The Interruptors (2011) (Tuesday, February 14, 2012) (154)

On paper, The Interrupters, a film by Steve James (co-director of Hoop Dreams), about a group of volunteers who go into urban communities to help people alleviate violence and revenge attacks, seems like a can't-fail film. A brilliant filmmaker and a wonderful subject! But, as they say in sports, that's why they make the movies. The Interrupters is one of the biggest cinematic disappointments of the year for me, as it's way too long, has no real story structure and generally bores rather than inspires.

The film follows a year with the CeaseFire Violence Interrupters, a Chicago-based non-profit group who work with former gang members to mentor young people, many of whom are current gang members, and try to get them to cease the ever-spiraling cycle of violence and retribution. We meet three mentors, Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams and Eddie Bocanegra as they each work with a handful of individual kids to turn their lives around. Aside from their work with individuals, they each attend local community meetings and bigger CeaseFire panels where strategies are discussed. We see Matthews several times on the street literally getting in the face of young men as they are about to get into fights yelling them down to stop the violence.

Starting with the summer, we see four seasons of their work, and follow a few individual kids they struggle to keep in line. Matthews works with a girl who is prone to violence, has been arrested for something drug-related, and has difficulty turning the other cheek (and not getting high) when the heat turns up. Williams works with a young man in a similar situation, desperately trying to show him that a violent reaction would not make life better for anyone.

The biggest problem with the film is that there is simply too much information and too many people shown on screen. It is clear that what the Violence Interrupters are doing is fabulous and difficult work, but this is a case where showing less would be more effective. If we could concentrate only on three stories (one for each mentor), the message would be clearer. As it is, we see three stories and then about a dozen smaller stories in the middle. Yes, this clearly shows that they have very hard jobs to do and a lot of way to go before their work is finished, but part of the point of the documentary format is to not show everything, but to curate the best parts. For much of the length of the film, it seems the only reason we are still watching anything is because it's winter, say, and we need to get back to the end of spring. That's silly.

I can't really say there are many moments that are very memorable from the film, as there is just too much information presented. There are some happy endings and some sad ones and some unclear ones. It's easy to see that the work of the Violence Interrupters is amazing, but it's a shame it is presented in such a way (and that so many other critics are so thrilled with the results). This really could be a good 40-minute short about the work just of Matthews with the one young woman.

Otherwise, it should have been expanded to a miniseries, along the lines of the TV miniseries Brick City, about politics and people in Newark, NJ (that's a great series that everyone should see). As far as I understand it, there were longer cuts of The Interrupters in earlier versions, so I imagine there is adequate footage. Such a set-up wold allow stories to be expanded and clarified.

Stars: 2 of 4

Page One: Inside the New York Times (2011) (Monday, January 23, 2012) (144)

Page One: Inside the New York Times is a documentary that follows the Media desk of the New York Times during the end of 2009 and early 2010. One of the main characters of the film is Media columnist and reporter David Carr, and with his rough Upper Midwest voice, he takes on all attackers who claim that the paper is going under and that the days of broadsheet print are over.

Throughout the film stories pop up, get discussed, are printed and then forgotten. We see the first WikiLeaks video dump showing US armed forces killing Reuters journalists, we see the late-2009 withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, we see the Tribune Company fall apart. With each story it is clear that the editors and writers of the Times are serious thinking people who try to look at more than one side of the issue.

Meanwhile, from every angle, they are under attack from other journalists and news media players such as blogs and news aggregators who claim that the world wouldn't be so bad if there were no more Times. Each time this comes up, director Andrew Rossi shows that the claim is worthless without a full consideration of the ramifications of such a situation. The New York Times is the originator of many stories each day and a world without it might very well be a worse place.

This is clearly a glamor project that shows how wonderful and smart everything surrounding the New York Times is. There are brief mentions of the Carlos Slim loan to the Times, the new building and it's sale-leaseback deal, the new pay-wall on the website and the buyouts of old staffers. Mostly we see how a bunch of young (mostly) good looking (mostly) men make tough decisions all the time.

I generally don't like films like this that come off as much as an advertisement for the subject as a document about it, but this is generally not too offensive. It is interesting and clever how stories come and go through the film just as they do on the front page of the paper. Still, it sometimes seems like a movie with no plot and no beginning or end.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Iron Lady (Saturday, December 31, 2011) (130)

The first thing I noticed about Phyllidia Lloyd's The Iron Lady was that the makeup in it is amazing. The film opens roughly in the present day as Margaret Thatcher (Dame Meryl Hepburn Dench Streep), now in her late 80s, is walking around her London flat talking to her dead husband who seems to stick around in her mind as if he was really there. At first glance it really doesn't look like Meryl at all. As much as you look for a terrible wig seam on her forehead or terrible plastic droopy jowl, you can't find any evidence that it's makeup. It's really remarkable (particularly in light of the makeup debacle that just occurred onscreen with J. Edgar).

I was totally expecting that I would hate this movie before I went in to see it. I expected that it was going to show Thatcher as a heroic feminist who fought men and did what was right for her country, while underplaying her major and lasting sins. I have to admit, it was not that bad... though it was really not that brilliant either. Much of the praise of the film will go to Meryl, of course, and more than anything, this feels like a movie created for her, while trying to not offend anyone one any political side (it's really not offensive... which is a bit offensive in its own right).

The film has a typical biopic structure, told mostly through flashbacks. We see present-day Maggie looking back at her life: the daughter of a middle-class grocer with conservative political leanings himself, she went to Oxford and then became a young star in the Tory party. We see her quick rise through the party until she became P.M. in 1990. From there the three major events of her tenure are mentioned and shown, but not dwelled upon. We see the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, though we never really get much info on that story; we see the Falklands War for awhile, but never really see how she used it to wag the dog and get out of the heat she was taking for the terrible economy (that third thing)... which we don't really see or hear any mention of. Ultimately we see how either because she was losing some level of mental clarity or because she was losing track of sound economic principles, she was shown the door by her party and resigned.

Meryl is much better as the doddering old Maggie than the middle-aged spitfire (young Maggie is played well enough by Alexandra Roach). I think a lot of that comes the fact that the old Maggie is a bit of a subtler performance with small reactions and lots of associations by the audience, while the younger Maggie is filled with all sorts of speechifying and grandstanding, which I've always found to be Meryl's weakness (though I know most people love that stuff from her). I guess I also have to admit that I'm so repulsed by the positions the middle-aged Maggie took that my reaction to that segment of the film was probably not unclouded.

There's a good deal of really cliched and lazy filmmaking here as well. At one moment when we see Maggie walking into Parliament for the first time, we look down a long hallway with windows at the end. Through a lighting trick, the windows are all white and the foreground is dark. As she steps into the frame she's out of focus and is merely a dark spot in a white background. Then the focus racks and she comes into focus as she approaches. This terrible shot is used in terrible TV shows nightly, to say nothing of silly movies. I hate this shot. Later, we see old Maggie in her flat watching the TV as a commentator explains that "she's a polarizing figure because..." and goes on to list her basic resume of achievements and perceived failures. Show, don't tell, Phyllidia. Show, don't tell.

I'm not really sure what Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan (who also co-wrote Steve McQueen's disappointing Shame) are trying to do here. There is no particular emotion that comes out of the film. It's not an intricate take-down of a villain, like Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall and it's not a heroic social-political piece like Ford's The Young Mister Lincoln or Eastwood's Invictus. At times the tone felt rather over-the-top and goofy like a film by Bunuel or John Waters (I'm sure John Waters would giggle throughout this film if he were to see it... it's pure camp), though I can't be sure that that was intentional or if the tone was just too earnest at those moments. At one point we hear the song "I'm in Love with Margaret Thatcher" by the Brighton punk band The Notsensibles... but out of context there's an idea that it's actually a pro-Maggie song... which it's not... it's a joke... at least I've always thought it was...

I guess I really should hate this movie because it doesn't tear down someone I hate (I would be throwing this computer across the room if such a polite film about Reagan was released... and I'm sure it's coming). I guess I just was expecting so much more of a story of sacrifice and achievement than this, that what we get was really only lightly painful. She really comes of as a typical silly old lady more than any sort of political hero, and although I wish she had been decimated by this film, I guess that's better than being lionized.

Stars: 2 of 4

Crime after Crime (Friday, November 4, 2011) (95)

This is a very good documentary about the legal battles of Deborah Peagler, a woman convicted of killing her boyfriend in the early 1980s after he had abused her and her daughter for years. She should have only served six or so years in prison but because of several bad and illegal decisions of the Los Angeles County D.A.'s office, she served 27 years. The story shows her with her two pro bono lawyers digging up information on how her case was mishandled and then how the DA took some particularly shameful decisions in the appeal process in order to save face and advance a political career. The format is very direct and easy to follow chronologically. Peagler's story screams for a Hollywoodified narrative adaptation, along the lines of Erin Brokovich ("They're called tits, Ed.") or Conviction. I'm sure that movie won't be as good as this one.

Stars: 3 of 4

Ides of March (October 7, 2011) (87)

God - I've almost totally forgotten this movie. It's based on an off-Broadway play and really feels like that. It's a very small political story about a guy running for President in the Ohio primary (George Clooney) who has a young political advisor (Ryan Gosling) who is sought after by his main rival. There's some messiness with a young intern (of course), and lots of banal liberal claptrap about energy policy and giving power to the people. It's all very stagey and very slight. Clooney, who also directed the picture, does an adequate job with the script, but can't overcome the mundaneness of the story. It all feels very on-the-nose about our political system, but doesn't really say anything significant. I love independent, non-profit theater, but this is a bad example of the worst part of it. This was clearly adapted because of the subject matter rather than the strength of the work. I'm totally uninterested in it.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Miral (Friday, April 1, 2011) (18)

Ugh. This fucking movie... So Julian Schnabel has made three fabulous movies up to this point: Baquiat, Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I think he films are much more interesting, much more visually appealing and much more approachable than his other artworks (I really don't like his broken plates on canvas "paintings). Miral, however, breaks that streak as it has a really terrible story, is full of terrible film cliches, has no clear narrative structure with lots of waste and was apparently cast by a blind person (and a deaf person).

The story follows the Palestinian freedom movement from the creation of Israel in 1948 to sometime randomly around the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993 (apparently the Second Intefada wasn't important or something). Miral (Freida Pinto) is a girl born to two Palestinian people in the 1970s. After her mother dies, her father puts her into an orphanage for Palestinian girls in East Jerusalem (I think) set up by Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass) who is a sorta political person. There she is raised on the edge of political radicalism, but never really becomes a radical herself.

At some point when she's a teenager she gets a boyfriend who is more of a radical and she begins peacefully protesting Israeli treatment of Palestinians with fliers and picket signs. Then she's arrested and then there's a peace agreement (I don't mean to give too much away. Sorry). That's about it. More than anything, this is a really, really dull story where basically nothing happens. It doesn't really give a good view of the Palestinian struggle (Arafat and the PLO are never mentioned, as far as I could tell) and doesn't really explain any amount of world history that was happening at that time.

There's nothing wonderful about the look of the film, nothing you haven't see a million times in other movies. Schnabel plays with colors throughout the film, so sometimes you get washed out, super bright desert scenes, sometimes he puts a blue or red filter on the lens and you get blue or red scenes. The camera seems to move a lot, in one sequence he tilts it up to look at the tops of trees in a woods and spins... I think I've seen that before in one of his movies (maybe Diving Bell). It's all a bit paint-by-numbers filmmaking and not really interesting.

OK - so let's talk about how Freida Pinto is an Indian woman born in Mumbai and is not Palestinian. This was really totally distracting for me throughout the film. I heard an interview recently with Schnabel who said that Rula Jebreal, who wrote the memoir the film is based on (and who is now Schnabel's girlfriend), looks Indian so he cast an Indian in the role that is based on her. Well, that would be great, if the movie was called "Rula" and it was hyper-realistic - but it's not. It's a
movie called Miral and there is no sense in not casting a Palestinian, or Arab, woman in the role. It's weird and culturally dishonest.

Then there's the fact that the film is in English and not Arabic. Two of his first three films are not in English. Before Night Falls is a film about Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas and it is in Spanish and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is about French fashion editor Jean-Dominique Bauby and is in French. So why the hell is this movie in English? It's totally distracting, especially when there are English-speaking characters in the story - like a US military guy who mysteriously comes in and out of the first act of the film and is played by Willem Dafoe.

The film has been getting a lot of press about how it's anti-Israeli or something. I really don't see that totally. It's anti-Israeli the way that Star Wars is anti-Empire or the way Pan's Labyrinth is anti-Spanish fascists. That is to say that the Israelis are painted so broadly and are so bizarrely one-dimensional that they almost cease to exist as real characters or a real negative force.

There are several (turgid, terribly written) lines of dialogue where you hear Palestianians commiserate about " why won't they let us build new houses?" or "why are the settlers in our land?" Well, yes - those are good questions - but empty questions really won't scratch the surface of the issues. We see IDF soldiers acting like dicks at checkpoints. OK - buy why are they acting like dicks? And is it only the soldiers who are acting this way or do Israelis on the street agree with them. The fact is we see basically one civilian Israeli in the whole film, played by Schabel's daughter Stella... and she's a pretty cool girl, who is then dropped from the plot.

My favorite bad part of this bad film (aside from the all-brown-people-are-the-same mixup) is that end credits song is some obscure Tom Waits tune, sung in English, sorta a bluesy, mournful rock piece. Uh, Julian, are you telling me there wasn't something more relevant to the story or the region that you could have put in this spot? Maybe a song from the rough geographic area (by a Palestinian musician? Even a Palestinian rock song? Something in Arabic?)? What's the point in all this cultural gobbledygook? I don't really know and I bet Schnabel doesn't either. This is very much the throw-pasta-at-the-wall approach to making movies. It doesn't stand on its own at all, is incredibly boring and is pretty dishonest as a historical narrative.

Stars: .5 of 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stars; .5 of 4

Fair Game (Friday, December 3, 2010) (151)

Imagine, if you will, that you were raped in the most brutal and violent way possible. Now imagine you were forced to watch a feature film of your own rape. Finally imagine that as a cherry on top of this horrible sundae, you were forced to watch another person being horribly raped, although you really didn't totally care about them. This whole viewing experience might be rather nauseating and terrible for you. This is the best analogy of my experience watching Doug Liman's Fair Game.

OK, I know the rape metaphor sounds extreme, but what else would you call Bush's horrible, horrible war in Iraq based on political motive and not any sort of military goal. Fair Game is essentially as much a film about how the Bush administration moved to a war footing from their first day in office and then sold the war with bullshit as it is about a career-C.I.A. operative being exposed by a Bob Novak column (leading to the deaths of several people at a minimum) for political retribution. This film was downright hard to sit through for me, partly because it's just not very interesting or gripping and partly because the story underlying the narrative is so incredibly foul (and, of course, true).

Based on the books by Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame Wilson, the film tells the story of what happened to lead to their entire lives being turned upside down as political pawns. We see Valerie organizing what seem to be high-level research and negotiations on counter-proliferation matters in the late 1990s, going undercover with assumed identities, all while working for the C.I.A. We see Joe, a former diplomat in the State Department, being sent to Niger to investigate the claims of a deal with Iraq for yellow cake uranium. We see how the war begins in Iraq, and that Joe decides to write an op-ed in the New York Times about how the claim of the uranium deal was based on bad intel. Then we see how the Bush White House leaks Valerie's name as pay-back.

There's something about films dealing with recent, painful events (mostly told from a liberal or ultra-liberal points of view) that I think are inherently frustrating and uninspired. Like a work about September 11, 2001, a film about the trail of lies that led to our involvement in the Iraq War stands as a rather hollow monolith devoid of much interest or emotional hooks. Clearly I have very strong emotions about what happened. (I fucking hate Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz and all those motherfuckers with every bone in my body. I knew they were lying the whole time they were talking and I find their lack of concern for what they've fucked up beyond infuriating.)

How is Doug Liman (who really is a very mediocre filmmaker) going to tell me a story that adds something new to my experience? My emotions on the subject are so powerful that the film simply becomes a catalyst for my own rage; Liman can get away with emotional shorthand to trigger me having an extreme emotional reaction. This is very different, of course, from a filmmaker who has to tell an entire story from scratch and make me feel emotions simply from what he puts onscreen. Once he sets off my emotions, based on nothing he is doing cinematically, they cloud my ability to watch the story with any sort of unbiased view. The experience for me becomes about my rage and not about what I'm seeing, which really becomes secondary.

But there are a lot of other problems with the film. For one, the style is totally banal and so recycled it's just plain boring. Liman uses lots of hand-held cameras to make it seem like a documentary, make it seem intimate. But then nearly every transition occurs with the most hackneyed helicopter shots over D.C., showing monuments and the Capitol Building then such shots are totally unnecessary. (He also bizarrely suggests the Wilsons take cabs all the time - including Valerie taking a cab when she finally goes to talk to Congress. This makes no sense. Why would people who are somewhat afraid for their safety take cabs. Nobody in D.C. takes cabs.)

Beyond these issues, however, there is a lot of problems with the characters that are presented. Joe Wilson, who gives his resume to us at least twice, is a life-long diplomat and foreign service worker, yet somehow he's totally unaware of how the C.I.A. gathers intel and how governmental bureaucracy is sometimes frustrating. (Are you telling me, a former deputy to several embassies in West Africa and the former ambassador to Gabon never worked with the C.I.A? Hard to believe.) We only ever get the most superficial portrait of Joe and Valerie and never really connect to them at all. Mostly we see that they are both heroically fighting to knock down lies that they are asked to support. This isn't a connection to then, however, this is an observation.

I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but Joe Wilson comes off here as a reckless narcissist. We constantly see Valerie telling him to shut up and not stir the pot about what he knows about Saddam (having met him over the years) and yellow cake, but he constantly doesn't listen to her. I feel like Liman is showing this almost as a joke (she tells him to not go on television the next day and then there's a cut to him doing exactly that), but it's not really funny. In the strangest turn of events, we see that a group of Iraqi nuclear scientists, who Valerie had worked with in the lead-up to the invasion and who she was trying to get out of the country, are murdered as a result of the whole Bob Novak column. Novak is absolutely not in this film to such a great degree that it's really presented that the blood of the scientists falls on Joe's hands. Is that what Liman meant to do?

Also strangely absent from this whole story are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney; all we see are Scooter Libby and Karl Rove discussing what to do about the Wilsons. Is Liman suggesting that somehow this was organized by Bush's and Cheney's head men, but not by them specifically? Is he absolving the two of them of responsibility? It's very hard to tell.

I should mention something about the acting, which is getting lots of attention, but which I found totally unimpressive. Penn is unemotional, mechanical and rather overdone; Naomi Watts (as Valerie) is fine, but she's so monotone and her style is so vanilla it's hard for me ever to like her very much. The best acting job is Sam Shepard (playing Valerie's dad... he always plays dads these days), who gives a beautiful one-scene performance.

The most exciting moment for me in this film was when I realized a scene where Joe and Valerie are talking in a park was actually shot in my neighborhood park a block from my home in Brooklyn. The rest was either incredibly dull and badly formed or so dramatically uncomfortable as it showed infuriating material that I already know well. This is not much of a movie, it's just a regurgitation of a somewhat interesting, somewhat uninteresting story.

Stars: 1 of 4

Videocracy (Sunday, October 24, 2010) (140)

Videocracy is an Italian documentary about how Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi controls his country and his power through the garbage he puts on television and the greater media that surrounds his terrible reality shows. It is pure political polemic of the most bitter and cutting variety. It doesn't really work totally as an effective documentary (or polemic), but there are some amazing moments in it.

We see some of the history of Berlusconi's reality shows and how he came to power. We see how he made Italian women want to be "velinas" or TV game show models - like Vanna White, but more mindless and with less clothes. We then see how he keeps his friends in the entertainment industry close, like Lele Mora, a super-agent for TV stars - especially those who want to go from Big Brother to music recording. Finally we see Fabrizio Corona, a major Italian paparazzo and how Mora and Corona and the television stations keep the gossip and celebrity nonsense swirling in the atmosphere, ultimately helping to keep Berlusconi popular with the people.

In many ways, this is a bit of a glimpse at what America could be in 50 years. Politics is basically taken over by demagoguery and the only entertainment is absolute garbage gossip. People are generally unhappy, but they don't really fight it because their minds are so numbed by the situation.

Director Erik Gandini clearly has a beef with Berlusconi and basically calls him a criminal and a murderer several times through the film. He uses a voice over narrator who sounds like he's spitting acid when he says the prime minister's name. I think some of this political hatred should have been modified as what we get is much less effective with it in there.

This is a fun movie if you are interested in Italy (and don't like Silvio Berlusconi), but it is not one that is incredibly important. It's basically a very good 60 Minutes story - or really, three stories - but with a lot more animosity.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stars: 3 of 4

Freakonomics (Sunday, October 3, 2010) (129)

Freakonomics is a fun and interesting documentary based on information taken from the 2005 book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Due to the very braod and weird nature of the book, the movie is made up of four shorts that are each individually written and directed by some of the most impressive and talented young documentarians working today.

Morgan Spurlock is probably the best known director, previously creating Super Size Me, and he has a great segment here about how given names either are or are not a predictor of success or failure in life. Alex Gibney, who recently made the brutal and brilliant Taxi to the Dark Side, has a nice piece about cheating in sumo wrestling and what it tells us about cheating in the banking industry. Eugene Jarecki, who did the interesting documentary Why We Fight, gives us a rather shocking and well-made short about how the rise in abortions in the 1970s led to a lowering of the crime rate in the 1990s. Finally, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, who made Jesus Camp, bring us a story about how a Chicago-area school district is experimenting with paying kids money for good grades.

Each film is introduced by a brief discussion of the general context of the piece by Levitt and Dubner (these segments are directed by Seth Gordon who made the documentary The King of Kong - one of my recent favorites). These intros as well as the shorts themselves almost all employ wonderful animation elements, some more than others. Jarecki's piece is almost entirely animated with news footage cut into it, while Gibney's and the Ewing/Grady one have only a little in theirs.

Spurlock's short is a great example of his quirky style and very reminiscent of the best moments from his 30 Days television show - that is thankfully off the air now (he really ran out of ideas and it went down the tube). Several of the directors use Levitt and Dubner as interview subjects in their pieces to make the toughest freakonomic positions.

I think I was most affected by the Jarecki short for it's elegant animated style and totally mind-blowing conclusions. It's hard to argue with the economic and sociological findings through all of these pieces (particularly in this one) because the concepts they're working with are so immense. We have to assume that they checked their work and know what they're talking about - so we just have to have faith that what we are seeing it totally correct. I think Gibney's short is probably the dullest, though it has the best photography and might look the best aesthetically of the four.

There is a definite small-screen element to this film, and I almost feel it would work just as well, if not better, on television, rather than in the cinema. This could have easily been a small series on AMC or IFC or some cable channel - and in fact I would hope they continue to make other shorts along these lines.

Stars: 3 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