Steady Diet of Film

Review: Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

With a perfectly timed release to be viewed in tandem with Inside Job, Charles Ferguson’s excellent macro analysis of the root causes of and leftover systemic ills from the 2008 financial meltdown, Alex Gibey’s Client #9 details the fallout for one particular victim of the financial industry’s collective malignancy and capacity for destruction. The former governor of New York turned national joke turned CNN talk show host Eliot Spitzer.

Gibney is a fascinating filmmaker, with a bewildering output in terms of both mass quantity and startlingly inconsistent quality. After working for two decades as a television producer, he exploded on the documentary scene in 2005 with Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a detailed and affable account of what would apparently be the tip of the iceberg for complex financial scandals. In 2007 he won an Academy Award for Taxi to the Dark Side, an impassioned examination of interrogation techniques inspired by the life and work of his father, a former military interrogator. That same year he released the terminally dull Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, in which Gibney seemed to be at a 118-minute loss for how to depict someone who has already been endlessly mythologized.

This year he released Casino Jack and The United States of Money, a turgid, lifeless attempt to further takedown lobbyist/convicted felon Jack Abramoff. Yet Gibney also contributed one of those most artful and thoughtful short pieces to the omnibus documentary Freakonomics in which he took the absurdly unfilmable subject of an economist’s study of cheating in Sumo wrestling and created a haunting and tragic snapshot of integrity ceding to avarice. He’s also directed a film version of Lawrence Wright’s one-man play "My Trip to Al-Qaeda". Client #9 continues to demonstrate that Gibney is far more comfortable with subjects who 1. participate on-camera and 2. perceive themselves as some kind of victim.

In Spitzer’s retelling of his own life, he’s victim of both of his own hubris and a dark cabal of powerful enemies. When he was elected New York State Attorney General, he transformed an office that had previously been used to reprimand unscrupulous car salesmen into a ruthless crime-fighting machine. They went after mobsters and high-level white collar criminals, often undercutting Federal investigations and always grabbing as many headlines  along the way. Spitzer also did very little to discourage the whisper campaign that he would someday be president of the United States.

But in 2008 then-Governor Spitzer was linked with a high-class prostitution ring and overnight went from being a populist hero to a national joke. Never charged with a crime or named in any of the leaked affidavits, his inevitable resignation took out a visible enemy of many powerful people. And in the wake of several high-level Republican officials being linked with prostitutes and infidelity (with little to no repercussions to their political careers) tongues began wagging about the unfairness of it all.

Spitzer trots out some well-rehearsed statements about regret and accepting accountability that couldn’t be any less sincere. It’s clear he believes as long as his ideological opponents are also doing bad things that the world has treated him unfairly and there’s nothing weird about staying angry about it forever.

Gibney has always had a knack for bloating 90 minutes worth of content into two-hour films. If there is some personal life quota that needs to be met to justify the subtitle “The Rise and the Fall of” there are better choices than the nauseating sentimentality in reinacted scenes of an overbearing immigrant father who withheld affection (and didn’t let a 10 year old Eliot win at Monopoly) or unctuous lines like “Spitzer approached his work with the same veracity he did his tennis game”. And for as much time as we’re made to ponder the personal lives of his political enemies, there’s a glaring void in the confessional record when Spitzer summarizes how his decline has affected his wife Silda (or their three daughters) in the statement “this experience has made me realize the depth of her forgiveness.”

Still, when Gibney is at his best there’s no better investigative provocateur working in documentary film. He untangles the threads of an elaborate conspiracy that involves scorned financial industry tycoons, the former head of the New York Stock Exchange, professional political hitman Roger Stone and the former Republican leader of the New York State Senate -- then gleefully confronts each of them with his findings. It’s a wonderful (and awful) illustration of the sick culture from which they all derive that they can each just smirk and crack wise about taking down Spitzer. Watching Client #9, it’s striking that the 2008 financial meltdown has become the anti-Woodstock for Baby Boomers with God complexes. Over the course of this film, no fewer than three people insist that if not for that pesky firing, being voted out by the board or resigning in disgrace then they alone could have prevented the collapse of this complicated system.

Gibney is much less effective in his handling of how much paying for sex actually brought about Spitzer’s downfall. He delights in depicting Ashley Dupre, the $2,000/hour call girl and the former Governor’s go-to gal, as a vacuous self-promoter. The film whirls through dozens of images of her partying in skimpy clothing and sneers when she goes on Fox News and lip syncs to Christmas carols. Simply to reveal that Dupre only one “date” with Spitzer.

Is it supposed to be a startling revelation that a New Jersey high school dropout turned call girl has made bad decisions in her life? Or perhaps the audience is supposed to draw a meaningful comparison to Spitzer’s life of luxury and privilege also leading to bad choices. At any rate, the film trots out a law professor who works himself into some serious pearl-clutching histrionics about the arcane law used to justify the investigation of Spitzer “never being used to prosecute Johns.” Good heavens! Conversely, the film showers respect and soft-lit adoration for “Angelina”, another (apparently, more favored) former call girl who is now working as a day trader (oh, the Circle of Life). She left New York when the scandal broke and is now going public via a private interview with Gibney that was transcribed and performed in the film by an actress.

These women are both victims of a bizarro chess game being played by men who take pleasure in crushing anyone who endangers the many zeros on their paychecks, political accolades or television appearances. And while a filmmaker's affinity towards the one who would give an interview is understandable, the lengths gone to make a joke out of Dupre seem more than a little redundant.

Still, Client #9 is easily counted in Gibney’s "win" column, the film is a fascinating, prismatic view into a culture where political power, moral integrity and privacy intersect in ways that impact the rest of the world.


Client #9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer opens November 5th in New York.

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: Rachel

Rachel Corrie was an American activist who, while protesting the demolition of Palestinian housing developments in the Gaza Strip, was crushed to death by an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer in early 2003. Three years later, her journal entries and letters home were adapted by actor Alan Rickman into “My Name is Rachel Corrie” a stage play that continues to be performed today. Now those same writings provide the narration for documentary filmmaker Simone Bittone’s film Rachel. Similar to Bittone’s previous film The Wall (winner of the special jury prize at Sundance 2006), Rachel is a cool, even-tempered film about the most heated and emotional conflict of our time.

The film sifts through dozens of the people touched by Corrie’s death and how her earlier experiences propelled her to such dangerous political activism. Most of the people interviewed are very mindful of the role they will play in creating or preventing the process of turning Rachel Corrie into a martyr and carefully package their responses accordingly. A mournful Palestinian villager credits Corrie with saving several people’s lives. A resolute Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson provides mounds of investigatory paperwork requested by the army to better understand what happened. A representative from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM, the group Corrie was affiliated with at the time of her death) demonstrates, in public relations hyperdrive, the ‘entire day’ of training that Corrie received before heading to Gaza. College faculty members are stricken with their own sense of culpability. Corrie’s affinity group is still slightly dazed by their gruesome memories. An anonymous Israeli foot soldier (not present the day Corrie died but was stationed in the area) talks about the regularity of war lust and casual destruction. Private investigators are furious that the crime scene was tampered with and that an autopsy was performed without the presence of a neutral witness. The Israeli medical examiner insists that his office called the US Embassy, who in turn refused to send a representative.

It’s a purposely mundane and hopelessly rhetorical back and forth that will serve mostly to reinforce people’s existing feelings about the players. Intercut with photographs of Corrie, a pretty, blond, American girl who is always framed to look inquisitive or joyful, we are reminded how much the stakes change when an American dies in a foreign war zone. Her letters illustrate an uneasy equilibrium between commitment to the Palestinians’ cause and naivety as to what the conflict really is. There’s a mysterious absence of the dangerlust one might expect considering that, by all accounts, Corrie purposely sought out the most dangerous place in the world to be a direct action resistor.

Bitton’s laissez-faire approach breaks a bit for the film’s harrowing finale. The surviving members of ISM bemoan the fact they only had still cameras to document what happened. Had the events been captured by video, they express with rage and regret, the debate would be settled about what transpired--and Corrie may have not died at all. The film closes with surveillance footage shot from another bulldozer, which was positioned to witness Corrie’s death. The operator of this bulldozer, who contacted his emergency dispatch as the events unraveled, narrates. Bitton shows the affinity group the footage and encourages them to narrate it for themselves.

And the ISM members are right; the video footage is a great deal more conclusive than their collection of still images. Yet enough loose ends remain to provide fodder for both sides of the debate. This break in such a constructed style highlights Bittone’s clearest directive in the film; entrenched beliefs (fortified by heated emotions and long-standing grudges) will not be swayed by details of individual tragedies.

Rachel plays at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City starting October 8th-14th.

**Full disclosure: While I never met her personally, I graduated from the Evergreen State College the same year that Rachel Corrie would have, had she completed school.

Review: War Don Don

Rebecca Richman Cohen’s debut War Don Don (winner of the Special Jury prize at the 2010 SXSW Film Festival) follows the trial of Sierra Leonian war criminal Issa Sesay. Embracing the complexities of the conflict there and examining how “law and order” might survive, this film portrays the process of seeking justice by blaming a few bad actors for catastrophic destruction as highly artificial.

During his trial, Sesay’s defense attorneys tackle the politically dicey task of differentiating the unpleasantness of what transpired in Sierra Leon from the unpleasantness of what happened in other civil wars. Sesay was the head of the RUF, a paramilitary group conscripted by neighboring Liberia’s president Charles Taylor to enslave hundreds of thousands of people, force them to mine natural resources which netted huge profits. The legal team attempts to render what happened in Sierra Leon as a rare civil war, based not on a religious, ethnic or geographic conflict. Instead, it gets cast as nearly entirely profit-motivated, implicating far more than just one genocidal despot.

From 1967 to 1985, Siaka Stevens was the prime minister and president of Sierra Leone, overseeing a period of political repression and massive poverty. Children who grew up watching parents struggle and younger siblings starve to death were low-hanging fruit for Taylor, who promised them a road to heroism by taking up arms and becoming freedom fighters against an obvious and external enemy. These armies, armed to the teeth and managed by angry teenage boys, splintered into their own agendas, loyalties and unchecked aggression. This led to the murder, maiming and displacement of hundreds of thousands Sierra Leonians. When UN peacekeepers eventually intervened, they disarmed and arrested Sesay.

Similar to Rob O'Reilly’s and John Murphy’s The Trial, which focuses on the trial for Kosovo’s former prime minister Ramush Haradinaj, we see the difference between a rebel leader and a war criminal comes down to a lot of different variables. None of which are determined by who was left standing at the end of the conflict. In these instances, history isn’t written by ‘the winners.’ Instead, it gets recorded by the special courts funded by the British and United States governments, who funnel millions of dollars into war torn regions to complete what most people believe is a largely symbolic notion of justice.

The idea is briefly floated that the amount of money it took to build a special courthouse, as well as set up investigative, prosecutorial and security teams for the five year trial, may have been better spent on rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure. Thousands of survivors require physical rehabilitation in a country with very little non-slave economy to speak of. To her credit, Cohen understands these things are a lot more complicated than checking either to War Tribunal or Social Services box.

War Don Don toggles between court footage and interviews with attorneys for both teams, historians, survivors and one of Sesay’s mentors (now a well-funded witness for the prosecution). Interestingly, this happens without the guiding hand of narration, musical cues, infographics or personal intervention by the filmmaker. Cohen has previously collaborated as an editor with Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine), therefore, it’s noteworthy that for her own project she takes the tonally and structurally opposite approach to non-fiction storytelling.



War Don Don airs September 29th on HBO.

Review: Waking Sleeping Beauty

Between 1984 and 1994 the Walt Disney corporation experienced a renaissance in their animated films division, a branch of the corporate behemoth that had come to see live-action films, premium cable, theme parks and merchandising as its reliable cash crops. Up to this point feature-length animated films were increasingly viewed as the expensive monkey cafe being run by a bunch of art school weirdos that no one wanted to deal with. Don Hahn, a long-time animator and producer within that monkey cage makes his documentary directorial debut with Waking Sleeping Beauty, a love note to the craft and mythology of the artisans who toiled on the stories, characters, songs and thousands of hand-painted frames that went into films like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King.

The first hour is a catalog of grievances about how corporate executive shuffling and box office receipts created ripple effects all the way down to musty Burbank basement the animators were locked inside of day and night. Hahn employs home video footage, thundering musical cues and voiceover that makes for an occasionally bracing mix of sentimentality and paternalism. Grown men gleefully slashing each other’s tires over disagreements about The Great Mouse Detective is a difficult struggle to relate to, which isn’t made an easier by Hahn’s smug retelling. And while the leadership void and overlapping management is understandably frustrating, one really wants to sit down some of these artists for whom authentic creative expression is supposedly priority one and tell them, maybe you shouldn’t have gone to work for a corporate giant founded by a former Nazi that built its brand on celebrating white male American birthright horseshit -- just thinking aloud here.

What is fascinating about Waking Sleeping Beauty is seeing how overarching trends in the culture impacted a hopelessly out of date company bogged down by in-fighting and hamstrung by investors who demanded quarterly growth. In the mid-90s the Walt Disney corporation was a buttoned down, hyper-secretive operation that was obsessed with controlling their employees behavior and “image management” to the nth degree (speaking of, whatever happened to Celebration, FL?) But the sprawl of “entertainment journalism” combined with animation blockbusters created celebrities out of animators eager for recognition -- which quickly eroded the ability to keep a lid on thousands of semi-gruntled employees.

But less than two decades later this, a highly sentimental though ultimately unflattering portrait of the company (one that had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the VHS revolution), features dozens of employees happily smack-talking on-camera, a constant stream of (presumably legally cleared) clips from Disney feature films and surreptitiously shot footage from private meetings. The film’s relatively small (by the company’s standards) release is even being managed by Walt Disney’s theatrical release division. Since most of the blame is laid at the feet of specific executives and not dysfunctional workplace culture Waking Sleeping Beauty may have a problem seeing the forest through the trees but it’s a rare glimpse into the Mouse’s insane kingdom.


Waking Sleeping Beauty screens at the Hollywood Theatre October 25th and will be available on dvd November 30th.

Review: I'm Still Here

I’m Still Here, a documentary about the tumultuous life of Joaquin Phoenix that offers Scientologist whackjob  Edward James Olmos as its poet laureate and Sean Combs (aka Puff Daddy, P Diddy, Sean John, etc.) as its voice of reason, will be a litmus test viewing experience for people concerned with issues of authenticity, ethics or good taste.

After going through the Young Hollywood rites of passage, maturing from child star, to indie “it boy” and eventually into a bona fide mainstream success (even winning a Golden Globe for his role in Walk the Line), Joaquin Phoenix announced in late 2008 he would retire from acting to pursue a new career as a hip hop musician. According to his imdb biography, Phoenix attended rehab for alcoholism in 2006, but his sobriety is never commented on throughout the many scenes where he snorts cocaine, smokes marijuana or goes on protracted rants about the communication practice of bees or how people are out to get him.

And even though he takes his public declaration (an exclusive he gave to tabloid tv show "Extra") very seriously and spends many hours in his home studio laying down tracks, when his big break comes, a chance to play his demo for rap mogul Puff Daddy, he’s too doped up to make the meeting and spends the rest of the film chasing after Puff’s approval. While waiting on phone calls to be returned from the famed producer he sleeps with hookers, does more drugs, goes on tyrannical rants threatening his employees (all of his creative collaborators also seem to work as his personal assistants). When he finally gets a chance to visit Puffy in the studio (the first time we really get to hear Phoenix’s music since he mumbles his way through his public performances) he is devastated by the polite but firm rebuking his songwriting skills receive.

The collaboration between Phoenix (given a Writer/Producer credit here) and director Casey Affleck (also a young actor who benefited from nepotistic opportunity but seems to hold less anxiety about it) is constantly commented on by the duo. For people who spend their professional life performing for cameras and have their personal lives documented by tabloids the concept of “inner life” is a fairly tenuous one. Unfortunately for Phoenix, his only apparent framework for understanding how people’s stories can be developed is narrative films. In one scene, he screams at an assistant who’s been feeding insider information to entertainment writers “you’re the villain here, the audience is going to see the good guy win now!” [Point of order: the assistant is not fired for feeding supposedly false or private information to the media.]

The presence of Affleck’s camera has transformed Phoenix’s decline into an object of endless public speculation. Rumors of Phoenix’s retirement being an elaborate prank have been given far more credibility than the more obvious possibility that Phoenix is an indecisive, over-indulged junkie surrounded by people who have a financial stake in keeping him in the news. Two actors collaborating to make a documentary about celebrity culture is fertile grounds for bullshit (excuse me, “performance art”), but it still seems like a better perspective on the situation than the pageant of inanity we see in Phoenix’s final press junket wherein entertainment writers meekly ask questions like “Will Puffy be writing lyrics as well as music?” Too inert or afraid to make the same bold proclamations they do on their Twitter accounts.

Affleck deserves less ambivalent kudos for his sense of composition and pacing. Periodically he frames Phoenix as a stolid lump being spliced to bits by paparazzi flashbulbs; there’s a long, silent scene where the sad actor shares a table with his father that speaks volumes and the final shot (a takeoff on Michelangelo Antonioni’s last scene in The Passenger) is a wonderful, contemplative moment to wrap up his noisy, chaotic film.

#034 Eat, Pray, Love and The State of Chick Flicks w/ Joanne McNeil

This week I'm delighted to be joined by Joanne McNeil to discuss Julia Roberts and Eat, Pray, Love. Joanne defends EPL's lack of quirk and we easily agreed on the film's spot-on casting choices all the way down the line. But the topic that really brings us together is trouble with "chick flicks" -- why she loves them, why I hate them, what constitutes "hardcore chick flicks" and which director we would both like to see brought to a military tribunal for crimes against humanity by way of chick flicks. 

 

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Review: Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an upper-middle class Brooklyn refugee who landed in SoHo in the late 1970s and made a name (or nom de plume as it were) for himself as a graffiti artist in the gritty but vibrant art community exploding in pre-Giuliani New York. Basquiat spraypainted oblique poetry and snappy cultural criticisms signing it SAMO (short for “same old shit”) before becoming a full-time paintor. This lifestyle, in the beginning, fully funded by his girlfriend as he was a devout bohemian opting to scrounge for change rather than work low-wage jobs. He quickly became a darling of the art world blending a universe of pop culture, sports and historical references with his raw, detailed, colorful work. He was a delight to art buyers, critics and fans who had grown weary of the the ultra-minimalist aesthetic popular at the time. One interviewee describes the scene as “white walls with white people drinking white wine” (a comment director Tamra Davis delights in placing over vintage footage shot in a room of nearly invisible glass objects in a brightly lit gallery).

Davis shot a lengthy interview with Basquiat in 1986 at the height of his fame (just two years prior to his fatal drug overdose at age 27) and uses this footage as a leaping off point to give his work and life a better context for understanding. Opting to illuminate the experiences rather than prognosticate on Basquiat’s state of mind, the film uses a wealth of newly shot interviews with collaborators, friends and fans that range from people who went on to attain great levels of success (Julian Schnabel and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore) to people who appear to be living in the same bohemian conditions but minus the Olsen twin irony. Enough years have lapsed that feelings of jealousy and anger about the way Basquiat may have treated them in his drug-addled later years has waned, their recollections are marked by an enduring respect for his creativity and work ethic as well as a sadder understanding that none of them could have prevented his premature death.

Basquiat’s friendship with Andy Warhol is treated as sacrosanct (even though it seemed to precipitate Basquiat shucking his old friendships and using heroin “to increase his focus”) which also serves to illustrate the different social stratospheres that exist within a cultural movement that can become blurred though the course of history. Basquiat’s life then followed the sad, predictable trajectory of a young artist who becomes wealthier and more famous than all the people around him. Quickly alienated from his friends and too young to know how to find new grounding within a whirlwind of criticism and gold-diggers -- he easily bought into the mythology of ‘the artist too sensitive for this world’ and became a heavy drug user.

Radiant Child also delves into the complications Basquiat faced being the most famous person in any posh art gallery then stepping outside and being perceived as ‘a scary black man’ who couldn’t get a cab and was regularly hassled by the police. And inside the cultural movement that prided itself on breaking all pre-existing rules and notions Basquiat (understandably) bristled at constantly being described as “African” (his parents were Puerto Rican and Haitian) and “primal” by the professional art class.

Davis (along with editor Alexis Spraic, whose film Shadow Billionaire was one of my favorites last year) makes the sage choice to not play up New York’s drastic commercial sprawl since the 1970s. She uses footage from Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens to flesh out the landscape and steers clear of showing us how many Starbucks have cropped up in what used to be punk clubs and artists’ spaces. She also weaves together a fitting and beautiful soundtrack of Basquait’s own influences of noisy rock’n’roll, bebop and beat poetry.  


Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child opens in Portland at Living Room Theater September 3rd.

Review: The Tillman Story

Pat Tillman had recently married his high school sweetheart and was a rising NFL star when he famously put his professional sports career on hold to serve three tours with the Army rangers (two in Iraq, one in Afghanistan). During an incident that was that was first described as a shootout with enemy combatants but weeks later re-classified as a ‘friendly fire’ mishap he died after receiving multiple gunshots to his body and head. The details of his death grew even murkier as the Tillman family (along with a retired green beret turned private investigator who acted as a de facto fixer for navigating the language and culture of ground combat infantry) sifted through thousands of documents about their son’s death. Despite no solid explanation for how or why their son died, the Tillman family was left helpless and confused as the Bush administration turned the story of his short life into a promotional device trumpeting the war efforts. Old interview footage was re-purposed to morph Tillman’s obvious patriotism into blank jingoism and military officials attempted to strong-arm his widow into overriding Tillman’s specific requests that there be no military involvement with his funeral arrangements. Despite the clarity of focus within the Executive branch’s and military’s public relations campaigns, the Tillmans’ frustrations finally exploded in the form of a letter penned by Tillman’s father telling top Army brass to go fuck themselves -- which one might be surprised to learn -- is considered a threat and automatically triggers an official investigation, in this case first with the Army, then the FBI and finally by Congress.

Perhaps equally as interesting as the particulars of the Tillman family’s struggle for answers is the drastically changing cultural context it exists in and how this film will speak to audiences as the wars in the Middle East have lost their nationalistic sparkle. Similar to Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure, The Tillman Story demonstrates the new phenomenon of military and governmental sloppiness, cover ups and craven publicity stunts being constantly undermined by the new generation of ground-level soldiers’ endless ability and desire to self-document the minutia of their daily routines. But while Standard Operating Procedure was largely ignored by audiences and nitpicked by critics, Tillman played Sundance and the Los Angeles Film Festival to sold out crowds, glowing reviews and had a strong opening weekend in New York and Los Angeles despite some controversy over the MPAA’s decision to saddle the film with an R-rating.*

Director Amir Bar-Lev’s previous film My Kid Could Paint That also examined how a family handles having the public image of their child taken away from them and turned into something they can barely stomach. Obviously, the stakes for the Tillmans were much higher but in My Kid Bar-Lev demurred (quite uncomfortably, on-camera) at asking the difficult questions that were the base appeal of his subjects. The Tillmans are happy to embrace an opportunity to give their side of things and air grievances and provide a more fascinating portrait of a family, clear-eyed in the face of monumental government and media interference with their memories, lives and grief.


*Far be it for me to defend the MPAA’s practices or decisions, but the f-word appears in The Pat Tillman Story approximately as many times as the average Apatow film.

Review: Countdown to Zero

Countdown to Zero is an impassioned, exhaustively researched reminder of the lingering dangers of nuclear weapons. Using a quote from a speech President Kennedy delivered in 1961 before the United Nations to provide the film’s framework for why (accident, miscalculation or madness) how (build, buy, or steal) nuclear weapons could be obtained and used. Combining the efforts of producer Lawrence Bender (An Inconvenient Truth) and director Lucy Walker  (whose previous films Blindsight, Waste Land and Devil’s Playground have garnered no fewer than six Audience awards on the film festival circuit) their motives and personal politics are clear. They go about exploring this thorny geopolitical issue with the aid of a lot of top shelf speakers (former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev, former UK prime minister Tony Blair, current Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, former Secretary of State James Baker and Valerie Plame to name a few) who provide clear insights and thoughtful introspection.

But the specter of being tagged “a talking head film” looms large in Countdown to Zero and the methods the filmmaker team employs to make the film ‘more human’ run the gamut from colorful (if not somewhat predictable) to so monumentally offensive and stupid that they strip away much of the film‘s credibility and craft. Demonstrations of animated detonation zones on city maps, archive footage of plane crashes edited together for comedic effect and well bankrolled news footage serve their purpose but are used as the repeated go-tos for jokes that didn’t feel all that funny to begin with.

The overly chatty “man on the street” interviews wherein people -- conspicuously reflecting every ethnicity, age, gender and geographic location -- enthusiastically cite the same opinions, ‘nuclear bombs are like.. totally bad!’ also start to grate pretty quickly. It’s understandable that a filmmaker would want to introduce some levity into the subject of global nuclear annihilation but it greatly undermines the evidence presented by scientists, former heads of states and trained spies to treat their expertise as though it needs to be backed up by a pep squad.

But the moment Countdown veers into reprehensible territory begins with its opening sequence of surveillance footage from no fewer than four subway station terrorist bombings. The message that these attacks could have been far more damaging had they been padded with nuclear material is a fairly obvious and unnecessary one to make. Nor is it appropriate to show what amounts to snuff footage for a film with such a pronounced political agenda. Countdown then continues the meme, sprinkling mock surveillance footage of a baseball game throughout the rest of the film. Matched for framing and timing to the subway footage, the viewer sits ready to flinch at an explosion we know will never come. It’s a galling manipulation that is both unethical documentary storytelling as well as profoundly shitty filmmaking.

There’s also a niggling feeling that one of the scientists appears to be coached into making his message into a better pullquote. When mentioning that the technology needed to make nuclear devices is well-established and readily available he quips, “this equipment is from the 1950s.. this is 2010!” Countdown to Zero premiered at the Sundance film festival in late January 2010, it seems very unlikely his interview was conducted in the year 2010. But priming its subjects for maximum trailer-osity is really the least of the film’s offenses.

All of this begs the question, what happened here? Walker’s previous works have all been genuine crowd-pleasers but never through a process of dumbing down their material or creating a false sense of suspense. Quite the opposite, in the past she’s gone into isolated and stigmatized communities, gained the trust of people either doing extremely difficult work (a woman trying to convince Tibetan monks that blind children aren’t cursed in Blindsight) or at particularly unflattering point in their lives (the Amish teens smoking meth during their “rumspringa” in Devil’s Playground), then burrowing into their stories so thoroughly it was impossible to not be moved by the experience of really spending time with and understanding these individuals.

The film’s failures don’t derive from a lack of caring or craft. Remnants of a smarter film can be seen in the construction and editing of a lot of complicated material into a thoughtful, accessible film. In one scene, the film imagines what actually happens after a nuclear explosion. Walker (providing the film’s voice-over) explains the immediate medical and structural damage, then goes on to posit what the culture and political ramifications would be in the weeks, months and years for people outside the blast radius. It’s an exceptionally thoughtful grace note to a film that is so callous towards actual suffering.



Countdown to Zero opens in New York in Los Angeles today. It opens in Portland at Cinema 21 July 30th.