Shared Darkness

While renewed calls for a national focus on income inequality, predominantly grounded in a discussion of a minimum wage hike, are met with predictable squeals of “Class warfare!” from barons of industry, perched-on-high professional capitalists and other assorted defenders of the status quo, there’s an important second front in this developing battle — one that can be seen in the emerging populism of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has made student loan debt (and the attendant profits reaped by federal government programs) one of her pillar issues. The new documentary Ivory Tower dives headlong into this thorny issue, not bemoaning achievement gaps or essaying the relative deterioration of American high schools and the public educational system, but instead asking pointed questions about what it is reasonable to expect from institutions of higher education, and how they may need to be retooled in the digital age.

Directed by Andrew Rossi, Ivory Tower rather clearly venerates college, but not in an empty-headed, reflexive or elitist manner. Rather, it makes a crisp, convincing case for the college classroom and university experience in sum being the ideal rehearsal spaces for democracy — where civility, an open mind and the free and reasoned exchange of contrasting opinions can forge crucial critical thinking and cooperative skills needed in almost every industry. The fiscal imperilment of this experience for future generations, then, is something that should give us all pause.

Utilizing profiles of a variety of institutions, Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times) sketches out how colleges in the United States, long regarded as leaders in higher education internationally, have come to embrace a competitive business model that often promotes turnover and expansion over the quality of learning. Akin to the Cold War’s arms race, this boom has been great for construction and layered levels of college and university administration, but without much benefit for students, who are increasingly asked to shoulder greater and greater costs. College tuitions have skyrocketed more than 1120 percent since 1980. This is especially true for state universities, many of whom have seen their endowments slashed and raided to fund Pyrrhic political victories.

The stories herein are edifying and interesting. In addition to examining historically black colleges and so-called “MOOCs” (massive open online courses) from companies like Coursera, Udacity and edX, Ivory Tower also roots down into a radical core premise — the idea of a quality education as a right. To this end, strands looking at Deep Springs College (a free school in California’s Death Valley that extracts a two-year commitment in exchange for labor and community service) and Cooper Union (another free school, established in 1859 by industrialist Peter Cooper and endowed by a lease fee on the land that houses the Chrysler Building) rate among the most interesting. The latter is particularly fascinating, detailing a student revolt against president Jamshed Bharucha when he introduces a plan to start charging tuition following a series of misguided expenditures and failed investments on the part of the board of trustees.

Interweaving an original score from Ian Hultquist that makes evocative use of a simple drum-and-guitar pattern, Rossi delivers a movie engorged at times with feeling, and full of questions for which there are not always necessarily easy real-world answers. Doesn’t that describe the college experience itself, however? Even when monsters and villains of parity and justice can be identified, after all, it doesn’t immediately deliver us a solution. Our mission: try, try again, fail again, fail better. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, PG-13, 90 minutes)

Chronicling some of the very tangible costs of dissident behavior in societies much less freer than ours, Danish filmmaker Andreas Johnsen’s Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case is an absorbing nonfiction look at renowned Chinese multimedia artist Ai Weiwei, who, after just under three months of isolated imprisonment with no formal charges, is transferred to house arrest and put on a year’s probation, barred from giving interviews or having a domestic online presence.

Alison Klayman‘s superb 2012 documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry offered up a much more rounded portrait of the man as an artist, though that film also dealt heavily with the political activism (including spearheading a citizens’ investigation into the more than 5,400 children who were killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in large part owing to shoddy government construction) which landed Ai in trouble with Chinese authorities. Following a contentious arrest, Klayman’s film actually ends with Ai emerging from his aforementioned confinement. Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case, then, tracks his cautious reemergence and attempts to come to grips with the emotional and physical fallout (sleep difficulties, a fog of depression) stemming from his detention. It’s less a study of China as a society in flux and more an unobtrusive document of roiled personality. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (International Film Circuit, unrated, 89 minutes)

A socially agitative work that throws a light on a systematic American political failure, and the placement of private profit and special interests ahead of public health, Fed Up tackles the childhood obesity plague in a manner that roils the stomach and heart in equal measure. Narrated by Katie Couric, director Stephanie Soechtig’s documentary lays waste to the cruel, dismissive assessment that corpulence is simply a reflection of a lack of personal willpower, arguing that lethargy, eating to excess and other behaviors associated with being overweight are often the result of overwhelmed biochemistry, and not the root cause of obesity.

One leaping-off reference point for Fed Up is the revelatory nonfiction offering Food, Inc., which did a solid $4.4 million in theaters in 2009, while also spawning a companion book of the same name. But the more apt comparisons may be the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth and 2004’s Super Size Me — films that got in the mainstream zeitgeist and seemed to alter perceptions on a fundamental level. Fed Up feels like it has the same potential, in that it elicits concern and personal reflection in similar portions. Soechtig’s film has the macro, analytical surveyor’s eye of the former film. It also has a pinch of the anecdotal pop (if not outrageousness) of the latter; its truths are self-evident and easy to grasp for a layperson, in other words.

Its makers are smart enough, too, to know what criticisms are coming their way. Fed Up sizes up the pushback-playbook of anti-regulation free-marketers (with its attendant howls of “nanny state” overreach), and shrewdly assays the lack of scientific mooring in their arguments. The association the film ultimately draws, comparing food industry causality deniers to Big Tobacco CEOs paraded before Congress, lying through their teeth, isn’t necessarily kind. But neither does it seem inappropriate. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (TWC/Radius, unrated, 98 minutes)

A kind of true-life, slow-motion disaster flick for the NPR set, director Rachel Boynton’s Big Men is an engaging documentary that roots down into the very human and relatable effects of the discovery of a huge African oil deposit upon a disparate variety of characters, from the penthouse to the pavement. Assaying the mores and motivations of all these dreamers and schemers, the film throws a spotlight on human fallibility, and all the shades of grey that color the geopolitical world. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Abramorama, unrated, 99 minutes)

Documentaries about the great financial crisis of 2008 have been numerous, but Hank: Five Years From the Brink attempts to put a personal spin on the affair, providing a look at the matter from the point-of-view of embattled Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Directed by Joe Berlinger, the film offers up a humanizing and in many ways sympathetic portrait of the man, but such a free-pass airing and seeming endorsement for many of his decisions, as well as a lack of substantive exploration of their after-effects, that it’s vexing throughout and at times borderline noxious.



Hank unfolds chiefly as a decorated extended interview — Paulson holding forth in his raspy, self-admitted monotone, with liberal gesticulations. The only other interviewee in the movie is Hank’s wife Wendy, and so the opening eight or 10 minutes of the movie sketches out a loving biography of the Illinois-raised, nature-loving Dartmouth University graduate, and his courtship of the Wellesley College student a couple years his junior. From there, the film charts Paulson’s professional life in mostly glowing terms — making partner at Goldman Sachs in 1982, then rising to COO in 1995 and eventually CEO in ’98.

After twice demurring when tapped to become Secretary of the Treasury, Paulson accepted the position in 2006. The bulk of the film then charts the choppy waters of economic calamity, beginning with the sub-prime mortgage market collapse that started in Europe in the latter half of 2007. For three weeks in September of 2008, Paulson — along with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Timothy Geithner — stood charged with preventing a total global financial collapse, by way of convincing bank CEOs, Congress and everyone else of unprecedented bailout packages totalling nearly $1 billion.

Anecdotes are few and far between herein (though Paulson does note that he believes the loud dry heaves from which he’s suffered throughout his life in moments of extreme tiredness and stress assisted in finally brokering a deal with Congress on the unpopular Troubled Asset Relief Program). But this isn’t a film of solid context and detail, either. Hank largely glosses over Paulson’s brief White House tenure in the 1970s — first as a staff assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense and then, from 1972 to ’73, as an assistant to John Ehrlichman — during which he would play a role in a 1971 bailout of Lockheed Martin. And his time at Goldman Sachs is described in only sunny, idealistic terms. While it paints him as a man of integrity not much concerned with money, the film doesn’t note that Paulson had to divest himself of $600 million worth of Goldman Sachs stock prior to becoming Treasury Secretary, so of course it doesn’t dare float a question about any potential conflict of interest.

More to the point, though, Hank has neither the stomach nor intellectual curiosity to ask many questions of substance. When it comes to issues like Bear Stearns stockholders being paid $10 per share rather than the initially offered $2 through a Fed-brokered deal to prop up JP Morgan’s purchase of the troubled investment bank, or, later, a direct injection of hundreds of billions of dollars in capital rather than buying up toxic assets under TARP, the film lets Paulson kind of skate by. He explains these decisions in broad strokes, with a shrug.

Letting his subject narrate his own story, Berlinger offers up a portrayal of a guy trying to manage, massage and mitigate Wall Street perception, above all else. This may or may not have been paramount in achieving economic stability (and there’s considerable evidence to suggest it was at least somewhat important), but some of the statements Paulson makes (“Complexity is the enemy of transparency, complexity is not a good thing in finance” and “None of us understood the extent of what we were dealing with”) without the benefit of any pushback or follow-up are rather galling.

Paulson tries to inoculate himself from criticism by noting that Wendy and his two children “weren’t fans” of the Bush administration prior to his accepting the cabinet position, but he also goes to significant (and significantly absurd) lengths to de-politicize the financial crisis in both its lead-up and most tangled time, praising President Bush’s access and engagement, though in only the vaguest terms. Hank seems smitten with and overly deferential to Paulson — it doesn’t press him on the issues of tracking mechanisms or other enforcement measures for TARP, so when in the final five minutes of the film he derides multi-million-dollar CEO bonuses as exhibiting a “graceless lack of self-awareness”… well, yeah, sure. There’s that, I guess. Was there any reason to be genuinely surprised, though, given their well-catalogued behavior?

Glass-half-fullers with an appetite for public affairs and political nonfiction programming may find intrigue in Hank: Five Years From the Brink, and reject the aforementioned criticisms as being not of Berlinger’s designated focus. There’s a measure of truth to that. But any film about the global financial crisis of 2008 that fails to seriously consider subsidized risk, the illegality of massive credit default swaps, echo-chamber thinking and, yes, lack of jail time for those who perpetrated this fraud is irresponsible at best and deleterious at worst. And that’s Hank. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its Los Angeles engagment at the Laemmle NoHo7 and other theatrical engagements, the film is also currently available on Netflix. For more information, click here to visit its website. (Abramorama Films/Bloomberg Businessweek, unrated, 86 minutes)

An insider’s account of almost six decades of Israeli history, the deadly dull The Prime Ministers is a Zionist booster shot that trades away what benefits in firsthand recollection and access it has through a steady drip of reflexive self-importance. The thirteenth production of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Academy Award-winning Moriah Films banner, director Richard Trank’s documentary isn’t so much a work of historical illumination or even the cinematic equivalent of a series of policy papers as it is a blinkered field trip through the turbulent annals of modern Israel, marked by a misguided attempt to “dramatize” events and/or lend it some measure of marquee, stamp-of-approval star power by way of a series of play-acted voiceovers from Sandra Bullock, Michael Douglas, Leonard Nimoy and Christoph Waltz. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Following its earlier bow in New York City, The Prime Ministers opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal and Laemmle Town Center, followed by an expansion to other cities and venues. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Moriah Films, unrated, 115 minutes)

The Federal Reserve is charged with controlling the United States’ monetary supply, regulating banks and setting interest rates. But prior to the financial collapse of 2008 and the quixotic quest of marginalized Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul to alternately audit and/or abolish the Fed, you’d have been hard-pressed to find more than one in 10 Americans who could tell you those facts, let alone articulate a cogent opinion on it. With his new documentary, director Jim Bruce aims to change that. Narrated by Liev Schreiber, Money For Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve throws a light on the most powerful financial institution on Earth, serving as an invaluable civic resource.

Markets around the world pay close attention to every action and utterance of the Fed Chairman, and have even more so ever since the abolishment of the gold standard (meaning paper dollars’ linkage to a fluctuating market price of that precious metal) in 1971, under the Nixon Administration. In a clear-eyed, non-partisan fashion, Money For Nothing (funded in part, ironically or depressingly, by Bruce’s short trades on financial stocks) does a good job of sketching out the history of the Fed, and how too often short-term benefit and/or political considerations get a hearing with the supposedly air-tight and independent body of regional presidents, or governors, that comprise the institution.

It’s a different animal than last year’s The Gatekeepers, director Dror Moreh’s nonfiction examination of the Israeli Shin Bet security agency, but Money For Nothing strikes a similar chord of slack-jawed amazement because it isn’t some clamorous document of outsider rage. That film had interviews with all of the living former agency heads who prosecuted a harsh anti-terror policy against the Palestinian people that many agree crossed a line of human decency. Comparably, Money For Nothing isn’t short on hard-edged self-reflection and insights. In addition to the expected assortment of economists, authors, investors and financial historians, Bruce also secures interviews with a remarkable array of former and current Fed officials, from former Chairman Paul Volcker to current Vice Chair Janet Yellen, whom many believe has the inside track to succeed departing Chairman Benjamin Bernanke.

On the one hand, the human face these interview subjects put on the Federal Reserve is very helpful and important. The Fed isn’t some conspiratorial organization worthy of a Dan Brown novel; it’s made up of real people. On the other hand, learning about some of their attitudes and beliefs, and their decision-making process is… well, often scary and depressing, in equal measure. This is especially true of the tenures of Alan Greenspan and the aforementioned Bernanke, in the decade-and-a-half leading up to the 2008 financial collapse.

The Fed is generally expected to lower interest rates based on problems and bubbles in the real economy, but the Money For Nothing makes clear the dangerous precedent set by Greenspan’s drastic lowering of rates during the Wall Street crash of October 1987. In essence, that meant that the Fed was now beholden to the whims of the stock market as well, and was to serve as its protector. While Greenspan was for a long time deified for his steady stewardship of the economy, the reality was that a mindset which socialized the risks of the rich had taken hold; Wall Street financial firms, merely following the incentive structure very clearly indicated by the Fed, would dream up and indulge in ever more complicated derivatives trading, among other things. Eventually, this would dovetail with an overheated housing market that would then balloon into the greatest credit bubble in world history.

As informative as it is, there’s a gut-punch sadness to Money For Nothing, then — a melancholic dawning. It puts something of a sour spin on capitalism and the undue attention and coddling the United States heaps on a sector of the economy that creates nothing. Bruce, leaning heavily on a score by composer Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, attempts to negotiate an emotional soft landing of sorts, pointing out various mechanisms of adjustment and consideration.

It only works up to a certain point, though, since meaningful and protective Wall Street banking reforms have not been enacted over the past five years. While fantastically enlightening as it relates specifically to the Federal Reserve, the chief parallel takeaway of Money For Nothing is something that is also evident in other walks of life: money talks, and there’s a well-heeled elite class that has a private line. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements in other cities, Money For Nothing opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Monica 4-Plex, where Bruce will be on hand for an in-person Q&A on opening weekend. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Liberty Street Films, unrated, 100 minutes)

A fascinating piece of nonfiction psychological portraiture, Informant tells the story of Brandon Darby, a former radical activist who made his name in the post-Katrina chaos of New Orleans, only to outrage much of the same community by later becoming a FBI informant and, under questionable circumstances, helping seal harsh criminal indictments against two young protestors at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

The only film with interview access to Darby since his public confession, Informant connects and succeeds as both a sociopolitical potboiler and a case study in unreliable narration. The film starts a bit slowly, but charts Texas native Darby’s intense reaction to the government’s bungled Katrina response, during which he headed to the Big Easy and co-founded the progressive grassroots relief organization Common Ground. While possessing a strong anti-authoritarian streak, Darby also had problems with the horizontal leadership hierarchies of activist groups; he seemed to want to make all the decisions himself.

The particulars that put him on a path toward government mole are a bit muddled and, in the grand scheme of things, not terribly important, but the portrait that emerges of Darby is of a lonely guy who’d survived an abusive childhood, and was driven by a desperate desire to be known for something big. When he was given even small doses of validation and emotional support by FBI handlers, it helped exponentially fertilize a sense of self-importance already within him, which in turn created a series of circumstances whereby he likely goaded younger activists who looked up to him into crossing an already blurry line of criminality. The fallout of the case is bizarre, with Darby now a Tea Party hero and active speaker on the right-wing political circuit, for having foiled an “anarchist plot” he helped foment.

Director Jamie Meltzer makes the unusual but engaging choice of introducing a couple atypical elements into his production, playing Darby portions of interviews that contradict his version of events, and also staging tense but at times subjective recreations starring his subject. The result doesn’t always provide the clearest picture of events from a chronological perspective, but interviewees across the political spectrum help lend credence to a reading of Darby that is, oxymoronically, sympathetic and judgmental: that of a big-hearted but big-headed guy whose ability to read right and wrong is enormously persuadable.

Some of the questions Informant raises — including that of a paranoid government security state driven to create crimes to solve — are expansive and scary, but Meltzer’s film has an all-too-human heart, which is what ultimately makes it compelling. Informant opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Music Box/Lucky Hat Entertainment/Filament Productions, unrated, 81 minutes)

A nonfiction film about the slow bleed of American manufacturing jobs over the past five to six decades, American Made Movie is engaging enough for armchair politicos, but generally more successful as a diagnostic statement of basic socioeconomic condition than a groundbreaking work in and of itself.

Directed by Nathaniel Thomas McGill and Vincent Vittorio, American Made Movie includes interviews with the owners, CEOs and workers from companies both small and large, as well as the heads of a number of manufacturing think tank and lobbyist groups that push their agenda to lawmakers at both the county, state and federal levels. In this respect, it certainly gathers some good/outrageous anecdotes — including the story of Merrie Buchsbaum, a jewelry maker who started her own business, developed a homemade line of stars-and-stripes earrings and necklaces called Americana, landed a lucrative contract at the Smithsonian Museum, and then saw her idea undercut by a Chinese manufacturer of plastic trinkets.

American Made Movie has a lot of these types of authentic, sympathetic voices — hardworking folks who, as someone notes, can compete against anyone in the world, but not foreign governments, which have enormously subsidized and underwritten the catch-up in manufacturing in many countries. The movie also throws a patriotic light on companies like New Balance — the last athletic shoe manufacturer to still make their sneakers in the United States.

Unfortunately, American Made Movie feels disjointed in sketching out correlative relationships, from past to the present and into the future. It touches on the #OccupyWallStreet protests of 2011, but seems uncertain of how to fold that event — along with a tripling in the national income gap over the past three decades-plus — into a narrative that breaks down along free trade versus protectionist lines.

To its credit, American Made Movie doesn’t merely sound the gong of xenophobic alarm. It possesses an even, rational tone throughout. But neither does it feel like builds to a point of particular climax or catharsis. The film is saddled with a sing-songy, frequently dopey voiceover narration, and the solutions McGill and Vittorio ascribe to the predicament range from simplistic to politically dubious. American Made Movie is mostly an audio-visual book report of plot synopsis; it leaves one wanting for just a little more — a little more clarity, a little more fire, a little more investigation, and a little more righteousness. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more general information, visit the movie’s eponymous website or Facebook page. (Variance Films/Life is My Movie Entertainment, G, 85 minutes)

A healthy roster of social-activist documentaries have tackled America’s public education crisis, most notably Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting For Superman. Director James Takata’s We the Parents, though, is refracted through a decidedly different prism.

A briskly paced piece of moment-in-time cinema, it’s a fascinating look at the new frontier of so-called parent trigger laws, which allow, via petition signatures, 51 percent of parents to basically form a union with control to either shut down their children’s place of learning or transform it into a charter school. The first law was passed by the California State Legislature in January, 2010; six additional states, including Texas, Indiana, Ohio and Connecticut, have followed suit, with another 20 states considering similar regulations.

We the Parents throws a warm, loving sunbeam of advocacy on Parent Revolution, a non-profit organization which, eschewing what it deems the outmoded “PTA model” of parental involvement, aggressively touts parents as the largest stakeholder group in the entire education system, and thus seeks to leverage that majority share into political power, through means that involve as much cudgeling as cajoling. A good portion of We the Parents charts the grassroots, community organizing efforts of the group as they first recruit and then help support parents for the law’s debut test case, involving failing McKinley Middle School in Compton.

While it’s definitely a movie which sides with this somewhat radical upending of conventional power structure and command, Parent Revolution’s Ben Austin and many others — including parents themselves, most of whom, existing on the socioeconomic margins, have been cowed too long by the political process — speak movingly as to the goals and larger possibilities of the parent trigger law. Also, Takata does include interviews with figures from McKinley’s administration, who obviously stood in dissent to the reform efforts.

In this most immediate sense, there’s a gripping, social-legal thriller aspect to the film, as one wants to see how things pan out for these families. (Spoiler alert: signature verification technicalities and other legal pushback ensues, putting matters back in the courts, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.) More robust dissent and a research-oriented point-of-view may likely have given We the Parents greater depth and dimensionality, but with the first schools transformed under this new law opening their doors this very week in California, Takata’s film represents a timely, relevant snapshot of a cause in active motion. Following its local engagement at the Laemmle Music Hall, We the Parents opens in New York City at the Quad Cinema on September 6. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Go For Broke Pictures, unrated, 60 minutes)

In 2010, Josh Fox’s shocking documentary Gasland, with footage of Pennsylvania residents along the Delaware River Basin lighting their tap water on fire, drilled down into the issue of hydraulic fracturing, helping to introduce the word “fracking” into the broader American lexicon. It was a gripping and oddly poetic nonfiction work, and perhaps the most moving piece of cinematic social advocacy since Michael Moore’s Roger & Me. An Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Film followed, along with an embrace by the Beltway punditocracy and an entirely predictable subsequent backlash; Fox became the lightning rod/poster boy for the controversial issue of domestic natural gas extraction.

Debuting and playing throughout this month on HBO, Gasland Part II continues the story, with Fox’s trademark deadpan, sardonic narration. Again frequently sporting a black hoodie and his beaten-up Yankees baseball cap, Fox unspools his tale like an environmental noir. As the map expands nationally and even globally (Australia comes into play), Fox examines key legislative victories and setbacks in fights to establish legal precedent and bring the natural gas industry in line with provisions of the Safe Water Drinking Act. Fox also smartly circles back around and checks in with some of the subjects of Gasland, including Dr. Al Armendariz and the mayor of frack-heavy Dish, Texas, who’s planning a move out of town.

Whereas documentary sequels are a fairly new and still rare phenomenon, Gasland Part II gives off a bit of the vibe of a placeholder installment — a certainly not-unimportant one, but a time-marking entry nonetheless. It’s bleak at times, with significant triumphs and protections getting overturned and erased. In some respects it’s sort of The Empire Strikes Back of what one presumes to be a larger, continuing series — a parallel not lost on Fox, who even namechecks that movie in recounting the efforts of moneyed powers-that-be to squash and discredit both he and his first film.

Editorially, Gasland Part II suffers a few hiccups. Some of its revelations are notable if still somewhat circumstantial. For instance, in 2009 the American Natural Gas Alliance hired the same public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, that in the 1950s peddled cigarette advertising featuring doctors touting their health benefits. Tidbits like these beg for further digging or illumination that, even with a running time of just over two hours, often doesn’t fully materialize. Fox, too, has a way of sometimes setting things up only to quickly abandon them and then awkwardly loop back, making over-the-shoulder connections that could work in conversation but are less efficient and persuasive in cinematic form.

Still, if the movie doesn’t always present a reconciled public face for Fox’s various instincts — raconteur, intellectual, grief mop — it undeniably establishes him as a populist authority on the subject of fracking. “You have a lot of upper-middle class white people with college degrees getting ticked off because they’re being treated the way third world indigenous populations have always been treated,” one interviewee notes. If hydraulic fracturing is to remain an integral component of the United States’ national energy plan moving forward in the 21st century — and it is just that in President Obama’s current plans — that phenomenon will only continue to increase. Fox, one feels, will be there too, chronicling the contretemps. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 126 minutes)

Ben Affleck‘s Oscar-winning Argo opened up some eyes to the Iranian Revolution, which — largely owing to American support for the overthrown Shah — never really seemed to receive a full and honest treatment in the United States press at the time, and certainly hasn’t since relations between the two nations have calcified in distrust. Even nastier scabs are ripped off, however, in the emotional documentary My Stolen Revolution, which tells the story of a group of female dissidents tortured under the Islamic regime.

Her memories sparked by the recent “Arab Spring” protests in Iran, director Nahid Persson Sarvestani — a stalwart Communist Party intellectual who escaped the country with her one-year-old daughter — tracks down five of her far-flung former comrades, one of whom also escaped but the rest of whom were imprisoned and tortured. What ensues over the first half of the film is a sort of Broken Flowers-style travelogue, driven by the director’s desire to have her adult daughter understand their roots, as well as her desire to expiate the guilt she feels over the arrest and subsequent execution of her younger brother Rostam. For the second half of the movie, Sarvestani gathers the women at her home in Sweden, where they share and reminiscence.

Some might argue that the narration which channels the others’ experiences through Sarvestani’s free-form shame and remorse is self-absorbed, but My Stolen Revolution, which just enjoyed its North American premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival, is primarily a work of witness. The stories (including infections resulting from beatings, and at least one rape) are sometimes gruesome and almost always outright inhumane, but mostly just overwhelmingly heartbreaking; the notion of a young girl acting out on her blindfolded doll just the sort of physical abuse and physical beating she saw her mother take in real life is hard to process.

Like a wide variety of documentaries dealing with genocide and torture — including Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath’s Enemies of the People and Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure — My Stolen Revolution shines an uncomfortable but necessary light on the cruelty and sadism that too often goes hand in hand with absolutism, whether religious or otherwise. As much queasy ire as Sarvestani’s movie evokes, though, its subjects are sterling examples of the resilience of the human spirit. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Real Reel Productions, unrated, 75 minutes)

They bear the puckish name of an American liberal arts college group, and their air-quote music — blasts of awkwardly rhymed social complaint that makes Liam Lynch’s “United States of Whatever” sound like a delicate Shakespearean sonnet — is quite honestly dismissible at best, so in one sense it’s something of an unlikely surprise that Pussy Riot has achieved the notoriety they have.



Formed in 2011 after Vladimir Putin was nominated for a third term as Russian president, this controversial, anonymous feminist art collective took issue with what they deem the excessive nationalism Putin promotes, and well as the various rollbacks in freedoms and general church-sanctioned patriarchy over which he has presided. A series of public performance-art style protests came to a head on February 12, 2012, when masked members of the group jumped up on the altar of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a place sacred to Orthodox Christians, for a 40-second blast of punk music. Arrests and international hot-button status ensued.

The new HBO documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, then, attempts to peel back a bit of the hype and present the facts of the case, following the trial of Masha Alyokhina, Nadia Tolokonnikova and Katia Samutsevich — each of whom face seven years in prison on charges of “disrupting social order by an act of hooliganism that shows religious hatred.” Directors Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin intercut interviews with the participants, their parents and other figures with courtroom footage and other TV clips that showcase a certain lit fuse of fundamentalist fervor in the country.

The film doesn’t evidence much of a unifying technical aesthetic, but — bolstered as it is by a nice array of performance clips and ancillary protest footage — there is a certain grungy-chic quality to it. There’s a pinch of history herein too (the church in question was torn down in 1931 under Josef Stalin, and only rebuilt in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union), but while dissenting viewpoints are roundly tolerated, A Punk Prayer doesn’t really endeavor to delve deeply into the insecurity and offense of fundamentalists. (Then again, maybe it’s a matter of the articulateness, or lack thereof, of the subjects to which it does grant time; one elderly protester compares the Pussy Riot performance to “taking a shit in your apartment.”)

Part of this disconnect and agitation surely relates to there existing no real point of collective reference in the former Soviet Union for performance art or punk music. To many, Pussy Riot seem to come across as a half-step removed from mouth-foaming aliens, so their message of freedom of speech and broader political participation is drowned out by the clamorous means of their expression. A couple figures, including a somewhat sympathetic-sounding prosecutor, seem to grasp this.

But, paradoxically, in largely tightening its focus to the women and some of their immediate family, Lerner and Pozdorovkin fail to fully explore the both Russian and international resonance of their message, by way of the protests and counter-protests the trial spawned. Ergo, while interesting throughout, A Punk Prayer seems like a bit of a missed opportunity, insofar as its connection to the personal freedoms Westerners so cherish and speechify about. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 88 minutes)

A recent Los Angeles premiere at the 16th annual Dances With Films, Tumor: It’s in the System joins a considerable slate of contemporary documentaries — inclusive of Peter Nicks’ raw, verité-style The Waiting Room — offering up a damning assessment of different elements of the American health care system. Here it’s a look at how potential alternative treatments (like divisive Gerson therapy) and even cures for cancer have been suppressed since the early 1900s — the implication being that some combination of the bureaucratic regulatory system and the rapacious self-interest of capitalism have combined to incentivize managed treatment of symptoms over the long-term health of the population.

Such material has the capacity to tip over into “black helicopter” territory fairly quickly, but co-directors Valerie McCaffrey and Cindy Pruitt, despite a fevered sense of advocacy that sometimes gets the better of their editorial plotting, do a generally good job of interweaving testimonials from an array of open-minded physicians and unusual survivors whose stories belie the myth that chemotherapy is the only — or indeed, even the best — way to combat cancer. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Become a Revolution Productions, unrated, 76 minutes)

It’s safe to say that Michael Perlman, the director of the new documentary Free China: The Courage to Believe, won’t be receiving the red carpet treatment any time soon in the glorious People’s Republic of China. (Hell, even simply attaching my name to anything other than a vicious attack review may bring about a mysterious denial-of-service incident on this site.) A damning nonfiction look at the human rights abuses of the world’s most populous country as filtered specifically through the oppression of Falun Gong practitioners and two enormously sympathetic, steel-spined subjects, Perlman’s film makes a case for the indomitability of the human spirit and the eventual futility of unreasonable autocratic will.

Free China is so interesting (and important, plus in an odd way reassuring) not merely because it exposes some of the specifics of China’s abysmal human rights record, but because it also ties this issue in with unfair and unjust labor practices. The stories — both individually and on a macro level — are a travesty, certainly, but if there’s a cold comfort to be found it’s in the long-game absurdity of the Chinese government’s attempts to build a Great Internet Firewall, whereby it can keep out all influences and voices around the world it deems inappropriate, and crash it at a moment’s notice to stifle any gathering storm of protest. This may work for a generation, maybe two. But human nature trends toward curiosity, and freedom. It’s a losing strategy in the long term, especially as international consensus pools in areas unattached to China’s opinions. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie and how to take up the banner of its social cause, meanwhile, click here to visit the film’s website. (World2Be Productions, unrated, 61 minutes)

If every war is a thousand rolling tragedies, then the flip side of such conflict is also the opportunities it provides for humanity to showcase the better angels of its nature. Poker is the unlikely binding agent at the heart of Rescue in the Philippines: Refuge from the Holocaust, a briskly paced documentary in which a disparate but closely knit cabal — including the president of the Philippines and a future president of the United States — work together to concoct an intricate plan of rescue and re-settlement, saving over 1,300 Jews from death in Nazi concentration camps. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Rescue in the Philippines opens exclusively in Los Angeles this week at the Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills. (Three Roads Productions, unrated, 60 minutes)

For better and worse, and particularly for those on the younger side of the boomer generation, New York City’s mayors have often stood astride national politics, even before the events of September 11, 2001. No one typifies that more than the recently deceased Ed Koch, who was a unique political brand — at once easygoing and tough — whose blunt, blustery appeal can be traced forward in time to a figure like current New Jersey governor Chris Christie.

A divisive three-term Democratic mayor whose tenure spanned the 1970s and ’80s and whose post-political career would include gadfly commentary and a two-year stint as the judge on The People’s Court, Koch was to plenty a hero, and yet to others an opportunistic race-baiter. He was never boring, however, nor anyone but himself, qualities which are on abundant and inimitable display in the entertaining, thought-provoking and in some ways even elegiac portrait of Neil Barsky’s new documentary, Koch.



A self-described “liberal with sanity,” the Jewish Koch was a quick-on-his-feet populist — he garnered over 75 percent of the vote in his successful re-election bids, and was the first candidate to score Democratic and Republican party endorsements in the same election — who rounded into form after an unlikely and unruly 1977 primary to unseat incumbent Abe Beame. An ex-Congressman, his fierce advocacy for the city of New York and his ability to spin, spar (can one imagine today a politician telling a voter point-blank to shut up?) and frame informed conviction as truth and right would find welcome reception with voters and media alike. “As a politician you have got to get the public to follow you,” says Koch in one of the film’s interview segments, “and you can only do that by being bigger than life — it’s theatrics.”

That instinct drove various reforms — none bigger than his ambitious, multi-billion-dollar public housing program — but would also eventually make Koch the strong and very personal enemy of all sorts of groups who felt marginalized by both his decisions and decision-making processes. Koch’s closure of the Harlem-adjacent Sydenham Hospital, one of 17 municipal city hospitals, would strain and stain relations with African-Americans for years (along with other issues), and his aggressive leveraging of condemnations of 42nd Street properties — which would eventually pave the way for the commercial boom of Times Square — would have to beat back 47 separate lawsuits to stand. Koch’s third term would bring what some viewed as comeuppance — unprecedented scandal via a string of bid-rigging, phony contracts and bribes attached to various borough presidents and city commissioners.

The gift of Koch, then, is that it embraces the clutter and volume of opinion about the man, without stooping to its nastiest extremes. Having the subject as a driving force of the film certainly helps; Koch is just a great interview, whether addressing the Sydenham controversy, the many rumors and smears about his sexuality (he never married, and was rumored to be a closeted homosexual, which rendered fraught his relationship with the gay community during the AIDS crisis) or any other manner of topic. Barsky takes the measure of the man, and if his portrait is undeniably rather favorable, it also honestly addresses outside criticisms of Koch’s governance, and mostly forthrightly puts this dissent to him.

In its third act, the movie lags a bit, focusing in dawdling fashion on legacy burnishing. Still, an attractive technical package, inclusive of classy, evocative cinematography by Tom Hurwitz and smartly chosen and juxtaposed archival news clips, boosts this engaging nonfiction snapshot’s profile and appeal. Koch is a reminder that our best politicians aren’t timid creatures, but neither are we likely going to agree with them on every issue, so it’s important to remember that they shouldn’t be punished to the extreme for that fact. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Zeitgeist, unrated, 95 minutes)

In addition to a slew of recent books, Saving Lincoln arrives on the heels of Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated film, just in advance of this weekend’s Tom Hanks-narrated Killing Lincoln on National Geographic, and not far behind a piece of mash-up entertainment that repositioned the 16th president of the United States as a neck-slashing sworn enemy of vampires. So what could director Salvador Litvak’s micro-budgeted curiosity possibly contribute to the Lincoln canon? A decent bit, it turns out, if primarily for history buffs and open-minded arthouse cineastes.

The film is notable for two reasons — the first, and most readily apparent, being that it’s built around a novelty compositing scheme that uses historical photographs to build scenic 3-D backdrops (more on this later). But Saving Lincoln also filters the story of Lincoln’s ascendency and presidential struggles throughout the Civil War through the eyes of Ward Hill Lamon (Lea Coco), his former law partner and confidant. When the first attempt is made on Lincoln’s life, in 1861, Lamon appoints himself the President’s bodyguard. This narrative prism gives Lincoln’s various subsequent crises of confidence a distinctly personal and human weight.

Some of the movie’s drama is too on the nose and characterized by speechifying, and other bits are outright tinny. The performances vary, too. Coco is all blustery earnestness, and Tom Amandes, as Lincoln, doesn’t fully capture the in-his-bones weariness Lincoln feels from the weight of the war, instead relying on actorly mannerisms and tricks. Still, Saving Lincoln is an unusual exception to an old screenwriting rule — a movie whose framing device benefits and saves it much more than its actual execution.

Part of this has to do with some of the inherent interest and gravitas attached to certain scenes in and of themselves (Lincoln’s arguing of the Emancipation Proclamation before his cabinet, and the Gettysburg Address), but a lot of it also has to do with the film’s look, which alternately enchants and lowers one’s demands or expectations of the movie. Working with cinematographer Alexandre Naufel, Litvak achieves a look that might be best described as a sort of ultra-low-budget Sucker Punch, with washed-out sepia tones dominating green-screen-type backgrounds for which unerring dramatic realism is not the aim. Were the script tighter, it would be interesting to see Litvak’s approach applied in an even much more aggressively minimalist style (think Lars von Trier’s Dogville), to further spotlight and artistically re-contextualize the stakes of its stark arguments regarding liberty.

Still, almost in spite of itself sometimes, perhaps because just it spans a greater period of time than Spielberg and Day-Lewis’ recent big-budget collaboration, Saving Lincoln connects as an ancillary curio about the man and his struggles, at least for history buffs. Open-minded arthouse aficionados could also certainly do far worse than to spend another 100 minutes getting lost in the struggles of this fascinating, steel-willed man. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Saving Lincoln opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, in Beverly Hills; for more information on screenings and viewing options, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Lane Street Pictures, unrated, 101 minutes)

An innovative, riveting and thought-provoking overview of the brutal history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, director Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers, along with the unfortunately overlooked Tears of Gaza, makes a strong and vigorous case for a re-examination of the United States’ relationship with Israel, and an adjustment that reflects the reality of them as a powerful ally but not a 51st state. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 102 minutes)

A tack-sharp political drama with satirical underpinnings, Knife Fight digs into the characteristic foibles of high-rolling politicians through the point-of-view of campaign operatives, and dissects ego and ambition, idealism and win-at-any-cost pragmatism, but all without succumbing to lazy, armchair cynicism. A collaboration between Oscar-winning director Bill Guttentag and political consultant Chris Lehane, Knife Fight is smartly written and superbly cast, and one of the more lithe and entertaining explicitly political films of the new decade — a true movie of the moment that is every bit the look behind closed doors of modern American politics that The Ides of March was, but a lot more tonally balanced and laced with an undercurrent of hopefulness.



Media consultant and political strategist Paul Turner (Rob Lowe, crushing a pitch right in his performance wheelhouse) is a savvy, in-demand figure, juggling work on multiple campaigns from his San Francisco base, the movie’s main setting. Paul’s young and more naive assistant, Kerstin Rhee (Jamie Chung), still isn’t entirely sure of whether or not she wants to commit to this profession. Their two main present gigs are for Kentucky governor Larry Becker (Eric McCormack), facing a tough re-election challenge against a former major league baseball player, and California Senator Stephen Green (David Harbour), a popular war veteran whose incumbency is threatened by a blackmail plot at the hands of a scheming masseuse (Brooke Newton).

As Paul works to feed information through an ambitious reporter, Peaches O’Dell (Julie Bowen), he can’t help tumbling into a “FWB” relationship with her. He also has to contend with the persistence of an idealistic doctor turned would-be gubernatorial candidate, Penelope Nelson (Carrie-Anne Moss), negotiating a labyrinth of strategies and considerations that brings him into contact with his private-eye operative (Richard Schiff), a damaged college student (Amanda Crew) and a powerful TV network chief (Chris Mulkey) eager to use his airwaves for some political score-settling.

The crispness of its characterizations is what first jumps out at a viewer regarding Knife Fight. Each player, no matter how big or small, is imbued with a particular, identifiable motivation or at least world-view, and it’s in the push and pull of this morally grey twilight that the movie unfolds. Paul, who ponders what Machiavelli would do and counsels Kerstin on the outsized personal weaknesses that typically come with outsized political talent, is a brutal adherent to the dictum that the ends justify the means. Part of the beauty of Knife Fight, then, is that it forces a personal reckoning upon him without stooping to the calculating, pat ridiculousness of some 180-degree swing in conscience or character. As things go sideways, Paul comes to recognize certain boundaries, and the potential values of at least some moderation. But he does not ignore his experience, or abandon his principles.

Lest that all sound too wonky, Knife Fight is a lot of fun, too. While it’s not written or told with quite the same level of exuberant, sometimes over-the-top flourish as The West Wing and The Newsroom, fans of Aaron Sorkin’s somewhat similarly themed small screen political offerings would be especially advised to seek this film out. Lehane’s political experience (he was press secretary for former vice president Al Gore‘s 2000 presidential campaign, among much other work) comes through in the spot-on ads for Becker, Green and their opponents, as well as a myriad of small ways.

And the performances crackle too. Lowe, as rakish and charming as ever, is adept at tough but good-natured characters — slipping a knife into someone’s ribs with a smile. He has a surprisingly engaging rapport with Chung, who is also quite good, and it’s surely a credit to Guttentag — a winner of two Academy Awards for his documentary work — that actresses like Crew and Jennifer Morrison, among others, shine so brightly in their small roles.

Well put together and dinged only a smidge by an ending that could have used a few more smudges, Knife Fight puts a lively face on contemporary politicking. That KT Tunstall’s cover version of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” rolls over the end credits is yet another reminder that certain core American traditions endure, but also always serve themselves up for changes. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Knife Fight is also available to view on VOD, iTunes, Sundance Now, Xbox, PlayStation, Amazon, Google Play and YouTube. For more information, click here to visit its website. (IFC Films, R, 99 minutes)

A well meaning and deeply felt counter-culture documentary touting societal engagement, creative response to problems as well as activism more generally, Let Fury Have the Hour rages against communal indifference and fiscal recklessness and greed, but never mounts much more than a scattershot attack against the mainstream targets and hegemonic establishment ideologies it fixes in its sights. Unfolding in the style of a rather exuberant mixed media collage, however, and featuring a wide array of interesting interviewees, the film is nonetheless a fairly engaging call to action, no matter the fuzzy, indistinct chorus of its melodious sermon to the choir.



Director Antonio D’Ambrosio’s movie, which premiered last year at the Tribeca Film Festival, is an unapologetically raw and impassioned slice of social history which takes as its leaping-off point the 1980s rise to power, respectively, of Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and then winds its way through the reactive artistic comings-of-age of a variety of figures. Those interviewed include artist Shepard Fairey, economist Richard Wolff, playwright Eve Ensler, rapper Chuck D (above), rocker Tom Morello, environmentalist Van Jones and filmmaker John Sayles, the latter of whom speaks quite interestingly and eloquently about attending the 1980 national GOP convention and experiencing firsthand the significant difference between the rhetoric on the floor versus what was televised in the event’s truncated network news packaging.

Let Fury Have the Hour touches on everything from counter-cultural phenomena like skateboarding and breakdancing to more recognized forms of art and music (particularly punk rock and political rap, in the form of Fugazi and Public Enemy). While discussing their own creative awakenings, the interview subjects provide a sociopolitical frame for their experiences, talking about (in their view) the predominant peddled worldview of those on the political right — that to care is selfish, to help is vain, and personal happiness is available chiefly through consumption and one’s individual purchasing power.

In one sense, D’Ambrosio’s headstrong resistance to more rigidly funneling his film through a stronger editorial lens is admirable, as it gives Let Fury Have the Hour a ranginess that keeps it fresh and surprising. At the same time, as a single cogent work, the movie leaves one wanting for more. There doesn’t seem to be a very strongly reasoned topic sentence here, something that a few half-hearted late stabs at connecting activism in general to the turbulence of democratic uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere seem to underscore. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, which opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7 and will also be released on VOD on March 5 via SnagFilms, click here to visit its website. (SnagFilms/CAVU Pictures/Gigantic Pictures, unrated, 87 minutes)

In his first directorial effort without his twin brother, Allen Hughes roots down into urban vice and sullied power corridors with Broken City, a muscular but middling thriller of sprawling political corruption whose reach exceeds its grasp. Starring Mark Wahlberg as a crusading, recovering alcoholic ex-cop gunning to bring down an ethically questionable mayor of New York City (Russell Crowe), the movie is gritty but narratively unconvincing in wide swatches, succeeding in tone and atmosphere more than the specifics of its conspiratorial plotting. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, R, 109 minutes)