Steady Diet of Film

Review: Mugabe and the White African

Government property seizure is a tough cinematic sell. If the rules of society have broken down to the point where thugs, corrupt political officials and/or armed militias are forcibly removing people from their homes there are usually even more viscerally terrifying crimes happening in the foreground that are likely to capture public attention. But when the peace treaties have been signed, the news cameras have left and the garbage is getting picked up each week there are still deep wounds that can leave generations of disenfranchised and embittered people whose ancestors have been stripped of their homes, livelihoods and cultural legacies.

Mugabe and the White African centers on Mike Campbell, an Australian-born naturalized citizen of Zimbabwe (and the filmmaker's father-in-law) who has been a farmer in his adopted country since the late 1960s. But for the better part of a decade, Campbell has been embroiled in a legal fight against dictator Robert Mugabe's land reform policies that seized redistributed property from white residents who purchased the land while the last dictator was in power and give it to poor black residents who were long-discriminated against by white politicians.

 

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.com

Review: Restrepo

Restrepo

Within America’s conversation about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan much criticism has been lobbed at journalists who reported from warzones while being embedded with the troops. Critics say a reporter’s chief concern should be objectivity which would (understandably) be comprised when sharing life and death situations on a daily basis. Proponents say it provides an invaluable view of war from the ground-eye perspective of the troops. I tend to fall in the latter category, and feel it’s a far more damning statement about the predicament of journalism that any one reporters’ work is expected (by editors or readers) to be all things to all people.

Restrepo, the collaborative effort between author Sebastian Junger (who also penned the bestseller "The Perfect Storm") and photographer Tim Hetherington, depicts five months (over the course of a year) spent at an outpost in the Korengal Valley, the most violent front in the Afghanistan war. The film -- which opened the Sundance film festival earlier this year and picked up the Grand Jury Prize --builds its story with on-the-ground footage as the soldiers inch along the valley, picking off Taliban members and trying to convince locals not to accept the $5/day payment to fight the United States on the Taliban’s behalf.

Restrepo’s press materials doggedly identify the film as both apolitical and being absolute reality. It presents the horrors and the boredoms of war, but the nature of filmmaking does not allow for straight across “truth”. What we see in Restrepo is more along the lines of what Werner Herzog has referred to as “the ecstatic truth” of these soldiers’ experiences. The film contains no interviews with diplomats or generals and what little context the filmmakers provide is presented via interviews with the surviving soldiers filmed months after the fact.

 

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.

Review: Zombie Girl

Zombie Girl

Emily Hagins had been a cinephile since age 7 and at the age of 12 was determined to make the leap to feature-length director with Pathogen, an original zombie film she penned herself. Growing up in Austin, TX, a hotbed for DIY film-making, she has aww-inspiring parents who, with some mild amusement and exhaustive determination to help her succeed, support her creative endeavors.

As with most film-making ventures, the real antagonist in Emily's story, told in the documentary Zombie Girl, is life itself. The bevy of adult mentors who have advised and tutored her along the way are quick to point out not that she presents any great level of innate talent for film-making but that her determination and enthusiasm (and preternatural gift to network) is hard not to cheer for. But emphasizing the need for organization and preparation and the danger of getting caught up in frustrations is a difficult message to convey to film-makers twice Emily's age. As the obstacles begin to pile up (stars being grounded, falling behind on homework and ceaseless technical problems), we see that the greatest barrier to filmmaking may be finding the wherewithall to finish a project at all.

 

Read the rest of my review at Greencine.

Review: A Mother's Courage: Talking Back To Autism

A Mother's Courage: Talking Back To Autism

It's difficult to avoid comparisons between A Mother's Courage (originally titled The Sunshine Boy) with The Horse Boy (originally titled Over the Hills and Far Away) another recent autobiographical documentary on the stress put on families dealing with Autism. With Horse Boy, Rupert Isaacson documented his family's trip from their cozy Texas suburb to the far-flung provinces of Mongolia to seek shamanic treatments from reindeer herders. Fridrik Thor Fridriksson's Courage centers on Margret Dagmar Ericsdottirs, an Icelandic women from a similarly privileged family who travels to the States to visit different schools and individual specialists in the field of Autism. Their 8 year old son Kaley has gone through many experimental treatments with little results and has now aged past the point of most effective interventions.

Autism is a little understood neurological disorder that heightens some senses to the point of being unable to cope with outside stimuli. Kids on the more progressed end of the spectrum can appear to be blind, deaf or unable to speak even though there is no physical abnormality. The affected often develop repetitive behaviors to self-stimulate in a controlled, soothing way. Even those on the less-impacted end of the spectrum have extreme difficulty empathizing or interacting with their parents and peers.

While sympathetic to these families' struggle, Fridriksson seems particularly focused on the excesses of American families' lifestyles (an inevitable parallel in a culture with enough wealthy and self-determination to be at the forefront of Autism treatments). When spending time with various Americans the camera carefully monitors indulgent snack food, the paper plates they use, the locks on the fridge and pantry with special reverie given to the Costco shopping experience.

 

Read the rest of my review at Greencine.

Review: The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

Rating (out of 5): ****

A fascinating theme emerges early on in Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith's Oscar-nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers: that the same circular thinking and one-upsmanship games inevitably will overtake hyper-insulated circles once their belief system come under fire. Whether they be grassroots activist groups, major media companies, the Department of Defense or the White House -- the wheels come off with striking similarity and lead to fantastic collapses.

Daniel Ellsberg began as a researcher in the State department for the Johnson administration on the day of Gulf of Tonkin incident. A true Cold War believer, his department was tasked with compiling evidence of violence against Americans in the region that would enable White House policy advisers to construct an explanation for why the war on Communism was about to be expanded. But after years of amping up reports of petty criminal acts and masking false alarms with his credibility, Ellsberg enlisted in the Marines to gain a perspective on Vietnam he felt he wasn't getting it through high-level security intelligence briefings. He was shocked to learn that military strategists had invented investigative ground campaigns out of whole cloth and the sum of the war consisted of dropping millions of pounds of bombs on an underdeveloped nation. Upon his return he came to realize that the combination of Congress' deference to the Executive branch and battling egos within by then-President Nixon's team meant the war could conceivably go on until the United States ran out of bombs or the American people chose to stop it.

Read the rest of my review at Greencine.

Review: Defamation

Rating (out of 5): **

It's difficult to take Yoav Shamir's Defamation in the manner it's intended. Shamir, an Israeli jew, attempts to piece together a light-hearted understanding of the virulent antisemitism his nation's culture, education and news reportage has inculcated their citizenry to believe is running rampant throughout the rest of the world. What he discovers is that many powerful people are applying the "anti-Semitic" label to things that are simply minor annoyances inevitable in heterogeneous societies or outright misguided paranoia. But even as he frames many of these ideas as being over-reaching, or worse yet, being purposely amped up by people who have a vested interest in keeping Jewish people rapt with terror, he sidesteps any discussion of what impact these actions might be having on the international community or Israel's long-term well-being.

As far as documentaries about lofty subject matter starring their directors go, Shamir is an appealing and thoughtful host. But the explosive nature of his premise is weighted down by his own unexplored uncertainty and the occasionally mean-spirited edit jobs of playing people's clumsy passion for cheap laughs. It's not that comedy can't (or hasn't) been used to demystify or take the temperature down on divisive issues, but real storytelling requires more than just charisma and access.

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.

Review: Hunger

British artist Steve McQueen's directorial debut Hunger focuses on one of the darkest periods in Britain's recent history. When Irish republic activists were arrested en masse and staged a brutal protest campaign to make their imprisonment as costly, exhausting and embarrassing for the British government as humanly possible. The prisoners banged on walls, screamed all day, refused to bathe or use toilets and eventually went on hunger strikes that created a martyr out of a then 27 year old Bobby Sands (played by Inglourious Basterds' Michael Fassbender).

McQueen's background as a performance and video artist is expertly translated to screen -- cocooning a series of small, contrasting political screeds within images and juxtapositions that cannot be easily erased from the viewer's mind. Hunger contains many of the trappings of the historical biopic: the young police officer who considers himself apolitical, locking himself in bathroom stall and sobbing; a young protester recounting a story of getting into trouble as a kid that provided the foundation of his political ideology; Margaret Thatcher's defiant pronouncements filling the air anytime someone turns on a radio; an older, Protestant dead-ender now a prison doctor, whose cruel acts provide contrast to the young staffers all growing weary with concern and personal doubts as the hunger strikes begin to claim lives; and, much to my personal delight, the use of Buddhist imagery to underscore death.

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.com

Review: Lioness

Lioness

Rating (out of 5): ***

The first half of Lioness, co-directors' Meg McLagan's and Daria Sommers' debut, focuses on the arcane circumstances that brought the first unit of female combat fighters (dubbed "Team Lioness") together. Since the Iraq invasion has never been officially declared a war, there are technically no combat missions being fought there. Ergo, female soldiers can be placed on the frontlines of any engagement despite it presently being illegal for them to serve in combat situations. The Marines' missions focus on following up on gathered intelligence routing out insurgents and terrorist cells, which are typically run out of private residences. Because male American soldiers frisking Muslim women in burkas could conceivably lead to a jihad that would consume the entire Arabian desert, female soldiers (none of whom speak Farsi) were dispatched to placate the locals.

But because the Lioness team members all came from the Army and were never trained in the Marines' weaponry, strategy or vernacular there were many occasions when the women were abandoned during shootouts or were nearly left behind in villages without an operational vehicle or map. Watching this documentary one understands why the the Bush administration's 'women in the military' meme was Jessica Lynch and not Team Lioness. Months after returning from their tours, the women still express deep resentment at the unnecessary dangers they faced due to what amounted to a poorly organized propaganda effort.

Read the rest of my review at Greencine.

Review: Outrage

Outrage

Rating (out of 5): ****

To each generation of gay rights activists there is a galvanizing moment where the status quo becomes intolerable. In the 80s it was the Reagan administration's denial of AIDS while half a million Americans died; in the 90s it was the passage of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," banning gays from serving in the military. In the Aughts it was the totality of the 2004 Republican strategy to win the presidency and house seats by funding anti-gay measures across the states' to encourage religious fundamentalists to vote.

The documentar Outrage presents BlogActive creator Michael Rogers as the leader of a new opposition movement. Rogers employs the values of old-fashioned yellow journalism with the tenacity and immediacy of blogging to collect data and out political figures who by night have same sex partners but spend their daylight hours chipping away at the civil liberties and safety of out homosexuals. Outrage also demonstrates the baffling inability of mainstream media to cover these issues at all -- even when it involves inappropriate expenditures of funds to take a same sex staffers on exotic locations or when it is a clear-cut case of hypocrisy. (Though the film leaves aside any issue of how one defines lesser hypocrisies when the nature of federal legislation is so convoluted, a single vote impacts a myriad of different issues.)

Read the rest of my review at Greencine.

Review: Amreeka

"Coming to America" films in the past have typically been packaged as either broad comedy (such as uh, Coming to America) or relentlessly bleak dramas (In America) and tend to gravitate towards the urban centers of the United States. Amreeka (marking the debut of L-Word writer-director Cherien Dabis) posits a recently divorced, non-religious Palestinian woman and her son embarking on a journey to the far more recognizable landscape of contemporary American life: the suburbs.

After Muna and her teenage son Fadi are granted visas through a lottery program, they spend precious little decision-making time to determine that their once comfortable life under occupation is becoming so exceedingly dangerous and lacking in opportunity that taking a chance on a new beginning is their only viable option. They move in with her sister in the outer boroughs of Chicago where Muna looks for work as an accountant and Fadi starts at a new high school. Unfortunately, her accent and his timid nature are immediately deemed unacceptable in each of those worlds, leaving her working at a White Castle restaurant and him getting beat up on a regular basis.

Set in the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Amreeka feels like a script that started out as a comedy and over the inevitable revision process became exceedingly focused on underlining each character's difficulty. There are great moments of levity during Muna's time at White Castle hanging out with her high school drop out co-workers. And a relationship forged between Muna and a bank manager that didn't hire her are affectionate, while underscoring that even 'good white people' are powerless in a structure of institionalized racism.

Read the rest of my review at Greencine.