Steady Diet of Film

Review: The Shock Doctrine

Most people can agree that human motivations are largely driven by economic necessity and aspiration. So there's a fundamental gap in the way many documentary film-makers often approach history. Instead of looking at how power and influence are carefully created and manipulated, we often get constructed narratives about heroes and villains acting as though they were struck by lightening bolts and lifted up by faceless masses, culminating in the ecstatic state of now.

Michael Winterbottom's (A Mighty Heart, Code 46) and Mat Whitecross's adaptation of Naomi Klein's bestseller "The Shock Doctrine" examines the inspiration and methods of what Klein dubs 'Disaster Capitalism'. The film illustrates several moments in history when free market zealots, guided by the teachings of economist Milton Friedman, seized upon chaos to carry out extreme policy changes. These changes are (in the film-makers' eyes) completely against the interests of the people, but the people, reeling from military coups and natural disasters, were too stunned to defend themselves.

These policy changes started with removing price controls and eradicating labor standards then quickly progressed to privatizing land, utilities and eventually military combat (that last one took Friedman's ideas beyond even his own greatest expectations). Klein and Winterbottom make the case that 1. we should care about this because it's likely the land we live on is more valuable without us on it and natural disasters can happen anywhere and 2. free market solutions succeed only at widening the gap between wealthy and poor while muting the democratic process.

The test cases Winterbottom focuses on are Pinochet-era Chile, Thatcher-era Britain, Yeltsin-era Russia and Bush (43)-era United States. Katrina-ravaged New Orleans and tsunami-decimated Indonesia are used as supporting examples since the timelines for the book and the film dictated that these latter two tragedies be covered in far less depth. 

As snapshots of culturally-diverse but ideologically-identical political histories, The Shock Doctrine is a bitter treat. Stalwart in its beliefs and visceral in its execution, economic lessons are rarely this thrilling. But because it takes the side of the systemic underdogs, the film struggles to end on a hopeful note. And it's impossible to not see the footage of Russians standing in soup lines and being beaten in broad daylight by mobsters and not be scared to death for the people of Haiti. 

It's also gratifying to see a documentary about the muddled lead up to the American invasion of Iraq set in a larger historical context. The news footage of Ford administration-era Donald Rumsfeld speaking about the Soviet Union with even more florid language than he ever used for the post-9/11 "Axis of Evil" produces a sincere hope that he's using his newfound unemployment to write a book. Or at least doing some serious self-reflection. 

There were reports last summer that Klein has disavowed the film after clashing with the film-makers on how best to convey her ideas. But Klein's speaking appearances serve as the framework for the film and she personally conducted many of the interviews that appear in the final cut. And according to the official Sundance program, she will join Winterbottom and festival founder Robert Redford for a Q&A after the film's screening at the film festival this week.


The Shock Doctrine  is screening January 21-31 at the Sundance Film Festival and will also be launched simultaneously on-demand as part of the new Sundance Selects program.

Review: Freedom Riders

Direct action groups are often seen within larger social movements as being too demanding, too naive and ultimately too annoying to contribute to the larger purpose at hand. But few people ever opened a newspaper to see a photo of someone writing a letter to Congress or attending a silent auction and felt a call to action. History may be written by the letter writers, but it's made by people who didn't have the good sense to be patient and stay put.

Freedom Riders delves into the amazing constellation of events that transformed a group of twelve scrappy activists, barely on anyone's radar, to a phenomenon that over the course of six months made the world hold its breath while fundamental political, social and cultural ideologies were put to the test in the hills of Alabama and Mississippi.

Director Stanley Nelson (The Murder of Emmett Till, Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple) looks at the role international bad publicity (an outraged German news program proclaims: "In the land of Ernest Hemingway, some still struggle for basic rights!"') played in getting a reaction from President Kennedy, the different ethical issues covering the events the black members of the press faced, the collusion of the KKK with police and members of the national media, activists' strategies for communication in a time before Facebook, different reactions within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) over Martin Luther King Jr's decision not to join the Freedom Ride and the bizarre political powerplay between the Safety Commissioner and Governor of Alabama that (inadvertently) saved hundreds of lives.

But for my money, the best anecdotes in the film are those that showcase John Seigenthaler's (Attorney General's Robert Kennedy's assistant) personal awe of Diane Nash. Nash, a leader in SNCC, led the second round of Riders after the first wave had been beaten so severely they were convinced they would die if they continued. One imagines the (now very comic) scene of the entire Kennedy White House in a lather trying to negotiate with the Riders to cease their operations, expecting to be put on the phone with a hardened Teamster-type and instead getting the demure but steely Nash.

Freedom Riders is an engaging, thorough elaboration on a hugely historic event that averages about a paragraph in a typical public high school textbook. It will surely reach a considerable and appreciative audience on PBS on the 50th anniversary of the events when it airs as part of the American Experience program in 2011.

This film also provides an interesting prism through which to examine Fair Use regulations. Nelson has made six films that wound up screening on PBS, each casting a spotlight on little known or regretful moments in American history. Nelson does so with photographs and newsreel footage that is rare and astronomically expensive to license for commercial use. Because of these costs, only film-makers backed by institutions like PBS can access these artifacts and tell these stories without resorting to puppet reenactments.

Since television is considered too bureaucratic and narrow in focus to appeal to film-makers trying push the boundaries of non-fiction storytelling, there exists a chasm in the documentary world between the film-makers who view themselves as artists first and film-makers who desperately want to tell these stories now while some of the participants are still alive to share their firsthand accounts. Ultimately the real losers in this battle are viewers, whose lives could be enriched by further understanding how our world has been shaped and where it's going. History is most accurately reflected when as many voices as possible get involved in the telling of stories.

As long as I'm on a soapbox, it's also draconian United States copyright laws that keep touchstone films like the Civil Rights documentary Eyes on the Prize out of reach of any audience. I, however, gleefully pirated Eyes footage for my college film, paying tribute to Nash. 

Freedom Riders is a real life David and Goliath story that will exhilarate all audiences. However, it's in that very exhilaration that also exists a painful reminder of just how cut off we are from our own history because of greed-driven, fundamentally anti-democratic protectionist laws.

Freedom Riders is screening January 21-31 at the Sundance Film Festival.

#031 The White Ribbon w/ Greg Wick

This week I'm delighted to be joined by Greg Wick, a long-time film-making compatriot of mine, to discuss Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. Wick (who also worked on John Hillcoat's The Road last year) explains how digital video is increasingly being used to create effective period pieces. We then discuss the paucity of immersive film experiences, how this film dredged up one of my greatest phobias and what entertainment journalists have in common with repressive Protestant villagers. Enjoy!

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Review: The Red Chapel

A (self-described) unscrupulous journalist, and a Danish-Korean comedy duo (one who is mentally disabled and wheelchair-bound) spend two weeks in North Korea with the stated agenda to perform for the residents of Pyongyang in a show of respect for Kim Jong Il. But in actuality they are there to make a guerilla-style expose of the ruthless police state. Under the careful eye of their state-assigned hostess Ms. Pak and each night submitting their footage to the state's "video specialists" (who edit out any material that might impugn the Dear Leader) and Mads Brügger's documentary directorial debut The Red Chapel was born.

The Danes travel around the nation's sparsely populated capital, hobnobbing with officials by day and performing their comedy routines to crowded auditoriums of polite but understandably confused audiences at night. Part of the gag of Red Chapel (which toggles with some discomfort between agit-prop and deafeningly ironic meta-comedy ala Borat -- maybe more like Bruno) being that the duo's act could not be considered by any rational person to be funny or pre-meditated. The routines are a haphazard mash-up of fart jokes, badly recounted Hans Christian Andersen yarns and singing Beatles tunes on an acoustic guitar. Brügger trains his lens on audience reactions then dubs in his own narration of conspiratorial thoughts that must be running through the minds of the Koreans.

To say that the film tests the boundaries of documentary ethics would be a thundering understatement. The Red Chapel challenges every documentary ethic known to the film-making world. Putting Pak at the center of his narrative, Brügger describes her as a military interrogator based only her use of rudimentary English (nevermind the question, who in Korea is teaching English besides state propagandists?) He also takes her to a monument built in Kim Il Sung's honor and while she silently weeps, overdubs that she must be performing an unspoken, but constant sadness as a patriotic ruse. This is at least such a blatant substitution of the film-maker's expressions for the subject's that it says more about him than her. But the fact remains, if the North Korean government got ahold of The Red Chapel all of Brügger's subjects' lives would be endangered. And considering the astounding work that must be involved with visiting North Korea as a quasi-journalist from a Western country, the film dwells a great deal on flatulence, in-fighting and mocking Ms. Pak. An extended joke about gifting Jong Il's staff with a pizza stone that he probably won't share ('Millions of people are starving to death! LOLz!') feels brutally infantile.

But even ill-conceived documentaries, made up of censored footage, helmed by someone who admits to having no moral qualms about misrepresenting himself to his subjects -- is still exposing a broader audience to the issue at hand. American film-makers tend to train their lenses on North Korea as a personal crusade (Kimjongilia) which tends to produce martyr-as-storyteller adventure tales that can cause a brain-damaging amount of eye-rolling. Coupled with the fact American audiences want to see Kim Jong Il as a morally corrupt clown who appears only occasionally on the world stage to shoot off failed nukes and amuse us with his platform shoes and pompadour hairstyle (and "The Daily Show" is more than happy to oblige this narrative). But for as didactic, silly and potentially hazardous as The Red Chapel can be, it never strays from letting the viewer know: behind the surreality of the situation, millions of people are living in a constant state of terror because a mentally ill dictator (who inherited the job from his dad) controls every facet of their existence. Brügger's intentions are heartless and intellectually bankrupt, but his outcome is a stronger document of the North Korean situation than anything of its kind.

The Red Chapel is screening January 21-31 at the Sundance Film Festival.

UPDATE: This film has also been screening with the title Kim Jong-Il’s Comedy Club.

 

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.

#030 The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector w/ Chris Sutton

This week I am delighted to be joined by musician Chris Sutton (The Gossip, Hornet Leg) to discuss Vikram Jayanti's documentary The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector. After Chris talks me down from the fugue state watching this film creates, we talk about the difficulty rock biographers face to expose the mania of celebrity without exploiting mental illness, the Phil Spector seduction technique and how arduous the editing process becomes with a narcissistic subject. 

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Review: The Jazz Baroness

Produced for the BBC and directed by her great-grand niece Hannah Rothschild, The Jazz Baroness focuses on the life and influence of Pannonica de Koenigswarter (Nica for short), a wealthy child of the Rothschild financial empire who developed an unlikely relationship with pianist Thelonious Monk years before jazz music had reached any level of acceptance in well-regarded society. 

The anti-black hostility of the 1950s coupled with the vast chasm between their socio-economic backgrounds -- he the child of sharecroppers with a history of mental illness and she the daughter of a German Jewish family that the British monarchy once asked for a loan -- inevitably made the very existence of their coupling somewhat of a spectacle. But The Jazz Baroness emphasizes how much common ground Monk and Nica found in love of music and how his (undiagnosed) illnesses and constant state of poverty fed her desire to be seen as a caretaker after having spent her childhood and young adulthood in a cage made of spun gold. 

The film employs interviews with several musicians, writers and various scenesters of the New York jazz scene from the 1950s through the 70s including Quincy Jones, Thelonious Monk Junior, Clint Eastwood, Sonny Rollins and Dan Morgenstern. Helen Mirren narrates letters written to friends, giving some insight to Nica's inner life. There is also rare super-8 footage shot by band members of Monk and Nica chatting as well as live recordings of Nica introducing Monk's performances and Monk sweetly crooning to her from the stage. 

The excrutiatingly proper Rothschild family were so mortified by the heiress's decision to ditch her husband and five children and take up with a group of black musicians, that she had all but been written out of the family's legacy. Early on Director Rothschild also expresses feelings of inadequacy about the expectations of her high society life and as a film-maker approaches her subject with the generosity of a curious progeny rather than an investigator. But Rothschild also takes great pride in the accomplishments of her family, even as she conveys disappointment with their treatment of Nica. One of the key interviews representing the clan is a great aunt who recounts how many of their family members were brutally killed in the Holocaust. Assembled alongside a considerable amount of wealth porn to help us understand the virtual Versailles the Rothschilds had to abandon to move to the States and the militaristic dedication they had to maintaining their previous way of life. 

The Jazz Baroness provides insight into how the culture and political climate of the time impacted Nica and Monk's unlikely relationship and purposely leaves aside any (seemingly) obvious issues of drug abuse, child abandonment or infidelity. This lends a sweetness to the film that feels absent in a lot of music and art history documentaries, especially of those that center on the non-central figures of the scene.

RIYL: Elevator to the Gallows, Marie Antoinette, Bird (Eastwood), Jazz (Burns), Scott Walker: 30th Century Man. 

The Jazz Baroness screens at the Reel Music festival in Portland this weekend. 

#029 We Live in Public w/ Phoebe Owens

This week I am joined by social media advisor Phoebe Owens to discuss Ondi Timoner's new documentary We Live in Public. We decide quickly that Josh Harris may be a lot of things: lucky, clever, confident -- but a visionary? Not so much. We then discuss the complex situation of a documentary film-maker acknowledging their subject is a total nutter and still wanting the film to go further, Timoner's amazing PT Barnum-esque promotional skills and ultimately why social media is too chaotic to be controlled by millionaires. Enjoy!

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Review: Youth in Revolt

Looking over a few of the Best Films of the Aughts lists, you might notice something sad and startling: virtually no American independent films made the cut. It would appear there was zero new talent to replace all of the promise and excitement of film-makers like Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, Gregg Araki, Robert Rodriguez, Steven Soderbergh and Allison Anders who came on the 90s film scene full of piss and vinegar and have since mostly evolved into studio film-makers. During that period a person could go deaf from all the artists moaning about how many of their peers gave into the amorphous threat of "selling out" but the Aughts demonstrated an even bleaker possibility. Plenty of film-makers were happy to neuter themselves far in advance of Daddy Bigbucks even hinting interest.

If you worked in film, read about film or had even a passing interest in film you might have noticed certain recurring themes in the narrative films that became superstars of the festival circuit. In fact, if you were paying any attention at all, you may have at times felt bludgeoned by the ill-conceived repetition: white middle-class American man in his late 20s, can't grow up, can't commit to his lovely girlfriend, hates his parents, still mad about not being popular in high school and can't hold a job. Happily absent any political conscience in one of the darkest periods of our nation's history, these pixie boys were overwhelmed by the combination of their own privilege and total lack of expectations for greatness (or even goodness in most cases). A host of whacky secondary characters (this is where you might see anyone who is old, queer, fat, sexual, poor or not white) would turn up to wax on with poetic, folksy metaphors about the protagonist's desperate plight, he would make a large dramatic gesture towards reconciling all previous wrongs -- top it off with a hip soundtrack and there you have the history of Independent Film-making 2000-2009 in a nutshell.

And in the late Aughts these protagonists managed to regress even further and so began the over-identification with high school age children. These emotionally fragile oracles who were somehow jaded by a world they'd had no interaction with were hyper-articulate, possessed a tightly metered sexuality and a carefully calibrated host eccentricities to substitute for a glaring lack of personality or depth. As if upcoming American film-makers decided en masse if they could just re-write their own biographies they would magically re-awaken as thoughtful, competent human beings making interesting art. In the words of perhaps the Aughts most cherished commentator the LOLCat, FAIL.

 

Which brings us to Miguel Arteta, whose 2000 film Chuck & Buck was a darkly funny precursor to excoriating male bonding films like Old Joy and Humpday but has since faded into the landscape of good television and helming the noble but forgettable Jennifer Aniston vehicle Good Girl.

In his Arteta's latest Youth in Revolt, Michael Cera (who it's hard to believe anyone age-appropriate would ever identify with), plays Nick Twisp another misunderstood child of divorce. His slutty mom (Jean Smart) and his noble eunuch father (Steve Buscemi) share custody bouncing him back and forth between the suburbs of Berkeley and a trailer park in the sticks of Northern California. He falls head over heels with Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday) the girl next door who is (sigh) dating the jerky, but confident Trent. To help him get in touch with his own inner douchebag, Nick creates an alternate personality Francois Dillinger, a delightful French ruffian who makes them good boys go bad. In a misguided attempt to win Sheeni's affection, Nick sets fire to a restaurant which results in her getting shipped off to a French-language boarding school a few hundred miles away and him hiding out in his mom's trailer with her increasingly repulsive line-up of boyfriends.

It's telling that Francois Dillinger's every scene is riffed in Youth in Revolt's trailer. Dillinger represents both the film's sole source of levity (the first third is so leaden and self-serious I wasn't even sure if the film is a comedy) but also its greatest failings. Teenagers of the 21st century have so much access pop culture history there truly is a seemingly endless fluidity of personality and representation. Even a meathead could do a google search Serge Gainsbourg and get what Nick Twisp was going for in the time it takes to read a Wikipedia entry and look at a YouTube video. But instead of having any fun with what actual teenagers' lives are about, Arteta is obsessed with keep the film totally airless and mired in unremembered nostalgia (really, tan corduroy pants again? When will this cruel, sartorial hell Wes Anderson hath wrought finally end?)

Hopefully, Youth In Revolt represents a bookend to this unfortunate chapter of cinema history. I doubt it will, but just in case.. a note to artists everywhere, now in their 30s (or worse) and still desperately trying to re-write their failed pubescent period: You're a tyrant to your preciousness. Your peers clearly made the right choice in shunning you because you're insufferable and boring. Please, if not for the sake of art then for your own well-being, just stop.



CC: Rian Johnson, Zach Braff, Jared Hess, Seth Gordon, Diablo Cody, Jesse Eisenberg.