Category Archives: documentary

U2 3D

Posted on February 24, 2008

A testbed for a new generation of 3D technology, U2 3D is no gimmick. One of the trailers was for the upcoming Scorsese-directed Rolling Stones concert movie and the difference was clear. Another trailer, by the way, was for a new 3D version of Jules Vernes’ classic SF novel Journey to the Center of the Earth and from the few minutes shown looks likely to be a bigger result than would be expected from yet another normal remake, even with Brendan Fraser as the star.

The 3ality technology made a qualitative difference for me, analogous to the difference between analog and HD TV. There were a few times, primarily when the overhead camera flew towards the stage over the crowd, that I was a bit overwhelmed, but in general the large,  spacious stage worked well. Their setup for this tour was a two level primary stage, mainly for The Edge’s electric piano setup at the left, with two long arms curving in towards each other 80 feet or so out from the main stage. Bono and Adam Clayton went out the arms into the heart of the audience the most but even Larry Mullen, Jr., got out their with a simple snare and cymbal kit for Sunday Bloody Sunday. The Edge, well, he’s an amazingly creative guitarist who rarely turns up in discussions of six string greats, though he ought to. I was quite amused to see him changing guitars for every song, with no repeats until at least the sixth song, and apparently believing that stomping his leg improves the output.

U2 don’t add any other musicians or backup singers, why should they when between them they create a huge walloping sound, and after 30 years have a quality relationship very few outfits can match–can you think of another band that has the exact same membership as the day their first record came out and is still producing the same high quality music?

The biggest negatives about U2 3D are that at 85 minutes the show is just not long enough–TS1 and I are big, big fans and 13 songs were about four or five too few–and there are no backstage scenes or anything but Route One performance footage. I would have liked to see a few minutes of what the band does immediately before running onto the stage.

The movie’s set list has few surprises; it was shot during the Vertigo tour (TS1 and I saw the San Jose show), in seven locations across South and Central America and Australia, though primarily in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

  1. Vertigo
  2. Beautiful Day
  3. New Year’s Day
  4. Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own
  5. Love and Peace or Else
  6. Sunday Bloody Sunday
  7. Bullet the Blue Sky
  8. Miss Sarajevo
  9. Pride (In the Name of Love)
  10. Where the Streets Have No Name
  11. One
  12. The Fly
  13. With or Without You

recommended

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Why We Fight

Posted on July 21, 2007

A powerful, award-winning exploration of the American involvement in Iraq by Eugene Jarecki, Why We Fight (2005) applies inspiration from Frank Capra’s World War II motivational films and President Eisenhower’s farewell address that gave us the term military-industrial complex to explain where the thinking behind this adventure originated.

Too frequently documentaries are bland melanges of talking heads, even when the subject matter is compelling an important. 100 straight minutes of talking about almost any subject can just turn into too much yada yada yada and dramatic yet empty images do little to correct things; repetitive shots gliding down overly similar stretches of whatever are just as snore-inducing. Jarecki avoids this by integrating clips from Eisenhower and other important historical figures.

Mainly though, we see the rationale for the Iraq War through interviews with a few relevant, insightful folks:

Karen Kwiatkowski: A career military officer who was actually in the Pentagon working on the morning of 9/11, and had also spent time on assignment to the National Security Agency, she was assigned to the DoD’s policy development office but resigned in disgust after Cheney associates hijacked her bureau’s function.

Richard Perle: One of the original Neocons, Perle is also one of the heavy lifters in the Project for the New American Century, a thinktank which provided analytical firepower for the attack on Iraq and the use of pre-emptive strikes that are the core of the Bush Doctrine. Perle fervently believes, if we are to take him at his word, that bringing down Saddam Hussein was massively important in reducing the threat to America’s national security.

Wilton Sezker: A retired New York City police officer, Wilton’s son died in the World Trade Center’s collapse. Searching for a way to memorialize him, and thinking back to his own service in Vietnam, Sezker wrote to the military to ask that the son’s name be painted on a missile before it got dropped in Iraq. His request was granted and they even sent him photos of the adorned bomb. Shortly thereafter, though, the former cop saw through the Bush Crew lies about Iraq and now spends his days wondering why he let himself be duped.

Susan Eisenhower: The former general’s granddaughter weighs in, pointing out that exactly what he warned of in that historic speech came to pass nearly immediately, to his great chagrin, and the relationship has become so enmeshed in the system that its invisible.

Chalmers Johnson: A professor specializing in Asian politics who was also a CIA consultant in the Vietnam era, Johnson became disillusioned with American government tactics during the scandals of the ’70s and has since been trying to use his insight and contacts to bring wrongheaded policy into public view, including the publication of three books on what he calls the American Empire. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 Johnson wrote an article for The Nation called Blowback, which is a CIA term referring to unforeseen responses to secret government actions, because in his view this is exactly what caused the terrorist horror in Manhattan and DC; in fact he published a prophetic book with that title in 2000 which received little notice until that sad September day, at which time it jumped onto the bestseller lists.

recommended

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New York Doll

Posted on January 24, 2007

While the band was incredibly influential after blasting onto the rock stage in the early ’70s, the New York Dolls came along about two or three years too soon for me to really have gotten into them and by the time I might have the band splintered and David Johanson more or less spoiled things with his Buster Poindexter act. Not to mention I had second generation, “improved” versions in the form of the Clash, the Talking Heads and so on who took the raw inspiration of the Dolls and made it–let’s be honest–more radio friendly.

New York Doll is a documentary made in 2004 about Arthur “Killer” Kane, the Dolls’ bass player, by Greg Whiteley in the weeks leading up the band’s first reunion concert in nearly 30 years at the 2004 Meltdown Festival in London. Whiteley, a recent art school grad, had become friends with Kane through their membership in the Mormon Temple in Los Angeles and got the idea for the film after Arthur told him about the concert.

Its a small film, barely 85 minutes or so, with almost no production values, just a single camera pointed at whoever’s talking with a little footage of the old days and from the Meltdown shown cut in. Kane is the dominant character but not dominant himself, I felt like he was about at peace with the highs and lows of his life but that his life energy bank account was almost all drawn down. Meaning I was not surprised when, just three weeks after the big reunion concert, he died.

“Aging’s not for sissies” is a quote I heard years ago, apparently attributed to Lucille Ball though that’s not where I hard it, and Kane’s life is proof of it. At 21 he was riding high, literally of course from drugs and booze, just about becoming the next rock god, but at 31 he was in the gutter with no money, no skills, no friends. He got the chance to resolve the demons that plagued him after the band broke up, which is something quite rare.

A big part of this film’s appeal is that Whiteley doesn’t try and make a history of the Dolls. He doesn’t show us, for instance, how they came together or the details of their breakup but mainly shots of their flamboyant lifestyle and footage of their appearance on an episode of the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test. Instead the camera follows Arthur on his bus rides to and from work–yes, the man is too broke to own a car… in Los Angeles–and comments from a few of his co-workers at the LDS Library of Family History and his bishops. Mainly we get Arthur, 30 years after he stopped wearing the makeup and dresses.

recommended

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March of the Penguins

Posted on September 3, 2006

My small present to Sweetie for her birthday last month was the allegedly totally cute and entertaining frozen nature flick March of the Penguins and tonight we finally got around to watching it. No one can look at the penguin chicks after they show up about halfway through–not counting the brief egg glimpses–and not come away juiced and amazed.

Mating begins in Fall and females drop the eggs as Winter is hitting, carrying the babes to be atop their claws before passing the chore to the menfolk. The ladies lose over 30% of their body weight after giving birth and need to head straight back to the ocean for food. So the men stay inland, eggs on their claws and no food themselves for over four months in the end. Even so, the dads have to be extremely careful since the briefest of exposures to open Winter air temperatures and winds will kill the chick before it can hatch.

Morgan Freeman, clearly succeeding James Earl Jones as trustworthy, believable voice of the nation, recorded the English narration (IMDB credits show that with the film’s unexpected commercial success localized versions were made for many markets) but the filmmakers did a good job of realizing that less is more and that visuals and emotional music suffice to tell the tale of the Emperor penguins and their endless annual cycle of migration and mating. Director/writer Luc Jacquet also was smart to keep all evidence of his production team out of the shot, and then bring in a taste under the closing credits and a making of featurette.

This should easily become a perennial children’s favorite, a movie they can watch a number of times as they grow up themselves and understand more of the world around them.

recommended

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An Inconvenient Truth

Posted on July 22, 2006

Frankly, I’ve put off writing up this movie because I wasn’t sure how to say what I feel. Regardless of party affiliation or attitude towards Al Gore, this is very watchable and a film you must see. Assuming you care in the least about the world we–or perhaps more importantly, your children and their children will–live in. I’m not saying its perfect or that the science cannot be challenged.

I am saying that we essentially face a real world variation of Pascal’s Wager. If the science is wrong, in whole or in degree, or if other developments make the problem irrelevant, then there’s little lost in acting as if we are in a climate crisis; if the argument made in Truth is correct, then we either start making real changes or sentence generations yet to come to a horrific future.

Frankly, if the science in An Inconvenient Truth is correct, some environmental changes may come within a decade that will make our present horrific. Two high probability events, significant ice cap melts in Antarctica and Greenland, could kill millions of people living in coastal areas on all continents and make tens of millions more refugees; you can write off big chunks of San Francisco, New Orleans, Miami, Manhattan, Naples, Venice, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, coastal India, Japan, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, most of the Caribbean, Caracas and Rio de Janeiro. Plus oil export port facilities throughout the Middle East.

That’s just the most direct, near term effect from one pair of high probability events. Gore lays out much more dire consequences if we maintain the status quo and frankly the research he presents seems very solid to me. Look at the temperatures for the last month or so, 2006 is already shaping up as the hottest year since we began keeping records!

Solutions are available and, Gore asserts, will have positive near-term economic benefits. That is, despite the negative progaganda of the corporate interests fighting them, changing our products and consumption habits in ways that greatly decrease human environmental impact will increase employment and gross global economic activity. Just not for the huge oil and gas companies, which is where almost all the funding for opposition to the changes comes from!

Some related linkage:

absolutely recommended

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The Corporation

Posted on December 29, 2005

For someone with an MBA, I tend to have a fairly negative opinion of American business leaders. So watching The Corporation was right in line and held few surprises for me; despite relying a bit more on Michael Moore, Noah Chomsky and Jeremy Rifkin than I would have the material is well-organized and delivers clearly the message that modern corporations have simply become uncontrolled and unhinged.

Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan were the documentary’s key collaborators and realized that the story is so provocative that restraint in its telling was the best choice. Mixing interviews with CEOs, labor leaders, political activists and academics in between onsite footage, the first half is structured as a checklist of symptoms that add up to what would be diagnosed as psychotic in a real person.

Especially effective were the comments from Ray Anderson, Chairmen of Interface, Inc., the world’s largest carpet manufacturer. This is a man who realized that his products were literally plundering the earth and decided to overhaul the entire system to completely change its environmental impact. One scene was a clip of Anderson speaking to a group of North Carolina business leaders and I was sad to see many of them yawning out of boredom.

recommended

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Edgeplay

Posted on August 27, 2005

Back in the ’70s teen chick rockers the Runaways almost pushed it over the top but, sadly all too common in the history of rock and roll, fell apart in a frenzy of intramural ego battles, drugs and external manipulation. Of all the members only Joan Jett really went on to realize her ambition and commercial success with Lita Ford managing a few hits. Edgeplay is a documentary made by Victory Tischler-Blue, better known as bass player #2 Vicki Blue, that takes an honest look back in surprising detail at what happened from the inside out.

The two biggest drawbacks are that Jett wouldn’t participate and is heard only a few times on contemporaneous interview tapes and the other women, though clearly at times in physical proximity, never talk with each other (other than Blue’s questions) in responce to sometimes startling revelations. Lesser evils are a general lack of performance footage and Runaways music as well as very strange interspersed comments from the very strange Svengali who put the group together, Kim Fowley.

On the plus side, putting Edgeplay into the watchable column, the women are forthright in discussing the incidents and emotions which after all happened when they were between 14 and 20 years old. Drummer Sandy West tells us that during those years she was doing drugs and men to the point that after the band dissolved she was forced to become a mule and collector for dealers to support her habits, breaking down doors gun in hand. Original bassist Jackie Fox confirms longstanding rumors of a suicide attempt that sent her home early.

Lita Ford, still the hardbodied gorgeous blonde I remember from her late ’80s/early ’90s videos, comes across as less honest or perhaps simply remembers events from her own self-esteem supporting POV. I think the film’s biggest miss is a conversation/confrontation between Ford and lead singer Cherie Currie, the second to leave after one too many feuds with the guitarist.

recommended, barely

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The Fog of War

Posted on February 1, 2005

Better was Errol Morris’ acclaimed documentary The Fog of War. This film shows a great deal of creativity without letting the creative distract from its core, a lengthy interview with Robert McNamara structured as a series of lessons learned (and this is the film’s subtitle: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara). For you young’uns out there, this Bay Area native made three significant contributions to modern American society:

  1. Using methods developed for the military during WWII, during a 15 year stint at Ford Motor Company he brought statistical analysis into the corporate world; while much of his work was used to improve marketing he also brought out a number of safety enhancements such as seatbelts and steering wheels that wouldn’t impale a driver after a crash.
  2. Drawing criticism from all sides, he left Ford five weeks after being named president to serve as Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ; he was one of the key architects of our initial involvement and huge expansion in Vietnam–this period was of course the meat of the discussion,
  3. Leaving the Cabinet late in LBJ’s term, he was president of the World Bank for 13 years; there was very little mention of his work at the bank but under his leadership some very substantial development programs were funded, though a number later drew strong criticism as wasteful and riddled with corruption on the receiving end.

Movies are a visual medium, to say the least, and so Morris couldn’t simply point the camera at McNamara and ask his questions. Instead, he weaves period footage with bits filmed for this documentary with shots of the 85 year old man talking. The bits Morris filmed, though, weren’t recreations of big historical moments but instead simpler scenes or illustrations; examples are skulls being dropped down the center of a stairwell, an experiment McNamara had done at Cornell University to understand the impact on a person’s head of a crash and how different packaging could protect us better; close up shots of various reports, prose and numerical, as McNamara explains how or when that information was used; and, shots of an old reel-to-reel tape recorder as conversations between McNamara and one of the presidents he served discussed played. But our subject was also on screen quite a bit, generally in extreme close up.

There were some topics he wouldn’t discuss, and secrets he wouldn’t divulge. One comes to realize that, many years after the fact, McNamara understood that Vietnam might have been avoided if leaders on both sides had been willing to talk to each other. The US was caught up in the Cold War, still very raw after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the decisionmakers saw this little faraway country as a chess piece of suddenly significant consequence in blocking the Soviet Union and China. The Vietnamese wanted only to reunite their country and finally be free of foreign domination, and they viewed the Americans as latest in a long line of would-be colonial masters. I wonder, now, how different the last 40 years would have played out if somehow both sides had understood and corrected the other’s mistaken perceptions.

McNamara stands by his record, doesn’t try to whitewash or evade his part. Now that most of the other participants are dead, he provides a level of insight for Vietnam and his part in WWII that I believe is rarely matched by anyone on the inside of such significant historical controversies.

recommended

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The Game Of Their Lives

Posted on December 13, 2004

Most legendary matches from the World Cup over the years have been the one off upsets like the thrown together team of American amateurs who beat England 1-0 in 1950. One of the great stories, though, is the absolutely unknown North Korean team which travelled to England for the 1966 Finals, not only because they beat Italy to reach the last four–and took an early 3-0 lead against Portugal before collapsing to star Eusebio’s four goals–but for the way in which the people of Birmingham (where they were based for the opening round) took them on as favorites only a dozen years after the Korean War.

The Game Of Their Lives is a terrific documentary from Daniel Gordon which looks at the North Koreans’ 1966 experience as well as visiting the usually off-limits nation to film interviews with the (still living?) players and their manager. While the historical bits were interesting for me, always love to see some of what happened before I got to be a fan, the really meaningful moments were the interviews and scenes filmed inside North Korea.

The secretive communist regime rarely allows foreign cameras in or their people to speak to journalists and many outsiders tend to belittle the cult of Great Leader and Dear Leader (father/founder of the nation Kim Il Sung and his son/current dictator Kim Il Jong). The players, though, made heartfelt comments about their Great Leader which made me think about how different people see the same things differently. They all broke down in tears during a scene filmed at a memorial featuring a huge statue of the man who lead their country at the time of the Finals, all wishing that he were still around to guide them.

My second favorite part was the interviews with people from Birmingham who were involved in those days as fans or civic leaders. They explained how the city, whose main soccer team had just been relegated and which viewed itself as underdogs to bigger metropolises like London, quickly took to the most unlikely visitors. I guess 1966 was a simpler time than today because even if the Cold War was in full force the visiting squad and the locals easily and commonly mixed together without incident; no way that would happen today.

From a film perspective, Gordon did a good job. He intercut archival footage with new material, and paced the game footage with the other discussions. Other than explaining the two Kims and the impact of the war on North Korea early on to give context and understanding to other material, he left politics on the sideline.

recommended even for non-soccer fans

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Tom Dowd and the Language of Music

Posted on November 10, 2004

The art of recording music has been born and revolutionized time after time in just the last century and a bit. One man, with a beautiful heart and a soul that was simply musical, is little known to the lovers of modern music but made undisputable contributions to several of those revolutions and helped give us an amazing amount of many different types of hugely popular music.

Tom Dowd and the Language of Music is a loving biography of that man, made in the months before Dowd passed away, during a time when he was still making new music with modern talent in his mid-70s. He began as a recording engineer when Atlantic Records was founded in the late ’40s, built the first real commercial stereo and multi-track studios and took to the computerized studios of the ’90s and later like he was born to it.

Who did Dowd record? Jazz and R&B artists like John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and Otis Redding. And rockers, man did he work the board magic for rockers: Eric Clapton (both The Cream and Derek and the Dominos), The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Young Rascals, The Drifters, Bobby Darin, Dusty Springfield, Rod Stewart and Cher. So many more, just an awesome discography.

There isn’t too much detail about the technical aspects of what Dowd did, though he does go back to the original Layla tapes and give a little taste of how the individual tracks fit together in the mix. Some discussion of his pioneering work in stereo and multi-track recording. Lots of interviews with artists he worked with–Clapton talks about believing so much more in Dowd’s musical instincts than his own and Gregg Allman cannot say enough about Dowd as a man. Plus his important partners at Atlantic Records, his boss and company founder Ahmet Ertegun, producer Jerry Wexler and protege Phil Ramone.

A sweet taste of the last half century of music. A portrait of a man who was a key piece of connective tissue across musical eras and genres.

Recommended

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