At the NYFF premiere I attended, director Charles Ferguson said he set out to make Inside Job a “blockbuster” of documentaries, a film suited for mass consumption so as to be a call-to-arms. Certainly the B-roll he meshes between talking heads – sweeping, infinitesimally textured pans of the NYC skyline, sprawling factories, all shot on the RED – is as gorgeously epic as anything shot in the last couple years, and the beautiful score is no afterthought, but I still fear the film may be too dense to reach the same population that has swallowed up 2012 and Clash of the Titans in droves.

That’s not all a bad thing. The film is incisive, meticulous and doesn’t finch, but I wouldn’t say the experience is compelling so much as maddening. It washes over you and leaves you in a stupor of frustration. The audience I sat with was quite happy not to get the kind of dumbed-down presentation of facts we did last year with Capitalism: A Love Story. There are no stunts, no heroism here, and that’s all the better. Instead, it’s like a long, intelligent, mostly coherent conversation with the experts and villains – George Soros, Glenn Hubbard, Frederic Mishkin and Eliot Spitzer (pictured above) – of the 2008 financial recession launch, with a few blips of incredulity from Ferguson’s mouth that make their way into their film, like “Are you serious?”

And we’re with Ferguson, because it is shocking: we’ve spent the last 30 years making the financial market riskier and less stable, the investment firms are increasingly betting against the American people and there’s no sign of it slowing down now. When Matt Damon calls us to action in the film’s closing voiceover, we realize we’re stepping into a new time: one where Obama no longer is the hopeful solution but, quite explicitly, part of the problem. It’s an inconvenient truth: the man we believed in who got a chance to reform wall street appointed dozens of same people who caused the meltdown and who have no reason to go back on deregulation because it’s not in their interest. It’s hard to accept, and hard to know what to do. It leaves you cold.

The Tillman Story (Amir Bar-Lev, 2010)

What a pleasant surprise!

What a horrible way to start this review.  This is an infuriating film.

I had heard nothing about this film, but it gave me a lot to think about.  The Tillman Story retells Pat Tillman’s decision to abandon his multimillion-dollar football contract in order to serve in the US Army in Afghanistan in 2002.  Already a national football star, Tillman’s decision attracted a fair amount of press, but only in his death did he become a household name.  The film examines how Tillman’s death was taken by the government and spun into a pro-war media spectacle.  Tillman was depicted as an American hero, who died in an intense firefight with the opposition, when in reality he died by friendly fire.

The Tillman Story is very much a post-Michael Moore documentary.  Audiences have grown to be wary of documentaries with a master of ceremonies and are much more open to a “figure it out yourself” narrative.  Do not misunderstand, the information is prescriptive and Josh Brolin’s narration is very sympathetic, but it is tempered with self-explanatory footage–e.g. Donald Rumsfeld and other top officials pleading ignorance in front of the supreme court (shameful footage indeed).  I was consistently surprised with the acuteness of Bar-Lev’s eye; he effortlessly dances between the hilarious and the truly tragic aspects of this young man’s death with such speed that I could only keep up by crying and laughing at the same time.

What struck me about this film is how quickly an idea can consume a person.  Pat Tillman did not believe in god or want a military burial, yet the famous politicians attending his high-profile military funeral all solemnly proclaimed how Tillman was now up in heaven and at peace with god.  Following this, one of his younger brothers speaks (skip to 7:25):

He’s fucking dead. I still can’t shake this clip.  It kicked me in the stomach in the theater and I can’t even watch it now.  Consider sitting through your loved one’s funeral as people who never knew him drone on about the country and the glory of war (Tillman is later recounted watching the bombing of Baghdad and saying. “This war is so fucking illegal.”)–I was shaking in my seat.  To feel such a visceral reaction is rare for me, but the blatant truth in some of the footage is undeniable and simply presented.  I never thought I would describe any documentary as “true”, but The Tillman Story is remarkable.

After the film finished, a woman in the back was loudly chatting with her friends: “You know who really upsets me is Donald Rumsfeld.  If I could just shoot anybody in the head, it’d be him.”  Really?  Really.  Films like this leave me feeling helpless because, while a lot of information is presented, no solutions are even hinted at.  This only enrages the viewer and equips her with enough sound bites to keep up conversation at her monthly olive-tasting and short fiction club.  If you ask about it, she’ll tell you to go see the film instead of running for office.  Information is only useful in concert with action, and I’m alarmed by how satisfying and easy it is to take in information without any consequence for inaction. How does one deal with this barrage of corruption and misinformation?

I, for one, postponed my political campaign and went to see two more films.

]]> http://sainteliotandco.com/reviews/the-tillman-story/feed/ 1 http://sainteliotandco.com/reviews/memories-of-the-space-age/ http://sainteliotandco.com/reviews/memories-of-the-space-age/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:30:40 +0000 Giampaolo Bianconi http://sainteliotandco.com/?p=1635 For All Mankind, dir. Al Reinert (1989)

For All Mankind begins with JFK’s announcement that our technology–put together, he says, more perfectly than the finest watch–will take us to the moon. Speaking, JFK looks comfortable in a dated, ancient way. Kennedy’s announcement sets the tone for the rest of the film: it’s not laudatory or patriotic, though it depicts one of the proudest moments in American history. For All Mankind is a strangely distant film, refusing to revel in the triumph of the moon landing and instead constantly wondering what it means to have sent anyone into space anyway.

The film is an amalgamation of Apollo and Gemini missions during the ‘60s and ‘70s, painstakingly assembled from over six million feet of film footage archived by NASA. It is a collage without a documentary narrative; instead, the shots bounce off one another and emerge as a completed whole with eerie clarity. The footage is hauntingly beautiful: shots of empty chairs at mission control, the awesome fire that pours out of a space rocket, propelling it to the cosmos; lock-jawed astronauts testing their suits. Every frame is an artifact of the strangeness that was our space race, our desire to get to the moon.

The film is one of the most engrossing viewing experiences I can imagine. Everything is delightfully bizarre, like strolling through a gallery full of work by Marcel Duchamp: watching the film, you become an alien. Seeing a shot of some NASA types with IBM written on their jackets, I forgot what IBM stood for. The technicians push buttons on comically massive boxes that can’t be, yet are, computers; the astronauts themselves—eating, pissing, shitting, whirling in space—always seem to be on technological life-support, hyperaware of their reliance on the machines and space suits keeping them alive.  Wryly, they realize how alien they are.

One of the film’s most memorable moments is when one of the lunar astronauts—Buzz Aldrin, I assume—describes a dream he had while asleep in the lunar module. He dreamt that he followed a set of tire tracks with the moon rover. Eventually, he and Neil Armstrong found another rover with two astronauts, perfectly preserved, sitting inside. Upon closer inspection, the astronauts proved to be themselves; the rover, too, was theirs. It’s straight out of J.G. Ballard, who himself wondered about astronauts’ dreams.

Astronauts are a unique bunch. In their interviews, they seem to be somewhat unable to make sense of their experiences, and many of their thoughts seems centered on questions of “why me?” They must have their experiences, someone observes, as proxies for the rest of humanity: not everyone has gone to space, not everyone has been to the moon. With their suits on, it’s difficult to tell the astronauts apart, and Reinert makes no attempt to distinguish them when we hear their voice-overs. They speak with one voice: the voice of having been to space. It’s more collectivity than the Soviet Union could have ever imagined, and Reinert’s film remains the most fascinating vehicle in which it can be witnessed.

Jefferson Bull Fermor, as a boy.

Faith Healer, Adam Hirsch’s 2009 senior thesis film, has been almost as elusive in the past few months as its subject, Jefferson Bull Fermor.  No longer!  Adam finally taped together the last few pieces and scrounged enough up to get it out.  I’m happy to point you to two newly published excerpts from the film.

Much more content to come.