The Eagle Huntress

Alternate Title:  Eagle Dressage

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:   A young Mongolian girl from the steppes attempts to become the first female master eagle-hunter in living memory.

Things Havoc liked: Among the many things that are to be found in this wide world of ours, the Eagle-hunters of Mongolia are among the most awesome. They are men who use wild-captured golden eagles, the largest true eagles in the world, to hunt game, either for meat or for fur, across the steppes and mountains of Central Asia. I discovered that these guys existed some time ago, and ever since then have gone about my life in the sure and certain knowledge that the title of "baddest motherfuckers in the world" was very much taken, and if you disagree, I defy you to find an occupation more awesome than that of riding horses at full gallop across the steppes while commanding a fifteen-pound bird to slay your enemies. As if that weren't enough, every year, the master eagle hunters of Mongolia and Khazakhstan (the borders between the two countries are pretty much imaginary) gather together in Western Mongolia for the annual eagle festival, in which they compete to see whose eagle is most awesome, and who among them is most awesome by extension. A documentary about these men and their golden eagles would be interesting enough, but this film, by legendary documentarian (and asshole) Morgan Spurlock, and Star Wars actress Daisy Ridley, is about a thirteen year-old girl who, in defiance of a thousand-year-old patriarchal tradition, has decided to join them.

Honestly, what else do I need to say here? This movie sold me from the premise alone, a documentary look at an insanely badass girl doing insanely badass things in the hopes of becoming accepted among insane badasses. The girl in question, Aisholpan, thirteen when the movie was made, is the eldest daughter of a former champion eagle hunter, who expressed interest at a young age in becoming one herself, and... well... proceeded to do just that. The movie chronicles a roughly six-month span in Aisholpan's life as she attends school, lives with her family in a yurt on the steppe, and practices and trains to become a master eagle hunter, a process that begins with her rappelling down a cliff to capture a juvenile golden eagle from its nest, and ends with her hunting foxes through the Kara Khitai mountains at a gallop. Along the way, we get to know her family and schoolmates, get to see the life of modern Mongolian steppe-hunters and herdsmen, and watch the famous eagle festival itself, which includes soon-to-be-Olympic events such as Eagle Dressage (I dare you to call it something else), Eagle Diving Speed contests, and long-range tracking contests judged by elder eagle hunters with talent-show placards to show the scores. You cannot make any of this up.

Morgan Spurlock and I have not always seen eye to eye, to say the least, but his turn towards the strange and exotic (as opposed to the revolutionary notion that eating too much makes you fat) has seen me soften my stance on him... at least a bit. This time he and co-director Otto Bell wisely get out of the damn way, simply following Aisholpan and her father around as they capture Aisholpan's bird (who strangely never gets a name), train it, take it hunting and to the annual contest, confident that this sort of material will sell itself. As such, we get a lot of great details, on the details of the family's life, either in a yurt or a broken-down ruin which serves as a winter camp, on the sheer ruggedness of the central Asian terrain, which looks like it should have Conan running across it at any given moment, or my favorite bit, bloopers from when the various eagle-centric events at the competition don't go as planned (one bird gets so confused it starts trying to drag its handler down a mountain, to the uproarious laughter of all concerned). Overall though, the movie is brisk and fascinating, even without the badassery on display, a glimpse into the lives of people that one has little context for and no understanding of, seen in their own terms and in their own time. As such, the casual relationship between girl and bird is what really got to me, the ease with which she and her father handle these enormous (up to 17 pound) birds, hurling them into the air from a full gallop and catching them in mid-dive on a prepared arm. If any of you had any doubts about my earlier claim that these are the baddest people around, half an hour's viewing of this movie will cure you of them.

Things Havoc disliked: A fair amount is made, throughout the film, of the fact that Aisholpan is the first girl to attempt to become an Eagle Huntress in living memory, and that this is in violation of thousands of years of tradition. And indeed, the few times that the movie cuts away from Aisholpan and her family is for the purposes of interview clips with assorted stern, elderly Mongolian men (all wearing spectacular coats and hats) who frown in disapproval and speak about how girls should not participate in the sport of eagle hunting, for all sorts of the usual bullshit reasons. And yet, when it comes to Aisholpan's actual efforts thereto, absolutely nobody seems to have the slightest problem with it.

Please don't get me wrong, I am not complaining that there was not more sexism in the movie. I am complaining that the movie seems to be trying to generate some for the purposes of drama. Aisholpan catches her eagle, trains with it, and enters the premier competition in the world to showcase her art, unannounced. And yet rather than twirl mustaches or argue, the Mongolians running the contest and participating in it seem to regard her as a curiosity more than anything else. She is allowed to participate without seemingly a single objection raised, is judged more than fairly (given the results), and cheered on for her efforts, ultimately successful, at trying to join this most awesome of groups. All credit to the eagle hunters involved, but the movie plays heavily through narration and editing on this notion that the dark forces of patriarchy are arranged against her, when none of them are actually in evidence. Perhaps there was a lot more pushback behind the scenes that we didn't get to see, and certainly the fact that Aisholpan's father is a two-time champion eagle hunter probably did not hurt her acceptance, but the way the movie is shot and thrown together, it feels an awful lot like a bunch of Western filmmakers trying to generate the sort of parochial drama that they assume a traditional culture must be inculcated with, when the culture in question may simply not give a shit. It's not like the Mongols (or for that matter, most nomadic groups) have no history with women taking on traditionally-male roles in war or hunting, but then I'm no anthropologist. What I do know is that a narrator insisting over and over to me that Aisholpan will face tremendous adversity due to being a girl, coupled with us seeing absolutely no signs of this adversity beyond a handful of staged interviews with people somewhere else, does not speak well of the objectivity of the filmmakers.

But it's not like Morgan Spurlock would ever distort the truth to fit his pet theory, now would he?

Final thoughts:  Ultimately though, I'm here to review a movie, not whine about Morgan Spurlock, and The Eagle Huntress is an excellent documentary, with an instantly-captivating subject and plenty of stunning shots of Mongolian landscape, majestic eagles, and the nerveless handlers thereof. For the shots alone, this movie would be worth seeing, to say nothing of everything else we are privileged to bear witness to throughout it. The story, at its base, is fairly simple, despite the efforts of the filmmakers to gussy it up for primetime, but a simple story is no vice, especially not in a documentary. As such, if you can find The Eagle Huntress anywhere, I recommend it highly. After all, if you have aspirations of becoming the baddest dude on Earth, it's only a good idea to see what your competition is capable of.

Final Score:  7.5/10

Next Time:  Amy Adams vs. Cthulhu

The General's Post Fall Roundup

And now, a note from the General

Hello again, ladies and gentlemen. Following a long break in which I had to re-charge my batteries and participate in other, non-cinematic activities, I have finally returned to the fold to do a little bit of catching up. The movies below were ones that I saw whilst taking my little break, and as I would not dream of forgoing the chance to tell you all what I think about them, I have provided my customary little summaries below. Here's to Oscar season at last, and a final race to the end of 2016!

The General's Post Fall Roundup

The Lovers and the Despot

Alternate Title:  This is Still a True Story

One sentence synopsis:    A South Korean Actress and her ex-husband, a famous Director, are abducted by North Korean Kidnappers and forced to make films for Kim Jong Il.


The Verdict: As you may recall from my completely honest and entirely reasonable review of Sony's hacked film The Interview, North Korea and I have a tempestuous relationship when it comes to movies (something I'm sure they share with nobody else). Yet despite all my attempts at hyperbole and outrage at some new gyration of the hermit-kingdom's antics, North Korea is a stranger place than any of us can possibly imagine, with a whole host of strange and inexplicable behaviors that exceed those of rogue states and enter those of Bond villains. This is a country that once nearly started a war over who was allowed to cut a tree down in the Korean DMZ, who spent a month and a half breathlessly reporting on the progress of their invincible armies' conquest of the United States, and who blew up part of the South Korean cabinet for reasons I don't think anyone has ever figured out. But like a lot of strange cult-of-personality regimes, North Korea does have a slight bit of method to their madness, particularly their obsession with art and the political implications and international prestige purposes thereof. And so it was that we come to the story of a kidnapping.

The Lovers and the Despot is the story of South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee, once one of the greatest box office draws in all of South Korea, and her philandering, artistically-obsessed, outspoken director-husband, Shin Sang-ok, once touted (briefly) as Korea's answer to Japan's Akira Kurosawa. In the late 70s, amidst political turmoil in South Korea and dwindling fame as an actress, Choi was lured to Hong Kong under the guise of a film project, and kidnapped by North Korean agents under what appears to be the personal order of Kim Jong-il himself, who set her up as a kept guest and asked her to make films for North Korea, whose film output was so stagnant and poor quality that even Kim himself regarded their movies as nothing but tripe. Initially reluctant, she was eventually convinced to participate in this mad scheme after the arrival of her ex-husband Shin, who was either kidnapped himself, or made his way there voluntarily (reports vary). Together, they were compelled to re-marry, and became the leading couple of North Korean cinema, working there for eight years, attending film festivals and making a great many movies, before finally making their escape to the American embassy in Vienna.

Too weird to be true? This is North Korea, who once sent special forces commandos to beaches in Japan to kidnap teenagers and force them to teach Japanese to their army units. But what's compelling about this documentary isn't how strange it is, to be honest, but how... normal it is. Choi and Shin got it into their heads to record their conversations with Kim Jong-il (the first such recordings ever to be made), and what we consequently have is a candid, unscripted look at one of the most secretive and strangest figures in the late 20th century, the most awkward dictator in history, who comes across like a drooling fanboy intimidated by the artistic talents around him (Hitler is supposed to have acted similarly among stars of stage and screen). One might expect that the films Kim demanded would be nothing but propaganda, but no. Kim wanted prestige, particularly international prestige, and seems to have given his pet filmmakers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted, ignoring the dictates of his own propaganda ministry, including the first love story ever filmed in North Korea, lush medieval epics, and even a Godzilla movie (yes, there is a North Korean Godzilla movie in existence. I must have it.) Though the film never softpedals the horrors that North Korea was and remains capable of, they also make clear what sort of exhilaration can come from being the favorite of an absolute God-Emperor like Kim, particularly for filmmakers whose stars were already in decline back home.

The Lovers and the Despot his not a perfect documentary, as the story it tells winds up being just about what you think it's going to be, save in details, and because frustrating gaps still remain in it, such as the question everyone seems to be tiptoeing around as to whether Shin was or was not kidnapped. But it is still a look at a subject it is rather hard to get a good look at, and yet another tale from the hermit-kingdom of North Korea to make one marvel at just how strange the world can be at times.

Final Score:  7/10

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The Magnificent Seven

Alternate Title:  The Mediocre Several

One sentence synopsis:   Seven disparate fighters in the Old West team up to stop a mining baron from destroying and slaughtering a small town of pioneers.

The Verdict:  Speaking of Akira Kurosawa, we have before us a remake of a remake of his greatest work. Goody.

Seven Samurai was a tremendous movie in every sense, and like most tremendous movies in every sense, has been copied a thousand times by every filmmaker who comes along looking to kick-start their career. John Sturges, of Ice Station Zebra, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (a musical version of the Wyatt Earp story), and The Great Escape, did so in 1960 with the original Magnificent Seven, a movie that starred Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Steven McQueen, and Charles Bronson, and should really have been more awesome given the cast I just cited. But that was the early sixties, and here we are in the Year of our Lord, 2016, with an Antoine Fuqua-directed remake. Given that the original Kurosawa film all the way back at the beginning of this chain was one of the best movies ever made, is there a chance that the man behind Training Day could produce magic out of this?

No. No there was not. You see, Antoine Fuqua is just not a good director, Training Day notwithstanding. With the exception of his one great masterpiece, a movie that coincidentally (or not) also starred Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington, all he's ever made is a slew of crap such as The Replacement Killers, King Arthur, Olympus has Fallen, or The Equalizer. His version of the Magnificent Seven is par for the course in every way, a big, stupid action fest in which characters do dumb things for no reason other than the notion that they might look good on screen. I usually call this "xXx-syndrome", save that unlike xXx, this movie doesn't actually get the stunts correct, letting signature moments and scenes either run on way too long (such as a sequence wherein eighty-six bad guys to not shoot Chris Pratt for no reason at all, thus getting themselves killed), or not long enough (such as a culmination fight between Martin Sensmeier's Commanche warrior and a rival evil Indian, which ends in about five tenths of a second). How Fuqua, who has a twenty-year history with directing action movies, hasn't figured out certain basic truths yet is beyond me, but you cannot produce tension by having a hero effortlessly slaughter thirty mooks without breaking a sweat, nor are audiences so innocent in these days that they can't figure out that a hero who smiles and says goodbye to his love interest before mounting his horse and riding towards the villains to the accompaniment of stirring orchestral music has finally lost his character-shield and may now reach a sticky end.

Yes, the cast is pretty decent, at least as a theoretical cast, and not as an actual one. Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke are about as good as they ever are, even in an Antoine Fuqua movie, which as we've established, is nothing new for them. The former plays the leader of the titular seven, and survives the film, as is customary for Washington, by downplaying everything and acting like the only adult in the room, while Hawke plays a Louisiana gunfighter of some repute (but no accent), who actually does a decent job alongside companion and life coach Lee Byung-hun, who gets the James Coburn role from the original as the quiet, knife-wielding assassin. Chris Pratt on the other hand, whom I love dearly in all manner of movies, is just not very good in this one, which makes no sense to me, given that the role of a cocky hotshot cowboy should have been right up his alley. I blame the direction, frankly, as Pratt's character is way too over-saturated in the film, with everything he does buttressed by shot selections, and especially a score (the late, great, James Horner, of Titanic, Braveheart, and, The Land Before Time, and The Wrath of Khan) which seems designed to make absolutely certain nobody in the audience can mistake him for anything but the designated charming rogue. Everyone else in the movie is completely forgettable, including Peter Sarsgaard as a typically slimy villain, save only for Vincent D'Onofrio, a man I generally have little good to say about, but who here plays a mountain man who has plainly gone crazy in the wilderness, and who, in a movie filled with over-choreographed stuntwork, stumbles blindly about like a drunken bull, screaming incoherent gibberish and murdering people with an axe. It's something.

Enough said, really. The Magnificent Seven is a boring movie that rises just enough off the strength of its cast to barely hit the mediocre bar. It's a film that will, I expect, be completely forgotten until it comes time to make yet another remake of Seven Samurai, which judging from the state of Hollywood, should take about ten minutes.

Final Score:  4.5/10

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Queen of Katwe

Alternate Title:  Zugzwang

One sentence synopsis:    An impoverished girl in the slums of Uganda is taught to play chess by her youth worker and becomes an international prodigy.


The Verdict:  When the trailers fail me, and they so often do, I find myself having to go see movies "on spec", by which I mean basing my decisions around who's in the movies, who made them, and what they're about. So if you want to know why I went to see a Disney movie about chess prodigies, look no further than the cast, which includes David Oyelowo and Lupita Nyong'o (the former of a bunch of recent films including Selma, the latter of 12 Years a Slave), and the director, Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair, of Salaam, Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding. FIlming on location in the Katwe slums of Kampala, Uganda, Nair used all local actors (save of course for the above-mentioned marquis ones) to produce a film about poverty and escape provided by chess. I felt I had to try it.

And... no. No it didn't work. And I feel bad about reporting that it didn't work, because like all movie critics, I like the concept of the story and want to give the film a pass for it, but this is not charity and I am not trying to praise movies because of their social content. The base fact is that when you hire non-actors for your movie, you're liable to get all sorts of things, but unlikely in the extreme for any of those things to be "acting". Nobody in this movie, save for Nyong'o and Oyelowo, can act. Nobody. Not the lead actress, a young Ugandan named Madina Nalwanga, not the many other children involved in the film, who have no idea what they are doing in front of a camera and have not been instructed, not even the other adults in the movie, who seem to have been told to overact as much as possible so as to make sure that the audience knows what they're saying. The script, meanwhile, is the most basic Disney-sports-movie fare you can imagine, following the exact same trajectory as Cool Runnings (for instance) save without the local color and humor that made that movie so watchable. Most of the film, indeed, seems to be filler material, as characters narrate each others' actions to one another in slow, laborious scenes that lack any punch or interest. If it weren't for the pedigree of the filmmakers here, I frankly would have called this a first-time effort from an amateur director. Maybe there were budgetary restrictions, maybe the biographical nature of the film got in the way, or maybe nobody was willing to take any risks with a "heartwarming, feelgood movie," but the overall effect is surprisingly poor, and leads to long stretches of the film rendered boring as paste by the simple fact that nothing is allowed to happen.

I don't want to pile it onto a basic movie like this one too thick, as the film is hardly some kind of crime against sense and cinema, but spec only gets you so far. If you want praise from me, you need to actually make a good film. And Queen of Katwe is not one.

Final Score:  4/10

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The Accountant

Alternate Title:  Number Crunching

One sentence synopsis:   A math savant with high-functioning Autism uncovers a conspiracy to defraud a major robotics company and murder the only witness.


The Verdict:  In 2003, Ben Affleck, then in the middle of the tailspin portion of his career, appeared in a superhero movie by the name of Daredevil. It sucked, miserably, and contributed to such a nexus of failure that year that Affleck abandoned superhero movies entirely in favor of more challenging work in more interesting movies such as Hollywoodland, Gone Girl, The Town, and Argo, the latter two of which he directed, and the last of which earned him an Oscar. In defiance of expectations from the last decade, Affleck is now a successful, respected, actor and director, a powerful man in Hollywood, capable and apparently willing to chose his own scripts. And yet the superhero bug never really seems to have left him. Hollywoodland involved him playing Superman after all (sort of), and this year, Affleck engaged in the double-whammy of playing not one but two superheros, first as Batman in DC's flagship Batman v. Superman, and second as an autistic killing machine in the movie we have before us here. The former, I need not tell you, was a disaster on the level of the Hindenburg explosion. How was the latter you ask?

Actually... pretty good.

Yeah, this one surprises me too, guys, but The Accountant, a movie in which Ben Affleck plays an autistic savant who happens to have been trained by his special-forces father to be a unstoppable killing machine as well as a mathematical prodigy, is a damn fine little movie, not because it makes a whole lot of sense, but because it involves good actors doing what they do best while good cinematographers capture them doing it, and that's a formula that will take you far with me. Ben Affleck is one such good actor, playing a role that could easily have been either silly or offensive, and in fact which ten years ago probably would have been both. His character's concept is manifestly ridiculous, but Affleck plays it sermon-straight, as a high-functioning autist who has developed a lengthy and complex series of coping mechanisms to deal with the nature of his condition, from sensory-overload chambers to repetitive tics. I would not call the movie the most er... realistic take on Autism and its many varieties, but the filmmakers clearly knew that they were treading on thin ice with this one and took active steps to make the movie into something like what Arnold Schwarzenegger would make if you told him to create an Autism Speaks commercial.

The rest of the cast is just as good, from the always-enjoyable J. K. Simmons, playing a treasury department director who has been chasing the mysterious "accountant" for decades, to John Lithgow, playing the head of the robotics company that all of this winds up landing upon, and Anna Kendrick, as a young in-house accountant who serves as a sort of "sidekick" (I hesitate to say love interest, given the workings of the film). But the real meat of the movie is the action, which I am satisfied to report is some of the best I've seen all year. There's been a trend over the last eighteen months or so of action directors finally starting to eschew the whole Jason Bourne-style shaky-cam style of cinematic combat for a cleaner, more focused style that I choose to call the "John Wick". The Accountant follows this trend, shooting the combat in glorious stable vision, allowing the characters to slice, shoot, stab, and smash each other with crisp, perfectly cinematic execution. The concept may be demonstrably goofy, but the film seems to know that, using the ridiculous contrivances that are the bread and butter of movies like this with something of a wink and a nod, as though the filmmaker were patting the audience on the back and asking them to bear with him so that he can tell his ridiculous story.

The Accountant is hardly a perfect movie, everyone seems to spend the entire run-time expositing the plot, and the ending makes even less sense than the absurdity of the setup would have you believe, but thanks to the strength of its cast and its style, it holds together surprisingly well. In a year that has already given me some of the worst action/superhero movies that I have ever seen, sometimes a mere "good" film is all that you can ask for.

Final Score:  7/10



Next Time: Time to get back in the swing of things with a proper Superhero movie.

All Things Must Pass

Alternate Title:  The Importance of Things Baby Boomers Liked

One sentence synopsis:     Russell Solomon and the original employees of Tower Records reflect on its creation, reign, and dissolution.


Things Havoc liked: I see an average of about one documentary per year, usually whenever I am coming off a rough stretch at the regular theaters, and with the worst Bond film in living memory directly in my rear-view mirror, this seemed like a good time. The difficulty with documentaries, like with anything really, is that a lot of them are poorly made, or thinly disguised polemical rants hurled at a paying audience with no attempt made at objectivity. So it was that, rather than see a movie about how the filmmaker is the only person in the world endowed with morals in a world comprised of sheeple, I thought that I would go and see one on a subject that nobody ever gets passionate or argumentative about: the music industry.

Tower Records, for those of you too young to remember it, was once a giant of the music industry, a chain that was not a chain, half music emporium, half shrine to the mystical glories of popular music, an empire that grossed a billion dollars in the last year of the 20th century before ceasing to exist five years into the 21st, and All Things Must Pass, taken from the metaphysical slogan that accompanied its final liquidation, is a chronicle of its lifespan, from its creation in 1960 by Russ Solomon, who sold records off of a jukebox in his father's drugstore, becoming more and more successful until he finally bought out his father and re-purposed the enterprise entirely around music. It walks through interviews with the major employees, in the main hired as young school-age dropouts in the throes of the sixties, who started working there because they loved music and because the store had no dress code or maximum hair length, and wound up executives and regional directors in their forties through sheer time commitment and the fact that promotion was all internal. There's a vibe here of the kids being given the candy store, as the major figures of the company are all either scene-sters who were looking for a cool place to work, and found one that would let them spin off a casual million or two to go build major stores in Japan, or party-crazed kids who fell into music accidentally when they discovered a job that didn't care how drunk you got or how many drugs you took as long as you showed up to work.

Tower was important to more than just the employees, however, and it's the music artists that stud the film with their memories of the store that really cement how important Tower Records was to the industry at large. Dave Grohl, of the Foo Fighters, first entered music by working in a Tower Records and experiencing the small world that existed around it. Bruce Springsteen describes knowing that he had made it when his records first appeared in Tower, and using the store's stock and displays as a barometer of not only how he was doing but how all of his contemporaries were as well. Meanwhile, Elton John, whose career spanned the lifetime of Tower, assures us with perfect certainty that he spent more money in Tower Records than any other human being, and we must believe him. He makes the place sound like a cross between Studio 54 and a shrine to music, and seems genuinely torn up by its demise, intoning that there was never any place like it before and never will be again.

Of course the title is indicative of where this all leads, and as documentaries on the rise and fall of companies go, All Things Must End is one of the more honest when it comes to the inevitable demise of its subject. Blame is spread fairly evenly all around, from Solomon himself, who lost his best friend/accountant and, without his advice, made business decisions that were less than ideal, to the general tenor of the financial times in the years before the first Dot.com crash, where businesses were encouraged to take fantastic-sized loans no matter the risk. The prevailing wisdom, of course, in regards to record stores in general, is that the internet, piracy, and worthless kids who didn't appreciate brick and mortar stores killed them all, but the film does not allow such facile reasoning to infect its narrative. Yes, Napster and the like did their damage to Tower's sales, but many of the former employees reflect on the fact that the record industry itself created Napster by doing away with Singles sales, preferring to force people to buy $19 CDs containing a single song worth listening to, confident that there was no other way for people to get their music. When Napster did show up, the industry refused to lower prices to match the new reality, instead concentrating on suing people away from piracy. Tower, and the industry in general, failed to adapt to the changing technology, and despite actually having the first online music store in the world, they fell into the trap of so many businesses I watched or was a part of in those years, businesses who were overtaken by bank-mandated "restructuring experts" of little talent and less intelligent, who through malice, incompetence, or greed, systematically destroyed what was left of the company in the pursuit of some sort of quixotic MBA-school mandate to "increase branding" or something similar. By the time they were done, there was only a carcass of a company left to pick over.

Things Havoc disliked: In describing the origins of Tower Records, All Things Must End does a fine job, as it does in describing its ultimate demise and what legacy it left behind. But unfortunately, the middle sections of the film lag significantly behind these two elements, as the film drags into a fairly slow repetition of new location selected - store opens - young aimless kid gets hired there - store does really well - young aimless kid becomes responsible adult thanks to Tower Records - repeat. I recognize we're here to chart the business, by and large, but the movie seriously repeats its "nobody thought we could put a store in Sacramento/San Francisco/Seattle/Manhattan/Tokyo/Buenos Aires/London, but we did!" shtick about a dozen times before it's finally time for the business to collapse and the movie to end. At a certain point, we're not here for a Business School case study, we're here to watch a documentary about one of the more culturally-influential institutions of our times, and while there's some effort made by the above-mentioned artists and the company executives to ground us in the epochal nature of what we're being shown, the film really seems to rely on the notion that you already know what Tower Records was, and how special it was to Baby Boomers everywhere. Not being a Boomer myself, I had certainly heard of Tower, but I don't believe I'd ever been in one, and I remarked on its passing as I would have any other large store that collapsed (who remembers Good Guys and Blockbuster?). Maybe I'm just not in tune with the world. Or maybe, conversely, we should re-think just how sacred everything that Baby Boomers liked in their youth really ought to be.

Final thoughts:  But now I'm just being unfair, and while All Things Must Pass is not a great documentary on the level of Searching for Sugar Man, it is a solid enough one to be worth a watch. The subject matter necessarily renders it somewhat restricted in its purview, and indeed, I had to contort my schedule quite a bit just to be able to see it. But if we judge a film's qualities based on whether it told us a story worth listening to and did so well, then there are far worse things one can do with two hours of your time than sitting back and getting a glimpse of a cultural world as it used to be, and hearing from the people for whom it was a special place, even if those people don't include yourself.

Final Score:  7/10

Next Time:  We were there at the beginning.  We will be there for the ending...

Ballet 422

Alternate Title:  Watching the Watchers

One sentence synopsis:    A young ballet dancer at the New York City Ballet is given the opportunity to write, choreograph, and produce a new ballet in two months.


Things Havoc liked:  I do like catching the occasional documentary, even about subjects I care nothing about, and there are few subjects I care less about than ballet, a highly stylized art form whose artificiality has never appealed to me. Oh I have nothing against ballet, certainly, and I know plenty of people who speak highly of this or that troupe, show, or dancer. One thing I do know about ballet however is how exacting it is, how terribly hard everyone works, how cutthroat the competition is for every position at every level. I know this, of course, because I have seen movies such as Black Swan, and movies would never lie to me. And so it was that I decided to go see a documentary about this full contact sport and see what the process for making these things actually is.

Ballet 422 is about a young man named Justin Peck, one of the "choral" ballet dancers (the lowest rung on the totem pole) at the New York City Ballet company. Thanks to an in-house choreographer's course and a promotion put on by the company, Peck was given a chance to write and direct (to use the movie parlance) a new ballet, the four hundred and twenty second in the history of the company. The documentary is simply a record of the process of him doing so, working with the dancers, the costumers, the lighting technicians, the conductor and orchestra, all of the myriad people who must come together in order to produce any kind of live performance such as this. All of this seems like a huge opportunity for a fairly low-ranking member of the ballet's cast to be given, and I must assume that this is some sort of particular distinction that Mr. Peck was singled out for.

Things Havoc disliked:  Why must I assume this? Well there's a couple of reasons, but mostly it's because this documentary doesn't tell you anything at all about anything.

Ballet 422 is the least informative documentary in the history of documentaries, and if that's not literally true then I really don't want to know what ranks above it. It has nothing to say, not in any sense of the word, about Ballet, about the process of making it, about Justin Peck or his creative process, about anything whatsoever. It is a complete waste of time in the form of a 75 minute hole in your life. Not content with providing no narration to their supposed documentary, the filmmakers for Ballet 422 have decided in addition that there should be no interviews, no subtitles, no actual discussion with the subjects of their story, just silent observation, as the ballet dancers and crew go about the business of creating the ballet. You might think that even with all that, it would still manage to be an interesting viewpoint into a hidden world, but so averse are these filmmakers to elementary film-making conceits, to informing their audience at all, that we literally are given long stretches of the camera watching a person who is in turn watching a dancer offscreen perform a routine we do not know anything about. We literally stare into the eyes of someone watching something else for minutes at a time, and are somehow expected to derive meaning and importance from the subject thereby. This approach is so tremendously wrongheaded that it is almost farcical, a pastiche of overly-important arthouse-style "undocumentaries" that are fashionable among the stupid crowd.

Oh there's stuff in this film, certainly, dancers and costumers and musicians and the rest of it, but while we do see them rehearse, or plan, or block, or inscribe notes onto arcane pads and computers, we have no conception of what they are actually talking about. At best we're given a chance to see Peck himself critiquing the way one of the premier dancers performs, or having a conversation with the conductor of the orchestra as to whether he's allowed to address them before the premiere (the departments seem pretty protective of their turf in this company, though I suppose that's no surprise), but devoid of context or, all we're watching is what amounts to a home movie for insiders from the ballet company, a series of vignettes meant to stimulate people's memories of the process of putting the ballet together, not substitute for them for us uninitiated plebeians. We get no sense of the artistic intention behind this ballet, no idea why Peck wants things to be one way and not another, nor of what options he has thought of and discarded. The movie doesn't even manage to generate a sense of pressure or tension as he goes about trying to pull this ballet off. Isn't two months a bit short for creating a full on ballet? I have no idea, as the film treats the whole affair as a workaday event. As a result of all this, I left the theater without even any idea as to what the ballet is supposed to be about, what it was based on, or even what its title was. And as to the various people I saw over the course of the film, let's just say that I didn't realize that Peck was himself married to one of the lead ballerinas (something that drastically alters the dynamic going on here) until I happened upon the IMDB page for the film and noticed the names matched.

Final thoughts:   Ballet 422 is one of the worst documentaries I've ever seen, a film that fails not on an artistic level, but on the deeper, mechanistic level of actually getting across the subject matter to the audience. I can only assume this was intentional, as the film is so systematically devoid of contextual information that I can't envision this happening by accident. Someone decided, for whatever reason, to tell the audience nothing whatsoever, confident either in the thought that merely peering behind the curtain would be enough for us, or perhaps trying to make some artistic point about audiences being spoon-fed information. Either way, the result was a totally pointless exercise, a documentary that documents nothing but context-free footage of people doing things that we don't understand, for purposes we don't know, in the service of a vision we don't see, from a choreographer we never get to meet.

Hell, you want to know what kind of documentary this is? The poster for the film shows the main character on stage, staring off at the interior of the richly-furnished theater, no doubt dreaming of the world premiere he is about to stage before everyone at the New York City Ballet.

The theater he's "staring" at? It's the 180-year old Mikhailevsky Theater for Dance and Performing Arts. In St. Petersburg.  A place referenced by name, location, or even inference exactly zero times in the entire film.

Final Score:  3.5/10

Next Time:  Johnny Five alive?  And kicking ass?

What We Do In The Shadows

Alternate Title:  Hobbiton by Night

One sentence synopsis:    Documentarians film a group of vampires around Wellington for several months, learning about their lives and habits.


Things Havoc liked:  With as many movies as I watch, I don't get around to seeing a lot of television. As such, while I've certainly heard of New Zealand-based comedy group Flight of the Conchords, mostly thanks to their musical stylings, I have not seen a great deal of their work on screen at any point. Still, reputation is reputation in this sort of thing, and with the Doldrums still upon us, a small indie offering from Kiwiland about Vampires seemed as good an option as any. Words cannot describe the horrors that otherwise awaited.

So... Wellington, New Zealand: Southernmost capital city in the world. Quaintly picturesque town nestled on the straights between the North and South islands. Headquarters for the production of the Lord of the Rings. Overrun by vampires. But fear not, would-be visitors, a collection of fearless cameramen and documentarians have ventured forth to draw back the curtain from the dark world of these dwellers of the night. Finally the truth can be known.

What We do in the Shadows is a mockumentary in the style of Christopher Guest, centered around a group of four flatmate vampires living in one of the more boring cities on Earth, and engaging in their nightly routine of hunting, bloodsucking, and performing dark rites. Sort of. Explaining what actually happens over the course of this movie would sort of defeat the point, I feel, as that's the point of the jokes in the first place, all of which work better in context than they would here. So let's turn to the vampires themselves. Taika Waititi, a filmmaker I've barely heard of, plays Viago, a German transplant vampire who moved to New Zealand in pursuit of his lost love but got waylaid when his coffin was rejected for insufficient postage. Fluttering about the shared flat, he clashes alternately with Deacon (Johnathan Brugh), a douchebag who seems to have gone on with his douchebaggery in the afterlife, circumstances be damned, and Vladislav (Jermaine Clement), a morose sex-obsessed technophobe (initially), who may or may not be Vlad the Impaler, and who spends most of the movie shivering in terror at the mention of his arch-nemesis, "The Beast". As the filmmakers follow these three around, we meet all manner of other denizens of the Wellington underworld, from Peter, an eight-thousand-year-old Nosferatu-knockoff, to a local pack of new-age Werewolves, to Nick and Stu, a fledgeling vampire brought into the coven early on, and his human associate who helps the Vampires discover the wonders of such modern marvels as Facebook and selfies.

This all sounds dry, I know, but the humor in this film is very dry, in a sort of spur-of-the-moment style with references and in-jokes worthy of any mockumentary I can recall. From Deacon's familiar Jackie, pissed off that she hasn't been turned into a Vampire yet while being forced to run his errands and clean up after his "feeding" efforts, to Vladislav's... "skills" at hypnosis, to Nick's conception of subtlety when it comes to disguising his nature as a vampire, to how the Werewolves deal with their... condition... the entire affair is a welter of circumstantial comedy, none of which, I'm afraid, will play well here. The film also uses its indie-documentary style to send up found footage films, periodically turning in satire far worthier than anything the Scary Movie series has put out.

Things Havoc disliked:  You kind of have to like films like this, films that sort of wander around without a point to them, in order to get much out of this. There is no plot to the film, no arc, no narrative progression. Characters do have things happen to them, yes, some of which have been established before, but there is no real unifying theme to the movie beyond the characters existing and being followed by the camera crews. I realize that documentaries and the films that ape them work differently than feature films, but even fake-true stories are supposed to be stories, and there's no real equivalent to Waiting for Guffman's theatrical performance, or Best in Show's dog show, the central unifying event around which the movies were made, and which served as a sort of climax. Attempts are made with the undead masquerade ball that the characters are looking forward to for much of the film, but the ball itself doesn't really pay anything off and the characters go on thereafter as though it were simply another incident. Even when aping real life, it's possible to be a bit too meandering.

Final thoughts:   The difficulty with a movie like this is that there really isn't a lot to say here. You really are going to like the concept of this film or you are not. I saw the thing based on a single trailer at an indie showcase some weeks ago, and thought it was hilarious and fun. Someone else might take one look at this review's description and think it was the most boring thing on Earth. They would probably not be wrong. But the fact that the jokes, in fact the film itself, works only in context, makes it rather proof against any attempt to review it. Flight of the Conchords made a fake-documentary-comedy about New Zealand vampires living in a flat in Wellington. Whether you think this sounds like the sort of thing you would like or whether you think it doesn't, you're probably right.

Final Score:  7/10

Next Time:  Goddamned if I know.  Doldrums season strikes again.  Maybe Will Smith remaking Matchstick Men?

Life Itself

Alternate Title:  Plaudite, Amici. Comedia Finita Est.

One sentence synopsis:    A documentarian covers the last few months of Roger Ebert's life with retrospectives on his career, relationships, and personality.


Things Havoc liked:  When one thinks of movie critics, one thinks inevitably of Roger Ebert. A pulitzer-winning, populist movie critic without parallel, Ebert's influence on the state of film criticism, and for that matter film itself, is hard to sum up. Without Roger Ebert, I would probably not be writing this blog, but then that's true of a vast number of people. And for all the scorn I heaped upon several of his less-than-cogent opinions for movies like The Artist or The Flowers of War, there is a reason that it was his opinion, and not that of other critics, that I took to task. The most powerful movie critic in the world, the first, and to my knowledge, only one to ever win a Pulitzer, he shaped my tastes in ways I'm sure I cannot even begin to speak to. And now he is gone, and all we have are his reviews, and the memories of those who knew him.

Life Itself, by Prefontaine and Hoop Dreams' director Steve James, is a biographical documentary, nothing more, nothing less. Filmed in the main during the last four months of Ebert's life, as he was battling cancer, pneumonia, and the aftereffects of having his jaw amputated, it chronicles Ebert's career from college to the Chicago Sun-Times, from Cannes to Siskel & Ebert. Much of this stuff is standard biographical material, but the movie refrains from becoming nothing but a record of awards won and milestones achieved by relying heavily on the reminiscences of people who knew Ebert, his skills and his flaws, his giant ego and his manifest personability. We follow his career through thick and thin, from winning national awards and being courted by world-class newspapers such as the Washington Post or New York Times, to the travails associated with his alcoholism, to his ongoing love-hate feud/relationship with fellow critic Gene Siskel. All the while, there are intercut sequences with the Roger Ebert of "today", his face scarred by a series of terribly invasive cancer surgeries, and interviews with his wife and family, who are all putting on a brave front as they patiently await what they know to be the end.

And that's really all the movie is, and all it needs to be, as anyone who has the slightest interest in the subject of the life of Roger Ebert should find all manner of tidbits within this story to make them smile. One of the best sequences, in the midst of a discussion of their work together, involves several behind-the-scenes sequences of Ebert and Siskel trying to film a promo for their show, intercut after (and even during) every take with bitter, sarcastic sniping at one another that sounds like the sort of thing people tolerate only when they've grown so accustomed to such treatment that it's no longer worth fighting over. Yet a second clip, later on, has them embarking on a collective, extemporaneous rant about how Jews (like Siskel) and Catholics (like Ebert) are the only people who actually give a damn about their religion, and that protestantism and WASPs in particular are people who want "a little faith... maybe." In Ebert's own words, "we were killing each other for thousands of years before they showed up." Ebert remarked once that the answer to the question of whether he and Siskel hated each other and whether they were best friends were both Yes, and the hints of the greater relationship he had with his famous co-host are there to be seen for any fan of the great movie duo.

Things Havoc disliked: But only hints.

It was ludicrously hard to write this review (which is why it has been so delayed), partly because documentaries are always a difficult topic to write subjectively about, but also partly because there just wasn't that much to say, and that itself is the problem. The movie is billed as a biographical documentary on Roger Ebert's life and career, but what it actually winds up as is something extremely macabre, and the reason for that is that the film chooses, for reasons that I'm sure made sense at the time, to focus with almost laser-like exclusivity, on Roger Ebert's death.

I mean, I get it. Ebert died while the film was being made (we see his last, fleeting answers to the filmmakers' Emails as he was dying in the hospital), and his disability was so extreme as to exert an almost ghoulish fascination, and yet rather than resist this urge, the filmmakers decided for some reason to make Ebert's inevitable death from cancer and pneumonia the center of their film. Perhaps they thought they were replicating Citizen Kane, I don't know, but the movie, by the end, becomes almost morbid, as the filmmakers use all their considerable talents to try and wring pathos over the end of a great man. They succeed, of course, but the endless succession of sequences concerning Ebert's disability, his efforts to resume some fleeting fragment of his normal life, his decline and ultimately his death, accompanied by the tearful exclamations of his wife, led me, at least, to wonder if any of this was appropriate at all. Ebert, like all public figures, lived his life in the glare of spotlights, by his own choice as much as any, but to reduce half a film about a great man to the details of his final decrepitude seems almost voyeuristic, to say nothing of the notion that this is time that might be better spent regaling us with the stories of his works and deeds and thoughts and beliefs.

And part of the reason I am left wondering if we couldn't use more of those things is because, to be frank, we don't get all that much of it. Despite being produced by Martin Scorsese and featuring interviews from several major figures in cinema such as Werner Herzog, the movie is astonishingly light on details concerning a man who popularized film theory and film criticism for the mainstream audience. Precious little is heard from Ebert's actual reviews, the reviews that made him famous, won him a Pulitzer, changed the nature of American film, and serve as the reason we're watching the movie in the first place. We see him go to Cannes, go to Telluride, see movies and lead lectures about them, but we have no idea what his own personal theories were, what his perspective for criticism was, why he felt one movie was better than another. We are told that he was a fine lecturer and a witty storyteller, but not shown or given the opportunity to hear a single story or excerpt from a lecture of any sort, and when later in the film the filmmakers contrast his critical style with that of legendary New Yorker/New Republic critic Pauline Kael, we are presented the fact that his style and hers were different in a vacuum, without the slightest idea of what his style consisted of, or how it was different from hers. I appreciate that my tolerance for the ins and outs of film theory is probably higher than most people, but we are sitting in a documentary about one of the greatest film critics of all time, it's okay to talk shop. Worst of all though, not a single one of Ebert's biting, cutting negative quips, the ones so good that he compiled them into books, makes it into the film, denying us all the chance to admire the quality of the man's writing, even though we're watching a movie ostensibly about that very fact.

Final thoughts:  The irony of me reviewing a film about the greatest film critic in history is not lost on me, and yet I still have a job to do here. This movie is not badly made, nor is it an unfitting tribute to a great man, and yet is was, to me, deeply unsatisfying. It is arguable that the reason I found it so was because I have particular interests that weren't met, but I regard it as eminently reasonable to assume that a movie lionizing the life of a famous film critic might have a thing or two to say about film criticism. And while the material that IS here is valuable, there simply isn't enough of it to sustain my interest through the two hours that the movie runs. The obvious point of comparison here is last year's Iron Lady, a biopic that was so busy displaying the life of a great woman in her decline that it forgot to show her to us while she was actually in her prime.

For all that we did not agree, Roger Ebert was a great man, and a great critic. I can only hope to one day match the breadth of his skill, wit, and love of films. He deserved a better tribute than this. And the nature of film being what it is, God willing, he may one day receive it.

Final Score:  5.5/10

20 Feet From Stardom

Alternate Title:  Singers in the Dark

One sentence synopsis:   Interviewers chronicle the lives and careers of a number of highly accomplished backup singers.

Things Havoc liked:  If you were ever a fan of music from around 1950 to 1990, then chances are you have heard the work of a number of the women in this film, women who are the acknowledged experts and most accomplished performers in the strange, unknown-to-me world of backup singing. Oh I knew what the profession consisted of, like everyone I've seen the women (and men) standing off on the side of the stage, moving in unison and singing choral accompaniments or harmonies with the "main" talent, but I, probably like the majority of you, never quite realized just how much backup singers actually contribute to their songs. Go back and listen to such masterworks as David Bowie's "Young Americans" or the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter", and you will find that the backup vocalist serves the way a "featured" or "guest" performer does nowadays, singing nearly half of the lyrics, including most of the ones you actually remember from the songs. "When kids sing along to those songs," says one of these backup singers, "they're singing our part." And often enough they actually are.

20 Feet From Stardom presents the careers of a number of women, particularly Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, and Lisa Fisher, all backup vocalists of great stature within their industry, with careers that span four or even five decades. Both through demonstrations of their (flatly incredible) vocal capabilities, and a cavalcade of interviews with established stars such as Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Stevie Wonder, or Mick Jagger, the movie convinces us of their skill, yet the movie is not about the mere fact that these women are not well known, but instead dives into the profession of backup singing as a legitimate, separate profession, equal in difficulty to headlining, and no less important, fulfilling, or renowned. We are shown where backup singers (or at least these backup singers) tend to come from, almost uniformly from gospel singing rooted in old black church music with its line-callback format, and given some idea of just what makes a great backup singer in the first place, the ability to harmonize and adapt one's voice to largely any style or range of music. The skillset, while similar, is not the same as that required for headline or solo singing, and while most of these women are highly proficient singers in their own right, some profess to have no desire to sing by themselves or as the leaders of groups, preferring to sing backup even when offered other chances, and believing their chosen careers to be no less valid or important than those of their leading counterparts.

And what careers they have. 20 feet from Stardom is in many ways a trip back through four decades of music, from the first days of Motown to the climax of the 80s. Merry Clayton, just as an example, sang the backup vocals on everything from Gimme Shelter to Sweet Home Alabama to Feelin' Alright, in between stints with Tom Jones, Bobby Derron, Elvis, Carol King, and of course, becoming a member of Ray Charles' backup group, the Rayettes. Darlene Love, meanwhile, contributed her voice to songs from the Beech Boys, Dionne Warwick, Sonny and Cher, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner (footage of the "Ikettes" dancing in the old Ike and Tina Turner Review is worth the price of admission alone), and on and on and on it goes. Indeed, one of the great astonishments of this movie is just how small a pool major backup singers seem to be drawn from. I'm sure the profession extends well beyond the women presented here, but based on the evidence provided, one good backup singer is able to elevate literally dozens of acts to stardom, and most continue with their starring bands for as long as those bands exist. Lisa Fischer, for instance, has been the Rolling Stones' primary backup singer for twenty-five years. She remains so today.

Of course not every backup singer is content to remain in the shadows. Most made efforts at solo careers here and there, releasing LPs of singles, christmas albums, or even their own work, but almost to a woman, they regard their experience with attempting for stardom negatively. One backup artist, a woman named Tata Vega, explains that her weight (she is a large woman) and image were held against her when center stage in a way they never were bare paces to the side, and all of the women speak of the cutthroat, dirty business that is actual stardom, one that seems to have very little to do with talent and much to do with a willingness to play "the game". Darlene Love, for instance, signed a solo contract with legendary producer and asshole Phil Spector, and then watched in horror as he took songs she recorded and gave them to other groups, piping her voice through the sound system while the designated star lip synched to it. Her efforts to break away from Spector stymied by the incestuous nature of the recording industry, Love simply gave up music for a time, as did many other women whenever the strain of the dirty business that is rock stardom became more than they could bear. Some express regret at having done so. Others say that the experience taught them that they had no real interest in being stars, and preferred their careers as professional backups. After all, says one, more people have heard her voice (given the sheer number of songs she has appeared on) than Elvis.

Things Havoc disliked:  If it sounds as though I've merely been recapping what the movie has to say, rather than offering a criticism of the way it says it so far, there's a reason. The best Documentaries play much like their fictional counterparts, telling a story that is captivating and engaging but simply happens to be true. Last year's incredible Searching for Sugarman is an excellent example of this. 20 Feet From Stardom however seems content simply to drift, haphazardly, from one topic (and one singer) to another, only to double back at seemingly random intervals. We follow Darlene Love's career for a while, then Lisa Fisher's, then back to Love, then someone else, with no real sense of progression or reason to it all. There is no attempt, for instance, to categorize the material by era or genre, showing the evolution of backup singing or how it changed with the different styles of music between the 50s and 80s. We get very little information as to how any of these women got into backup singing, what qualities they had (beyond simply being "good") that allowed them to get those coveted spots behind the Stones or Skynard and not someone else. That the film wishes to draw attention to these women is laudable, but a Documentary exists to inform the audience of a fascinating story, and there is really no story here, other than "these women exist".

Moreover, if there can be said to be a lesson from this movie, it is that backup singing and headline singing are two different disciplines with two different sets of pressures applied, and that the majority of singers cannot transition from one to another, either because they have no interest in doing so, or because the transition is fantastically difficult. I'm prepared to accept that this is indeed true for most, but in actuality there are a large number of leading, major acts in the music business who began their careers as backup singers. Elton John, Phil Collins, Sheryl Crow, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Cher, Pink, Gwen Stefani, all began as backup singers, and all managed to negotiate the transition with apparent success (I am listening to Phil Collins as I write this review). I recognize that these people are exceptional by definition, and that they, unlike the women whose lives are chronicled here, clearly desired careers as music stars above all else. But to simply leave the subject as "the transition cannot be done", as this film does, we are left without any idea of what separated these singers from those, which gives an uncomfortable impression that the filmmakers, having chosen as their subject women who did not become stars, have chosen to pretend that becoming a star is due entirely to politics and backstabbing, and requires no skill at all, only a cutthroat desire to succeed at the expense of others. To an extent, I'm prepared to accept this. But I find it difficult to believe that someone like Whitney Houston owed her solo career to nothing but luck and politics, and not at all to her voice.

Final thoughts:   Ultimately, 20 Feet From Stardom, is not a classic documentary destined to change one's life, but a soft, easy look back at the careers of a number of tremendously talented and accomplished backup singers. The majority of the women in this film are now in their 60s and 70s, and yet to all appearances, they continue to perform with their favorite bands, or for compilation albums and awards shows. One (Love) even found success as a supporting character in the Lethal Weapon movies. The lack of focus and the soft-shoeing of the whole transition question is disappointing, but this film is still worth the watch, particularly if one has any interest at all in how all the music you remember so fondly was put together, and by whom.

Final Score:  6/10

The Gatekeepers

Alternate Title:  The Men on the Wall

One sentence synopsis:   The six retired heads of the Shin Bet discuss the nature of Israel and Palestine's enduring conflict.


Note from the Author: This movie, and for that matter, this subject, defies facile divisions. As such, rather than review the movie in my traditional method, I will simply be expressing such thoughts as I have regarding it and its subject matter.




It has been years, literal years, since I heard anything reasonable said on the subject of Israel and Palestine. Mention Israel, or for that matter Judaism in these parts, and you will more likely than not be treated to a virulent diatribe regarding the putrid evils of the state of Israel, all who support it, and if you are unlucky, Jews in general. And should one go to states such as Texas or Georgia, the mere suggestion that Israel is deserving of criticism will be met with violent opposition from those whose rejection of the Palestinians and all their works approaches almost religious levels of fervor. I have seen and heard the most horrific things being said to those who dared offer their opinions on the subject, and heard in turn truly vile distortions of reality, common sense, and human decency offered up in the guise of "analysis" of the situation in the Holy Land, both from talking heads and ordinary people. And yet, in the midst of all this vitriol and hate, along comes a film that asks no more than our attention for a couple hours, as half a dozen old men recount to us the way things are in Israel, how they got to be that way, and where, they believe, things should go from here.

The Sherut haBitachon haKlali, more commonly known by the Hebrew acronym Shin Bet, is Israel's lesser-known, but arguably more important secret service. If the Mossad is Israel's CIA, Shin Bet is their NSA, responsible for internal security, counterterrorism, and the protection of both the populace and senior officials from whatever threats might arise. The six men that this film introduces us to are the six living former heads of the organization, representing between them an unbroken line of succession covering the twenty-four years from 1988 to 2011. Before and during this period, these men oversaw and participated in every major Israeli counter-terrorist endeavor since the Six Day War of 1967, and the film consists of them talking about these experiences, no more, no less. From the establishment of networks of informers in the West Bank to the campaign of targeted assassinations against leaders of Hamas, through scandals, Intifadas, peace accords and terrorist attacks, the movie is simply the six leaders of Shin Bet explaining themselves in as much detail as they can, buttressed only on occasion by prompts from an unseen interviewer.

And what explanations they have. The film uses the evolution of Israel's relationship with Palestine and the on-again, off-again efforts towards or away from peace as its narrative thread, and the men describing what happened do so with a complete disregard for equivocation and codewords that is almost unheard of in modern politics. "Forget about morality in a War on Terror," says one. "Find morality in terrorists first." Yet another admits, almost with a smile, that to the Palestinians, of course, he was a terrorist, something he came to understand and even accept. Descriptions of torture techniques used against recalcitrant Palestinian prisoners stray perhaps a bit from the mark, what with references to "moderate physical compulsion", yet the heads admit that there were incidents where men died under torture. Some express regret, even anger that such a thing should happen. Others defend the fact that these men were holding literal "ticking time-bomb" information that led to saving dozens of civilian lives. One outright admits "I was tired of seeing live terrorists in court." But none try to duck the issue.

It is, of course, impossible to bring up the subject of Israel without bringing ones own worldview and opinions into it, for me as much as anyone. Pro-Israeli as I am, though not to the point of rendering the state immune to criticism, I found, I will admit, much within the film to confirm what I previously believed. The movie glances at, but does not belabor the point that Shin Bet's actions, however misguided or foolish, were generally aimed at reducing or eliminating civilian deaths, primarily in Israel, but also in Palestine, particularly as the extreme right in Israel began stoking its own flames of hatred and madness. By contrast Hamas, and the other organizations Shin Bet was pitted against, were explicitly aimed at causing the maximum number of civilian deaths, Israeli or otherwise, in the service of goals related to a permanent state of war and genocide. One of the officers recounts how he met his counterpart from the PLO in a peace conference in London, and was told that the Palestinians would ultimately win, if only because "our victory is to make you and your children suffer." Two more explain how a pair of botched operations and situations (the extra-judicial killing of two Palestinian bus hijackers, and the deaths of a dozen civilians during an air strike on a Hamas cell) resulted in their immediate resignations, and the fall of the Israeli governments which oversaw them. If this was Justice, it was a thin sort for the relatives of those who died, yet the men point out that had Hamas performed such actions, the consequences would have been lionization and praise, followed by a repetition of the attacks as often as possible. That said, does the simple fact that Israel acted in a more forthright manner than Hamas (a low bar if ever there was one) excuse such actions? None of the men present think so. Several become angry, furious even, over the lapses and errors that led such things to occur. None, to my recollection, attempt to pass the buck.

Yet for all the confirmation I received from this film, I received plenty of surprises, checks, and disabusals as well. The men at the heart of the Shin Bet see a very different side of the major figures of the Middle East than the rest of us do, and I was surprised how much variance there was between these perceptions. Figures like Golda Meir, lionized by the Israeli left as a champion of peace, or Menachim Begen, who shared a Nobel peace prize for signing peace with Egypt, are considered by these men to have been completely uninterested in the Palestinians, their grievances, or the peace process. Begen is remembered by one to have bragged about how many settlements he had overseen the foundation of. Conversely, right-wing figures such as Ariel Sharon, remembered nowadays as a blood-drinking warmonger, is portrayed here as having had the most concern of any Israeli PM over the collateral effects of the targeted assassination theory. At one point, one of the Shin Bet directors speaks of pleading with him to authorize a strike to destroy much of Hamas' leadership, insisting that to hold back would be to guarantee more Israeli dead. Sharon refused to attack. Other revelations included the sheer extent of contact between Shin Bet and the relevant Palestinian security authorities, with whom they seem to have worked fairly closely, through Intifadas and even wars. "We are not helping you for your sake," one of the heads was told by a Palestinian officer. "We are doing it so that we can one day have a state." Much time is spent discussing the rise of Jewish terrorists within Israel, and Shin Bet's efforts to head them off, defusing, among other things, a plot to literally blow up the Dome of the Rock. Other attacks were not defused in time, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli ultranationalist, something several of them regard as their greatest failure.

Is this movie biased in favor of Israel? Maybe. I don't think so. It regards the aspirations of the Palestinian people as self-evidently justified, talks of the various upheavals and intifadas as not merely natural, but obvious and predictable outgrowths of Israeli policy in the Palestinian territories. "We as good as planned for it" says one, throwing his hands up in disgust. Is it one-sided? Yes, but the purpose is not to produce artificial 'balance', but simply to illustrate who these faceless men were, and what they think of what they did. And indeed, the opinions we receive are far more balanced than one might accept. Every single one of these former terrorist-hunting heads of intelligence, men whose lives were sought by their enemies, and who sought and took the lives of dozens and hundreds of would-be terrorists, is publicly and unequivocally in favor of advancing peace by any means. "Coming out of this job, you naturally become something of a leftist" says one, arguing in favor of shunting Israel away from its religious wing and fulfilling the two-state solution for Palestine, whatever the short-term cost. Of all six men, the one most militant in defense of his policies, also makes the claim that Israel should talk to "everyone, absolutely everyone, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, even Ahmadinejad," if it has the slightest chance of accomplishing anything. All of them make distinctions between the 'tactics' of their operations, which they claim were highly successful, and the overall 'strategy' of long-term peace, which they claim was entirely non-existent for most of their tenures. "Killing them [Hamas leaders] did reduce attacks, but did not produce moderation," admits one. The purpose of the film is not to argue for facile solutions, though some are suggested, nor to beat drums of Israeli nationalism or terrorism or any other hot button issue. It is, and remains, six men with a unique perspective, discussing their work like adults. Insofar as they can be self-critical, they make the attempt. Most men in their position would not.

Roger Ebert and I have disagreed many times on this little sounding board of mine, but in this matter we are of uniform opinion. In his review, he called the movie the most pro-Israeli film he had ever seen, specifically because it was so practical. "In recognizing Palestinian points of view (though without endorsing them), it sees Palestinian self-determination as synonymous with Israeli peace." Does it tell the whole story? Probably not. But unlike most rhetoric on the subject, it at least tells part of the story, a story that, if we are to grapple with this issue at all, deserves to be understood. In the end, we are left with six old men, whose job it has been to shield Israel from her enemies, expressing a desire to see an end to it all through dialogue and compromise. Insofar as it expresses these wishes, it is unexpectedly thus, as Ebert himself claimed, the most hopeful film I have seen on the subject.

Final Score:  7.5/10

Searching for Sugar Man

Alternate Title:  The World before Google


One sentence synopsis:     A handful of South African music aficionados from the fall of Apartheid go hunting for an obscure American musician whose music inspired them.


Things Havoc liked:  On a cold night in Detroit, in the winter of 1973, a struggling young musician known only as Rodriguez got up on stage in a bar somewhere near the waterfront, and performed music from the two albums he had released several years earlier. Unknown save to a handful of music snobs, heckled by the crowd, and beset by money and shyness troubles, Rodriguez played his last set before a sullen, heckling crowd, thanked them politely for their attention, drew a gun, and shot himself dead right there on the stage.

Such, at least, is one version of the story of Rodriguez, as related to us by a series of interviews with various now middle-aged South Africans who in the late 70s and 80s, participated in the exploding music scene in South Africa. Some tell us that Rodriguez died of a drug overdose, some that he burned himself alive on stage, and other lurid, strange tales born from the fact that Rodriguez, completely unknown here in the United States, was, in South Africa, bigger than Elvis, and yet totally mysterious to them. His music, brought by bootleggers into the sealed society that was Apartheid South Africa, became the driving force of a generation of white South African protestors in the same way that Bob Dylan did for American youth in the 60s. One such South African, who still goes by the name of "Sugar" (drawn from one of Rodriguez' songs), explains to us that in his country, Rodriguez' music was as ubiquitous to him as any other artist that could be named, and that walking into a white liberal house in South Africa, one would expect to see a Rodriguez album sitting right next to the Beatles.

Searching for Sugarman is the story of a search by a handful of these South African music fans, as they sought in the early-mid 90s to determine the story behind this mysterious musical phenomenon, unknown in his own country, whose two albums are still considered some of the finest music ever produced by the handful of people who have heard them, and who seemingly vanished without a trace shortly after completing them. In an age before Google, Wikipedia, or the widespread use of the internet, these people began to search, via contacts with record companies, postings on early internet bulletin boards, and slow piecing together of rumor and story, attempting to understand who Rodriguez was, where his music had come from, and why and how he had died. So unknown was Rodriguez domestically that nobody in the United States even knew that he had become popular in South Africa, and attempts to track down anyone who had even met him vanished into tangled webs of royalty payments and corporate ignorance. Yet doggedly these men continued to search, seeking to know more about the musician that had influenced their lives so heavily.

Searching for Sugarman is a documentary record of this search, what it uncovered, and what resulted from the discoveries they made. To tell you what happens in the turns of this story would be to spoil the point of seeing it, but I can tell you that the documentary untangles this story with amazing dexterity. From Detroit to Cape Town to Los Angeles and back to Detroit again we roam, talking to music fans, to friends of Rodriguez from his recording days, to record executives and journalists picking up the story, and on and on. All throughout the story we learn about Rodriguez himself, the son of Mexican immigrants who worked in backbreaking manual labor in the poorest regions of Detroit, and wrote music nobody (here) heard that was deeply infused with political messages and vignettes from working class life.

Rodriguez' music fills the soundtrack of the picture, and it's damn good music. His voice is a cross between Don Maclean and James Taylor's, a smooth, even voice over music that reminds me strongly of Bob Dylan's best work. Like pretty much every American, I had never heard of Rodriguez in my life, but the film spends a great deal of time with experts and record executives, explaining how revolutionary Rodriguez' sound was, and expressing their utter mystification at his failure to break through in the United States. By the end of it, we feel like experts on this obscure man's music, and I would wager that more than a few of us were inspired to go searching for these nigh-unobtainable albums. I certainly was.


Things Havoc disliked:   This is a strange tale, and it's told well, with many turns that I could predict and some I could not. I will not spoil any of them here, as learning all the things that the researchers learned is half the fun, but I will talk about a subject that stuck with me. Early on, as the South Africans are looking for Rodriguez, they resolve to follow the money trail of royalty payments from South Africa back to the labels in the United States. There, the documentarians meet with a record producer named Clarence Avant, one of the original men who knew Rodriguez and produced his two albums. They confront Avant with questions concerning where all the money from the records ended up, only for him to become extremely defensive, refusing to answer questions about the money, and accusing the filmmakers of headhunting. Later on, one of Rodriguez' relatives suggests that there was no money, that the albums never made money even in South Africa, because piracy and bootlegging soaked up the sales that might otherwise have been made.

Um... excuse me?

These records were released in 1970 and 1971. Their popularity in South Africa commenced about five years later. While there certainly was bootlegging in the 1970s, this was long before we could blame Napster and Bittorrent for all the ills of the music industry. We see hundreds and thousands of perfectly legitimate copies of these albums, vinal, cassette, and CD, in stores and homes all across South Africa. We speak to record labels in South Africa who explain that they paid extravagant royalties to companies in the United States. The albums were both certified platinum by the South African Recording Industry, an award based solely on the number of actual legal sales. And yet when Avant blusters and Rodriguez' relatives wave their hands at piracy, the documentary appears to simply drop the subject, as though that answers everything. The question is never brought up again, and the strong implication that the filmmakers leave us with is that ungrateful music pirates kept Rodriguez from enjoying the fruits of his labors. I've heard some nonsensical statements on piracy proffered by the RIAA and other such groups, but never with such bald-faced gall as the subject is introduced here.


Final thoughts: Honestly though, by the end of this film, even I had forgotten about the piracy issue. The story here is not about piracy or record sales or money lost or won or earned or stolen. The story is about a strange and unique man, and the excellent music he produced, labored over, and believed was forgotten about, only for it to unexpectedly become the voice of a generation he never even imagined. It's one of the finest documentaries I've ever seen, carrying us along a story so strange that I would not have believed it if it hadn't been laid out for me in such an effective way. By the time this story finally ends, we're left with a sense of profound wonder that all these things should have happened, and that people like this should have lived. After weeks of dross, boredom, and teeth-grinding annoyance, it's good to meet people who neither waste my time nor fray my temper, but simply wish to tell me a story of music, art, and the bizarre crapshoot that is 'recognition'. And that this story and not those was the true one is enough to make anyone smile.

So do yourself a favor, and give it a listen. And you might just start searching for Sugar Man yourselves.

Final Score:  8.5/10