Seymour: An Introduction (***)

The title of the movie may grab J. D. Salinger fans who know it as the title of one of Salinger’s better known short stories. They’ll be disappointed to learn that, while the movie too is a character sketch, it’s of the wholly unrelated Seymour Bernstein, a successful pianist turned piano teacher and composer in New York City. This Seymour gave up the limelight for contentment, and it’s that sentiment that strikes you in Ethan Hawke’s documentary.

Hawke includes conversation with others in the film, but it’s the footage of Bernstein, nearing 80, interacting with his younger students that is most captivating. These students are advanced, already capable of playing the right notes, but if you’ve wondered what things make the difference between a very competent musician and a truly excellent one, you get some idea here. Listening to one student chop away at the keys, Bernstein notices not the student’s hands but his shoulders. Placing his own hands on those shoulders, he has the student play it again, now more relaxed. It’s these kinds of small observations, but also his manner, that must make Berstein a fine teacher. He is the opposite of the teacher in Whiplash, inspiring with calmness, confidence in the student, and even a little humor. “Not all notes can be passionate,” he say after hearing one loud performance.

But Hawke is not a piano student, and it’s not the technical skills that drew him to his subject. Both acting (notably in the partly improvised films of Richard Linklater such as Boyhood, Tape, and the Before trilogy) and in interviews, he’s struck me as someone who is maybe thinking too much, who never seems relaxed. Maybe he envies Seymour Bernstein, who strikes me as someone who is thoughtful but not overthinking; he’s gained wisdom with age and simplified the things he prefers not to think about, like where to live. (So he’s been in the same apartment his entire adult life.) Whether you are a music fan or not, he may inspire.

IMDb link

viewed 3/26/15 7:30 pm [PFS screening] and posted 3/30/15

Citizenfour (***)

Decades from now, will Edward Snowden be widely viewed as a patriot who fought to protect the privacy of Americans from an increasingly intrusive government? Or as a traitor who, by copying government files and revealing the data-collection methods of the National Security Agency, betrayed his government and compromised the ability of the United States to catch potential terrorists? Or, I suspect, both? This documentary by Laura Poitras does not attempt to give a definitive answer to that question, but allows Snowden to explain his motivations and his course of action.

Not that Poitras is trying to be an objective filmmaker. She was in fact, Snowden’s initial conduit for releasing the NSA files. (Citizenfour was how he identified himself initially.) He had already contacted journalist Glenn Greenwald, whom he corrected assumed would be sympathetic to his views on privacy, but was unable to establish a secure communication method. So instead he turned to Poitras, who had already poked at US “war on terror” policies in her documentaries My Country, My Country and The Oath. Poitras arranged for Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, both of the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, to interview Snowden in Hong Kong, and she and Greenwald were the conduit for the information the public got to hear. The filmed briefing sessions, over an eight-day period, form the heart of this film.

If nothing else, one is likely to conclude from the film that Snowden was at the very least, acting out of a sincere concern that the government was overreaching in its data-gathering, that he does not seem to be a crazy person, or even unusual in his demeanor, and that he acted cautiously. The caution was both in terms of how he released the data (only Poitras and Greenwald received all of the copied files) and how he arranged the release, including encrypting his conversations and not telling anyone he knew, including his girlfriend, of his plans.

But judging Snowden’s actions means assessing more than his good intentions and carefulness. It means also quantifying the seriousness of the threats to privacy, the value of the information that can be gained from searching millions of phone and internet records, and the effects of revealing the NSA’s activities. Poitras tells us some things about the first, virtually nothing about the second, and very little about the third. In her defense, these are all difficult to quantify, and doing so was probably not her intent. Rather, the film is best seen as explaining the types of activities the NSA (and, incidentally, and even more broadly, the British government) was engaged in, why Snowden saw that as a problem, and what he, assisted by Greenwald and other journalists, did about it. If you are only mildly interested in those questions, I’d avoid the movie. Snowden himself is articulate, and worth hearing, but not so colorful as to be a riveting personality. Visually, the film is unavoidably on the dull side, with the t-shirt wearing Snowden and his hotel room filling much screen time. And, because Poitras does not directly depict any of the government efforts to find Snowden, or prosecute him, or deal with the fallout of his revelations, the sense of tension is less than it might have been. Snowden’s relevations are a valuable piece of history, and it is good to have this record of what happened. But, as a movie, Citizenfour is merely worthwhile, not riveting.

IMDb link

viewed 11/19/14 7:20 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 11/21/14

Fed Up (***1/4)

One might track the American obesity epidemic by looking at the rise of the food documentary, which has nearly become its own subgenre in the decade since Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me. This film shares its title (minus an exclamation point) with a 2002 production that focused on the industrialization of food production in the second half of the 20th century. While director Stephanie Soechtig (whose earlier film Tapped went after the bottled-water industry) covers that turf briefly, the particular enemy here is Big Sugar, which really encompasses the entire processed food industry, since added sugar is in almost all of the packaged foods found in the modern supermarket, not to mention the candies and snacks found in the checkout aisle of stores of all types.

Countering arguments about individual responsibility and fears of an overregulating “nanny state,” Soechtig emphasizes childhood obesity, selecting a cross-section of what seem to be working-class American teens as her case studies. They help to explain how simply exercising personal choice as a way to slim is so difficult when even school purvey junk food and, as is clear from the clips, they are often led astray by misleading health claims on food labels that tout, say, lowered fat and don’t mention all the added sugar.

Katie Couric provides the narration. Soechtig also gets some of what might be called the usual suspects in the anti-corporate food war to make her case, including Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, former FDA head David Kessler, and pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig. Lustig has the role of explaining why it is not true that, as I used to believe, “a calorie is a calorie.” I’ve heard the explanation, but he does it well. Finally, former President Bill Clinton and Iowa Senator Tom Harkin speak to the power of the food industry to thwart even modest-seeming measures like keeping fast food out of schools and issuing dietary guidelines that set a recommended level for sugar.


That both of these politicians are Democrats speaks to the difficulty of the issue. As with global warming, for the obesity crisis, no plausible private-sector solution presents itself. Thus denial becomes an attractive option for those suspicious of Big Government solutions. But perhaps, with the issue increasingly apparent for all to see, added sugar really will come to be seen, like cigarettes, as the “poison” that Lustig calls it.

Like some of the other food movies, this one ends with an exhortatory message, in this case urging the viewer to cut out sugar for ten days. It’s a slightly odd one, given that the film specifically repudiates the idea that reform can come through individual action. I also suspect that the people seeing this movie will be those already quite conscious of their own diet. However, should some ordinary filmgoers happen to see this, they’ll find a pleasant, well-paced film with some fun graphics (less intrusive than Spurlock’s) and an informative rather than hectoring tone.

 

IMDb link

viewed 6/12/14 7:50 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 6/12/14

The Missing Picture (***)

No documentary has ever been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, but awards for 2013 saw this movie receiving only the second such nomination in the foreign-language category. The other one was the animated Waltz with Bashir; it’s perhaps not entirely a coincidence that both films use non-traditional techniques to tell personal stories of war. Both films can be seen as visual memoirs, but Cambodian-born Rithy Panh’s story is less linear and more impressionistic. The narration (read by Christophe Bataille in French) is like a long, poetic essay about the longing for a lost childhood.

According to the film, Panh last saw his home on April 17, 1975, the day before his eleventh birthday and the day Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces overran the capital of Pnom Penh. The film well decribes the effects of the relocation, forced labor, agrarian “reform” and other policies inspired by the Chinese communists, but with the focus on the personal rather than the historical forces at work. To supplement the mostly black-and-white footage that exists from the period, and to tell the more personal aspects of the story, Panh uses clay figures and small-scale re-creations of many historical scenes. This is more effective than I might have thought.

For me, The Killing Fields remains the most indelible film about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. My taste would have preferred either a more historical film or a more detailed personal one, perhaps telling us of how Panh escaped to Thailand and became a filmmaker. It’s not a long movie, but perhaps is a bit long for the sort of gauzy remembrance it is. Where it did impact me was in importing the power of ideology. Greed and lust for power are enormous forces, but ideology was the motivating force that created the most murderous movements of the 20th century, from the totalitarian communism to the Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide.

IMDb link

viewed 4/10/14 7:15 at Ritz Bourse and posted 4/10/14

Particle Fever (***)

It takes the world’s largest machine to study the world’s smallest things. As large as a five-story building, the Large Hadron Collider was constructed in an underground tunnel over a 20-year period near the Geneva headquarters of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). (A similar project in Texas had been defunded midway through construction.) The idea was to smash subatomic particles together in a simulation of conditions present in the first moments after the Big Bang, with the hope that doing so would produce the long-hypothesized Higgs boson, which in turn would confirm scientific theories that had been coalescing since the early 1960s.

Make sense? Not to worry, this documentary leaves the hardest science in background shots of equations on chalkboards, focusing instead on the “particle fever” of the scientists who have, in many cases, waited decades for their ideas to be confirmed (or shot down). To be sure, there is some talk about the Higgs particle and what it means, but more about the “fever” of the scientists. Director Mark Levinson picks half a dozen of them to follow, most prominently Americans David Kaplan and Monica Dunford. Representing the theoretical side of physics, Kaplan provides, among other things, a really clear explanation of the multiverse, the still-speculative idea that our universe is one of many, each with a different set of fundamental properties. Dunford is a super-enthusiastic graduate student who’s more involved with the practical side of things.

Of course, “practical” is meant in a relative sense here. The most amazing thing about the giant Collider may be that billions of dollars were spent on it without the certainty that it would produce anything other than knowledge for its own sake, though also proof that thousands of people from dozens of countries could cooperate to figure out answers to the most fundamental scientific questions.

IMDb link

viewed 3/29/14 1:05 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 3/30/14

Tim’s Vermeer (***1/2)

A warning: this movie may well make you feel like a not-too-bright slacker. Tim Jenison is no slacker and is very smart. At home with seemingly any piece of machinery, he and his company NewTek are responsible for a series of video production innovations that the film breezily runs through. This documentary, directed by the Teller and narrated by his partner-in-magic, Penn Jillette, is pretty breezy in general, so right away we are introduced to its primary thesis. That is, the Dutch master Jan Vermeer used a mechanical device to create his paintings, allowing them to achieve a near-photographic level of realism unlike that of his predecessors or contemporaries.

Like many a magician, Vermeer did not, apparently, leave records behind detailing his tricks. But a few art experts, like David Hockney, thought he had one. Jenison, not an artist, had a hunch what it was. He first shows us the trick, which, to simplify, involves the use of a mirror to project an image in such a way that the painter can, accurately if slowly, copy it onto a canvas. Then, more difficult, he employs it himself. Then, still more difficult, he seeks to re-create Vermeer’s The Music Lesson using materials available to Vermeer in the 1660s,
in rented San Antonio garage.

Unlike Vermeer, who presumably did not actually build the chair or the room seen in his painting, Jenison had to construct both before beginning. Learning Dutch to read old documents was also not an impediment. And that’s before he puts brush to canvas, day after day. This kind of fierce determination is as astonishing as the proposition that someone else might have painted this way 350 years ago. Along the way, Jenison points out features of the painting consistent with that proposition. He’s pretty convincing.

This is an ideal story to tell cinematically; what would have been hard to understand in text is made easily comprehensible with the visual element. In the end, the film leaves us with what I call the Milli Vanilli question. (For the pop-music-history impaired, this musical duo caused an uproar in 1990 when the public learned that they had not performed the music on their records.) That is, should learning how something was (probably) created change your perception of its quality? Jenison, and Penn and Teller, argue against the idea that technology cannot be art; in effect, they say, whatever makes us full of wonder is wonderful.

IMDb link

viewed 3/11/14 7:30 at Ritz Bourse and posted 3/12/14
 

Let the Fire Burn (***3/4)

Anyone who lived in the Philadelphia area in the mid-1980s will remember the police confrontation with the radical group MOVE on May 13, 1985, that resulted in the deaths of eleven group members, including children, and an out-of-control fire that destroyed multiple city blocks in the West Philly neighborhood. Those who don’t remember may find even more bewildering the sequence of events that resulted in such a calamity. This documentary tells the story extremely well using, exclusively, period footage, primarily local news coverage, film of the hearings held by the city in the months after the confrontation, and the videotaped deposition of thirteen-year-old Michael Moses Ward, who had been living in MOVE house with his mother and survived the conflagration.

Told sequentially, the film provides some of the history of MOVE (not an acronym), which formed in the early 1970s. Under the guidance of spiritual leader John Africa (whose followers adopted the same last name), the group espoused an anti-authority, pro-self sufficiency philosophy and rejected most modern technology, though not autos. To many people, they just seemed dirty and odd. To their neighbors, they were a nuisance. To the police, they represented a threat, and a 1978 confrontation with the group left one officer dead, one MOVE member beaten on camera, and the MOVE “compound” destroyed.

After that, the group relocated to a row house where the 1985 confrontation took place. The last two thirds of the film recount that fateful event, interspersing the news footage with the later testimony in a way that seems as clear as possible and fair to all sides. Today, the MOVE fiasco is a symbol of a decade when the city had reached a low point. It’s still possible to argue about the extent MOVE was to blame and how the city should have handled the group and the plan to evict it from the West Philly row house. It’s unclear what lessons are to be drawn from it. Still, watching it occur is like watching a suspense thriller, albeit a depressing one.

A sad footnote that occurred after the film was complete was the death of Ward, also known as Birdie Africa, in September 2013.

IMDb link

viewed 11/7/13 7:30 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 11/7/13

The Short Game (***1/2) [screening]

By now the formula for this kind of documentary is familiar. Pick a bunch of kids to follow as they engage in a major competition. Spellbound, the spelling-bee movie from 2002, set the standard for this. Here the sport is golf, the competitors are seven and eight years old, and international, and competition is an annual one in North Carolina. The director, Josh Greenbaum, profiles five of the boys and three of the girls. You’ll probably have your favorites. Mine were Zamokuhle Nxasana, a South African boy hoping to improve on his 43rd-place finish of the previous year, and Sky Sudbury, a petite Texas blonde. (Nxasana father notes that, not so long ago, the boy would not have been able to compete; the country has changed so much that his father has to explain apartheid when they go to a museum.) The biggest personality seems to belong to Allan Kournikova, whose sister is the tennis star Anna, and who had already won the previous year.

Greenbaum nicely divides the film, with half set during the competition. He adds TV-style narration to pace things along and explain. There are (minor) tantrums, penalties, and everything else you’d see on an adult golf course, but the kids are a little quirkier and less polished. The kids, not the golf, are the main subject. It’s a great movie to see with some kids.

IMDb link

viewed 10/18/13 7:15 pm at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival]

Inequality for All (***1/4)

What An Inconvenient Truth was for Al Gore and global warming, this documentary by Jacob Kornbluth is for Robert Reich, labor secretary under Bill Clinton, and US income inequality. It’s similarly built around a lecture series, given by Reich to his students at University of California, Berkeley. (The movie also credits Reich’s book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, as a source.) Additional interview segments supplement the lecture, some with Reich, others with winners and losers in the new economy. And there is a little of Reich’s own story, from his early friendship with fellow Rhodes scholar Clinton to his childhood experiences being bullied because of his lack of height. Reich has incorporated his lack of stature into his act. When accepting his cabinet position, he said he had already known he was on Clinton’s “short list.”


Reich uses a plethora of statistics to show how wealth concentration has changed over time in the United States, frequently employing a suspension bridge to symbolize the changes. The peaks of the bridge represent the years 1928 and 2007, years preceding economic collapse — in each case, wealth disparities had reached new heights. He uses the statistics to correlate the current rich-get-richer trend to declines in union participation, the growth of the banking industry, and rising college tuition rates. Thus, although in his lecture he promises to challenge the assumptions of conservatives and liberals, most of his argument falls comfortably along liberal lines. Clips of Jon Stewart humorously making Reich’s points also reinforce that image.

Here the comparison with global warming is instructive. The worst effects of climate change are yet to come, so it is relatively easy to deny. But increasing income disparity over the last 30 years is nearly undeniable. Thus the argument becomes whether we should care. There is are fairness arguments in either direction, but primarily Reich is saying that income inequality is not merely unfair, but that it weakens the economy by making it more difficult for the middle class to thrive; since consumer spending is 70% of the economy, a middle class with no money to spend cannot buy the goods and services it generates. Besides Reich, the best spokesperson for this point of view is the Nick Hanauer, owner of a pillow company. Hanauer all but states that his eight-figure income is more than he deserves; he has so much that he doesn’t know what to do with it. Most of it is not use to create jobs, but invested in funds that he knows little about. Of course, those resistant to Reich’s argument might still claim that these funds create jobs indirectly, and while Reich may be correct in the long term about inequality hurting the economy — I think he is — in the short and medium term it is possible for the overall economy to grow even though those with below-median incomes get poorer. This I think the fairness argument needs to be made, too. Arguably, this is done indirectly. Hanauer and Warren Buffett, who appears briefly, are contrasted with other interviewees who are struggling to make ends meet in the new economy. Many of them work in the same kinds of jobs that were around in the 1970s, but the jobs now pay less in real dollars.

 

One thing Reich doesn’t tackle is the political movements behind these changes or the cultural landscape that may have lent public support to policies he deplores. About his onetime boss, Clinton, his take is basically, we did a lot, but not enough to reverse the long-term trends. By his own account, he was something like a broken record in bringing up the issue of inequality at every opportunity. Politics may explain why, in
that in the aftermath of the economic downturn little has been done to reverse inequality (the Affordable Care Act conceivably could help). No doubt this disappoints Reich, but his ideas have found some expression in the Occupy movement of 2011 and have at least received broader dissemination. the last third of the movie depicts the Occupy protesters and generally exhorts its audience to go forth and change things. It’s more general and less compelling than the first half of the film. But for someone who wants the facts about inequality, and Reich’s argument, in distilled form, this movie presents it clearly, and Reich is an engaging personality.

 

 

IMDb link

viewed 10/16/13 7:10 at Ritz 5 and posted 10/17; revised 10/19

The Act of Killing (***)

This is among the oddest documentaries I’ve seen, a sometimes goofy take on a most grim subject. With over 200 million inhabitants, Indonesia is, to Americans generally, surely the most mysterious of the world’s populous nations. Even the well-informed may not know about the 1965 coup that resulted in the mass executions of hundreds of thousands of suspected communists, with the assistance of lists provided by “western governments,” as the brief title states. Joshua Oppenheimer does not explore the history that preceded the Suharto dictatorship or the role of the CIA in facilitating it. Instead, he examines a few of the men who committed the atrocities. But rather than just interviewing them, he gets them to re-create their crimes, providing them with professional make-up artists, sets, and letting them direct.

The “star” of the film is one Anwars Congo, a genial, gentle-seeming host who seems to have aged well. In an early segment, he explains — and demonstrates — the method he devised to quickly strangle some 1000 (by his own estimate) victims. Congo still pals around with another of his anti-communist comrades, a overweight and jolly man with a penchant for dressing up like a woman during colorful musical sequences staged by himself and the others.

I confess to being less enthralled by this film than I had expected, given its widespread acclaim. Despite their crimes, Congo and the other men are not characters of great depth; it’s hard to tell whether they felt any strong emotion when killing. Only Congo, who says he sometimes has bad dreams, seems to have even the dimmest qualm about it. The lack of introspection no doubt allowed them to kill easily. Possibly I’d have preferred more history to be included. What is maybe more striking than these unrepentant men, who seem to embody the banality of evil, is that they live in a country than seems as blind to the horror of its past as its perpetrators. The dictator is dead, but there have been no apologies for the past, no truth and reconciliation committees, and obviously no imprisonments. Those empowered by the coup, and their descendants, are still in power, ruling over a corrupt country where people are paid to attend political rallies and, in one of the most astonishing segments, a talk-show host born after 1965 praises her elders for their humane way of eliminating the supposed communists, who remain enemies today. As the numerous credits to “Anonymous” attest, Indonesia is still living with its cruel past.

IMDb link

viewed 7/25 at Gershman Y [PFS screening and reviewed 7/26–8/6/13

 

Twenty Feet from Stardom (***)

Something like a companion piece to Standing in the Shadows of Motown, a documentary about the unheralded musicians who backed up 1960s hits by the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Miracles, the Temptations, and other stars, this shines a spotlight on the backup singers of American popular music, mostly the rock and R&B of the 1960s–'80s. With DIY home-recording equipment, Auto-Tune, and cash-strapped record companies, these are tougher times for backups, but some can still make careers of it.

Movies like this can sometimes be on the dull side because they don’t get beyond testimonies to the wonderfulness of their subjects. The first half has some of that, with Bruce Springsteen (who married his back-up singer), Stevie Wonder, Mick Jagger, and Sheryl Crow (a former back-up singer) among those testifying. Sting does too, but we actually get to see him working in the studio with Lisa Fischer, too. Fischer is one of the stars of the second half of the film, which is built around featurettes about a few of the women, but particularly in terms of their efforts at building solo careers. Among the most successful has been Darlene Love, still singing into her 70s and inducted, as a solo artist, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Then there is Merry Clayton, the powerhouse female voice in the Rolling Stones hit “Gimme Shelter,” whose solo efforts in the 1970s met with only modest success. There is the relatively young Judith Hill, a songwriter who worries that too many backup gigs will derail her efforts to be seen as a solo artist. And there is Fischer, who had a moment of Grammy-winning stardom in the 1980s but professes to be happier as, most prominently, the Rolling Stones’ favorite backup singer on tour.

The film is not as revelatory as Standing in the Shadows; a couple of the women (and, with a few exceptions, the subjects are women) speak of their discomfort at being seen, on stage, as sex objects more than performers, but not that much behind-the-scenes dirt gets dished. (That Ike Turner saw himself as a pimp and his backup dancers as “hos” hardly counts as dirt at this late date.) Nor is there a ton of technical information about how back-ups are utilized in the recording process. But, for those with an interest in pop music, especially pre-1990 rock, the movie should be entertaining. I was especially taken with old clips of an impossibly young David Bowie, of George Harrison at the Concert for Bangladesh, and of Ray Charles exuberantly singing on television with the Raylettes, who included Clayton.

IMDb link

viewed 7/3/13 7:25 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 7/3/13

Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay (***)

If you saw The Illusionist and The Prestige and was as intrigued by the magic as by the story and characters, you’ll enjoy this documentary about Jay, who was a consultant on both films (and many others), and played a small part in The Prestige. As grainy footage attests, Jay, now in his 60s, has been performing for audiences since well before his voice changed. His specialty is slight of hand, especially card tricks.

Deceptive Honesty could have been another title for the film. As Jay, born Ricky Potash, notes, a magician tells the audience they’ll be deceived, then does it, even as the audience tries to figure out the trick. There are lots of them in this movie, and I suspect you won’t be any better than I was at figuring them out. And figuring them out would only be half of it. The other half is the skill of performing, honed from endless practice. The actual title of the film promises mysteries, but while many are presented, none is explained. If you know anything about magicians, it’s that they don’t like to explain their illusions to non-practitioners (and only reluctantly to their own kind). Still, I was kind of hoping that at least one of them, perhaps one of the simpler ones, would be explained. Jay’s life is not much of a mystery — mostly. His occupation seems to take up most of his time. But we also learn that, not long after the death of his grandfather, a magician himself, Ricky Potash left home as a teen and never looked back. And that’s all we learn about that.

As for the “mentors” of the title, there are plenty, the bygone ones with wonderful names like “Cardini” and “Al Flosso.” These men (and there are no female magicians featured) taught him their secrets as a child and befriended him as adults. And, in important ways, the world of magic forms a continuum to the past. It has been, and is likely to be in the future, practiced in much the same way for hundreds of years. Jay is most open when he describes these others, and we see clips or photos of them as well. There are relatively few talking-head segments with others, notably David Mamet, who has employed Jay as both actor and consultant on several films, and has directed two of his one-man shows.

The window into this barely changed culture, and just getting to watch Jay at work, even on a screen, makes the documentary by Molly Bernstein worth a look.

IMDb link

viewed 6/5/13 7:20 pm and reviewed 6/5/13

The Gatekeepers (***1/4)

Shin Bet is the Israeli internal security agency. Its members are unknown to the public save for its directors. Director Dror Moreh has gotten not just one, but all six of the living former heads of the agency, to speak on camera about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Primarily, the documentary proceeds in chronological order, noting several of the turning points and highlights of Israeli security operations, including both successes and failures, notably the assassination (by an Israeli right winger) of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. The visuals include historic footage, footage illustrating several operations in the Israeli occupied territories, and the men themselves, which is helpful, since the film switches back and forth among the six men.

The film details several periods of relations with the Palestians, and the changing approach of the agency over the last 30 years or so. (Some knowledge about the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict is helpful.) Ultimately, however, the film is about the limits of intelligence operations. These men don’t all agree with each other about tactics. They certainly aren’t sympathetic to terrorists—early 1980s director Avraham Shalom unapologetically recalls ordering the killing of two captured bus bombers, for which he was forced to resign. Morality? There is no morality when it comes to terrorists, he says. It’s only a question of tactics. Yet, as another of the men puts it, “When you resign you become a bit of a leftist.”

This film does not present the Palestinian perspective, except as it plays into the thinking of Israelis. It is only these six men (and the interviewer) who speak on camera. Yet the message is that an approach based on distrust and hatred will be bad for both sides. As this appears to be the current approach, the film is somewhat depressing. The conclusion is short, and it’s not clear the security men have any policies in mind to change the mindset on either side. Still, the perspective is valuable.


IMDb link

viewed 3/6/13 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/6/13

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (***1/4)

This documentary, codirected by Werner Herzog, might well have been called Trapped in Siberia. The title might refer to the isolation of the setting, which for more than half the year is accessible only by helicopter from outside the region. Or it might refer to the fate of the sable and other wildlife that are caught by the movie’s “star,” a personable 60-year-old who has been making his life and living for 40 years using an ax, things he makes with his axe (such as skis), and a snowmobile. He spends much of the year roaming a “territory” of about 1500 square kilometers, stocking a series of self-made cabins in the fall, then returning throughout the winter to reap the animals caught in his traps. When the Yenisei River is not frozen over, he catches a lot of fish, too.

There are other people in the film; primarily they are other men who are making a living in traditional ways. The provides only limited cultural context, and virtually no political context, for the lives these men lead. Moreover, while the term “taiga” applies to northern forested lands around the globe, the film specifically deals with one sparsely populated area of Siberia, and leaves out the details of village life. (Visually, the town holds decidedly less charm than the natural landscapes.) This is not a bad thing, but the no-nonsense approach way surprise those who’ve seen Herzog documentaries such as Encounters at the End of the World (filmed in Antartica) or Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Perhaps because this is a collaboration (with Dmitry Vasyukov), Herzog’s German-accented narration is devoid of the speculation and philosophizing he has often employed. Perhaps also he is taking a cue from his leading man, whose own explanations (in Russian, with subtitles) of what he is doing are clear and concise. And, of course, the man’s skill with an ax speaks for itself.

Notwithstanding the apparent contentment of these “happy people,” I doubt anyone viewing this will be persuaded to adopt their lifestyle. Yet it’s impossible not to admire their independence and self-sufficiency.

IMDb link

viewed 2/22/13 7:20 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/23/13

The Queen of Versailles (***1/4)

Twenty-six thousand square feet. Enough room for a couple, eight kids, a nanny, and assorted staff. Enough room to host a reception for all 50 Miss America contestants. Could anyone want more? Apparently, David and Jackie Siegel could. When Lauren Greenfield began her documentary, David was the “time share” king who had recently opened his greatest project, a skyscraper in his adopted hometown of Las Vegas. He boasted of having personally gotten George W. Bush elected president. Jackie, his third wife, was an ex-beauty queen who had borne him a new family of seven young children, though a Filipino nanny did a lot of the less-fun stuff. (They had taken in another girl, Jackie’s niece.) And 26,000 feet was just not big enough.

The Seigels’ new place, nicknamed after the French palace, would become a boondoggle symbolic of the Great Recession, and David’s attempts to maintain his empire, and Jackie’s to reform lifestyle, would give Greenfield’s film an unexpected story arc. David Siegel has meanwhile sued Greenfield over her editing choices, which he argues exaggerate the financial troubles, but all things considered, they don’t come off too badly. At least, they seem more relatable, less hateable, than you would think if all you knew was the bare facts above. Jackie, who is the main character, may not be the world’s best mother—she freely confesses she wouldn’t have had so many kids if she needed to actually raise them herself—and she may be a bit childlike herself, but she’s no Leona Helmsley figure. That is, she’s pleasant to spend time with.

In the end, money, especially money one comes into suddenly, as by lottery or marriage, may not change a person so much as allow a person to indulge the personality one already had. That’s the sense I get here. It’s probably just as true of reality-show contestants, and that’s the vibe of this documentary.

IMDb link

viewed 8/22/12 7:20 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/13–9/15/12

Searching for Sugar Man (***1/4)

I’ve always been impressed by the ability of foreigners to appropriate America’s culture and make it their own. (It happens less the other way around.) We sometimes make a joke of it, as with David Hasselhoff’s popularity in Germany, or Jerry Lewis’s in France. But, on the evidence presented here, and it’s pretty good evidence, Sixto Rodriguez is bigger that Hasselhoff, or Lewis…in South Africa.

That the Detroit native made only two albums in the early 1970s and remained completely unknown everywhere else, including Detroit, makes the story unlikely. Even more unlikely, and impossible in today’s digitally connected world, is that Rodriguez heard nothing of his overseas following. Nor did the South Africans know anything about the man who was a household name there. (At least among the white population. Although Rodriguez is said to have been an inspiration to whites who opposed apartheid, his fan base does not appear to be multiracial.) Fans pored over lyrics for clues about the artist. There were rumors — he was said to have committed suicide before a hostile audience — but that’s all.

So this documentary — by a Swede, Malik Bendjelloul — is a kind of detective story as much as anything else. Bendjelloul also managed to interview the producers of the two albums, who attest to his genius, but that’s not the interesting part. What turns out to have happened to Rodriguez, including his missed opportunity for 1970s stardom, is both unusual and mundane. And the movie itself has provided its own touching ending to the story, with its soundtrack and Rodriguez’s re-released 1970 debut finally granting him the chart placings that eluded him 40 years ago. The music itself, incidentally, fits into the emerging singer-songwriter sensibility of the time, but with generally grittier lyrics and a haunting musical quality somewhat reminiscent of another 1970s artist who has re-emerged, Nick Drake, with some Bob Dylan influences. There’s plenty of it heard in the movie, which cannot explain its enduring qualities nor the vagaries of circumstance and coincidence that can affect what becomes popular.


IMDb link


viewed 10/17/12 7:45 pm at Ritz Five and reviewed 10/17/12

Pink Ribbons, Inc. (***1/4)

You probably know the subject of this far-reaching documentary from the title. In just 20 years, the pink ribbon has become the symbol of a now-worldwide movement to raise breast-cancer awareness. If awareness is the measure, the movement has been a near-complete success. (In surveys, women routinely overestimate their risk of getting the disease.) If raising money is the measure, it’s also hard to argue with the approach taken by organizations like the Susan G. Komen Foundation and the Avon Foundation, which has been to partner with private companies and sponsor a variety of participatory activities such as the Race for the Cure. However, if reducing the loss of life to breast cancer is the goal, the success is more modest. Overall rates of cancer have increased in recent decades, and treatment gains have been modest.

This movie—financed by the Film Board of Canada, interestingly—is based on the book Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy by Samantha King. Boiled down, the film’s argument is that the emphasis on corporate-friendly fundraising and feel-good awareness events has been at the expense of research into the causes of breast cancer and to a more focused policy that would coordinate the efforts of dozens of governmental and scientific efforts. Although there is no time for deep epidemiology, the film gradually builds to the suggestion that environmental causes are an important, if not the most important, cause of breast cancer. Many of these environmental causes might implicate the companies that associate themselves with Komen et al. (Breast Cancer Awareness Month was actually cofounded by a drug company that stands to gain if women use its cancer drugs, but not from prevention.) Yet the film is not a polemic. The director, Léa Pool, has primarily directed narrative features, and she makes sure to include a variety of viewpoints as well as the usual colorful graphics and fun historical footage; she includes the surprising origin of the ribbon symbol.

Representatives from Komen (CEO Nancy Brinker, who resigned in 2012) and Avon get plenty of face time, and so do the many people volunteering their time and efforts. The film does not imply that they are insincere or claim that they have done no good at all, though it is possible that a couple of the women interviewed think that. These include Barbara Ehrenreich, the left-leaning social critic and ornery “survivor” of breast cancer who doesn’t care for the term; Barbara Brenner, longtime leader of the less-mainstream Breast Cancer Action; author King, who provides a lot of the historical critique; and a number of other activists, researchers, and stage-four patients. Given its breadth, the documentary is fairly successful at presenting its many viewpoints in an engrossing way. Ideally, it too will raise awareness that will translate into action.

IMDb link

viewed 8/2/12 7:20 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/2/12

Surviving Progress (**1/4)

This liberal feel-good (or feel-bad) documentary, adapted from a book by Ronald Wright, makes the case that our society is a kind of bubble that may soon burst. Specifically, Wright argues that modern humans have fallen into a “progress trap.” As with ancient hunters who became so adept at slaughtering mammoths that they killed off the source of their wealth, we have become so adept at exploiting natural resources that we are exceeding the capacity of Earth to regenerate them. He gives 1980 as the date when we began to do this on a global scale, although the film echoes people like Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, whose warnings of catastrophe began 40 years ago and proved, at least, premature. It’s not quite clear why 1980 is the key date, but perhaps it’s not coincidental that that’s when Ronald Reagan was elected. That’s also when the United States began to experience an increasing concentration of wealth that continues. The film implies, not entirely correctly, that this is a phenomenon everywhere. Economist Michael Hudson links wealth concentration to the fall of the Roman Empire and says “that’s what’s threatening to bring in the Dark Ages again.”

Only the fiercest anti-environmentalists would deny that the explosive growth in output and wasteful use of resources in the last decades brings challenges with it. But to declare, as the film does, that a phenomenon that has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in Asia since 1980s is a “failed experiment” is at best premature and overstated. Geneticist David Suzuki broadly criticize economics, which is “not a science,” for ignoring pollution and other societal costs. “Economists call these externalities…that’s nuts.” However, plenty of economists, including Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman, have written about the problems of externalities. Suzuki seems to disparage the profession for having created the very term. Repeatedly, the documentary argues by such assertion, rather than proof, wielding very little empirical data. A detour to Brazil provides some detail about deforestation, but, generally, I longed for more specificity.

To be fair, proving such a bold thesis is well beyond the purview of a feature-length documentary. Wright’s book, which I have not read, dwells more on past civilizations than our current one. Given that it’s far easier to explain the past than predict the future, perhaps the directors, Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, should have followed that path. Alternately, they might have deeply delved into some specific areas where the negative effects of human activity are undeniable. There’s a lot of talent on hand here—the talking heads include Jane Goodall, Stephen and Hawking, and authors Robert Wright and Margaret Atwood—and building a film around any one of them might have been better than giving each a few sound bites. One participant, writer-engineer Colin Beavan, actually made his own film about his and his wife’s experiment in nonconsumption. Though based on a gimmick, Beavan’s No Impact Man: The Documentary nonetheless seriously grapples with the idea of conservation in a more concrete (and entertaining) way.

The positives of the film include some nifty time-lapse simulations and the opening and closing segments, in which gorillas trying to solve a logic problem. (This sort of ties into the idea that our brains have not evolved too far beyond that of apes, so we’re lousy at anticipating long-term consequences.) But the most worthwhile portion of the documentary is the one about solutions, which includes the expected warnings (by Beavan and others) about the need to conserve but also interviews with geneticists, notably Craig Ventner, about the possibility of generating artificial organisms to repair damage or even improve upon human physiology. Like everything else here, it’s quite speculative, but since the turf is less familiar, also fascinating.

IMDb link

viewed 5/22/12 7:20 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 5/23/12 and 5/25/12

Chimpanzee (***1/2)

A coproduction of the Jane Goodall Institute, this should further burnish the reputation of Disneynature as a distributor of high-quality documentaries. (The two directors also worked on Earth, the first film distributed by Disneynature.) With stunning footage shot in jungles in Uganda and Ivory Coast, it follows a year or so in the life of a young chimp who is called Oscar, along with a few other members of the group he lives in. The “plot” mostly centers around food and the troupe’s efforts to find it, move it, open it (in the case of nuts), and defend it from a neighboring group. The characters consist of Oscar, his mother, the group leader, and a couple of other chimps who are specifically identified. There is drama, pathos, and light comedy, as with Oscar’s inept attempt to crack open a walnut. For this the chimps use large stones, a learned behavior that takes a long time to master.

Though it will appeal to adults, the documentary is clearly aimed at a family audience. The narration, read by Tim Allen*, is styled like it might accompany one of Disney’s traditional animated features. Oscar is referred to as “our little guy” and the like. The leaves one chimp munches on become a “side salad,” and so on. Still, it’s actually good storytelling that should be quite riveting even for kids used to animals that talk. Adults will be amazed at the painstaking effort that must have gone into capturing the apes as they hunt, prey, shiver in the rain, groom each other, and, of course, eat. They might also notice that not a word is said about mating; the chimps’ promiscuous ways would presumably be less family friendly than the pair bonding of, say, emperor penguins. The camera also cuts away from the most viscous scenes of predation.

Even with the anthropomorphic narration and child-friendly editing, the success the filmmakers have had recording the lives of these difficult-to-document animals makes this well worth watching for anyone with even a mild interest in the subject. Some beautiful time-lapse photography is  
a bonus.

*I’d never noticed before how much his voice sounds like that of Brad Pitt

IMDb link

viewed at Franklin Institute 12:00 N 5/27/12

Bully (**3/4)

Thanks to the ratings controversy surrounding the inclusion of a few words that virtually anyone seeing this would already have heard many times, this documentary from Lee Hirsch (Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony) arrives with more fanfare than most. It’s probable that the subjects of the film, none old enough to see an R-rated movie alone, would have heard the words actually directed at them many times. That’s what’s happening when we watch Alex, the most prominent “star” of the film, get harassed and punched on a school bus. Also prominent are Kelby, ostracized in her high school for being a lesbian; Ja’Maya, a 14-year-old whose bullies drove her to an impulsive, foolish act; and two other boys whose parents or classmate must speak for them, because they committed suicide. (For whatever reason, all of the students profiled are from small-to-medium-size communities in the South and Midwest.)

Alex, whose large mouth has gotten him tagged with the name “fish face,” is unique in that Hirsch was actually able to film him on the bus, in school, and at home, his refuge. His social awkwardness is more apparent than with the others. Besides the scenes with his middle-school classmates, we see administrators failing to address the problem. In a scene sure to provoke the most discussion, the vice principal at Alex’s school tells another boy that his refusal to shake hands with his tormentor means they’re alike. Sensibly, he replies yes, but I don’t hit him.

Would that there had been more insight into the ways in which bullying persists. Hirsch eschews an academic approach and so does not present any “experts” on the subject. But, given that the problem of bullying has been getting increasing attention for a few years now, perhaps he could have visited a community that has truly made an effort to address the problem. Perhaps he could have interviewed the kids who bully, or who did in the past. One kid, the best friend of an eleven-year-old suicide victim, does admit that he was a bully in second grade, but stopped as he saw the effect it was having. But he does not explain what was satisfying about bullying or why he began to feel empathy for his victims.


Bully is film that is sure to provoke empathy, and seems almost wholly directed to that goal. Perhaps even bullies will identify with the victims, should they see the movie. Adults may identify with the grieving/helpless parents, or maybe even the vice principal. She is certainly exasperating, perhaps even clueless, but she is also genuinely at a loss as to how to help. No doubt she is like many other administrators in many schools. (Kelby tells a different story; she encountered outright hostility from faculty as well as students. Although the film does not make this point, combating anti-gay harassment may require another sort of strategy.) In the end, the film is silent as to what, in fact, a sympathetic administrator should do to combat bullying. Its solutions begin, and end, with community awareness.

IMDb link

viewed 4/9/12 7:00 pm at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/10 and 4/12/12