June 12, 2004
Fahrenheit 9/11.
Fahrenheit 9/11, the new documentary by Michael Moore, begins with a scene that is likely to take the breath away from any American liberal. Not the bombings in Iraq, not the Pentagon attack, but instead Al Gore celebrating victory in Florida back in 2000. It plays out as a dream, and you want to believe for a moment that none of it every happened - no Patriot Act, no Iraq war, no trillions of dollars in top-tier tax cuts, no Halliburton, no Bush. You want to believe that scene - Al Gore, with Ben Affleck and Robert De Niro cheering him on in the background as he thanked Florida for their votes - is actually true, that he would go and get the electoral votes and we can do it all over again. But we can't.
Allan Ball aside, there's nothing to ruin an arts career more than going from your first major success straight into television, and I think nobody has suffered worse than Michael Moore over the past several years. The amazing, personal vision shown in "Roger and Me" was followed up with two television shows, "TV Nation" and "The Awful Truth." Both shows were exercises in self-promoting sketch comedy which made Saturday Night Live seem like a meditation in humility. Every skit was Moore berating a lower-level manager with some sort of cheap comic set piece. This "look-at-me" mentality coupled with TV's need to short attention-reducing comedy gags lurked in the background of "Bowling for Columbine" - the movie often felt like a series of TV sketches strung together by a very loose thread.
So it's good to know that Moore has once again returned to full form with Farhenheit 9/11. No matter what you think about the President, or the War in Iraq, or Moore himself, this is a movie that should be seen. Moore has grown by leaps and bounds, and he has assembled a movie that, even if you find it flawed or outright wrong, will leave you unsettled with some horrific images of what is going on in the background of our country.
Stylistically Moore has never been more aware of his strengths and weakness. I think he knows that the "let's do a pratical joke!" style of ambush journalism, while a perfect match for television, is getting old, and definitely not appropriate for the subject matter of this movie. When it does show up, which it does twice, it's under a minute and feels like it was thrown in just to appease the fan base. The music has also become more scene specific and are a perfect match. "Vacation" by the Go-Gos plays over Bush's endless vacations pre-Sept 11th and itmake the montage. Bush seems like a 13-year old girl having the time of her life during her junior high summer vacation instead of the most important person in the world.. The theme from the "Greatest American Hero" ('Believe it or Not') gives the aircraft carrier landing Bush did an extra layer of surreality and fakeness - it's even more like a child dreaming of becoming a comic book hero now.
And the bad choices are left out. Something like "What a Wonderful World" ending with the second plane hitting the second tower, one of the cheapest and offensive parts of Bowling for Columbine, is nowhere to be found here. In fact, the scenes of the tower crashes will numb you. In a scene which proves that you need to see movies in a theater to get the full experience, the screen goes black and all you hear are screamings and sirens. At home on a TV screen, it would be a nothing experience - "hey look the screens dark." In the theater, you feel as if it's happening all over again. Everything goes black, and the sound of the terror surrounds you. It feel like something is genuinely wrong all over again, at that very moment.
Moore's voice is his strongest weapon here. It can go from projecting a slight sense of dread while talking about complex business relations between the Bush family and prominent Saudis to extreme compassion while interviewing people who have lost loved ones to Iraq, to snide sarcasm while condescending to members of Congress. He also leaves a lot of voice for other people. Much of the footage is archival: news broadcasts, newspaper columns, press conferences, and the President speaking. It's clear that this is intended to do end run past complaints that he is lying or biased - and it helps, though it doesn't work entirely by itself. But whether or not Moore is completely objective is besides the point.
Sure there are all the normal complaints. People have this quaint, but naive, view on how objectivity should work in a documentary. People who make documentaries are not journalists. There needs to be no "equal time" to make for an excellent documentary. That said, there needs to be a consideration of the alternative, if only to discredit it properly. Moore has said publically (though not in the movie) that this movie is so slanted as a counter-balance to the media not doing it's job over the past 4 years. I'm willing to give him this. Sure, in 20 years it may look like yet more rabid propaganda, but to see rows and rows of amputeed American soldiers in a failing Veteran's hospital, while the media isn't fighting to show the caskets of American's wartime dead, is a completely shocking experience, one you can't find in major American news.
Another major complaint is that Moore's conspiracy theories having holes in them. The first third of the movie is spent laying out connections between the Bushes and various Saudi oil tycoons, including the Bin Ladens. Many people are criticizing the movie for not having a full proof explaination for a quid pro quo tradeoff. There isn't one, and Moore does want any prosecutor does when there is no smoking gun - he piles on loads and loads of circumstantial evidence. Tons of it. And though you don't leave thinking that any specific action was taken on behalf of the Sauds, you leave thinking that they played a major part in the process of our government's thoughts. One might even say an inappropriate part.
Still there could have been more at some points. The examples of the excesses of the Patriot Act have nothing really to do with the Patriot Act itself - there's no mention of secret trials, or seizing medical records, or Ashcroft doing jumping-jacks on behalf of the gun lobby. We could have seen more on how Halliburton came to the place of power that they are now, and how a former Secretary of Defense named Dick Cheney began the wheels of making our military dependent on this private corporation to operate.
All in all, it's something that needs to be seen. I think the area in which Moore has grown the most is being able to create a setting that doesn't involve himself. You rarely, espeically compared to his other movies, see him at all. Everyone has talked about the footage of Bush sitting in the classroom while the towers crumble being in the movie. What nobody has talked about, which is surprising as it's one of the more powerful things in the movie, is Moore asking in a voice over what Bush was thinking. Instead of assuming he was dumb-founded, Moore wonders if Bush is wondering which of the powerful Middle East interest, whom he and his family has considered friends over the years, has betrayed him. It's followed up shortly thereafter by the image of Bush and the Saudi ambassador sitting on a balcony on the White House, having a cigar, while watching the pentagon smoldering in ruins. They are two powerful moments, likely to give you pause to re-think Bush, no matter what you thought going in.
June 09, 2004
Just take the Reagan out past Naperville
From Chicagoist: As if living in the far west suburbs of Chicago wasn't already a degrading enough experience, Governor Blagojevich is renaming I-88 the Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway. The Gipper will join other famous Illinois superstars such as Adlai Stevenson and Dan Ryan in having a highway named after him.
"Now, when people drive on I-88, they'll remember Ronald Reagan and everything he did for our country," the governor said in a statement. "They'll remember his strength and convictions. They'll remember the way he restored our belief in the American dream."
For you non-Illinois people, I-88 goes from the western suburbs of Chicago to the Iowa state line. It's primary use is to get people to the mind-numbing sprawl of far west suburbs like Naperville. It's widely considered one of the most depressing expressways to commute on in Chicagoland, and that's saying a lot.
June 08, 2004
two documentaries
When people complain that there aren't any good movies, I really have no choice but to groan and roll my eyes. Movies right now haven't been this good in two decades. Sure, they are hard to find and never advertised. But between the internet for promotion and a strong and growing niche theater market, movies are getting around. Some are even getting critical praise. And nowhere is this more obvious than with American documentaries.
I'm still amazed at how much it has grown and matured. Plotlines that 10 years ago would have sounded like fodder for PBS ("it's about a spelling bee", "it's about birds flying from place to place") have become such magical experiences as "Spellbound" and "Winged Migration." It's gotten so good, that even the "Best Documentary Oscar", which 5 years ago was a joke, having never even nominated Errol Morris, awarded him the trophy over other also-qualified achievements like "Capturing the Friedmans" and "My Architect."
But it's also a critical time for documentaries. Michael Moore, who is more talented than his critics give him credit for, has proven that one can take a formula for political op-ed pieces glossed over as documentary and make quite a commerical success. And it's with this mindset that we have to approach Super-Size Me.
Everything about Super-Size Me made me uncomfortable on the first viewing. First, it's gimmicky. In case you don't know, this is the story about a healthy man who binges on McDonald's, eating only three servings of it a day for 30 days, and his subsequent health breakdown. He puts on weight. He becomes depressed. He loses his sex drive. The gimmick doesn't bother me per se. What bothers me is the way it handles itself. This movie is of the type that makes it's "argument" within the first 4 minutes, and then plays out the remaining 83 laughing it's way to the climax.
Say what you will about Michael Moore, but the man has extreme heart. I always find it funny when critics point out how much money he has made. His notable charity aside, everything about Moore screams with compassion for people down on their luck. It's immediately checked by a contempt for those in power, but his considerable girth and sloppy, gravy-stained fashion sense, isn't a ploy. It's what the man is. He is blue-collar America, pissed off and with access to a camera. He can also connect with people well: be it a blue-collar auto worker having a breakdown after being layed off or a security expert crying just by thinking about the Columbine massacre.
Super-Size Me is a lot like Moore without any of this compassion. It shows sequence after sequence of obese people with a sense of morbid delight, instead of concern for their well-being. While Moore's narrator voice can register sympathy and humor, Super-Size's narrator's voice is always one of glib condescension. I had a hard time believing that I should give him any credit when he was trying to take the moral high ground against a food industry lobbyist - I kept thinking "shouldn't you be thanking him for giving you people to look down at?"
And like Moore, Spurlock (the guinea pig/director of the movie) will always take a cheap shot instead of developing an argument. One example is when Spurlock is talking with a principal over the unhealthy choices at a high school which serves fast food. Instead of asking how much money lobbyists got for the school boards and parential communities from the fast food lobby, he picks on the poor principal, asking why her kids are eating chocolate and soda for lunch. Like the security guards and cops Moore always goes after, this poor principal has no real influence over what the school board does with their budget (she is employed by them, after all). He completely avoids the argument that Americans are exercising less by only leaving it to a compromised fast-food industry lobbyist to develop it.
In the end, there isn't much here that will be new if you've read the excellent "Fast Food Nation", or "Fatland", or any of the other literature about the effects of fast food on our health and the malling of our country. However there is one level that the movie worked on, and it competely surprised me, because it's the last level it should have worked on: the effects of fast food on one man. Going in, I thought that I would see him get fat, and yeah it would be kinda funny and sad that this poor healthy guy is now a fat American like everyone else in the movie. Ha-ha, roll credits.
Instead, you get to see this man fall apart at the seems. You know he doesn't die, but when his doctors find his liver crumbling like an alcoholic's, you are genuinely worried about him. You see how he changes, how his eyes look glazed over after eating a hamburger, and how he becomes irratible and defeated. He changes from being energetic and lively, and enters what looks like a mind-dead slumber where drinking a 50oz Pepsi and downing french fries robs him of the energy necessary to do trivial tasks like watch TV or talk with his girlfriend. Everyone eats fast food now and then, and everyone feels a little sick and regretful afterwards. But to actually see the changes of a lifetime condensed into 30 days editing into 87 minutes is powerful - does our entire nation feel this miserable, this irratible, this unhappy because of all the crap that we are putting into our bodies?
Where Super-Size Me presents most of what it is going to say within 10 minutes of the opening credits, "My Architect" never presents you with what it wants you to believe. This amazing documentary, put together by the illigitimate son of great modernist architect Louis Kahn, is created almost 20 years after Kahn's death. His son was 11 when his father died, and this movie is his attempt to try and figure out what his father was all about.
The first thing that becomes obvious is how impossible it is to know someone that has already gone. Even with most of his contemporaries alive, and a large collection of video, letters, notes and other archival matters, we leave with no idea of what the man was really like outside of anecdotal evidence. And everyone's opinion of the man seems completely influenced by themselves, as if the dad was focused through a personal prism each time. The co-worker who left his job to spend more time with his kids feels that Kahn didn't spend enough time with his kids, an architect from Bangladesh believes that Kahn exists only as a demi-god of architecture who brought democracy to his country with design, and his put-upon mom, who was Kahn's girlfriend on the side, still believes that Kahn was about to take off from his family to be with her.
Even by the end, the movie gives you now easy answers. And even the simplest things are difficult to work your mind around. Kahn would spend weekends with his son, using his secretary to lie to his wife so he could play with him and draw with him. Is this because he was a great dad, very concerned about his child in difficult situations? Or is was this an excuse to play make-believe a with family that caused him no real stress, to escape from what seemed to be a horrible wife and failing marriage? There's no way to know once it is gone. And the movie turns into a quest for peace of mind rather than an actual biography.
The film is very emotional, which is surprising considering how unemotional the narrator is. I was almost disappointed in him at times - all around him are people talking about his father as a quick-tempered man prone to arguments, and we see in his son nothing more than a sense of curiousity. No anger, no sadness, and not even all that much glee: just someone trying very hard to make sense of something. At his worst he loses his temper with his mother over the way his father treated her, but even this sounds less like him speaking as an adult and more like a hurt 8 year old wondering why they just couldn't be a family.
June 07, 2004
A FITTING TRIBUTE
We were saddened to hear of the weekend passing of former President Reagan. To keep the spirit of his work alive, Ginandtacos.com honored his memory by tripling military spending, declaring ketchup to be a serving of vegetables, and calling Anwar Sadat a "nigger".
Post a response here and let us know how you memorialized the greatest actor ever to be elected president since 1979.
