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.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has inspired both documentary and narrative movies, but none is more imaginative than Wrestling Jerusalem. This year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival(SJFF36) will host Wrestling Jerusalem’s world premiere.
Wrestling Jerusalem is a one-man play written and performed by Aaron Davidman, who creates seventeen different characters, both Jews and Arabs, who each relate their own experiences of the conflict. Davidman portrays his characters without benefit of costume; he varies the accents, but mostly we can tell the characters apart from the content of their stories. Davidman’s performance is vivid and startlingly personal.
Davidman launches Wrestling Jerusalem with a montage of his characters explaining “It’s complicated” – a defining truth that most would accept. Then the characters continue by disagreeing about the conflict’s start (1946, 1947, 1967, 1973, the Hebron massacre – both of the massacres) and who is to blame for its continuation (Abbas, the settlers, the Orthodox, the terror attacks, Bibi, etc.). Then each character unspools his or her own perspective. Over a crisp 90 minutes, it’s absorbing stuff.
Thankfully, with one just guy on-screen for the entire film, the filmmakers keep Wrestling Jerusalem from being too stagey. They place Davidman in two locations, a solitary theatrical stage and in the desert (looks like Israel/Palestine, but it’s the California Mojave). It’s an impressive job by director Dylan Kussman, editor Erik C. Andersen and cinematographer Nicole Hirsch Whitaker.
Davidman has a point of view, but was careful not to make Wrestling Jerusalem into a screed. Instead, he’s careful to let his audience connect the dots in our own minds. Near the end, one of his characters says, “You are Israel, for you have struggled with God and with men” from Genesis 32:28, but does not does not finish the quote with “and have prevailed”.
You can experience Wrestling Jerusalem at its world premiere at this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival(SJFF36), where you can see it at San Francisco’s Castro on July 27, at the Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theater on July 30, at CineArts in Palo Alto on July 28 and at the Rafael in San Rafael on August 7
The important and absorbing documentary Zero Days traces the story of an incredibly successful cyber attack by two nation states upon another – and its implications. In Iran’s nuclear weapons development program, the centrifuges used to enrich uranium began destroying themselves in 2010. It turned out that these machines were instructed to self-destruct by a computer worm devised by American and Israeli intelligence.
No doubt – this was an amazing technological triumph. Zero Days takes us through a thrilling whodunit non-geek audience. We learn how a network that is completely disconnected from the Internet can still be infected. And how cybersecurity experts track down viruses. It’s all accessible and fascinating.
But, strategically, was this really a cyberwarfare victory? We learn just what parts of our lives can be attacked and frozen by computer attacks (Spoiler: pretty much everything). And we learn that this attack has greenlighted cyberwarfare by other nations – including hostile and potentially hostile ones. Zero Days makes a persuasive case that we need to have a public debate – as we have had on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons – on the use of this new kind of weaponry.
Director Alex Gibney is one our very, very best documentarians. He won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and he made the superb Casino Jack: The United States of Money, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer,Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,Going Clear: The Prison of Beliefand Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine.
Gibney’s specialty is getting sources on-camera that have the most intimate knowledge of his topic. In Zero Days, he pulls out a crew of cybersecurity experts, the top journalist covering cyberwarfare, leaders of both Israeli and American intelligence and even someone who can explain the Iranian perspective. Most impressively, Gibney has found insiders from the NSA who actually worked on this cyber attack (and prepared others).
Zero Days opens tomorrow in theaters and will also be available to stream on Amazon, iTunes, Vusu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox and various PPV platforms, including DirecTV.
Here is the perfect companion film to Weiner – it’s the inside story of ANOTHER campaign – one of Anthony Weiner’s opponents in the same 2013 mayoral election.
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.
WEINER. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.
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.
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.
Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin in WEINER
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.
Lyndon B. Johnson, one of American history’s larger-than-life characters, finally comes alive on the screen in the HBO movie All the Way. Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad, Trumbo) is the first actor who captures LBJ in all his facets – a man who was boring and square on television but frenetic, forceful and ever-dominating in person. All the Way traces the first year in LBJ’s presidency, when he ended official racial segregation in America with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
LBJ was obsessed with gaining and keeping political power, and he was utterly ruthless and amoral about the means to do that. His tools of persuasion included deceit, flattery, threats, promised benefits and horse-trading. He was equally comfortable in playing to someone’s ideals and better nature as well to one’s vanity or venality. In All the Way, we see one classic moment of what was called “the Johnson treatment”, when LBJ looms over Senator Everett Dirksen, and it becomes inevitable that Dirksen is going to be cajoled, intimidated or bought off and ultimately give LBJ what he wants.
LBJ was so notoriously insincere that one of the joys of All the Way is watching LBJ tell completely inconsistent stories to the both sides of the Civil Right battle. Both the Civil Rights proponents (Hubert Humphrey and Martin Luther King, Jr.) and the opponents (the Southern Senators led by Richard Russell) must determine whether LBJ is lying and to whom. Each of them must make this calculation and then bet his own cause on his perception of LBJ’s real intentions.
But LBJ amassed power for two reasons – he needed to have it and he needed to do something with it. Along with the LBJ’s unattractive personal selfishness and the political sausage-making that some may find distasteful, All the Way shows that Johnson did have two core beliefs that drove his political goals – revulsion in equal parts to discrimination and poverty. We hear references to the childhood poverty that led to the humiliation of his father, to the plight of the Mexican schoolchildren in Cotulla, Texas, that he mentored as a young man, and his outrage at the discriminatory treatment suffered by his African-American cook Zephyr.
Bryan Cranston brilliantly brings us the complete LBJ – crude, conniving, thin-skinned, intimidating and politically masterful. Besides Cranston’s, we also see superb performances by Melissa Leo as Lady Bird, Anthony Mackie as MLK, Bradley Whitford as Hubert Humphrey and Frank Langella as Richard Russell.
All the Way is remarkably historically accurate. It does capsulize some characters and events, but the overall depiction of 1964 in US history is essentially truthful. As did Selma, All the Way drills down to secondary characters like James Eastland and Bob Moses. We also see the would-be scandal involving LBJ’s chief of staff Walter Jenkins, a story that has receded from the popular culture. Vietnam is alluded to with a reference to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which is fitting since Vietnam grew to become LBJ’s nemesis and the national obsession only after the 1964 election.
All the Way was adapted from a Broadway play for which Cranston won a Tony. I saw three movies in theaters last weekend and none of them were as good as All the Way. LBJ’s 1964 makes for a stirring story, and All the Way is a compelling film. Seek it out on HBO.
Ever notice how people who watch a lot of Fox News or listen to talk radio become bitter, angry and, most telling, fact-resistant? In the documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, filmmaker Jan Senko as she explores how right-wing media impacts the mood and personality of its consumers as well as their political outlook. Senko uses her own father Frank as a case study.
We see Frank Senko become continually mad and, well, mean. And we hear testimony about many, many others with the identical experience. Experts explain the existence of a biological addiction to anger.
Senko traces the history of right-wing media from the mid-1960s, with the contributions of Lewis Powell, Richard Nixon, Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. Senko even gets right-wing wordsmith Frank Luntz on camera to explain the power of buzz words. If you don’t know this story (Hillary was right about the “vast, right-wing conspiracy”) , Senko spins the tale very comprehensively. If you do know the material (and my day job is in politics), it is methodical.
This topic is usually explored for its impact on political opinion. Senko’s focus on mood and personality is original and The Brainwashing of My Dad contributes an important addition to the conversation. One last thing about the brainwashing of Senko’s dad – it may not be irreversible…
I first reviewed The Brainwashing of My Dad for its U.S. Premiere at Cinequest 2016. The Brainwashing of My Dad is available streaming on Amazon Video, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Ever notice how people who watch a lot of Fox News or listen to talk radio become bitter angry and, most telling, fact-resistant? In the documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, filmmaker Jan Senko as she explores how right-wing media impacts the mood and personality of its consumers as well as their political outlook. Senko uses her own father Frank as a case study.
We see Frank Senko become continually mad and, well, mean. And we hear testimony about many, many others with the identical experience. Experts explain the existence of a biological addiction to anger.
Senko traces the history of right-wing media from the mid-1960s, with the contributions of Lewis Powell, Richard Nixon, Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. Senko even gets right-wing wordsmith Frank Luntz on camera to explain the power of buzz words. If you don’t know this story (Hillary was right about the “vast, right-wing conspiracy”) , Senko spins the tale very comprehensively. If you do know the material (and my day job is in politics), it is methodical.
This topic is usually Senko’s focus on mood and personality is original and The Brainwashing of My Dad contributes an important addition to the conversation. One last thing about the brainwashing of Senko’s dad – it may not be irreversible…
The U.S. Premiere of The Brainwashing of My Dad will be March 5 at Cinequest, with additional screening on March 6 and 9.
During the Communist regime of the repugnant Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romanians could only experience two hours of television per day and all of that was boring Ceaușescu propaganda. They were starving for culture, of any type and any quality, and a ring of smugglers responded to the demand with bootleg VHS tapes of American movies. The rewarding documentary Chuck Norris Vs. Communism tells this story.
Now this isn’t about high cinema from America and the rest of the world inspiring the current crop of Romanian auteurs – although that did happen. This is about ordinary Romanians feasting on even the crappiest American movies, especially the never-ending cascade of action movies (Chuck Norris movies were among the favorites).
The authorities, usually obsessively repressive, turned a blind eye top the VHS smuggling because they totally missed the subversive impact the movies that were not overtly political. But the ordinary Romanians saw abundantly stocked American supermarkets and measured that against their own deprivation.
One guy organized this VHS smuggling ring. Amazingly, one woman narrated a Romanian voiceover for all these movies – hundreds of them. It was a shady business for him and a moonlighting gig for her – but now they are cultural heroes in Romania. We meet these two briefly in Chuck Norris Vs. Communism. And we hear the testimony of Romanians touched by cinema – even trashy cinema.
What is banal in some cultures can have a significant impact on others. Chuck Norris Vs. Communism makes that point engagingly, in a story you won’t see anywhere else. Plays Cinequest on March 4, 6 and 12.
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.
