Cynical Cinema

At this point, the entire world knows how badly the war in Iraq was mismanaged.  And how poorly thought out was the war in Afghanistan.  We all know that the Americans tortured people.  And that to this day, they are continuing to torture people.  Any reasonable citizen of North America would, upon reflection, agree with the concept that the Americans are almost certainly torturing many, many innocent people in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and so many other prisons like them.  But the scandal is almost out of the headlines, what with the presidential race, and so little dialogue dedicated to the issue.

Taxi To The Dark Side brings the issue of torture back into the public consciousness.  And it’s a brilliant film.  It connects the dots between the Bush administration and the tactics they used to approve the torture of these prisoners.  Donald Rumsfeld, on a memo detailing interrogation techniques, writes a joke at the bottom of the memo - “standing for four hours?  I stand for eight to ten hours a day!”  Sure.  But these prisoners are chained with their hands abover their heads, forced to stand perfectly still for four hours at a time.  And it isn’t the same as walking around the White House.  This casual disregard for human suffering was a pervasive attitude in that White House, from Rumsfeld to Cheney to Bush.

The “Taxi” in the title refers to the taxi driven by a man named Dilawar.  A young man in Afghanistan who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The Americans were being attacked by rockets at their bases, and even at their prison.  A local militia chief in Afghanistan arrested several people in conjuction with the attacks, among them Dilawar and the three people riding in his taxi.  He turned those prisoners over to the Americans in exchange for cash, a common practice in Afghanistan.  It was later determined that the rocket attacks were in fact launched BY that militia chief himself, and he did so to inflame American anger in order to cash in by turning over innocent people.

So Dilawar was being held in “extrajudicial detention” at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.  He was questioned repeatedly, without being told why he was being held.  He was chained to the ceiling, threatened with dogs, and then beaten to death.  This became a small story because this was the second death of a prisoner at Bagram in about a week.  But the military and the high-ranking government officials involved managed to effectively sweep it under the rug.  It became a big story when a reporter visited Dilawar’s family in Afghanistan.  The family showed them the report the Americans had given them, along with Dilawar’s body, pertaining to the death of their brother, son, and father.  None of them spoke English, let alone had the ability to read English.  So for months, they hadn’t known at all what it really said.  But the reporters did.  On that report, the cause of death was listed as homicide.

The soldiers involved in that beating death were prosecuted.  The soldiers (Lynndie England, most famously) at Guantanamo Bay who put their prisoners in humiliating and disgusting positions and took pictures of them were prosecuted.  But was it really the fault of those soldiers?  This movie takes a very fair, very balanced look at the system that created these inhumane, despicable conditions, and allows us to draw our own conclusions.  The conclusion that is most obvious is that the idea of this torture came from the top down.  This was not just, as Rumsfeld said at the time, “a few bad apples”.  And it wasn’t even that the higher-ups simply looked the other way.  Even more than that, the higher-ups actively encouraged the soldiers to torture these people.

The film uses file footage of a psychology professor at McGill University whose experiments many years ago in sensory deprivation have been used for many years by the Americans to torture enemies.  The soldiers involved in the murders at Bagram are interviewed.  FBI operatives are interviewed about their interrogation techniques.  (The FBI, incidentally, was kicked out of Guantanamo Bay because they were perceived to be “too soft” when interrogating prisoners, and the operation was turned over to the CIA, which led to waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and many techniques that have proved to be incredibly unreliable in terms of eliciting information from prisoners.)

I can understand, to a degree, the argument for torturing people for information if there is an immediate threat, your prisoner is the only one who can give you the appropriate information, and you need that information yesterday.  But that is a situation that never, ever comes up.  Ever.  So the Americans end up performing heinous acts of humiliation and torture on their detainees, with no real benefit to doing so.  And while there are several prisoners who are indeed part of Al Quaeda in detention, it is far more likely that the torture is being performed on innocent people, who are held without the chance for a trial, and without the understanding of the crime with which they are charged.  Because they are not, really, charged with a crime at all.  They are just held in prison, waterboarded, and sometimes beaten to death.

The acts performed on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, are among some of the most despicable acts in the recent history of humanity.  And Taxi To The Dark Side lays them bare.  This movie had to be made, and it must be seen.  It won the Oscar this year for Best Documentary Feature, and deservedly so.  If one guilty person is treated in this way, it is reprehensible.  If one innocent person is tortured until he dies, then it is a dark day for all of humanity.  Courtesy of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their ilk.  This movie features graphic scenes, and it is tough to watch.  But watch it anyway.  You, and the rest of the world, need to know.

When I brought home Sex And The City on DVD, my girlfriend said “oh, cool”. When I brought home The Visitor, she said “will that make me cry?” and decided not to watch it. And when I brought home The Go-Getter, she said “why do you watch this crap?” (The Go-Getter, incidentally, was not crap - it was very good.) But when I brought home Meerkat Manor: Season Two, she said “oh my God, YAY!” I’m not even joking. And ten minutes later, we were watching the first episode of the second season. And seven hours after that, we were watching the final episode of the second season. Because Meerkat Manor is, really, that compelling. Alliance Films releases season two on October 7th, and it is well worth picking up.

Now, I may just be a morbid guy. Or perhaps I am cruel and mean-spirited. But when I watch nature documentaries, like Meerkat Manor, I want to see animals eat other animals. That’s just what I enjoy watching. And aside from the dominant meerkat, Flower, inexplicably attacking a bird, we see very little of it. There are hard-fought battles between meerkat tribes, battles that leave meerkats dead, and often the babies as well. One of the meerkat babies gets eaten by a goshawk. But we don’t get to see that. The program is all about the “real life and death” events in the Kalahari, but we don’t get to see the cool stuff. I guess it’s a way to keep the series PG-rated. There is even a scene where the group of meerkats surrounds a cobra, keeping it at bay before they finally abandon it to it’s fate as a snake-eating eagle circles overhead. So…what happened to the snake? Did it get eaten? We never find out. Come one Animal Planet. At least show a snake getting eaten.

Despite the fact that the truly violent parts of the show are edited out, this program is still ridiculously compelling. It contains all the cliffhangers and the emotional moments you would associate with soap operas. Only instead of terribly attractive awful actors, this one stars tiny little cute meerkats. My girlfriend is right. Yay!

Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing, on September 23rd, Season One of a series I never knew existed until now. But it’s a great one. This American Life is a TV series based on a Chicago public radio show hosted by Ira Glass. Glass reprises his role as the host of the show for television, and he’s funny enough and serious enough to make this program bizarrely compelling. It’s a show that travels around the United States meeting interesting people. Kind of like Wayne Rostad in On The Road Again. Only funnier and more interesting. Each episode of the show centres around a particular theme, although “theme” appears to be a word used rather loosely.

From the very first story we hear on the very first episode, we’re hooked. A woman tells a story about the time she peed on the school bus when she was a little girl. It’s a great way to grab the attention of an audience, and this TV show had mine all the way through Season One. They go through slaughterhouses, visit cloned bulls, and get a behind-the-scenes look at a hot dog stand in Chicago that brings out the absolute worst in people. This show is both charming and compelling, and I’ll bet you can’t watch just one episode.

There is actually a controversy brewing in Canada over the Canadian porn channel. Like, there isn’t already porn all over TV and the internet. Kids are just as likely to be exposed to porn now as they were before. The real controversy ought to be over whether anyone really wants to see Canadian porn. Ever. The series Webdreams makes a good case for Canadian porn being less interesting than any other kind of porn, but still profitable. After all, it’s naked women and men and it’s porn. It will make money. It costs eleven dollars to produce, and makes at least twenty-two dollars when it’s sold. Simple.

But at the same time, I really don’t understand the appeal of a show like Webdreams. It’s a show that chronicles the behind-the-scenes aspects of the adult entertainment industry, mostly here in Canada. It follows people trying to break into the adult industry. Season three follows two guys trying to get into producing gay porn, a guy who has starred in several movies but is moving on to be a director, and an internet bondage girl who wants to become more mainstream. Make the slightly bigger bucks, you see. So…what’s the audience for this show? I understand that some people are fascinated with porn. But they are simply fascinated with the porn itself, are they not? Do they really care about what happens behind the scenes? Are they really pulling for some no-name internet porn chick to make it to the big time? Am I missing something here?

It strikes me that people want to see actual porn. And as I’m sure we’re all aware, there is porn everywhere. The only people who would watch this show are the ones hoping to catch a glimpse of the actual porn in action. And since those glimpses are few and far between…why bother? I’ve just watched episode one of season three, and it made me irritated. And that’s all. This show is staggeringly boring. And the third season begins tonight at 10:00 p.m. Eastern on Showcase.

Alliance Films is releasing Jane Goodall:  When Animals Talk today, September 2nd, on DVD.  This is another DVD that comes from the people at Animal Planet, one that features Jane Goodall, famous for her 40 years working with chimpanzees.  And she talks to animals.  Like chimpanzees.  It’s easy to roll one’s eyes when we see Goodall beginning a speech by making chimpanzee noises, and it’s also easy to tune out when we see people talking about their pets and how they seem to sense when daddy’s getting home.  Yeah yeah yeah.  They’re animals.  We get it.  Pets are not interesting to me.  Show me a komodo dragon that knows when your husband is getting home.  And waits in his bushes.  THAT would be interesting.

But then there are the creatures that are fascinating.  There are killer whales that actually beach themselves in order to eat sea lions, and in doing so they establish a dialogue with the man who has been studying them for years.  After they rip sea lions to shreds, he goes in the water and plays with them!  (I would rather have seen them eating more sea lions, myself…that was pretty cool.)  Then there is the parrot that not only speaks, but actually understands speech, has conversations with people, and may have a telepathic bond with his owner.  (You have to see this bird to believe it.)  And then there are the elephants, the rats, the whales and…more pets.

Which means that more than half of this DVD is interesting.  Whales and elephants and rats and their methods of communicating with each other and with us are fascinating.  Cats are not.  Dogs are not.  If only this documentary had stayed away from commen house pets, it would be great.  As it is, it’s just decent.  But that parrot alone makes this worth checking out!

I have one complaint with Pete Seeger:  The Power of Song, and I’m going to get it off my chest first.  Pete Seeger is a folk singer who is mostly forgotten today.  You might remember Bruce Springsteen’s recent album, The Seeger Sessions.  Springsteen is a huge Seeger fan and appears in this documentary.  So too does Bob Dylan.  And here’s what bugs me.  One of the biggest stories in Pete Seeger lore involves Bob Dylan.  At the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Bob Dylan went electric, creating a massive controversy.  According to legend, Pete Seeger was so incensed when Dylan plugged in his electric guitar that he stalked the backstage area with an axe, looking to chop through the power cables running his amp.  He apparently had to be physically restrained.  But Bob Dylan appears in this documentary, and there is no mention of this event!  None!  This is one, as a Dylan fanatic, I really wanted to hear about.

But, that really is my only complaint.  There are other Pete Seeger stories, legendary stories, that are explored in full detail in this film.  Like the story about the Vietnam veteran who showed up at one of Seeger’s concerts with the intent to murder him, but after hearing Seeger’s songs and understanding them for the first time, he broke down, didn’t go through with his plan, and told Seeger that his life had been changed.  And that was the kind of man and the kind of artist Seeger was.  This documentary traces his activism and music through his early days, through his pop star days, all the way up to the present day where he still lives with his wife of what must be sixty years at least, and continues his activism even in his 80s.  It’s an incredible portrait of an American patriot, a patriot every bit as great as Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau.

There are some impressive interview appearances from the likes of Dylan and Springsteen, as well as Natalie Maines from the Dixie Chicks, Joan Baez, Bonnie Raitt and Arlo Guthrie.  And some of Seeger’s great songs are featured as well - “Stickin’ To The Union”, “If I Had a Hammer”, “We Shall Overcome”, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”, and “Big Muddy”.  There is footage from Seeger’s appearance in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he refused to testify and faced jail time.  His activism is traced right up to the present day, and another impressive moment is when he built a boat and lobbied (successfully) to clean up the Hudson River.

This is the best DVD out this week, from Alliance Films.  Check it out.

The Jeff Corwin Experience is a show on Animal Planet starring a Crocodile Hunter type guy who visits exotic locations, seeking out exotic animals, then picks them up and shows them to the camera.  The first season comes out on DVD tomorrow, September 2nd, from Alliance Films, and starts out in Borneo.  Corwin finds elephants, sea turtles, orangutans, snakes, bats, creepy-looking proboscis monkeys, and tree frogs.  He then moves on to India for episode 2, where he finds cobras and all kinds of other exotic wildlife.  The animals are cool, the locations are cool, and the episodes feature as many animals as possible.  As Season One continues through Arizona, Alaska, Indonesia, Thailand, Madagascar and the Galapagos, we get to meet many animals we would ordinarily not get to see.

But the show isn’t great.  And the problem is the host.  Jeff Corwin is a likeable guy.  He kind of looks (and acts) like Ryan Reynolds, only without the really funny stuff.  Just the kind-of funny stuff.  But he talks too much.  He does a few set-pieces that are meant to be funny, but really we just want to see more animals.  Enough about you, already!  Let’s get to the proboscis monkeys!  That being said, this show is certainly good for kids.  They will be entertained, and at the same time they will learn about the natural world and perhaps something about conservation as well.

ESPN Inside Access DVDs are incredible.  ESPN takes absolutely every bit of footage they can find of a sports star and crams it all onto one DVD.  In this case, that star is Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees.  SportsCentury shows, interviews, highlight reels, Chris Meyers.  It’s all here on yet another amazingly complete package.  So complete that there are some obscure items that no one but the Derek Jeter rabid fanatics of the world would ever want to see.  Jeter cross-dressing on the set of Saturday Night Live.  Jeter being interviewed by Freddie Prinze Jr.  Highlights from the Triple A all-star game the year before he was called up to the major leagues.  And a feature on the “World’s Sexiest Athlete”.

All in all, this is as complete a collection as you will ever find on an athlete, and Derek Jeter is certainly deserving.  His best highlights are truly unbelievable, his best plays seem to be reserved for the biggest stages - Championship Series, World Series, this is where he shines brightest.  But in the end, it’s not as exciting as it should be.  And that’s because Derek Jeter, the athlete, is sensational.  Derek Jeter, the person, is boring.  He’s the stereotypical, “one game at a time”, “110 percent” quote machine.  His interviews are boring.  His quotes are boring.  The interviews with his teammates and coaches hint at the possibility that there is more to him.  He flips out on teammates when they need to be called out.  He is an aggressive team leader and a passionate personality.  Behind closed doors.  But we sure don’t get to see that.

A great DVD jammed with information, this is an exciting look at an amazing baseball player.  But that’s about it.  And after more than two hours of various features showing just how boring Derek Jeter really is in public, I was really hoping that ESPN comes out with something more interesting soon.  Like David Ortiz.  Or Barry Bonds.  Or - especially - Manny Ramirez.  THAT guy is entertaining!  Derek Jeter:  Inside Access comes out tomorrow, from Alliance Films.

Paramount Home Entertainment is coming out with a movie called Chicago 10 on August 26th. It’s a very strange take on the famous Democratic National Convention held in Chicago in 1968, and the anti-war demonstrations at that convention that led to riots, arrests, and a really bizarre trial. Chicago 10 is basically a documentary about that trial, featuring archival footage of Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Bobby Seale, and the rest of the people involved with the trial. Interviews with them at the time, footage of Hoffman and David Dellinger at speaking engagements, and of course footage of the demonstrations, the police response, and the riots that took place. What happened after the disturbance in 1968 was that eight people were put on trial for “crossing state lines for the purposes of inciting a riot”. The trial really was a farce, and film maker Brett Morgen wants to accentuate this by creating a cartoon representation of the trial itself.

Which means that between the archival footage and the documentary pieces, we get a re-enactment of the Chicago trial by cartoon characters. They look like the people they represent, they talk like the people they represent, and Morgen has recruited some big names to help voice these characters. Jeffrey Wright, Amy Adams, Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schrieber and many others participated in this film. Which is impressive, and really adds punch to the courtroom scenes, which are taken directly from the transcripts of the trial itself. A trial which saw the judge order Bobby Seale, the national leader of the Black Panther Party, to be bound and gagged right in the courtroom because of his frequent outbursts. This was an absolutely crazy time in North American history, and this trial really encapsulates what was craziest about it. And this movie provides a really interesting look into that trial.

Interesting, but not as interesting as it should be. This trial and these events in Chicago in the late sixties fascinate me, and I wanted to learn everything I could. And in watching this movie, I learned an awful lot. But the style of the movie and the “artsy” nature of the animated segments don’t really help. It’s better than one of those cheesy “courtroom re-enactment” scenes from other, worse documentaries, and I frankly don’t know what I would have preferred to see in it’s place. But the style of the movie becomes overpowering, and I found myself getting distracted from the actual story by the animation. It isn’t a major fault, because this movie is still impressive and thorough, but it prevents the film from being a great one.

Where In The World is Osama Bin Laden comes out August 26th from Alliance Films, and it’s a terrific premise for a movie. After watching The Hunting Party, and witnessing the amazingly easy capture of Radovan Karadzic a month ago in Belgrade, it isn’t actually a giant stretch to think that one guy with a camera crew could conceivably find the man. Or at the very least come pretty close. And certainly one guy with a camera crew who interviews the people closest to Bin Laden would bring out some information as to his whereabouts that would come as a shock to the general public. After all, it has been SEVEN years since September 11th. SEVEN. And has anyone, anywhere, come within sniffing distance of this guy? At the very least, a movie like this one will remind us that Public Enemy Number One is still at large. Like, hey! You remember that guy, who did the thing with the planes? Yeah, we still don’t have him. And perhaps we’ve stopped trying.

And, at the very least, that’s what this movie does. And that’s ALL it’s good for. Morgan Spurlock, the man who brought us the fantastic film Super-Size Me in 2003, has taken his second stab at directing, producing and starring in a documentary. And he has, for the most part, failed. While there is nothing overtly wrong with Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden, there is also nothing particularly right. He talks to people all over the world, in places where Osama Bin Laden may be hiding, and other places where he is obviously not hiding, getting their opinions on American foreign policy, and he talks to soldiers in Afghanistan and he makes a little bit of commentary on the situation. But here’s the thing - this is a documentary. And I learned nothing. Documentaries are supposed to teach you something. Either give you a window into a world you have never heard about, or give you a new insight into something with which you are already familiar. This movie does neither.

In the end, it feels just like one of those TV news pieces where they go out on the street and ask people’s opinions about something. Like high gas prices or Dion’s green shift. It’s just done in other parts of the world rather than in the United States. And Morgan Spurlock, while he has the ability to be funny, attempts to inject humour into this film where it doesn’t really belong, and it ends up being less funny and more irritating. Interspersed in between his interviews with the regular people of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, we get treated to phone calls between Spurlock and his pregnant wife who is waiting at home for him to return. I don’t know if these conversations are thrown in there as a way of justifying the fact that the film maker never really puts himself in harm’s way, or if they are just another way of making the movie more about Spurlock himself. Either way, it’s just distracting.

And I don’t think he needed to put himself in harm’s way. He seems to be doing so, at certain points in the movie, but you get the sense that at no time is he really in any danger at all. And if you’re going to make a movie like this, you have to do one of two things. Either go all the way - search through the mountains, dodge bullets, and talk to potentially dangerous terrorist targets. Or, make a movie that is so insightful and compelling that no one will care about the fact that you aren’t really trying to catch Osama Bin Laden. Spurlock has done neither, and therefore the movie doesn’t work. To find a really good movie about this conflict and this sort of subject matter, check out Blood Of My Brother. And ignore Where In The World is Osama Bin Laden.