French documentarian Nicolas Philibert takes on a backstage tour of the seven channels of Radio France in House of Radio (La Maison de la Radio). Philibert’s style is entirely observational – there is no narration and I remember only one title identifying the Radio France building at beginning of film. The camera just watches the people of Radio France do their jobs – including interviews, news reports, performances, games shows and even the sports reporters on motorbikes covering the Tour de France.
As San Francisco Film Society Director of Programming Rachel Rosen noted, radio is a medium that draws much of its power from the absence of images. The editing in House of Radio seems completely random but it’s not – Philibert strings all of his nuggets together so that we never lose interest. I want to see this guy’s next movie.
I saw House of Radio at the San Francisco Film Society’s French Cinema Now series. It’s not currently available in theaters or on DVD or streaming in the US.
Hers to Lose: Inside Christine Quinn’s Bid for Mayor is an extraordinarily evocative political film, it’s only 30 minutes long and you can watch it for free.
It’s the story of Christine C. Quinn’s bid for New York City mayor in 2013. At the start of the race, Quinn was the heavy favorite. She was the City Council President and a dominant force in Manhattan’s Democratic establishment. She would have been the first woman and the first openly gay Mayor of New York City.
Then, as happens in politics, two things went wrong. First, she had positioned herself as the Democratic partner and heir to Republican Mayor Bloomberg, which helped her immensely in the years of Bloomberg’s popularity in New York; but by the time of the 2013 primary, Bloomberg had become very UNPOPULAR among Democratic primary voters. Then, as voters looked to an anti-Bloomberg alternative, one of Quinn’s opponents, Bill de Blasio unleashed a killer campaign commercial, featuring his teenage son Dante, that crystallized the aspirations of the electorate. Quinn sank like a rock in the polls, and de Blasio shot upward. This was one of those moments in a political campaign when there is just nothing a candidate can do to stop a popular tsunami.
As Hers to Lose opens, we see Quinn – just after her defeat – explaining that she granted access to the New York Times documentarians so they could record her victory. She is composed, but her eyes are filled with pain. Quinn had dedicated years of her life to running in this race, suffering political and personal attacks, enduring long hours and living in a fish bowl; to see this film is to appreciate how much she put into the contest and how helplessly she watched her lead slip away. At its most searing, Her to Lose chronicles the never-ending torrent of abuse hurled at Quinn by haters – especially the single issue opponents of horse-drawn carriages who hang around her building so they can revile her as she begins each day; as one might assume, this vitriol takes its toll.
You can view Hers to Lose: Inside Christine Quinn’s Bid for Mayorhere at the NYT.
Seduced and Abandoned is director James Toback’s (The Pickup Artist, Tyson) documentary about that overlooked aspect of filmmaking: the pitch. The camera follows Toback and his star Alec Baldwin through the Cannes Film Festival as they try to get funding for their new movie. The project they are pitching is Last Tango in Tikrit. One can only imagine…
Toback is shameless in his pursuit of backers: “250 years from now, the only reason anyone will know your name is when it rolls on the screen as producer of my movie”. When Toback and Baldwin learn that a young actor-wannabe has a very rich dad, they pounce and dangle a newly written role for the son. Toback is willing to dump Neve Campbell for a younger box office hottie and to change the plot from a Middle East story so he can shoot in the US. It’s all very sly.
Seduced and Abandoned is playing on HBO. Here’s the teaser.
Filmmaker Matthew Cooke’s documentary How to Make Money Selling Drugs is a dispassionate critique of the Drug War. Using the How To format as an attention grabber, Cooke presents the job opportunities in illegal drug commerce as rational economic decisions How much money can you make as a street dealer? As a drug smuggler or kingpin? What is the risk that you will need to defend your product inventory from a violent robbery? What are the risks that you will be incarcerated? How do those risks change if you are African-American?
The talking heads are former industry insiders, ranging from former street dealer 50 Cent to big league smuggler Brian O’Dea and notorious LA druglord Freeway Rick.
How to Make Money Selling Drugs is effective because Cooke generally strips away the value judgements and lets the audience draw its own conclusions, balancing out the risks and rewards. The final risk presented, that of addiction, is particularly sobering. (How to Make Money strays from this approach just once, with a Woody Harrelson diatribe.) I expect that most viewers will conclude that 1) drug dealing is not a great long-term career path; and 2) the Drug War has not been effective in reducing drug abuse or illegal commerce.
How to Make Money Selling Drugs is available streaming from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
Okay, here’s a jaw dropper. In the chilling documentary The Act of Killing, perpetrators of genocide in Indonesia are asked to re-enact their murders – and they are pleased as punch to do so. We meet unapologetic mass murderers face-to-face. Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has created the year’s most startling documentary.
After the 1965 military coup, death squads sympathetic to the military labeling opponents of the regime, landless farmers and ethnic Chinese as “communists” – and killed 2-3 million fellow Indonesians. The killers were mostly Indonesian paramilitary groups and gangsters. The Act of Killing introduces us to several of these murderers, who don’t try to evade or spin their deeds, but instead look proudly and nostalgically at their murders as the highlight of their lives.
The film primarily focuses on two self-described gangsters, Anwars and Herman. The two enthusiastically embrace the film project so they can document their murders for history. Anwars is said to have killed a thousand by himself. Because beating them to death produced too much messy blood, he devised a method of strangling them with wire. The corpulent Herman chooses spends about a third of movie dressed in flamboyant drag, which is ridiculous, but the film is so disturbing that the audience just can’t laugh. Besides acting out interrogation torture murders and a village massacre, the two come up with a Bollywood-like musical number of Born Free, complete with dancing-girls in front of a waterfall, in which the garotted dead reappear to thank Anwars for sending them on to the afterlife. It is beyond bizarre.
In the film’s most riveting scene, a guy who has been recruited to play a torture victim in the film-within-a-film, recounts the death squad murder of his step-father to Anwars and Herman. To keep his composure, he awkwardly laughs as he describes the abduction – but his eyes are clearly blaming the old gangsters. Then he acts out his torture for the camera.
The Act of Killing is hypnotically compelling – you can’t believe what’s on the screen, can’t believe that you’re still watching it and can’t stop watching.
The Act of Killing is directed by Oppenheimer and co-directed by someone credited as “Anonymous” and Christine Cynn. Oddly, there is no writing credit. The great documentarians Errol Morris and Werner Herzog are among the executive producers.
[We don’t often explore genocide from the perpetrator’s point of view, although two excellent documentaries come to mind: Shoah and Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, both on my 5 Essential Holocaust Films. The current film Hannah Arendt is about the academic theorist who coined the term “banality of evil”, but that story’s duel of letters between hand-wringing intellectuals makes for a stale discussion.]
The Act of Killing is a very uncomfortable movie, and I suspect that it wouldn’t be not a great choice for most of my readers. But it pushes the envelope of cinema and is the most uniquely original film of the year (or millennium so far?). I’m really glad that I watched it.
The documentary A Band Called Death tells the story of three African-American brothers from Detroit who formed a band that could have launched punk music – but remained unknown until the 21st century. The brothers’ parents invested a settlement from a car accident into top flight instruments for the teens, who unexpectedly eschewed soul for rock. Two years before The Ramones and The Sex Pitols, Death’s groundbreaking sound was about to earn the band a record deal when…Well, just watch the movie. The filmmaking is solid if unremarkable, but the story is a great one.
Thanks to Paul and Harrison for turning me on to this gem. A Band Called Death is available streaming on iTunes.
Marion Dougherty (left) and some of her discoveries in CASTING BY
Every serious movie fan should see the fine HBO documentary Casting By, which reveals the importance of the casting department, chiefly by focusing on the pioneering work of New York casting director Marion Dougherty and her Hollywood counterpart Lynn Stalmaster.
In the hey day of the Studio System, studios would simply typecast actors plucked from their list of contract players, But Dougherty, casting for the early TV dramas shot in New York, picked the most promising stage actors and cast them AGAINST type. When the Studio System collapsed in the early 1960s, Dougherty and Stalmaster were able to bring this approach to the movies, especially for former TV directors like Sidney Lumet and George Roy Hill and young up-and-comers like Martin Scorsese.
It’s really difficult to imagine American cinema from the past 50 years without Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall – and Dougherty is the person who cast them for their breakout credits. Not to mention James Dean, Jack Lemmon, Warren Beatty, Rod Steiger, Jon Voight, Christopher Walken, Glenn Close, Martin Sheen and Diane Lane. And she pushed for Danny Glover to be cast in his Lethal Weapon role, originally written for a white detective.
Stalmaster’s story is just as compelling, including his advocacy for then unknown John Travolta and his casting of the very odd kid in Deliverance.
Casting By also takes on the turf war with the remarkably ungenerous Directors Guild, which results in grudging credits and no Oscars for casting directors.
The Cheshire Murders, another in HBO’s fine summer documentary series, takes us beyond the familiar police procedural. This is not a whodunit – we immediately know what happened and who committed the crimes. Three murders were committed in a home invasion, and the two perpetrators were caught red-handed – their guilt confirmed by confessions and DNA and other forensic evidence.
Instead, as The Cheshire Murders peels back the onion, we hear about the crime’s impact on a quiet Connecticut suburb and on the families of the victims and the perpetrators. We trace the unanswered questions on the police response. We follow the life journeys of the murderers which culminate in this horrific crime. We see how the case affected the political debate over capital punishment in Connecticut, and test our own views on capital punishment with the facts of a heinous crime, certain guilt and monstrous offenders.
The Cheshire Murders is all the more effective because the filmmakers refused to sensationalize the case. The facts, speaking for themselves, are compelling enough.
The Cheshire Murders is currently playing on HBO. Note: Some of the victims of this wanton, senseless and disgusting crime were children; although there are no grisly images, the facts of the case are disturbing.
DECEPTIVE PRACTICE: THE MYSTERIES AMD MENTORS OF RICKY JAY
In tracing the development of the great magician Ricky Jay, the documentary Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay explores the fascinating history of 20th century American magic. We get to see performances by Jay and his mentors, with comments by Jay himself. Ricky Jay’s mysteries are the secrets of 1) his illusions and 2) his family – both unrevealed. Whether expansive about his mentors and his passion for magic, or tight-mouthed about his relationship with his parents, Jay is a fascinating character.
Because the audience gets to see lots of amazing magic, Deceptive Practice is attractive as a performance film. But Jay is an unsurpassed raconteur, one of my favorites, and when he holds forth, it’s as entertaining as any of his illusions.
(I was fortunate to see Deceptive Practice at the San Francisco International Film Festival sitting next to bunch of real magicians.)
Gideon’s Army, another gem from HBO’s fine summer documentary series, explores the work of public defenders in the South. By defending indigent criminal defendants, these lawyers preserve the American legal principles of fair trials and the presumption of innocence. But the game is rigged against them – they are starkly under-resourced and, in the South, face shockingly high bail requirements and extremely severe mandatory sentencing laws. Each responsible for 120-150 cases at a time, they suffer long hours and low pay, defending the mostly guilty – a recipe for burnout. One PD even has had one client who planned to murder her in open court.
To tell this Sisyphean story, Gideon’s Army focuses on a handful of public defenders and their cases. There’s probably more optimism in the film than in real life (which is necessary, because a more realistic depiction would probably be depressingly unwatchable). It’s an important subject and a good watch. Gideon’s Army is currently playing on HBO.
