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.
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