Steady Diet of Film

#009: The Cove w/ Phoebe Owens

This week I discuss Louie Psihoyos's documentary The Cove with film-maker/documentary producer Phoebe Owens. After I come down from my intense distaste for advocacy films, Phoebe and I discuss the secret life of dolphins as violent offenders of the ocean, how effective film can be as political speech, the Oregon connection to Taiji dolphin harvesting and why documentary film needs to be a 'big tent' party. Enjoy!

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#008: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince w/ Harry Potter fans

This week I attended a massive midnight screening of the sixth installment of the Harry Potter franchise. Our huddled group ran the gamut from uber-fans (Nancy and Jessica), polite enthusiasts (Bonnie and Christina) and total newbs (myself). 

We discuss the differences between the book and film, similarities between Harry Potter and Sex and the City as well as the hopes and dreams people pin to the beloved Harry Potter mythology. 

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#007 The Secret w/ Joel Grus

This week atheist author Joel Grus ("Your Religion is False") and I discuss the self-help film The Secret. 

For the record, this episode represents the most times I've had to edit out my insane monkey laugh. Enjoy!

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Review: Cooking History

It's rare I get to say this, but there's something to be admired in the brazenly honest marketing materials for Péter Kerekes's documentary Cooking History. With the tagline "6 wars, 10 recipes, 60 million dead," the film explores the world of military chefs during wartime. It is both a brilliantly executed micro-history, providing insight into universal truths about war and combat via a small subset of people, as well as one of the funniest films of the year.

Cooking History traces the history of twentieth century European warfare though the stories of food service people. Those we meet run the gamut from a field cook who worked in the two foot wide kitchen of a nuclear submarine to an elderly Russian woman who was conscripted into the war effort at a young age to a personal chef of Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito. Each new cook is introduced with 'helpful' recipes of hearty, comfort food made in enormous proportions. ("Baked Ziti: 3 quarts oil, 175 pounds ground beef, 150 pounds dried penne pasta, 32 pounds Mozzarella cheese, a pinch of salt. Serves one thousand.") 

Excluding the scenes depicting graphic animal slaughter, this film provides an apolitical, strangely pleasant framework for understanding the mix of honor, obligation and reservation most of the subjects feel about their wartime experiences. For example, we encounter a Jewish breadmaker who survived the concentration camps then moved to Argentina, intent on poisoning former SS officers who escaped Nuremberg justice. While he never states his track record (possibly for legal reasons),  there are reports that indicate many former SS officers have been executed by avenging Jewish death squads. 

Recounted stories are intercut with footage of a wood burning oven being airlifted by helicopter to a military training camp located in a distant, unnamed outpost. The journey of this mass of industrialized steel's heroic, yet unnatural flight through pastoral countryside, knowing it will create a bounty of food for people desperately in need of reassurance and good morale (especially when viewed in a festival setting where chances to eat are few and far between) takes on a nearly mythic proportion.

As an interviewer, Kerekes has an odd hiccup. He occasionally slides into Barbara Walters-mode, asking a rhetorical question clearly designed to elicit an emotional outburst. When the Russian woman is asked "Why do you honor the dead so elaborately?" Kerekes does not manipulate the moment with editing to look like something meaningful happens. He leaves us with her brief, weary glance, filming her as she returns to laying meat blintzes on the snow-covered graves of dead soldiers, politely ignoring the question. These moments haunt, precisely because the rest of the film is so ruthlessly committed to finding the dark bits of humor in human perseverance. At first glance, it seems that the two styles are sullying each other. But the awkward situation is repeated twice, clearly a comment about the ultimately mundane ways in which we are able to sympathize with human tragedy.

Many of the people interviewed have had decades to process their feelings about these experiences and many have long since returned to civilian life. Along with the gregarious nature of professional chefs (a world I only occasionally glimpse through the books, interviews and television appearances of Anthony Bourdain), Cooking History maintains enough detachment and political distance to be hilarious, riveting and edifying. 

See also:

• See the trailer for Cooking History.
• Kerekes interviewed on NPR's Talk of the Nation which includes call-ins from American military cooks.
• Kerekes interviewed by GenevaLunch 

Review: Carmen Meets Borat

Before her soldout screening at Hot Docs 2009, Mercedes Stalenhoef explained that she got the idea to make Carmen Meets Borat while traveling through Spain. She met her soon-to-be-subject Carmen, a Romanian girl who dreams of a more eventful life than working in her father's tavern in a small village. The townsfolk, recently duped by the producers of the film Borat, had been told they were going to be in a documentary. They were asked (and did) sign legally binding contracts in English (which none of them speak) only to be depicted as Kazakhistani abortionists and thieves living in comical poverty in a film that grossed hundreds of millions of dollars.

Stalenhoef introduced the film stating "anyone who saw the film and speaks Romanian would know this was not Kazahstan." Which even with a Canadian audience, this seemed like a tall order. Despite her good intentions and genuine affection for Carmen, it's a bit leery that her film was financed by European broadcasters so infatuated with Sasha Baron Cohen that they will fund projects with the most tenuous connections to him. It's troublesome that in attempting to humanize the Romanian villagers, Stalenhoef's footage isn't all that different from choices director Larry Charles made with Borat. We see children getting drunk on plum brandy and the adults are mostly portrayed as belligerent, paranoid and violent alcoholics.

It could have served the story well to stick with Carmen, showing what life is like for a girl all too much aware of the more exciting world outside her life in a place so easily mocked. Unfortunately, Stalenhoef instead focuses on the legal drama when the villagers decide they are entitled to damages from Team Borat. Now, my legal understanding comes strictly from re-runs of "Law and Order", this nevertheless seems hopeless from the get-go. Even the attorneys (apparently well known for winning restitution payment for Holocaust survivors) come across a bit dubiously. Forthright about their interest in their 30% cut of a potentially huge payoff (which is fair enough), they are never given a chance to to elaborate on any personal identification they might have with the cause. Viewers can only assume they do have some, since they doing quite a bit of work for free. Also absent is any sense of how or why they find it likely to win a defamation suit in a British court against a trans-national film studio.

It's easy to lose sight in the courtroom antics and Carmen's sympathetic struggle that this community has a legitimate grievance. And that it's never acknowledged, apologized for or apparently even superficially explored in a documentary that supposedly focuses on their story. It must be pretty demoralizing when your nation's only film presence on the international cultural stage is 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (an austere drama about a young woman trying to obtain an abortion under Cecesceau's dictatorship) and 13:08 East of Bucharest (a searingly funny black comedy about situational groupthink leading to self-aggrandizement and the erosion of collective memory). Carmen Meets Borat only serves to further obfuscate the legitimate cause of a people already facing an uphill battle.

#006: RiP: A Remix Manifesto w/ Jason Gross

 
This week I discuss Brett Gaylor's documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto with music journalist Jason Gross*. 

Jason gives us a context to understand how artists throughout time have used remixing to the great benefit of culture and why musicians like Negativland and Girl Talk resemble modern day Al Capone and John Dillinger figures in our time of draconian copyright laws. 

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*As you can hear we had some continuing technical difficulties this week. I've been trying to remedy the situation by adjusting settings in our set up but it appears now it will only be resolved by scrapping our current system, publicly disparaging the Olympus TP7 (terrible!) microphone and building anew. We thank you for your patience.