Grizzly Man
Timothy Treadwell lived for 13 summers with grizzly bears as if they were tame and loving creates before he was killed by one them. Treadwell created in total 100 hours of film footage that Werner Herzog has woven into an arresting documentary. The film is the most original piece of work that I have seen in a long time. It deserves to be seen by any serious student of the cinematographic art. Treadwell tells us that he is unable to live in “the people’s world.” Casting himself very successfully on the 100 hours of footage as an actor in a film shot in beautiful Alaska, he goes on to say that he committed himself to spending all summer protecting what he believed to be an endangered species. He constantly risks his own life and during the last two years also that of his girlfriend.
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Like with many borderline crazy people, there is rationality in his madness. Treadwell deep down knew that at his core he was an artist (who can only exist in relationship to society) and that he was willing to sacrifice everything to create a piece of art that had never existed before and but for him would have never seen the day of light. By taking us away from civilization into the wild and brutal world of grizzly bears, Treadwell was able to provide an entirely new perspective on civilization. He brings us right to the point where we can see: Man Grizzly.
March of the Penguins
In high school biology classes I watched many films about animal and plant life. The one I recall most vividly is Konrad Lorenz tricking little geese into believing that he was their parent during a particular phase in their young life. These films were produced on relatively modest budgets. In the hearts and minds of teenagers they could not compete with the Hollywood pictures that we went to see over the weekend. Once in a while I would doze off during my biology films because the classroom was darkened, tricking my body into thinking is was night and time to go to bed. Hollywood films on the weekend could never play this trick on me. March of the Penguins just as its eye-popping predecessor Winged Migration beautifully marries Hollywood style film-making with the genre of high school biology films. Invented was this potent genre in France where Hollywood films are taxed to subsidize domestic film production.
Capote
As a biography of a major writer of the 20th century America Capote is an artistic failure. The film covers only a short period in Capote’s life when he researched and wrote In Cold Blood. The script utterly lacked a central requirement of a good biography: make us understand the person better. All we learn about Capote is that he was almost as cold-blooded as the murderers he interviewed in his pursuit of a story that could make him a famous writer. I suspect many critics have sung high praises for this mediocre film because they identify with the fellow writers. This is made easier because the best scenes in the film are when Capote entertains fellow writers in New York salons. Capote leaves no doubt that making a film about a world-class writer is a nearly impossible task. The most electrifying moment of the entire film occurs when Capote reads a few passages from his book In Cold Blood. You immediately think: What amazing language! How did he think of stringing these words together! The film itself never comes close to the quality embodied in these passages from the book. I am looking forward to reading In Cold Blood. The script utterly lacked a central requirement of a good biography: make us understand the person better.
The Fog of War
Robert McNamara was a cold warrior with a soft heart. He led the Pentagon under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson until the disagreements between Johnson and McNamara over Vietnam became too large. This film is one long interview with McNamara. The subtitle of the documentary is “Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.” The lessons he has to offer are profound and some of them you have never heard before. I don’t want to give away some of the amazing things that he reports. Anyone living in the 21 century should see what McNamara has witnessed in his lifetime.
The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo
PBS broadcasted today for the first time a documentary on the painter Frida Kahlo If you have not seen the Hollywood motion picture Frida with Selma Hayek in the role of Frida, you will find the documentary very stimulating. But if you have seen Selma Hayek’s marvelous Frida, you realize just how accurately the Hollywood film captured the life of this pioneering Mexican woman. The problem for this documentary is that there was nothing left out in the Hollywood picture. Hats of to Selma Hayek and the people who made the Hollywood motion picture about Frida.
(Here you find a schedule of future broadcasts of the documentary.)
Some of Frida’s paintings trying to express her inner turmoil are the most arresting paintaings I have ever seen expressing humon emotion. There is a wonderful website in Italy that provides links to many of her paintaings.
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Bowling for Columbine
My expectations were only moderately high after having been disappointed by Moore’s under-researched Fahrenheit 9/11. Already during the first couple of minutes, you get the sense that Bowling for Columbine is a superbly crafted film. The symbol of guns is so deeply embedded in the American psyche and the facts about gun violence in America are so well documented that Moore can use a simple technique: Let people from all walks of life talk about their views on the issue and what emerges is the material for an amazing picture of American society. Moore in the best sense of the word directs peoples’ statements into a gripping tale about contemporary America. You are shocked, you learn, and you laugh. The Oscar 2003 Oscar for best documentary is well-deserved. The film is a masterpiece.
As an aside: I watched this movie late at night at the gym on the Stairmaster. Toward the middle of the film a particularly funny scene made me laugh out loud. Not far from me an employee was cleaning up the gym. The five-foot one slender blond girl seemed to tell me something but I couldn’t hear what she was saying with my headphone on. I took them off and now could understand her words. “I thought you were laughing about me,” she says. “No, I am laughing about a scene in Bowling for Columbine. It is really funny,” I reply. “I hear that it is good but I don’t like its message,” she adds. “I grew up in Michigan with guns and I believe that everyone has a right to wear them.” Over the next minutes, she utters the same justifications for guns that Moore captured on his film. “Everyone has a right to defend oneself. It is in the constitution. I am small 5 foot 1 woman. If someone tries to rob me in my car, I can only defend myself with a gun. And when people attack someone, they deserve to be shot.” I objected that shooting someone because they want to take $20 out of your wallet is perhaps a bit extreme. “ “No, I am allowed to defend myself with a gun.” Michael Moore pointed his finger on why so many people pay dues to the National Rifle Association. They feel insecure and believe that a loaded gun in the house or the car is going to make them safer. But what I also realized in this conversation is that people are socialized into the belief that guns are an American right enshrined in the constitution. Gunn ownership forms part of their self-identity. I presented the obvious objection to the belief that the constitution allows everyone to bear arms for self-defense (rather than to form a militia to protect the commonwealth): “So, you think I can bring into this gym my personal nuclear weapon in case some of the big guys over there try to beat me up or take my DVD player?” Then she said, “No, that would be too extreme.” What I realized at this moment is that when people like her insist on the constitutional right to bear arms, they insist on being able to do what they grew up with. Since they did not grow up in a society in which everyone brought his or her little nuclear weapon to the gym, they don’t have difficulty prohibiting the right to bear nuclear arms. But since they are guided by emotions and not logic, they don’t understand that logically speaking this makes no sense. The parents of the children who were killed at the Columbine High School believe that it is simply too extreme in an urban and modern society to allow kids to get easily get their hands on guns.
Fahrenheit 9/11
Anyone who expects a documentary in the style of Ken Burns will be disappointed. There is no true analysis of why almost half of the electorate still seems to supporting Bush a few days before the election. Michael Moore has copied the methods of the Bush Whitehouse and engages in his own kind of propaganda. He turns the George Bush presidentcy into a farce. There are a few funny lines that will make you laugh unless you are George Bush. The first half of the film about the Saudi connection to Bin Laden and the Bushs is weaker than the second part where Moore turns the camera on the war in Iraq. He features a soldier who will rather go to jail than go back for a second tour in the Iraq war and a mother who lost her son in Iraq and is mad as hell. If Bush loses next week, the decision to invade Iraq will be the chief reason, giving Michael Moore a beautiful opening to help film him out of the office.
Capturing the Friedmans
Watching the life of a child molester and the disintegratation of his family is probably not the kind of story most people consider seeing when they wish to have a good night at the movies. But this documentary is such a spectacular piece of work that even a difficult subject cannot get in the way of having a great film experience. The film raises all sorts of interesting questions about family relations and how different people experience and remember the same events. This is a must-see film for any aspiring documentary maker.
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