Sundance ’08: American Teen

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance, Teen

*/****
directed by Nanette Burstein

by Alex Jackson Real life is just like the movies, according to Nanette Burstein’s American Teen. The film follows the adventures of The Brain, The Athlete, The Princess, and The Basket Case as they finish their last year of high school. By the end, we learn that each one of them is a brain, an athlete, a princess, and a basket case. In other words, they’re all individuals while being pretty much the same. Burstein seems to have turned complete control of the film over to her subjects and resisted refining anything through her own perspective. The results are predictably excruciating to watch. Via the resources of the cinema (slick photography and editing, animated sequences), the teens are transformed into gods, a needlessly flattering notion to the adolescent ego. You’re worried about getting into college? Your boyfriend broke up with you, and you’re depressed? These problems really are as monumental as they seem; it’s substance enough for a feature-length film! Some reviews have complained that the fantasies that inspired the animated sequences are tired clichés: the jock dreams of winning the big game, the geeky kid dreams of getting a girlfriend, etc.. If the fantasy sequences don’t have a whole lot of depth, that’s because their originators don’t have a whole lot of depth, either. What do you expect? They’re only 17.

Sundance ’08: The Order of Myths

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance
**/**** directed by Margaret Brown by Alex Jackson Margaret Brown's The Order of Myths is the flipside to blandly noble docs like The Recruiter. Faithful to the ideal of "objectivity," the typical documentary filmmaker doesn't love anything; Brown's problem is that she loves everything. The result is a film that works very well as cinema: it has a pulse, a mood, a feeling, and is never boring. Yet it also has a terminal case of the cutes, and after it was over I can't say I felt all that edified. The film is about the traditionally segregated Mardi Gras carnival…

Sundance ’08: The Recruiter

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance
An American Soldier **/**** directed by Edet Belzberg by Alex Jackson The Recruiter, which also goes by the moderately less forgettable title An American Soldier, is just another Sundance documentary, barely distinguishable from past efforts like The Ground Truth or Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. The film follows Army recruiter Sergeant First Class Clay Usie as he brings a new generation of soldiers to the front lines. Director Edet Belzberg's splintered narrative sees four recruits go off to boot camp, where they find themselves in way over their heads. Belzberg's thesis seems to be that these recruits are kids--unprepared for the…

Sundance ’08: Yasukuni

Posted in2000s, 2008, Authors: Alex Jackson, China, Documentary, Film Festivals, Japan, Sundance
***½/**** directed by Li Ying by Alex Jackson Yasukuni is a Shinto shrine in Tokyo dedicated to the spirits of soldiers who died serving the Emperor of Japan. Included within the 2,466,532 names are 27,863 Taiwanese, 21,181 Koreans, and, most significantly, 1,068 convicted war criminals. The shrine is a centre of controversy for many Asians, some of whom feel their ancestors were forced to serve the Emperor and thus wouldn't want to be listed. Others could never endorse a shrine that features, for example, the names of Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Takeshi, the two officers who participated in a beheading…

Matthew Barney: No Restraint (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
directed by Alison Chernick

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Full disclosure: my exposure to Matthew Barney extends solely to his whales/Björk/petroleum jelly extravaganza Drawing Restraint 9, and to say I didn't get it would be putting it mildly: it sailed so far over my head that it may still be in orbit somewhere over Mercury. Yet I was game for Alison Chernick's Matthew Barney: No Restraint, if for no reason other than that it might decode said production and provide a framework for appreciating Barney's other work. On this score, the film only does half the job. Running an abbreviated 71 minutes, it offers a rather rushed assessment of the artist's métier, with various critics and performers peppering the roughest outline of Barney's modus operandi with soundbites of approval. When all's said and done, it's a teasing, fitfully interesting suggestion of a mindset but far from key to understanding Barney's peculiar dream logic.

Iraq in Fragments (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD, War

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
directed by James Longley

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Aesthetically speaking, Iraq in Fragments isn't all that fragmentary. Although director James Longley essentially divides the country into thirds (according to Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd), the film is really quite fluid and harmonious. This has its drawbacks: we're released from the take-a-step-back God's-eye approach familiar from countless documentaries and thrown into what appears to be the scrum of social life in Iraq, sink or swim. A little context would be useful, as it would be if we were in the middle of the war zone itself. Whatever the shortcomings of this approach, however, Iraq in Fragments takes a necessary swipe at the idea that the eponymous country was a mass of undifferentiated Oppressed yearning for a conquering hero to release it from bondage. It suggests that Iraq is at least as complex as that of its invading "liberators"; and if Longley's three snapshots can contradict each other, that's to be expected from any nation with more than one cultural faction.

Going To Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film (2006) [Unrated] – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, DVD, Horror

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
director uncredited

by Alex Jackson My cardinal rule about documentaries: they shouldn’t just coast on the gravitas of their subject matter. They have to have some kind of perspective and work on their own terms. With that said, documentaries about movies are a bit of a blind spot for me, as I have a particularly strong difficulty separating my affection for the film and my affection for what it’s about. I know that This Film Is Not Yet Rated isn’t very good–it’s childish and doesn’t mount a terribly convincing case against the MPAA. But come on, I could talk for hours about the MPAA if I could find somebody who would want to listen. Cinemania? Yeah, the filmmakers didn’t do much more than point and laugh at those guys. God help me, though, I had a little envy for them: I only wish I could theatre-hop in New York City, exclusively watching the films that interest me without worrying about money or having to review them. I could feel that my critical capacities were being tested in these cases, but I survived. However, when you have a documentary that isn’t about merely the movies, but about slasher movies specifically–well, shit, any pretense of objectivity on my part has officially gone out the window.

Sicko (2007)

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Theatrical

**/****
directed by Michael Moore

by Walter Chaw There’s a moment that stands out in my mind about Fahrenheit 9/11, which tied with The Passion of the Christ as my pick for the worst film of 2004 (one for the left, one for the right): it’s the moment when Michael Moore, in the middle of a riff about the “coalition of the willing” backing the United States into Iraq, descends through archival footage and rinky music to mock the countries that were actually our allies. The point being that America pretty much took matters into their own hands while breaking international law and flaunting its power over a largely impotent United Nations–and the effect being that Moore is a complete fucking asshole so concentrated on making a narrow, obvious point that he handily proves the widespread perception of Americans as xenophobic, arrogant, ignorant, and loudmouthed. Going after the Bush administration is enough like shooting fish in a barrel that most of Bush’s own party has turned against him (not helping, probably, is that a majority of soldiers losing their lives in Iraq come from economically disadvantaged families). Likewise, going after lax gun-control laws and a society of fear following the Columbine High School shootings; likewise, corporate superciliousness in the rise and fall of industry in industrial America. I think, in other words, that Moore has made a living shooting fish in barrels, and that his latest target in Sicko, the United States’ inhuman health care industry (and its lobbyists–four per congressman!, Moore informs), is just another one of those arguments no one is taking the other side on.

Manufactured Landscapes (2006) – DVD

Manufactured Landscapes (2006) – DVD

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, DVD, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
directed by Jennifer Baichwal

by Walter Chaw There’s something about Jennifer Baichwal’s profiles of artists. After debuting with a nicely-modulated piece on writer Paul Bowles, Baichwal heard her muse with The True Meaning of Pictures, a profile of Appalachian portrait photog Shelby Lee Adams that, without overtly politicizing the subject, digs gratifyingly deep into the question of where representation becomes exploitation and, trickier still, how the audience might have as much to do with that difficult equation as the essayist himself. With Manufactured Landscapes, Baichwal looks at the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, an artist who shoots landscapes of industrial wastelands that reveal men to be astonishingly productive beasts–and destructive, too, in the same procreative stroke. It’s hard to imagine the industry necessary to manufacture the scale of the freighters getting dismantled in the ship-breaking yards to which Baichwal travels with Burtynsky (I’ve heard a similar sense of awe attends a visit to the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA)–hard to assimilate the amount of Nietzschian will-to-power necessary even to contemplate the construction of titans.

On Native Soil (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
directed by Linda Ellman

by Alex Jackson I know I’m beating a dead horse here, but I think the documentary too often gets a pass as cinema. All of the focus is on the subject matter and next to no interest is paid to technique. The core audience for documentaries might be the same one Pauline Kael described in her infamous essay “Fear of Movies”, i.e., the people who refused to see Carrie, Taxi Driver, or even Jaws because they “don’t like violence” (read: they don’t like anything that is going to take them out of their comfort zone). The larger problem isn’t simply that films, on a visceral level, ought to be pleasurable or, at minimum, interesting, but that the lack of filmmaking excitement in most documentaries is intended to approximate objectivity, which is poisonous to art. “Objectivity,” almost by definition, eliminates values and any perceivable human element, and once art eliminates values and any perceivable human element, it ceases to have any utility.

Philadelphia Film Festival ’07: Zoo

Posted in****/****, 2007, Authors: Ian Pugh, Documentary, Film Festivals
****/**** directed by Robinson Devor by Ian Pugh Constructed as a series of dream-like, blue-tinted re-enactments anonymously narrated (and sometimes acted out in silhouette) by the people involved, Zoo--so named for an apparently in-crowd nickname for "zoophile"--documents a small group of individuals gathered together on a ranch in Washington, one of the few states in the union where bestiality is "not illegal," to hang out and share their love for animals; their illusions of solitude are shattered, however, when one of them dies from a perforated colon after having sex with a horse. The zoophiles are portrayed here as fairly…

Philadelphia Film Festival ’07: The King of Kong

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Ian Pugh, Biopic, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sports
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters **/**** directed by Seth Gordon by Ian Pugh Sarcastically described as Rocky for video games, The King of Kong is superficially about how human beings will latch on to any opportunity to acquire fame and admiration--but really it's about how easy it is to laugh at nerds. The documentary follows the subculture of obsessive retro gaming, because there's a shake-up in the works: junior-high science teacher and family man Steve Wiebe is closing the gap on the (world-record) high score for "Donkey Kong" held by pretentious hot-sauce mogul Billy Mitchell. These middle-aged…

Fuck (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD

F*ck
½*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C-
directed by Steve Anderson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I have no doubt that a first-rate documentarian could make a smart, provocative film about the sources and uses of the word “fuck.” But the thing about first-rate documentarians is, they usually have better things to do. Thus, it has been left to one Steve Anderson to do the legwork, resulting in a film that flaunts something far more obscene than the Seven Dirty Words: the self-righteous piety of comedians. Though I have been a lifelong user of the famous four-letter word, I found Anderson’s Fuck almost completely unbearable, as it brings out a variety of non-experts left and right to get hot-and-bothered about something that almost certainly needs to be appended to a larger issue. Between comics who are all too happy to attack us with their hostile fuck-talk and right-wingers who counter with vicious, repressive hate, it would require a stronger man than I to sit through Fuck without feeling completely battered down.

The Up Series [Five Disk Collector’s Edition] – DVD

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2007, Authors: Ian Pugh, Documentary, DVD, FFC Must-Own, UK

by Ian Pugh “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.”

So goes the Jesuit maxim, and, as it happens, so begins almost every review you’ll find of Michael Apted’s “Up” documentary series. Of course, you can’t really fault someone for falling back on that warhorse (or this would be a very ironic paragraph indeed), because it’s the concept that brought the original television production Seven Up! to life, intended as it was as “a glimpse into Britain’s future.” That is to say, into the lives of fourteen seven-year-olds, chosen from all walks of life (though mostly from polar opposites of the class divide) and asked about the world, their ambitions, and just generally how they’re doing; they’ve been revisited for the same purpose every seven years hence.

Jesus Camp (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
directed by Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It’s hard not to be moved by the horrors of Jesus Camp. A record of one Pastor Becky Fischer’s far-right Christian summer camp, it’s loaded with stuff any compassionate person would decry–usually the cruelty and intimidation of adults, who are often seen scaring children shitless. But even as we may despise these guileless sadists as they reveal themselves to the camera, at some point it all begins to ring hollow. The film has nothing beyond the image of children being bullied while their parents natter on about hateful fundamentalism; perhaps most regrettably, there’s no discussion as to why, in the 21st century, 80 million Americans willingly believe in such corrosive nonsense.

Sundance ’07: Strange Culture

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
*/**** starring Thomas Jay Ryan, Tilda Swinton, Peter Coyote written and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson by Alex Jackson On May 11, 2004, artist and college professor Steve Kurtz called 911 to report the death of his wife Hope by heart failure. When medics arrived, they saw his art supplies and called the FBI: in preparing an installation that would let patrons test whether food had been genetically modified, Kurtz had ordered biological materials over the Internet. The feds detained Kurtz as a suspected terrorist and confiscated his equipment. After a grand jury rejected the charges of terrorism, Uncle Sam…

Sundance ’07: VHS – Kahloucha

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance, Tunisia
**/**** directed by Nejib Belkadhi by Alex Jackson There may very well be a Pauline Kael review for every occasion. For VHS - Kahloucha, it's her dismissal of Francois Truffaut's Day for Night: "[It's] a movie for the movie-struck, the essentially naïve--those who would rather see a movie, any movie (a bad one, a stupid one, or an evanescent, sweet-but-dry little wafer of a movie like this one), than do anything else." Ayup, that about covers it. This documentary portrait of amateur Tunisian filmmaker Moncef Kahloucha never makes the mistake of condescending to its subject, but it never quite elucidates…

Sundance ’07: Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Ireland, Music, Sundance, UK
***/**** directed by Julien Temple by Alex Jackson I worry that this film was wasted on me. I usually walk out of the Q&A sessions after festival screenings because I can't bear to hear the stupid questions the audience asks or, as in the case of M dot Strange, the filmmaker's stupid answers. This time, however, the questions were intelligent and thoughtful, and, it almost goes without saying, so were the replies. Watching Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, I was reminded a bit of those critics who said that The Passion of the Christ was made for hardcore Christians…

Sundance ’07: Crazy Love

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance

***½/****
directed by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens

by Alex Jackson Dan Klores’s Crazy Love is essentially just another talking-head documentary, but my goodness what talking heads they are! At first, it seems that Klores–to echo that oft-repeated charge against pop-doc filmmakers like Errol Morris, Michael Moore, and Chris Smith–is condescending to his subjects by laying their distinctly Jewish tackiness out to be skewered. But as the picture soldiers on, any emotional detachment dissolves away: these people aren’t tactless so much as they’re simply candid. They have absolutely nothing to hide, and that openness makes it extremely difficult to categorize anybody in the film as a monster or a victim. Burt Pugach was a prominent negligence lawyer in the East Bronx; in the fall of 1957, he spotted secretary Linda Riss, fell in love with her, and successfully seduced her. When he couldn’t divorce his wife, Riss left him and got engaged to somebody else. Enraged and deeply depressed, Pugach hired some goons to rough her up. They threw acid in her face, eventually blinding her. Pugach served a stint in prison, and when he got out he proposed to Riss. She accepted–the way she figures it, she’s blind and nobody wants her or is willing to be with her except Pugach, who was the one who blinded her in the first place, explicitly so that nobody else would want her. He “wins.”

Dane Cook’s Tourgasm (2006) – DVD

Posted in2000s, 2006, 2007, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Documentary, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A- Extras D
“The First Laugh,” “Working It Out,” “The United States of Insanity,” “It Was The Best of Times…,” “Determined and Injured,” “Competitively Speaking,” “Beginning of the End,” “Back in the Day,” “The Curtain Call”

by Ian Pugh It’s not that I don’t get Dane Cook. In fact, it’s difficult not to occasionally chuckle when looking over his repertoire, as in ruminating on the general inconvenience of having the Kool-Aid Man burst through your wall and the fact that no one can ever finish a game of Monopoly, or wondering who would write racial epithets while sitting on the toilet, he represents a strict literalization of that old sarcastic summation of stand-up comedy: “He’s sayin’ what we’re all thinkin’!” It’s not that funny, but we all laugh, anyway, partially for Cook’s enthusiasm, partially because he’s a reflection of us at our most vulnerable (that is, at our stalest creative moments), proudly transcribing the idle thoughts and half-attempts at wit that pass through our minds on a daily basis. We laugh, painfully, because we’ve all contemplated what Cook has to say.