Film Fatale

Looking around at the Emmy Award previews in Variety and elsewhere, I saw some familiar names in the directing categories.

First up: the nonfiction category. No surprise to see which network dominates the category: HBO devotes considerable support to the documentary form (though Cinemax, PBS and Showtime deserve praise for their doc series, too.)

If Spike Lee's shattering Hurricane Katrina epic WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS doesn't win the award, I think you'll hear shouts of protest. This is passionate, pointed filmmaking from a director working at the top of his form.

Continue reading "Emmy Noms: TV Docs, Directors to Watch" »

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 04:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Herzog: bearable in front of the camera

The Academy has shortlisted fifteen feature-length and eight short documentaries for the 2006 Oscar voters to focus on. As these films get more attention, check out how many directors put themselves into the frame, making themselves the protagonists of their films.

Nathan Rabin of The Onion has an open letter to these doc director/stars. Morgan Spurlock and Werner Herzog, you're okay. Kirby Dick, "your presence in your documentary serves as an annoying distraction that detracts from the force of your argument."

Don't blame Michael Moore (ROGER & ME) for this trend. It was Ross McElwee, whose thoughtful yet tooling-for-some-strange non fiction saga SHERMAN'S MARCH (1987) set off the trend man with a camera movies. McElwee's movie was subtitled, "A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation"; it struck a chord with the girlfriendless and won the grand jury prize at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Indiewire's Anthony Kaufman has a smart piece in SLATE on why so many documentaries about the war in Iraq aren't doing well with movie audiences--despite a dearth of US television about what's really going on over there, and a growing sentiment that US involvement should decrease or end entirely.

Four years and 2,745 US deaths into the war, are Americans too jaded and depressed to shell out $10 bucks to see a movie that's probably going to be about about casualties, carnage and political clusterfuckage?

In the wake of Michael Moore's highly poltiical FAHRENHEIT 9/11, which grossed $119 million, there have been at least 10 documentaries about the war in Iraq -- but none has grossed more than $1 million. Only the war-machine-in-general exploration WHY WE FIGHT, has broken that barrier. (THE WAR ROOM, about the military's handling of media coverage from the war front, is nearing the mark).

Beyond GUNNER PALACE, OCCUPATION: DREAMLAND, and THE WAR TAPES, I can honestly say I don't even remember hearing about press screenings for the other films that Kaufman mentions. Other non-fiction filmmakers have been more successful by pointing their cameras in another direction: at the gross civil rights violations committed here in the U.S. since 9/11.

Watch Lowell Bergman's two part FRONTLINE series about all the heralded arrests of homeland Al Qaeda cells (Lodi, upstate New York, and Miami) that turn out to be nothing (all charges dropped for lack of evidence)--PBS has made THE ENEMY WITHIN available for free on its website.

Continue reading "Battle Fatigue: Anthony K. on Why Iraq Docs Keep Flopping" »

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

PBS American Masters series has covered many of the giants of filmmaking -- John Ford, Preston Sturges, William Wyler, to name a few-- but this week's entry on Andy Warhol is a surprise. The two part documentary by Ken Burns gives strong emphasis to Warhol's film work and the influence he's still having on filmmakers.

Part two, which airs Sept. 22 in most cities, has most of the film clips. But what's the title of that movie in which a young man has that faraway yet familiar look on his face?
"Writhing in ecstasy" as the Boston Phoenix so delicately describes it.

Oh, that's just a 1963 underground favorite called BLOW JOB. Not that PBS dares to ID the 16mm clip, lest the public-TV haters stamp off an avalanche of tsk-tsk'ing letters to the FCC.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 09:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Five years after 9/11, television is offering a mass of documentaries and remembrances of the terrorist attack on New York and Washington, DC.

Watching them, it's striking to notice what's been excised from the news footage--not just the worst and most unbearable of memories (people jumping from the World Trade Center), but the exclamations of shock and horror of eyewitnesses.

Among the first and best TV documentaries was "9/11," by Jules and Gedeon Naudet, the French brothers who happened to be following a downtown firefighter's first year on the job. Their cameras caught the first plane hitting WTC1--and the reactions of all who saw it happen. "9/11" won an Emmy and a Peabody Award. CBS broadcast the documentary unedited on the six month and one-year anniversary of Sept. 11, but now censorship groups are poised to complain about the gutter language spoken by firefighters and eyewitnesses -- as if that were the real obscenity that occurred on 9/11. To avoid any possible fines from the FCC, Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns some CBS affiliates, plans to show the documentary late at night rather than in prime time.

"This isn't an issue of censorship. It's an issue of responsibility to the public," said Randy Sharp, director of special projects for the American Family Association which describes itself as a 29-year-old organization that promotes the biblical ethic of decency.

If this organization gets its way, will 9/11 will be remembered as the day that 4,000 died, and everybody minded their P's and Q's?

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Get ready to be outraged and overcome with sadness, all over again.

One year after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf states--and one year and way too long before the Federal goverment limped into action to help--HBO will air a four-hour documentary about the devastated lives the storm left behind. WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS begins Aug. 21.

Read all about what Lee's been up to lately, and what he hopes this nonfiction film will accomplish. New York magazine's got a hefty profile of the documentary and feature director, and in the New York Times, The Reeler takes a look at his breakthrough movie SHE'S GOTTA HAVE IT - which still looks fresh twenty years on.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 09:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)