This Is Not A Film

Just saw the excellent guerrilla documentary This Is Not a Film by and about the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Panahi is under house arrest and was when he made this film. He was told he could direct or script films, so he made this documentary in his apartment in a single day and had it smuggled out of Iran on a USB drive in a cake. He's currently under threat of 6 years in prison, plus an additional 20 years in which he's not supposed to make films. Which makes this documentary quite a brilliant middle finger leveled at the Iranian government. A must-see for fans of film-making, Iranian film, Iranian culture, protest and anyone who decries censorship.

Snag Film

Documentary lover? Snag Films lets you watch docs online for free and embed promos for them (or snag them) on your site. Here's their most popular offering, Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me.

Six Billion Others

Six Billion Others is a project by French photographer Yann Arthus Bertrand, which will tie in with Pangea Day, coming up on May 10th. It features video interviews with thousands of people from around the world on different subjects, such as love, liberty, anger, discrimination--the whole gamut of the human experience.

Attending a Tribeca Film Festival discussion on Pangea Day tonight, I learned more about that event's origins, too. Jehane Noujaim, director of the extraordinary documentary Control Room, provided the idea after winning a TED prize in 2006 for her film. The winner receives $100,000 and "a wish to change the world" and Pangea Day grew out of her wish to bring the world together with film or, as she described it, to create a "World Cup of storytelling."

Premiering this year, Pangea Day will be a four-hour event presenting live music, various speakers and, primarily, specially-commissioned short films from around the world. These films were made with camera phones, which were distributed around the planet. We saw some of the resulting footage tonight, and it was of surprisingly good quality on the big screen.

Noujaim closed out the night by paraphrasing this quote from Longfellow, which summarizes the intent behind Pangea Day:

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each person's life, sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

(I should mention, too, that my employer Avenue A | Razorfish provided the design and marketing for the Pangea Day Web site, though I wasn't involved in the project.)

Tens

My contribution to the end-of-year top-10 navel-gazing. With everything in one post for the sake of sheer laziness. Reserving the right to make adjustments between now and December 31st. The year ain't over yet! Not necessarily in order of preference (I have to be difficult), though the number ones are my favorite picks.

Movies

Anton Chigurh: What's the most you ever lost on a coin toss.
Gas Station Owner: Sir?
Anton Chigurh: The most. You ever lost. On a coin toss.
Gas Station Owner: I don't know. I couldn't say.

- No Country for Old Men

1. No Country for Old Men - just when I thought maybe the Coen brothers were starting to flag, they come back with this astonishing piece of work
   
2. No End in Sight & Taxi to the Dark Side - saw the latter at TriBeCa Film Festival, so its wide release is 2008; ideally both films would be shown back-to-back on primetime television
3. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - *added 12/27
   
4. Michael Clayton - "I am Shiva, the god of death!"
5. Red Road - which I almost forgot about, but which was excellent, if harrowing
   
6. The Savages - alternately excruciating and hilarious
   
7. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead - banner year for Phillip Seymour Hoffman
   
8. After the Wedding
9. This Is England - nobody went to see this - it was sensational
   
10. Helvetica - forgot this gem of documentary - *added 12/27

Update: Knocked out of the top 10

• Superbad - maybe Knocked Up if I'd seen it
• Lars and the Real Girl - better than advertised

Plus these 5 special mentions:

1. Lives of Others - actually an easy selection for near the top of the list, but, technically, I saw it last year
2. Blade Runner - The Final Cut - one of my favorite movies of all time - a sci-fi Casablanca - seeing it in the theater for the first time was a real treat
3. The Bourne Ultimatum - just because the trilogy is such a riot
4. Zodiac - I loved it, but it just didn't stay with me
5. The Wind That Shakes the Barley - as above
   

Plus these 5 I'm sure I'd love if I'd seen them:

1. Persepolis - looks gorgeous and I enjoyed the book
   
2. Rescue Dawn - Werner Herzog can do no wrong
3. Eastern Promises - neither can Cronenberg
   
4. Diving Bell & the Butterfly - nor Schnabel (Update: see above)
   
5. Control - how did I not get around to seeing Anton Corbijn's debut as a director?
   

Albums

Make up something to believe in your heart of hearts
so you have something to wear on your sleeve of sleeves
so you swear you just saw a feathery woman
carry a blindfolded man through the trees
showered and blue-blazered, fill yourself with quarters
showered and blue-blazered, fill yourself with quarters

- The National, "Mistaken for Strangers" from Boxer

1. The National - Boxer - sorry, but LCD Soundsystem's had a couple of actual groaners; Boxer only had a song or two that were simply less beautiful than the others
   
2. Joan as Policewoman - Real Life (apparently, this came out last year; feel like this year to me); ravishingly good
   
3. Cinematic Orchestra - Ma Fleur
   
4. Radiohead - In Rainbows
5. Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha
6. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver (well, it was really good)
   
7. Feist - The Reminder
8. Grinderman
9. Blonde Redhead - 23
10. Saul Williams - The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!
    

3 more definitely worth your time:

1. Patrick Wolf - The Magic Position
2. NIN - Year Zero (partly for it's amazing viral marketing campaign; trust me, I never thought I'd see NIN in any list of mine either)
   
3. Atlas Sound - actually not out until next year; expect great things
   

5 I haven't gotten, but apparently need to:

1. M.I.A.- Kala
2. St. Vincent - Marry Me
3. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
4. Kanye West - Graduation
5. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Massively over-rated:

• The Good, The Bad, & The Queen
  

Books
Since I make no particular effort to read what's on current best seller lists, this is a list of the top 10 books I read this year, regardless of when they were published.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing direction. You change direction, but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you, something inside you. So all you can do is to give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand does not get in, and walk through it, step by step. There is no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverised bones.

- Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

1. Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
2. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
   
3. Remainder - Tom McCarthy
   
4. Martin Amis - House of Meetings
   
5. Moth Smoke - Mohsin Hamid
   
6. Out - Natsuo Kirino
7. Motherless Brooklyn - Jonathan Lethem
8. The Swallows of Kabul - Yasmina Khadra
9. Survivor - Chuck Palahniuk
   
10. The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell - John Crawford

Tell me your favorites in the comments. I wouldn't want to miss anything.

L Magazine: Entertainment for the ADD Generation

If the current issue is any indication, Brooklyn's L Magazine specializes in cinema reviews for the attention deficit afflicted. On David Fincher's latest effort, the magazine's Nicolas Rapold complains that Zodiac suffers from a "workmanlike pace":

[M]an, get ready to hum tunelessly along to someone else's obsession, with a lot of racing through libraries, working the phones, abstruse speculation, the inevitable comparison being All the President's Men but even more resistant to suspense. Unbalancing precise turns by an excellent supporting cast, wombat-eyed Gyllenhaal is finally a sinkhole in the film's indefatigable third act. Fittingly, several paragraphs of info-rich epilogue conclude the inconclusive saga.

Every sentence in that paragraph includes an explicit or tacit complaint about the film's pace. Not an illegitimate exercise if you're critiquing a film that undeservedly wears out its welcome. After all, some movies might prove tedious at 60 minutes (who needed 70 minutes of Pootie Tang?), let alone 120. But does the fact that Zodiac doesn't present Seven or Fight Club's rock video pace make it a stultifying effort? Certainly not.

Here's how Slate's Dana Stevens describes Zodiac:

Zodiac is long—over two and a half hours—but when it's over, you almost wish it had gone on for another 20 minutes, just to see every end get tied up. But of course, all the ends are never tied up in real life, even when the murderer is found. To undertake a thriller of this length and scope with no prospect of a morally satisfying resolution, Fincher must have been a little nuts himself. We'll see whether audiences used to the tidy one-hour cases on CSI and Law & Order will follow him down Zodiac's murky, twisted, and ultimately dead-end street. It may not sound like it from that description, but it's a hell of a ride.

Stevens recognizes that due to its length, Zodiac may not be every audience member's cup of tea, but at least she doesn't describe it's length as an innate weakness. Instead, she describes the film as "surprisingly cerebral," a categorization that allows for the type of rumination some may find distracting, but also celebrates the compulsive attention to detail. I agree. Zodiac may not be as electrifying as Seven, but it's more engrossing - and edifying. The NYT's Manohla Dargis even describes it as "an unexpected repudiation" of Seven.

In the same issue of L, Jason Bogdaneris reviews Philip Grvning's Into Great Silence and to similar effect. Bogdaneris's gripe:

This film is asking a lot of its viewers. To remain seated and attentive for all 162 minutes of its running time while a life of sparse submission to matters spiritual (thus unseen and largely unseeable) is depicted, requires attention spans that one isn't apt to find in ready supply in this day and this age. ...

Classically painterly in its visual style, as well as its intent at elevating its subject matter, Grvning employs a sort of video pointillism, not without success. Still, it's asking an awful lot.

Apparently then, this film which has received raves reviews from cinephiles elsewhere wasn't MTV enough in it's portrayal of "matters spiritual" for Bogdaneris.

I've not seen the film, but I imagine viewing in precisely the way A. O. Scott advises:

You surrender to Into Great Silence as you would to a piece of music, noting the repetitions and variations, encountering surprises just when you think you’ve figured out the pattern.

Scott suggests it may end up being one of the best films of the year. L Magazine gave it 3 out 5 stars - basically a C. At 162 minutes, it's just too damn long, huh?

You have to wonder what L's Bogdaneris would think of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah the 544-minute (9+ hour) documentary about the holocaust, within which Lanzmann refuses to show any archive footage, and instead spends a great deal of time interviews with elderly Poles and showing empty fields where crematoriums once stood against stark voiceovers. There are gripping interviews, to be sure, if you're willing to wait for them, and when Lanzmann surprises his interviewees, they might be former Nazis (Michael Moore's muggings seem decidedly lightweight in comparison). Perhaps I'm guilty of hyperbole to suggest that Shoah should be required viewing for every school child, but I'm not sure you could drag the L's reviewers kicking and screaming in to see it.

Is this really what we have to look forward to? A generation that demands that its cinema, its documentaries, its news, its very education be presented as a Michael Bay production?

Shut Down Guantanamo

Via Amnesty International, send a message to the President to shut down Guantanamo.

Also, if you haven't seen it (or if you're wondering what all the huff about Guantanamo is about), check out Michael Winterbottom's excellent amalgam of documentary and film, The Road to Guantanamo. It's out on DVD now.

Top 10 Movies of 2006

Quite late and in semi-intentional, but quite possibly fluid order (don’t ask me to commit! And if you have any complaints, read the subtitle on the blog, which has been there since day one):

10. The Queen - helps if you were raised in a Commonwealth country
9. Road to Guantanamo - strong offering from Michael Winterbottom -howe anyone could watch this and justify our handling of detainees boggles my mind. Oh yeah, no one watched it.
8. Little Miss Sunshine - simply irresistible
7. Volver - another wonderful film from Almodovar - is he capable of making a bad one?
6. Man Push Cart - excellent NY indie probably never coming to a theater near you
5. Deliver Us from Evil/Jesus Camp - two horrific and gripping documentaries about child abuse and, oh yeah, they're both about child abuse in religious circles.
4. L'Enfant - the Dardenne brothers offer another gripping, humanistic fable (see also Le Fils)
3. The Departed - just a whole lot of fun; and unlike some folks, I didn't even mind the ridiculous placement of the rat at the end of the film. Fit the flick's feel entirely.
2. Children of Men - see my review
1. The Aura - I might be one of the few people to include this in a top ten list, let alone at number one (could swap with Children of Men, though) - see my review

Honorable Mentions

Babel - writers act as gods when deciding the fates of their characters and Alejandro González Iñárritu makes for a bit of meanspirited God directing this one - I enjoy Thomas Hardy, for Pete's sake, yet I found the way the characters got repeatedly bludgeoned in this one rather disagreeable. Still, I'm tempted to slide it on up there into the top 10 because I find his filmwork so intoxicating.
Half Nelson - that Ryan Gosling sure can act
Little Children - disturbing and funny - great combination - consider moving into top 10
Miami Vice (confession: my Michael Mann weakness + Gong Li crush = multiple viewings)
Notes on a Scandal - Academy Award for Dame Judi
United 93 - see below
Update: Forgot about 13 (Tzameti), which came out here in 2006, but got a very small release. Excellent B&W film noir from Argentina. I'd even consider adding this to my top ten.

Haven't Seen Yet

The Good Shepherd, The Prestige, Pan's Labyrinth, Letter from Iwo Jima, Iraq in Fragments, Death of Mr. Lazarescu, The Proposition, Army of Shadows, Marie Antoinette, Venus, Dream Girls (and people think I see everything that comes out!) - Update: I've since seen The Good Shepherd and Pan's Labyrinth. Both of which were great, but I'll keep out of the top ten for now.

Overrated

Borat – I laughed a lot, but I guess all the hype killed it for me.
Scanner Darkly – maybe just because I’m such a huge Phillip K. Dick fan, I hate it when people dick around with his work. That said, it did make me laugh, made some pretty good points and loved the fact that he had himself under surveillance – very meta, post-modern, etc.
World Trade Center – I actually thought WTC a pretty gutless film – it only focused in any depth on the lives and families of those officers who survived the WTC scenario Stone depicted. United 93 was a sharp, steel scalpel compared to Stone's flimsy plastic spork. Who’da thought I’d ever say that about Stone? I wasn’t looking for conspiracy theories. Just a real strong dose of reality.
Inside Man - I thoroughly enjoyed this one; just don't think it was that great; and all its twists could be seen an hour off. Hey, I enjoyed Casino Royale, too – the last couple of Bond movies looked like stinkers and I skipped ‘em.

And Honorable Mention for Best Video Perfomance

The comedic stylings of one Stephen Colbert at the National Press Club coupled with George W. Bush at his side. (Over 3 million views on Google Video alone.)

Maybe With a Bang and a Whimper

Not a review of Children of Men, the intermittently jaw-dropping and always engaging new movie from Alfonso Cuarón, but a few random thoughts.

First: Michael Caine. The ever lovable Michael Caine plays portrays the moral center of the film, a laid-back dippy hippy type whose appropriately absurdist response to the evils around him is "pull my finger." A line that actually starts out as a joke in the movie later morphs into an astonishing middle finger leveled at the forces of darkness in the world. I won't say how in case you haven't seen the movie, but it's a riveting show of defiance.

On that note, it's interesting to note that though a few folks have claimed Children of Men bears a purely liberal bent, it depicts nasty types operating at both ends of the politcal spectrum. If fact, the movie depicts Theo (Clive Owen's character) as avowedly apolitical, to the point of emphasizing that he hooked up with Julianne Moore's character in their youth for more carnal than constructive means. It's clear that he's prompted to assert a political opinion - prompted to act and not just to grouse and complain - but it's also eminently clear that he's on the run from both sides.

Some other wonderful details: Theo's attire. He spends the first half of the movie with his shirt exactly half untucked, then escapes in muddy socks and later ends up running through a battlefield in ill-fitting flips-flops. Not to forget the fading London 2012 sweatshirt he's wearing by that point, too. For such a morbid flick, it includes a surprising amount of physical humor.

I also loved the little touches of advanced but realistic technology littered though all the rubble and decay.

Children of Men is that rare movie that has only grown in my estimation after I've seen it and allowed it to sink in.

Seven years after the year 2000, the year many people actually feared might be the fulfillment of the End Times, and we're still speaking of the apocalypse. However, perhaps for better reasons now.

Reminds me, I really gotta read Cormac McCarthy's new one, The Road, too.

Fear Is Not What's Important

"Fear is not what's important. It's how you deal with it. It's not a matter of whether you feel it. It's how you manage it."

That's James Nachtwey in the excellent 2001 documentary War Photographer directed by Christian Frei. The temper of this subtle, but powerful documentary perfectly mirrors an extraordinary man, who one editor for Der Stern describes as appearing on the battle field in pressed jeans, an immaculate shirt and neatly parted hair. To watch Nachtwey in action is an astonishing thing. Considered the best in his field, he seems utterly unlike any combat photographer (or paparazzo) you could imagine. He's soft spoken, even described as shy, and he remains utterly, utterly calm and quiet in every situation he'd shown in.

Most impressive, however, is the philosophy behind his work:

Is it possible to put an end to a form of human behavior which has existed throughout history by means of photography? The proportions of that notion seem ridiculously out of balance. Yet, that very idea has motivated me.

For me, the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke a sense of humanity. If war is an attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war and if it is used well it can be a powerful ingredient in the antidote to war.

In a way, if an individual assumes the risk of placing himself in the middle of a war in order to communicate to the rest of the world what is happening, he is trying to negotiate for peace. Perhaps that is the reason why those in charge of perpetuating a war do not like to have photographers around.

I watched another film this weekend which focuses on the theme of fear: Peter Greengrass's United 93. Like a lot of people, when I first saw the trailer for this movie (it's almost a documentary or cinéma vérité in its style), I was prepared for the worst. When I heard Greengrass was the director, I though maybe he'd pull it off. And he did. It's a tense and horrifying film that left the audience (myself included) largely speechless, as it should, and though there are heroes in the movie, they act as humans, planning on the fly, acting in a rush. There are no stirring aisle-way Agincourt speeches because that's not what happened. That's never what happens, despite what Hollywood's been feeding us for decades.

Still, these men were heroic in the most human sense. They were successful in overcoming their fear and attacking their hijackers, but their success didn't prevent their death. As we know, however, it likely saved the lives of many, many others.