Blank City (2011) (Wednesday, March 8, 2012) (158)

There are few subjects I like more for documentaries than New York in earlier eras. In Blank City, French director Celine Danhier, looks at the downtown art scene, particularly the culture of filmmakers, in the East Village in the late 1970s and early 1980s -- one of the worst eras in the recent history of New York City.

Following on the heels of the experimental art filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Jonas Meekas, Jack Smith, Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow, a large group of drug- and alcohol-addled kids started shooting small movies with Super-8 cameras they borrowed, rented or stole. This is the same era and the same group of people who brought you bands like the Talking Heads, Blondie and the Ramones -- a very CBGB-based set who lived somewhere from Avenue C to Bowery and from Houston to 14th Street. The city was broke and dangerous and their films were weird and terrible and amazing.

Dozens of artists, actors and filmmakers from the era are interviewed with clips from many of their movies. Probably the most famous of those people are Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi and Deborah Harry. We see how the movement went from the so-called "No Wave" films, which were rather chaotic and improvised, frequently sexual and about the desolation that surrounded the filmmakers, to the "Cinema of Transgression" of Nick Zedd, Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch (don't worry - I don't know most of these people either), that was more hyper-political and in-your-face. We see how the movement died when the neighborhood started getting nicer again in the late '80s and some of the (better) directors (like Jarmusch and Susan Seidelman) moved on to bigger projects.

This is a really fun and interesting documentary about the very recent past that seems to have been buried as if it took place a century ago. There's a constant sense throughout that despite the fact that New York City was terrible in that era, it was also wonderful. As much as hipsters bitch about how nice and yuppified the city is now, even East Williamsburg is nicer than Alphabet City was then. We probably won't ever see another time when groups of artists could rent lofts to live in for $50 a month... and, sadly, we won't ever again see such an enormous and weird output of art

Stars: 3 of 4

An Encounter with Simone Weil (Tuesday, March 6, 2012) (23)

Simone Weil was a less-than-totally-well-known French philosopher active mostly during the period between the two world wars. A consummate humanist, she struggled with the nature and scale of human suffering and wrote volumes and volumes of journals about it. She began as a Marxist, concerned with the rights of workers in French factories and moved on to other post-Communist concerns about people suffering under totalitarian organizations of any scale.

Raised as a secular Jew in an intellectual family, she became interested in the spiritual and mystical side of Christianity, as a way of understanding pain, suffering and exaltation. Ultimately Weil died in London in 1943, while working for the Free French Government, largely as a result of a near-starvation regime meant to symbolize a connection between herself and the people of France (Occupied and Vichy), who were not eating well.

In her film, An Encounter with Simone Weil, director Julia Haslett presents a fascinating biodoc about Weil, but from a very personal, almost avante-garde point of view. Haslett explains early on that her father suffered with mental illness through his life and committed suicide when she was 17; her brother, an academic also concerned with the history of suffering of blacks in America, deals with his own depression and thoughts of suicide.

The film is not a standard biodoc, however, but rather is more of a personal diary or collection of thoughts by Haslett, mostly about Weil, but also about suffering of people in her family and others. She is as much the subject of her doc as is Weil.

As the film moves along, we see the very typical still scans of photographs of Weil as well as copies of her hand-written journals and essays; Haslett interviews some of her family members who are still alive in France as well as contemporary philosophers, academics and researchers who are using her writings for their work.

The most daring element, though, is that Haslett has an actress playing Weil, has her study her writings and then interviews her. This is the very literal encounter with Simone Weil. As she is doing it, Haslett speaks about how she doesn't know exactly what she is going to get out of it. It's a very bold and interesting device -- to see if through the craft of acting, one might be able to unlock doors into a deeper meaning of the text. As a thought experiment this is a rather brilliant tool; I'm not sure it finds any specific success, although I appreciate the effort.

There is a real beauty to the way the film acts a bit like Haslett's journal, as she's researching Weil, who kept journals herself. I like the way Haslett tells Weil's full biography and gives a picture of her soul, and subtly shows her own emotional biography, as it relates to her father and brother. It's cut together really elegantly.

This is a very interesting, well made film that does more than just tell the story of a relatively unknown thinker. It is clear that this is a very personal film, which might lead to how good it is, but it also clear that Haslett is a daring filmmaker, interested in film form and structure as much as in narrative history. I always appreciate any film that breaks rules and pushes boundaries -- and this one does it very well.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Woman with the Five Elephants (2011) (Thursday, February 23, 2012) (155)

The so-called "five elephants" in the title of the German documentary The Woman with the Five Elephants are the five major novels by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the eponymous woman is Svetlana Geier, one of the most important translators of Russian literature into German who has spent the past 25 years working on those paper pachyderms.

This documentary starts out as a profile of Geier showing her method for translation, involving two rounds, one where she dictates to a lady who types (on a typewriter) what she says, and a second where she rereads what she put down with another linguistic and literary scholar. We see that she is a grandmother in Freiburg with a big family, she works for several hours a day and also takes care of cooking family meals for celebrations.

At some point one of her sons gets injured in an accident and she stops her translation work to take care of him, cooking for him and visiting him in the hospital. In this period she is asked by her alma mater in Kiev, Ukraine to visit and speak to students about her methods and her work. She sets off on a train trip, with one of her granddaughters, back to her hometown that she left during the war.

We then see her back story. In the Ukraine, she was a star German student and when the Nazis took control of Kiev, she got a few lucky breaks thanks to some of the officers who lived with her mother and her. At some point she was offered a scholarship to study at the University of Freiburg, where she moved with her mother before the end of the war.

There is an interesting passage where Geier reflects on her own luck and on "freedom" as described and written about by Dostoyevsky. Although she doesn't say it, it is clear she is thinking about how her own personal success and life was a result of Nazis, the archetypal group who would deny other such freedom, being kind to her.

This is a nice movie, although I feel like it's various threads don't totally connect (outside of this one sequence). I feel like there are really two stories here, one about the world's greatest Russian-to-German translator and another one about a young Ukrainian woman who got lucky early in life thanks to the Nazis. Perhaps this is very contemporary and young of me to feel, but it all doesn't really matter that much to me.

She's a wonderful woman, a loving grandmother, and has an intricate past but not all that interesting as a human. This is another case where I feel a 40-minute short would have been more compelling, showing one part of her story or another.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (Saturday, February 11, 2012) (8)

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth deals with the rise and fall (literally) of the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St. Louis in the late 1950s through the early 1970s. The film serves as a response to those who believe in the mythology that grew up around the development at the time of its failure, some of which still lasts today.

The Pruitt-Igoe development was designed and built in the mid-1950s to replace the dilapidated tenement houses of poor inner-city St. Louis. A modernist dreamscape, the concept was that the poor families who lived in the slums could all move to a bright and new housing project, pay modest rents and grow economically. The problem was that at the time the project was built, there were few jobs available to the working poor black community in St. Louis and with a baroque web of Welfare laws, families were torn apart just to stay above water.

Almost immediately the apartment blocks began to show signs of wear and tear. Security and maintenance teams had their budgets cut and within a few years, the Pruitt-Igoe buildings were in terrible shape. Of course this had everything to do with the situation of the tenants rather than their character or qualities. This specification was lost, however, by the time the buildings were condemned and raised in the early 1970s (the footage of that demolition was used prominently in Godfrey Reggio's brilliant Koyaanisqatsi). At that point, public housing, poor inner-city blacks and urban areas were seen as the problem, for which the might not be a solution.

The film is told very well and mostly chronologically and thematically, interviewing historians and former residents of the buildings. We see how the buildings represented the modernist ideal of a new city built out of whole cloth and populated instantly. We see how it was a wonderful and frightening place to live at different times and how tearing it down was probably the only possible thing to do.

This is a very effective movie about a very important topic. It's efficient, compelling and far-reaching. It's easy to see how some of the conclusions made by some of the interviewees are reflected in our world today. This is a nice small film that has a big impact.

Stars: 3 of 4

Tabloid (Friday, July 15, 2011) (55)

When Randall Adams died the New York Times ran a rather lengthy and in-depth obituary for him, albeit more than six months late. He had been wrongly convicted of killing a Dallas police officer in 1976 and had served 12 years in prison for the crime. It was only after filmmaker Errol Morris dug into the story and turned up mitigating evidence during the making of his 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line that Adams got a new trial and released.

The Thin Blue Line is an *Important* film, not only for what it did for Adams but for what it did for the documentary format. Morris used a brilliant score by Philip Glass, wonderful reenactments that showed how moments described in testimony and witnesses' points of view are frequently hard to navigate and sometimes difficult to remember. He re-invented the interview documentary, showing that people sitting in chairs under artistic lighting can be interesting to watch. Most importantly, the film is much bigger than Adams or any of the people in the story. It becomes a story about humanity, the human condition, the fickleness of justice and the concept and understanding of memory.

Morris has had a brilliant career since then and several of his films aside from Blue Line (Vernon, Florida, A Brief History of Time, Mr. Death, The Fog of War) rank among my favorite films of all time. They all transcend their small, slice-of-life stories and show us a mirror into our souls as human beings. Morris latest film, Tabloid, though generally well made, is not particularly deep and delves into a subject that's simply not important enough for the filmmaker's effort. It is an decent film, but not brilliant and leaves us wanting a lot more in terms of interest or creativity.

The story begins simply enough. Joyce McKinney was a beauty queen who feel in love with a Mormon man named Kirk Anderson. As she was not Mormon, and neither particularly religious nor chaste, their relationship was immediately forbidden and he was sent on his mission as soon as possible. Not understanding the ins and outs of the religion, she thought he had been kidnapped by a cult, and raised funds to go rescue him in England.

When she got there (with a small posse of associates, most of whom were in love with her), she took him to a small inn on the coast and kept him tied up in bed for three days, while she forced him to have sex with her. He was declared missing by his church and McKinney's group was hunted down. After she was arrested, she became an immediate star through the work of two rival tabloid papers, the Daily Sun and the Daily Mirror, who were in the middle of a small war.

Each paper went to great lengths to dig up dirt on McKinney, and each got different information, which led to two very different portrayals of her on their pages. She was either a whore and a slut who posed for dirty S&M pictures to make money, or a sweet woman who was just heartbroken and was desperately in love with her ex (she really was the former, as much as Morris presents both sides).

We meet a few of the journalists involved in the coverage by each paper, a few of her former associates and McKinney herself. They all tell very different stories of the events, though one general narrative emerges over the course of the film. It is indeed interesting how each person sees the story differently based on his or her knowledge of the events and their stakes in the drama.

We never get, however, a real deep look into McKinney, the way we might have had of Fred Leuchter (Mr. Death) or Robert McNamara (The Fog of War). The film is ultimately just as shallow as the tabloid stories were to begin with. We never really see why this story was such a big deal - or if it really was a big deal outside of these two papers. It's clear that she was on the front pages for a few weeks or months, but we don't get any context or when she stopped being on the pages. The fact that the film is called Tabloid is a mystery to me, as the it is much more about McKinney than it is about the papers.

Clearly Morris is an artist and a master filmmaker, so he knows what to do and how to make something look good. He uses lots of found footage, industrial films and clips from old Hollywood pictures (not unlike Bruce Connor might have done). He uses his now-standard "Interatron" (or is the "Megatron"?) to interview his subjects (basically it's a two way teleprompter where the person sees the interviewer's face on a screen, through which the camera shoots the person). (I worry this style is getting a bit tired, honestly).

It all feels a bit like Philip Roth's novella Everyman, which was well received, but rather a phoned-in work in the overview of his oeuvre. Everyman was a re-hashing of the same ideas Roth had struggled with for the previous decade and brought nothing new to the table. Tabloid does not expand Morris universe and fits in much more with his First Person documentary television show (which is generally great).

I hope Morris can pick himself up, dust off the rather cynical and silly anti-Mormon junk and move on to make more interesting films. I hope this isn't the first sign that he's losing his magical touch (the way I worry Roth has in recent years). Just like Roth, though, Morris makes good art, it's just that it's not even close to what he's done in the past.

Seen in a vacuum this is a good movie, but seen from the inside of Morris' work, it looks like a failure. As I write that, I think about Morris' brilliant examination of an "event horizon" in A Brief History of Time. Oh, how the mighty has fallen.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Project Nim (Tuesday, July 5, 2011) (50)

Project Nim, a documentary by James Marsh (who made Man on Wire and Red Riding: 1980, both very good films), tells the interesting and heart-breaking story of Nim, a chimpanzee who was raised from two-months-old to age five by (human) grad students studying language and communications in chimps. Nim's raising was anything but scientific, but not entirely surprising considering the early-1970s era in which he lived.

At Columbia University in 1973, Linguistics professor Herb Terrace enlisted grad students (and his sometimes paramours), to raise the chimp, cleverly named Nim Chimpsky. Over the first three years of Nim's life, he had no fewer than five human minders and teachers, each one different in style and scientific method than the last. He was taught American Sign Language and was ultimately able to express his basic desires ("I want a hug," I want a banana," "I need to use the toilet"), though his ultimate ability to "cummunicate" his emotions or anything other than his wants was debatable.

Shuttling between humans who had very different ideas of the project, Nim was either closely minded or let to roam free and "be an ape". (One of his human minders, a grad student in psychoanalysis, apparently was interested in his masturbation and breast fed him from her own breast. Ew.) Ultimately, around age 4 he started acting like the chimp he really was the whole time, biting people who he perceived as threats and becoming less and less fun and cute. At this point the Columbia project ended and Nim's life as a post-experimental chimp began, moving from medical research labs to chimp jails.

This is a very interesting examination of the scientific method gone wrong, and how humans being humans are sometimes more animalistic than an ape being an ape. The film is largely unsentimental, although, there are several moments when Marsh relies on our connection to Nim and our anthropomorphizing of his plight to pull our heartstrings. I could have done without these moments (mostly because such things are so banal and shallow).

Still, there is a lot of interesting material that forces us to ask ourselves interesting questions. If humans are able to smoke pot, why can't chimps? Is it at all humane to test medicines on chimps if it will save human lives? At what point in a non-physical psycho-sexual relationship between a chimp and a human should administrators step in to block it? All very difficult and interesting questions....

Stars: 3 of 4

The King's Speech (Tuesday, December 7, 2010) (154)

The King's Speech is a movie about King George VI (Colin Firth) of England and how just before he became king and in the first years of his reign, after his brother Edward abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, he had a terrible stammer that made it basically impossible to speak to anyone, and particularly in front of large crowds.

He and his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) tried all sorts of speech therapists throughout England and have always struck out. It seems that there were a lot of quacks out there who had no problems with trying and failing to help a royal with ridiculous therapy techniques.

One day Elizabeth finds Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) an Aussie who has a very interesting psychoteraputic process to speech therapy (I think a lot of speech therapy these days is closer to this than it is to putting marbles in your mouth an enunciating or whatever). He begins treating the soon-to-be king with very unorthodox methods, like calling him his family name Bertie and asking him about his feelings of losing his father. All of their work leads up to a big speech he gives on the radio to all of his subjects around the world at the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

This is not a bad movie, but it's not much of an interesting movie at all - basically nothing happens in it. It's about a guy with a stammer who goes from a communication level of about four out of ten to a level of about seven-ish out of ten. Big fucking deal! We never really get any insight into the King, either because the writer (David Seidler) and director (Tom Hooper) didn't think it was polite to investigate a royal in such a way or maybe because not much is known of his private life (for the same reason). I guess this is a buddy movie... but it's a really top-heavy one that much more about style than substance.

Hooper uses some nice super wide angle shots to convey a level of uncomfortable intimacy, putting us in the visceral position that George is in during his therapy. This is very clever, but is basically just a gimmick. It doesn't really connect to any particular psychological drama we're seeing (unlike, say Polanski's use of wide angle shots in Repulsion, which show Catherine Deneuve going mad). There is no psycho-drama here, which is really frustrating because we are teased with it for a moment and then it's taken away.

The script is pretty terrible here and might be the worst part of the film. Most of the dialogue is ridiculous. There's a scene that's in the trailer where Logue is sitting in some special coronation chair in Westminster Abbey and George starts yelling at him to move. Logue ask him why he should and he responds, "because I have a VOICE." Ugh. What a terrible line. And it's not really like that leads to any breakthrough, as we were already told than when he yells, he doesn't stammer. On top of this, there is a collapse of the time structure where we see in one scene George's coronation and in the next his big '39 speech. Those two events were about two years apart and there was a lot of travel and speech giving in the middle - what about those years? (Also, what about Goerge's phonemic 'r' sound that he can't say? Is that just OK for English people to not be able to say hard Rs? I was confused that that was never brought up.)

The acting is getting a lot of hype here, but I thought it was just very OK. Firth does a very good impression of a man with a stammer and Rush is not as big and over-the-top as he has been in some past roles. The acting is good, but it didn't move me very much.

This whole movie didn't move me. I don't know why exactly it was made. It's not all that special a story. We don't really see what happens that leads to his breakthrough (aside from the simple practice of saying specific words and sounds). It just sits there and doesn't move much. Big deal!

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Oath (Sunday, October 24, 2010) (141)

The Oath is a very powerful documentary made by filmmaker Laura Poitras for the PBS series P.O.V. (and later released in theaters). This is the second installment in what is supposed to be a three-part series of life in the Middle East and America in the so-called "post-9/11" world. This is the follow-up to her brilliant documentary in 2006 called My Country, My Country, about the first post-Saddam election in Iraq.

This film is formed around two parallel stories of two men who were once very closely linked in terrorism, but now are less so. Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni man, was arrested in Afghanistan during the initial American invasion there in 2001. He has become known as "Osama bin Laden's driver" and was brought up on charges of providing material support for terrorism. (Ultimately he became better known for challenging the terms of his imprisonment and trial. The U.S. Supreme Court found in his favor, which led to a more standard military court marshal trial.) We see his legal team of American military officers fighting in his favor and speaking to the press at his trial in Guantanamo Bay.

Separately, we see Nasser al-Bahri (a.k.a. Abu Jandal) who was at one point Osama bin Laden's bodyguard. Also a Yemeni, he was involved in Al Qaeda in the late 1990s and was arrested in Yemen in 2000 in connection to the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. He was ultimately released in 2002 after it was clear he was not directly involved in that action, however during his time in detention, he was instrumental in giving interrogators information on the architecture of Al Qaeda and locations for their bases in Afghanistan. Most of the film is spent with al-Bahri in his home in Sanaa, Yemen as he teaches a new generation of young men about his views of Islam and Jihad.

Al-Bahri still deeply believes in the Jihadi struggle against the West and is still a general supporter of Al Qaeda and its actions around the world, but does not feel good about the tremendous loss of human life its attacks have created. He is very torn on this issue. He talks very frankly about how bad he feels when innocents die, but he knows it is for a bigger purpose. He says that he won't be able to stop all the violence and that it's coming regardless of what he does and says. He advocates that people read and study more than fight, but that he'll be ready to fight when the battle gets to his doorstep.

Much of what he talks about also relates to the oath he gave to bin Laden that he would be a soldier in his Jihad. Many in the jihadi world and in Al Qaeda see him as an apostate and a scoundrel because they believe he has backtracked on his oath, which in fundamentalist Islam is an offense punishable by death. He struggles with his because he is also a fundamentalist and he knows what he has done. He talks in circles about how he didn't so much play with the West against Al Qaeda because he doesn't believe he should be forced to kill people. He is clearly a very reluctant soldier, and his humanity comes through strongly as worries about death and damnation.

What is fascinating, of course is how the two stories are shown next to one another. The two men (who are brothers-in-law through al-Bahri's sister, by the way) were on the same path at one point (I believe al-Bahri got Hamdan into Al Qaeda) rising up the power ladder of Al Qaeda together. Then al-Bahri slipped and changed direction leaving his comrade on the field of battle. What is even sadder is that Hamdan was at most a driver, a rather low-level worker in the greater Al Qaeda machine, while al-Bahri is out as a free man - and he's talking about continuing with jihad. In basic terms, the man who couldn't stand the heat of battle and quit is now the free man paying less for his actions than his more devoted brother-in-law.

Poitras is an absolutely brilliant editor and director when it comes to creating powerful juxtapositions. She shines in transition, particularly with the beautiful landscape shots of Sanaa and Gitmo. She'll follow an important statement by al-Bahri or Hamdan's lawyers with a beautifully colored sky, say, that helps to seal the meaning of what was just said. It is because of beautiful transitions like this that this is not really just a political/historical/current events documentary. This is a really gorgeous film to watch.

I also love the juxtaposition we see between al-Bahri's constant questioning of his faith and his actions and the Pentagon's sureness of itself with regard to the fairness of holding Hamdan for seven years without a trial and the honesty of the trial itself. These two parts are beautifully cut back and forth to show how the former is a constant struggle, while the latter is barely examined and totally a done deal.

There is also a very sensible, easy-to-follow story structure to this work, that is not only reminiscent of a good newspaper article, but also a powerful narrative drama. Poitras lays out all the information we need very carefully and slowly so we can get a grip on who each person is and how he relates to others and to the bigger story. I don't believe she is really giving us a specific view one way or the other about how to think of these men. We don't come out thinking that one man was screwed, say, and one man was guilty. It's much more gray here, so we see how al-Bahri has some good and powerful points about jihad and Al Qaeda and he's neither a villain nor a hero. He's just a man, full of fear and doubt.

At one point, when talking to his students, al-Bhari says about Americans, "They can't live without planes, girlfriends, pizza, macaroni. A jihadist can live on stale bread." This is a very important point, very well said and a clear definition of the Jihahi's view of the world. It is made even more powerful when Poitras shows him taking a swig of a Coke bottle moments after he finishes speaking.

(One interesting note, is that al-Bahri says that the United 93 plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was actually intended for the White House rather than the U.S. Capitol building. I had never heard this before, but it is interesting.)

Al-Bahri is not a robot. He is a man with normal human emotions. This is important, I think, in an age when politics and international media have settled on treating terrorists as mindless drones doing the bidding of higher-ups. We see here that sometimes these pawns are actually fully-formed humans who share the feelings we all would. Blind faith is so challenging and even in the situation of jihad, it is not a binary black or white dilemma.

Poitras presents for us here a magnificent balance of two men who took divergent paths and had different faiths. One is in a jail cell in Gitmo serving his time (he was ultimately released in 2009) and the other is sitting in his living room in Sanaa talking to students... and to a filmmaker. They are both men of deep faith and belief, but are very different. It is very interesting that Hamdan is never on screen here, but his story comes across just as powerfully, through his lawyers and his back story.There are lots of elegant parallels and intersections in this film. It is well worth watching.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Secretariat (Monday, October 11, 2010) (135)

Secretariat is based on the biography of the great horse by Bill Nack that he wrote in 1975. It is important to note that the official billing says the film is "suggested by" Nack's book, which is an important distinction because it really plays fast and loose with history. I guess one reason for this is that the film is really a story about Penny Tweedy, the main owner of the horse, and some details were added to make her more of an interesting character.


In 1969, Penny Tweedy (Diane Lane) is a Denver housewife with four kids and a loving husband. She's busy doing typical housewifey tings when she gets a call that her mother has just died and her father is now suffering from dementia. She flied back to Virginia to her family's horse farm that her father has turned into a successful business. While there, she is told that due to the estate taxes involved after a death, the family would be better off selling the farm and all the horses.


Penny seems to be a very smart lady with a nose for horses and she resists her brother's and husband's pleas to sell, instead deciding to fire the horse trainer who has been stealing from them and hire Lucian Laurin (John Malkovich) a trainer with a good reputation. Lucian quickly begins to train the farm's newest foal a big red horse that will ultimately be called Secretariat.


Secretariat is a tremendous horse from the get-go. He has a tremendous lineage a huge size. He begins racing as a 2-year-old in 1972 and wins a ton of races and ultimately is named Horse of the Year, an unusual achievement for a horse of his age. Just as this happens, Penny's father dies, bringing back the calls for the sale of the horse to pay for the taxes. They might be able to get as much as $7million for him - a record price. Penny doesn't want to sell him and instead sells shares in him, but retains control. She then has to hold her breath during the Triple-Crown season of 1973 to see if her decision was wise or not.


There are a ton if things wrong with the story, it's hard to know where to start. For one thing, Penny Tweedy was actually involved in her father's farm for awhile before she is in the film, and even owned Riva Ridge, the horse that won the Derby and Belmont in 1972 (the year before Secretariat won those). The really interesting story (as it is beautifully told in the book) is that Penny loved Riva Ridge more than Secretariat and rather resented that the red horse took attention away from her favorite. I guess this story was cut out for efficiency, but I think it could have been rolled in somewhere - especially if the film is really about her and not the horse.


The film is made by Disney and has a very saccharine, boring feeling about it throughout. Diane Lane does a good job with the role, but it is so shallow there's not much for her to work with. Director Randall Wallace does a very bad job here and misses at least two of the most exciting parts of Secretariat's story almost completely. The scene when they are selling shares in the horse is told in the book in a wonderfully dramatic and cinematic way (when reading it, I thought about how it would be turned into a scene in a film). Here, the scene falls flat and never really raises any excitement or interest at all.


One thing I'm really upset about it the treatment of the Preakness. Secretariat's most famous win is certainly the Belmont, which he won by 31 lengths, but possibly his most dramatic was the Preakness where he started out from behind (as he did in nearly all of his races) and then made his move to the front of the pack on the first turn. This is really never done in horse racing because it requires the horse to take a wider line around the bend, effectively running a longer race than the others. That Secretariat did that in this race was for many the most impressive feat. In this film, we see the race on the television in the Tweedy house and can barely see the move on the grainy TV screen. What a shame!


I would not recommend this film at all, but would strongly recommend Nack's book, Secretariat: The Making of a Champion. I think that is a much more interesting and exciting telling of the story than this very polished and trite film.


Stars: 1.5 of 4

A Film Unfinished (Monday, September 6, 2010) (115)

Yael Herzonski's A Film Unfinished is an interesting film, but not something all that fabulous. It is a documentary about a Nazi propaganda film that was shot in May 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto. Herzonski shows clips from that film and then adds to it journals and first-hand accounts by some of the Jews who witnessed the filming first-hand. She then also shows survivors of the Ghetto and the camps watching the footage and reacting to it. All of these documents help to show us how the people lived and how the Nazis clearly exaggerated simple situations or staged fake ones to make a political point. This is a documentary about a documentary.

One thing we see clearly here is how desperately hungry the people in the Ghetto were and how the Nazis rather brazenly brushed past this fact. Historians over the years have known full well that this Warsaw documentary was a propaganda piece and that much of what we see was not nearly the truth. What Herzonski's research shows - and especially what the interviews with survivors show - is that even basic scenes of Jews going to a restaurant for a nice lunch were also pure fabrications. The survivors joke about how nobody went out to eat at restaurants because there was just simply no food to be found in the Ghetto. Not only that, but the interiors were much shabbier than what the Nazi's present. One man jokes about how nobody would have had a vase of flowers on a table because they would have eaten the flowers!

I always appreciate a critical analysis of the documentary form - I think it's one of the most compelling topics in film theory. The idea that a movie exists as a "non-fiction document" is an absolute red herring, allowing lousy and lazy technicians get away with all sorts of formal transgressions from outright propaganda and polemic to simply cheating with framing. All film - all art - is clearly subjective and subject to any number of outside influences. This film shows how even accepting the Nazi film as a propaganda piece doesn't mean that we fully understand the truth on the ground entirely. She shows how there are deeper levels of meaning to any single image.

As interesting as this dissection is, Herzonski's film is not really all that interesting or compelling. I think most Holocaust films play too strongly on our human emotions and reactions and I think the director sometimes lets our natural visceral reactions rule over a stronger insight. Basically, I think most films about the Holocaust are intellectually cheap and emotionally easy. The digging into the truth about the original film is lightly interesting, but it doesn't go incredibly deep with further questions. This could have been an effective doc short and I think it doesn't pull off the significance of a full feature.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Mugabe and the White African (Saturday, July 24, 2010) (84)

The White African in this film is Mike Campbell, a farmer in Zimbabwe who grows mango on his large plot of land. He is fighting to keep his farm and trying to withstand the attacks and threats from local thugs who have been encouraged by the government to kick him and his family out. Campbell is fighting Mugabe in court in order to keep his land from seizure.


As part of Robert Mugabe's land redistribution program that began several years ago, white farmers are being rushed off their land in Zimbabwe so it can ostensibly be given to the poor peasants who live in the area. In actual fact, the white farmers are being beaten and terrorized in order to get them off their land. Once gone, their land ends up in the hands of local ministers, Mugabe supporters, judges, members of parliament and their families and associates. Because these people are not farmers, but just corrupt bureaucrats, they don't know how to grow anything on the land, further killing jobs in the already miserable economy.


There are actually two white Africans in the story. The other is Campbell's son-in-law, Ben Freeth, an equally tough young man who doesn't see how Mugabe's plans are fair or good in the slightest. Mike and Ben travel several times to Windhoek, Namibia for their trial at the Southern African Development Community's high court. Each time they go there, the Zimbabwean government postpones the case, and ultimately walks out of the court without presenting their side.


It is clear that Mugabe's land plan is illegal and racially bigoted and that if he wanted the white farmers out of his country he could have gone about it in a less violent and destructive way. It is also clear that Mugabe does not have a legal leg to stand on and that he cannot just void the land sales to the whites from years before merely on a whim.


The film is rather simplistic, however and somewhat disappointing. It relies on our emotional instincts, rather than explaining things to us with historical facts. It is much easier to show how scary the armed thugs are who constantly show up on Mike's farm, but it doesn't really explain why these particular guys are there. Throughout the film, I constantly wanted more information and more detail, and what I always got was more emotional heart-twisting.


For instance, Mike's lawyers explain that he bought the farm "after independence" (by which I gather they mean after 1965), though they do punt on the question of who he bought the farm from. If he bought the farm from another white person, it's not unreasonable to see that the blacks in the area might be upset by that. What we do see a lot is the bloody aftermath of white farmers getting beaten up by gangs of thugs. Of course this translates to us -but it is a rather cheap way of telling the story.


I don't mean to take the side of the thugs at all, but some more analysis of the situation would have been nice. Clearly the fact that Mike is providing jobs to hundreds of locals wheres the thugs who would take his farm would not is a compelling reason by itself to keep him around (aside from the human rights issues involved).


This is a good movie, but not a great movie. It does generally tell an effective and compelling chronological story. I just wanted a bit more here that I didn't get.


Stars: 2 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

American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein (Sunday, June 20, 2010) (55)

This is a small documentary about American academic Norman Finkelstein who has made a career out of being a Jew who does not supported much of the recent Israeli policy toward Palestinians. He has been an outspoken critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East and has worked tirelessly to get the world community to see the conflict from the Palestinian point of view. As the son of Holocaust survivors, he has been an interesting voice in the debate, comparing Israeli treatment of Palestinians to his parents' treatment in the Warsaw ghetto by the Nazis.

The film briefly shows Finkelstein's roots in Brooklyn and how he made a name for himself in the early 1980s writing a piece that criticized a popular book that only took the Israeli side of the conflict. Most of the film takes place in the past few years as he went on a college campus debate tour over his latest book. In the middle of the tour, he got into a fight on the radio with Alan Dershowitz and then made it his mission to condemn Dersh and prove him to be a plagiarist. This got him into hot water with his employers, Hunter College and then DePaul University.

Finkelstein is certainly a weird guy and basically doesn't know when to shut the hell up. He is not wrong about Dersh copying footnotes from an earlier book into his recent one (I have read about this and it seems pretty clear that he plagiarized), but so what?! This is not a battle worth fighting.

At a point, Finkelstein goes even further off the rails by claiming that Hezbollah is a force for good. Certainly they are doing some money-giving work on the ground in Beirut, but it's hard to argue that they are an absolute force for good (their policy of wiping Israel off the map isn't "good", no matter how you slice it).

He seems to enjoy being a firebrand, more than being a serious public intellectual. It is interesting to see before our eyes him move from the latter to the former.

This is an interesting film, though rather wonky. You have to be interested in the Middle East and the "peace process" to even remotely enjoy or understand this. Still, it's an interesting work.

Stars: 2 of 4

Waiting for Armageddon (Sunday, June 20, 2010) (54)

Waiting for Armageddon is an interesting documentary about how right-wing American Christians support very rigid Israeli right wing efforts to get Palestinians out of Jerusalem, figuring that Jesus will only return when the city is controlled by Jews and the Temple is rebuilt. It is a bit of a cautionary tale for American Jews (or really any Jews) who support a one-dimensional approach to Israeli policy. It is about how these people are not looking to be friends with Jews, but are looking to use Jews for their own devices. Jews to them are place-holders with a false religion who represent a possible deliverance from their terrestrial lives. This cynical view is particularly sickening to me (not only the people who think it, but also the Jews who allow themselves and their people to be used in such a way).

The film is done very nicely with interesting interviews from both sides (from the Christians and from skeptical Israelis) and interesting perspective from academics and historians. It has a nice, tight look and seems well put-together overall.

The best and freshest thing (and really an amazingly lucky documentary moment) is a sequence at a gathering of Christians where a speaker talks about how "post-modernism" is the worst thing in the world, because it allows you to split the meanings of words and actions. Calling post-modernism horrible because of its fluid definitions! How amazing! How post-modern!

Still, there's nothing much very original about this film. It's not bad at all, but it's not really anything that I haven't seen or read before in the (left-wing) press. Yes, the Christian-Right generally hates Jews and only cares about Jesus' second coming... it's not all that interesting.

Stars: 2 of 4

Cropsey (Thursday, June 17, 2010) (52)

Cropsey is the name that kids on Staten Island gave to a boogie man who allegedly kidnapped kids, cut them up and dumped their bodies in the woods. We are told at the beginning of the film that this was always an urban legend there until the late-1970s when a few kids actually did start going missing and at least one of their bodies was discovered in the woods. This documentary shows the police chase to find the murder and the media and legal trials that followed for the man they caught.

Soon after the massive man-hunt began on Staten Island, loner and homeless man Andre Rand was caught. He had been an orderly on the island's child mental hospital which was notorious for its inhumane living conditions for the kids. When the hospital was shut down, he stayed in the woods near the hospital ling in tents and scavenging.

At the time of his arrest, an unfortunate picture was snapped of him, looking insane and with drool coming out of his mouth. The local newspaper ran this photo under a headline suggesting that the "drifter" was arrested for the murder. This sealed his fate in the minds of his would-be jurors. Now in the present day, he is being tried for the murder of a second girl that same summer and the filmmakers go out looking for more information on Rand's past and the crimes themselves.

At it's core, this film feels like a poor-man's Paradise Lost, the brilliant documentary by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky about two unfortunate teens who were charged and convicted with murder because they dressed weird in their rural school. Here, directors Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman suggest that part of Rand's problem is that everyone was looking for a killer and he fit the bill, so he was convicted. They do suggest that he was probably guilty - and certainly was weird - but there is certainly an understanding that he didn't get a totally fair trial (and there is a suggestion that the trial in the present day is also not totally fair either).

My least favorite part of the film is that Brancaccio and Zeman become characters in the story as they hunt around for information. I don't really care about their story - I care about Rand and the story of the murders. To bring the story back around to them, I think is a sloppy byproduct of a badly conceived script (the movie is not called "Cropsey, Brancaccio and Zeman" after all).

This is a good movie, but not a great movie. It's interesting and shows some interesting stuff that I didn't know about mental health in New York up through the '70s. Still, I think overall this is a bit of a good story base that never really pans out. I'm not sure what their idea was with this doc (to make a movie about Rand, about the search for hard-to-find information), but the end result is not totally satisfying and rather choppy.

Stars: 2 of 4

Have You Heard from Johannesburg (Sunday, April 25, 2010) (34-36)

I normally don't review documentaries like this - made for television and multi-part - but I watched this one at Film Forum, where it played for two weeks, so I'm counting it and reviewing it. This is a seven-part, nearly-nine-hour history of the anti-Apartheid movement. It follows the early political actions of the 1950s through the 1980s and the American movement to divest from South African firms who were complicit in the racist movement.

Much like Eyes on the Prize, it tells a beautiful story of how over time, people such as Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Govan Mbeki led the movement in its early days in the streets of Soweto and how they were all arrested and jailed or exiled from the country. It shows key points in the movement, like the murder of Steve Biko, the Soweto riots and the government beat-down of activists in the 1970s.

Through the different chapters many different parts of the movement are shown. One part deals with the sporting arena and how by the 1970s, South Africa was not allowed to participate in many international competitions as they couldn't find opponents who would play their all-white squads. Another part shows the rise of anti-Apartheid sentiment in the United States and how university students forced their schools to sell stock in South African business.

There is not much here critical of the movement - all the leaders come across as saintly men and women who do nothing but good throughout their lives. This is clearly not the true case. Just as in any political movement, there were misplayed moments and even some outright bad stuff. But what they did to end the Apartheid system is important enough for me to let the omissions slide.

This is a great work and one that should be taught in classrooms around the world.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Sun Behind The Clouds (Friday, April 2, 2010) (26)

The title of the documentary The Sun Behind The Clouds refers to the Dalai Lama and how at some point in the future he will be able to regain his position as a cultural, political and religious figure for the Tibetan people. Just as clouds might cover the sun on an overcast day, it is still there; when the clouds clear, the sun will shine on the land and the people.

This is the central theme of this film - a historical look at the Tibetan liberation movement and the relatively new conflict within the Tibetan people after the Dalai Lama changed his position slightly several years ago. His Holiness does not directly advocate for the ouster of China from Tibet, but rather for a "Middle Road" approach for the right of his people to live in their homeland, which will remain in China and practice the religious they choose without government pressure to not practice. He also would like to see China relax its efforts to wipe Tibetan culture (its music, clothing, customs, etc.) off the map by imposing more traditional Chinese culture on the remaining Tibetans living in Lhasa and throughout the nation.

The film lays out a very easy-to-follow history of Tibet in the 20th Century and how the Chinese came in an how the Dalai Lama fled to India. It shows how the Free Tibet movement has gained cause celeb status and how passionately the Tibetan people inside and outside Tibet feel about it. The filmmakers follow a march from the Dalai Lama's current home in exile, Dharamsala, India, to Lhasa by hundreds of faithful Tibetans in advance of the Beijing Olympics of 2008. This march led to riots in Tibet as the people got excited and mobilized for a fight with the Chinese Communists. As this is happening, the Dalai Lama is touring the world speaking out about peace and understanding.

There is a very interesting moment when one Tibetan activist talks about the schism the Dalai Lama has created within his people. He is both head of the Tibetan government in exile as well as its spiritual and cultural leader. What he says is generally taken to be a divine truth, however, he is a political human whose followers sometimes disagree with him. There has developed over the years a group of strict liberationists who see anything short of the return of absolute sovereignty to be a failure. These people cite as evidence earlier statements of the Dalai Lama from 30+ years ago. There is another group who follow what the Dalai Lama says directly as gospel, so as his opinion has evolved and become more moderate and even-handed, they have changed their minds too.

All of this is a very big problem for a peaceful nation with no standing army. Their options are rather limited - especially when the Chinese government treats them with such contempt (if they even 'treat' them at all). The Dalai Lama has an impossible dilemma of whether to keep fighting a battle he probably can never win while his culture gets slowly erased from the planet, or to give in to the reality and build "a new Tibet outside of Tibet" for the survival of his people and their way of life.

This is a very interesting movie that tells a good, clear story in a very approachable way. It shows the difficulty of the situation and does not advocate one position or another.

Stars: 3 of 4

Waking Sleeping Beauty (Friday, March 26, 2010) (23)

This is a very interesting documentary about Disney animation from 1984 through 1994 - arguably the most important time in the history of the company and the era that created the entertainment behemoth that Disney is today. In the early 1980s, Disney animation was at its lowest point since the death of Walt in 1966. They had a string of bad movies that were not interesting to viewers and not making money. Around 1984 the board of Disney brought in Michael Eisner and Frank Wells to turn the studio around.

Up to that point, the company was making most of its money on the theme parks and live-action movies. Eisner brought in Jeffrey Katzenberg as the Chairman of Disney and the two of them developed a strong interest in re-launching the animation arm, the bedrock of the company's legacy.

The animation department was being run by Roy Disney, Walt's nephew. Roy and Katzenberg worked tirelessly, along with executives like Dick Cook and Peter Schneider to reorganize the creative process and come up with ideas that would be both appealing to people of all ages and make them want to spend money to see the works. They all worked closely together and almost all of them hated the others. There were a lot of big egos involved and they all were puffed up by their huge paychecks.

The film is really about the historical elements of the change (going from The Great Mouse Detective to The Little Mermaid to The Lion King) and the political forces that played in the background. Eisner famously didn't promote Katzenberg when Frank Miller died, which sent Katzenberg out the door and on to DreamWorks, now a major rival to Disney (animation and live-action).

As interesting as the story is (it really is a fascinating and engaging story), the film does not really do enough to bring the viewer in and interest them. There is only a small amount of animated material shown onscreen and almost no music (considering it's a documentary about animated musicals, I think this is a shame). More unusual, and frustrating, is that all of the interviews with the principle people are used as voice-overs and you never see a 'talking head'.

I think the point of this is that it is supposed to help focus on the old footage on screen. What it actually does it makes it more confusing because it's never clear if we are hearing an old or a new interview. If you had the visual footage along with it, you could tell if it was shot recently or 20 years ago. Disembodied voices are hard to follow or pay attention to. This is especially hard when you have to juggle the names and voices of a few dozen people without a face or other visual clues to fall back on.

Sadly, we see very little about how the style of Disney's animation changed in this time. They get so wrapped up in the history they forget to mention that a movie like Beauty and the Beast looks different than earlier 2D Disney fare, like The Black Cauldron. There is also not enough discussion of how Disney got to work with Pixar so frequently at the end of the 1990s and through the Aughts.

This is a very interesting, Shakespearean chapter in Hollywood history (almost King Lear meets Henry V), but it is not presented in the best way.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2009) (Saturday, January 30, 2010) (221)

This documentary shows the rise and fall of Daniel Ellsberg, the defense wonk who ultimately made the Pentagon Papers public, illuminating truths about the Vietnam War and how the defense department did not believe it was a winnable effort. The story focuses mostly on Ellsberg and his career path from the Defense Department to the RAND Corporation onto and off the ground in Vietnam and around the United States.

This is a very interesting story and one that the directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith tell very well. It could be rather complicated and difficult to understand, but here is told told in a straightforward, unflinching way. It lays out the complex diplomatic and military struggle as a clear narrative and shows that what Ellsberg did in outing the secret papers.

The biggest problem with the film is that it does show Ellsberg to be a contemporary superhero, which is somewhat hard to digest. He's shown as the only guy in the world who did this one heroic thing. He's also seen as a mad genius who risks his family's well being on this obsessive quest to tell the world what he learned. I would have much preferred a bit more restraint, possibly showing him as a career bureaucrat (which he was, albeit a well informed one with a good soul) who did a single daring thing. I don't need the hero worship - it's a bit silly. It also makes Ellsberg seems like a narcissist, which makes him harder to like.

This film is one of the five documentaries nominated for the feature doc category in the Oscars and it might be one of the best of that group (I did like Burma VJ and the Cove as well). Still, I wish the directors showed more of the contrary point of view, allowing me to see on my own that what Ellsberg did was a good thing (giving up state secrets and all).

More than anything, I appreciate how this is a subtle condemnation of Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, George Tenet and any number of Bush-era defenders who didn't speak up in the lead-up to the Iraq War, but sat silently in their offices. It doesn't matter that they now regret their silence. Today they are as guilty as Bush, I think. Ellsberg's story shows another path they could have taken.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Young Victoria (Sunday, December 20, 2009) (199)

Sometimes it feels like there's a new British royal biopic every year. Elizabeth, Elizabeth II, George III, Mary, Victoria - they're all great chances for directors to show off grand costumes and wonderful noble homes with manicured gardens and fantastic interiors. To this point, I've found most of them rather anonymous - that is, it's sometimes hard to tell one from another. They all blend together in their silk and gilt brocade, their stuffy accents and crystal chandeliers. The Young Victoria, however is a very nice movie - one that stands apart from the others by it's simple story and beautiful style.

Victoria (Emily Blunt) is a 19 year-old princess and is next in line to the British throne once her uncle William IV (Jim Broadbent) dies. She is also the niece of Leopold, King of Belgium. In order to consolidate power, Leopold introduces her to his nephew (and her cousin) Albert (Rupert Friend). The two have many interests in common and quickly fall in love, though they can only marry after her coronation. She stumbles several times in the first days of her monarchy when taking advice from a cagey politician, Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany). She soon marries Albert and has to figure out the balance between being a loving, romantic wife and a strong and sensible leader for her country.

Unlike most of the recent movies about British royalty, this one has an interesting and beautiful style from French-Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee. He uses the camera very well in a clever, but subtle way. In one wonderful scene during a birthday dinner for King William, we see a deep shot of all the wine glasses set up on the table. Vallee uses a rack focus to show the successive crystal glasses down the line. One is in focus, then the next, then the next, leading our eyes into the picture in a visually playful way. He uses these racking shots throughout the film to point our view in specific places. It is clever and dynamic and really great.

Emily Blunt is getting a lot of attention for her performance here, and she deserves it. Her Victoria is sensible, naive, feminine and powerful. She is utterly modern and strong. The other actors also deserve attention, particularly Rupert Friend who does well with a Belgian accent and plays the line between husband and adviser to the most powerful woman (most powerful person) on earth and foolish lover very well.

This is a simple story with a very tight and smart script (written by Julian Fellowes). It is a biopic as well as a more serious romance and an interesting historical political drama. I like very much that it says what it has to say quickly (it's only 100 minutes) and shows the first chapter of a tremendously interesting reign and life. It shows Victoria and Albert as soul mates and world leaders who would go on to change the course of modern human history. But it does this very gently and subtly. I look forward to the next chapter in this story - The Middle-Aged Victoria, I guess. Yes - I'm looking forward to a sequel... how strange!

Stars: 3 of 4