I review Kimberly Reed’s documentary Prodigal Sons for the Turner Classic Movies website.

Halfway through Kimberly Reed’s documentary Prodigal Sons, her older brother Marc, who was adopted before she was born, tracks down his biological mother. Her name is Rebecca Welles and Marc discovers that he is the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. That dramatic revelation would be the focus of any other documentary but in Reed’s study in family, identity, sibling rivalry and mental illness it’s simply another dimension of a very personal story.

See the complete feature here.

When Eyes on the Prize (PBS), a landmark six-part documentary series on the civil rights struggle between 1954 and 1964, first ran on public television in 1978, it was still recent history. The Montgomery bus boycott was barely thirty years before and is was only a couple decades since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law: not ancient history but events that much of the audience lived through. Many of the activists and protesters involved in those events are interviewed for the program, produced by Henry Hampton, but the power is in the rich collection of newsreel footage and news interviews from the day. This history was well covered by TV and newsreel crews, not just the sometimes violent confrontations but speeches by politicians justifying segregation and vowing to fight the federal government for their right to discriminate, interviews with protesters and civil rights leaders, even KKK rallies whipping up white audiences into a lather of fear and anger.

From the recent rebroadcast of the landmark documentary series

Political leader and civil rights activist Julian Bond narrates with a thoughtful calm that cuts through the anger onscreen and the injustice and outrage it rouses in the audience. Winner six Emmy awards and numerous other honors, it’s one of the most powerful documentary portraits of American history and it debuts on DVD in the wake of its rebroadcast on PBS: all six hour-long episodes on three discs in a box set of three thinkpak cases, plus an archival interview with creator Henry Hampton, who died in 1998.

Read more »

The aliens arrived almost thirty years ago, their crippled spacecraft hovering to a halt over Johannesburg, where it remains hovering over the city. That defining image hovers over the entirety of District 9 (Sony), a savagely whipsmart satire of first contact with an alien species reduced to repressed immigrant population from first-time feature director Neill Blomkamp and producer Peter Jackson. What should be an ominous and amazing transport from another world is neither threat nor utopian promise, merely an annoyance to the local human population that can’t look to the sky without seeing that reminder of an unwanted subculture that has been segregated and shunted to the slums: the aliens have become the underclass.

Evicting those pesky alien squatters

What could be an unbearably bleak and cynical portrait becomes a ferociously entertaining piece of science fiction thriller in the hands of Blomkamp, who frames the story through the bumbling obliviousness of amiable idiot civil servant Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a grinning administrative functionary promoted far beyond his pay scale and his abilities. All the better to run the Department of Alien Affairs as a front for outsourcing millions in private security and turning the concentration camp inmates (sorry, that’s segregated population) into research subjects for the weapons division. You can find my full film review on the blog here.

Read more »

I review Chris Smith’s documentary/interview platform Collapse, with Michael Ruppert explaining why we’re screwed.

Ruppert is the whole show in Collapse, which features the chain-smoking dissident delivering his assessment in blunt, easy-to-grasp terms: We’re heading for a collapse. Economies are failing around the globe, the arable soil is being drained of nutrients that are being replaced with petroleum-based fertilizers, the human population has exploded to numbers that the planet can’t sustain.

It’s a dire prediction out of some sort of science-fiction apocalypse, and the temptation is to label it crackpot paranoia and fringe conspiracy theory (as many of his critics have). But Ruppert is well-informed, articulate, and backed by a pretty good track record of equally ignored predictions, if he does say so himself. We have to take him at his word there—Smith is no Errol Morris.

Read the entire review here.

The infamous photographs of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and detainees (some of them innocent of any crime) by American MPs at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad have become iconic imagery of American military shame, displayed so many times that they have begun to lose their shock value.  Errol Morris returns to these photographs, which were taken from three separate cameras and freely shared with the servicemen and women posted at the prison, as exhibit A in his investigation what happened, how and why. Standard Operating Procedure brings the horror back to the images

Morris interviews five of the seven indicted MPs (including Lynndie England, whose “thumbs up” poses with naked prisoners gave her instant global notoriety) among his numerous witnesses. His technique is unsettling and direct: they look directly at the audience, challenging us to really confront their stories and experiences. Even more unsettling is his use of the eerie cameraphone footage of the MPs with the prisoners which, unlike the photos, has not been dulled by media overexposure. The result is not simply a political documentary. It’s a police procedural, an investigative mystery, a study in perceptions, a portrait in how the media shapes a story and how the government shapes a story for the media. He finds compelling evidence of institutionalized behavior tacitly, if not the explicitly, approved by officers up the chain of command. So why wasn’t it pursued?

For Morris, it all comes back to the photos themselves. The only crimes prosecuted were the ones seen by the public in the leaked photographs: the evidence that shamed the military, embarrassed the United States, convicted the MPs involved, and now stand as the iconographic image of American arrogance and hypocrisy. Eyewitness statements can be contradicted or denied. The photographs could not, and the people in those photos were branded with the crimes. Standard Operating Procedure challenges us to really understand not just what the pictures show but what they don’t show (absence of leadership and accountability, absence of a plan, does not show up in a picture) and to see them in context. And he confronts us with the most important question surrounding them: Do they reveal a crime, an aberration in the system, or standard operating procedure?

Read  the DVD review on MSN here.
Read more »

The Bucket List may not be the worst film of 2007 (2008 for Seattle), but it is easily the worst film coming from such a pedigree: Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman star and Rob Reiner directs (okay, Reiner hasn’t been a sign of quality for years now; really, what happened?). The film is a dying wish fantasy with two old men (only one of these old men is grumpy) facing terminal illness, and one of them (the grumpy one, of course) a conveniently placed billionaire to fund the whole deal.

Chambers (the reflective mechanic played by Morgan Freeman) inadvertently reviews the film in a remarkably prescient comment lobbed at Nicholson’s tiresome character: “Edward, I’ve taken baths deeper than you.” He could have been talking about the lukewarm bath of a film he found himself in.

As Chambers reminds us, the bucket list — an inventory of things to do before you kick the bucket — is “supposed to be a metaphor,” but this is a film that takes everything literally. Cole uses his unlimited checkbook to make Chambers’ dreams come true with a barnstorming world tour by private jet of the wonders of the world. They are spectacularly un-wondrous scenes, no thanks to conspicuously indifferent computer effects to match the film’s glib insincerity.

These two cutely eccentric movie oldsters verbally parry, philosophize and bond over dinners in Paris and motorcycling across the Great Wall of China. And for all Cole’s spiritual apathy — strange in itself considering his library of inspirational literature — that old cliche rears its familiar head: Just as in foxholes, there are no atheists in American movies about terminal illness.

The review is at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer here.

Also this week: capsule reviews of the documentaries War Made Easy and Billy the Kid and the surprisingly endearing Japanese juvenile romantic drama Honey and Clover, co-starring Yu Aoi of Hula Girls and Hana and Alice.

The gentle conflicts and easy rhythms and small triumphs over personal adversity are low-key almost to a fault, and the smitten stares and unrequited crushes and creative crises suggest high school melodrama as much as young-adult drama, but that restraint also is part of its comfortable charm. It’s cute and sweet without getting saccharine and avoids the contrived complications of American stories of students charging the emotional and sexual minefields of adult relationships and responsibilities (no one here even makes out, let alone sleeps together).

All three capsule reviews can be found here.