Media Things: Film

The World According to Bush

2005-02-11T06:56:41-08:00

I missed this one when it premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival last year. I'm looking forward to catching the DVD. The World According to Bush covers much of the territory of Fahrenheit 9/11, but is a more sober, conventionally made look at the first 1000 days of George Bush's presidency. It was originally scheduled to screen at the Cannes Film Festival in May, but when Michael Moore finished his film at the last minute, Karel's film was pulled because festival artistic director Thierry FrÃ©maux didn't want Cannes to appear too anti-American. The documentary has earned praise from a number of quarters for offering the most coherent exposition of the slide into war through high calibre interviews with the likes of author Norman Mailer, weapons inspector Hans Blix, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Pentagon advisor Richard Perle. However, there has been little U.S. media interest. "Either they don't know or they don't care," said Karel, speaking through a interpreter. Karel said that Michael Moore had omitted some important parts in George Bush's story. "There is hardly anything about the religious right and its relationship with the Bush family and also the dangerous liaisons between Israel and the Bush family." Both films reveal the unholy relationship between Bush and bin Laden clans, but The World According to Bush goes further back in history to the days when Prescott Bush, W's grandfather, was banker to Hitler's Third Reich. -- Rebort (IOFilm Review]

Unprecedented - The 2000 Presidential Election - 2004 Campaign Edition (2002)

2005-02-06T08:25:27-08:00

This is part I in producer Robert Greenwald's Un- Trilogy which also includes Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War and Unconstitutional - The War On Our Civil Liberties (2004). In the course of 47 provocative minutes, Unprecedented leaves little doubt that the 2000 presidential election was a mockery of justice. Focusing on rampant, court-sanctioned abuses of the democratic process in Florida, directors Richard Ray Perez and Joan Sekler present a thorough reexamination of the circumstances that allowed the election of George W. Bush, including the Gore campaign's fatal failure to request the state-wide recount to which the Democratic party was legally entitled. In particular, the political ambitions of Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris are exposed with devastating, irrefutable evidence of cronyism, including the Bush administration's post-election appointment of the son of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, whose support of Florida's haphazard election results was arguably a violation of his oath. Through it all, Florida's African American voters and discounted "felons" are victimized by a bureaucratic nightmare of exclusion, and uncounted votes remained officially in limbo. The film's liberal bias is obvious (it was executive produced by Robert Greenwald, the director of Outfoxed), but Unprecedented is ultimately an impassioned plea to Americans of every political affiliation: If you don't vote, you will further weaken the democratic principles that were so fatefully violated in Florida. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

Unconstitutional - The War On Our Civil Liberties

2005-02-06T08:21:16-08:00

Part III in Producer Robert Greenwald's Un-Trilogy. Part I is Unprecedented - The 2000 Presidential Election - 2004 Campaign Edition (2002) and Part II Unconstitutional - The War On Our Civil Liberties (2004) Completing a trilogy that should be required viewing for all Americans, Unconstitutional explicitly reveals how the USA Patriot Act violates numerous civil liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Following the equally persuasive documentaries Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election and Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, this film presents powerful and tragic examples of how the USA Patriot Act--passed with virtually no Congressional debate just 45 days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01--has been used to justify the unconstitutional arrest of innocent immigrants based on Arab stereotyping; the illegal detention of vaguely defined "suspects" and their improper treatment (including beatings and torture) during extended confinement; prisoner abuse of alleged terrorism suspects in Guantanamo Bay military prison; the allowance of improper search and seizure without due cause; prohibited travel based on racial profiling; bully tactics employed with impunity by local police in efforts to undermine free speech; and other clear indications of the Patriot Act's unconstitutional enforcement. The more personal these stories of violation are, the more gut-wrenching is the realization that U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft--and by extension, the George W. Bush administration--have used the Patriot Act to justify what is essentially a dictatorial police state. Sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union and full of bipartisan testimony by lawyers, politicians, and victims of Patriot Act abuse, Unconstitutional makes an eloquent case for the careful interpretation of Constitutional law, exploring rising opposition to Patriot Act abuses while exposing how many of our freedoms have been undermined in the name of post-9/11 security. Regardless of your political affiliation, this is a chilling reminder of how seemingly good intentions can corrupt even our most cherished American values. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

Uncovered - The Whole Truth About the Iraq War

2004-11-20T10:07:30-08:00

Robert Greenwald

Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire

2004-09-27T20:15:42-08:00

I enjoyed this film, learned a fair bit and upped the termperature in my righteous indignation thermometer by several degrees centigrade. From the VIFF 2004 film guide: A short, sharp addition to the fast-growing body of documentaries indicting the current Bush administration, Hijacking Catastrophe goes beyond simple Bush-bashing to paint a horrifying portrait of organized US imperialist expansion and public deception stretching back to the early Reagan era... Well-documented premise is that a few radical neo-conservatives first hatched theoretical foreign and domestic policies too extreme to be revealed--let alone fully implemented--during Reagan's first term. Their wish list included such goals as the US no longer honouring certain international treaties or the UN; an offensive, "pre-emptive" military approach toward invading other countries found problematic or desirable; artfully scaling back civil liberties and Constitutional rights; vast increases in defense spending... The point is that this way lies creeping fascism, not to mention catastrophic national debt (projected as $7 trillion by this year's end) that could eventually lower living standards for every citizen, save the very rich. Noted en route is the status of various Bush Jr. honchos (Chaney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, the prez himself) as "chicken hawks" who avoided their own military service in younger years... Commentators run a gamut that includes international diplomats and activists, leftist intellectuals (Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer), investigative journalists, and appalled (if safely retired) military personnel. Iraq civilian casualty photos provide the stomach-churning reality that's been largely airbrushed from popular American reportage.

Jeremy Earp

The Lord of the Rings

2004-05-31T15:45:15-08:00

Well, if this one isn't an obvious choice: The best fantasy film ever produced; adapted from, arguably, the best literary fantasy ever written.

Peter Jackson

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

2004-05-31T12:19:14-08:00

Adapted from the novel of the same name by Milan Kundera this film features Daniel Day Lewis, Juliet Binoche and Lena Olin, the two women in their breakout performances. This was not a simple adaptation by any means. Kundera's text uses breaks in the narrative to further illuminate both his characters and his themes, at one point discussing how and why the author made explicit choices in developing the central character of Tomas (Daniel Day Lewis' role in the film). Fortunately, the filmmakers chose to ignore this brave narrative reflexivity which works so well in the novel and concentrate instead on the characters, story and themes in more cinematic terms. Set initially in the Prague Spring, in the heady days of free speech and political possibility and closing after the crushing Soviety invasion, this is on the surface a lusty story of lust and love, politics and passion. However, as the title implies, what Kundera was really after was meaning, and the filmmakers were wise to follow his lead. Yes, we can excape an oppressive country, live free and accumulate both success and wealth, but if there is no personal meaning in such a carefree existence are we not, in fact, lost? If we sacrifice our sense of place, belonging, commitment and passion, what remains? The unbearable lightness of being. Kundera and the filmmakers conclude that being happy is dependent on the passion one has for life and for people, and on the acknowledgement of one's connnections to being, both culturally and socially. Without these an easy existence is an empty one.

Philip Kaufman

Blade Runner

2004-05-29T14:42:41-08:00

The quintessential Sci-Fi film. Star Wars is a great yarn, but Blade Runner is truer to the best-of-breed social commentary originating from authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick, the latter of whom authored Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep upon which this film is based. My personal preference is for the original version, with Harrison Ford's flat, weary voice-over narration. It sets an aural tone in subtle juxtaposition to Vangelis' ethereal score. I've watched a VHS of the Director's Cut version dozens of times.

Ridley Scott

Casablanca

2004-05-29T13:32:40-08:00

For me, the quintessential dramatic film. It's hard to believe the makers were writing the script as they shot it, making the result a likely triumph of editing. Crisp, meaningful dialog, every line of which moves the story forward. Laughs, love, song, tension, death and tragedy along with an outstanding ensemble cast building to perhaps the most well known resolution in storytelling. Here's lookin' at you kid.

Bogart and Bergman

Dogville

2004-04-21T13:35:17-08:00

The Vancouver International Film Festival annually commissions several promotional short films which are broadcast on television and shown before every festival screening. In 2003, the theme was "what if the characters in the film were actually living in the film?" One of them featured flat lighting, a shaky camera and a couple of physically destabilised businessmen on their way to an important presentation. They quickly recognise that their pale complexions and growing motion sickness are due not to an unsettling car ride, but rather the shaky camera and non-existent lighting endemic to the Dogma '95 film they're in. As one businessman leans over and retches behind a newspaper box, the other raises his fist to the sky and shouts, CURSE YOU LARS VON TRIER!!! vonTrier is an iconoclast of the first order, and plenty of film-goers will find elements in Dogville worth shaking their fists at. The camera swoops, jitters and shakes undoubtedly causing the focus-puller numerous anxious moments, many of which end up in the final cut. Edits jump, crash and tumble, scantily maintaining the axis. Perhaps most disturbing is that all the action takes place in a minimalist, cramped soundstage with only the barest suggestion of a set. The film opens with a God's-eye view of Dogville, or rather an architectural floor plan of the town painted on the soundstage's black floor with thick white lines. Block-stencilled letters label the buildings and streets of the town, as well as "The Old Lady's Bench" and the "Gooseberry Bushes" and other objects of note. The barest of set dressing is applied to this floor plan. A writer's desk, a doctor's medicine cabinet and an easy chair are all the pieces used to describe the home of Tom and his father, bunk beds, a cradle and a chalk-board represent the home of a family of seven. There is a portion of a wall here, a window there, a flatbed truck, some wooden arches give the feel of a mine shaft (labelled "Dictum ag Factum," latin for, I believe, "Speak the Truth".) Cramped into this space are the 15 inhabitants and one dog of Dogville who are today to recieve a mysterious visitor, a fugitive, who the town agrees to take in and protect. I won't say anything about the story itself other than to observe that the conflict which drives these characters is between hopeful innocence and human nature. It is not an uncommon tale, but von Trier's film portrays it with growing ruthlessness, and the stripped-down set, which at first is a distraction, (knocking on an imaginary door is one thing, but opening and closing it is a task none of the actors pulls off with any aplomb) in time works to the director's advantage. In the end, there are only the characters, the conflict and its disturbing resolution. About that resolution I will say only this: the makers of the film The Punisher have nothing over von Trier. Curse him or hail him, you will not forget seeing this film.

Lars von Trier

The Snow Walker

2004-03-10T00:34:28-08:00

A fairly simple but beautifully shot and effective clash of cultures film. A bush pilot and his ailing Inuit passenger crash land in the high Arctic. Of course it is the Inuit girl's traditional living skills which save him from the elements. A better film would have left the story there, in the Arctic. Instead, we are periodically dragged back to Yellow Knife (or, rather, flatly lit studio set intended to be a bar and hangar in Yellow Knife) to follow the efforts and anguish of the pilot's colleagues, friends and lover, who eventually call off the search. I am always anxious to get back to the real drama, as the pilot develops respect, then warmth, for the young Inuit woman, even as the winter snows gather, and her condition worsens.

Farley Mowat

The Company

2004-02-27T22:59:03-08:00

The latest from Robert Altman, of whom I am a reserved fan. Altman, when he's on, hits them out of the park, as he did with The Player but when he's off, as he was with Pret a Porter, he's disturbingly unwatchable. The Company is not so narratively driven as The Player though neither does it devolve into Pret a Porter's endless driveling, non-sequitur dialog. There is a loose story here, as Altman's interest in his subject matter meanders through the life of Ryan, the dancer portrayed by Neve Cambel. However, the best moments occur when the film loses itself cinematagraphically in the art of dance itself. The film here is lovingly intimate and ever so much more interesting than the daily lives of the dancers themselves, at least the razor thin representation of character we get to know. I believe the more interesting choice here would have been entitled, The Dance. In the end, those are the moments I remember, the moments I am sorry to see interrupted by closing credits.

Robert Altman

The Corporation

2004-02-14T15:26:11-08:00

This is a film co-directed by Mark Achbar, who also co-directed Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. Manufacturing Consent is arguably the most important documentary ever made about the Media. The Corporation may be the most important film made about corporations. A corporation, by legal definition, is considered a person, with all the rights and legal status that implies. This documentary, The Corporation, analsyses just what kind of a person a corporation is. The conclusion? A psychopath, with all the destrutive, self-interested often sadistic behaviour that implies. This is a pretty well-made film, though its intended formatting for television is often visible in a weak, jaggy picture. Also, after fully developing its thesis (corporate psychopaths) the film loses focus for a bit. Understandably so, perhaps, given the breadth and depth of information about the nature and significance of corporate psychopathy it is attempting to present. The early going is the most compelling portion of the film, while the film-makers tick off a World Health Organisation checklist of a psychopathic behavioural traits, all exhibited by corporations. The second half begins by emphasising and supporting the thesis with case histories. A disturbing litany of abuse, certainly, but the film's narrative thrust stalls. It does finish strongly by pulling the loose ends together in a hopeful message. Ultimately, real flesh and blood people can win out over bloodless corporate beings. There is one important logical point The Corporation side-steps. If we subject the human race, as a species, to the psychopathy checklist the same way the film subjects corporations to it, that is, as a "species" of non-flesh-and-blood beings, then humanity could be judged psychopathic. I think most of us are misguided to a lesser or greater degree, and many of us are dangerous in our ignorance and hubris. However, the vast majority of human beings are not psychopaths. Is it necessarily true that all, most or even a significant number of corporations are? The film does highlilght certain structures which force a corporation to behave in ways which are certainly anti-social. For example, a corporation's charter legally binds it to grow as quickly as possible and maximise its short-term profit. All other considerations are secondary at best, including the environment, the conditions of its workers, etc. If we transfer this kind of behaviour to a human being, we end up with someone who thinks primarily of their own material well-being. American Libertarians argue that one individual's material well-being benefits all other individuals in their sphere. That is, there is a virtue in selfishness. Most of us, however, look at that kind of behaviour as simply selfish. It's not the kind of person who makes a loyal friend. These are not arguments made in the film, and it leaves a hole in the film's thesis. A small but not insignificant one. On the other hand, this observation in no way diminishes the conclusion that the current set of rules and structures which corporations operate under direct them toward certain behaviours, behaviours that are easily definable as dysfunctional, destructive and self-serving. More about this important and highly regarded documentary at The Corporation website.

Mark Achbar

The Fog of War

2004-01-27T05:17:42-08:00

I saw this Documentary at the Vancouver International Film Festival this past fall. Splendid. But don't just take my word for it: New York Times review: FRANK RICH Oldest Living Whiz Kid Tells All Published: January 25, 2004 There has been no more unlikely movie star this season than Robert McNamara, the only living character in Errol Morris's documentary "The Fog of War." The 87-year-old Mr. McNamara -- who, as the Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter pointed out, is a dead ringer for Gollum in "Lord of the Rings" -- has been as surprised as anyone by his new-found audience. "I don't know a damn thing about films and TV," he said when we spoke last weekend. He can't remember the title of the one other movie he saw in the past decade and has "never seen a DVD." He hasn't watched any other film about Vietnam, period, having made a particular point of avoiding those by Oliver Stone. As secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Mr. McNamara presided over the most disastrous foreign adventure in American history and refused to speak out against it even after his own private doubts helped fuel L.B.J.'s decision to fire him. Mr. McNamara still lives in Washington, minutes away from the memorial to the 58,000-plus American dead. Are strangers nice when they approach him to talk about the movie? I asked. Yes, he said, but he acknowledged that the sample may be skewed: "People who hate you don't come up to you on the street and say you're a son of a bitch." Since its release, "The Fog of War" has generated plenty of debate on two fronts. Should Mr. McNamara, who freely admits to making errors about Vietnam but stops well short of outright contrition, rot in hell? The verdicts on his confessions in Mr. Morris's film range from mild praise (he's conceding fallibility, however belatedly) to utter rage (Roger Rosenblatt, on "The NewsHour," likened him to the self-justifying bureaucrats of Treblinka). The greater debate has been over the degree to which the follies of Vietnam are now being re-enacted in Iraq. Though Mr. Morris started interviewing Mr. McNamara before 9/11 and his film never mentions current events, the implicit parallels between then and now are there for the taking. In the Johnson administration's deceptive hyping of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a provocation to war, we see the Bush administration's deceptive hyping of the supposedly imminent threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction for the same purpose. In Mr. McNamara's stern warnings against waging war unilaterally and against trying to win the hearts and minds of a foreign land without understanding its culture first, we find historical lessons we didn't heed as we blundered into the escalating chaos of our "postwar" occupation of Iraq. Such analogies can be pushed only so far, however, and Mr. McNamara refuses to draw them publicly, despite repeated badgering by interviewers like me to do so. But if it is inexact, not to mention wildly premature, to declare that Iraq is Vietnam, it is not too soon to mine a related and pressing resonance of the McNamara story. When President-elect John F. Kennedy appointed Mr. McNamara to his cabinet, he was lionized as the very model, indeed the very shiny new model, of the modern star business executive: famously, the first non-Ford to be president of the Ford Motor Company, the most brilliant of the 10 so-called Whiz Kids whom Ford had recruited en masse from the Air Force brain trust of World War II, and the first M.B.A. from Harvard Business School to ascend so high in government. As a national role model at the dawn of Camelot, Robert McNamara was Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and, yes, Paul O'Neill before it was cool. He entered the cabinet as an exemplar of "American certitude and conviction" who could use "his rationality with facts" to intimidate bureaucratic dissenters, David Halberstam wrote in "The Best and the Brightest" in 1972, after Mr. McNamara had come to his bad end. Among Mr. McNamara's virtues, Mr. Halberstam wrote, was loyalty -- but "perhaps too much loyalty, the corporate-mentality loyalty to the office instead of to himself." "The Price of Loyalty," Ron Suskind's new best-selling expose of the inner workings of the Bush White House, reads like an as-told-to book by its principal source, Mr. O'Neill, a C.E.O./cabinet officer fired by another Texan wartime president. It casts the former treasury secretary in the same role of protagonist that Mr. McNamara plays in "The Fog of War." When Mr. O'Neill was first appointed, he was hailed for his successful tenure at Alcoa, where, like Mr. McNamara at Ford, he was prized for his humanistic concern with safety as well as his can-do resuscitation of a sinking bottom line. The parallels end there. Whatever one thinks of Mr. O'Neill's White House tenure, he is of footnote stature in American history, if that. And unlike Mr. McNamara, a loyal courtier to presidents to the bitter end and beyond, Mr. O'Neill hardly waited a moment before trashing George W. Bush. Consistent to a fault, Mr. McNamara doesn't approve of Mr. O'Neill's behavior. "I think it's terrible," he says. "It's wrong for a cabinet officer after he's out to blacken the reputation of the president." He finds it "particularly bad" that Mr. O'Neill has since retreated a bit from his criticisms: "If you're going to do it, don't shift!" But the former treasury secretary's cooperation with Mr. Suskind's book is useful in a way Mr. McNamara might have been had he spoken out when it could have made a difference. (Our involvement in Vietnam lasted another seven years after his seven years in office.) "The Price of Loyalty" is valuable not so much for its few specific headline revelations, or for its gratingly adoring portrait of the na?ve and often hapless Mr. O'Neill, as for its atmospheric impressions of a White House where a C.E.O. mentality all too reminiscent of Mr. McNamara's shows signs of poisoning governance. In the Kennedy administration, Mr. McNamara's background was something of a novelty. The Bush administration boasts more C.E.O.'s in top jobs than any administration in history -- as well as the first president with his own Harvard M.B.A. These resumes were commended by the press when Mr. Bush took office, much as Mr. McNamara's had been 40 years earlier. But what Mr. O'Neill describes in Mr. Suskind's book is not the executive branch of a democratic government so much as an old-school dictatorial corporate monolith where any serious debate, whether about economic or foreign policy, is stifled from the top. In "The Best and the Brightest," Mr. Halberstam summarizes how Mr. McNamara, his mind already made up on any subject, would run meetings at Ford (and later at the Pentagon): "Despite the appearance of give-and-take, the whole thing would become something of a sham, the classic Harvard Business School approach with loaded dice." The sentence could be grafted as is into Mr. O'Neill's descriptions of the Bush White House meetings in "The Price of Loyalty," where the McNamara-style C.E.O. enforcing his will and quashing debate often seems to be Mr. Cheney, freshly arrived from Halliburton. As Mr. McNamara's wielding of charts, statistics and unassailable rapid-fire logic mowed down internal dissent to Vietnam policy, so a similar intellectual arrogance at the very top of the Bush administration loads the dice for its rush into gaping budget deficits and ill-planned, excessively optimistic scenarios for post-Saddam Iraq. I asked Mr. McNamara to identify any bad Ford habits that might have led him astray once in public service. He didn't concede much, noting only that he arrived in Washington having no sense of the role of the press in public life ("We had nothing like that in Detroit!") or the possibility that reporters might try (and succeed) in uncovering governmental activities that the administration wanted off the record. This corporate tic is duplicated exponentially in the Bush administration, which is shrouded in secrecy to the point where the public's right to know has been deftly supplanted by the small shareholder's right to receive an unfailingly upbeat annual report. "The Fog of War" shows where this can lead. We see the vintage clips of Mr. McNamara promoting good news and suppressing the bad as the war turns sour -- a "credibility gap" echoed by this administration's "Mission Accomplished" happy talk after the fall of Saddam. We learn that there was no real White House debate of the domino theory, which as a premise for pre-emptive war in Vietnam was as intellectually suspect as the pre-emptive doctrine the Bush administration has applied selectively to justify its invasion of Iraq. "We were wrong, but we had in our minds a mind-set that led to that action," Mr. McNamara says in "The Fog of War" when he recalls how Vietnam spiraled after the Tonkin incident. Errol Morris is not a historian or an ideologue but a profound student of the quirks of human nature. As he dramatizes Mr. McNamara's efforts to make sense of his own history, we see that it is the man's vanity, his narcissistic overestimation of his own "skill set" (to use current C.E.O. lingo), that leads him into a mental fog and his government into a quagmire. Such a classic tragic flaw is personal, not political, which is why "The Fog of War" is moving in the end. We see its protagonist inexorably heading toward disaster, in his case taking a country with him, and we are powerless to stop it. At Ford, Mr. McNamara was eventually succeeded by Lee Iacocca, who more than anyone rehabilitated the image of the corporate star. It wasn't long after Mr. Bush and his C.E.O. team arrived in Washington that that image took its biggest hit in years, thanks to the new corporate whiz kids of the dot-com bubble, "The Smartest Guys in the Room," as the recent book by Fortune magazine's Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind calls Enron's executives. But the economy is up a bit now, and memories in this country are short. The new runaway hit of prime-time television is not "Arrested Development," the well-received sitcom about an incarcerated Enronesque C.E.O. and his family. It is instead "The Apprentice," in which Donald Trump, the first C.E.O. with his own reality show, is glorified for behaving in the imperial manner of Mr. McNamara in his heyday and Mr. Bush in "The Price of Loyalty": his executives speak only to second his motions. It's all terribly entertaining, and at the very least, the star's hair deserves its own Golden Globe nomination. As a businessman serving his stockholders, Mr. Trump may even be as good as he thinks he is. But imagine him bringing the same management style into government at wartime, and you can picture his boardroom table of underlings nodding in agreement at the idea of donning a uniform for a premature victory jig on an aircraft carrier. That's why "The Apprentice" is, in its own farcical way, a valuable cautionary tale in its own right. Call it a "Fog of War" for dummies.

Errol Morris