Nanking (2007) – DVD

May 4, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, DVD, War

**½/**** Image A Sound A
directed by Bill Guttentag & Dan Sturman

by Alex Jackson Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's 90-minute documentary on the 1937 Nanking Massacre isn't so much reductive or simplistic as it is overachieving. The film suggests several promising avenues of discussion but stops there, at the level of overview, leaving you frustrated and hungry. As I felt similarly unsatisfied by the Ken Burns mini-series The Civil War, it occurs to me that the problem is one not of brevity but of excess ambition. With several hours at his disposal, Burns tried and failed to meet the likely-futile goal of creating the definitive document of the American Civil War. Even allowing for the decrease in scale, Guttentag and Sturman shouldn't have expected to sum up the entirety of the Nanking Massacre in a scant hour-and-a-half. By trying to tell us everything about the Nanking Massacre, Nanking ultimately tells us very little.

Sundance ’09: Earth Days

February 3, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance
***/****directed by Robert Stone by Alex Jackson I'm not quite sure how I feel about the environmental movement--the subject of Robert Stone's documentary Earth Days. There are two inarguable, somewhat contradictory truths at work here: mankind has been destroying and continues to destroy the planet he is inhabiting; and various doomsday scenarios predicted by the environmental and population-control movements have not come to pass. Stone shows us environmental leaders from three decades ago predicting that the sky will fall in 30 years. I sort of wish he had found room for a clip from Richard Fleischer's great 1973 film Soylent…

Sundance ’09: Kimjongilia

January 28, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, South Korea, Sundance
The Flower of Kim Jong II**½/****directed by NC Heikin by Alex Jackson Kimjongilia takes its title from a hybrid red begonia created in honour of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's 46th birthday. It is said to symbolize wisdom, love, justice, and peace. Director NC Heikin juxtaposes propaganda footage romanticizing Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung's North Korea against interviews with former oppressed North Koreans who now reside in South Korea. As political filmmaking, it's pretty crude. There really aren't two sides to this issue: Kim Jong Il is a bad guy and there doesn't seem to…

Sundance ’09: Boy Interrupted

January 25, 2009Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Biopic, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
***/****directed by Dana Perry by Alex Jackson In 2005, Dana and Hart Perry's 15-year-old son Evan fulfilled a life-long obsession with suicide by jumping out his bedroom window. Documentary filmmakers by profession, the Perrys worked through their grief by making this feature-length memorial to him. Exactly the sort of thing that seems immune to criticism, the film is nonetheless admirably free of sentimentality. When Perry includes footage of herself pregnant with Evan, she does so as a professional documentarian economically conveying the depth of a mother's attachment to her offspring. Given that one of Evan's dying wishes was to be…

Standard Operating Procedure (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

November 25, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Documentary

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
directed by Errol Morris

by Bryant Frazer There's a tension in Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure between the subject matter–the torture and humiliation of inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad during the U.S. occupation of Iraq–and what Morris is really up to. Anyone who's read his excellent "Zoom" blog for THE NEW YORK TIMES, including his brilliant, three-part consideration of the pedigree of two different photographs taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War, knows that the director is concerned lately with the methodical, emotionless investigation of the circumstances surrounding a picture's taking. He wants to know what a photo conceals in addition to what it reveals–what's happening outside its spatial frame? Its temporal boundaries?

W. (2008) + Trouble the Water (2008)

October 28, 2008Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Theatrical

W.
**½/****
starring Josh Brolin, James Cromwell, Elizabeth Banks, Ellen Burstyn
screenplay by Stanley Weiser
directed by Oliver Stone

TROUBLE THE WATER
**½/****
directed by Carl Deal & Tia Lessin

by Walter Chaw John Powers once called Nixon-era Oliver Stone our most Nixonian director: smart, driven, divisive, unlikeable. So the neatest trick of Stone's latest biopic, W., is to make George W. Bush–arguably the most reviled, detached, ideologically arrogant president since James Buchanan–a figure of genuine pathos. Never mind that this incurious, adolescent, fundamentalist fanatic is our proverbial Nero, fiddling while every foundational tenet of Lincoln's party is fed to anti-intellectualism and evangelical Christianity. George Orwell said something once about how the end of democracy is heralded by millionaires leading dishwashers; what's unexpected for me is the extent to which the Republican party in the new millennium has not only convinced the blue-collar to vote against its own self-interests by waging class warfare against liberals, but also begun to turn against the intellectuals in its own party. "Georgetown cocktail party" conservatives are now painted with the same broad brushstroke as "Latte-sipping" lefties–and this idea of abandoning the middle class takes on the onus of not just money and privilege, but education and eloquence as well. The logical end-point of wanting a President as ill-read, venal, and feckless as your alcoholic born-again Uncle Festus is a figure like Governor Sarah Palin, whose chief qualification appears to be her ability to blend into your local chapter of Oprah's Fan Club without a ripple. Hate, division, ugly innuendo, and racism: sowing fear and reaping the political benefits until the house falls down.

John Adams (2008) + Jimmy Carter Man from Plains (2007) – DVDs

October 21, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Biopic, Directors: Jonathan Demme, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Television

JOHN ADAMS
Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
“Join or Die,” “Independence,” “Don’t Tread on Me,” “Reunion,” “Unite or Die,” “Unnecessary War,” “Peacefield”

JIMMY CARTER MAN FROM PLAINS
***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Ian Pugh It’s hardly anything new to explore the professional brilliance and personal failings of those upon whom history has bestowed the title of Greatness, but Tom Hooper’s epic miniseries John Adams bucks genre expectations by refusing to keep us at arm’s length with a standardized character archetypally flawed, deigning to present us instead with an actual human being. Certainly, it forges an entry point in dismissing the sense of harmonious unity we usually attribute to those early American leaders: marvel as the opinion Adams (Paul Giamatti, a delightfully bitter pill) holds of stoic, wooden George Washington (David Morse) sours from respect to resentment; smirk as he barely hides his contempt for the hedonistic Ben Franklin (Tom Wilkinson) and his platitudinous adages; shock as he is too late in realizing the treachery orchestrated by that prick Alexander Hamilton (Rufus Sewell). But it’s not enough to tear down romantic icons by having General Washington–who looks as if he’s leapt out of a Stuart painting–crack one of his false teeth at breakfast. “Bed, both’a ya!” Adams shouts at his children shortly after witnessing the bloody aftermath of the Boston Massacre, and suddenly the shroud of tall tales collapses in a single powerful blast from a man who may represent the antithesis of any preconceived notions we have about the era of powdered wigs and stockings.

Shine a Light (2008) + Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (2008) – Blu-ray Discs

August 28, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Concert Doc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Disney, Documentary, Music

SHINE A LIGHT
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
directed by Martin Scorsese

HANNAH MONTANA/MILEY CYRUS: BEST OF BOTH WORLDS CONCERT TOUR
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
directed by Bruce Hendricks

by Bill Chambers Film critic and snarkmeister extraordinaire Glenn Kenny recently blogged, "When Martin Scorsese's Shine a Light hit theaters in April, it gave movie critics, myself included, a chance…to weigh in on just what they thought of [the Rolling Stones]. It sure was fun, kinda, but rather missed a point, which is that having an opinion on The Stones these days is like having an opinion about Mount Rushmore. No one really gives a shit." While I'm inclined to agree, does that not make a concert from "The Stones these days" tantamount to a sightseeing tour of Mt. Rushmore? What, then, does Shine a Light leave us to talk about? Sadly, not a lot.

Encounters at the End of the World (2008) + Frozen River (2008)

August 1, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Drama, Theatrical

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
***½/****
directed by Werner Herzog

FROZEN RIVER
*½/****
starring Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott, Mark Boone Junior
written and directed by Courtney Hunt

by Walter Chaw It’s a source of endless delight for me that Werner Herzog–the man who refers to nature as “obscene”–has become known of late for delivering mordant, mildly condescending nature documentaries. His Grizzly Man is a modern classic of Bavarian madness–now find Herzog in Antarctica, declaring at regular intervals in Encounters at the End of the World that “something doesn’t seem right” with a perfectly-preserved hut used by Shackleton a hundred years ago, or with a demented penguin making its way to certain doom on an inexplicable march to the inland. With an opening that has Herzog immodestly laying out his mission statement as wishing to discover, in a roundabout way, why it is that men are obsessed with riding their metaphorical steeds into the wild unknowns, he illustrates the conundrum with a sideswipe at mankind, equating us with ants that hold other insect species as “slaves” and wondering why chimps, despite their intellectual sophistication, decline to domesticate goats to ride them on their own existential pursuits.

Lake of Fire (2007) – DVD

May 6, 2008Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A-
directed by Tony Kaye

by Alex Jackson I'm all over the map on Tony Kaye's epic abortion documentary Lake of Fire. I suppose the first thing that bothers me is that the film purports to be about a controversial issue, as I don't perceive any controversy on the issue of abortion: anybody trying to take away women's access to safe and legal abortions is a moron. It's not that the pro-life movement is immoral and it's not that they merely have values that differ from my own. It's that they are idiots. There is only one right answer and if you can't see it, it's because you are a moron and haven't really thought the situation through.

Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains the Same (1976) – Blu-ray Disc

March 13, 2008Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Concert Doc, Documentary, Fantasy, Music, UK

The Song Remains the Same
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant
directed by Joe Massot and Peter Clifton

by Bill Chambers I was a closet Led Zeppelin fanboy throughout my teen years. It wasn’t because I thought their music reflected poor taste (no guilty pleasure, they–no need to sic Carl Wilson on me), but rather because there are connotations to liking them I felt misrepresented me and my affection for the band as facilitators of emotional catharsis. Affiliate yourself with The Cure and at the very least you’ll score points with hot goth chicks; affiliate yourself with Led Zeppelin and expect to spend your Friday nights rolling 20-sided dice and/or mingling with ersatz hippies. In retrospect, I had basically separated the Led Zeppelin discography from the iconographic baggage that came with it; and I think part of the reason I could never get through The Song Remains the Same (the movie, not the album, although the album is no great shakes) as a teenager–other than the fact that, no matter how you slice it, it simply isn’t very good–was because its goofy non sequiturs and psychedelic glaze endeavoured to undo all my hard work. I found its imagery psychically intrusive on the seven minutes a day I spent moping to “The Rain Song.”

Sundance ’08: American Teen

January 25, 2008Posted in2000s, 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.…

Sundance ’08: The Order of Myths

January 23, 2008Posted in2000s, 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 in…

Sundance ’08: The Recruiter

January 22, 2008Posted in2000s, 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 real world,…

Sundance ’08: Yasukuni

January 21, 2008Posted in2000s, 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 contest…

Matthew Barney: No Restraint (2006) – DVD

December 6, 2007Posted in2000s, 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

November 5, 2007Posted in2000s, 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

September 19, 2007Posted in2000s, 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)

July 3, 2007Posted in2000s, 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

May 3, 2007Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, DVD, FFC Must-Own

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

Mustownby 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 to even contemplate the construction of titans.