Steady Diet of Film

Review: Robocop (1987)

SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

In a dystopic, but recognizable future Detroit, powerful corporations are primed to “bring back Detroit” with an unexplained plan that will yield 2 million jobs. The only thing standing in the way is that the city is overrun by violence and chaos -- some of it by organized mobsters (led convincingly by two Nineties tv Bad Dads: Twin Peaks’s Ray Wise and That 70s Show’s Kurtwood Smith) as well as legions of rogue junkies, robbers, rapists and murderers.  The city (a laughably non-existent presence, directives are given straight from military contractors) hires Omni Consumer Products, an ultra-vulture capitalist group who have a track record of profitizing organ donation, space travel and marine life. OCP is now diversifying their portfolio with robot local law enforcement technology.

 

When Alex Murphy, an exemplary police officer, is brutally murdered by street thugs he is posthumously volunteered for a bold new experiment -- a cyborg police officer! With the training and dedication of a top-shelf human police officer but none of the pesky union requirements like sleep, dignity or a pension plan.

 

Rife with Vietnam allegory (executives in a penthouse boardroom congratulate themselves on “controlling the civilian population” for the greater good), Philip K. Dick themes (this android does indeed dream, but not of electric sheep) and a scathing critique of capitalist excess (the latest luxury car from Detroit is the 6000 SUX) -- Verhoeven treats Robocop with straight-simplicity, giving no winks to its absurdist plot elements.

 

 

Made in 1987, RoboCop’s reputation of hyperviolence hasn’t softened with age. People aren’t just shot, they’re ripped in half by machine gun fire. A wouldbe assassin isn’t just apprehended, he’s dumped in a vat of industrial toxic waste (in an abandoned factory, natch) then exploded. In the closing scene, our hero is impaled, has a ton of bricks dropped on his head and is then resurrected (walking on water, no less) to give absolution to the sinners. It’s this grandiose approach that has made Paul Verhoeven’s name a punchline in some erudite circles, but there’s a gruesome integrity to his work. It should be hard to watch someone be murdered. And it should also be imbued with more value than a plot point.

 

There’s an old-fashioned sensibility to the ‘white hats vs black hats’ depiction of a police force that is egalitarian, incorruptible and ever-valiant in their efforts to pull back their city from disaster. While fighting increasingly brutal violence on the streets, they’re also being stripped of their benefits and eventually total job security. When their jobs are on the cusp of becoming fully mechanized, there is talk of striking -- which is treated with genuine introspection about the role public servants play in civilians’ lives.  In the current climate of hero-protagonists soaking in self-loathing, obsessed with and ultimately corrupted by the unquestionable deceit within traditional institutions, it’s (oddly) sweet and pleasant to see an action film that offers a worldview beyond “FML”.

Sundance 2011: !WAR Women Art Revolution / We Were Here

!WAR Women Art Revolution
Lynn Hershman-Leeson / United States

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s follows up her 2007 hybrid-documentary/narrative Strange Culture with a hybrid-documentary/autobiography. !WAR Women Art Revolution marries her experiences as an artist at the cutting edge of the second wave women’s movement with an intensive history lesson about the use of art as a tool for social change.

Using interviews with artists recorded in her home over the course of 40+ years, Hershman weaves archival footage of performances, protests and consciousness-raising groups to celebrate and draw lessons from the movement. While paying direct tribute to their work, she articulates the angst they experienced at the hands of condescending art teachers and the indifferent (when not outright hostile) gatekeepers of the mainstream art scene. At the time, the leading trend for contemporary art was hyper-minimal painting and not the loud, brash work that occassionally involved body fluids that the women were doing.

Hershman also highlights the difficulty in forming collectives on the basis of identity politics because once the common enemy is lost the group can lose its focus. But for the time being, many of the women thrived existing with both outsider status and a community to come back to. They created new forums and channels for artists to present to, publicize and educate the public and Hershman has access to an exhaustive collection of photographs, video footage and handmade zines to re-create the heady experience.

!WAR follows a similar trajectory as many band documentaries -- the excitement of being weirdos having fun and doing something new, the delight in shocking the establishment and the incremental successes that were managed with varying degrees of certainty. Eventually in-fighting led to resentments, splintering and even the possible murder of one artist. In a music documentary this would serve as the low-point of the story and anything that came after would need to be framed as a comeback. But art critic B. Ruby Rich is quick to point out that the culture only benefits from a chaotic marketplace of ideas and that it’s the constant dialogue about feminist art that continues to make it one of the most vital arenas of expression.

Hershman’s own professional life as a performance, visual and film artist is framed as a similar three-act success story. She was rasied a nice Jewish girl in the suburbs, radicalized by her experiences at Berkeley in the 1960s and moved to New York. For over 20 years she received very little recognition from the art world until when in the late 90s she found a gallery owner who believed in her and sold her entire collection for a massive (undisclosed) sum of money.

Similarly !WAR treats younger artists like Miranda July (whose second feature film also screens at Sundance this year) and MacArthur Genius Janine Antoni as existing on a continuum rather than the people for who ‘the torch was passed down’. The music for the film is entirely made up of post-1990’s indie rock mainstays like Le Tigre and The Gossip with an original score by an early iteration of the Carrie Brownstein/Mary Timony supergroup Wild Flag -- creating a historical document that continues to live and breathe.

At the heart of !WAR is the desire to see feminist artists included in the broader institutions (many of the artists included are now professors and historians at major universities). The film ends with the bold message that there are no outtakes, only archives -- available in full as part of the Stanford Digital Collection.

 

We Were Here: Voices from the AIDS Years in San Francisco
David Weissman and Bill Weber / United States

There are films that take on a mythic levels of importance in their community, the gravity of their reception often owes more to timing and necessity than merit. Some stories reflect so much pain, regret or shame that any mention of the subject in a public way immediately transforms the casual film-going experience into a cathartic purge that in all likelihood has little to do even with filmmakers' intentions. These works still serve a purpose: they give voice to those under-represented in mainstream culture, they open people up to human experiences they may not have even known existed and they spread that much ballyhooed disinfectant -- sunlight -- into places that desperately need it. But they don't typically reflect a great deal of craft and rarely hold up to repeat viewings (anyone revisit Torch Song Trilogy recently? Yeesh.) They are films that serve an important function, but are largely disposable. But co-directors David Weissman and Bill Weber (The Cockettes) have made a thoughtful, firsthand account of what it was like to be at ground zero during a widely misunderstood epidemic and the beautiful, ugly and ultimately mundane human impulses that natural disasters lay bare.

We Were Here paints life San Francisco in the late 1970s as what probably wasn't, but will still be thought of as a utopic paradise. Far from the violent, hard-edged legacy of the Stonewall riots in New York City, San Francisco, bathed in the golden California sun, with all precepts of the 1950s WASP-y perfection already demolished by the Haight-Ashbury hippies and diverse immigrant populace, was the Promise Land to queer kids escaping hateful or hate-inducingly dull Midwestern burgs looking for a taste of the hedonistic, good life.

The story relies solely on five interview subjects strategically placed to cover much of the breadth of the crisis: a hospice nurse, an artist who dated a clinical biologist, a budding politician, a flower shop owner based in the Castro and a young journalist.

There are some harrowing images drawn by the film, a stubborn lover arguing about whether to be taken to the emergency room over a low temperature then dying during the short car ride to the hospital, a room full of doctors at a national conference to discuss AIDS drug trials breaking down sobbing over how badly they were failing their patients and the dread every person faced having to choose between which sick friends to attend to and which to shut out as a matter of self-preservation.

The film deftly avoids too much blame-shifting or rearview mirror grandstanding in lieu of underscoring the personal experiences in total chaos and uncertainty. At the apex of anxiety President Ronald Reagan appears. The oft invoked Republican icon of kinder, gentler (whiter, straighter, wealthier) days -- is typically portrayed in documentaries about this time as having been at best a clueless dolt and at worse a cruel dilletante who laughed off a genocide as it was happening on American soil. Here he's given a pass for being insulated by closeted gay staff members before focus is quickly shifted back to a young, overwhelmed community organizer who is trying to deal with the sudden upsurge of people starving to death in their apartments because they became too sick too quickly to feed themselves.

Weissman and Weber understand that cruelty and destruction hardens some, vulcanizes others but leaves most simply baffled. There's nothing extraordinary about the people who survived the early years of AIDS. And a lucky combination of chance, privilege and clear-headed thinking in times of pandemonium does not make for a happy ending to any cognizant human being. Still, it's a cliche for a reason, out of the wreckage and despair came real medical breakthroughs, a new respect between gay men and lesbian women and a generation of queers who had too much to be proud of (and too much to lose) to consider a life in the closet.

Sundance 2011: A Family Portrait in Black and White/The Green Wave

A Family Portait in Black and White
Julia Ivanova / Ukraine
Between her (now grown) biological offspring and the dozens of kids she’s taken in from the foster care system, Olga Nenya is now the mother to 27 children. Most of the kids are biracial, their parents were African immigrants who have disappeared, been deported or lost their custody rights within the cruel bureacracies of a post-Soviet burg. Many of them were put into the system at an old enough age to dimly recall their biological parents and for the most part seem to have adjusted to their new family structure.

The film opens depicting the multi-culti clan like a bucolic Bennetton ad -- children playing with goats, harvesting fresh vegetables and always smiling all the while being effusive and adorable. A town magistrate even presents an award to the group for Olga’s Promethean efforts towards improving the lives of disadvantaged children.

But quickly something more sinister is revealed. Olga's need for control and her personal racial biases, filtered through lingering affections for the old Soviet culture of discipline and conformity -- is slamming hard against some of the adolescents’ ideas and expectations for their own future. Instead of seeing her rundown home (purchased with money from a British charity which years later still has no hot water or indoor plumbing) as a launching point, she views her it as a means for rebuilding a new society. In Olga’s vision they live simply, celebrating cooperative work and diversity. But from the children’s more modern take on things, this life represents constant menial labor and arbitrary governance which renders many of them fundamentally joyless and unable to imagine an autonomous life outside of Olga’s strict control.

Using the lack of oversight in the foster care system and the virulent racism of smalltown Ukraine as a shield from criticism, Olga blocks potential adoptions for three of the children, constantly belittles anyone who exerts a sense of independence, openly chooses favorites and even institutionalizes one boy who requires too much discipline, telling him he’s too slow a reader to live at home.

Filmed over the course of three years, first-time filmmaker Julia Ivanova deftly creates and subverts expectations for the viewer while drawing out complicated emotional processes from Olga’s children as they sit at the crossroad between a (truncated) childhood and limited adulthood.



The Green Wave
Ali Samadi Ahadi / Iran

In Iran’s 2009 election for prime minister reformist candidate (and former president) Mir-Hossein Mousavi squared off against the five-term incumbent Mamoud Ahmadinejad. The internationally reviled Ahmadinejad has long been criticized for political corruption and cow-towing to arch conservative religious clerics within Iran paving the way for Mousavi to run on a simple platform of “respect for different cultural groups, equal rights for women and more democracy”.

Subjects in two different Sundance selections this year, The Green Wave and An African Election cite the international wave of optimism created by the election of Barack Obama in the United States. In the days leading up to the election, people who describe themselves as apolitical or completely disenchanted with the democratic process talk about the joyful reinvigoration they felt for the future of their country. And even elderly people began to feel rays of hope break though years of well-earned cycnicism about a fair and open democratic process.

Despite a state-controlled press and heavily censored internet acccess, the enthusiasm gap began to swell as the election drew closer. In the days leading up to voting there was an unprecedented outpouring of support for Mousavi. Thousands of young people turned perfunctory public endorsement exercises into massive rallies, volunteered at polling locations and adorned themselves with the green armbands that would come to name their movement “the green wave”. This identification with the color green (which represents vitality and progress in the Iranian flag) also become an internet meme when non-Iranians tinted their Twitter avatars to show support for the heinous fallout of the election.

Immediately the election returns didn’t pass the smell test for Mousavi supporters. The official results were far off from what exit polls had indicated and in some cases didn't even accurately reflect basic population data about certain districts. Young people once again took to the streets, this time with shock, grief and rage. And as they did Foreign reporters were forcibly removed (including Iraq in Fragments director and MacArthur Genius fellow James Longley), cell phone communications were shut down and private militia groups (commonly used as auxilliary police forces)  were dispatched to beat, apprehend and eventually gun down protestors.

A recent United Nations Development Programme study reported that over 60% of Iran's population is under the age of thirty and reflective of its youth and vigor their street protests are massive, energetic and immediate. It's fitting that  depictions of their struggle would be told with a mix of old and new techniques. The Green Wave uses standard interviews with journalists, diplomats, clerics and lawyers and intercuts it with animated footage of the surreptitious blog and Twitter posts made during the protests. There is also a patchwork of cell phone video footage that had to be physically smuggled out of the country after all internet communication had been shut down.   

Most people have grown somewhat inured to massive human rights violations as a matter of being able to function in our current reality. There are more conflicts than ever and our ability to quickly transmit images, video and raw data worldwide hasn't had the antiseptic impact we'd like to believe it's capable of. Animation is so strongly associated with children's entertainment, there's a sense in watching the footage that nothing too terrible could happen and it helps the viewers resist the urge to look away.

The haphazard cell phone footage (which appears to have been often shot from neighboring apartment windows but often also from a groundview) of police beating (badges removed) beating unarmed protestors is reminiscent of the 1991 Rodney King beatings that led to violent riots in Los Angeles and has remained a touchstone of racial animosity in America ever since. Many of the heinous acts committed by the Iranian government now exist in the permamenent record of the internet, The Green Wave (and hopefully many more like it to come) weave together personal narratives that provide more understanding of both the tumult and the stakes for people living under a repressive regime.

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: Puppet

Long-time political media consultant David Soll’s documentary debut, presents a brief history of and insight into the renaissance of the puppet arts. Following a vaunted puppeteer as he brings his latest full-scale production together, Soll builds a larger narrative about the trials faced by artists whose work exists on the fringes of acceptable art.

Similar to what Amir Bar Lev’s My Kid Could Paint That did for modern art, Puppet provides an excellent primer on the history of puppetry, its key players and the pushes and pulls within their peculiar community. Puppet attempts to understand what it is about expressing themselves through intricate blocks of wood that puppeteers find so appealing.

Around the world and throughout history, puppet theater has been revered as high art (allegedly, in Indonesia puppeteers are considered prophets). But in the United States, the grind of capitalism and the insularity of professional art has banished it to the realm of children’s entertainment. As a result of never being taken seriously, struggling puppet artists can have trouble differentiating between when to stay true to their vision and when to absorb valid criticism.  

Puppet follows Dan Hurlin, a leader in the field of puppetry, over the course of two years as he produces his new show “Disfarmer”. For Hurlin the stakes are high; his last effort, “Hiroshima Maiden,” told the story of two young women who survived the bombings and were later pressured into appearing on an American talk show in exchange for corrective plastic surgery. At the live taping they were presented with the "surprise guests" -- two pilots of Enola Gay who had dropped the atomic bomb on their country. Hurlin spent years adapting the story for stage and opening ticket sales were strong. But when an extremely negative review ran in the New York Times, the production was shuttered within a week and the blow to Hurlin’s pride is one that clearly still haunts him.

Hurlin’s latest work is based on another true story about Mike Disfarmer, an eccentric portrait artist who documented rural communities in Arkansas in the 1950s. The play takes place the last week of Disfarmer’s life, as he wastes away from old age alone, reflecting upon his life and work.

The vitriolic (and utterly delightful) theater critic David Sefton makes the diagnosis that many fringe artforms are dominated by craftsmen and lack enough storytellers. He goes on to explain that if artists are too in love with the process of their chosen field, then the results are inevitably something esoteric and/or precious.

Soll clearly agrees with this description for what’s missing in Hurlin’s work; he shows us a lot of moments of Hurlin hemming and hawing over minor details while joking about how threadbare the actual content of the story is. The puppeteer desperately trys to force ill-defined ‘collaboration’ out of his puppet operators who would clearly prefer simpler, stronger direction. If Hurlin is, as one of his key funders suggests, the most vital voice in puppeteering today, he probably should be able to better express his emotional connection to the work he’s doing. But instead he cocoons himself in details. No “spoilers” here about how the show goes or how it’s received, but it probably provides a good learning experience for participants and viewers alike.

As a whole, Puppet is a thoughtful exploration about the the artistic process that also captures some of the nuances about how we relate (and react) to human experiences being conveyed in unfamiliar ways.


Puppet makes its world premiere at DOC NYC November 6th and 9th.

Review: Armadillo

Janus Metz’s directorial debut, Armadillo centers on a Danish Army platoon stationed for six months in rural Afghanistan. As an ally to the United States in Afghanistan, their missions focus on traveling around the hardened countryside and appealing to farmers to inform on Taliban members who may be hiding in the region. Their limited interaction with the local population is not heartening, as locals express fear they will be killed if they are known to be assisting the soldiers. And the constant shell campaigns and forced clearing of their poppy fields do nothing to endear the soldiers to them.

It’s intriguing to see what motivates young people from a country without a long or romanticized military history to join the forces. In a fantastic opening scene, the commanding field officer gives newly arrived soldiers their first debriefing. “You might be asking yourself, why do I belong here?” he begins, and goes on to elaborate that they must continue the work their countrymen have started and try not to get too caught up in the details. In later conversation, soldiers mention that prior to enlisting they thought (hoped) they’d be stationed in the Balkans and simply oversee a mostly peaceful situation. They’re not optimistic about intangible victories in a warzone furhter mired by a hopeless political situation.

 

There’s an interesting comparison to be made here with Sebastian Junger’s and Tim Heatherington’s film Restrepo (review to come). On the surface, they exist at opposite ends of the filmmaking spectrum. Armadillo is beautifully shot (the film was apparently a test campaign for a new model of HD cameras to see how they handled in the worst possible field conditions), cinema-verite style with no talking head interviews or voiceover. Restrepo has a much gritter look and relies on Junger’s direct conversations with soldiers on the ground and after the fact. Despite differences in technique, both films rely on a strong, three act narrative thrust and recognizable tropes from the war film canon.

Additionally, Armadillo and Restrepo were both released this year with extremely prestigious festival runs. Armadillo opened in the Critics Week section of Cannes (a rare honor for a documentary, also bestowed this year on Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job). Restrepo premiered in January at the Sundance film festival.

Both films show soldiers playfully wrestling with each another to substitute for the physical comfort of home. Each film takes care to highlight the extreme Otherness of the soldiers’ situation; dressed like camouflaged spacemen, they try to negotiate agreements with extremely poor Afghan farmers. The two films’ final act hinges on an unfortunate miscommunication that causes things to get very bloody. Restrepo builds towards a particularly gruesome and chaotic gunfight that stemmed from a double-dealing village elder. In Armadillo, a misconstrued phone call home leads to an internal investigation, making everyone in the unit suspicious of one another and revealing a great deal of rancor between the commanding field officers and generals back home.

This past year, Scandinavian documentary filmmakers have created intense work pluming their sense of national and masculine identity. But where films like Steam of Life, The Regretters and Freetime Machos drew men out about their very intimate experiences and connected them with more universal truths. Despite the Afghanistan war being an American-led enterprise with spotty international support, Metz has clearly made a film for the homeland. The bloodshed he captures is gruesome, but fairly standard practice for wartime conflict and will be of little shock to an American audience. In fact, most American reviews have focused mainly on how beautiful Armadillo is to look at. But the civilian casualties in particular have captured the Danish imagination. Armadillo has dwarfed Hollywood fare at the box office, received reams of press coverage and evoked so much public outcry that every elected official has been forced to comment.

Even The Tillman Story, which unearthed a deliberate campaign of lies and misdirection that traces all the way to Donald Rumsfeld (and also benefitted from an extremely prestigious festival push), barely made a dent in the box office or public discourse about the war. I write this on voting day of a heated mid-term election where candidates have made serious hay on issues like taxes, healthcare, deficits and the media while Afghanistan has gone wholly unmentioned. Armadillo is a thoughtful reflection on how the Afghan war has impacted the young lives of soldiers from our allied countries and could represent a tipping point in where those allies will stand as we move forward in a war that has all but left our collective conscience.


Armadillo makes its US debut at the inaugural DOC NYC film festival November 4th.