what they
were doing with any larger context. Several times while watching this
film I couldn't help but wonder why I should care at all about a group
of people who place a zealot's level of import on making
crayola doodles, personal journaling and backpacking through Europe.
And if this is some effort to unite the world through an unassuming art
project (it was initiated shortly after the terrorist attacks of
September 11th), how are people who don't have regular enough access to
computers to learn about the journals supposed to participate?
There
are scenes of genuinely touching moments where interview subjects
manage to distill their experiences for themselves. But those bits are
mostly centered around acts of extreme cruelty or disgust the
journalers feel for each other. In one scene, a middle-age woman who
has spent her life taking care of her family uses the journals to open
up about her experiences of sexual abuse as a child. Someone responds
by creating a sexually explicit collage depicting her as "a fat cow".
How the woman found out about something that happened in the journal's
timeline after she had it is unclear but the next person in line
states blithely that "art is meant to provoke". Yes, fat jokes contribute so much to the discourse. Let's exhibit Rush
Limbaugh in the Louvre. Sometimes a director's effort to leave things open to the viewer's interpretation winds up
as a total lack of compassion for its subjects and 1,000 Journals suffers greatly from this ambivalence.
The
film is playing several more film festival and sales are being handled
by Louise Rosen Ltd. Official site.
ASK NOT Directed by: Johnny Symons (USA)
Johnny Symons'
impassioned documentary Ask Not is a ruthless investigation of the
failures of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The DADT policy was a political
compromise enacted under the Clinton administration in lieu of the campaign promise of removing
the ban on homosexuals serving in the US military. At the time
it seemed to many to be a flawed but acceptable stop gap measure but as Symons reveals, has
created a myriad of new problems for soldiers, officers, the military
and the Executive branch.
It's a sad fact that the extent of our involvement in the Middle East these days
has made this the perfect opportunity for equal rights activists to press
the issue, though the film itself is agnostic towards the current
wars. In one particularly harrowing scene, we learn that 54 translators
fluent in Farsi and/or Arabic were discharged pre-9/11 leaving the Bush
administration unable to get through the backlog of wiretap
communications that are now understood to contain many red flags leading up to the
terrorist attacks.
Symons
does an excellent job of balancing talking heads who put the political
climate of the passage of DADT into context, archival footage and the
personal stories of the deep psychological problems that can be
inflicted on a soldier or officer living a lie to serve their country.
The number of active duty and retired military personnel he was able to
convince to speak on camera is particularly moving.
The
film also spotlights a fascinating element in American history -- a
moment where President Truman can be lauded for judgment and courage.
After signing the executive order to integrate the
military many top-ranked generals threatened to leave and while there
is no footage from the actual conversation, Truman's response appeared
to have been, "Seeya, wouldn't wanna be ya" resulting in zero resignations.
We also spend time with a grassroots activist group called Soulforce that stage sit-ins in the recruitment offices located in strip malls
throughout the country. Openly gay people who have been denied the
ability to serve and their supporters sit silently are eventually
arrested for trespassing. The scene is striking for several reasons,
the most obvious being how reminiscent the images are of the lunch
counter protests that became a cornerstone of the Civil Rights movement
(with a little post-Gen X irony, these are now black officers arresting
white kids). Living in the Bay Area I have a bit of a skewed perspective on anti-military activism and was stunned by how polite civil disobedience is in midwest. The absurdity of the situation is also uniformly accepted,
the recruiter all but says "if I could enlist you all I would
meet my quota for the rest of the year". And for the duration of the
sit-in not a single heterosexual person comes into the office to
enlist.
The
film has been selected to air as part of the PBS series Independent
Lens in the 2008-2009 season.
Official site.
This week Cathy and I pay tribute to the lighter fare dedicated to the fairer sex and review Baby Mama, 27 Dresses, Jumpin' Jack Flash.
Please visit Show Me Your Titles with any feedback.
To celebrate Mothers Day this year I put together a list of Great Moms in Movie History.
The Understanding Mom: Dianne Wiest's earthy compassion grounds the hyper-whimsical Edward Scissorhands, making a story about a man born with scissors for hands (by Tim Burton, no less) seem more Boo Radley and less Freddie Kruger. Before she became the poster child for troubled celebrity youth Lindsay Lohan was all streaky hair, freckles and charm in the 2003 re-make of Freaky Friday. She and Jamie Lee Curtis bridge the generational divide with great comic aplomb. In the 1977 melodrama Turning Point, Shirley MacLaine plays a former ballerina who left the dance life to raise a family and when her former best friend/top competitor (Anne Bancroft) comes into town; a Dynasty-esque catfight ensues.
Read the full list at Greencine.
Recently I was trying to put together a line up for a forthcoming episode of Show Me Your Titles, the weekly film discussion podcast I co-host, on the theme that would generally fit around the topic of the exploitation of workers.
One of the films that I saw as a possibility was Bordertown, a film directed by Greg Nawa (Selena, Mi Familia) and starring Jennifer Lopez, Martin Sheen and Antonio Banderas. Lopez plays an investigative reporter for a newspaper in Chicago inexplicably sent to Juarez City, Mexico to investigate the murders of thousands of young women who work in the production pl ants opened along the border following the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The story is based on real events that had previously only been explored in film with Lourdes Portillo's documentary Seniorita Extraviada which has availability limited mostly to college libraries.
Bordertown had recently been shunted by its distributor straight to dvd but given how much I had enjoyed I Could Never Be Your Woman (a remarkably smart romantic comedy that earlier this year had also been dumped to dvd) I was confident that Bordertown was a good film, possibly a great film that soft-minded marketing execs had declared that despite the heavyweight cast and directing talents would too difficult to promote.
My sagely cynical co-host Cathy recommended that I see the film for myself before committing it to SMYT's line up and I, oblivious to any possible beef with the film, happily obliged.
The film opens up with a graphic gang rape scene (which, as a matter of policy, disqualifies it from being covered on SMYT) and more or less goes downhill from there. The woman is beaten, strangled and buried alive but she survives and limps several miles home strong in her convictions to seek justice. The following two hours contains further degradation of every kind, there's the corrupt, thuggish police force, an international government conspiracy, an eyeball gouged out, a drive by shooting, Lopez going undercover as a factory worker 10 years her junior, prostitution, a teen pop idol, trans-racial adoption politics, someone being beat to death with a plank of wood that's on fire (ala Freddy Kruger), an open mass grave, a group of people left to die in the trunk of a car parked in the desert, and perhaps most harrowing of all: a scene where uber-diva Jennifer Lopez dyes her own hair.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but the script holding this all together is so ludicrous that plot points contradict each other from scene to scene. It would qualify as a camp classic among the likes of Showgirls and I Know Who Killed Me if it weren't all based on events that happened to real people with little to no justice for the victims.
In reality what is happening in Juarez City is genocide. There have been many theories about different culprits behind the thousands of rapes, murders and kidnappings of young women (including several serial killers and organ trafficking) but what remains clear is that these women's lives are not considered valuable so long as the nearby factories keep American consumer goods cheap.
The film brings to a head a deep conflict in feminist film criticism, do these depictions of violence raise awareness of the threat women face on a daily basis? Or do repeated, sanitized images of this kind desensitize us further from the obscene levels of violence in our society?
What is most troubling about Bordertown isn't all the ways it goes wrong (these are well-treaded paths of exploitation) but the glimmers of intelligence that I desperately want to believe belong to this director whose work may have been elbowed into different directions by jittery studio executives. There is a great scene where Lopez's character, distraught with the inefficacy of American journalism thrashes about her posh news office throwing computer monitors and televisions to the ground screaming, "there's blood on your hands! There's blood on all of our hands!"
Nava also does a masterful job of portraying class rage with visual splendor. The places where poor people live, work and congregate are all dirty, cramped and constantly violent. The wealthy people are hardly seen working at all but the homes, restaurants and parties they inhabit seem utopic in contrast with lavish gardens, floor-to-ceiling aquariums and the constant sound of soft piano tinkling.
I just wish he and Lopez shared the same righteous anger towards the actual murders instead of using them as a backdrop for an an uneven, absurd vanity piece.
UPDATE: I recently had the opportunity to interview documentary film-maker Lourdes Portillo and asked her about Bordertown.
AMERICAN TEEN Directed by Nanette Burstein (USA)
Nanette Burstein's first solo directing effort, after having collaborated twice with Brett Morgen (Chicago 10) on the Kid Stays in the Picture and On the Ropes; is for better or for worse, being marketed as the documentary version of the Breakfast Club. The film observes a princess, a jock, a nerd and an outcast for the length of their senior year of high school in Warsaw, Indiana. And to the surprise of only the people with the iciest of hearts, we learn even high school kids are more complicated than their niche.
As motion graphics, cgi and animation becomes easier and cheaper it's exciting to see how documentary film-makers put them to use. Like Flow: For Love of Water, a documentary on water politics I also saw at the festival and loved, American Teen brings in a lot of great ancillary material via animated sequences. Burstein asked each teenager to describe their greatest fantasy and then uses different animation styles to realize those scenarios. It's a sequence set early in the film that creates an immediate connection between the viewer and the subject.
The story is developed in a fairly straight-forward manner, which might deeply offend the aesthetic demands of film purists. But this is an endearing snapshot of the frustrations for small town kids on the cusp of adulthood. And as someone who works in documentary distribution, I celebrate any docs that widen the base of people who will see documentaries in the theaters and the films that remove the "stodgy, educational" stigma the genre still largely carries.
In a Q&A that followed the screening, Burstein mentioned she chose the Midwest as a location because the people there are less jaded than their coastal or urban counterparts. In a blistering scene where one of the girls decides to send a topless photo to her boyfriend and within a matter of days everyone in town has seen it (including her father and pastor) and ostracized her, the viewer gets a very different idea.
The sold out screening I attended had the audience enthralled, groaning and cheering along with the kids' triumphs and tribulations. The film, purchased at Sundance by Paramount Vantage, opens wide July 25th and is likely to be one of the most popular documentaries of the year.
DUST Directed by Hartmut Bitomsky (Germany) (capsule)
Hartmut Bitomsky's documentary Dust is a delightfully monastic examination of perhaps the most mundane substance on the planet. Bitomsky follows the creation of industrial dust in a factory, a restoration specialist at a museum protecting great works from insidious particles, the rigorous routine a housewife who self-identifies as a clean freak and geologists who study the different dusts of the world. Dust may not sound like a thrill ride but it's compulsively watchable and deeply informative. Recently acquired by First Run/Icarus Films (Operation Filmmaker, I for India, La'Commune Paris 1871) the film will be released theatrically in November 2008.
CHILDREN OF THE SUN Directed by Ran Tal (Israel/USA)
Children of the Sun examines the world of the Israeli commune movement ("kibbutz") from the perspective of the first generation of children who were born into them (of which director Ran Tal was as well). The film is told entirely through super-8 home movies shot between 1930-1970 and narrated with audio roundtable interviews of the kibbutzniks now.
Called "the children of the sun" because they were the first generation of Israelis born after the Revolution of the Sun, the Baby Kibbutzniks were raised in a 100% collective mentality. Primary care was handled by appointed nannies instead of their parents, they were never left alone with their days dedicated to synchronized sports and manual labor. The idea of 70 children sharing a communal bathroom and 'sexual purity' exercises for the girls are mildly horrifying, but Children of the Sun is a fascinating slice of Israeli history. The film will air later this year on the Sundance channel.
Feminine Mystique shorts program
The Ladies - Christina Voros's cinema verite documentary won the Golden Gate documentary short award. Voros follows two sisters who survived the Hungarian revolution (and multiple marriages) who now run a seamstress shop out of their cramped New York apartment.
La Corona - the Oscar-nominated documentary short about the annual beauty pageant in one of Colombia's maximum security prisons. Not unlike Errol Morris's protagonist Lyndie England in Standard Operating Procedure, many of the women interviewed blame their incarceration on their involvement with a man be it through drug-running or joining a political crusade that was condemned by the state. Co-directors Isabel Vega and Amanda Micheli gain total access to these women and put their subjects at tremendous ease.
WING: the Fish that Talked - A touching narrative short, reminiscent of Julia Kwan's Sundance 2007 family dramedy Eve and the Fire Horse (one of my favorite films that year). When a young girl's grandmother passes away she comes to believe her pet goldfish contains the woman's reincarnated soul. Dutch film-maker Ricky Rijneke has a commanding sense of cinematography. Definitely a film-maker to watch.
The Grand Inquisitor - To San Francisco film noir lovers, Eddie Muller is a bit of a local hero as the chief programmer of the annual Noir City film festival (read our coverage of last year's fest here). With the Grand Inquisitor, he makes his debut as a writer/director. The film features noir heroine Marsha Hunt as an elderly woman trying to defend the memory of her husband from a young girl detective who believes he was the Zodiac killer.
Since You've Been Ong - a San Francisco-based narrative short about a couple breaking up as a new relationship is formed. The story and actors are entertaining enough but I could go a very long time without seeing another film with voicemail narration.
For additional SFIFF51 coverage listen to recent episodes of Show Me Your Titles film podcast:
#30
SFIFF preview: Forbidden Lie$, FLOW: For Love of Water, Ballast,
Stranded: I've
come from a plane that crashed on the mountains
Criterion announced today their first wave of Blu-ray titles scheduled to start being released in October.
The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor (two separate releases for theatrical and original dvd versions)
El Norte
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear
This selection represents an interesting spread thematically and in scope of projects -- no doubt a strategic decision to see which demographic is going to present the greatest demand for these new $40 discs. Will it be the indie-philes (Bottle Rocket, Chungking Express)? Film schoolers (Contempt, the 400 Blows)? Landscape enthusiasts (Walkabout, the Man Who Fell to Earth)? Baby boomers (Monterey Pop, For All Mankind)? Or the moms who love historical epics (El Norte, the Last Emperor)?
I was recently feeling nostalgic about the death of Roy Scheider (shut up) and watched the Sorcerer and loved it. So I will be cheering for the original French film the Wages of Fear.
This week Cathy and I review I'm a Cyborg But That's OK (Park Chan-Wook), Planet B-Boy (Benson Lee), Wings of Defeat (Risa Morimoto), 881 (Royston Tan) and short films from the San Francisco International Asian American Film.
Enjoy! Please share any feedback you might have at Show Me Your Titles film podcast.
In tribute to director Susanne Bier we review Things We Lost in the Fire (Halle Berry, Benicio del Toro, David Duchovny, Anna Paquin)
After the Wedding (Mads Mikkelsen, Rolf Lassgård, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Stine Fischer Christensen) and
Brothers (Connie Nielsen, Ulrich Thomsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas).
SMYT #26: Spotlight on I Could Never Be Your Woman dir: Amy Heckerling starring: Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul Rudd, Saoirse Ronan, Stacey Dash, Fred Willard, Tracy Ullman, Jon Lovitz, Graham Norton and Henry Winkler.
SMYT #25: Slacker Girls, Cathy and I review Smiley Face (Gregg Araki), Funny Ha Ha (Andrew Bujalski), Daisies (Vera Chytilová) and a bonus interview with director Andrew Bujalski.
SMYT #24: Spotlight on
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days dir: Cristian Mungiu starring: Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov, Alexandru Potocean.
Great news, documentary lovers. Frontline and HBO Documentaries are now streaming their full-length programs free online.
PBS's Frontline (possibly taking a page from the creators of South Park) has uploaded the last few years worth of episodes including the recent Bush's War and my personal favorite the Merchants of Cool.
HBO Documentaries (who recently won the bidding war for Jennifer Venditti's documentary Billy the Kid) will be be streaming their new films for short periods of time. Tricia Regan's Autism: the Musical has been streaming since Wednesday and will be available until this Sunday.
There is also a new site FreeDocumentaries.org that indexes all documentaries available on Google's free video streaming site. Their selection includes Barbara Kopple's Shut Up and Sing, the incredible BBC series the Power of Nightmares, Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight and dozens more.
And YouTube competitor DailyMotion has recently launched Cinema Daily Motion, starting out with the festival darling Red Without Blue.
Related: Agnes Varnum reports PBS's POV 2008 line up announcement.
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