This is Not a Film (Friday, March 2, 2012) (21)

In December 2010, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, one of the leaders of the Iranian New Wave, was sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on making films, writing screenplays or doing interviews. He was accused of colluding with others to make propaganda detrimental to the Iranian regime after being arrested at the grave of Neda Agha-Soltan, the woman who became famous for being killed on camera during the 2009 Green Revolution.

In 2011, locked in his apartment awaiting a decision from the appeals court, Panahi, along with friend and documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, shot a near-documentary, near-diary piece about a day in his life. The clever title, This is Not a Film, refers to his court-ordered ban on making films, but also raises a semantic dilemma about what exactly this is that we are watching. It's not really a film in a traditional sense that there is a particular plot of story that is being worked through; it is not a documentary about anything in particular, because Panahi's actions on this day are rather banal and not particularly intersting (he could leave his house, he's not in jail yet; he is making a movie of some form).

At first Panahi reads the script that would have been his next film, were he allowed to make it. Much like the neorealist content of his other works, this one deals with a woman in college. He puts tape on the floor of his massive and seemingly rich apartment to delineate her bedroom and rearranges the furniture to suggest the setting. As he begins to read from the text (he jokes that there was no ban on reading a script, so he's not violating the ruling), he stops to talk about the art of directing and the small details of working with non-actors, as he does in most of his films. He pulls out DVDs of his past films to show what he means. He begins to break down, as he realizes he cannot do this again for the foreseeable future.

This non-film proceeds and gets into a meta-discussion between Panahi and Mirtahmasb about the nature of documentaries and representation. It leaves us wondering how much of this is scripted and how much is natural. It seems totally natural, though Panahi's wife and daughter are curiously absent for the 12 or so hours the cameras are rolling (apparently if they were home they would have to wear a chador to obey the law, however women in Iran do not wear chadors in their homes; as a way around this obvious violation of law or naturalness, Panahi sends his family out of the house for the day).

This is a very nice, very clever film that not only raises post-modern issues of representation and perceived reality, but also functions as a sly attack on the monstrosity of the Iranian regime. Smuggled out of the country on a USB drive, it's amazing to me that this wouldn't be a violation of Panahi's sentence -- although it might follow the letter of the ruling, it seems to violate it at every turn and stick a thumb in the eye of the authority.

As interesting as the film is, it does lose some steam by the end, with the last 15 minutes a return to every-day life. I'm sure this is just a view into the mundaneness of life, though it feels like it's unrelated to the rest of the film and doesn't totally have any point (we see Panahi talking to the brother of the super of his building as he takes out the garbage). As much as I like the philosophical discussions that proceed this, I find this curiously boring, waiting for some greater connection to something of significance.

This is definitely a good film and possibly an important one, but it feels more like collection of scattered thoughts more than an effective essay of any sort. It is a handful of video journal entries, almost all of which are fascinating, but don't totally hold together well, as stream of consciousness frequently is wont to do. I like how this fits into the sharp naturalness of Panahi's previous work, and I think in the long run it will act as an important milestone, it just feels a bit less cohesive than it should.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Attenberg (Friday, February 24, 2012) (18)

When watching Athina Rachel Tsangari's film Attenberg, it is important to keep in mind that the writer-director got a masters in Performance Studies. Her film is as much a study of motion, dance and performance as it is a narrative. Considering this fact is also central in understanding that this is not a typical film with a standard "A to B" structure, nor is it an "easy" movie where you walk out feeling happy that you just saw some nice storytelling.

It is a challenging and a strangely cold film, though a totally beautiful one. It is one of the most interesting movies I've seen in a long time. It feels very much like Giorgos Lanthimos' brilliant 2010 film Dogtooth (for which Tsangari was an Associate Producer), though much more human and relatable.

The film centers on Marina (Ariane Labed), a 23-year-old woman who takes care of her father Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis) in the last stages of cancer treatment. They live in a small mining town on the water that Spyros designed at some point in the past 30 years, now seeming to have nearly no inhabitants in it. It's a typical Modernist village, with rectilinear streets and buildings, awkward public spaces and difficult, cold interiors.

When she's not taking her father to the hospital for his tests, Marina spends much of her time driving visiting scientists around for the local mining firm. As the story goes on, her main rider is an engineer (Lanthimos... yes, the same guy who directed Dogtooth) who she finds theoretically attractive, despite the fact that she's generally not interested in sex and has no experience with it.

One of her main interests is hanging out with her best friend Bella (Evangelia Randou). The two almost exclusively talk about sex; Bella is a normal 23-year-old who likes sex, has a boyfriend and likes talking about it and she's rather obsessed with teaching Marina all she knows. Marina, meanwhile, seems reticent about her sexuality or any erotic emotions.

All of this is rather simple and straightforward and makes up most of the plot ... which is to say very little happens in this story. What keeps it interesting the whole time, though, is that Tsangari formally tells a separate story, different from the general narrative. The film is a master class in the differences and effects of static and moving camera work. Almost all of the standard narrative elements are shot with static shots. Tsangari has a keen eye for composition and these shots are almost all interesting, contrasting deep shots with shallow ones and characters at different points in space .

In the middle of all these static story-telling scenes, Tsangari intercuts sequences of uncanny dance and movement performed by Marina and Bella. At first glance these seem a bit out of place and disconnected, and they all use moving cameras. Why this stark change in style all of a sudden? Well, these near-nondiegetic moments seem to function as some sort of dream-space, or at least non-chronological pieces of the story. Both characters intently look at the camera as they do these actions, reminding us that we are watching two performers, who might be the characters we know them as, but might just be two random people dancing. Certainly these dynamic shots are more liberating than the rest of the static ones.

There's a wonderful long dolly shot following Marina pushing Spyros down a long hall in the hospital. Here is where the dream world crosses over for a moment with the earthly, Modernist world. In fact, the whole film functions as a long and effective criticism of Modernist ideals. For one thing, Spyros himself criticizes his own design, saying he built this unnatural space on the top of sheep meadows. He gets into the concept that there was not a natural evolution in this town (or perhaps in Greece in general) from one era to another (from agriculture to industry), but that the Modernist era came along and sat on history, forcing its emotionless will on everything. He's ashamed of his greatest accomplishment as he gets ready to face the unknown. (There's an interesting analysis of the current Greek debt crisis here, more incisive than many news reports.)

This leads Marina's other main hobby, which is watching the nature films of Sir David Attenborough. Both Spyros and Marina (when he's at home and not in the hospital) love to watch the scientist talk about monkeys and other jungle creatures and sometimes re-enact their strange movements and screams. She seems to have a connection with natural, evolutionary things more than she does with other people. She is the product of Modernism, devoid of deep sentiment and disconnected from other things. The title of the film, at this point, becomes a Modernist respelling of Attenborough's name.

Tsangari has all the actors speaking their lines in particularly monotone, dispassionate style, possibly inspired by Richard Maxwell or other Post-Modern theater or performance creators. Again, this underlines the strangeness and non-humanness of the setting and the people in the film. All of the actors are wonderful, but particularly Labed and Mourikis, who seem to have a fun time as they do mundane things (and also seem to interact in a wonderful and intimate way that fathers and daughters who love one another really do).

This is a deeply interesting and thematically difficult film. Whereas Lanthimos' Dogtooth was a bit of joke, playing mostly with semiotics in a bizarro non-place, Attenberg seems to take the argument one step farther. Tsangari shows how the Modernist legacy in every-day life has magnified certain behaviors and alienated us from our natural states of being. She raises simple bathos to near holy, fetishistic levels, mixing weirdness and beauty in connected (and disconnected) moments. This is what modernity is. She does this all in a gorgeous and elegant way with techniques far beyond her years.

Stars: 4 of 4

Patriocracy (Tuesday, February 14, 2012) (10)

Following in the wake of polemicist documentarian Robert Greenwald, Brian Malone's Patriocracy is a nice and safe story about how bad American government is in 2012 and what we have to do to get it back to normal. Malone suggests that the reason everything on Capital Hill stinks so much is because of the deep partisan rift that has opened up in recent years and how no business gets done anymore because both sides are just bickering back and forth.

Malone's biggest example of nothing getting done is the Simpson-Bowles fiscal readjustment committee (he spends a lot of time interviewing Sen. Alan Simpson, who likes to say words like "bullshit" a lot). Apparently because there were members of both political parties and that both parties are monolithic, the findings of that group had to be perfect, or something. That they didn't get passed in Congress and that the White House basically ignored them is a terrible thing.

This is where the film loses me. I agree that things don't get done enough in Washington and that the bickering is sickening, but I don't think both sides are equally to blame for the problem. I would say things got terrible when the GOP controlled congress in the mid-aughts and then got worse when the so-called Tea Party Republicans gave the GOP a majority in the House in 2010. That nothing gets done in the Senate has more to do with Republicans there not wanting to bend at all than with any sort of greater issue with partisan bickering or filibuster issues. (Yes, I realize I'm asking the GOP to bend more, but that's because the Senate Dems. already bend a ton for their centrist members.)

There are a bunch of smart suggestions made in the film, like having primary elections not be divided by party, but all-in-one affairs where many parties could run against one another, and taking money out of elections, but all of these things seem like long-shots that will never come together.

I mind that centrism is seen as some sort of perfect state of being, because centrism now is really center-rightism. The American political system is gerrymandered so much to the right that even "compromise" is just a way of giving Republicans almost everything they want. This feels like how people feel both sides of an issue should be explored to make something fair, but really, there's right and wrong and showing both sides gives "wrong" too much credit.

Stars: 2 of 4

Bonsai People: The Vision of Muhammad Yunus (Tuesday, January 24, 2012) (3)

The title of this film, Bonsai People, comes from one of Muhammad Yunus' millions of aphorisms about how people are like bonsai trees and that they can grow but they need care and love and the right soil. Yunus is a really great guy. He saw a need for micro-lending in his native Bangladesh and began the Grameen Bank, a nimble bank that broke with international tradition by lending small amounts of money to the poorest people they could find. Grameen's clients are almost all women who are looking for small loans under $100 to buy a cow or a few small trees or some seeds to start a small business. This documentary looks at all that Grameen and Yunus do.

After Yunus got tons of attention in 2006 when he won the Nobel Peace Prize, international companies fell all over themselves to work with him in one of the zillions of Grameen off-shoots, in health, housing, farming, livestock, childhood and women's education, disaster relief, food and on and on. The film is punctuated with some of Yunus' more wholesome and banal chestnuts ("Credit is a human right;" "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime;" "Making an impact in people's lives is as important as making money.") and we see how his policies and ideas are helping to life poor women out of poverty throughout Bangladesh.

Strangely criticisms of Grameen's lending practices are mentioned and quickly dismissed. We never really see what happens to women who can't pay back their debts and why (there's a suggestion that health care emergencies sometimes get in the way of paying back the loans... but that seems like a much too specific reason). There's also a strange sense, in discussion with some of Grameen' more long-term borrowers, that the bank acts as a bit of a pusher forcing women to take loans they might not need or want. One women proudly shows off her beautiful house and farm paid for by work and Grameen loans. Wonderful - but it does feel a bit like she's a junkie showing all the wonderful different drugs her dealer has given to her. A bit strange. I wish there had been a bit more balance to this portrait and that it came off as less of a propaganda tool than it does.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

In Time (Tuesday, November 22, 2011) (104)

In Time is a dystopian sci-fi movie that is totally silly and terrible, but actually really fun and very close to being interesting. The film is a straight-up Marxist polemic about a future world (of downtown LA) where all money has been turned into time. In this world, humans are genetically modified to live until they're 25 and then stop aging. At this point, a digital clock on their arm (genetically built into them, you see) turns on and begins to tick off one year, after which they're supposed to die.

This being a hellscape, it's not so simple, though, as one can work and earn more time (as one would earn more money) and the "rich" of this world are able to buy and sell time, as if it was money. Ersatz "billionaires" live wonderful lives, and, because they don't age past 25 and have unlimited resources (time), they lead totally different lives in another "zone" from the poors. Of course they're all hot. (This is complicated.)

At some point, Justin Timberlake gets sick of always being poor, that is, close to being dead, and he is given a century by a rich guy who is sick of living anymore. JT goes into the world of the rich looking only to see how they live, but once he gets there, he finds that he's not trusted and not wanted.

The idea of the film is actually pretty clever, and I totally give writer/director Andrew Niccol credit for making such a blatant and angry Marxist film (it fits in very well with the current Occupy Wall Street movement). Still, the dialogue is totally laughable throughout the film, either totally banal or filled with every "time" and "clock" pun you can imagine ("I'm gonna clean your clock" - literally; "your time is up"). Also, the acting by JT and Amanda Seyfried is really terrible and hard to take seriously. It feels as over-the-top as Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, but it's played as totally serious.

The art direction and costumes are really wonderful here, probably some of the best art direction and production design of any film this year (Gattica looked great too, by the way). Everything is 1960s-70s futuristic. The cars are either '60s Lincoln Continental sedans or '60s Dodge Chargers (or some such Mopar car) but always painted matte black. There is something wonderful about how part of the nightmare of this world is that they went back in time for their future. It's a very clever thing and looks amazing. In spite of this, though, it's a goofy movie that's much more unintentionally funny than serious.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Transformers: Dark of the Moon 3D (Saturday, July 2, 2011) (48)

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

-- Martin Niemöller

On a space shuttle launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, Simmons (John Turturro), a government-worker-cum-freelance-Transformers-hunter-expert paraphrases this poem as he speaks to the heroic Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf). He's talking about how as a gesture of weakness and conspiracy, the U.S. government agreed to the demands of the Deceptacons to send the Autobots out of the country and off into the wilds of space. Simmons is upset that the holocaust of the humans at the hands of the Decptacons will continue and, like the German pastor before him, he will have tacitly endorsed the heinous act by not fighting against it.

You might say that director Michael Bay and writer Ehren Kruger are being a bit heavy-handed, invoking the Holocaust to a sci-fi action story like Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but you would be wrong. They are presenting a deeply searing critique of modern consumerism and a deep post-structuralist analysis of the past 60 years of world history. "Was it all worth it?" is the question that they wrestle with. Taken down to it's basic parts, we see how the hope, good fortune and lessons that came out of the Second World War was all an illusion, that capitalism and the concept of "freedom" are broken systems and that there is only a bright future for us today if we embrace femininity.

The basic story of the film is much too complex to understand from a wide point of view in the context of this column (a fact which is, in itself, a comment on American consumerism, of course), so to put it simply, you have to know that the Deceptacons have come back to Earth, are more Communist than ever and are trying to get a bunch of fuel rods that were crashed on the moon in our pre-human-history. It seems these rods (read: phalluses) are the basis for re-building the Transformers' home planet of Cybertron. If they can insert the rods into our buildings, they'll be able to summon Cybertron inside of Earth's atmostphere. (Spoiler alert: When they succeed in bringing Cybertron to Earth, it looks like a big breast with a gigantic nipple.)

The role of sexuality is ever-present and central to the story. It reminds me of Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Salo: 120 Days of Sade, although here most of the sexual torture is replaced by violence and we are left only with symbolic rape. The Deceptacons are a class of super-masculine bourgeoisie, in the waning days of their own empire. They are led by a Prime (see: The President, The Bishop, etc. from Salo) whose goal is really just to dominate and subjugate. They have their own set of laws, which can be amended at a moment's notice; they appreciate youthful vigor and seem to have as much of an interest in boys as they do in girls.

Their main tool of destruction is Shockwave, a robot that can grow to infinite lengths (like an awesome erection) and burrows through the land and buildings with sharp teeth (like an awesome erection). He is, of course, a gigantic penis with teeth, a Freudian nightmare far worse than the vagina dentata. He is a clear symbol for the Deceptacon culture of over-excess, fucking the world, force feeding people excrement and acting on the most depraved thoughts and desires one could conceive.

But Bay and Kruger are not making a direct parallel to Pasolini, of course. In a very post-Roland-Barthes way they take the predicate of the Holocaust and twist it. Here the Capitalists (the Autobots and the US Government) are the Fascists and are fighting the Communists (the Deceptacons). The American freedom they are tying to defend is best symbolized in the hundreds of brilliant product placements throughout the film. One of the cars is a NASCAR stock car that is sponsored by Target. As we see our heroes fighting the bad guys, we see Target right there in the mix. The film is a polemic about American consumerism. What they are fighting to defend is a world of no choices, corporate overlords and the force-feeding of industrial crap (read: excrement). In the middle of the wreckage of post-battle Chicago, a brand new Ferrari drives down the street unscratched. Overconsumption and the post-feeling world have won and we can celebrate by dreaming of buying cars we'll never be able to afford.

The fact that Bay made this in 3D and has begged people to see it in that format, promising us more than we've ever seen, is a cynical commentary by him on the state of the movie industry and the filmic format. Like Werner Herzog did with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Bay shows us here how everything we see is not just done well, but amazingly overdone and and we have to pay more money for the honor of beholding it. We already live in the world he's showing us in the film.

Even the human characters and locations are tied to this theme of post-choice hyper-saturation. The film is set in Washington, D.C. where Witwicky (even his name is a comment on the outsourcing of encyclopedias to the crowd-sourced Internet) is dating a bodacious blond English girl named... uh, I don't remember, but she's a Victoria's Secret model (even here, the poor woman's humanity is stripped away and she becomes a symbol of her employer in the real world; the nightmare that Marx feared has come true and we are all just drones to our corporate masters). In this post-hellish reality, there is no United States or United Kingdom. All Western governments are the same and they're all are marching in lock (goose) step to subjugate the masses with garbage (and to make us bend over so they can rate who has the best ass, so they can then kill that person).

Similarly, though the film is set in Washington, it is shot in Chicago (home of awesome tax breaks... again, a comment on the film making process) -- before the action ultimately moves to Chicago. This is a brilliant way of showing that all American cities are the same. There is no capital city and no "Midwest". There is just one big nightmarish post-Capitalist stretch of cities in American tied together by Interstate 88, the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway. The American government is a fascist organization, it will rape you. In the words of Pasolini's Duke, "the fascists are the only true anarchists." And, I'll add, in the words of his Bishop, "all is good if it's excessive".

Indeed.

Finally, the film shows us that the hyper-masculine nature of the Deceptacons cannot be defeated simply by complimentary warriors fighting a battle, but femininity is the key. It is only after Optimus Prime loses his trailer and rocket arm (is castrated) that he's able to beat Megatron and Sentinel Prime (a new character, a Prime who switched to the Deceptacons when he wasn't able to sell more product). And Wikipedia's girlfriend this time has even bigger lips and more amazing flowing hair than that Megan Fox chick, which means she's able to deflect danger with her feminine charms (read: her gigantic tits and super short skirts... and, by the way, she totally flashed us her crotch when getting out of the Mercedes SLS AMG Gullwing car... a car once described to me by an Italian man as a "pussy magnate"... true story). But it's really only when WikiLeaks is totally emasculated, after he's beaten by Dr. McDreamy and that dude from the Las Vegas TV show, that he's able to help out in any significant way.

This is a deeply moving comment on our world and on our lives. It is a film that I would call *important* (and at 157 minutes, you can't not understand that). It needs to be studied more for it's intricate symbols and allusions. We need to understand better why Cybertron looks like a breast when the Deceptacons are so masculine (is it an Oedipal relationship they have with their world? Is that why there are no female Autobots?) and to figure out why exactly John Malkovich is needed in the story at all. I think he's the key to something. His three-piece suits stand out as some sartorial commentary, I think. They're certainly of the same quality as the members of the cabal in Salo. Woah, it's getting even deeper as I continue to think about it....

Stars: 7 of 4

Waiting for "Superman" (2010) (Saturday, February 26, 2011) (185)

The first act of Davis Guggenheim's documentary/polemic Waiting for "Superman" is a confusing mess. In voice-over he tells us about how he always supported public schools, but when it came time to put his own kids in school he chose to put them into a private school. Now he feels guilty about it and is making a documentary about how bad public schools are and what he thinks should be done to fix them. He introduces us to five kids, mostly in elementary school and one kid in 8th grade. One is in DC, one is in LA, one in Silicon Valley and two in New York City. All of these kids are at risk of falling through the cracks of the system and not getting good educations (except for the rich white girl in Atherton who is just dumb despite her parents being rich and white).

Guggenheim shows how over time public education has been a big policy point for presidents, governors and mayors and how over the past 40 years we have fallen behind other countries. He talks to dozens of education people, mostly heads of school districts and leaders of charter schools. He then starts assigning blame and comes to the simple conclusion that teachers unions are the real reason the whole system is broken.

When he's not directly assigning blame to unions (mentioning the New York City 'rubber rooms,' where bad teachers go to get paid and not teach... a classic and boring refrain from the anti-union side) he and his talking heads speak against them in code, mentioning the "establishment" or the "system" as being the problem. He then goes into a long and elaborate celebration of charter schools - places where teachers' unions are not in control and where administrators can rule absolutely (only very briefly mentioning that test results for charter schools on the whole are frequently as inconsistent as those from public schools).

True to his polemical style, Guggenheim never looks into the efficacy of charter schools and never compares their results across school systems. He never gets into things like teacher retention rates at non-union schools or funding issues. He certainly never examines how teachers are trained and mentored as they go along, how the families of the kids who struggle the most are frequently the most broken or how hard it is for kids to find their ways to the charter school lotteries he fetishizes. For him teachers are complete units out of a box that either work or don't work regardless of the environments in which they teach and socioeconomics of their students' families.

There is no noticeable flow or structure to the film, so as you jump around from one kid to another and from one troubled school district to another (he also talks a good deal about Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and Houston) it's just rapid-fire bitching more than any effective dissection of the problem. There are no chapters or themes that help to lead and no direction from one moment to another. The last 15 minutes are spent watching the five kids in lotteries in their towns trying to win a spot in the better charter schools. This is incredibly boring and totally shallow. We either feel happy or sad for the kids either getting in or not getting in to their schools - but what does that have to do with anything? That's not going to fix the system and is not really what this movie is about.

The movie is really about how unions are the problem and should be done away with (I guess). He celebrates Michelle Rhee of the D.C. school system who came into her job like a tornado and began firing people preaching testing and a more corporate results-based system for elementary schools (she lost her job when mayor Adrian Fenty lost his last November). He celebrates Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone, a successful socio-educational area in Harlem (Canada seems like a good guy working outside the public school system... but is the best example of a good charter school - they're not all like his). He condemns Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the two major teachers' unions.

He played so fast and loose with information and facts that I felt like I was watching a piece made for Fox News. The attacks on unions seemed even more awful considering the current standoff in Wisconsin between Republican governor Scott Walker and the unions and the democrats in the legislature (and those teachers have even agreed to change their contract). He never talks about how the Finnish teachers who have the best schools in the world are totally unionized and have many of the benefits (like tenure) that their American peers have. It's all very sickening.

If teachers and teachers unions are so bad, how on earth do we have any kids who succeed? (There's one expert quoted talking about how it's about 7% of teachers who are bad... so are those the only ones causing the problems?) Doesn't the federal government - or even state governments - have something they can do to help - like with give more money to the schools? Clearly the high school in Silicon Valley is nicer than the one in East LA, isn't that something worth examining? But Guggenheim doesn't examine anything.

There are clearly a lot of problems with education and there are hundreds of things that should be done to fix them (sure - get rid of the rubber rooms. Those are disgusting). Guggenheim suggests that without merit pay for teachers, there will be no change and growth. This is dumb.

I'm particularly upset that Guggenheim, now one of the best-known documentarians working today, would make such a sloppy movie. Aside from the unfair attacks on the unions, this film is impossible to follow and the cinematic equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. It's a total mess.

Stars; .5 of 4

GasLand (2010) (Monday, January 17, 2011) (176)

Josh Fox's interesting documentary GasLand tells the story of how over the course of the past decade millions of Americans have been affected by a process of natural gas drilling, called 'fracking'. No, this is not some Battlestar Galactica sexual euphemism, fracking is a process where natural gas is collected after deep holes are drilled into the earth and water, laden with toxic chemicals, is forced into the wells. Due to massive industry lobbying and major relaxations in environmental and regulatory standards gigantic swaths of the middle part of the country, from Pennsylvania to Wyoming, are now speckled with these fracking wells.

The problem is that the chemically rich water has to go somewhere when its underground and generally ends up in drinking water. This makes the water non-potable, clearly, but also flammable, which is a neat effect to see on camera, but would be shocking to see in your kitchen. Through the film, Fox takes us around the country looking at how different families in different parts of the country have been hurt by this drilling process, how they live with the day-to-day realities of it and how they are fighting back (mostly unsuccessfully).

This is a clever polemic, but is ultimately a bit dull. It feels the whole time like a very good Frontline special or 60 Minutes report, but there's not enough intrigue to hold attention for nearly two hours (it's way too long). One nice touch that Fox uses is a wonderful banjo/bluegrass score throughout. This is probably a bit manipulative as it suggests down-homey Americana in a rather lazy way, but in the end it's wonderful music. He also uses great black and white, bold, all-caps, sans-serif titles between sections to orient us as we watch. There is a rather 'DIY' quality to these, which I like a lot.

I always hate polemics that end with a call to action and direct me to a website - that after seeing the movie, I'm supposed to get off my ass and write a letter to my congressman or senator. This is annoying do-gooderness, when just presenting the information would suffice to tell a good story. I want to watch a movie, I don't want to get involved in a movement. Stop sending me to your website, I'm in a movie theater and won't remember the address when I get home. Just show me interesting, evocative things and let me have an experience.

Maybe my issue is really with polemical docs, which are over the hump for me and on their downslide. I've had enough of liberals telling me what to cry about now (I saw as an avowed ultra-liberal). I'm no longer interested in stories about energy/chemical/food/health care companies being evil. I know those stories well.

I think Fox has a nice movie here, but he should have cut it down by 20 minutes. It drags too much and he seems to lose control somewhere after the middle of the second act. He should have tightened the story a bit and cut some of the repetitious material (how many people do you need to have on camera lighting their water on fire?).

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Inside Job (Saturday, October 9, 2010) (133)

Inside Job is a documentary about what led to the enormous economic crash of 2008 that we are still suffering from today. Director Charles Ferguson, who previously did the powerful Iraq War polemic No End in Sight, does a great job of telling the story from a historical look at banking in America to specific policies that changed in the 1990s to how unregulated money forced us into our current hole.

This is polemic, to be sure - but it is also the most efficient and complete history of the past 10 years of finance that I have ever seen or read. There are few revelations in it, but I appreciate how well Ferguson shows and tells us how small moves several years ago helped to loosen previously tight seals.

I have few small gripes about this, but nothing incredibly important that really gets in the way of the effectiveness of the piece. There is a section in the middle of the film where a shrink to finance guys talks about how much the young Wall Street bankers are obsessed with fucking whores in nightclubs and doing cocaine (this actually comes up twice in the film). This thread really has nothing to do with the economy or anything judgement-wise. I think Ferguson is trying to suggest that the young guys in the firm loved the amazing piles of money they were earning and the power that came with it - but that's a pretty shallow point, really.

There is also no mention of Fed Governor Ned Gramlich's speeches and writings about the looming Sub-Prime lending crisis from the early and middle parts of the decade. This is a shame, because he really saw the problem before it hit and should have been listened to more.

What is great about the film is that I felt like I had heard about or knew almost everything in it, but couldn't see how one thing really lead to another. Ferguson's presentation is clean, efficient and mostly fair. If only the bankers could have been any one of those things.

Stars: 3 of 4

South of the Border (Sunday, July 4, 2010) (66)

This is a polemic piece by Oliver Stone about the rise of Leftist/Socailist leaders in Latin American politics and how they have all succeeded in kicking off the shackles of the U.S.-backed IMF. Oliver Stone, a man nobody needs to hear from ever, is an ass who tells about a third of the story of each of the leaders he concentrates on. This is not really a full picture of the Latin Left, but merely Stone's view of it. It is also as much about him as it is about these leaders, an arrogant twist on an already silly project.

I'm about as Left as you get politically, and have a specific, if limited, interest in Latin American politics. I think I know a fair amount about most of the players involved in this piece, so there was nothing all that new about the material. This is yet another arrogant and silly part of this work: It has a limited audience of people who are interested in the topic, but it doesn't go very far past the surface level of newspaper headlines describing any of the politicians. It's an introduction to these people, with basically no analysis of them or their positions.

The first person Stone visits is Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. He accurately tells Chavez's story of how he tried a coup d'etat in the early 1990s, but failed, went to jail, ran for president and won in 1999. Stone talks in glowing terms about how Chavez has helped the poor, gotten rid of IMF regulations and been a super-popular, super-great person in his country. Stone says nothing about Chavez's critics, nothing about his iron-fisted control of media, nor how he shut down television and newspapers critical of him and nothing of the persisting poverty that surrounds him. As a Leftist, I can say that Chavez is far from perfect or desirable.

Stone then goes to a bunch of other leaders, including Evo Morales of Bolivia (who has never said much that I have been able to argue with or support - he's still a bit of cipher to me until he takes a stronger position on things), the Kirchner's of Argentina (who are more center-left than anything, but strongly anti-IMF), Lula of Brazi (also a center-leftist who got rid of the IMF) and Raul Castro (a favorite among American Leftist elites, despite his documented cruelty during his brother's long tenure). Several times the leaders suggest that it's an honor for them to meet Stone (and of course he keeps these lines in the film, as if we are supposed to know that Stone is a great man too).

Interestingly Stone never mentions Michelle Bachelet of Chile who was the president when he was shooting most of the other interviews in early 2009. It is not clear what he didn't like about her - though she does seem a bit more even-handed with her rhetoric, and much more of a French-type socialist than a Bolivarian firebrand.

The whole film says nothing about the bad things these leaders have done or their failures. I never mentions anything negative about Castro or Chavez, two men who could have books written about their dark sides, and never really examines the net effect of the re-valuation of the Argentine peso under Nestor Kirchner. This is mostly a vanity piece for Stone to show off how special he is because he can get to interview these leaders. It's frustrating and incomplete.

Stars: .5 of 4

Collapse (Sunday, November 29, 2009) (178)

Collapse is a very interesting and clever documentary by filmmaker Chris Smith about professional gadfly Michael Ruppert. To say that Ruppert is a conspiracy theorist is to miss the point. He thinks that everything in the world is screwed up and has a critical comment on just about every aspect of foreign, energy and economic policy. He is mostly an autodidact, having been an LAPD officer for many years working with the DEA and CIA on drug trafficking. Ever since the early part of this decade, he has been an avid reader of all sorts of journals and published a newsletter on all of his theories.

The film is simply a long and interesting interview with him getting his opinions on a wide variety of topics. Smith uses a very "Errol Morris" style where he shows Ruppert seated and talking with cut-aways to found-footage from old newsreels, cartoons and propaganda films. This feels very much like it could have been made as a chapter in Morris' First Person television series.

Ruppert's basic theory of the universe is that you should not trust government because the it lies and deceives in order to make more money for rich business interests. He says that renewable energy sources are over-hyped as they are either entirely inefficient, not thoroughly thought through or rely too much on a fossil fuel infrastructure. He says we should face the fact that we use oil and will need to remain on oil for a long time to come. He advocates that we are past the point at which we've used up most of the planet's oil reserves, so he foresees the collapse of the world population in the years to come. All of this is rather bleak and sober - but very interesting and hard to argue with.

The style is very nice and effective, with Ruppert at the center of the story, and keeping us interested along the way with all the interesting footage. The score, by Didier Leplae, Joe Wong and Noisola (all three!) is certainly inspired by many of the Philip Glass works composed for earlier Morris works such as The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time.

I like that Smith, in true Morris fashion, does not judge the subject and just lets him speak for himself. It is up to us, as viewers, to make an opinion about Ruppert. Is he full of crap or the smartest guy in the room? Is he a conspiracy theorist or does he really see the plain, unvarnished truth? Should we listen to him or just blow him off as a wacko? It's fun and very interesting.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Yes Men Fix the World (Sunday, October 11, 2009) (146)

The Yes Men are a post-modern political hoax duo whose mission is to expose corporate greed and fraud through elaborate public pranks. Their targets are the traditional big-meanies of the multi-national corporate landscape, from Halliburton and Dow to the wrong-headed mosaic of government agencies that work in New Orleans re-building after Hurricane Katrina. This film, written and directed by the pair themselves, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, is a tongue-in-cheek look at some of their more famous and powerful works that brought them the largest amount of attention.

Their most successful act began with them setting up a website that appeared to look like an 'ethics' arm of Dow Chemical. Approaching the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster (where tens of thousands of people were killed from a massive chemical spill and then thousands more died in the following years from the damage) the Yes Men, posing as Dow executives, were invited on to BBC to speak about the company's reaction to the situation it created.

Bichlbaum, under an assumed name, spoke on camera about how sorry the company was that the event occurred, and how they were going to accept full responsibility for their actions and pay the victims and their families with several billions of dollars. Of course, Dow has never admitted to any amount of responsibility and has been totally unhelpful to the Indian city.

Moments after the interview, top headlines around the world reported this gigantic turn-around in message and unparallelled restitution money. Of course, it was only a matter of minutes before Dow's real spokespeople contacted news media to say that in fact the Yes Men were pranksters and that they still don't take responsibility for their actions and still will not pay any money to the Indians who were hurt.

This, in the end is the real art of the Yes Men - getting big companies and government bodies to specifically defend indefensible beliefs, policies and messages.

This film is a much more successful indictment of corporate greed and capitalism run awry than the recent Michael Moore movie, Capitalism: A Love Story. The Yes Men know that there are not two sides to every story (as Arriana Huffington has been saying for a few years now). There is not real scientific *debate* about evolution or climate change - so it's foolish for news reports to give 'equal time' to both sides. There is not a real moral pro and a con to Dow paying back victims of their chemical spill - they messed up and they should help the victims of the accident. That there are corporate suits and apologists who would defend the faceless company is sickening and, simply, bad. The Yes Men try to expose these problems.

They are not shrill, rather they are funny and friendly. In the film, they hatch their next 'attacks' from their modest super-hero den, as if they were poor, kitschy Batmans. This is a very funny and clever doc that leaves you feeling empowered by these modern-day Davids versus Goliath. I can't wait to see what they do next!

Stars: 3 of 4

Capitalism: A Love Story (Sunday, September 27, 2009) (133)

I'm getting sorta sick of Michael Moore. I'm glad he's an outspoken advocate for progressive and populist causes and generally very rational, but his shtick is getting old. I am especially getting sick of his movies being considered plain documentaries rather than polemical arguments, which is really what they are. It has been a long time since Moore actually *documented* anything - at least since Roger and Me, if he ever did it. His films are more angry now and much less connected to reality-based thinking. His logic has gone out the window and he is mostly shrill and behaves like a prick.

The love story Moore describes in this film is between capitalists and their money - how original! He shows how when he was a kid, everything was wonderful and how government regulations and the tax code made corporate profit irrelevant and how everything was wonderful. The he shows how Reagan deregulated stuff and lowered the taxes so rich people could become super rich. Then he shows how everything went to hell after that. Then he interviews New York intellectual/actor/writer/bon vivant Wallace Shawn about economics - because, uh, Wally once took a class in college called Econ 101.

The biggest problem with the film is that there is absolutely no structure and it is paced so slowly that it feels like it's 4 hours long and dull the whole time. It's as if Moore wrote all his little beefs on slips of paper, put them in a hat and pulled them out randomly - and then filmed them all and put them all on screen. It list feels like it's one totally random point after another with nothing connecting them (for 130 minutes!).

Somehow Moore's argument (I don't mean to ruin it for you) is that democracy is the antidote to capitalism. Uh, I have no idea how that works, actually. Is he suggesting that we don't currently live in a democracy? I totally hate greed and gigantic multinational organizations as much as the next guy, but I would also concede that America is a democracy. Sure, people with money are able to adjust laws to make democracy work better for them than their poor neighbor, but capitalism is not the opposite of democracy. (For that matter, Michael, New Orleans didn't flood because of too much capitalism either.)

By far the most frustrating section of the movie, for it's sheer partisanship and foolishness, is the last part dealing with Obama. Moore totally pulls his punches and basically lets off Obama scott-free with barely a minimal amount of criticism of his financial program. This omission is most visible in the opening sequence where we see a family in Peoria, Illinois being evicted from their now-foreclosed home. The time stamp on the video shows February, 2009 - a few weeks after Obama took office. If Moore was the least bit consistant, he would criticize Obama for not freezing foreclosures (which was a plan offerecd by Hillary Clinton, for whatever it's worth). Instead, the eviction of this and another family are symbols of a broken system, and Obama remains a heroic change agent.

Later, Moore mentions that Tim Geithner was the president of the NY Fed and oversaw the massive bailout of New York companies before becoming Treasury Secretary - but he literally mentioned that Obama made him Treasury Secretary. (In other words, he says that Geithner is a bad guy, but doesn't say that Obama gave the bad guy a more powerful job.) This is simply lazy and not the whole truth of the story.

I'm just sick of Moore's shtick. I generally agree with his overall message, but they are hard to like because his movies are so sloppy. By the time he goes to Wall Street to 'collect our money' back from the banks who got the TARP funds, I was just watching the clock hoping the movie would end. It is a cheap stunt that doesn't move the story along at all and just makes security guards at the banks look like jerks. How very middle class of you, Mike!

I would love for there to be more regulation of banks and real estate, but capitalism isn't the bad guy - deregulation and low taxes and old-fashioned greed are. Moore needed a better writer and editor for this movie. It was all over the place and didn't say anything new at all. Everything that was said was so unfocused that all his points were undermined by their fuzziness and silliness.

Stars: .5 of 4 (He would have gotten 1 star if he had not been on every news and talk show for the past month saying absolutely nothing constructive, original or rational.)