The documentary The Lovers and the Despottells one of those you-would-never-believe-it-if it-were-made-up stories. The late North Korean nutcase Kim Jong-Il, dissatisfied with the cinematic element in his propaganda machine, sought an upgrade by KIDNAPPING a top South Korean director and his movie star wife.
The story of the kidnapping and their escape spans two decades and is a real Cold War thriller. One interesting aspect is that there was some question as to whether the two were actually kidnapped or instead defected – after all, the director’s career was in a downturn in South Korea and was ultimately resurrected in the North. But, come one, who escapes from South Korea to North Korea?
The proof of their kidnapping is both convincing and mind-boggling. The craziness of the North Korean regime has created such anti-communist paranoia in South Korea that the kidnapping vs defection question is still unresolved for some – and that’s crazy in and of itself.
The Lovers and the Despot will make good companion piece to Under the Sun, the documentary expose of Korea under its current Great Madman Leader, Kim Jong-il’s son Kim Jong-un.
The Lovers and the Despot is now available streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and cable and satellite TV on demand.
It’s the eve of the Presidential election, and we need to find some relief from the current soul-sucking campaign in historical or fictional politics. So here are three great movies about political campaigns:
The Candidate (1970): Probably the best political movie of all time. Robert Redford stars as an activist ideologue who resists following his father’s path into electoral office. Once he’s in, he embraces winning with the help of a savvy consultant (Peter Boyle). Anyone who has run a campaign will relate to this roller coaster. Especially if you’ve set up an event with a bad sound system. Or if you’ve been late to live television appearance. Or if you’ve swiped an opponent’s literature when door-hanging. Some scenes were shot on location in the Bay Area, including a banquet in a San Francisco hotel and a speech in San Jose’s Eastridge Mall. The Candidate is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The Last Hurrah (1958): The master director John Ford is famous for westerns, but this portrait of an embattled incumbent is a classic of political cinema. Spencer Tracy plays the leader of an urban political machine. He’s got years of accomplishments and a machine in his favor, but his newspaper-owning antagonist is running an empty suit against him in a campaign increasingly fought on the newfangled medium of television. He’s been so successful for so long that his ward heelers have become complacent, and he’s smelling the campaign getting away from him. The Last Hurrah is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The War Room(1993): the brilliant documentary of the FIRST successful Clinton for president campaign. We get to watch from the inside as the first Baby Boomer takes out a sitting President from the Greatest Generation, aided by the new masters of the spin and the newly emerged 24-hour news cycle. Remember – this was the campaign steered by the on-again-off-again-on-again whims of H. Ross Perot. What seemed at the time as cut throat tactics are quaint today. And viewers will become wistful for time when you could kill a news story, no matter how sensational, if it were unverified or untrue. The War Room is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon Instant, iTunes and Hulu (subscription).
Plus tonight, Turner Classic Movies brings us two brilliant political documentaries:
Primary documents the Wisconsin Democratic primary election campaign in 1960. This was a key stepping stone in John F. Kennedy’s road to the White House because it was a chance for him to demonstrate that he appealed to voters outside the Northeast. Kennedy’s rival Hubert Humphrey was favored because Wisconsin neighbors Humphrey’s home state of Minnesota. Primary is both a time capsule of 1960 politics and an inside look at the Kennedy family unleashed in a campaign. There’s an amazing scene where Humphrey appeals to a handful of flinty farmers in a school gym – he’s giving his all and he ain’t getting much back. Only 60 minutes long, Primary has been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. The great documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, who went on to direct Monterey Pop and The War Room, shot, edited and recorded sound for Primary.
The Times of Harvey Milk – the documentary Oscar winner from 1984. It’s the real story behind the 2008 Sean Penn narrative Milk – and with the original witnesses. If you pay attention, The Times of Harvey Milk can teach you everything from how to win a local campaign to how to build a societal movement. One of the best political movies ever. And watch for the dog poop scene!
Meet the Patels is both a documentary and a comedy – and ultimately, a satisfying crowd-pleaser. Over several years, filmmaker Geeta Patel filmed her own brother Ravi and their parents in their quest to find a wife for Ravi. Ravi and Geeta’s parents were born in India, had a traditional arranged marriage which has resulted in decades of happiness. Their American-born kids, of course, reject the very idea of an arranged marriage. But Ravi finds the pull of his Indian heritage compelling enough to dump his redheaded girlfriend and try to find a nice Indian-American girl. His parents try to help him with unbounded and unrelenting enthusiasm.
Meet the Patels is very funny – much funnier than most fictional comedies. It’s always awkward when parents involve themselves in their child’s romantic aspirations. That’s true here, and produces some side-splitting moments. It helps that the Patel parents are very expressive, and downright hilarious. The dad is so funny that I could watch him read a telephone book for 90 minutes, and the mom is herself a force of nature.
We learn that the Patels of Gujarat have adapted an entire menu of marriage opportunities unfamiliar to mainstream American society: a matchmaking profile system called “biodata”, matrimonial fairs, “the wedding season” and more.
Meet the Patels has its share of cultural tourism and the clash of generations. But it is so damn appealing because it’s much more than that – it’s a completely authentic saga of family dynamics, dynamics that we’ve all experienced or at least observed. The family members’ mutual love for each other drives family conflict and, finally, family unity.
I saw Meet the Patels at the Camera Cinema Clublast year, and it had a brief theatrical run in the Bay Area. Meet the Patels is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play. It’s hilarious and heart-warming, so don’t miss it.
Toweris a remarkably original retelling of the 1966 mass shooting at UT Austin. Tower is a tick-tock of the 96 minutes when 49 people were randomly chosen to be shot by a gunman in the landmark tower 240 feet above the campus. That gunman is barely mentioned (and may not even be named) in the movie.
Tower is director Keith Maitland’s second feature. What makes Tower distinctive and powerful it’s the survivors who tell their stories, reenacted by actors who are animated by a rotoscope-like technique (think Richard Linklater’s Waking Life). Telling this story through animation, dotted with some historical stills and footage, is captivating.
Since 1966, we’ve suffered through lots of mass shootings. The UT Tower shooting was especially shocking at the time and prompted the questions about what drove the “madman” to his deed. But, fifty years later, what’s really important today is how the event affected the survivors – what was what like to live through this experience and how it lives with them today. That’s the story that Maitland lets them tell us – and in such an absorbing way.
I saw Tower at the Mill Valley Film Festival. It opens theatrically in the Bay Area today at the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley.
Toweris a remarkably original retelling of the 1966 mass shooting at UT Austin. Tower is a tick-tock of the 96 minutes when 49 people were randomly chosen to be shot by a gunman in the landmark tower 240 feet above the campus. That gunman is barely mentioned (and may not even be named) in the movie. What makes Tower distinctive and powerful it’s the survivors who tell their stories, reenacted by actors who are animated by a rotoscope-like technique (think Richard Linklater’s Waking Life). Telling this story through animation, dotted with some historical stills and footage, is captivating. October 7 and 9.
Death by Design is an important environmental exposé on the toxic impact of personal electronics. Most of us have heard that some very dangerous materials and some horrific working conditions are used in the manufacturing of our favorite devices. Death by Design is the first film to successfully tie it all together, with historical perspective, global sweep and a possible way out. October 7 and 11.
Ella Brennan: Commanding the Table tells the story of the New Orleans powerhouse restaurateur – and it’s compelling. This is a woman who started running restaurants in the 1950s before she was thirty, the mentor of celebrity chefs Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse and Jamie Shannon and responsible for Bananas Foster, the Jazz Brunch and a host of food trends. October 15 only.
Ella Brennan leads the MVFF’s Focus: Culinary Cinema program, along with documentaries on chefs Massimo Botturo (Theater of Life) and Jeremiah Tower (Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent) and a road trip narrative, Paris Can Wait, starring Alec Baldwin and Diane Lane.
Of course, the big family hit of the Holiday season may turn out to be, of all things a documentary about a Mongolian girl – The Eagle Huntress; reportedly it’s both a crowd pleaser and spectacular eye candy.
This year’s MVFF runs from October 6-16, mostly at the Sequoia in Mill Valley and the Rafael in San Rafael, but also at three other Marin venues. Check out the program and tickets for the MVFF. I’ll be adding more festival coverage, including both features and movie recommendations. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest coverage.
This year’s Mill Valley Film Festival features Death by Design, an important environmental exposé on the toxic impact of personal electronics. Most of us have heard that some very dangerous materials and some horrific working conditions are used in the manufacturing of our favorite devices. Death by Design is the first film to successfully tie it all together, with historical perspective, global sweep and a possible way out.
Death by Design begins with the dark side of Silicon Valley’s history, related by the sonorous voice of environmental pioneer Ted Smith, founder of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Smith takes us through the discovery that the supposedly clean semiconductor manufacturing industry had been polluting the drinking water in some Silicon Valley neighborhoods. Groundbreaking occupational lawyer Amanda Hawes shows us the heartbreak caused when humans ingested those toxics.
Pioneering environmental heroes, Smith and Hawes saw this coming before anyone else. Although Smith bemoans the centuries-long impact of toxic pollution and Hawes shows us the very personal cost of occupational exposure, the two played a pivotal role in Silicon Valley history – they saved the geographic Silicon Valley from becoming much more widely and permanently despoiled. Thanks to their efforts, Silicon Valley, ironically, is more attractive than ever for the workers and investors fueling the current tech boom.
However, economic globalization has allowed the electronics industry to simply export the environmental impact from California to developing nations, and Death by Design tours us through a tech chamber of horrors in China.
We learn that 20% of China’s arable land and 60% of its groundwater are already contaminated (not ALL the fault of high-tech). We visit the “recycling” of e-waste in Guiyu – an unimaginable industrial catastrophe. We throw stuff away, and Death by Design asks us to consider the question, “Where is away?”.
But not all of the environmental costs have been have been moved away from us. In Death by Design, we also meet scientists who fly through the sky, sampling the chemical composition of clouds and collecting aerosols; they can detect pollution in North America and trace it back to Asia.
Death by Design’s Chinese segments – in factories, homes and bodies of water – is especially impressive. What must be shrewdly obtained footage helps us understand the plight of workers employed by the suppliers to international tech companies, including the major Apple supplier Foxconn, whose workers can suffer through 12-hour days and 7-day weeks. Death by Design pins the labor cost at 1 percent of an iPhone’s price; the movie leaves the math for the viewers: if you triple a 1% labor cost, a $400 phone would sell for $408.
As fitting for a techie movie, Death by Design also brings us some geeks to show us that Apple designs the iPhone for an 18-month life; you can’t extend the life by replacing the battery or other parts because Apple locks the case with proprietary screws so we can’t open it up.
If there’s a particular Bad Guy in this story, it’s Apple. I became ever more conscious that I was watching Death by Design on an iPad with Apple ear buds.
One hopeful glimmer is the introduction to the Chinese environmental entrepreneur Ma Jun, who has compiled a database of environmental impacts as a tool to press for change from within China. Another is an Irish startup that has developed fair trade computers that are updatable and reusable; their cases are built from an unexpected raw material.
Director Sue Williams maintains the topical urgency without creating a screed. She also covers a lot of ground in a crisp 73 minutes. And, most impressively, Williams delivers the Chinese footage necessary to complete the story. Death by Design is one of the most important environmental documentaries – and one of the most watchable. It plays the Mill Valley Film Festival on October 7 and 11.
This week’s recommendation couldn’t be any timelier, given Anthony Weiner’s disgraceful collapse into yet another texting scandal, resulting his getting dumped by his wife, Hillary Clinton confidante Huma Abedin. Don’t miss the political documentary Weiner, probably the best documentary of the year. It also provokes some reflection on the media in this age. It’s on my Best Movies of 2016 – So Far.
You may remember Anthony Weiner as the politician forced out of Congress in a sexting scandal. A couple of years later, he tried to make a comeback by running for mayor of New York City. Weiner is the inside story of that campaign, which self-immolated when the sexting scandal popped up again. Weiner is a marvelously entertaining chronicle of the campaign, a character study of Anthony Weiner himself and an almost voyeuristic peek into Weiner’s marriage to another political star, Huma Abedin.
Co-director Josh Kriegman served as Weiner’s Congressional chief of staff and left politics for filmmaking. When Weiner was contemplating the run for mayor, Kriegman asked to shadow him in the campaign, and Weiner agreed. Kriegman and co-director Elyse Steinberg shot 400 hours of backstage footage and caught some searing moments of human folly, triumph and angst.
In office, eight-term New York Congressman Anthony Weiner was a firebrand, pugnacious and a master debater with a vicious sense of humor, always eager to mix it up. He is married to Huma Abedin, a close Hilary Clinton advisor often described as “Hilary’s other daughter”. Huma is as reserved as Anthony is ebullient, and her own distinguished career in politics has been behind the scenes. He lives for the limelight, but she is uncomfortable in it.
Anthony begins his comeback with brutally painful media launch. The press is in a complete feeding frenzy – all revisiting the scandal and nothing else. One of the highlights of Weiner is a montage of talking heads reviling Weiner, including Donald Trump, who bellows, “We don’t want any perverts in New York City”.
But when Anthony goes on the campaign trail, the electorate begins to really respond to his passion and feistiness. Weiner unexpectedly surges into the lead 10 weeks to go. We are treated to a first-class procedural and see what only political pros see – the banal opening of a campaign office, rehearsing speeches, shooting commercials, dialing for dollars.
But then the scandal re-opens when a publicity-seeking bimbo releases a photo of Anthony’s penis that Weiner had texted her. We see his Communications Director as the new scandal unfolds in real-time, her eyes becoming lifeless; my day job for the last thirty years has been in politics, and I have gotten some bad news, but nothing like this.
Amazingly, we see Anthony calling Huma and telling her. When the screenshot of Anthony’s penis shot goes viral, we watch as Hums see it for the first time on the Internet, and her anger builds into rage. Anthony finally kicks out the camera.
New York Post prints headlines like “Weiner: I’ll Stick It Out” and “Obama Beats Weiner”. Anthony tells his shell-shocked and pissed off staff “nobody died”, but nobody’s buying it. Anthony has masterfully redefined himself to be more than the punchline once, but the second set of revelations make him indelibly a punchline – and no one can come back from that. From behind the camera, Kriegman plaintively asks Weiner.”Why did you let me film this?”.
Anthony’s pollster gives him the bad news: “There’s no path anymore to get to a runoff” and “So this is a solo flight”. The smell of death is about the campaign at the end, but Anthony is in “never quit” phase.
Anthony’s best moment is when he is obligated to face a hostile neighborhood meeting in the Bronx neighborhood of City Island. He knows that he is doing poorly there, and there aren’t many voters out there anyway, but he keeps his head high and delivers a courageous effort.
Anthony’s worst moment may be when he is re-watching himself in a mutual evisceration of a TV host on YouTube. He is relishing the combat, but Huma, behind him, is appalled by Anthony’s Pyrrhic victory. He smugly thinks that’s he won the verbal firefight, but Huma just says, “It’s bad”. She’s right.
I saw Weiner at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) at a screening with co-directors Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg. Kriegman said that he “intended to show the humanity behind the headline – the nuance that is Anthony”. Steinberg noted that “the most exposed are the least revealed”. As of the SFIFF screening on April 23, Anthony Weiner had to date declined to watch Weiner. In Weiner, Anthony looks back after the campaign and ruefully sums it up, “I lied and I had a funny name”.
Weiner has more than its share of forehead-slapping moments and is often funny and always captivating. It’s almost certainly the year’s best documentary and one of best films of 2016, period. Weiner is available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and DirecTV.
Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham in THE BANDIT. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.
Writer-director Jesse Moss describes The Bandit as “a buddy movie about a buddy movie”, and he’s right. The buddies are mega-star Burt Reynoldsand his stuntman/friend/roommate Hal Needham, who directed the enormously successful Smokey and the Bandit franchise.
Needham, one of only two stuntmen with an Oscar, is arguably cinema’s greatest stunt performer and stunt coordinator. Reynolds did many of his own stunts, and we we see some hard, hard falls in The Bandit. But Burt did nothing to nothing to match Needham, whose FIRST career stunt was jumping off an airplane wing to tackle a rider off his horse. We see many instances where Needham became a LITERAL car crash test dummy.
One of The Bandit’s highlights is the Needham stunt that broke his back – jumping a car off a dock and onto a barge – and slamming into the barge a little short.
There’s rich source material here from Burt’s garage (Reynolds calls it “King Tut’s Tomb for documentarinans”), which stored tapes back to 1956.
For added color, Needham and Reynolds were epic partiers, who embraced and exemplified the Mad Men era. Needham was a vivid character and lived a helluva life. I strongly recommend Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interview with Needham.
Hal’s widow told Bay Area filmmaker Jesse Moss that Needham hated documentaries because they were boring, so Moss aimed to make a documentary that Hal would enjoy. Indeed, The Bandit opens with the sly Reynolds, in maroon leisure suit with flared pant legs, mocking his own image outrageously. And, it’s a hoot throughout.
(Moss’ first movie was at San Francisco’s Castro Theater in 1979, when his dad took him a double feature of Erroll Morris’ Gates of Heaven and Hardware Wars, a documentarian born!)
I saw The Bandit at its premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). It played on TV channel CMT, and now can be streamed on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
UNDER THE SUN. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.
The subversive documentary Under the Sun is a searing insight into totalitarian North Korean society, all from government-approved filming that tells a different story than the wackadoodle dictatorship intended.
The North Korean regime gave filmmaker Vitaly Mansky permission to film the story of a young girl who is training to take part in one of North Korea’s ritualized propaganda spectacles – when children “join” the Korean Children’s Union on the birthday of the current Supreme Leader’s father. The script and the filming locations were all assigned by the North Korean regime and all film reviewed by their censors. But Mansky was able to conceal and preserve the outtakes – and those moments are devastatingly revelatory about life on North Korea.
What we see is a grim society, virtually devoid of vibrancy and joy. Families are posed briefly mechanically and unsmilingly for ritual family photos in front of flower-bedecked giant portraits of the Leaders. The streets are drab and empty of vehicle traffic even at rush hour. Mansky shows us surreptitious glimpses of his minders and even of boys raiding garbage cans. There’s a lot of regimentation depicted in Under the Sun and lots of people drearily filing to and fro. Sometimes it gets tiresome – but that’s the point.
Everyone is conscripted to perform and watch phony staged spectacles of the grandest scale. The rapturous crowds shown on TV contrast with the stoic crowds forced to view the televised events. North Korea must have the world’s most professional event planners per capita.
Most chillingly, we see a class where 6-year-olds are taught to hate Japanese and Americans. This appears to be a scene that the North Koreans INTENTIONALLY included in the movie.
The beautiful irony of Under the Sun is that, in trying to tell a story about the best of their society, the North Koreans actually reveal their worst. I saw Under the Sun earlier this year at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival. Under the Sun opens July 29 at the Lee 4-Star in San Francisco.
There are two programs of short films (Jews in Shorts) at this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and one of them features the documentary short I, Dalio – Or the Rules of the Game. Covering the career of French Jewish actor Marcel Dalio, I, Dalio reflects on how Dalio’s Jewishness informed his life and film career. It’s a documentary of special interest to cinephiles because of Dalio’s roles in three of the all-time greatest films. One of those films is Casablanca, and Dalio gets one of that film classic’s biggest laughs when his croupier says “Your winnings, sir” to Claude Raines’ Captain Renault.
Born in Paris as Israel Moshe Blauschild and adopting the stage name of Marcel Dalio, he became a prolific character actor in French cinema, specializing in weaselly, conniving and otherwise malevolent roles, often playing the foil to his real-life friend Jean Gabin. I, Dalio notes that the only two Dalio roles that were explicitly Jewish were his starring turns in the Jean Renoir masterpieces La Grande Illusion and The Rules of the Game.
Then, within a year of The Rules of the Game’s Paris premiere, the Nazis invaded Paris, and Dalio took his talent to Hollywood. After the war, Dalio continued to work, producing over a hundred more screen credits in international cinema and television.
I, Dalio – Or the Rules of the Game will appeal to audiences interested in both cinema history and Jewish identity. Running for 33 minutes, I Dalio anchors one of the two programs of short films (Jews in Shorts) at this years San Francisco Jewish Film Festival(SJFF36), where you can see it at San Francisco’s Castro on July 27 and at the Piedmont in Oakland on August 6.
