Category: political

DocuMondays – Art and Copy



Art and Copy (2009, dir. Doug Pray)

It’s everywhere. You experience it almost every hour of the day, and it is usually while you are in a passive state. It persists and nags at your brain without you ever realizing it, but when you see it done exceptionally well you sit up and make note. Advertising is a modern psychological virus. The majority of it is terrible, which makes sense when you think about how much of it there is. As the film states, we experience 5,000 advertisements a day in multiple mediums. When it is done well, we slip out of passivity, sit up, and make note. What’s interesting is the best advertising either sets an atmosphere without every directly referencing the product, or is completely direct about the product and the emotion that goes along with it. This documentary interviews the pioneers of modern advertising from the mid-1960s to the 1980s.

The documentary is structured in a very clean way. Each section of the film is divided with a scene without dialogue and statistics on advertising placed over scenes of urban meditation. The first section of the film talks about the environment the featured advertisers came into. We’ve all seen ads from the 1950s which have an air of a false stereotypical salesman’s pitch. With the young turks that took over in the 1960s, they began to create provocative ads that didn’t necessarily give the viewer information on the product, but evoked curiosity and emotion in them. The Volkswagen Beetle ads of the late 60s were a major breakthrough in American advertising, where the quirkiness of the product was acknowledged. Very straightforward taglines were used instead of just making the logo swallow up the space.

It was the firm Doyle Dane Bernach that brought us the Beetle ads, and the shockingly harsh (for its time) American Tourister luggage ad, as well as the hyper arty Braniff airline campaign and finally the I (Heart) NY image. Mary Wells, the Peggy of her time, was an incredibly inventive and creative copy editor who took her background in theatrics and applied it to advertising. The sense of drama in commercials is something that sticks with us today (think Budweiser frogs, Taster’s Choice soap opera). At the time these ideas were presented, the good old boy network in charge were confounded and even the clients were often times frightened at the possibility of risking their brand on such ideas.

The documentary focuses a lot on the divide between the business side and the creative side, particularly how in the old paradigm, the accounts people were over creative. In the 1960s, this was subverted with the creative types either becoming more aggressive or striking out on their own. The East Coast was also the mecca of advertising so no one was noticing when the West Coast firms began rolling out revolutionary campaigns. It was one of these firms that got the Apple Computers contract and brought up the “1984” Superbowl ad, introducing the Mac to us through a Ridley Scott directed ad. You never see the Mac once. This firm still holds the Apple account and came up with “Think Different” in the 1990s and the current silhouette iPod campaign.

The final segment of the film deals with the ethical responsibilities of the advertiser, in specifics how it ties to politics. They feature the Morning in America Regan ads from 1984 that are unlike anything out today, and epitomize the way an incumbent can run and win again. Some of the interviewees agree that the ads works, but from an ethical perspective they find it misleading because of the facts it ignored. Hal Riney, the man behind the Morning in America ad confesses that his habit of going purely emotional in his ads goes back to a childhood where affection was held back from him. In the majority of his work images of the Rockwell America is evoked in a cleverly deceptive way. If you are at all interested in media and the way humanity’s decisions can be shifted by the creative this would be a very insightful film to digest.

Wild Card Tuesdays – Three Days of the Condor



Three Days of the Condor (1975, dir. Sydney Pollack)
Starring Robert Reford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, Max Von Sydow, John Houseman

In the wake of Watergate in the early 1970s, a trend began in films made by younger directors towards anti-government conspiracy thrillers. You had the “based on a true story” variety like All The President’s Men, the naturalist conspiracy like The Candidate, and the more Hitchcock-ian conspiracy in The Conversation. Here Sydney Pollack takes a crack at adapting a novel to the screen about a man on the more paperwork side of the CIA. It begins with some intriguing moments, but slowly devolves into a formulaic studio picture, only to deliver a very prescient twist.

Joe Turner (Redford) works for the American Literary Society, a front for a group of translators who spend their days literally reading everything and looking for any oddities that could be a way of encoding messages. Turner has discovered such an oddity, a book that was only published in Arabic, Dutch, and Spanish with no logically reason why. He receives a message from his superior telling him the Agency believes it is not of importance. Later that same day a group of men show up and kill all of Turner’s coworkers, while he escapes, now on the run. As he delves further into the conspiracy he learns that there is possible a subgroup within the CIA and that he has stumbled upon some vitally important secrets. He uses his technical knowledge and book smarts to stay ahead of his pursuers and eventually learns the reason why his coworkers were murdered.

The conspiracy part of the film is spot on and kept me very engaged. The part of the film that I zoned out during was the very forced love story between Redford and Dunaway. Dunaway was a woman he simply kidnaps to use her car and stay in her apartment. For some reason they inexplicably have sex the first night they meet and she helps me out, despite the implausibility of a person in this situation would do such a thing. Other than the forced romantic subplot (methinks I smell studio intervention), Dunaway has some interesting things to do and is able to move the conspiracy plot along by helping Redford identify the man behind his misery.

Max Von Sydow’s German mercenary is a character interesting enough to have his own film, and delivers an interesting speech near the end of the film about the peacefulness of his life, and how his job has a sort of meditative quality. Robertson does a great job as Redford’s callous superior and gets to deliver a chilling warning to Redford in the film’s final scene. Redford has uncovered the truth of the book translation and why his colleagues were murdered at this point, and Robertson talks about the coming decades in America, and how the unscrupulous actions of the CIA in the present won’t be judge by the citizens in the future. Definitely worth a view and will make you think about the state of the world in comparison.

Jolly Good Thursdays – Five Minutes of Heaven



Five Minutes of Heaven (2009, dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel)
Starring Liam Neeson, James Nesbitt

There is no collective event as traumatizing and as haunting in the United States as the conflict in Northern Island has affected those people. In 1975, Ireland was under siege by a civil war where neighbor killed neighbor. The IRA killed those who were Protestants and loyal to the British, while the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) would kill Catholics who were disloyal to the Empire. These murders were typically carried out by adolescent males, coerced into proving their loyality to their faction by terrorist cell leaders. In many ways, this is a parallel to the Islamic fundamentalist terrorism today; young men too dumb to know better end up dying or killing another. Over time, if they live, the glory fades and they are left with the emptiness of what they believed was a great act of glory.

Alistair Little was 16 when he killed James Griffin, 19. Alistair wanted to prove himself to Ulster and heard about a Protestant friend being hassled by Catholics. He and a group of boys steal a car, get ahold of a gun, and show up on James’ doorstep, shooting the young man dead. Witness to this crime is Joe Griffin, James’ 11 year old brother. Thirty years later, the BBC wants to put together a documentary that culminates in Alistair and Joe meeting. Alistair has served 12 years in prison for burglary and appears to have worked towards getting young men out of the situation he ended up in. Joe has agreed to meet but is both apprehensive and enraged at the prospect of finally confronting his brother’s killer. For the rest of his childhood, Joe was blamed for not doing something to save his brother by their mother, and now the grown man wants to unleash all of this pent up rage on Alistair.

Five Minutes plays out in a very unexpected way, primarily because it’s structured as a four-act play. Each act isn’t contained in a single set but is contained by a certain focus. The first act is the recreation of the murder in 1975, the second act is the build up to the documentary meeting between the two men, and so on. The acting weight is focused squarely on Neeson and Nesbitt and they are overqualified for the job. Nesbitt in particularly is able to see saw his character psychologically, increasing the intensity as the hour of he and Alistair’s meeting grows closer. A large piece of this are internal monologues, Joe simply looking in the mirror of his dressing room, pulling the knife he has brought to exact his revenge and mulling over if he should simply leave or go through with this.

Neeson is equally good but in a different direction. He plays Alistair with subtly, he’s a man who wants his victims to be able to confront him and knows they don’t care if he is sorry or not. As he tells one of the BBC crew, he wants them to step in and keep Joe from hurting himself. As we see later in the film, he is completely willing to let Joe unleash his anger on him. But he’s not just out to give victims their peace, Alistair also wants forgiveness. He’s closed himself up in an estate flat in Belfast, never married and has no children and spends his days either in non-violence support groups or stewing in his home. It is inevitable that these two men are going to meet, but the film lets us wondering under what circumstances will it be and under whose terms.

DocuMondays – The Weather Underground



The Weather Underground (2002, dir. Sam Green and Bill Siegel)

What is the line you would refuse to cross when it came to your beliefs about justice? Is it taking to the streets in protest? Is it standing up to the thug tactics of a corrupt cop? Is it killing in the name of your beliefs? No matter left or right on the political spectrum we can see multiple instances where once peaceful and calm movements were derailed by individuals desiring to commit acts of violence. There was Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, The Unabomber, and various other extremists who either cling to an ideology or religion as their justification. This film is about one such group that used methods of terrorism against the US government in the late 1960s through the mid 1970s.

Through archival footage and interviews with the players in this story we are told of the rise and fall of a homegrown terrorist organization. It’s common knowledge that the 1960s were a period of cultural upheaval across the globe. In the United States, it was was student protests against the war in Vietnam that fueled the fire, and the government seemed bent on use brutal force to push them back. In 1969 the non-violent Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held a convention in Chicago. The war in Vietnam was escalating and the current leadership of the SDS was trying to hold things together, while brasher elements in the group wanted to become violently pro-active. Out of this convention was born The Weathermen, a sub-group who clandestinely planned violent riots in the street and bombings of government buildings. At one point they were even hired to, and successfully did, break Timothy Leary out of a California prison. Their efforts had little effect on the government’s efforts in Vietnam, the ending of which was more influenced by the media’s release of graphic violence wrought on Vietnamese civilians. At the 1970s wound down, the members of the The Weathermen went into hiding, eventually turning themselves in at the onset of the 1980s.

The documentary was surprisingly balanced in how it presented this group. I personally would agree with many of the stances the Weathermen took on domestic and foreign policy up to the point where they brought violence into the mix. And while this is a left wing group, the mistakes made and regret felt year later transcend politics. At the time, this young men and women, including the much spoken about Bill Ayers, felt completely right and certain of their actions. One of the most fascinating interviews is with Brian Flanagan, a man who left the group shortly before Vietnam ended. He is able to sum up how things went from hopeful to cultish very quickly. He emphasizes that the leadership got so caught up in breaking the system completely, they failed to realize that lasting change comes in increments.

Mark Rudd, one of the leaders in the group, presents excerpts from his memoirs which detail a young man unsure of what he was getting into and heartbroken at the chaos he wrought, but not wavering in his political stance. I think this is a key point. While all the Weathermen regret the bombings and the riots, known as “The Days of Rage”, they have never stopped believing that many of the military conflicts the US has are not done with the best intentions. In our current political climate, we have a right wing movement with some members hinting at violence by brandishing weapons. The testimony of these men and women who have been there should be examined closely to understand the cost of violent actions and how they linger in the souls of those who commit them.

DocuMondays – Dirt! The Movie



Dirt! The Movie (2009, dir. Bill Benenson, Gene Rosow, Eleonore Dailly)
Narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis

There’s is something about the smell of healthy soil that is unlike anything else. My father got his degree in wildlife biology and worked for the Illinois Department of Agriculture for many years so soil and gardening and nature were a big part of my early years, whether I liked it or not. As I have gotten older I’ve become interested in nature from a global perspective, particularly the way our agriculture has slowly shifted into the hands of a few private corporate interests and away from typical citizen run farms. This documentary focuses on the impact of these practices on our soil and where this practices will inevitably leads us. It doesn’t sound all too excitement but the style of the film’s presentation keeps your attention.


The film begins with metaphor of soil as a living skin to the earth and goes on to talk about the amount of living microbes in a handful of soil. The film can come across fairly dry at the beginning and sags in moments that feel a little lesson oriented. It’s saving grace are the well educated group of interviewees who come from all over the world and present well thought out and reasoned ideas about how to create more sustainable systems. I particularly enjoyed Vandana Shiva and Gary Vaynerchuck.

Shiva is an Indian physicist whose focus has been on fighting against the corporatization of genetics and push towards stronger bioethics. Her experience growing up in India has helped her see the plight of farmers who are forced into working the land as dictated by corporate agricultural firms. The result is that many farmers end up in debt and kill themselves as the land dies around them. She also emphasizes that cultures where women are moving out of a subservient, second class role and into a more active role in their local agriculture are proving themselves to be incredibly sustainable and productive environments. Vaynerchuck, the host of a internet series about wine, is able to provide a poetic look at soil and its intricacies. He talks in length about going to vineyards where he tastes the grapes and the soil to get a better sense of the wine produced there. He has a lot of enthusiasm on the subject which helps pull the audience in.

Dirt! is by no means the greatest documentary made and it does definitely feel didactic in some sections. However, it is a topic that, if given a chance, will pull people in and teach them a lot about the complexity of their environment. I found the portion on mountain top blasting my mining companies to be particularly relevant to situations here in Tennessee. I think its our responsibility as socially conscious human beings to be informed about these topics and ideas.

Director in Focus: John Sayles – Silver City



Silver City (2004, dir. John Sayles)
Starring Chris Cooper, Richard Dreyfus, Danny Huston, Mary Kay Place, Tim Roth, Thora Birch, Maria Bello, Miguel Ferrer, Billy Zane, Michael Murphy, Kris Kristofferson, Daryl Hannah

John Sayles is not shy about his politics, and this film is definitely the work of a bleeding heart liberal. I myself am a fellow bleeding heart so I sympathize with the sentiments of the picture. However, it is a piece of cinema made out of anger and frustration and, while those elements have helped make great art, they cause Silver City to feel overly bitter and despondent, and way too didactic.

The movie opens on the filming a campaign commercial for gubernatorial hopeful Dickie Pilager (Cooper), the dim-witted son of a former governor of Colorado now believing he can win the seat. Sound familiar? Cooper’s performance, obviously modeled on President George W. Bush was very well done and, as much as I like Josh Brolin, made me wish we could have seen Cooper in Oliver Stone’s W.  During the filming of this commercial, as Pilager casts a rod into the crystalline lake in the frame, he pulls up a hand belonging to a body left in the water. Immediately, Pilager’s campaign manager (Dreyfus) thinks someone is setting Pilager up and hires a detective agency to investigate. The investigator is Danny O’Brien (Huston), a former news reporter who is less than enthusiastic at first. As he journeys deeper he becomes obsessed with Pilager’s connection to a multi-corporate mogul Wes Benteen (Kristoffersen).

On paper, this sounds like a great concept. But it fails, and it fails badly. Huston is completely unnatural in the leading role, proving to me he needs to keep to the supporting ones. I can’t figure out if it was the dialogue or actor, but he comes incredibly stiff and forced in his performance. And with Danny O’Brien as the character we are following, it makes the film that much more painful to get through. Cooper and Dreyfus deliver great performances, but aren’t in enough of the movie to make it work. I would have preferred that it had focused on the Pilager character’s campaign more and been a satire of President Bush. Instead, we get a poorly made activist film where metaphors are incredibly shallow.

The film made me feel very conflicted, as every political note it touches I am right there in support of. But it proves that when views are expressed too overtly they bog a film down. The film takes it self too seriously for the majority of the time, and when it does attempt to go light, such as when Daryl Hannah’s tough hippie character is introduced, the humor feels hollow and tainted by Sayles bitterness. Not the best work of this director; he CAN make great films about his political views (Matewan for example).

Next up: Sunshine State and my final thoughts on John Sayles.

Wild Card Tuesday – Hunger


Hunger (2008, dir. Steve McQueen)

Starring Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham
The fight between Catholic and Protestant sides in Northern Ireland has devastated that country since the late 1960s. Each side has visited monolithic brutality on the other in of the greatest displays of community inflicting such cruelty on itself. But the cruelty that was the worst, was that of employees of the British empire on IRA members imprisoned in facilities across the country. Director Steve McQueen never give support for the terrorist actions of the IRA, but advocates that all prisoners, regardless of their crimes, deserve humane treatment.
The film’s focus is real life IRA soldier Bobby Sands (Fassbender). While the film doesn’t explicitly cover his activities with the IRA, he was no saint. He helped ferry weapons for the movement and was involved in the bombing of a furniture store in 1976. The film chooses to portray Sands as a figure unwilling to budge an inch for the brutal authority crashing down around his head. In this effort he has allowed himself to become dehumanized. Simply put, he has been caged and treated like an animal, so he will behave like one. Sands smears the walls of his cell with his own feces, allows the daily meals to rot and mold in a corner, and funnels his bed pan (synchronized with the other prisoners) out into the hallway. Is it vile? Yes. But there something innate within us that despise authority that wishes to break us, so it comes off as bizarrely admirable.
Bobby’s most memorable, and final, triumph came when he began a hunger strike in 1981 which took his life after several painful months of starvation. Michael Fassbender destroyed his body through malnutrition to take on the gaunt, sunken appearance of a Holocaust victim. He become the specter of death with additional help from an incredibly talented makeup department. His back is covered in open sores, he’s unable to urinate for the prison doctor’s physical, and he stains his sheets with black, acrid blood. The moments before Sands passes are truly powerful. The film moves into his consciousness as hallucinations of his younger self appear and his mind travels back to long distance race where he and both Prot and Catholic youths ran together, in fields of golden amber. Director McQueen doesn’t want you to take the IRA’s side, he wants you to realize how irrelevant any side is, and simply see a man dying.
The aesthetic choice made by McQueen are magnificent. For the first 30 minutes of the film there is little or no dialogue. Only 50 minutes in is there an actual conversation between two people for extended amount of time. Here Sands and a priest from his community debate the point of standing in defiance of authority. The priest tells Sands he must submit to the uniform being enforced on the prisoners and Sands simply won’t budge. Once again, neither side wins in the debate. They simply come to the conclusion that neither of them will change their ideas about it. Hunger is one of the best examples of director using the language of cinema to tell a visceral and moving story. There is no maudlin sentimentality, yet there is a deep emotional core. Not for those lacking a strong constitution, but one of the most amazing British films I’ve ever seen.

DocuMondays – What Would Jesus Buy?


What Would Jesus Buy? (2007, dir. Rob VanAlkemade)

Starring Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir
There’s a huge problem going on in America and it is known as the Shopocalypse, can I get a Change-alujah?! This is the message being preached by faux-preacher/political theater activist Reverend Billy Talen. Now, with his Church of Stop Shopping, he is touring the country promoting the idea of thoughtful consumerism, wherein we make choices based on where products were made and their actual usefulness. During this outing, the group traveled from the East Coast to Disney Land over the Christmas Holiday spreading their message.
I loved much of the the concept of this documentary, however, it has a problem I find common in issue films of this nature. It presents the problem very well, and I am on board with that, but it never really offers a strong solution and seems to wander too much. The filmmaker seems unsatisfied with simply focusing on Reverend Billy or actually taking piece of his “sermons” and expanding on them Super Size Me Style. In that film, Morgan Spurlock would take an idea (children’s nutrition, usage of sugar) have his bit relating to it in his experiment and then expand upon it with interview of experts and people suffering from the after effects of a process food product. There are moments that come close to that here, but ultimately fall flat.
The film hits the targets you would expect it to: Wal-Mart, Disney, Starbucks. And the bizarre sermons are quite humorous. What the film needed was a strong grounding in anti-consumption message with statistics. It needed to hit three areas strongly: Pollution, Conditions in Third World Countries, and Long-Term Economic effects of spending. The director grazes these ideas so briefly that he shouldn’t have even bothered. It’s interesting how violent authorities become when Reverend Billy and his crew start talking about people ending their unchecked spending. Before anyone is aware of their message, most people seem confused and bit amused. Once the sermons about not giving into the Want impulses drilled into your brains, the security guards and police show up and become quite rough.
Because of the title, I think the film should have centered on rabid consumption juxtaposed against the teachings of Jesus. Once, he’s mentioned in a very interesting way by a question of when was the only time Jesus became violent. The answer being in the Temple when he saw the money changers and lenders. I found it interesting that I had never contemplated his one act of aggression coming towards others in relation to people seeking to profit off of others and using the religion to do so. What Would Jesus Buy? is an interesting film, but remains constantly on the surface and never tries to breakthrough.

Film 2010 #21 – A Face in the Crowd


A Face in the Crowd (1957, dir. Elia Kazan)

Starring Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Walter Matthau
Sheriff Andy Taylor this ain’t. If you familiarity with the acting of Andy Griffith doesn’t expand much further than The Andy Griffith Show then prepare to be shocked by this picture. Released three years prior to the television series, the role Griffith plays is that of a scoundrel, liar, womanizer, emotionally abusive drunk. The character’s profession as a television personality delivering blues-based country music and humorous monologues about his upbringing in North Carolina is remarkably similar to how Griffith made his start in show business. However, the darker aspects of the character are believed to be inspired by television and radio personalities Arthur Godfrey (who fired an employee on air in 1953, revealing his controlling personality) and Uncle Don, a child TV personality who was caught calling his audience “little bastards” on air.
The story begins with Marcia Jeffries, the niece of a radio station owner in North Arkansas who hosts a series called “A Face in the Crowd”, whose focus is finding everyman figures with dynamic personalities. She comes across Larry Rhodes, a drifter picked up for public drunkenness. Larry is a very charismatic person who pulls people in and Marcia decided to make him a regular on the station, nicknaming him Lonesome Rhodes. Lonesome rises up through a local television station in Memphis and is eventually picked by a national network in New York City. All the while, he reveals his true nature to Marcia as someone not truly as “salt of the earth” as he claims.
The film feels prophetic, but when its based on personalities and hosts of the past it reveals how cyclical the fame and media machine truly is. It is inevitable that parallels would be drawn between this film and Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and countless other politically driven svegalis who emphasize their simple roots and connection to the common man. Lonesome Rhodes is a sympathetic character at points in the film, but never an admirable one. The theatrical audience could easily be pulled in by Lonesome’s grin and “fuck you” to the Man take on his earlier career.
The film is a pretty standard cautionary tale and director Kazan knows how to use his camera to accentuate the madness that begins to overtake Lonesome. I absolutely loved a montage that shows how Lonesome’s national television series becomes a hit. It was the perfect example of how to use montage in an effective way that isn’t simply cheating on the part of a screenwriter. I also loved a sequence near the end where Lonesome is taking an elevator down to the limo waiting for him. The camera cuts between the elevator buttons lighting as he descends and simultaneous descent of his approval in the eyes of the public and his sponsors. Brilliant, classic piece of cinema.

Film 2009 #109 – In The Loop

In The Loop (2009)
Directed by Armando Iannucci
Starring James Gandolfini, Chris Addison, Tom Hollander, Peter Capaldi

“War is unforeseeable.”

With this statement from an interview Simon Foster, the U.K.’s Secretary of State for International Development starts a hellstorm of media attention. He’s met with the ire of the Prime Minister enforcer, Malcolm Tucker and told he has to work damage control. Foster and his aide Toby journey to the United States and attempt to play the political game.

Armando Iannucci came to fame in the U.K. through his work writing and producing comedic series, in particular Knowing Me Knowing You and I’m Alan Partridge, both semi-improvised shows starring Steve Coogan. He was also the mind behind The Thick of It, a satirical look at the goings on in the Prime Minister’s office and what would become the foundation of In the Loop.

While American filmmakers feel a need to make their political films hard-hitting or iconic idolatry, Iannucci opts for the stance of pointing out the epic buffoonery that goes on behind the scenes of the most powerful in the world. The relationships in the film are all a series of adolescent one-upmanship. The methodology of going to war for many of the characters is simply to prove a rival wrong or usurp their position.

Iannucci and his actors are extremely comfortable with language and the dialogue is strengthened by that confidence. There are moments that feel like the dialogic equivalent of a blockbuster film’s shoot out and explosion sequences. This is also an incredibly subversive film that works to show incompetence at every level and a disconnect between those in power and the people at the bottom. One particular sequence involves Steve Coogan playing a character whose mother lives next door to a government building and is calling Simon Foster to complain that the wall between the properties is slowly crushing his mother’s greenhouse. Foster, at the U.N. and rushing to save face for a series of flubs constantly shrugs the man off.

If you are looking for some strong counter-programming to the thoughtless films of the summer, In the Loop provides an alternative that is equal parts entertaining and incredibly intelligent.