Steady Diet of Film

Review: Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman

Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman is an utterly affable look at the life of the now-deceased photographer whose depictions of Southern California modernist architecture made a hippy artistic movement into a lasting cultural phenomenon. Schulman (an active participant in the documentary but passed away before it was released) hooked up with Richard Neutra, John Lautner and Frank Gehry at a time when Los Angeles itself was in a state of re-creation and upheaval. The film provides a glimpse into the rarefied world of modernist architecture and the people who mortgage themselves to the teeth trying to protect it.

Though the bulk of the work depicted in his photographs are private residences, Schulman's complicated relationship with higher education provides the documentary's framework. As a young man he attended seven years of college without completing a degree, when universities appeared in his work he often showed them as imposing institutions but (in a closing scene that has become quite cliche in non-fiction storytelling) by the end of the film Schulman is presented with an honorary doctorate. The film also delights in using animated sequences to illustrate the creation, influence and clashes in the history of modern design starting in the early 1900s all the way to the present. These scenes demonstrate that an appreciation for the fine art is a living thing -- agnostic to where (or why, or if) the viewer attended school.

 

Because of the advanced age of so many of the subjects, most of the people available as experts are the children, assistants, devotees and students of these men who are, understandably, uncritical. And while not every documentary needs to be an expose to be interesting, a few interesting nuggets go by with nary a follow-up question. Several references are made to Schulman being strongly favored by his mother over his four siblings growing up. At this late stage in his life one wonders how that impacted his artistic growth and/or his own parenting practices (his daughter contributes a great deal of doting, if content-less commentary). We also hear several sideways comments about Schulman clashing with his frequent collaborator Richard Neutra but no further explanation on how that affected their work process over time.

There are also a few celebrity enthusiasts interviewed including actress Kelly Lynch, who happily discusses how much she loves her Neutra-designed home -- even as she and her husband admit in the same breath that much of the space is impractical and rarely used. Fashion designer and film-maker Tom Ford delights in providing a cultural context for understanding how this work was conceived in a time of equal discovery (landing on the moon!) and uncertainty (Cuban missile crisis!) It goes unmentioned in Visual Acoustics (probably due to the timing of the productions), but Ford used a John Lautner-designed home for his recent film A Single Man. Filling out the celebrity involvement, actor Dustin Hoffman provides the film's narration.

Director Eric Bricker has created a comprehensive document of something we're not frequently invited to consider, the natural beauty of Los Angeles (as interpreted through the creation of lavish homes). As we sit in the aftermath of a recently collapsed housing market, that's left an uncertain economy and thousands of abandoned McMansions in its wake, Visual Acoustics provides a pleasant psychic sabbatical to a time when enormous amounts of wealth were being thrown into home construction and it created something with a lasting legacy and infinite imagination.

Visual Acoustics is playing in select cities. In Portland at the Living Room Theaters.


RIYL: Objectified, The Kid Stays in the Picture, Los Angeles Plays Itself, No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos, Herb & Dorothy, My Kid Could Paint That.

Review: The Horse Boy

When we meet the Isaacsons, they are a family at the end of their rope. The limits of their patience have been battered by son Rowan's autism, they've exhausted every treatment offered by Western medicine and are still left with a child who at the age of four is not potty trained, can barely speak and is almost constantly in a state of violent tantrum. Inspired by the nearly miraculous effect training with horses has on Rowan, they pack up for Mongolia to pursue shamanic healing rituals offered in far-flung provinces by reindeer herders.

Michel O. Scott's directorial debut The Horse Boy (which screened at film festivals under the name Over the Hills and Far Away) tries very hard to keep the focus on Rowan's incremental progress. But the thrill-seeking New Age parents, father Rupert, an Austin-based journalist, and mother Kristin, a professor of psychology, naturally draw more attention to themselves by virtue of being able to articulate the enormous guilt and frustration around their experiences parenting a severely Autistic child. And while their suffering is nearly palpable, they're unable to explain why they think this expedition is going to make a bit of difference.

While we see the disappointment and exasperation on the Isaacsons' weary faces, we never see how this has impacted their relationships with each other or extended family or their careers. As such, the spectacle of a wealthy, attractive, outdoorsy couple being physically and psychologically tormented by Mongolian shamans (the rituals the child endures are far less harrowing) is somewhat mockable. Particularly when the couple complains loudly that Mongolia is not as exotic as they'd hoped or when Rupert congratulates Kristin on having 'such a great sense of humor' when she is informed that the spirit of her schizophrenic grandmother is haunting her child's soul and as a result she must wash her vagina as part of the ritual. It's about this time one begins to hope the descendants of Genghis Khan will make an appearance. The douching ritual, and so many other TMI moments in this story, are left onscreen--though thankfully with some dignified pixelation.

Woven into the Isaacsons' story is a collection of talking head interviews with scientists and Autism researchers who elaborate on the confusion that surrounds the disorder. The film's editor Rita K. Sanders has an excellent flair for conveying the chaos within the world of Autism--despite the fact millions of people are considered to be somewhere on the Autism spectrum, there are no universally agreed upon causes, symptoms or diagnostic methods. It's through these talking heads we gain a better understanding for why pursuing costly, experimental treatments (that can have many bizarre side effects) can feel like a never ending crap shoot for parents. The reality is that parents feel cruel for trying and damned for not trying. Early on, the Isaacsons talk about the host of creams, diets, exercise regiments and a morning cocktail of hardcore anti-viral drugs--all with intermittent improvements.

The Horse Boy is extremely effective as a travelogue. The inner steppes of Mongolia and its natural wildlife (reindeer, it turns out, look nothing like their Christmas jingle depictions!) have rarely been captured by western documentary crews. This vast, majestic beauty does not escape Scott's lens.

Still, there is something missing from Horse Boy as a document of a family driven to the brink and enduring a harrowing experiment. It goes unmentioned that the trip is financed through a million dollar advance on a book deal secured by Mr. Isaacson. This might help explain why Mrs. Isaacson is rarely invited to contribute more than blithe agreements with anything her husband says and why he is positioned as an authority on shamanic rituals and constantly congratulated for discovering the therapeutic benefits of Rowan's horse training. And even though Jenny McCartney, the dating game show hostess that became an icon of superficiality in the 1990's pop culture, has been able to re-invent herself as a poster mom for families dealing with Autism, one can imagine most families still feel like it's them against the world as they try to navigate their situation.

But this lack of disclosure infuses Horse Boy with undeniable measure of both smugness and self-consciousness. The Isaacsons' (especially Rupert, who provides the voiceover narration for the film) need to be depicted as endlessly patient saints who can drop everything and travel to Mongolia, not because of their wealth or need for adventure and attention, but because they just care so much about their beleaguered son is going to be a tough one for average parents of Autistic children to identify with and even less appealing to those not impacted by the disease.


RIYL: Hear and Now, Sound and Fury, Reel Paradise.

The Horse Boy is playing in select cities. In Portland at the Hollywood Theatre.

50 Best Documentaries of the Aughts

Even though I mocked the (still technically incorrect!) way we're all measuring decades, I am powerless to the siren call of the listicle. I know I'm going against the grain with the purists by not ranking them, but once the list was winnowed down from hundreds of great films to just fifty it started to feel petty. However in the interest of reading pleasure I instead broke them down by their thematic elements.

This proved to be daunting in a different way. I'm always loathe to champion films that are inherently undistributable due to copyright strictures but I couldn't deny the pleasure of watching legendary film editor Walter Murch discuss his process and philosophy in Murch or Thom Anderson's Los Angeles Plays Itself, a must for understanding how setting impacts storytelling choices.

Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke also felt tough to categorize. His decision to make a comprehensive documentary about the impacts and responses to Hurricane Katrina immediately following his massive commercial success with Inside Man felt activist in nature. But a decade from now his event-centric film will likely feel as though it belongs under the Historical/Political heading.

And once the dust settled even I was surprised that each of my nature- and adventure- picks revolved around Antarctica. Must be the Shackleton spirit in me. As always, all favorites are subjective, I would love to hear which films you thought were great this decade.

Enjoy!

ACTIVISM
Blue Vinyl (Gold and Helfand, 2002, USA)
The English Surgeon (Smith, 2007, UK) (pictured)
Shut Up and Sing (Kopple, 2006, USA)
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Lee, 2006, USA)

ART
The Beaches of Agnes (Varda, 2008, France)
Los Angeles Plays Itself (Andersen, 2003, USA)
Murch (Ichioka and Ichioka, 2008, USA)
The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (Fiennes, 2006, UK)
Rivers and Tides (Riedelsheimer, 2001, Germany) (pictured)
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (Harlan, 2001, USA)
True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia (Baichwal, 2002, Canada)

CHARACTER
Forbidden Lie$ (Broinowski, 2007, Australia)
The Gleaners and I (Varda, 2002, France) (pictured)
Girl 27 (Stenn, 2007, USA)
Grizzly Man (Herzog, 2005, USA)
Protagonist (Yu, 2007, USA)
Shadow Billionaire (Spraic, 2009, USA)
Tyson (Toback, 2008, USA)

EXPLORATION//NATURE
Encounters at the End of the World (2007, Herzog, USA) (pictured)
Ice People (Aghion, 2008, France/USA)
Winged Migration (Perrin, Cluzaud and Debats, 2001, France)

FAMILY//PERSONAL
51 Birch Street (Block, 2005, USA) (pictured)
Of Time and the City (Davies, 2008, UK)
Tarnation (Caouette, 2003, USA)
Zombie Girl (Johnson, Marshall and Mauck, 2009, USA)

HISTORICAL

Cooking History (Kerekes, 2009, Slovakia) (pictured)

Orange Revolution (York, 2007, USA)

The Staircase

 (de Lestrade, 2003, USA)

GLOBALIZATION

Dust
 (Bitomsky, 2007, Germany)
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Gibney, 2005, USA)

FLOW: For Love of Water (Salina, 2008, USA)

King Corn (Woolf, 2007, USA)

Life and Debt (Black, 2001, USA)

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) (Kohn, 2007, USA)

Manufactured Landscapes
 (Baichwal, 2006, Canada)
Merchants of Cool
 (Goodman, 2001, USA)
Mondovino (Nossiter, 2004, Argentina) (pictured)
Oblivion (Honigmann, 2008, Netherlands)

Our Brand is Crisis
 (Boynton, 2005, USA)
Rip! A Remix Manifesto
 (Gaylor, 2009, Canada)
Up the Yangtze

 (Chang, 2007, Canada)

SPORTS

The Heart of the Game

 (Serrill, 2005, USA)  (pictured)

WAR

Control Room (Noujaim, 2004, USA)

Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi (Olds, 2009, USA)

The Fog of War (Morris, 2003, USA)

Iraq in Fragments (Longley, 2006, USA)

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (Kennedy, 2007, USA) (pictured)

No End in Sight (Ferguson, 2007, USA)

Taxi to the Dark Side (Gibney, 2007, USA)

Waltz with Bashir (Folman, 2008, Israel)

Review: La danse - Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris

These days, it's difficult to discuss a Frederick Wiseman film when the concept of documentary is so dominated by polemical diatribes and activist efforts to yank heart-strings. Having pioneered the "fly on the wall" approach, his films have no music, no voiceover narration, no title cards identifying time, place or speaker. Standard talking head style interviews are rare. Absent these fairly standard conventions, his films are never without their own unique momentum, passion and ideas. Wiseman tends to be drawn to large, complex institutions. He breaks them down, making them seem both like an intimate community and a microcosm for larger concerns in the culture. His naturalistic approach has led to his work frequently being tagged as an apolitical or austere. The former characterization I've had the distinct pleasure of seeing him vehemently deny in person and the latter I'm happy to argue against.

His shoots typically last between four to six weeks, making his camera and team probably actually feel like a fly on the wall. He then spends the better part of a year in an editing room, teasing out the rhythms and tensions of the places he explores. Since he tends to focus on venues that are strapped for cash (mental hospitals, state legislatures, high schools, welfare offices, etc.) or where stakes are very high (an Army basic training camp, the Neiman Marcus corporation, an ad agency), dramatic tension is never in low supply.

Wiseman's 38th film La Danse focuses on the Paris Opera Ballet as they prepare to unveil a program boasting seven new performances. In the architectural utopia they inhabit, we see the ceilings painted by Marc Chagall, ornate doorways and hidden alcoves--all of which must eventually be delicately vacuumed by a janitor. We see costumers sewing away at delicate layers of tulle skirts and tutus, while the financial people sit upstairs in a windowless conference room trying to put together luxury packages for big donors. The creative directors fight to bring in more modern choreography and programs, while the administrators fret that newer ballets create quagmires of licensing issues while selling fewer tickets.

To the great delight of dance lovers, we spend a great deal of time in the rehearsal spaces seeing the ballet come together as the coaches confer, analyze and reminiscence about how dancing styles and trends have changed over the years. Apparently these days there is a much stronger emphasis on "bottom-heavy" dancing than in the 50s and 60s, clearly the influence of Beyonce. And to my immense personal pleasure, we spend a fair amount of time in the cafeteria seeing not only what the staff eats but how they interact in their downtime.

When determining whether to watch a Wiseman film one should never ask "am I interested in this subject matter?" Instead, the relevant question is "am I ready to be fully immersed in this subject matter?" When we see scenes from the finalized performances, the drama and consequences depicted (though magnificently executed) seem somewhat weakened by the stakes the company itself is up against. In fact, a particular failed American investment bank is a high-ranking underwriter. Everything in our current global economy has been re-tooled to to emphasize short-term gains and immediate growth to the point that several giants have crumbled. What chance does the Paris Opera Ballet, which requires so much long-term investment, enormous overhead and offers few cross-promotional tie-in possibilities -- to fend off its own rapidly approaching extinction?


La Danse is playing in select cities. In Portland at Cinema 21 with a special benefit screening for the Oregon Ballet Theater on December 15th with OBT Artistic Director and several dancers on hand for a Q&A afterwards. The film will also be available on dvd in the Spring of 2010.

Review: The End of Poverty?

Philippe Diaz's The End of Poverty? plays like a video version of "Neoliberalism for Dummies" in the best and worst ways. Exploring how different segments of the developing world remain in grinding poverty, Diaz traces the legacy of colonialism to a modern day corporate imperialism that much squelch million of people to maintain consumer demands of industrialized nations. With an oddly forceful voiceover provided by actor Martin Sheen, the film screened at the venerable Cannes film festival in 2008.

Making the (not entirely graceful) leap from television, Diaz interviews a series of economists, historians, government ministers, academics and labor organizers, complete with title cards of passing statistics and historical factoids. Fairly, he also interviews with people living in extremely stricken circumstances. This latter group is consistently filmed in their home and work environments. The audience reads a title card saying that a family of eight lives in a 15-square foot shack or that sugarcane workers don't have the safety equipment they need to do their back-breaking work. Traditionally, the strength of documentary film is to show us things we are unlikely to experience first-hand. But despite his incredible access to geographically-diverse people who have every reason to distrust an American film-maker, Diaz seems oddly committed to framing his subjects in medium shots that are neither intimate nor provide larger contexts for their interviews.

Mono-cropping isn't the most appealing topic on earth. However, it is key to understanding how the shift to an export economy undermines nations' abilities to grow its own food, which leads to high productivity on balance sheet while people starve to death. Diaz does an admirable job explaining how international debt is transferred in ways that make it impossible for poverty-stricken countries to invest in their own infrastructure.

The film is funded by the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, a group whose key objective is agrarian reforms. And surprise surprise! When the film rolls around to solutions to worldwide poverty, the only suggestion made is third world land reform. 

There's nothing inherently wrong with making a one-sided documentary. Every advocacy group needs something to show at their wine and cheese fundraisers. But a film that purports to be about poverty misses the boat if it fails to mention international trafficking in sex and drugs, the US homeless epidemic or how today's wealth disparity creates tomorrow's terrorists. This is particularly disappointing given that Diaz manages to wrangle interviews from Nobel prize winning economists, a former World Bank president and several heads of state. That he ignores several affinity-building opportunities makes one wonder what the point is at all.

An Inconvenient Truth demonstrated that didactic lectures can be an extremely effective recruitment tool. But films like End of Poverty? stumble into the clumsy stereotype that non-fiction storytelling can only be slightly more engaging than the educational filmstrips we used to watch in grade school.


RIYL: The End of America, Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral On a Moving Train, Episode 3: 'Enjoy Poverty', Shadow Billionaire, In the Pit.


The End of Poverty is playing in select cities. In Portland at Living Room Theaters.

Review: Kobe Doin' Work

Produced for ESPN and now available on dvd, Kobe Doin' Work trained 30 cameras on NBA superstar Kobe Bryant for the course of a full game, with commentary provided on the final cut by Bryant. The game, pitting the Lakers against their longtime rivals the San Antonio Spurs, would eventually lead to Bryant's first Most Valuable Player award. After a screening of soccer documentary Zidane at the Cannes film festival, legendary film-maker (and Knicks fan) Spike Lee decided a basketball version was immediately necessitated. Since Lee's dabblings in documentary film (When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Four Little Girls) has produced even more incendiary work than the provocative narrative films (Do the Right Thing, 25th Hour, Bamboozled) that cemented his reputation as a film raconteur, news of his involvement in the non-fiction form is always cause for excitement for those of us who like to see the pot stirred. While it's not an entirely fair comparison to draw, Bryant's checkered past, my complete lack of interest in professional sports and the long shadow cast by Tyson (James Toback's brilliant documentary on boxer Mike Tyson), one can't help but feel a little short-changed by such a straightforward sports procedural.

The enthusiasm and nearly scientific analysis in Bryant's commentary does convey a few interesting nuggets to even the most hardened professional sports hater. Despite these players and teams bringing in millions of dollars, their locker room looks like one in which high school players would congregate in. Many Lakers players have learned conversational Italian and Serbian to accommodate team members who struggle with English. Bryant's incredible graciousness towards the abilities of his competitors is downright gentlemanly. Otherwise, even Lee's interjections on the commentary track only serve to add more details about the actual process of the actual game.

On a recent panel at the Starz Denver Film Festival about believability in documentary film, film-maker AJ Schnack (in a discussion about Michael Moore) brought up the strange stratosphere that celebrity film-makers inhabit. In addition to garnering their projects an exponentially higher amount of publicity, they also regularly gain access to people and stories who might otherwise be considered too private to divulge. Chris Rock's participation in Good Hair is an excellent recent example of how this influence can lead to light being shed on difficult, personal subject matter and Bill Maher's Religulous being an equally strong example of how not to spend one's fame capital.

It's unlikely that a person who's recently been through a very public sexual assault trial would partipcate in any kind of documentary film project, even one with the modest aspirations of Kobe Doin' Work, if not for the credibility brought to the project by Lee. While viewers will walk away certainly knowing a bit more about shooting from the triangle, one might also wonder whatever happened to that raconteur of yore.

DVD extras include: an introduction by Spike Lee, deleted scenes, photo montage, music video for "Levitate" by Bruce Hornsby, a behind the scenes featurette and several audio options to watch the full game. 

See also: September Issue, Murderball, Hoop Dreams, Bigger Stronger Faster, The Heart of the Game, Gunnin for That #1 Spot.

Review: Crude

Joe Berlinger's (Paradise Lost, Some Kind of Monster, Brother's Keeper) seventh film Crude follows the class-action lawsuit filed by a small group of Ecuadorians residing in the Amazon rainforest, they go after Chevron for massive industrial pollution that has driven entire tribes of native people out of their homeland. The litigation is spearheaded by Pablo Fajardo, a young man who grew up in one of the affected villages. Just three years out of law school, he's been put in charge of the fate of his people's customs, land and safety. Assisting him is brash US attorney Steven Donziger and advocacy group Amazon Watch. Filling out the story is a merry-go-round of oil corporation attorneys and scientists. As is the case in so much of Latin America's biography, rampant government corruption is a recurring character. 

A more literal version of modern David and Goliath couldn't be imagined. Understandably, oil giant Chevron (who merged with Texaco in 2001, halfway through the film's story) is not terribly threatened by a little bad publicity because really, what are a few dead Amazonian babies when the United States' entire economy rests on your product? Yet Chevron-Texaco deploys an army of attorneys who spend years tying the case up in different jurisdictions, muddying the waters of scientific research and burying judges under reams of briefs (and bribes). 

Essentially, this battle comes down to a constant and often irrational public relations campaign. Chevron-Texaco attorneys accuse Fajardo of getting wealthy off of the cause, although we later see he lives in windowless shack with his mother. Donziger becomes frighteningly intense when coaching non-English speakers on how to maximize heartstring-pulling pronouncements at a shareholders meeting. Somehow, Texaco-funded scientists manage to keep  straight faces when they declare the Amazonian people's insidious cancer clusters are caused by lack of hygiene. 

But the nuclear option is triggered when Vanity Fair features a spread on the photogenic Fajardo and his equally photogenic cause. This coverage garners the attention of newly elected president Rafael Correa (a young, smart candidate recently swept into office by a massive wave of popularity) and Trudie Styler (aka Mrs. Sting). Fajardo's world quickly changes when he is invited to attend Sting's Earth concert, bringing him international attention. We eventually see Jimmy Smits bestowing CNN's Hero Award on him.

Berlinger stands back and lets us be swept up in (and eventually become mildly terrified by) the garish thrall of the celebrity stampede. But he does not allow the Police's "SOS" (introduced by Cameron Diaz and dedicated by Sting from the stage, natch) to let us us off so easily. While the media coverage undoubtedly influenced Chevron-Texaco being (spoiler alert) found in violation of all charges by inspectors, we are made painfully aware that these companies will never pay a dime to the people who watched their children vomit blood and die excruciating deaths. And they only moved out of the area once the wells ran dry, utterly indifferent to how many customs, languages and people are squelched in the process. 

Crude plays like the documentary companion piece to Henri-Georges Clouzot's film 1953 Wages of Fear (though probably shares more in common with William Friedkin's 1977 re-make Sorcerer). The contrast of industrial greed clashing against the unceasing beauty of the natural world had me waiting in odd earnestness to see a washed out bridge or quicksand wipe out the interlopers. We want to cheer for nature to defend itself. Berlinger shows us the sad and gruesome reality is far more determined by wealth and power. 

RIYL: Carmen Meets Borat, Oblivion, Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi, Our Brand is Crisis, End of Suburbia, Terror's Advocate.

Crude is playing in select cities. In Portland at Hollywood Theater and Cinema 21. Available on dvd February 23, 2010.

 

See also: 

• "60 Minutes" segment on the Ecuadorian class action lawsuit.
• Joe Berlinger interviewed on KUCI's FilmSchool. [mp3 direct link]

CORRECTION: Sorry all, I didn't realize by linking to KUCI's podcast it would show up in our iTunes feed. We're not affiliated with the FilmSchool podcast, though we find it very fun and informative.

Review: End of the Line

Produced by ecological advocacy group Ocean Now, End of the Line examines the environmental and economic crises created by the industrialization of fishing. Specifically, how international regulations have been corrupted, skirted and flat out ignored. The near extinction of bluefin tuna has only made it chicer among the London sushi set. The financial impact on communities that thrived on small, locally-controlled fishing is severe, as technological developments now require fewer workers to capture a higher quantity of sealife. Ultimately, the environmental impact of disrupting underwater ecosystems is high and dire.  

Having made the benignly non-credible Unknown White Male in 2005, Rupert Murray is a good choice for a work-for-hire film. Based on Charles Clover's book by the same title, the film moves briskly and blessedly relies very little on graphic images of animals being gutted to make its points. 

Since the film begins with a stated objective, one can't help but receive the statistics and panicked tone with some suspicion. But the flip side to documentaries financed through advocacy groups is that in 9 out of 10 cases they have much better funding than investigative pieces would. And because every famous person needs a cause, these films easily attract celebrity involvement in voice-overs and promotion, often making them more appealing to a broader audience. Let's all note the critical, commercial and awards circuit success of this year's dolphin-killer expose The Cove. In End of the Line, Ted Danson takes up the cause.

Those fundraising dollars show up beautifully on screen here. The film boasts some of the most breathtaking underwater cinematography since the BBC series "Blue Planet". Murray also effectively uses animated sequences to convey the enormous scale of fishing vessels raking the ocean floor. 

End of the Line gracefully sidesteps one of the most common pratfalls ecology- and animal rights-focused documentaries fall into by aligning itself early on with the people working on the lowest rungs of the fishing industry. It opens by showing the devastating effect industrialization had on the cod fishing industry in Newfoundland in the mid-1980s.

Matthew Galkin's I Am An Animal: the Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA, being a recent study in what not to do in these circumstances. It never ceases to baffle how organizations with a clear, well-defined social agenda cannot be bothered to build affinity groups with that little known conglomerate known as humanity. It not only undercuts their recruiting efforts, it calls into question the film-maker's and organization's most basic intellectual function to try to cast workers earning minimum wage in horrifically dangerous work as bloodthirsty butchers getting wealthy from animal abuse.

The film's populist sensibilities ultimately make it quite pleasing. Instead of focusing on what everyone is doing incorrectly, it (politely) skewers hyper-consuming yuppies by showing the devastating effects of an endless quest for eccentricity and Omega-3 fats. As a result, those of us who are ordinary (meaning, we don't dine at Nobu on a regular occasion) feel quite superior. How about them apples?

RIYL: Collapse, FLOW: For Love of Water, Sharkwater, An Inconvenient Truth.

End of the Line is playing in select cities around the US. In Portland at the Living Room Theaters.

Review: The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi

On its face, The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi is a story about the death of 24 year old Afghani Ajmal Naqshbandi. A "fixer" by trade, Naqshbandi made his living translating, driving and navigating cultural considerations for foreign journalists as they tried to obtain interviews with Taliban officials, mullahs and local residents. In early 2007, Naqshbandi and a team of Italian journalists were double-crossed by Mullah Dadullah, who kidnapped and held them for weeks while demanding the release of Dadullah's brother and several other imprisoned Taliban officers. Unfortunately, the Afghanistan government's priorities were so focused on avoiding an international incident that when the Italians were released no one noticed Naqshbandi wasn't among the liberated. His family went on television, pleading to the better nature of their fellow Muslims to let their son go, but negotiations broke down and Naqshbandi was beheaded. The video of his execution sprang up almost immediately on the internet. 

Christian Parenti, a reporter for The Nation, spent months with Naqshbandi prior to his death. Over the course of their work together he grew close to the Naqshbandi family, who are understandably overwrought by his brutal death--yet composed enough to stand up to their president and demand justice. Director Ian Olds (Occupation: Dreamland) follows Parenti as he attempts to maneuver the bureaucracy of justice in a country that is at best slowly descending into chaos and at worst a criminal enterprise loosely being held together with good PR and rampant corruption. The scenes where Parenti attempts to file criminal reports with local police and court officials are practically lifted from a Christopher Guest film. At one point Parenti asks to sit in on a murder trial and the Afghan courts hire actors to play all of the roles of a would-be prosecution. 

As with Werner Herzog's 2005 Grizzly Man, we get to know Naqshbandi via the wealth of footage shot months prior to this death. Since both Ajmal Naqshbandi and Grizzly's Timothy Treadwell worked in highly documented and dangerous fields, pontifications of the many possible circumstances of their potential demises are readily available. Unlike Treadwell, whose arrogance, psychological dysfunction and lack of concern for the safety of the people around him frequently had audiences cheering for the bears, Naqshbandi comes across as thoughtful, sweet and sadly precocious in the way young people are when they grow up in war-torn countries. 

Similar to Pamela Yates' The Reckoning, The Fixer uses its primary subject as a launching pad to pose other, bigger questions. How can people be expected to form a national identity when there is no expectation of justice? Without some sense of nationalism, are these countries doomed to be a playland for violent militias and religious fundamentalism, forever locking the majority of the population into endless poverty and constant fear? It's difficult to watch the story of the charismatic and thoughtful Naqshbandi, who just weeks before his brutal death still expressed belief in hope and change for his country. But while the ethereal concepts of hope and change transformed America's political landscape in 2008, Ajmal Naqshbandi's life was cruelly extinguished, it's difficult to see a much different fate for his homeland.


The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi screened at Hot Docs 2009, airs on HBO this Monday August 17th and will be available on dvd in November 2009.

Review: Scott Walker 30 Century Man

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man provides intimate insight into the world that surrounds a charismatic but elusive artist. Even to people who don't quite understand the appeal of Walker's music, it's quite fascinating that he can compel people to follow him despite having an overall vision that is never abundantly clear -- sometimes even in the final product.

Noel Scott Engel began his storied musical career as a crooner in the boy band Walker Brothers.

Engel’s broody, melancholic vocals mixed well with the baroque, orchestral pop stylings of the day and quickly made him a massive teen heartthrob. (Even now the Walker Brothers music plays like the Jonas Brothers mixed with pre-Jesus Johnny Cash.) In these heady days, the band headlined bills that also featured the likes of nobodies like Jimi Hendrix, Cat Stevens and even Engelbert Humperdinck. After the bandmates parted ways, Scott Walker retained the stage name and went on to make a series of challenging, psychedelic opuses (titled Scott 1, Scott 2, Scott 3 and so forth). Each was heralded as a masterpiece by a rapidly dwindling audience.

Read the rest of my review at Greencine.