Bebo Valdés’s Incredible Comeback

Sonidos Latinos: Bebo Valdés’s Incredible Comeback

Ed Morales
May 11, 2008

Sometimes, the end of a documentary reveals itself to the director long before he is finished. That’s how it was for Carlos Carcas, who had been filming 89-year-old Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés as he played a moving rendition of “Old Man River.”

“He had just played a contradanza, and I was thinking, ‘How can he just switch from one genre to another like that’?” recalled Carcas. “I was like, wow, this is the end of the film – I don’t know what happens in the middle, but this is the end. Then [producer] Fernando Trueba walks in and says, ‘Hah! Old Man Bebo!’ and I had the title as well.”

Carcas’ lyrically informative documentary “Old Man Bebo” had just been screened at the TriBeCa Film Festival and received thundering applause. He had been Trueba’s cameraman on two films: “Calle 54″ and “El Milagro de Candeal” and then decided to tackle the task of telling Valdés’ life story.

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Battle for Haditha: A remarkable film about the Iraq war

Battle for Haditha: A remarkable film about the Iraq war
By David Walsh
9 May 2008

Battle for Haditha is a genuine achievement. Nick Broomfield’s film is an effort to reconstruct the events and circumstances leading up to the massacre of 24 men, women and children by US marines in the Iraqi city of Haditha in November 2005.

The film, a dramatization of the episode, first follows the various participants—marines, Iraqi civilians, insurgents—as they go about their daily routines the day before the killings.

Local women with their children buy chickens for a party. A youngish Iraqi couple is focused on. The American marines patrol the city, expecting an attack from any quarter. They carry out raids, knocking down doors, terrifying and outraging the inhabitants. Their banter among themselves is coarse and super-aggressive. Two insurgents, one of them a former member of the Iraqi army, obtain an IED (improvised explosive device) and receive instructions on triggering it, by means of a cell-phone.

A good deal of the film, including perhaps its most memorable portions, is devoted to the processes which make the marines capable of carrying out their murderous assault. Battle for Haditha begins with one marine musing out loud, “I don’t why I’m here,” and expressions of alienation and demoralization continue throughout. “The marine corps don’t care, the country doesn’t care,” we hear. The individual marine has to learn to “act like a machine.” The Iraqis are “ragheads.” The marines chant, “Train, train, train, to kill, kill, kill.” They are indoctrinated to suspect and fear everyone: “This is a hostile environment.” Women and children, they’re told, are capable of carrying bombs.

We see an Iraqi man carrying a shovel over his shoulder. Someone claims he could be on his way to planting an IED; permission is granted, the man is blown to bits.

Meanwhile, Corporal Ramirez (Elliot Ruiz) is having nightmares and can’t sleep. He asks to see someone, a doctor. He’s told: not until your tour of duty is over. He explains he’s having bad dreams about the things he’s seen. Again: no doctor till your tour of duty’s finished.

It’s Ramirez who will lead the enraged attack on defenseless men, women and children when one of his favorites in the unit is blown up in a Humvee. The scenes of the massacre are chillingly and convincingly done; Broomfield bases them on eyewitness accounts from both Americans and Iraqis. After the IED goes off under the convoy, killing the one marine, a higher-up is consulted. His comment—“Take whatever action is necessary. I don’t want any more marines killed”—unleashes the atrocity.

Ramirez and his marines have already pulled a group of Iraqi men from a taxi stopped nearby and executed them. The families the film has been following have the misfortune to live in the houses near the IED attack. While the insurgents who planted the bomb are able to get away from their rooftop position, the marines burst into homes and kill the civilians, including small children, in cold blood.

After the initial killings, in one of the most horrifying sequences, marine snipers laugh and joke as they pick off a man running through a field. He’s the husband of the young Iraqi couple we’ve met before. His wife kneels over his body, hysterical. Ramirez offers her his hand, she spits at him. He goes and vomits. Later, in front of the other marines, though, he pretends to be fine. An officer leads prayers.

The next day, in his quarters, Ramirez suffers a kind of breakdown. The nightmares have continued. He keeps seeing bodies, women with kids. I have “to live with this guilt for the rest of my life … I hate the officers who sent us in … They don’t give a f—- about us,” he shouts.

The leader of the insurgents is pleased. “The Americans lost the battle … Everyone is with us and we control the city.”

In a prologue, Ramirez is under arrest, charged with murder. The officer whose orders triggered the massacre presides over his fate. In a dreamlike sequence, Ramirez takes the hand of a small girl who survived the attack—two victims of the imperialist occupation of Iraq.

The film contains a number of remarkable and powerful scenes. It is not artistically perfect. Perhaps understandably, the writing of the Iraqi sections is somewhat weaker, a bit more schematic. Although Battle for Haditha was made with Iraqi actors (some of them professional stage actors) in Jordan, the filmmakers no doubt had a greater challenge in putting themselves in the shoes of ordinary Iraqis, much less fighters against the American occupation. The sinister figure of the ‘sheikh,’ the local leader of the insurgents, seems especially speculative.

All things considered, however, Broomfield and his collaborators have done an astonishing job. Best known for offbeat documentaries in which his own personality occasionally seemed to take center stage (Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, Kurt and Courtney, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer), Broomfield has apparently opened a new chapter in his career.

The Guardian’s Paul Hoggart in a piece entitled “Mr. Wry gets serious,” cites the comments of Peter Dale of Britain’s Channel 4, which funded Battle for Haditha and Broomfield’s previous work, Ghosts, about the deaths of 23 Chinese immigrants in Morecambe Bay in 2004: “I think it’s part of a transition in Nick’s work from a slightly wry, off beat approach to a much more passionate and serious and political approach to his subject. In his more frivolous documentaries the joke had been wearing a little thin. Ghosts was a welcome return to form.”

Broomfield took great pains to represent the Haditha events accurately. Twelve of the performers playing US marines in his film are ex-marines. He also managed to speak to some of the marines involved in the Haditha incident. He told the Guardian reporter, “We spent five days in a motel in San Diego interviewing them for probably 10 hours a day, just to get a sense of their lives and who they really were. They were very wary to begin with, but once people start talking, they really talk. The main marine character we focus on was this guy called Ramirez. The night he got back from Iraq he broke into a truck and basically had post-traumatic stress and ended up driving into a house. He was best friends with the guy who was killed by the bomb, and then had the job of writing numbers on the dead people’s heads and photographing them. They were extremely tough and had seen a lot of action. They talked about chasing each other around with people’s legs and kicking people’s brains around.”

The filmmaker also stated that his team met with Iraqi insurgents who claimed to have been active in Haditha.

Broomfield ended up making the film for Channel 4 because he found no financing in the US. The Los Angeles Times noted in May 2007 that “Every Hollywood door he knocked at, he was told it was too soon for such a movie. ‘Everyone’s so worried,’ said Broomfield … ‘They all wondered, “Does the American public have an appetite for this?””

The group of Haditha marines, in their conversations with Broomfield, explained the “standard operating procedure rules,” in the director’s words, under which they were operating. He told Time Out magazine, in an interview also published last May, “If, for example, a house is described as ‘hostile,’ then you just kill everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter if it contains two-year-olds or the elderly, which is what they did in Fallujah—where these guys had come from. …

“I realised that these soldiers were very, very poor kids, who had all left school unbelievably early. It was the first time they had all been out of the United States. They didn’t speak a word of Iraqi. They had no idea what they were doing in Iraq, and they felt let down by the marine corps. It was hard to condemn them out of hand as cold-blooded killers. …

“I think there have been lots of Hadithas, and there are lots of Hadithas every year…. The difference with this event is that the aftermath just happened to be filmed and now there’s an inquiry. It’s much more convenient for the US government and the marine corps to make scapegoats of these guys than actually deal with its policy and rules of engagement in Iraq. I’m sure it happens on a lesser scale every single day.’”

A conversation with two Iraq war veterans

I spoke to two of the former marines in Broomfield’s film in Toronto. Elliot Ruiz, born in Philadelphia, plays Corporal Ramirez and Eric Mehalacopoulos, born in Montreal, Quebec, plays Sergeant Ross. I asked Ruiz about his experiences in Iraq.

He explained, “I was 17 when I was sent to Iraq, during the initial invasion. We pushed all the way up to Tikrit and I ended up being wounded, I almost lost my life. It’s crazy, people don’t know the type of things that we go through. That’s what I like about the film, it shows that.”

I noted that film showed how the marines were whipped up into a frenzy and brutalized. I asked the pair if they had helped write or prepare any of the script.

Ruiz said, “No, but a lot of it was improvisation. Nick [Broomfield] just told us, ‘This is what’s happening in this scene, this is what I need,’ and mostly everything was improvised.” Mehalacopoulos added, “We used our experiences as the basis of it.” I commented, “So what we see is accurate?” Ruiz replied, “Yes.

I asked them both what they would like audiences to draw from the film.

“Like I said earlier,” Ruiz observed, “I just want the audience to take a look and see what we go through on a day-to-day basis. You might lose a friend, but you have to keep moving. It’s your job. A lot of people don’t understand that. I also hope that they see what the Iraqis go through on a day-to-day basis, you know.”

Mehalacopoulos continued, “As we speak, this is going on. The film only shows a little bit, there’s so much more to tell. I think it’s a movie that’s going to make people think, and that’s what important.”

I pointed out to Ruiz that the spectator finds himself horrified by the crimes Corporal Ramirez commits, but at the end he manages to be a sympathetic character. “The American soldiers themselves are victims,” I said.

Ruiz: “Exactly.”

Mehalacopoulos: “We were put there. We chose to enlist, and therefore we’re going to do our job and carry on the mission, and all that’s fine. But you ask 90 percent of the guys, they’d rather not be there.”

I suggested that no marine or soldier guilty of crimes should be absolved. “Those who are responsible for crimes are responsible for crimes, but the ultimate responsibility is above.” Mehalacopoulos agreed.

I asked them what they thought the war was about. Mehalacopoulos ventured, “It’s tricky, because there’s so much stuff that’s hidden from us, I think. A lot of people say oil. Who knows? It wasn’t what people were told, that wasn’t the real reason. There was a lot of lying, and that’s what’s not fair. All those families that lost their sons, brothers, husbands, whatever. It’s not fair. To die for a rich man’s, a powerful man’s cause. That’s throughout history. Big business …”

Ruiz went on, “If people saw this, it would change the way a lot of people think. That’s what I like about this film, it doesn’t hold anything back. It shows what happens on a day-to-day basis out there.”

Both former marines praised Broomfield. Ruiz said, “Working with him was wonderful. He stepped back and just let us be us. And that’s what brought the authenticity to the film.”

I asked Ruiz about the scene of Ramirez’s breakdown, where the character curses the officers who have obliged him to commit actions he will feel guilty about for the rest of his life—had this scene been based on his own experiences and feelings?

“I mean, I was 17, I almost lost my life out there. Who wouldn’t be angry toward that? Working on this film, and being able to go back to Jordan … People don’t understand, we were dropped in a combat zone in an Arab country. The things that happened to us, of course we felt a certain way toward the Arab people, or the Iraqi people.

“Going back to Jordan and being able to meet these people, see these people, live with these people on a day-to-day basis, totally changed my opinion and the way I thought about them. It was a wonderful experience. I never thought I’d be able to live with an Iraqi. I lived with an Iraqi. We shared the same bathroom. We joked around, he ended up being one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life, man. He was happy about everything. He didn’t care, it could be the worst day in the world, and he was happy.”

Mehalacopoulos continued, “It’s a people that’s been through a lot. And a lot more than anyone in the US probably. And they have so much pride because there’s so much culture and history, you know, the cradle of civilization, right?”

I noted there had been a propaganda war to paint all Arabs as terrorists. Ruiz nodded. “It took me going back to Jordan, another Arab country, to realize that. It’s a shame it took that, but that’s the reality. Thank god I went back to Jordan and got to spend time with the people and the culture.”

I noted that the Iraqis had every right to resist a foreign army of occupation. Mehalacopoulos said, “And they’re not going to stop fighting. I knew this from the beginning, because we got to a hospital in Baghdad. A doctor, a well-educated man told me, he predicted what was going to happen. He was totally right, and this was in the first few days of the war. You know what I’m saying? They know their people better than we do.”

Review of “Battle for Haditha”

nypress.com

SOLDIER ON

By focusing the ambiguity of the conflict, Nick Broomfield reveals, at last, the true emotional impact of the Iraq War
By Armond White

Nick Broomfield isn’t a media star or critics’ favorite like Michael Moore, Ken Burns or Errol Morris, but he’s made some of the best recent documentaries in decades. In Driving Me Crazy, Biggie and Tupac and other films, Broomfield departed from the doc-star pack with their easy repetition of mainstream opinion and status-quo points-of-view. (I’d call him independent if that term hadn’t been corrupted already.)

Broomfield’s newest film, Battle for Haditha, is a fictional drama recounting the 2005 incident where American troops killed 24 Iraqi civilians in retaliation for an attack on a Marine convoy. But Battle for Haditha also has the virtues of an excellent documentary: Through close observation of the Marines, a pair of insurgent bomb-planters and an Iraqi family, Broomfield credibly shows how this tragedy could occur. He presents a range of the Iraq War experience that has never been effectively shown before.

Being a good doc maker (one who controversially placed himself onscreen yet avoided the dishonest “showmanship” and bias that have overtaken the form) gives Broomfield a rare ability to balance perspectives. He crosscuts from an American soldier’s experience to show an insurgent’s motives, then to a civilian family’s pathetic neutrality. Battle for Haditha refutes the idea that there is only one way to look at the Iraq War. Most remarkably, Broomfield understands the proper use of both “realistic” and “dramatic” modes.

Battle for Haditha doesn’t confuse tenses like Michael Winterbottom’s egregious In This World, Road to Guantanamo and A Mighty Heart. One close-up image of Cpl. Ramirez (Elliot Ruiz) shows a young face both blood-spattered and acne-scarred; it shows Broomfield’s superb instinct for defining a personality without resorting to a slanted presentation of events. With cinematographer Mark Wolf, he knows when to keep wide-shot distance or close-quarters intimacy. He can juxtapose the insurgents cold-bloodedly planting an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) with a U.S. commander deploying a satellite sniper.

Although Battle for Haditha is certainly a plotted and arranged fiction, it is skillful and informative without corrupting our perspective via the techno-faddishness that undoes current filmmakers whether high or low, De Palma or Winterbottom. Through Broomfield’s technique, the actors’ improvisatory skills supply a deft sense of the war’s emotional reality. Fittingly, this is the best-looking Middle East movie since David O. Russell’s Three Kings.

The widescreen imagery is witty, it frames action in ways that attract deeper investment; we aren’t bullied into accepting “truth.” Broomfield asks that we recognize basic humanity: of scared young soldiers who must train, rouse and embolden each other; of disenfranchised Iraqi men who impetuously become rebels (“The Americans made the insurgency when they got rid of the army”); and of circumscribed civilians (“If we tell Americans, the terrorists will kill us. If we don’t, the Americans will think we’re insurgents. I would leave but travel is dangerous—we’re trapped.”)

Broomfield’s expositional dialogue is redeemed by the performers’ individual persuasiveness. Ex-marines Elliot Ruiz, Andrew McLaren and Eric Mehalacopoulos credibly inhabit the military moments, just as actors Yasmine Hanani and Duraid A. Ghaieb convincingly portray the married couple Hiba and Rashied. These characterizations—from angry G.I.s, to frightened children, to sexy conjugal intimacy—are as enthralling as any in the most revered Italian neorealist movies.

All this makes Battle for Haditha the film of the week. Its greatest breakthrough comes from Broomfield unabashedly portraying al- Qaeda characters while the rest of Hollywood fears facing this reality—as if following the Muslim prohibition against portraying Mohammad. (Bush bashers might take exception to Iraqi characters referring to insurgents as “terrorists”; but remember that Broomfield comes from the BBC tradition, which always portrays global politics differently than the U.S. media.)

This taboo-busting is an act of humane imagination; that’s what’s missing from one-way Iraq War films that condescend or propagandize. From Ramirez’ ribald war metaphor (“The body is Planet Earth, Iraq is a cornhole, the dingleberries are insurgents, the military is the turd going through”) to his tearful resignation (“After a while you become hardened, you become like them”), Broomfield offers the gift of ambiguity, yet he makes it clear that ambiguity is an effective point of fiction, not documentary.

While De Palma’s Redacted, Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure and Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss went disastrously wrong, Broomfield’s sophisticated balance of fact and fiction in Battle for Haditha illustrates exactly how the Iraq War will enter popular memory—as legend.

Junot Diaz’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel headed for big screen

Junot Diaz’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel headed for big screen

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic – Dominican author Junot Diaz announced Friday that Miramax is turning his Pulitzer Prize-winning book into a movie, but that he worries how the story will be portrayed.

Diaz, who lives in New York City, told reporters that he doubts Americans could make a good Dominican movie and that they likely will not employ any Dominican actors.

Diaz said he has intentionally become more isolated, rarely going out after winning the fiction prize for his novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” a tragic but humorous story of desire, politics and violence among Dominicans at home and in the United States.

The 39-year-old said he plans to write another book that will be completely different from his first novel, which took him a decade to write.

Diaz also said his book will be translated into Spanish and that he hopes it will not lose its essence.

Diaz left the Dominican Republic at age 7 and moved with his family to New Jersey.

Tribeca Film Festival

This year’s Tribeca film fest is in full swing and as always there are some movies of interest being showcased, not the mainstream kind of course, which makes it all the more worthwhile.

Here’s a look at some of the highlights:

villagevoice.com

Tribeca 2008
See these movies
by The Village Voice

With a more selective lineup of films and lower ticket prices, this year’s Tribeca Film Festival clearly aims to please some of last year’s detractors (who, us?). Yes, the-not-exactly-festival-y Baby Mama opens and Speed Racer closes, but in between, there are some pretty outstanding finds that won’t be enjoying a studio ad blitz any time soon.

Because we at the Voice like nice, round numbers, here are our 13 picks.

Baghead
Directed by Jay Duplass
April 26, 29; May 1, 3

A frequently bracing, lo-fi revisitation of the concept behind the 1972 zombie flick Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things—ham actors isolated in the woods can’t decipher if the horror stalking them is real, or their own theatrical prankishness run amok—the Duplass brothers’ latest imagines four Hollywood never-beens holed up in an isolated cabin to write themselves a breakthrough. The earmarks of a recently fashionable strain of improv-driven indie naturalism are present, including dialogue that blatantly displays every motive (though in characters whose days are filled with sitcom auditions, such banality has a plausible source). And despite the familiar fetish for sad-sack emasculation, what’s resonant are the empathetic portraits of beautiful people who’ve watched their prospects recede each passing year: Ross Partridge as a hired jawline who might’ve paid a decade’s rent standing in for Mel Gibson, and modelesque Elise Muller’s character, who can’t figure where it all went wrong, bragging that Jim Harbaugh asked her out a beat before realizing that she’s dated herself.

Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans
Directed by Lolis Eric Elie and Dawn Logsdon
April 25, 26, 28; May 1, 2

Even before Katrina, when most of this charming yet hard-hitting documentary was filmed, its focus was timely and essential. Once a colonial-era suburb (faubourg, in French), now a hardscrabble New Orleans section bordering the French Quarter, Tremé may be America’s oldest black neighborhood. When narrator, co-director, and Times-Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie buys a dilapidated house there, his septuagenarian Creole carpenter opens a window to the area’s history of creative ferment and social resistance: how 19th-century residents created symphonies and literature; the nurturing of early-20th-century jazz; the Civil War–era founding of the country’s first black newspaper; and a civil-rights movement, long pre-dating Rosa Parks, that instigated Plessy v. Ferguson’s challenge to segregation. In Katrina’s wake, the film’s deft blend of first-person narrative and archival photos, contemporary talking heads and theatrical recreation, underscores Elie’s question: “How can our past help us survive this time?”

Guest of Cindy Sherman
Directed by Tom Donahue and Paul Hasegawa-Overacker
April 27, 29; May 1, 2, 3

Guest of Cindy Sherman, the title of Tom Donahue and Paul Hasegawa-Overacker’s shambolic, weirdly compelling documentary, refers to an incident—a placecard, specifically—that was the undoing of the latter co-director’s romance with the notoriously elusive artist. Tracking the beginnings of Paul H-O’s dishy cable-access show, Gallery Beat, the film depicts the high-flying New York art world of the late ’80s and ’90s, including the year—1990—that Cindy Sherman broke big. Her wry self-portraits attract celebrities, major bucks, and the brash Paul H-O, whose persistence scores him a rare invitation to Sherman’s studio. Footage from the interviews he conducted there reveal a fluttery, adorable figure whose nerves betray a woman smitten. Scores of interviews with art-scene players give dimension to the strange story of Cindy and Paul; she disappears from the film, and he disappears, quite loudly, into her haute-fabulous shadow. His lament for their relationship encompasses a greater loss—that of an art community where even the riffraff were welcomed, and occasionally loved.

Idiots and Angels
Directed by Bill Plympton
April 26, 27, 30; May 3

Cult animator Bill Plympton’s hand-penciled expressionism is most recognizable from his shorts, likely because his deadpan, spatial-distorting sight gags often can’t sustain momentum in feature form, almost by design. Yet his beautifully creepy fifth film somehow transcends this limitation and proves his most fully realized yet, a grim fairy-tale comedy about a truculent businessman who discovers angelic wings sprouting from his back. Told without a word of dialogue, the mean bastard undergoes a spiritual awakening as his new appendages thwart his every transgression, a humiliating rise-fall-and-rise tale that affects a bar owner and his salsa-dancing wife, a conniving surgeon, and a town full of arson victims. Less concerned with gags than nimble storytelling and wide-screen aesthetics (every brooding corner of the frame is blotted in monochromatic noir hues), Plympton mines elegance from the utterly gonzo.

Lou Reed’s Berlin
Directed by Julian Schnabel
May 1, 2

Concert films are dicey: You weren’t there, you didn’t get drunk and rubbed by those strangers, and your red Netflix envelope is no proper souvenir. But Lou Reed’s Berlin is one of those rare live-performance documents that truly benefits from proper cinematic context. Reed’s 1973 Berlin, the 10-song tragedy of two junkie lovers, was criminally under-appreciated at the time of its release—turns out it’s nothing short of a masterpiece. Whoops. And until a five-day stretch at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2006, famously grumpy Lou had never performed the record live in full. Fellow 800-pound-gorilla Julian Schnabel showed up with sets, cameras, and ethereal druggy-people projections—pseudo-narrative scenes that end up delicately interspersed within the final cut. The result is a dreamy sepia-toned tableau of existential desolation and art-house incandescence. You weren’t there, but you didn’t need to be: Lou Reed’s Berlin doesn’t simply regurgitate a moment, it rewrites cultural history.

Man on Wire
Directed by James Marsh
April 26, 27, 29; May 4

In 1974, French funambulist Philippe Petit and his determined cohorts smuggled and installed a high-wire rig on top of the World Trade Center, where Petit then walked, danced, and laid down between the Twin Towers—criminal performance art to the ESPN2 extreme. In Brit filmmaker James Marsh’s exhilarating doc account—a crowd-pleaser in such witty, poetic ways that even an art-house curmudgeon couldn’t deny its tidy vigor—Petit’s adventure, from dentist’s-office inspiration and eight months of scheming to the ultimate stunt, is re-enacted like a slick heist thriller. Errol Morris couldn’t have done it better, at least not with such understatement: Never mentioning 9/11 beyond the hint of a poignant photo shot from below, Marsh shows Petit becoming as one with the sky as a nearby plane.

My Winnipeg
Directed by Guy Maddin
April 24, 30; May 4

Guy Maddin’s love-hate letter to his Manitoba hometown is, like Brand Upon the Brain! and Cowards Bend the Knee before it, a documentary-ish dreamscape with one foot in cinema’s earliest era and the other in his own subconscious. But more than just a whimsical curiosity, My Winnipeg takes an extraordinary leap forward, as Maddin folds archival footage seamlessly into his pomo-retro stylizations to produce genuine intrigue, laugh-out-loud comedy, nostalgia for a place most of us have never been to, and—oddest of all—truth. Maddin narrates and eulogizes the ambiguous history of “the heart of the heart of the continent” (a park built on a garbage dump, a three-story public pool segregated by gender, a fake Nazi holiday—is this place for real?) with a cast of sleepwalkers like the younger “Guy” (Darcy Fehr) and his overbearing mother, as played by the narrator’s “mother” (’40s femme fatale Ann Savage).

Night Tide
Directed by Curtis Harrington
April 29; May 4

The 1961 feature debut by the recently deceased Curtis Harrington, whose full filmography begs attention (The Killing Kind!), gets a welcome restoration. A proto avant-gardist in 1940s L.A., Harrington forays here into cheapjack Tourneur atmospherics, under the auspices of Roger Corman’s production company AIP. A sailor on leave chats up a dark, ethereal girl on the amusement pier. She has a reputation on the boardwalk: Previous boyfriends came to bad ends; hired to play mermaid at the sideshow, there’s a suspicion that she has actual mythical origins. For his lead, Harrington hired friend Dennis Hopper, his career then in TV-Western purgatory. He’s disarmingly gentle and serious here, in sync with the film’s sad quietude—the washed-out seediness of the Venice Beach locales is not soon forgotten.

Playing
Directed by Eduardo Coutinho
April 29; May 1, 3, 4

Playing is weirdly mesmerizing for a movie that consists almost entirely of Brazilian women sitting on a stage in an empty theater, telling their life stories. Half of them are talking about themselves; the others are actresses hired to impersonate the original storytellers, word for word and gesture for gesture. They might sway or wave their arms or raise their eyes to the sky for emphasis, but the camera always holds their heads firmly within its fixed gaze. Subjects are probed and prodded by director Eduardo Coutinho, who conceived of the film as a way to explore the relationship between acting and playing. The whole thing is highly conceptual, and worth a watch if only for the mind-reeling sensation of observing two women—one “real” and one “fake”—chip away at the same character simultaneously.

Redbelt
Directed by David Mamet
April 25, 27

The synopsis in the press notes for Redbelt, the latest meditation on American malehood from the heart and loins of David Mamet, is three pages long. Surprisingly, it’s the talkiest thing about this labyrinthine, sequence-driven movie. Mamet’s steely, staccato language is still in evidence, largely by way of a super-chill ethical vessel named Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), whose manifold codes of honor derive from the martial arts. A Desert Storm veteran with a demanding Brazilian wife (Alice Braga) and a jujitsu studio where he puts cops, thugs, and rape victims through their paces, Terry is a fighter, not a competitor. A series of chance encounters (most absurdly, with a Hollywood fat cat played by Tim Allen), however, conspire to get him back in the ring. Mamet is clearly enthralled with the world of body drops, Zen koans, and fight-movie motifs, but his self-seriousness actually works in favor of this satisfyingly overblown genre romp.

The Secret of the Grain
Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche
April 28, 29, 30; May 4

This overlong but absorbing drama turns an intensely detail-oriented eye to a Franco-Arabic community in a depressed seaside town. Slimane (Habib Boufares), a freshly laid-off dockworker, is the shy and stoic center of a raucous extended family. Prodded by his stubborn but doting stepdaughter (the magnetic young actress Hafsia Herzi), he takes tentative steps toward realizing a dream: opening a restaurant that sells his ex-wife’s famous fish couscous (the secretive grain of the title). Some abrupt transitions punctuate the film’s long stretches of dense, Altmanesque chatter, but director Abdellatif Kechiche captures his milieu just right—the gossip, the good food, the endless gutting and eating of fish.

Simple Things
Directed by Aleksei Popogrebski
April 26, 28, 30; May 1, 2

Aleksei Popogrebski’s solo directorial debut tells the story of a handsome but bumbling Russian anesthesiologist (theater director Sergei Puskepalis, strikingly Clooneyesque in face and bearing) who just can’t seem to get anything right. His teenage daughter has run away with a lout (though he’s curiously blasé about this development), his mistress is mad at him, and his wife is newly pregnant. Hurting for money, he takes a second job shooting up an elderly actor with pain meds. Despite the circumstances, there’s nothing flashy here: Popogrebski, a former psychologist, is patient and loving with his characters, and perfectly attuned to the rhythms of everyday life.

Somers Town
Directed by Shane Meadows
April 24, 26, 28; May 1, 3

Director Shane Meadows is of a rare breed, touching headline issues in his films without ever putting human interplay at the service of some message. His Somers Town details an inter-dialect friendship between an adolescent Midlands runaway (wizened Thomas Turgoose, who also starred in Meadows’s This Is England) and a young Polish immigrant (Piotr Jagiello), a big, uneasy kid with an incongruously piping voice and photography hobby that makes him stand out amid the jostling biceps of his father’s construction-worker buddies. The slight runtime is mostly devoted to deadpan anecdotage—the outfits Turgoose improvises after getting his bag nicked, or the hustling he endures from a neighborhood crap vendor (Perry Benson). Cinematographer Natasha Braier’s ringing silver-and-black London is enough to refute the tenacious idea that visual articulacy somehow contradicts honesty. The ending coda, something like a Scopitone set to a lullaby-soft song, is a dream of trans-European goodwill . . . and the film’s actually worthy of the sentimental indulgence.

…………………………………….

By Mina Hochberg | amNewYork Movie Critic

With more than 200 movies, from timely political documentaries to relationship dramas, this year’s Tribeca Film Festival–running from April 23 to May 4– has more than enough choices to satisfy every taste.

Some films, such as “The Wackness” and “Man on Wire,” are slated to open later in the year, which makes this your opportunity to get a sneak peek. Other films are still seeking distribution and have never screened before a public audience. We sorted through the lineup and selected 30 of the festival’s most promising pickings.

DOCUMENTARIES

Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot Beastie Boy Adam Yauch follows eight of the country’s top high school basketball players as they compete in an all-star competition at Harlem’s Rucker Park.

Man on Wire This Sundance favorite revisits the 1973 stunt of daredevil Philippe Petit, who snuck to the top of the World Trade Center and walked a high wire between the two towers.

Chevolution How does an icon of a Communist revolution become an icon in a capitalist market? “Chevolution” traces the path of Che Guevara’s face all the way to tees and beer bottles.

Under Our Skin If everything you learned about Lyme disease came from summer camp warnings against ticks, “Under Our Skin” gives you the lowdown on this growing epidemic — and why insurance companies don’t want you to know about it.

Guest of Cindy Sherman Videographer Paul H-O reflects on his romance with artist Cindy Sherman, offering his personal account of the New York art world and being attached to a celebrity within it.

Kassim the Dream A look at the life of Kassim “The Dream” Ouma, whose career as an international middleweight boxing champ is worlds apart from his time as a child soldier in Uganda.

The Chicken, The Fish and The King Crab Watch chefs take their art very, very seriously as a Spanish chef, Jesus Almagro, prepares for the prestigious “Bocuse d’Or” competition in France.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell After a decade-long war in Liberia that killed a quarter-million people, thousands of Liberian women united in a peaceful protest — to great success.

I Am Because We Are Madonna narrates this documentary about the plight of AIDS orphans in Malawi, the native country of her newly adopted son.

Run For Your Life Meet Fred Lebow, the man who pioneered the New York City Marathon in the 1970s. Without P. Diddy or Katie Holmes, Lebow resorted to more old-school PR tricks.

Secrecy Volumes of information are classified by the U.S. government each year, and “Secrecy” explores the details of the classification process. (Hint: It’s not just a guy redacting sentences with a black Sharpie.)

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind Director John Gianvito visits gravesites around the country to salute social activists of centuries past, from abolitionists and feminists to labor leaders and striking workers.

Theater of War If you missed Meryl Streep in “Mother Courage and Her Children” when it was staged two summers ago in Central Park, see her up close in this behind-the-scenes documentary that follows Streep, Tony Kushner and director George C. Wolfe.

Waiting For Hockney Amateur artist Billy Pappas spent nearly nine years painting a painstaking portrait of Marilyn Monroe, using a magnifying glass and a sling to prop up his aching arms. To top off the challenge, he then tried to catch the attention of renowned pop artist David Hockney.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster Contemplating his childhood obsession with pro wrestlers like Hulk Hogan, director Christopher Bell explores the issue of steroids and how it reflects a common American compulsion to be the best. (Opens May 30)

FEATURES

Katyn Nominated for best foreign film at the Oscars this year, “Katyn” delves into a dark chapter of Poland’s history, when 15,000 officers were massacred by Russia in 1940. Anna waits months to discover if her missing husband, a Polish Army captain, was one of the casualties.

Eden Love is barely in the air as an Irish couple approaches their 10th anniversary. “Eden” explores the complexity of a stagnant marriage.

The Secret of the Grain Winner of the Cesars (the French Oscars) for best picture, director and screenplay, “The Secret of the Grain” centers on the trials of a Maghrebi family as they start up a coucous restaurant in southern France.

Idiots and Angels This latest creation from animator Bill Plympton is a darkly comic, trippy tale about a miserable barfly who one day sprouts a pair of wings that forces him to do nice things against his will.

WWorlds Apart When a young Jehovah’s Witness falls in love with a non-believer, she’s forced to examine the insularity of her faith and consider the consequences of leaving her congregation.

Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha Melvin Van Peebles directs and stars in this coming-of-age romp about a rascally boy who grows up with the goal of exploring the world. Van Peebles, 75, plays the protagonist from youth to age 47.

The Wackness It’s Manhattan circa mid-1990s, and a lonely kid spends his last summer before college trading marijuana for therapy sessions with the stepdad of his high school crush. (Opens July 3)

Ramchand Pakistani When a young boy accidentally crosses the Pakistan-Indian border, he and his father are arrested and thrown into an Indian prison for “spying,” held indefinitely until who knows when.

From Within A small, peaceful evangelical town is terrorized by an evil presence that’s been prompting residents to kill themselves. Directed by cinematographer Phedon Papamichael (with a bit role by Rumer Willis, daughter of Bruce).

Trucker Michelle Monaghan plays a trucker who’s forced to check her rowdy lifestyle when an estranged son re-enters her life. Also starring Benjamin Bratt, Nathan Fillion and Joey Lauren Adams.

Life in Flight Patrick Wilson and Amy Smart star as a couple whose seemingly perfect marriage is not so perfect, despite his cushy architect job, a cutie-pie kid and a charming brownstone.

The Auteur The ” Martin Scorsese of Porn” gets a retrospective of his greatest films, including “My Left Nut” and “Requiem for a Wet Dream.” But those are nothing compared to his masterpiece-in-progress, “Full Metal Jack…” Well, you can fill in the blank.

Baghead This horror/comedy stars four attractive 20-somethings in a cabin in the woods, plus a man with a bag on his head. (Opens July 25)

Savage Grace Based on the true story of Tony Baekeland, heir to the Bakelite fortune, “Savage Grace” captures the disintegration of the dysfunctional Baekeland family. Starring Julianne Moore. (Opens May 30)

Bart Got a Room A high school senior tries to score a prom date while his divorced parents ( Cheryl Hines and William H. Macy) struggle with their own love lives.

A New Film – Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan

Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan
EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS OF THE OCCUPATIONS

HELP MAKE A NEW FILM AND A DIFFERENT FUTURE

This year, a scrappy, determined band of soldiers and veterans turned this country on its head.

On March 13-16, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) held Winter Soldier/Iraq and Afghanistan in Washington, DC. Over one hundred active duty soldiers and veterans publicly testified—from their own experience–about what they consider to be the immoral and illegal nature of those wars. They demanded immediate and unconditional withdrawal, and intend to force this issue onto the national stage.

Displaced Films and Northern Light Productions are producing the only documentary film that will be made about this historic moment, and the intense battle leading up to it. If you liked Sir! No Sir! you will love this new film. Winter Soldier/Iraq and Afghanistan will answer the question “Can a new GI Movement happen today?” with a resounding “Yes!”

The Winter Soldier Investigation was by any account a powerful, explosive, and controversial antiwar event, timed to mark the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq five years ago. No one who witnessed it could come out the same. But just as importantly, it transformed everyone involved in profound and unexpected ways. That transformation, both large-scale and deeply personal, is the subject we explore in our film.

WE NEED YOUR HELP

We are in a desperate race to make the film and have it in the world by September this year, right in the height of the election campaign. We cannot make it without your financial support, and the more money we raise the faster the film can be completed. Every donation of $50 or more will get an advance copy of the DVD when it is available. Donations of $1,000 or more will be credited in the film.

But don’t limit yourself. This is a chance to play a direct, critical role in making history and forging a new future.

ALL CONTRIBUTIONS ARE TAX DEDUCTIBLE. You can click here to make a credit card donation, or send a check to:

Pangea Productions
c/o Displaced Films
3421 Fernwood Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90039

Anti-War Soundtrack – 30 Songs that Inspired an Iraq War Veteran

reuters.com

Sire Records to Release “Body of War: Songs that Inspired an Iraq War Veteran”

BURBANK, CA, Feb 06 (MARKET WIRE) –

“Body of War: Songs that Inspired an Iraq War Veteran,” a double-CD compilation of songs curated by Iraq war veteran Tomas Young, will be released by Sire Records on March 18, 2008 — two days before the fifth anniversary of the United States invasion of Iraq. Young, a 26-year-old veteran, was shot and paralyzed from the chest down after serving in Iraq for less than a week. His heart-wrenching and inspiring story is told in the critically acclaimed feature
documentary “Body of War,” produced and directed by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro (www.bodyofwar.com).

Young enlisted in the U.S. Army just two days after 9/11 with the intention of fighting those responsible for the attack on our country. He has transformed his personal suffering into political activism. His powerful story and authentic voice serve to question the war in Iraq that cost him his mobility, and convey the moving journey of a young veteran’s survival and adaptation to his new life as paraplegic.

Young personally selected each of the tracks that appear on “Body of War: Songs that Inspired an Iraq War Veteran,” including Eddie Vedder’s previously unreleased, live version of “No More” — which was specially written for the “Body of War” documentary and performed with Ben Harper at Lollapalooza 2007 in Chicago’s Grant Park. A collection of several additional incisive songs will make up the double-CD set, including Bright Eyes, Neil Young, Bad Religion, Serj
Tankian, Laura Cantrell and The Nightwatchman (Tom Morello). (Track listing forthcoming)

This music, Young says, serves as his personal ’soundtrack for Iraq.’ “The compilation record was an idea that grew out of my love of music and my reliance on it before, during and after the war. The songs I selected for the record were tracks that inspired, motivated, and at times, literally saved me over the past few years.”

Vedder adds, “Tomas has taught me a great deal, and our friendship has become one of depth and sincerity. It has been a mind-expanding experience. I see how he relies on the strength of the songs to help him through each day. It is a true living example of the power of music.”

Acclaimed political artist Shepard Fairey designed and donated original cover art for the album. Fairey has long been haunting consumer culture with an ambitious mocking street campaign featuring an omnipresent Andre the Giant. An astute student in the arts of persuasion, Fairey began his epic satire on the science of celebrity endorsements and the alchemy of suggesting desire back in 1989, while he was still a student at The Rhode Island School of Design.

Since then, his propaganda has been proliferated through stickers, clothing, skateboards, posters, stencil-based graffiti and even a documentary film, to spread over the United States and the unsuspecting world at large.

All proceeds from “Body of War: Songs that Inspired an Iraq War Veteran” goto benefit the non-profit organization Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), as chosen by Young.

Founded in 2004 by Iraq war veterans, IVAW’s goal is to give voice to the large number of active-duty service people and veterans who are against the war, but are under various pressures to remain silent. In September, Sire Records donated $100,000 to IVAW in the name of Young, who is a spokesperson for the organization.

Garrett Reppenhagen of IVAW explains, “The ‘Body of War’ soundtrack is an inspiring collection of music that will awaken listeners to the challenges of returning war veterans, the failings of our political leadership and the catastrophe of the occupation of Iraq.

The creator, wounded veteran Tomas Young, skillfully selected songs that offer a profound prospective of his disposition which is shared by many veterans.”

“Body of War,” which was produced by legendary talk show host Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11th, 2007, to unanimous critical acclaim. Richard Corliss of Time magazine called it “a superb documentary … almost unbearably moving,” while Fox News raved that the film is “riveting.” The New York Times website praised the film as a “heart-wrenching and yet deeply affirming story, both a testament to one man’s enduring inner strength and a towering condemnation of a localized conflict.”

“Body of War” was named “Best Documentary of 2007″ by the National Board of Review (previous winners include “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Bowling for Columbine”), won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Hamptons’ International Film Festival, and was runner-up for the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“Body of War” begins a nationwide theatrical release in March, opening in Austin and Kansas City, with April and May dates to include New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, San Diego, Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis and St. Louis.

For specific dates, visit www.bodyofwar.com.

For more information please visit:

www.bodyofwar.com 

www.ivaw.org

“Taxi to the Dark Side”: Exposé on US Abuses in “War on Terror” Wins Oscar for Best Documentary

“Taxi to the Dark Side”: Exposé on US Abuses in “War on Terror” Wins Oscar for Best Documentary

Alex Gibney joins us to talk about his Academy Award win for his documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. The film investigates some of the most egregious abuses associated with the so-called “war on terror.”

Full Article 

Review of “There Will Be Blood”

There Will Be Blood: a promising subject, but terribly weak results
By David Walsh
6 February 2008

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

“He never did succeed in understanding, all his life long, how people could fail to be interested in other people.” – Oil!, Upton Sinclair

Histrionic, fatally confused and socially evasive, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is all the worse for its touching upon important subjects, oil and religion in American life. Putting the best interpretation on it, Anderson is simply way in over his head, with ultimately disastrous artistic consequences.

The filmmaker (born 1970) has chosen to tell the story of a fictional American oilman, set in California in the early part of the twentieth century. The film’s publicity variously suggests that There Will Be Blood is “based on” or “inspired by” Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil! Anderson himself says that Sinclair’s book “was a great stepping-stone…. [I]t’s only the first couple hundred pages that we ended up using…. We were really unfaithful to the book.”

Anderson has the right to make any film he chooses, but it seems light-minded in the extreme to invoke Oil! as inspiration or even a “stepping-stone” while creating a work that only makes passing reference to a few sequences in the original novel, and radically transposes or alters those, sometimes to the precisely opposite effect.

There Will Be Blood is morbid and gloomy from its opening silent sequences, which, nonetheless, hold one’s interest. We first see Anderson’s Daniel Plainview (an impossibly portentous name, as opposed to Sinclair’s simpler “J. Arnold Ross”) mining for silver, on his own, in New Mexico in 1898. In the process, he comes across oil.

Plainview’s single-minded physical determination and individualism are emphasized from the outset. In one shot, clearly meant to be significant, we see the prospector (played by Daniel Day-Lewis) squatting, alone against the desert in the early evening, with something of a mad glint in his eyes. This fanaticism will only grow larger as the film progresses.

Several years later, having set himself up in the oil business, Plainview works away at one of his first operations. Threatening music (by Jonny Greenwood) plays over the images of the oil workers, filthy and menacing. By one means or another, Plainview ends up with an infant, whom he apparently adopts and brings along on business trips as an advertisement of his status as a “family man.”

By 1911, Plainview has become one of the most successful oilmen in California. A young man, Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), appears one evening and offers to sell him information about a property, his family’s farm, where oil is seeping out of the ground. The tip proves a good one, and Plainview eventually purchases the farm, not without some tough bargaining from Paul’s twin brother, Eli (also Dano), an aspiring evangelical preacher. Plainview buys all the available adjoining plots of land.

The new operation uncovers an “ocean of oil,” but Plainview’s son, H.W., loses his hearing when the liquid violently bursts forth from the ground.

This first portion of the film bears some vague relationship to Sinclair’s novel. Oil! is not a great work of art, but it is lively and observant. It was published, in 1927, during one of the richest periods of American fiction writing. Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer and Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith were published in 1925; and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises the following year.

At times, Sinclair’s writing does rise to considerable artistic heights. The opening chapter of Oil! is a quite lyrical tribute to the automobile and the open road, from a young boy’s point of view.

It is worth noting some of the differences between the novel and the film—differences not bound up with the changes that inevitably arise from adapting a work to a different medium, but with distinct and even opposed artistic and social purposes.

Sinclair’s oilman, Ross, is an affable individual, a caring father, slightly overweight, largely uneducated although a shrewd businessman, thoroughly pragmatic. Sinclair introduces the one major speech that Anderson retains in the following manner: Ross “faced them now, a portly person in a comfortable serge suit, his features serious but kindly, and speaking to them in a benevolent, almost fatherly voice.” He “dressed like a metropolitan banker,” we are told, and had “the calm assurance of a major-general commanding, and the kindly dignity of an Episcopal bishop.”

Anderson’s Plainview is a different sort of animal: paranoid, unfriendly, secretive, a lone wolf—the director’s is a far more “radical” (and, frankly, trite) vision of a prospective oil baron. The film’s portrayal, however, throws the emphasis on Plainview’s personal monstrosity, while the novel matter-of-factly establishes that Ross lies, cheats and performs various corrupt and even brutal acts, not from personal wickedness, but as an inevitable result of the socioeconomic situation in which he finds himself.

Indeed, Ross remains likeable to the end of the novel, and continues to enjoy his son’s affection throughout, even as the latter becomes a “social reformer.” The older man’s defense of his misdeeds, when challenged by his son, is that there’s a “difference between a theoretical and practical view of a question.” As for bribing an influential politician or powerful man behind the scenes, it is simply “a natural consequence of the inefficiency of great masses of people” in a democracy; a corrupt official, on the other hand, “provided that promptness and efficiency that business men had to have, and couldn’t be got under our American system.”

Sinclair’s novel, in fictionalized form, takes in the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s (in which oil magnates bribed the Secretary of the Interior to allow them to lease public land for drilling). When Ross Jr. discovers that his father is planning to enter into a scheme to bribe government officials, he says, “It’s such a dirty game, Dad!” His father replies, “I know, but it’s the only game there is.”

Oil! is nothing if not expansive (perhaps too expansive) in its ambitions. The title of the book is somewhat misleading, as it seeks to make a more general survey of American political and social life in the first quarter of the last century. Sinclair’s Ross is loosely based on Edward Doheny (1856-1935), the oil tycoon, at one point reportedly the richest man in the US and one of those involved in the Teapot Dome affair.

The career of Eli Watkins is designed to bring to mind evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, whose Foursquare Gospel church gained an enormous following in the 1920s. Even the long-term relationship of William Randolph Hearst and actress Marion Davies is hinted at in the novel.

Sinclair, a socialist, attempts to bring to life the great political debates and controversies of the time. He treats the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the attempts by foreign governments to overthrow the workers’ state (at some length), as well as the ideological struggle between social reformists and revolutionaries. To Sinclair’s credit, although he was not a revolutionist, he provides the pro-Bolshevik elements with ample opportunity to make their case, and it is by no means entirely clear on which side the novel comes down.

Anderson’s Paul Sunday (again, an overly significant last name, presumably a reference to evangelist Billy Sunday, one of the models, along with McPherson, for Eli) makes only a brief appearance in There Will Be Blood, in order to sell out his family’s interests for $500. In Sinclair’s work, Paul Watkins, an extremely high-minded youth, innocently reveals the presence of oil on his father’s farm; he goes on to become a militant labor activist, a member of the early Communist Party and a political martyr, killed by a right-wing mob.

But then everyone (with the possible exception of Plainview’s son and the latter’s future bride, who have minor roles) takes a turn for the worse in the film as compared with the novel. The genial Ross, who merely believes that “practical” men like himself are obliged to bend the rules, becomes the misanthropic Plainview, who proclaims that “I see the worst in people,” whose life seems to be an accumulation of pointless hatreds and who murders two men in cold blood.

Details in the book are turned upside down for the sole purpose, apparently, of making the characters more malicious and their behavior more irrational. In the novel, for instance, moments before Ross’s operation begins drilling on the former Watkins’ farm land, the oilman goes out of his way to introduce Eli—whom he considers an outright fraud and a plague to “the poor and ignorant”—to the assembled crowd and encourages the preacher to give his blessing. Why wouldn’t the oilman desire friendly relations with an increasingly powerful evangelist?

In Anderson’s film, as the day when drilling will begin approaches, Eli asks Plainview if he may be permitted to bless the operation. At the eventual opening day ceremony, however, Plainview snubs the preacher—out of sheer perversity or ill will—in favor of Eli’s younger sister, Mary. Bitter feeling between the two men, not rooted in any obvious psychological or social facts, will only deepen over the years.

The labor process and the oil workers themselves undergo a transformation from novel to film. Sinclair’s attitude, as much as he criticizes the depredations of the private companies, is essentially sympathetic toward the discovery and production of oil. Ross’s son thinks to himself: “What could be more fun than a job like this? To know what was going on under the ground; to see the ingenuity by which men overcame Nature’s obstacles; to see a crew of workers, rushing here and there, busy as beavers or ants, yet at the same time serene and sure, knowing their job, and just how it was going!”

The men, too, as hard as they work, are not downtrodden and crushed. Sinclair describes the “young fellows in blue-jeans and khaki,” perched on top of trucks as the equipment is moved from one locale to another: “They sang songs, and exchanged jollifications with the cars they passed, and threw kisses to the girls in the ranch-houses and the filling-stations, the orange-juice parlors and the ‘good eats’ shacks. Two days the journey took them, and meantime they had not a care in the world; they belonged to Old Man Ross, and it was his job to worry. First of all things he saw that they got their pay-envelopes every other Saturday night…moreover, you got this pay, not only while you were drilling, but while you were sitting on top of a load of tools, flying through a paradise of orange-groves at thirty miles an hour, singing songs about the girl who was waiting for you in the town to which you were bound.”

In the film, the oil workers are nameless, faceless drones, ominous and interchangeable. This, again, is considered the “radical” view of things these days. In fact, it represents a diminution of life.

It is worth noting, for the historical record, that Anderson abandons the novel’s storyline entirely just prior to the first of two bitter oil-field strikes.

In any event, after that, the work is the filmmaker’s own creation, and it goes seriously off the rails, as Plainview rises to prominence in the oil industry, at the expense of his personal happiness, including his relationship with his son.

(It is best to draw a veil over the entire last sequence, set in 1927, which is disturbingly and thoroughly misconceived. Daniel Day-Lewis attempts to make up for the absurdity of the events, which come largely out of the blue, by sheer force of will, with ever diminishing results. The over-acting here is in inverse proportion to the emotional and social authenticity of the drama.)

Plainview’s growing lunacy simply goes unexplained. Very wealthy individuals may go entirely mad, like Howard Hughes, or not, like Warren Buffett. An artist makes it very easy for himself if he or she simply implies that the acquisition of wealth and power in and of itself is enough to drive someone insane. The lack of concrete connection between Plainview’s social existence and his mania tends to conceal, rather than lay bare, any mentally devastating social processes that might be at work.

Critics foolhardily compare There Will Be Blood to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. The bracketing of the two works could hardly be less apt. Kane is an extraordinarily talented man, with many attractive qualities, whose misfortune it is to be immensely wealthy. Given another set of social circumstances, he might have done truly great things. He is hemmed in and ultimately destroyed by monstrous social relationships. Can anyone seriously make the same claim about Anderson’s protagonist?

The social structure into which Plainview enters may be monstrous, but insofar as it is, it only suits and encourages his own essential deformities. The social relationships are rotten in There Will Be Blood because men and women are rotten, the film implies. This is simply wrongheaded and disoriented.

This is where social and political evasiveness, aided by historical ignorance and a blind faith in a “largely intuitive” creative process, enter the picture.

What could have been a scathing assault, through a reworking of Oil! or otherwise, on corporate America and fundamentalist religion is no such thing, despite the claims of various “left” critics and wishful thinkers. Of course Anderson is under no obligation to launch such an assault if he doesn’t believe one is necessary, but choosing Sinclair’s novel and then systematically declawing it seems an almost provocative act. It suggests that the filmmaker recognizes the significance of oil and religion in contemporary America—whose establishment, after all, has launched a brutal, neo-colonial war over Middle East energy resources—but then hasn’t the commitment or seriousness to see the process through.

His comments to various interviewers reveal some of this. Fashionably, Anderson chooses to distance himself from any concern with making a social critique. Asked how aware he was of “the film’s subtext about class, religion and money,” Anderson replied: “Well, aware of it to know that if we indulged too much in it, or let that stuff rise to the top, that it could get kind of murky. And it’s a slippery slope when you start thinking about something other than just a good battle between two guys that kind of see each other for what they are, just trying to work from that first and foremost and let everything that is there fall into place behind it. I would be wrong—it would be horrible to make a political film or anything like that. Tell a nasty story and let the rest take care of itself.”

But bitter experience teaches that “the rest” never does take care of itself, not without the conscious, deliberate intervention of the artist. No one has any use for a “political film” that is didactic or pat, or knows all the answers, but Anderson is excluding the possibility of an artistic, spontaneous and insightful examination of social life as a whole, the possibility of presenting the big picture.

Asked by another interviewer whether he had been thinking about “modern-day strong-arm capitalism and mega-church religion” while writing and shooting his film, Anderson said, “I was thinking that we’d better be very careful not to do too much of that.” Why? In any event, Anderson succeeded. He didn’t think too much “of that” and hence the film, despite some interesting and intelligent moments in its first two thirds, is neither genuinely radical nor thought-provoking. It’s a great mess, in fact.

Consciously or not, the filmmaker avoided a head-on criticism of American capitalism and its ideological defenders among the fundamentalists that would have brought attacks on him from the media and perhaps damaged his career.

Filmmakers are going to have to reorient themselves and learn to think about a host of important, complicated matters. It’s a difficult process and it involves struggle and sacrifice, but the future of the art form depends on it.

80th Academy Award nominations: a very poor showing

80th Academy Award nominations: a very poor showing
By David Walsh
28 January 2008

The Academy Award nominations, announced January 22, are more or less representative of contemporary filmmaking; the problem does not so much lie with the nominations or the nominators as with contemporary filmmaking.

Both There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson) and No Country For Old Men (Ethan and Joel Coen), two brutal films that purport to make sense of American reality, earned eight nominations, including best picture and best director. The ‘timeless’ love affair, Atonement (Joe Wright), and the legal drama, Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy), each gained seven nominations, including best picture. Juno (Jason Reitman), about a pregnant teenage girl, was the fifth nominee in the best picture category.

Of the films garnering a large number of nominations, Michael Clayton is the most thoughtful, although one of those works that tends to fade somewhat from memory. It relies on a few too many formulas and hardly breaks new ground. In any event, its treatment of the cutthroat corporate-legal world rings true. George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton, the film’s three lead performers, all received nominations. They deserve them; however, the degree to which the film threatens to be honored sheds a light on the enormously weak competition.

Bloody-mindedness dominates the nominations, with There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men leading the way. For best supporting actor, Johnny Depp and Viggo Mortensen received nominations in two more exceptionally violent films, Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton) and Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg), respectively. One could add Casey Affleck, as best supporting actor, in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik) and Amy Ryan for Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck).

Hollywood has chosen to sum itself up this way: a fascination with violence, on the one hand, or a belief that violence as a thing in itself rules the world, and, on the other, sentimentality, overt or disguised (Atonement, Juno, Away From Her). A few tame independent efforts, I’m Not There (Todd Haynes), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel), Into the Wild (Sean Penn) and a number of others, round out the selection.

Sicko, one of Michael Moore’s weaker efforts, is a nominee in the best documentary category. James Longley’s Sari’s Mother, about a woman seeking medical attention for her seriously ailing child in war-blasted Iraq, is a worthy choice for best documentary short subject.

The war in Iraq, now one of the longest and most disastrous conflicts in US history, received little attention from the academy voters, although their choices were limited. Tommy Lee Jones received a nod for Paul Haggis’s murky In the Valley of Elah and No End in Sight was nominated as best documentary.

The latter was directed by Charles Ferguson, a former Brookings Institution fellow and co-founder of a software firm, who, as the WSWS noted in a review, “is a liberal establishment figure who believes that the war in Iraq has gone horribly wrong. He makes clear in interviews that his purpose in making the film, which he financed himself, is to point out the mistakes made by the Bush administration, so that future administrations can carry out interventions more effectively.”

In addition, Philip Seymour Hoffman received a nomination for Charlie Wilson’s War, Mike Nichols’ defense of the ‘good neo-colonial war’ in Afghanistan.

Nominated in the best foreign language film category, Austria’s The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher), directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, is an honest account of an episode during World War II. Jewish concentration camp prisoners are forced to create counterfeit bills as part of a Hitler regime strategy to destabilize the British economy by flooding the country with forged Bank of England notes. One Communist Party printer refuses to participate, precipitating a crisis.

The nominations, taken as a whole, however, are a pretty miserable showing.

Films are written, directed and performed by human beings who breathe the same air as everyone else. These individuals too live in a world dominated by increasing social inequality, war and the threat of more devastating wars, deep financial crisis, suffering on a massive scale—why are they so unlikely to reflect on these realities?

This year’s award ceremony may take place under exceptional circumstances. If no settlement is reached in the film and television writers’ strike, and actors respect the writers’ picket lines, the ceremony itself February 24 at the Kodak Theatre will be a shadow of its usual self, for better or worse. Social struggle is impinging directly on the academy’s activities, but the films honored …

The state of the world finds such a pale and inadequate reflection in American filmmaking in particular. This wasn’t always the case. The Depression, war, fascism, the character of the ruling elite and problems of everyday life made their way into studio filmmaking of another day, albeit in a muted and sometimes misshapen fashion. What’s the problem today?

Hollywood is a money-making operation, presided over by massive companies with a stake in existing social relations. The filmmakers themselves are often privileged and insulated from economic hardship. These facts explain some of the difficulties, but not all of them.

There is the matter of the social atmosphere and the three-decades’ long period of political reaction. Social solidarity, compassion, a concern for the plight of the oppressed, a belief in the alterability of the world for the better—these ideas have been systematically attacked. The powers that be are enormously sensitive to any effort to pierce the veil with which the American media attempts to conceal harsh social realities.

Understanding the world is never easy. The artistic knowing of reality, which takes the form of thinking and feeling in images, is distinct from scientific cognition. “The nightingale of poetry, like the bird of wisdom, the owl, is heard only after the sun is set. The day is a time for action, but at twilight feeling and reason come to take account of what has been accomplished.” (Trotsky)

However, some ‘nightingales’ are more prepared to sing than others. Even if we accept that art must ‘limp’ after reality, US filmmaking at present is hardly moving its limbs.

Certain very unpleasant characteristics predominate. The obsession with extreme violence, in mainstream, ‘independent’ or low-budget horror films, is clearly bound up with the brutality of American society and the bellicosity and aggression of the current administration, its reliance on force, its use of torture and abuse, its declaration of war on much of the world.

But the reaction of the filmmakers is terribly superficial and impressionistic. One would be led to believe, by the current crop of nominees, that the source of the problem lies in the ‘American character,’ indeed, one would draw the conclusion from many of these films that the ordinary American is a psychotic. The pretense is that in portraying the most savage behavior the filmmaker is somehow penetrating to the ‘heart of darkness,’ one is shedding illusions about humanity, that one is, in fact, being ‘realistic.’

Can anything be explained in this manner? There is something self-serving, and lazy, in this cheap misanthropy and bleakness. It’s also a libel against the population, who are the victims of exploitation and violence, not its initiators.

The source of the brutalities in American society, ultimately, is to be found in the violence of its class divisions.

The notion that any population is inherently cruel, that it might be almost eager to exhibit its indifference to suffering is utterly wrongheaded; it is also belied by everyday experience. And the opposite of misanthropy and facile pessimism is not a resort to happy endings or prettification of the oppressed, or anyone else. It is a serious, painstaking engagement with the world and with humanity, with its capacity for nobility, treachery and everything else in between.

The filmmakers are responding uncritically to real historical and social problems. A vast political vacuum exists in the US. Where should the population turn for help? Where would it see examples of selflessness and self-sacrifice? What has become of the organizations and movements it believed represented its interests? If the filmmakers addressed themselves to these questions, they might get somewhere.

Contrary to current popular wisdom, inflicting pain on another human being is not something that comes ‘naturally,’ it is one of the hardest, most unnatural acts to perform. Being evil is difficult and exhausting. The German playwright Brecht wrote in the 1930s, when fascism was raining blows on various populations: “Is there no way of preventing man from turning his back on atrocities? Why does he turn away? He turns away because he sees no possibility of intervening. No man lingers in the presence of another man’s pain if he is unable to help him.” And further: “Brutality does not come from brutality, but from the business deals which can no longer be made without it.”

This concrete social understanding is very far from the minds of most of our contemporary filmmakers. It is not encouraged by the media. Instead the most trivial nonsense is written about films. We will continue to hear mostly about which film will receive a “boost” from an academy award nomination. It is difficult to make films that reveal the truth, but it has to and will be done.