Home Box docs

While PBS continues to showcase worthwhile documentaries on the programs “Independent Lens” and “POV,” HBO has really stepped up to the plate this summer and delivered a consistently interesting series.  I refer you to their website for a complete list and descriptions, but I’ll offer brief reactions to each film in the series.  I’ve found them all worth watching, some more and some less, even on subjects I was inclined to skip.  If you don’t get HBO, most titles can be put on your Netflix queue, and if you don’t get Netflix, well then, god bless you, but why in heaven are you reading Cinema Salon?

The standout so far seems to be Hot Coffee, a classic documentary in that it takes a subject that “everyone knows” and demonstrates clearly that what everyone knows is wrong, the truth turned upside down, and moreover how and why the misconception was disseminated.  That old lady who spilled coffee on herself and sued McDonald’s for it became the butt of jokes, as well as the poster child of a huge PR campaign to mock lawsuit judgments as frivolous and costly to the public.  Susan Saladoff shows that “tort reform” is just a code word for letting corporations run roughshod over the public welfare.  It’s perfectly in line with the Citizens United decision in granting rights to corporations and denying them to individuals.  The legal fiction that the corporation is a “person” with rights (but of course no obligations) is a source of endless mischief in our system.

Another film in the series, Mann v. Ford, backs up the point, detailing the attempt of a community of Ramapo Indians to seek legal redress from Ford Motor Company for the dumping of toxic waste on their land when the huge Mahwah plant opened in the Sixties.  Now the community is dying off from cancer and a host of other diseases, and makes a good test case for imposing responsibility on corporations through the courts.  Unfortunately the film should have been an hour long rather than feature length, and is padded with much tangential material that dissipates and distracts from its argument.

Something similar might be said of the first film in the series, Bobby Fischer Against the World, which as one would expect, is engrossing as long as it recalls the days when Fischer vs. Spassky was the main bout of the day in the Cold War and chess mania swept the country, and then peters out when Fischer gives way to right-wing paranoia and free-form hate-speech.

Sex Crimes Unit sounds like a spicy spin-off of Law and Order, and thus a likely skip for me, but giving it a chance, I was impressed by the workaday reality of women working through the legal system to confront violence against women, as well as the victims who were willing to come out of the shadows and into the light.  The lack of glamour or end-of-the-hour closure is exactly what made this real-life drama satisfying.

I also resisted Alexandra Pelosi’s Citizen USA: A 50-State Road Trip, figuring it was another celebrity project enabled by her mom Nancy.  But, gosh darn it, this film of “furriners” becoming citizens all across this great land of ours was genuinely moving, even eye-opening.

Would Love Crimes of Kabul turn out to be more a Frontline-type expose, or more of the tabloid variety, detailing outrageous fundamentalist punishments for sex?  Actually, it’s more like a reality-show set in an Afghan women’s prison, not a harsh-seeming place at all, where the women freely bicker and gossip over their respective cases.  The intimate access is amazing, even though it stops at the courtroom door most of the time, and while from a Western perspective the “crimes” seem absurd, the justice dispensed is no more erratic than our own.  Some know how to play the system, and some are crushed by it.  Ultimately Tanaz Eshaghian's film is amusing, as well as titillating, as well as edifying.

I suspected “There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane” of tabloid ghoulishness as well, but then saw it was made by Liz Garbus, who has been a director I look for ever since I saw The Farm: Angola USA (and actually the Bobby Fischer film was also hers).  I can’t, however, recommend that you take this trip, digging deep into the backstory of a horrific collision that killed eight on the Taconic Parkway two years ago, since I’ve been trying to put Aunt Diane out of my mind ever since I saw the film, as her final scenes repeat in my mind like an inescapable nightmare.  I was expecting resolution of the mystery at the end, that same ultimate reversal of what “everyone knows,” but wound up with something even more disturbing, the idea that “nobody knows,” the awful truth is ultimately unknowable, and all you are left with is the strange and personal ways that people confront and cope with unimaginable events.  This is a serious film about a headline event, but after it’s over, the subject may be something you wish you knew less about, rather than more.

The next film in the series is a winning tangent off the successful Spellbound formula, following a diverse group of cute kids from their far-flung homes to a high-stakes competition.  Instead of a national spelling bee, in Greg Barker’s Koran by Heart, this contest in Cairo is for reciting the Koran from memory, and featured are three 10-year-olds, boys from Tajikstan and Senegal, a girl from the Maldive Islands.  The contest is run by a moderate Egyptian cleric and government minister, and certainly presents a less sinister side of Islam than we are accustomed to seeing these days.  It is vaguely disturbing that the children are reciting in Arabic, whether they understand the language or not, which makes for awkward interactions with the judges, but then that’s hardly different from when liturgical Latin ruled the Church.  The Tajik boy is amazingly accomplished, though not quite up to speed on the rules of Arabic vocalization, and leaves the judges in tears.  The Maldives girl is the most surprising, and there may have been some affirmative action in the response of the judges, giving extra points for the extremism of her cuteness.  The Senegalese boy strives to live up to his father, the local imam.  All three are dazzled by Cairo and camels, the mosques and the pyramids.  With good will and diversity of motive, this film revises one’s mental image of young Islamic children in madrassas mindlessly chanting the Koran.  You’ll be rooting for these kids to do it perfectly.

This fine HBO documentary series wraps up over the next two weeks, but you can catch up with these films on rerun or DVD.

What's been on

I’ve had a bit of hiatus from regular film comment, but I intend to bring the record up to date in one long go.  Lately I’ve been involved with a number of TV series that I would encourage everyone to sample, though each will not be to everyone’s taste.  Previous seasons are usually available on DVD.

I’m pretty far gone on everything David Simon does, particularly The Wire and Generation Kill, so it’s no surprise that I found the second season of Treme (MC-84) on HBO to be compelling viewing from start to finish, as a swirl of musicians and other New Orleans characters contend with the aftermath of Katrina.  On the same channel, I was resistant to Game of Thrones (MC-79) since I am no big fan of sword and sorcery and the whole panoply of medieval dynastic conflict, but trusted my daughter’s recommendation enough to give it a try, and wound up going through the first season in short order, and now look forward to more.  Being a man of a certain age, or in truth a little past it, I reveled in the bittersweet, understated humor and drama of Men of a Certain Age (MC-86), just having completed its run on TNT and yet to be picked up by some enlightened other channel, perhaps in the type of arrangement that saved two final seasons of Friday Night Lights.    

I’ve been catching up with two series on DVD.  If you jones for English heritage productions such as Cranford from BBC, a steady stash is available from Lark Rise to Candleford, which just completed a four-season run, though at the moment I am taking lingering pleasure in the first, with its range of characters and variety of stories set in a late Victorian village and town (as named in the title).  For something completely different, but equally pleasurable, I would direct your attention to Justified (MC-81), which recently completed its second season on FX.  Though I have just caught up with the first season on DVD, I urge any fans of Elmore Leonard to check out this cowboy/cop action/romance comedy/drama, based on his work and featuring Timothy Olyphant (of Deadwood fame) as a cute but deadly U.S. Marshal breaking up a meth ring in Harlan, Kentucky. 

Just underway and promising more of the same are new seasons of three series I have followed devotedly.   The Big C  (MC-64) on Showtime does not seem to have worn out its premise as a cancer comedy, and is not likely to as long as it revolves around the adorable Laura Linney.  By all accounts, Breaking Bad (MC-96) on AMC just keeps getting better and better in its fourth season, another oh-no-you-don’t crime drama/comedy centered around meth dealing, anchored by Emmy-winners Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul and driven by go-for-broke producer Vince Gilligan.  Entourage has gotten a little old for me, but I will still tune in for its short swansong season, to see where the young gang of New York guys turned Hollywood players ends up.

Turning to film, I will group my recent viewing into a few adventitious categories.   One variety might fall under the heading of economic dislocation.  I caught up with a reputed classic of Italian neorealism, a rarity that I’d never seen, when it finally made it to DVD, but Vittorio de Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) will not alter my canon.  Worth seeing but not quite up to his Bicycle Thieves or Umberto D, its supposedly harsh realism clearly reveals a soft, sentimental center, with a postwar story of good kids trapped into crime, and sent to a reformatory that gives them a graduate education in it.  Ultimately the melodrama is more like Angels with Dirty Faces than Rossellini or Visconti.

China’s recent economic growth has come at the cost of enormous dislocation as hundreds of millions have moved from countryside to cities.  Lixin Fan’s intimate documentary Last Train Home (2010, MC-86) focuses on the dispersal of one family, as the parents go to the city for work and leave their teenage daughter and younger son back in the village.  That separation is compounded by generational conflict, as the film veers close to a reality-tv invasion of one Chinese family, while retaining its seriousness of purpose and subject. 

Two much glossier films detail the dislocation of poor rich guys in the recent financial meltdown.  A great cast carries The Company Men (2011, MC-69), the first feature by television veteran John Wells, and a credible drama of the downsizing era.  Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, and Chris Cooper are all corporate high-fliers at a Boston-based shipbuilding conglomerate, until the enterprise starts to sink and they are thrown overboard.  Affleck is saved by his sensible wife Rosemary DeWitt, and her brother, salt-of-the-earth housebuilder Kevin Costner.  Perhaps the film is over-earnest and over-emphasized in the manner of a tv drama, but for the most part it seems genuine.  Or at least the actors know how to sell it.

Less credible, though moderately entertaining, is Oliver Stone’s sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010, MC-59).  After all these years, Michael Douglas has Gordon Gekko down cold, in his new post-prison incarnation.  Shia LeBeouf is better than I expected as yet another young go-getter who comes under his wing, and his squeeze is Gekko’s estranged daughter, who is made plausible simply because she is played by Carey Mulligan.  Veterans such as Frank Langella and Eli Wallach contribute flavorful walk-ons, and the film has flash, if something less than substance.  This is definitely a case where fact is stranger than fiction, so if you want to watch one feature film about banking collapse, make it HBO’s Too Big to Fail.

Another group that emerges from my recent viewing could be called “Fixated on femmes”.   Francois Truffaut’s Man Who Loved Women is generally regarded as a lightweight entry in his oeuvre, but it’s one of my favorites and the purest distillation of one of his most persistent themes:  “Are women magic?”  It’s a theme that preoccupies many French films besides Truffaut’s, and here are three that I’ve watched lately (coincidentally, all three are available for instant play on Netflix):

As a fan of actress/writer/director Agnès Jaoui’s earlier work, The Taste of Others and Look at Me, I approached Let it Rain (2010, MC-72) avidly, but left it somewhat bemused.  Here she plays a feminist writer looking to parlay her literary fame into a political career.  After her mother dies, she returns home to the south of France, where her less-favored sister still lives.  Jaoui’s frequent collaborator and sometime-husband, Jean-Pierre Bacri, plays a local who wants, for various ulterior motives, to make a documentary about her, a process that breaks down in a variety of amusing and revealing ways.  Successful as a character study, the film’s overall impact is as vague as its title, and no more illuminating in its more accurately-translated British version, Let’s Talk about the Rain.  Based on its U.S. release date, this could have been included as an “appreciation” in my rundown of 2010, but the next film earns an outright “recommendation.”

In Mademoiselle Chambon (2010, MC-83), Stéphane Brizé features two actors unknown to me, which is perfectly appropriate to the story he tells, of two ordinary people confronting something extraordinary in their everyday lives, a story told in silent stares and sidelong glances.  He’s a building contractor, shown (at length) sledge-hammering a wall for a renovation; she is his child’s teacher, a roving substitute who takes annual appointments around France, to avoid long-term attachments.  They meet at the school, and a quiet fire starts to build.  Will it break forth, or will it be tamped down?  That is the whole film, but it is more than enough, conveyed with minimal dialogue but with emotions more revealed in being unexpressed.  If you want a lot going on and feelings spelled out, this film will frustrate you no end.  If you appreciate reticence, both in the characters and in the filmmaking, it will unfold to your satisfaction.

José Luis Guerin’s In the City of Sylvia (2007, MRQE-69) is another nearly wordless exercise, as an art student stalks Strasbourgh, looking for a woman he met briefly six years before.  The film is an ogler’s delight, as he sits in a street café and sketches the women all around him, from complicated angles that the camera emulates.  The visual play is joyful, and if that’s enough for you, this film will enchant.  When the stalking of one particular woman starts to get creepy, the fact that the young man looks like a Raphaelesque angel makes it seem less sinister.  And all the visual quotations from paintings and other films keep everything at an aesthetic and enigmatic distance, which I for one found appealing.

Here’s another threesome, this time with women behind the camera.  Dorris Dörrie’s Cherry Blossoms (2009, MC-62) takes off from Ozu’s Tokyo Story, to tell the story of an aging German couple who visit their grown children in the city, only to be ignored by offspring too busy with their own lives.  So they are left only with each other’s company, and when one dies, the other takes on that identity and tries to live out the spouse’s dreams of art and travel, which had been suppressed by marriage.  The film is beautifully shot, but its emotional content is more obvious than convincing. 

Iranian-born but US-educated Shirin Neshat is that rare video artist whose installation has stopped me in my tracks while walking through a museum gallery.  So when she turned to feature films with Women Without Men (2010, MC-68), I was willing to take a look.  The transition from visual to narrative artist is not complete, but shows promise in this magic realist adaptation of a novel about the condition of women in Iran in the early Fifties, at the time of the CIA overthrown of the elected government and installation of the Shah as absolute ruler.  A woman avoids the arranged marriage her brother is forcing on her by committing suicide, but then has a second life as a radical activist.  A general’s wife leaves him to move into a garden estate in the country, which becomes a haven for other abused women.  The feminist fable sometimes astounds visually and sometimes convinces, but lacks a dramatic arc and sustained impact.  

Which a less well-made Middle Eastern documentary such as Budrus (2009, MRQE) does have, as Brazil-born but US-educated director Julia Bacha follows the Palestinian village of Budrus as it attempts nonviolent resistance to the wall Israel intends to build across its land.  There is nothing special about the filmmaking, either in live action or talking heads, but the story itself is remarkable as peaceful protest manages to break down barriers, between men and women, young and old, Fatah and Hamas, and even with Israeli and international activists.  The confrontations between the protestors and the young Israeli soldiers are chaotic and unresolved, but in the end change is achieved.  This film has its heart in the right place, even when the camera tends to wander.

Falling into no particular category, I did check out a recent animated hit, since I’ve been pleasantly surprised at several lately.  Tangled (2010, MC-71) is a retelling of the Rapunzel story, and the animation is certainly spectacular enough, but the sentiments are more Disney than Pixar, betraying the princess-obsession of the “Magic Kingdom.”  This film is definitely not the must-see for adults that Up or Toy Story 3 are, unless pink is your favorite color.

As this variegated summary indicates, in the wide world of film, some of the best viewing actually originates on TV, but there’s always something to watch for everyone, if nothing for everybody.  Don’t take my word for it -- see for yourself.