Tag Archives: Documentaries

May 9, 2012 · 1:33 pm

Angola: The Farm

The Louisiana State Prison, nicknamed “Angola” after the plantation land it sits on, is unique, infamous and impressive all at once. They also call it “The Farm,” because all prisoners work, and the farms on the grounds feed the inmates. Some have likened this to slavery, but a working man gets in less trouble, and Angola has over five thousand prisoners, a large percentage of which will never walk free again. Louisiana’s sentencing guidelines are some of the toughest, and the prison has a hospice for all the elderly cons it must take care of. And not all are convicted of violent crimes.

Angola has a great variety of programs to keep the prisoners involved. There is the Angola Rodeo, which is as dangerous as any other, and garners criticism comparing it to the Roman gladiatorial arena. There is also a golf course for prison staff, where prisoners with the best behavior records can work as caddies, and recreational grounds and ball parks they can use as well. There are two programs for fathers in prison where they can meet with their families once a year.

Angola Prison Rodeo

However, the last thing you’d say about Angola is that it coddles prisoners. The prison has a long history of violent abuse and it was only turned around in the last two decades. Sex slavery rings were common, the “Red Hat” cell block was a pit of inhuman misery, and the guards were among the lowest paid in the nation. It has turned around, and while at first glance this may look like a country club, when you watch these prisoners or read their articles in The Angolite, the prison magazine, you see they are different from most convicts in other prisons. They have some dignity. They are not marking time in a cell, they can see the fruits of their labor, whether they sport a silver rodeo belt buckle, harvest crops, or ease a fellow con’s pain in the hospice. And according to the Shreveport Times, Angola has a lower rate of recidivism than local facilities, but this may not be correlated to these programs.

An excellent documentary on Angola and prison life in general is The Farm: Angola USA. The film documents the hospice, the rodeo, and the difficulties in housing a large prison population, many for life sentences. At least three of the prisoners featured were released after long legal fights over their convictions. Which is available to view on Liveleak:

http://www.liveleak.com/ll_embed?f=c8d538bb1eb1
Direct Links to: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

I found out about The Angolite through my writer buddy and ex-con Les Edgerton, author of The Bitch, Just Like That, The Perfect Crime, Gumbo Ya-Ya and many more. Subscriptions are $20 a year, and having read my first issue of this slick and well-written magazine, it is quite a bargain. The July/August 2011 issue had an in-depth article on illicit cell phone use in prisons, plus articles on the “Long Termers,” cons in Angola for 25 years or more, the Returning Hearts family visit program, plus short “expressions” and poetry by convicts, including a touching elegy to a lifer who’d rehabilitated himself yet died behind bars, an old trusty they called “Papa Smurf.” It’s great reading, and gives an insight into prison life.

Subscribe to the Angolite

© 2012 Thomas Pluck

I post on Twitter as @TommySalami ~ My Facebook Page

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March 2, 2010 · 11:24 am

movie compactor

To conserve paper, I have reviewed 5 recent movies in one post. With one week to the Oscars I still haven’t seen a few. I’m hoping to see The White Ribbon this weekend. Gonna skip Crazy Heart, as much as I like Jeff Bridges, because I saw Tender Mercies. But these are worth seeing:

Big Fan
Patton Oswalt as “that guy,” the face-painting home team obsessed freako who lives in mom’s basement and stays up late to rant on the local AM sports talk radio show. Oswalt once again shows his enormous range (you thought I was gonna say ass, didn’t you?) by totally becoming this role. Written and directed by the screenwriter of The Wrestler, we know to expect him to be a busted up shell of a man filling a hole in himself with his fanaticism. He sees his team’s quarterback one night and he and his buddy follow him to a strip club, and work up the guts to approach him. Things happen and he gets assaulted, and must decide just how much he’ll suffer for his home team. It’s a bit weak in the third act and ending, but as a character study it’s pretty gripping. This is one of the better films of last year that was sadly overlooked, and a fine first directorial effort for Onion alumnus Robert D. Siegel.

4 face-painters out of 5

Big Fan on Netflix

The Blind Side
This movie’s getting a lot of hate. Straight up: I enjoyed it. I think we’ve become accustomed to discounting uplifting fare as inherently shallow, and while it may be a stretch to nominate this for Best Picture, if Avatar is up there this has every right to be. The Hollywood take on Michael Oher’s rise to football stardom, this is a sports story with a deeply human element that is unafraid to tell us what we’re supposed to mean when we say “Christian charity.” The Tuohy family is rich; Mr. Tuohy is a former basketball superstar who now runs a gaggle of fast food franchises. The film obliquely points the finger at our millionaire sports heroes to perhaps give a little back, as Mrs. Tuohy- played with organic brilliance by Sandra Bullock, in what will hopefully be a controversial Oscar-winning performance that will bump Marisa Tomei’s win for My Cousin Vinny as the film snobs’ “least deserved award” category- decides to do the right thing and bring the practically-orphaned “Big Mike” Oher under her wing. This is old-school Hollywood storymaking, not unlike Slumdog Millionaire without Danny Boyle’s directorial strength. John Lee Hancock does a workmanlike job. He also wrote the screenplay, which to the real Michael Oher’s chagrin, makes him a sort of football oaf to begin with, when he was rather skilled by the time the Tuohys helped him. The real story is how they overcome their fear and saw Michael as a person, and shared their abundance of both the material and the emotional to make him part of their family. So what if it’s couched in a tale written for the demographic where both sexes love football from birth? It’s uplifting without being smarmy, and isn’t as simple as its critics claim it to be.

4 out of 5 ladies who lunch but also give back to their community

The Blind Side on Netflix

The Road
Adapting Cormac McCarthy is difficult but obviously possible; No Country for Old Men, anyone? This one’s not so easy, as much of the story is internalized. The screenplay veers from the source at times, to give us a female character to please the bean counters; I felt this was a distracting mistake. The story is simple- an unknown disaster has cut the shackles of civilization and returned man to his more bestial state, and a father resolves to protect his son from the ravages of cannibals and nature, so he may “carry the fire” of humanity, and bring hope to the bleak future. How does the world end? In this version we know it’s a bang, when it was left ambiguous before. Does it matter if it’s a whimper, or fire or ice? Not really, in the grand scheme of things. Humanity is consuming itself, literally. What the movie gets right is showing how the father- Viggo Mortensen- loses hope. How can he carry the fire when it has gone out inside him? Like Frank Darabont’s similar take with The Mist, the father’s protective drive has corrupted him. I found this a little too spoonfed, and I didn’t care for the flashbacks to the mother, though I see the parallels and contrasts director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) was making. My suggestion: see this first if you haven’t read the book yet, and let the book expand on it.

4 out of 5 long pig banquets

The Road on Netflix

Everybody’s Fine
Robert DeNiro plays a retired widower, who Harry Chapin was singing about in “The Cat’s in the Cradle.” He drove his children to be ambitious and worked hard while his wife handled family matters, and now that she’s gone, no one has time to visit. It surprised me by shifting alliances, showing the old man’s own flaws and how past wounds run deep. This one rises above the standard tearjerker, but never goes much further. Bobby is always endearing and is perhaps the perfect image of that sort of hard working family man who was always too tired to really give to his family, but I never really felt his sadness, like Jack Nicholson managed in the similar film About Schmidt. This was based on an Italian classic from the 90′s entitled Stanno tutti bene, starring the unequaled Marcello Mastroianni, and the new script has some nice touches. Bobby made PVC casing for telephone wires, and only talks on land lines (rather like Paulie from Goodfellas); his children are well played by Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale. At first they seem like the usual busy, ungrateful kids but bloom into real people. It’ll do well on cable.

3.5 out of 5 million miles of wire

Everybody’s Fine on Netflix

Food, Inc.
Are you eating? Might want to read this later. This should be for the modern food industry what Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was for turn of the century sausage factories, but I doubt many people saw it. Like the lackluster dramatization Fast Food Nation, this documentary exposes the industrialized network of factory farms and how it accepts disease and death among us, its customers, to serve its bottom line. I bet you expect the FDA to protect you from this, but the fact is they were created to promote and protect “farmers” and “cattlemen,” who are now mostly large corporate conglomerates benefiting from government-sponsored local monopolies. We see the victims of E. coli poisoning from “undercooked” beef- which would be perfectly safe if it wasn’t contaminated with, you know, shit- and E. coli tainted vegetables infected from manure runoff, since these county-sized slaughterhouse operations can’t dispose of the cow shit, which could probably fill one of the Great Lakes. Don’t criticize them too loudly, for they are protected by Federal Law (just ask Oprah, who was prosecuted for saying she wouldn’t eat beef until we tested all our cattle for Mad Cow disease, which we still don’t).

Genetically Modified foods are explored as well; they concentrate on Monsanto, not for abstract fear of “frankenfood” as some call it, but for how they have patented life, cornered the market on soybeans, and made it illegal for farmers who purchase their seed to … plant the seeds that were naturally produced. Plants produce seeds; but you can only plant the ones you buy from Monsanto. Your food now comes with a service agreement. It’s an eye-opening documentary, and while I found The Cove important, this is more so. If you wonder why a McMuffin costs less than a head of broccoli, rent this and find out. And wash and cook your food thoroughly. To quote Fast Food Nation, “everybody has to eat a little shit sometime.” Dig in.

5 out of 5 grass-fed free range organic strip steaks, hold the E. coli

Food, Inc. on Netflix

© 2010 Thomas Pluck.

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February 22, 2010 · 10:40 am

mondo mini movie reviews!

This is what I’ve watched in the past week or so.

Black Dynamite
A hilarious homage to the blaxploitation flicks of the ’70s, this one should not be missed. A dose of Dolemite with a dash of The Mack and Superfly, martial artist Michael Jai White plays the title character who’s out to avenge his dead brother, who was working for the CIA when a mafia drug deal went sour. It begins with him kicking an old lady through a door, and ends with him kicking ass at the White House, as his battle leads him to The Man himself. It gets a little silly in the middle when we learn what the Sinister Plot is, just in time for a homage to Enter the Dragon, but the dialogue is so moronically clever that you’ll be laughing the entire time. “If your momma was alive to see this, she’d be spinning in her grave!”

4 out of 5 fat muthafuckas wrestlin’ over pork chops ‘n greens

The Cove
If you ask the average person in Japan if they eat dolphin, they’d say no. So then why are thousands slaughtered every year in a secretive cove in Taiji? This documentary plays like a heist film as the man who trained Flipper, now turned activist, exposes the brutal and bloody secret of the dolphin industry, where hundreds are harvested for amusement parks and the rest are butchered for meat, and because the Japanese fishing industry thinks they eat too many fish. Yeah, really. This doc certainly has an agenda, but all good ones do; it takes great pains to show that the average Japanese has no idea this is going on, and this is no different than the corruption in America’s cattle industry, which keeps us from testing every animal for Mad Cow disease. You’ll never go to Sea World again after you watch this one.

4.5 out of 5 senseless slaughters

A Serious Man
The Coens weave a darkly comic tale of Larry Gopnik, a physics teacher whose life takes on the story of Joband the puzzle of Schroedinger’s Cat as his life begins to fall apart. I found it interesting, but at times deliberately difficult, and a little pretentious. It calls back to Barton Fink, and is enjoyable as a dark comedy if you don’t want to wonder if Gopnik is destined to misery because he’s angered God, is being tested, or has just made a serious of bad choices that like Schroedinger’s Cat, he can’t tell the result of without affecting it. It’s a good discussion film, but not for everyone; if you hated Synecdoche, NY you’ll probably find parts of this a little pretentious. I myself liked it, but felt some of it superfluous. The opening story of the dybbuk makes sense in retrospect, as it can be likened to Schroedinger’s cat, and then the issue of a student who may or may not be trying to bribe Gopnik for a better grade, and so on. There’s also the story of his son preparing for his bar mitzvah, which is both entertaining and nostalgic; did I mention it’s all set in the Jewish neighborhood of Minneapolis suburbs in the late 60′s? Nice touch. Much like the story of the dybbuk, it places it in the past and gives it all the feel of a parable.

4 out of 5 Larry Storches
The Hurt Locker
Wow. This is a war film, and the best depiction of the Iraq War I’ve seen, but first of all it is a character study. A study of the kind of adrenaline junkie operator who can handle the job of Explosive Ordnance Disposal- defusing bombs and IEDs in a war zone. Kathryn Bigelow has made a documentary-style masterpiece that takes the opening sequence of A Touch of Evil, where we see a bomb put in a car’s trunk and follow it, knowing it must go off, and makes it into a gripping war thriller. The movie is over 2 hours long, but felt like 90 minutes. Like the heroes of a Michael Mann film, these are men who define themselves by what they do, and there is a paucity of dialogue. Sgt. James leads a small squad after their leader is killed; they’re short timers who just want to go home, but he actually seems to love this job. And he’s incredibly good at it. The story unfolds like a memoir, with little structure, jumping from a sniper battle in the desert to an Iraqi base rat kid who James takes under his wing, to his men wondering if he’s going to get them killed. He’s a mystery; but in the end, we see his heart, and what makes him tick. It’s a brilliant character study of the kind of man it takes to do this insane job, disguised as a satisfying thriller. It is one of my favorites of the year, and it’s a toss-up to me whether it or Up in the Air is the better picture. Both make great entertainment out of prescient issues we’d rather ignore.

5 out of 5 Best Director Oscars for Kathryn Bigelow, Dammit

The Ghost Writer
Fuck you, Polanski. Come let justice be served. Stop being Noah Cross. Have you made a great movie since then anyway? You’re not getting my money until you pay your debt.

Temple Grandin
Excellent biopic of an autistic woman who revolutionized the beef industry by making slaughterhouses more humane. I read her story in the Star-Ledger years ago, and Claire Danes portrays her amazingly in what will surely be an Emmy-nominated performance. This is playing on HBO, and you should see it. It tries to give us the view of the world through her eyes, and while some of the direction is a bit indulgent and lazy- a montage set to guitar as she figures out how to get on a cattle lot that won’t let women in for example- the story itself is compelling and touching. It’s a TV movie for sure, but Danes performance, and David Strathairn as the teacher who understands her genius, make it worth your time.

3.5 out of 5 moo moo everywhere a moo moos

Dirty Ho
No, not porn! One of the better humorous kung fu flicks of the ’70s. Pita-San and I watched this and One-Armed Boxer vs. the Master of the Flying Guillotine, which has some cool fights and great kraut-rock music by Neu!; Dirty Ho is a kung fu comedy from ’79 starring Chiu hiu “Gordon” Liu, best known as Johnny Mo/Pai Mei from the Kill Bill movies. I’d recognize that bald noggin anywhere! He plays a prince with many brothers who’re trying to kill each other off for Dad’s inheritance, and he tricks a scheming thief named … Dirty Ho… to help him. Let’s face it, the name is what makes you watch this movie the first time, but it has great training sequences and fights, and plenty of laughs and slapstick. Plus a great scene where Gordon “fights” using his servant. An underappreciated classic, if you love kung fu flicks, you must find this one.

4 out of 5 dirty ho’s

© 2010 Thomas Pluck.

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November 20, 2009 · 12:07 pm

Tyson

“it’s like a Greek tragedy, only I’m the subject”
The moment that sold me on James Toback’s excellent documentary, Tyson, was when the former heavyweight champion of the world was holding back tears, murmuring about when he became a fighter, after trainer Cus D’Amato took him under his wing: “He spoke with me every night about discipline and character, and I knew, I knew nobody, noboby physically, um was gonna fuck with me again.”
I don’t have sympathy for a rapist, but you get a good idea of Tyson the man after watching this film, and he has only just begun to stop being the 12-year old boy who got into his first fight after bullies broke the necks of his homing pigeons. His father abandoned the family when Mike was 2; his mother died when he was 16, when he was still a street tough. Sent to reform school, he thought he was a fighter until a boxer knocked the wind out of him with one shot. When he proved himself through good behavior and discipline, the man taught him to fight, and hooked him up with trainer Cus D’Amato on the outside.
But Mike was a fat little boy who was teased mercilessly in a tough neighborhood, and childhood tears still spring to his face when he talks about it. Much has been said about bullying in schools, and many people still think “it prepares you for life,” but unfortunately it also helps make more bullies. When the heavyweight champion of the world has crushingly low self-esteem, it tells you that this isn’t something that “prepares you for the unfairness of adulthood.” You know what prepares you for that? Good role models, not bullies. Adults who make the difficult choices, who stick their neck out. If Cus D’Amato hadn’t died in 1985- the year Mike exploded into stardom- he might have had a moral center to continue his education from boxer into a man.

But instead, fame, fortune, entourages of sycophants, and predatory “wretched, slimy reptilian motherfuckers” like promoter Don King were there as influences. I believe we all know right from wrong by a certain age, and know that we don’t like being bullied, and should be able to extrapolate that we shouldn’t bully others; but I also know that the wounds of childhood left by emotional abuse and abandonment run deeper than logic, and often leave us broken and hurtful beasts that lash out at those most able to help us. So while I can never forgive Iron Mike for being a rapist and a wifebeater, I can see the desire for redemption in his eyes, now deep set in a puffy face that displays the decades of abuse from opponent’s fists and drugs he took on his own.
Toback’s documentary is a no-holds-barred look at the man. It was decided that Mike would have no say on the final cut, and filming began as he got out of rehab, in a fragile emotional state but a clear-headed one. It’s telling that his tattoos are of Ché Guevara and Mao, revolutionaries who became monsters. Mike revolutionized boxing in his own way, with a lethal combination of power and speed, but in the end he made a mockery of himself. I had no idea that Evander Holyfield was head-butting him- a fact I’m sure he disputes- but can completely understand how a wounded child like Tyson would take that disrespect with such fury that he’d ruin his career by biting the guy’s ear. Was it smart? No. But it was an emotionally stunted man lashing out, as he spiraled into self-destruction.

Does this absolve him? Hell no. But it helps give us a view of the man. It was something that should have been so clear, this huge pit bull of a fighter, with the lispy, high pitched voice, that he was fighting every bully who’d ever made fun of him. And like a pit bull, he was probably a friendly guy before they got hold of him, and beat him into something that could only react by lashing out. The film doesn’t just dwell on the bad, or his origins; we get to re-live his fantastic rise to stardom as one of the world’s premier athletes. 8 second knockouts. The Holmes fight. The Spinks fight. Getting all 3 heavyweight titles and becoming undisputed champion of the world. Mike was a perfect ’80s icon- he was tough, and he didn’t have the personality of a Muhammad Ali. His opponents could run, but they could not hide.
But this is mostly a picture of a man, like Mike himself said- a Greek tragedy, except he’s the subject. Director James Toback- famously independent- decided to show the movie to the opposite of its demographic, older white women who didn’t like boxing. According to the IMDb, he offered them $100 if they left in the first 5 minutes; if they stayed longer, they had to watch it all, and discuss it. Not one left, and many were in tears by the finale. I was never much of a fan; the media lingered too much on his “brutality,” and ignored the fact that under manager Kevin Rooney, he was actually a skilled fighter who took his opponents down with speed and power. But our casually racist attitude toward black athletes at the time encouraged his portrayal as a beast. Something he would live up to.

like a baby stillborn,
Like a beast with his horn,
I have torn everyone who has reached out for me
-Leonard Cohen, “Bird on a Wire”

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July 20, 2009 · 7:35 am

a hell ride through Asbury Park in a crowded theater

Hell Ride
Quentin Tarantino wanted Larry Bishop to make the “greatest biker movie ever” and produced this for him. They don’t succeed. It’s a good one, however. Bishop was in The Savage Seven back in ’68 and Tarantino Lazarus’d him into Kill Bill Vol.2, and this came of his current grindhouse obsession. It’s not a bad movie to catch on cable, but don’t expect much or you’ll be disappointed. Bishop plays Pistolero, an aging biker Pres dealing with mutiny from within, and vengeance for the murder by fire of his woman, Cherokee Kisum, still on his mind 30 years on. His compatriots The Gent (Michael Madsen) and the new blood, Comanche (Eric Balfour) deal with internal coups driven by the rival gang the Six Six Sixers, while Pistolero does peyote and commits acts of biker badassery. We learn of Kisum’s murder through flashbacks, and this Tarantino-inspired fractured storytelling doesn’t work in Bishop’s less able hands. And the dialogue feels inspired by the producer as well, and could have used a few rewrites; a lot of it just doesn’t work.

What does work is Bishop himself, who is believable as the old silverback; Vinnie Jones as the maniacal leader of the Six Six Sixers, and cameos by Dennis Hopper and David Carradine. Peter Fonda said he was done with biker pictures- they did try to get him. There’s a bounty of breasts and biker chicks acting like women do in biker pictures. Cherokee (Julia Jones) gets a lot of flashback time and is the one strong female role. The action is good, if sporadic, and the story ends a little shorter than you’d expect, but if you go in expecting a sleazy biker movie, it’s easy to watch. Just don’t expect a re-imagining or some sort of modern update.

Rating: Worthy

Greetings from Asbury Park
A heartbreaking documentary detailing the attempts by politicians and developers to “revive” Asbury Park by kicking old people out of their homes to build luxury condos through eminent domain. Certainly biased, but this grassroots documentary is the Roger & Me of eminent domain. It is showing on New Jersey local public broadcasting this month and is a must see for New Jerseyans and anyone who owns property, especially property that billionaire developers think they can make a buck on. Does it serve the public good to tear up perfectly good homes to build condos that start at $500,000 for a studio, just to give more waterfront property to the elite? Asbury Park has had blighted areas for many years, but going after neighborhoods where working families can afford to live is not right. Eminent domain abuse is the forgotten scandal and it is only going to get worse. It didn’t revitalize Detroit, and it won’t fix Asbury. The documentary is well made and worth your time.

Rating: Worthy


Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech
Fine documentary on free speech in America. It is playing on HBO this month and makes for good viewing if you’re interested in the subject, and you should be. It’s not just about government censorship, but also how the media reacts and is manipulated to have chilling effects of its own. They touch on everything from the recent “intifada” brouhaha in NYC to the ACLU defending the Klan’s right to march in Skokie. It’s not all-encompassing, nor does it try to be. This isn’t a top-notch doc, but it is worth watching. By Liz Garbus, who also directed the well-regarded The Farm: Angola, USA.

Rating: Worthy

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May 4, 2009 · 9:55 am

Trouble the Water

In 1927 there was a great flood in Louisiana; the National Guard came to rescue the white landowners, but left the black sharecroppers to tend to the crops. Immortalized in Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927,” some fleeing landowners sang “Bye, Bye Blackbird” to the doomed farmers. In the end, the “blackbirds” won; nearly 700,000 people were homeless, and they left for the cities, mainly Chicago. This gave birth to the Chicago blues, and the influx of new voters dumped Republican Hoover and his empty promises. The Party of Lincoln was abandoned for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. History repeating. It’s a bit more complicated, as Hoover got both elected and rejected due to how he handled the refugee camps for the displaced. The Wikipedia article makes for interesting reading.
Trouble the Water is the record of a family weathering Katrina, video camera in tow. 24-year old Kimberly Roberts and her husband Scott don’t have gas money to evacuate, so they hole up in their 9th Ward home as the storm hits. We get to see the terror of opening your front door to see a raging ocean where your yard once was. They survive, and we see them survey the wreckage of their neighborhood, the remains of those less fortunate, and the utter lack of any government response. The Indonesian tsunami a few years earlier- we had people on the ground faster for that.
They reenact their survival tales, and interview their neighbors. Kimberly reports on the scene like guerrilla news anchor, signing off with her rapper name, Black Kold Madina. It’s easy to roll your eyes, but this is what we didn’t see. Instead of pointing at a man in water up to his neck, holding a single loaf of bread and crying “looter,” like our talking heads did, this is embedded reporting from inside the hell hole. Jean Valjean would get torched these days, wouldn’t he? Their footage is interspersed with news bites, 911 calls, and factoids. But the real meat of the film is just following Kimberly and Scott through the wreckage of what was once their lives.
What’s most distressing is the interview with the soldiers who guarded empty base housing. They talk of protecting “government interests,” and how “civilians don’t know how to survive.” Quotes were cherry-picked I’m sure, but they are damning enough. When even a few soldiers are more concerned with protecting the government than saving fellow Americans, the leadership of their superiors is morally bankrupt. Maybe the best of our men were too busy overseas. On the other hand, the neighborhoods pulled together. “My enemies helped me,” one man says. They help each other navigate the bureaucratic mess FEMA imposed.
Trouble the Waters was nominated for Best Documentary last year, and lost to the cheerful Man on Wire; personally I thought Errol Morris’s excellent Standard Operating Procedure should have won, but it didn’t even get nominated. Trouble may not be a great movie, but it is worth seeing to see what our news media missed and ignored about the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the second disaster of our government’s inept response. I think it might have been better as an episode of Frontline, but it got more exposure this way. If you’re interested in seeing one couple’s story of surviving Katrina, it should not be missed.

Rating: Worthy

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=plyoto-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0027EU2S2&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

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May 3, 2009 · 12:50 pm

Grey Gardens Trio

I approached the HBO movie Grey Gardens with trepidation, since I loved the documentary by the Maysles and was unsure how they’d approach the material. It invites camp, but I always saw the Beales as sympathetic figures, and thankfully the movie does too. It doesn’t let the ladies off the hook for their eccentricity either, and this pair of shut-ins are colorful enough before the novelty of their relation to Jackie Kennedy is discovered.

Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore

If you don’t know the story, “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” were mother and daughter living on an estate in the Hamptons called Grey Gardens. The mother and father became estranged, and after he died she lived at the estate on a meager trust; she had become agoraphobic, though it is never called such. She’d hold parties at the house, and send little Edie on errands once no one would deliver. Little Edie envied her socialite cousins the Bouviers, such as Jacqueline, and dreamt of an acting, or dancing and singing career. She pursued it in New York City, but it never came to pass.
She suffered from alopecia, and took to wearing headwraps to hide her hair loss. Once Jackie became the First Lady, the paparazzi descended and eventually discovered the Beales, living in a decrepit old house full of cats and raccoons. Jackie paid to have the house cleaned of garbage and repaired, but two documentarians, Albert and David Maysles of Gimme Shelter fame, came to document these eccentric characters. I was introduced to the documentary by my friend Emma, and when it was released by Criterion. For years it was a camp classic; diva nerds loved that Jackie O had such tawdry relatives, and Little Edie was a bizarre counterpoint to Jacqueline’s classy demeanor. This was the ramshackle shed behind Camelot where the embarrassing relations lived.

The real Edies

Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange play the Beales, and we flash back to their better days, to see the slow descent into reclusion. Little Edie was always an extrovert and unreserved; we see her audition before a producer while he’s at a business luncheon. And slowly, her chances to break free of her mother disappear, and she becomes trapped in Grey Gardens. Jessica Lange is fantastic as the reclusive Big Edie, who goes from a boisterous party thrower to a bedridden cat lady once her paramours cannot tolerate one more wrinkle.

The two actresses are both fantastic; they had the Maysles documentary and another made from the outtakes, The Beales of Grey Gardens, to study and they are perfect. Drew Barrymore has the more difficult job, as Little Edie is practically unbelievable as a person. You really ought to rent the 1975 Grey Gardens to check her out. Her story eventually gets a happy ending, but only after a long imprisonment under her mother’s thrall. I highly recommend the HBO movie whether you’ve seen the documentaries or not; if you’ve seen it already, hunt down the originals to see just how good the performances are.

the misery of a caged bird not allowed to sing

I revisited the Maysles documentary it made me wonder how much it influenced Errol Morris when he made Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida; they share the “give ‘em enough rope” method of Grey Gardens, where the camera seems to fade away, like a fly on the wall. It’s common now, but leaving the camera around until the subjects became comfortable, and vulnerable, was a far cry from the father of the documentary’s nearly staged scenes- such as the basking shark hunt in Man of Aran.
Instead we get the slow realization of the bars on Little Edie’s cage, the poison from her mother’s mouth. A faded rose whose thorns encircled her daughter, keeping her from growing taller or brighter than herself. It’s depressing, but just as powerful as any Oscar-winning drama. The second film, The Beales of Grey Gardens, released in 2006 from remaining footage, is lighter in tone and less oppressive. It makes for an entertaining film in itself, but I’d definitely watch the original first. If it starts to depress you, remember that Little Edie eventually got her own dance revue and lived the rest of her life in Florida on her own, after her mother’s passing.

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March 24, 2009 · 9:35 am

Right America: Feeling Wronged- Some Voices from the Campaign Trail

During the 2008 Presidential Election campaign, Alexandra Pelosi followed the “Straight Talk Express” bus of the McCain campaign, and interviewed his supporters about why they would not vote for Obama. Pelosi’s mom is Speaker of the House Nancy, so you need a huge grain of salt to take with Right America: Feeling Wronged- Some Voices from the Campaign Trail. The unwieldy title should instead be “hand-picked extreme right wing idiots we got to talk on camera.”
She concentrates on the extreme people, because they are more entertaining. What’s most depressing about the film is that the fear-mongering by talk radio and Fox News has been taken to heart, and that both sides aren’t satisfied with disagreeing- they have to hate each other. The vehement Bush haters vs. the Obama=Osama people, who is worse? I would have liked a more balanced documentary, because I’ve seen plenty of unhinged types on the other side. Hell, she even finds a bunch of people saying they’ll move to Canada if Obama is elected- remember all the people who said that when Bush was elected?

Crying over McCain’s loss.

There is a great bitterness between middle America and the cities. They seem to think that their hard work runs the country, and that city folk are all the same. Just as the urbanite’s stereotype of country folk is an uneducated redneck wearing a hunter’s cap with ear flaps and a jaw full of chaw, they stereotype the city folk as wine-drinking atheists who want to ban guns and have free abortion clinics on every corner. Our media has failed us- both Fox News and MSNBC, by pitting us against each other and embracing the idiotic two-party system.

There’s a woman going door to door for McCain support, and is shocked when her lesbian neighbors have an Obama-Biden sign. She goes to a group of black men, and has nothing to say when one asks her if she thinks McCain cares about black people. We see churches espousing political candidates- but only McCain. This is nothing new, and I’m sure inner city churches were urging folks to vote for Obama. The documentary does bring to light a lot of the fear and hate people have, but it has a definite agenda.
Most of the people seemed afraid that Obama would not protect us from terrorists. But let’s face it, Democratic Presidents have gotten us into as many wars as Republican ones; I don’t understand why people fall for the meme that they are all pacifists like Jimmy Carter. Vietnam- Democrat. Kosovo- Democrat. World War 2- Democrats. The Republicans used to be isolationists, when paleoconservatives ruled the party; now both parties embrace interventionism, whether the U.N. tags along or not.

The socialist mantra is repeated endlessly, due to Obama’s gaffe of saying “spreading the wealth around” in a country that’s been brainwashed to believe the middle class is the rich. The cognitive dissonance required to support a President who increased the size of government more than any Democrat, who sent “economic stimulus” checks to everyone, who increased Medicare more than any Democrat ever could, and then call the other side the socialist is astounding. In a country where both parties are for enlarging Federal power, there’s no real choice.
Sarah Palin is lauded as “one of us,” and her Katie Couric interview was decried as a hatchet job. A man at a NASCAR tailgate party is crying because “immigrants get everything” and you can’t fly the Confederate flag without offending the blacks. She finds a guy who’ll say that women shouldn’t vote. In deep Mississippi at a truck stop she finds a guy who’ll say “I ain’t votin’ for no nigger.” But first there’s an old fella who says “I ain’t one of ‘em, but they ain’t ready for it here.” And a few black guys who are pissed off that she’s trying to paint Mississippi as racist: “What, they don’t say ‘nigger’ up in New York?” I assure you, I heard some pretty racist crap from old hippie baby boomers up north about Obama, especially when he was running against Hilary. “If you think they’re uppity now…” and so on.

If you want to see a biased look at the sports-team rivalry that passes as political discourse in America these days, or just get your dander up because people believe differently than you, Right America: Feeling Wronged might be worth watching on HBO. It’s a Michael Savage-style rant from the left for a change, which doesn’t make it any less a piece of shit.

Rating: Stinky

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January 28, 2009 · 11:56 am

Encounters at the End of the World

Werner Herzog is one of my favorite film makers. This may seem like damning with faint praise, but when he makes a documentary, it’s like a Bruce Springsteen song. He just sort of starts talking about what he’s up to, and at first you smirk, but soon you’re tapping your foot and involved in it, and not surprised when it’s a theme song for a movie or an inauguration.
Encounters at the End of the World is like that. Herzog visits Antarctica, well, because he wants to. He is adamant that he won’t be making another movie about damn penguins, and he concentrates on what interests him. First it’s the dreamers, wanderers and adventurers who people MacMurdo Research Station. John Carpenter wasn’t that far off with the quirky characters in The Thing, mind you. There’s a strange, homey atmosphere in the lonely places of the world, and we meet a woman who’s been all over the world, in dangerous places, and here she entertains her comrades by contorting herself so she can be placed in a duffel bag. We meet those brave souls who’ll dive among leopard seals under ice sheets to film the gorgeous formations or collect microscopic organisms, and the scientists who catalog the new species, and seek the origins of life on Earth.
He comments on how banal exploration has become, and we briefly meet a man who holds Guinness World Records for traveling in somersaults, on pogo sticks, and so on. He’s going to Antarctica to skip across it, or something. The point is that we’ve not only mapped the world, but hacky-sacked across it. But at MacMurdo, the spirit of Shackleton is still alive, and you see respect and perhaps envy for men such as him, who braved a new world, in their lives.
But perhaps to Herzog’s chagrin, the most arresting image is in fact, of a penguin who may have read Hemingway’s story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” As the little explore stares out over the ice, we know that his journey may only be caused by a fault in his little brain, but who’s to say our own desires to conquer the unknown are so different? The footage is beautiful, and Herzog has once again made a masterful documentary. Get it on Blu-Ray, the DVD is a bit soft.

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January 24, 2009 · 2:23 pm

Religulous

I’m not the biggest fan of Bill Maher now that he seems to concentrate on politics, but he’s always been a sharp and witty comedian. Now he sets his sights on religion with Religulous, taking the cue from Richard Dawkins to stop being apologetic for atheism and say what you really believe. There are reasons that you don’t talk politics or religion in bars, and this documentary sets out to be offensive, but I didn’t find it as strident as I expected. It’s actually very funny and only gets to be a bit much at the end when he tries to put a message on it.

The movie doesn’t purport or try to be fair; directed by Larry Charles (Borat), it intercuts the interviewee’s words with silly images, clips from hilariously bad religious educational films, soundbites and info-taters. It’s sort of like when Bugs Bunny stands next to someone holding an image of a screw, and a baseball. Screwball. Get it? But it still works, because he chooses his targets wisely. He goes after Jews for Jesus, strict Mormons, pagans, Scientologists, Bible-literalist evangelical Christians, ultra-Orthodox Jews, a man who claims to be the second coming of Christ, and some Fundamentalist Muslims. He doesn’t let anyone off the hook.

Going to the Holy Land with a film crew and asking about religion was already done in this year’s decent Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, and Morgan Spurlock got kicked out by his Saudi keepers, and chased out by Orthodox Jews threatening violence. Maher doesn’t manage to top that, in fact he walks out on a rabbi so tolerant that he attended Iranian Holocaust denial conferences. In fact, Maher was so angry he barely let the guy talk, so I couldn’t decide whether he was stupid, crazy, or an apologist. That was distressing, seeing Maher lose his cool. But otherwise he’s pretty in control and doesn’t get too snarky when asking people why they believe what they believe.

If you’re on the internet or watch Stephen Colbert or South Park, you know some of the secret and trademarked tenets of the Church of Scientology, and just how crazy they are. I won’t go into it here, because I don’t want to be attacked by lawyers, strangled with cans attached by string called e-meters, or pelted with enormous tomes of L. Ron Hubbard’s space opera sagas. Go to Operation Clambake at http://www.xenu.net if you’re curious. Maher spouts their teachings at the Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park , where nuts have shouted their imprecations for over a century.

What’s his point? When someone laughs at the idea of aliens nuking our souls in volcanos, he says “yeah, but Jonah living in the whale, that’s perfectly sane.” When he’s talking to the Bible literalists this comes out. “No, it was a very big fish.” Oh, that makes more sense. He speaks to the man who plays Jesus at a Christian theme park- who seems like a nice enough fellow, even as the Romans whip him for the entertainment of the Christians this time around- but he can’t put into words why he believes what he believes, and that’s some of the point. He goes to the Creation museum to see dioramas of the Flintstones, where kids can play with pet dinosaurs.



These are easy targets. Some are valid and scary. Do I want a politician who believes the Rapture will come in our lifetimes, and Armageddon will be soon fought on the fields of Megiddo? I’d prefer if he tried to stave that off. Maher even goes to Megiddo. Looks like a strip mine. Let’s hope it stays untouched. It’s not all fun and games- he goes to where film maker Theo Van Gogh was murdered for speaking out against fundamentalist Muslims. He speaks with rapper Propa-Gandhi, who looks like a nice hipster doofus, but sings about destroying the West. He gets a friendly Muslim to sneak him into the Temple on the Mount where Jews are not allowed. The guy looks very nervous.
If you’re not religious, this is very funny– but sometimes Maher’s pretty strident, and he’s obviously not trying to convert anybody. He may go for easy targets but he’s even-handed, going at it with rabbis and a company that sells products to help observant Jews try to trick their way around violating the sanctity of the Sabbath, by not really dialing the phone. He even goes for the obvious joke about how this is lawyering with God. He gets kicked out by the Vatican and the Mormons. He speaks with Satanists and even pot worshipers. For atheists it’s very entertaining and reassuring, and it’s a good record of the current state of religions all over the world in 2008 from the eyes of an unbeliever with a sense of humor. But there are no revelations here, either.

3.5 atheists in foxholes out of 5

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