Page One: Inside the New York Times, Andrew Rossi (2011)

No one with any interest in current events could fail to understand that information moves differently now than it did ten years ago, or ten months ago, or maybe even ten minutes ago. These changes have put obvious and well-documented pressure on "legacy media" companies like the Times. In July of 2002, NYT was trading at $50 a share; this past July it was at about $8 a share.

But you know all that. This movie goes over that territory, but where it really shines is in its depiction not of the Times as a company, but the Times as a collection of individuals. There are scenes where people gather around someone's desk and hash out what the ethical course of action is vis a vis some situation that's just arisen. People have principled disagreements, come to conclusions, act on them, and move forward. I found such moments heartening. Whatever else you want to say about the media, the Times, our desperate age, etc., you can't help but come away from this feeling like these people are truly acting in good faith and truly on a mission for good. They're probably doomed.

Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog (2007)

In which the NSF flies Herzog to Antarctica so that he can ask a penguin researcher, "Does a penguin ever go insane when they have simply had it with the colony?" If you love Herzog, this will tickle you pink. Dour laconic condemnations of civilization, breathless Caspar David Friedrich-esque romantic ejaculations in the face of ineffable landscapes, a fascination with damaged and fragile characters that comes across as both exploitative and sympathetic at the same time (the scene with the traumatized man who "escaped" from something he can't even talk about (East Germany?) and proudly shows Herzog the rucksack he has ready at all times, should he need to escape again, is without question my favorite moment in this film), and always, always, the magnetic attraction to oblivion. When Herzog talks about the dangers of diving under the ice, or how easy it is to get lost in a blizzard, or the way a penguin will sometimes become disoriented and start walking away from rather than toward the life-giving sea, you understand very clearly that he doesn't dread these disasters; he longs for them.

Herzog continues to make fiction films, but more and more his best attention seems to be directed toward documentaries. (Which, after all, is the more interesting movie, Grizzly Man or Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans?) Might it be that for a mature artist, the claptrap of artifice begins to seem an impediment rather than an aid to the realization of one's dramatic -- and even aesthetic -- goals? Discuss.

Inside Job, Charles Ferguson (2010)

If you read the New York Times and watch Frontline you already know most of this stuff, but this is nonetheless a sleek and efficient summary to force your libertarian uncle to watch, should you require a means of explaining to him in 108 minutes just why those damned hippies camped out on Wall Street are so irked. I particularly enjoyed Ferguson's invasion of the business schools at Harvard and Columbia, where economics professors are routinely paid huge sums to say nice things about deregulation but piously opine that they are immune to conflict of interest issues. The professors' ensuing dudgeons are pathetic to watch; incredibly, I end up feeling more sympathetic toward the tasteless Cristal-swilling johns downtown, who at least wear their avarice right on their shiny thousand-dollar sleeves.

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These endless summer days I ingest culture faster than I can process it. In addition to a lot of material about PTSD, which I'm reading for a writing project, this is what's been passing in front of my eyeballs. 

White Material, Claire Denis (2009). Denis goes back to Africa. Isabelle Hupert makes me nervous. The politics here are a mess, totally confused. A good example of how sloppy thinking likes to masquerade as ambiguity. But it's Claire Denis, so of course we must still love it.

Somewhere, Sofia Coppola (2010). Just letting the camera keep running on a lifeless scene doesn't make it Cassavetes. This is a deeply boring movie.

Another Year, Mike Leigh (2010). Another heartbreaker from Mike Leigh. It's not really a story so much as it is a kind of temporal vitrine, in which are displayed a half-dozen fully-realized characters, interacting with each other and trying to be alive.

True Grit, Joel and Ethan Coen (2010). Lacks the Coen whimsy of Fargo, etc. and also the Coen fatedness of No Country for Old Men. Fine, but neither here nor there.

F for Fake, Orson Welles (1973). Sloppy, self-indulgent, self-important, gimmicky, dull. And that's coming from someone who's genuinely interested in and who has great patience for this theme. Poor old fucker.

American Experience: Stonewall Uprising, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner (2010). Nice doc. Lots of fascinating footage of Village life in the 60's.

The Fighter, David O. Russell (2010). Stolid family drama, worth seeing. Has the kind of genuineness and moral seriousness of purpose you rarely see at the multiplex these days. It's about a hundred times less interesting than, say, Raging Bull, but I think contemporary audiences are so incredibly grateful when they're not pandered to, they wind up thinking something like this is art for the ages.

Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Jonathan Shay (1994). Perfect idea, poorly executed with slack, repetitive prose and a lot of unnecessary self-dealing.

Speed the Plow, David Mamet (1988). Dialogue perfection. Perfect dramatic efficiency.

Still Life: A Documentary, Emily Mann (1982). Really lively, allusive, slippery drama about the collision of eros and thanatos in the post-war life of a Vietnam veteran.

Lethal Warriors, David Philipps (2010). Philipps didn't ask for this job; he was a sports writer in Colorado Springs when the "Band of Brothers" started coming back from Iraq and killing each other and others. Philipps does an admirable job of stepping up and becoming a real reporter, covering some of the saddest stories of the war. Good, thorough, clear reporting. See also the Frontline episode, The Wounded Platoon.

Louie, Louis C.K. (2010-). Makes Seinfeld look like Happy Days.

The Passenger, Michelangelo Antonioni (1975). Oh, it's horribly pretentious and aimless and even sometimes irresponsible, but it's also of course gorgeous and dizzying poetry. I had to go get my camera to take pictures of it. Then I had to spend an hour planning a trip to Andalusia. 

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (1924). Been clambering up this Alp since May. Certainly skimmed some of the later Settembrini discourses, but I genuinely enjoyed almost all of these 700 pages. Took extensive notes elsewhere. This is utterly worth your time. Read it while you're young. What's it about? It's about a young man who decides -- the verb is too strong -- to absent himself from history.

Port of Shadows, Marcel Carné (1938). Oh, France. Merci pour Michèle Morgan.

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The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro (1995). Limpid prose kept me reading all 9000 pages, but there's not much there there.

Youth in Revolt, Miguel Arteta (2009).
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Edgar Wright (2010).
Cleverish enough, I guess. I like this Michael Cera fine, but why can't the protagonist in these things ever be a girl?

Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham (2005). Cunningham's a lovely writer sentence by sentence. The concept seemed too high-concept for me at first, but I grew into it and wound up enjoying this a great deal.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg (2010). One of the last great showbiz workaholics.

The Decalogue, Krzysztof Kieślowski (1988). If you've seen it, you know. If you haven't, you should.

Style Wars, Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant (1983). Terrific, fascinating documentary about the rise of graffiti and hip hop culture. Amazing to see NYC in the early 80's and realize how much time has gone by. Provided me with at least one long-sought source for a sample I'd wondered about: "You only specialize in one thing, you can't call yourself the all-out king."

Foul Play, Colin Higgins (1978). Second only to Seems Like Old Times on my list of Hawn/Chase childhood favorites. One of those 70's flicks that's simultaneously total fluff and highly clever.

The Informers, Juan Gabriel Vasquez (2004). There was no reason not to like this, but for some reason I couldn't engage with it.

Spies of the Balkans, Alan Furst (2010)
The Arms Maker of Berlin, Dan Fesperman (2009)
WWII espionage fiction: My annual holiday indulgence. A return to form for Furst, who seemed to me to be phoning it in the last few times. I blame Fesperman for not being Furst, but that's of course unfair.

The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko (2010). This isn't perfect, but it's very good, and it gives me a lot of hope. A reasonably serious and insightful story about a family of two moms and two kids going through a crisis of confidence, written and directed by an out Lesbian. Some might say that the achievement of the movie is that it doesn't even matter that the parents are gay, that it's just a story about a family crisis. That's only about half true. The parents' Lesbianism is integral to the story, but it doesn't determine the story. To me, this seems like a tremendous achievement; the piece neither claims special status for the couple nor asserts that this couple is just like any other. The view of human sexuality on offer here is also refreshing. It ain't Foucault, but it's way more sophisticated than the permanent adolescence Hollywood usually peddles in the bedroom.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Kirby Dick (2006)

Just what I needed: More corporate/puritanical cultural manipulation to be pissed off about. Dick is an annoying person and is overly fond of ginning up gotcha moments, but here, as in Outrage, his basic premise and his, well, outrage, are well founded. The MPAA rating system effectively controls what does and does not appear on the country's movie screens, and it's run as a homophobic misogynist pro-war star chamber.

I feel sad. I think I'm going to go to bed.

GasLand, Josh Fox (2010)

So we've all heard that one solution to the energy and global warming crises is to turn from petroleum to alternative fuels, like for instance natural gas. Natural gas! It's awesome! It's clean and cheap and plentiful and domestic! Well, guess what. Big corporations are drilling down into shale formations all over the country, and blasting toxic fluid down the holes to free up the gas so they can suck it out for you. This is causing widespread pollution of groundwater reservoirs, to such an extent that this guy in this picture here is able to set his tap water on fire.

You can find out all about it here. http://gaslandthemovie.com/

It's a terrible situation but, the formalist must take note, a very fine movie. Fox is personally involved in the problem -- a gas company wants to drill on his own property in upstate New York -- and acts not as a narrator of the film but as a character in it, to great effect. An extremely engaging and effective piece of agitprop.

Crude, Joe Berlinger (2009)

One of those movies that's interesting for reasons other than the ones the filmmakers wanted it to be interesting for. From 1964 to 1974, Texaco (now owned by Chevron) drilled for oil in Ecuador's rain forest. After 1974, Ecuador's state-owned oil development company continued to drill. Now the area is an environmental catastrophe. Local peoples filed a class action suit against Chevron in 1993, and now, 17 years later, the court case creeps imperceptibly forward. That's the story, and it's an important one. The film's another matter. It reminds me of a homely kid desperate to be popular as it lurches from one overweening attempt at pathos after another. It is relentlessly spotty when it comes to facts, and relentlessly bombastic when it comes to Poignant Tableaux. It looks to me like the filmmakers, in their understandable eagerness to get this story told and to move viewers to sympathy, if not action, have sacrificed reportage for spectacle. It is, as I say, understandable, but it's also unfortunate.

Tyson, James Toback (2008)

Thoroughly engaging documentary, thanks to Toback's inventive but lucid style, and -- mostly -- to Tyson himself, whose narration of his own story is by turns heartbreaking, self-aware, self-pitying, deadpan, boastful, analytical, emotional, and strange. Fully discredits the one-dimensional Tyson-as-thug theory, but doesn't shy away from the uglier aspects of his behavior.

Taxi to the Dark Side, Alex Gibney (2007)

This man, Dilawar, a taxi driver, was beaten to death by American soldiers at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan on December 10, 2002. He was shackled while he was beaten. He weighed 122 pounds when he died. He has never been accused of any crime -- not that that matters; it is illegal, as far as I know, to beat anyone to death, no matter what they've done or haven't.

This documentary starts with Dilawar's graphic, dramatic, outrageous story, but then, having seized your attention, turns, as it should, to the political and legal context which made stories like Dilawar's inevitable. The military and intelligence personnel who have tortured prisoners since 2001 have committed heinous acts, and I believe they should be held accountable. However, none of these crimes would have committed absent the tacit and overt encouragement of administration officials and their attorneys. Many people who should be in prison for crimes committed in the course of military actions since 2001 haven't been called to account. If I had to make a list of these people, the soldiers who beat Dilawar to death would be low on the list. At the top: George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee, Donald Rumsfeld, William J. Haynes II, Steven G. Bradbury . . . That would be a good start.

There are some moments in this movie that I don't like, where Gibney, understandably overwhelmed by some of the more Orwellian ironies he's reporting on, indulges in some Michael-Mooreish sarcasm. But on the whole, it's a remarkably comprehensive and effective document. If you want to understand the Bush administration's breathtaking, monomaniacal rush to subvert basic longstanding legal principles such as habeas corpus and the prohibition of torture, I'd suggest starting with this movie and Jane Mayer's The Dark Side.

Wheel of Time, Werner Herzog (2003)

Werner Herzog and half a million Buddhists journey to Bodh Gaya to observe Kalachakra, the Buddhist ritual where Tibetan Buddhist monks are ordained. The spectacle is overwhelming and humbling, and Herzog very rarely editorializes, directly or indirectly. Mostly, he just points his Steadicam at something amazing and lets it roll: monks in surgical masks making a mandala grain by grain, devotees making their way to Bodh Gaya overland on their hands and knees, a sea of pillows left behind after a service led by the Dalai Lama. Voyeuristic but not disrespectful, and fully irresistible.

Home Front, Richard Hankin (2006)

This is the story of Jeremy Feldbusch and his family. Feldbusch was badly wounded early in the Iraq war and lost his sight. He's now a spokesperson for the Wounded Warrior Project, a veteran's advocacy group. Hankin does the good hard work of living and breathing with Feldbusch, his family, and his community over a long period of time, and so achieves a depth and intimacy that other documentaries about returning veterans which just put them in front of a camera and ask them questions cannot. There are many scenes here which do a great deal to reduce the usual platitudes and abstractions to the very concrete, daily, unnoticed problems that veterans and their families have to deal with. Feldbusch is not a saint, madman, hero, zombie, proselyte, politico, flag-waver, cynic or any other stereotype. He's sometimes volatile and sometimes calm, sometimes extraordinarily insightful and other times pretty thick-headed. He's human, and not a number, and thanks to Hankin for introducing him to us.

I just have to say, as preface to my next entry, that the Feldbusches live in Pennsylvania, and the scenes in the film that blew my mind most were the ones where Feldbusch and his father determinedly figure out a way for Feldbusch to go deer hunting, despite his blindness. You need to see the shot of a blind veteran lugging a dead doe through the snow. It's the kind of thing fiction just can't do.

The Ground Truth, Patricia Foulkrod (2006)

Foulkrod's hugely irritating penchant for melodramatic music and editing threatens to ruin this documentary about the psychological and physical toll combat takes on soldiers, but the intelligence, passion, and honesty of the veterans, family members, and caregivers she interviews burn through the claptrap of the mise en scene. Minor and scattered but nevertheless illuminating.

Occupation: Dreamland, Ian Olds and Garrett Scott (2005)

It will be a long time before some as-yet-unborn Ken Burns has the proper perspective to deliver a comprehensive film history of the war in Iraq. Given the sheer volume of extant footage and imagery from the media and the thousands of cameras in soldiers' pockets, it may never even happen at all. In the interim, interestingly, what we do have are dozens of little documentaries like this popping up on cable TV and at film festivals like so many mushrooms. Typically directed, shot, edited, produced, financed, and marketed by two guys with a digital camera and a sense of mission, docs like this one follow around a unit of real soldiers and interview them with the same reverence major TV networks reserves for wonks. This is among the best of the genre I've seen. The soldiers -- an 82nd Airborne unit in Fallujah in 2004 -- are given their say, and the filmmakers' politics, while hardly invisible, are clearly and consciously subordinated to what the troops have to say. A few moments of real poetry, as when a well-meaning soldier chats with a very nervous Iraqi, trying to teach him the word "jacket" and to learn the Arabic for same, but the Iraqi misunderstands, and tells the soldier the Arabic word for "leather," which is what the jacket is made of. Somewhere there's a soldier trying to buy a jacket and getting handed leather, and an Iraqi man vice-versa.

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Highlights of recently consumed cultural products include

Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag (2004). Nothing particularly surprising here, but the utter sanity of the essay is a real tonic. Honest and deeply moral exploration of contemporary culture's relationship to images of pain, war, torture, and so forth. The most compelling moment, to me, is the one where Sontag demolishes the conventional wisdom that our steady diet of such images must inevitably inure us to them. She won't let us off the hook that easily. If we're going to look, she demands that we also see.

As Is, William M. Hoffman (1985). Excellent play; anyone who calls it sentimental is too cool for their own good.

Standard Operating Procedure, Philip Gourevitch (2008). Quiet, sane, systematic account of the experiences of the notorious Abu Ghraib soldiers. Gourevitch is painstakingly objective, except for a few sections where he indulges in some Sontag-like theorizing about the nature of the documentary image, and a few others where he can't help but call attention to some of the scandal's more vertigo-inducing conundrums. Among the most pointed: Sabrina Harman went to prison for photographing the corpse of Mandel al-Jamadi, but the CIA interrogator Mark Swanner, in whose custody al-Jamadi died, has never been accused of a crime.

Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman (1991). Inspiring walk along the high wire of literature above the abyss of propaganda.

The Theater and Its Double, Antonin Artaud (1938). Yum.

Baghdad ER, Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill (2006).

Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, Jon Alpert and Ellen Goosenberg Kent (2007). Some very moving stories from veterans about deadly days they lived through. Having Tony Soprano interview and offer encouragement is a little schmaltzy, though.

Complete Plays, Sarah Kane (2001). Terrifying and brilliant playwright. I don't know why I'd never heard of her. It's somehow sad when your Amazon recommendations get to know you this well.

Mad Men, Matthew Weiner (2008). This show is so sad. I love it.

Planet of the Apes, Franklin J. Schaffner (1968). Boring.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu (2007). Sorry, hate to be a spoilsport, but this is a really turgid, sloppily directed, and indifferently acted movie, and I can't help but think that all the international acclaim for it is actually somehow condescending and patronizing, like, "Oh, isn't that sweet, a Romanian who thinks he can make a movie." The film's bleakness has some power, and it's certainly a fine documentation of the insane Ceausescu regime, but it's not great cinema.

About 6000 hours of the 2008 Summer Olympics. I heart Guo Jingjing.

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Wanted, Timur Bekmambetov. The Da Vinci Code meets The Matrix meets La Femme Nikita. Is AJ all that? Yes, she is.

The Question, Henri Alleg. More bravery in a month than I'll muster in my life.

Shaun of the Dead, Edgar Wright. Documentary about contemporary English culture.

The Namesake, Mira Nair. Hackneyed narrative transposed onto inscrutable culture attempts to pass as original.

Strategic Air Command, Anthony Mann. Weird one from the great Mann. Made just two years before the Beckettesque desolation of Men in War, this film's a hymn to the constant nuclear vigilance of the SAC. Some of Mann's usual darkness definitely creeps in around the edges, but on the whole it's pretty sleepy.

Operation Crossbow, Michael Anderson. I heart cable WWII flick. George Peppard infiltrates buzz bomb factory. Double crossing and Sophia Loren.

The Thin Man, W. S. Van Dyke. A marriage to aspire to. Makes your liver hurt just to watch.

White Heat, Brenda Wineapple. Delightful account of the correspondence between Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. My review is here.

Bush's War. Brilliant, comprehensive documentary from Frontline covering the Bush administration's machinations from 9/11 to now. Watch it online. Costs only your time and your lunch, which you'll lose.

No End In Sight, Charles Ferguson (2007)

If you've been paying any attention at all, you already know that there was no reasonable justification for invading Iraq in the spring of 2003, that the invasion force was large enough to topple the regime but too small to maintain a stable occupation, that there was no coherent plan for how to manage and rebuild post-invasion Iraq, and that disastrous, hubristic mistakes (de-Baathification, the disbanding of the Iraqi army, the failure to declare martial law, mass random detentions) made very early in the occupation led quickly, inevitably, and inexorably to the bottomless pit which is today's Iraq.

This is still very much worth watching, though, because it provides a quick but comprehensive overview of the truly crucial period, from October 2002 to August 2003. The filmmakers speak to a tremendous number of people, from lowly infantry all the way up to Richard Armitage, plus journalists, Iraqi intellectuals, analysts, academics, bureaucrats, U.N. officials, military officers, and so on. (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bremer, Rice, Powell, and Wolfowitz -- the architects of the disaster -- of course refused to be interviewed.) On a few occasions, the interviewers display an unfortunate lack of objectivity -- sarcastic when talking with people they don't like; chummily with people they do. Aside from that, this is one of the finest documentaries on the war I've seen. Highly recommended.

The War, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (2007)

I've been taking my time watching these Tivo'd episodes of this fifteen-hour documentary; it's frankly too upsetting to watch more than an hour at a time. Burns is something of a sentimentalist, but those aspects are easy to ignore. The reason to watch this is for the raw footage, through which those people in those places in those times doing those things become these people in these places in these times doing these things. An astonishing document.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Alex Gibney (2005)

This is an amazing film, which should be seen by anyone who doubts for a second that corporate America and the American government not only exist in a permanent state of co-dependency and blatant conflict of interest, but are essentially two manifestations of the exact same impulse: greed. I'm a 21st century kid, cynical to the core, and not easily shocked, but I gagged on this. If you've only got twenty minutes or so, watch the segment about 2/3 through about the California blackouts in 2000 and 2001, which cut off power to millions of citizens, ensured the recall of Governor Gray Davis and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and which were completely and utterly artificially engineered by Enron traders in order to generate profits for the company and themselves. You hear tapes of the traders joking with each other about stealing from old people, and how good it is for business when wildfires get out of control. Then you hear the newly elected President H. W. Bush (good friends with Kenneth Lay, as his father was) saying that there is no need for the federal government to intervene in California. It's nothing you haven't suspected, but it still packs a wallop.

Moog, Hans Fjellestad (2004)

I happen to be a big fan of electronic music, and so thought this documentary about the inventor of the synthesizer might be enjoyable, especially since it promised appearances by DJ Spooky and Stereolab, household gods around here.

Sadly, the movie's pretty much a disaster. Moog is clearly a sweet old man, but I don't really need to watch him walk through his garden picking green peppers and talking about how gardening and inventing are somehow related, but in a way he can't describe. I think what happened here is that the filmmakers thought that because Moog is so awesome, all they had to do was turn the camera on and let him talk. There's a thing called editing, and it's important.

The best part is watching the astonishing Pamelia Kurstin play the theremin. My god! Who knew!