“Like most people today, Judy was a cynic and was offended
by the slightest hint of fantasy.” So reads a portion of the opening text of
the new movie directed and co-written (with his now former wife, Louise
Stratten) by Peter Bogdanovich. This clunky observation, I think, misreads the
modern or post-modern condition rather grievously. Cynicism today is in fact
fed by fantasy, or at least delusion; it’s a mask that affects to connote a
reckoning with The Real, which in fact merely enables its wearers to distract
themselves from the true horror of the world as it is today. But anyway.
Judy, played by Illeana Douglas, is a Hollywood reporter,
interviewing newly minted star Isabella Patterson, or “Izzy” who, as played by
the nonetheless appealing Imogen Poots, speaks with a thick approximation of a
Brooklyn accent that’s meant to evoke Judy Holliday in “Born Yesterday” or
“Bells Are Ringing” but doesn’t even get within swinging distance of Madonna in
“Who’s That Girl.” Accents aren’t even the main problem with “She’s Funny,” in
which Bogdanovich tries to merge the multiple-New-York-storylined romantic comedy
antics of his underappreciated 1981 masterpiece (yes, it is) “They All Laughed”
with the backstage-at-the-theatre-full-of-lunatics antics of “Noises Off.” The
movie sure is good-hearted enough. It’s a labor of love, it would seem, for all
involved. Several younger-filmmaker admirers of Bogdanovich—the one-time tyro
behind “The Last Picture Show” and other outstanding films of the “Easy Riders,
Raging Bulls” era—teamed up here to produce the long-gestating picture. Noah
Baumbach, Wes Anderson and George Drakoulias are all credited as executive
producers. Their clout, plus Bogdanovich’s reputation, and the goodwill he’s
garnered over years of working as an actor, no doubt helped pull together a
wonderful cast, including Owen Wilson, Kathryn Hahn, Rhys Ifans, Will Forte,
Jennifer Aniston, Austin Pendleton, and a lifeboat’s worth of recognizable
cameo players.
On paper, the premise of the movie is not untenable. Owen
Wilson plays theater director Arnold, in New York after working on a Hollywood
picture, about to embark on a new stage project starring superstar pal Seth
(Ifans), Arnold’s own wife Delta (Hahn), and a supporting player in the role of
a hooker to be named later. Speaking of hookers, Arnold’s got a weird habit: he
likes to solicit call girls, take them to a nice dinner, boink the bejesus out
of them (“You are the most…attentive kinda lover,” Izzy says to Arnold after
their sole amorous pairing) and then gift them with $30,000, telling them to
give up The Life and go pursue their dreams. He couches this pitch around a
speech featuring the catchphrase “Squirrels to the nuts,” which had at one
point been the title of the movie. One marvels at a world in which even the
most successful of contemporary theater directors could repeatedly depart with
30 large with such indiscrimination.
And that’s part of the problem with this
movie. Despite its preponderance of mullets among its younger players, “They
All Laughed” was at least a little conversant enough with the then-realities of
New York City life; as such, it could present a recognizable world. The level
of “fantasy” to which this movie actively aspires is so idealistic as to be
laughable, but not in an entirely good way. Old-movie lover Izzy at one point
says to Judy, about a playwright who falls in love with her, “He was exactly
what I imagined a playwright to be, and he was the Arthur Miller to my
Marilyn.” No, no, a thousand times no. Too many times the characters in this
movie sprint across the line separating quirky charm from know-somethingish affectation,
and then stay on the wrong side of it.
And this erodes the sunny farcical
tone to which “She’s Funny That Way”
aspires. It’s as if somewhere along the way this wannabe champagne got spiked
with eager-to-please bennies. There are some good, funny bits, one involving a
cab driver’s vivid protest against having to sit through a feuding couple’s
disagreement. Aniston’s reluctant therapist character, weirdly shrill at first,
actually gets funnier over the course of the movie, while Wilson underplays nicely
throughout. He could have been the picture’s anchor, but the frenetic
machinations of the plot spin it away from him. Then there’s the finale, in
which the viewer ignorant of old movies gets a vivid primer in Lubitsch from a
real-life filmmaker and film buff. It’s kind of cute and kind of…weird, which
would be fine, only it doesn’t know how weird it is. Given the narrow range of
this movie’s overall achievement, I imagine its preaching here will only reach
the already converted.
"Dirty Weekend" is a decent idea for a low-budget movie that never gets
past the idea stage, and after a brief while, you may start to question
whether it should have been a movie at all, much less a 90-minute one.
Matthew Broderick and Alice Eve
play coworkers who get stranded in Albuquerque, New Mexico during a
business trip. Broderick's character, Les, becomes obsessed with leaving
the airport to go on a shopping trip. He clearly has a secret agenda,
and Natalie accompanies him as his minder, needling him along the way to
get him to reveal what all the fuss is about, and justifiably
complaining that he is an evasive man who has a problem telling the
truth.
The above paragraph does not describe the first few minutes of the film, but the first half-hour.
Dirty Weekend Watch Movie Online
Another hour or so later, we've learned Les's secret. It's about as
unremarkable as can be, and probably not that far from what you imagined
the first time the film introduced the possibility that something
happened to him in Albuquerque. Along the way, Natalie—established early
on as a lesbian, to blunt any expectation that she might end up
sleeping with Les—reveals a secret of her own. This secret is also, in
the grand scheme of things, pretty mild, unless you disapprove of any
sexual behavior between consenting adults that is not of the plain
vanilla variety. Not once does a character say or do anything memorable
or even especially surprising.
LaBute made his bones with eloquently nasty, often downright morally ugly movies like "In the Company of Men" and "Your Friends and Neighbors" before moving into less easily pigeonholed fare, including "Nurse Betty," "The Shape of Things,"
a bizarre remake of "The Wicker Man," and a hilarious (really) remake
of the English comedy "A Death at a Funeral." To say he's been
hit-and-miss would be an understatement, and his butterfly-collection
approach to characterization has understandably not been to everyone's
taste. But in the past he's always given viewers something to react
against; you might not love everything, or even anything, he was doing
in any given scene, but at least you didn't sit around waiting for
something more than faintly interesting to happen, which is the case
throughout "Dirty Weekend."
Not once does LaBute do anything with
the camera besides use it to
photograph actors saying his lines, in locations that hold no thematic,
architectural or any other interest. Broderick and Eve are excellent,
but they can't save the movie because LaBute gives them little to latch
onto. The cinematic and dramatic
value of this film is close to zero. If it were actively bad, or
ostentatiously pretentious, at least it would get your blood pumping,
but instead it's passively bad—the kind of movie that seems to have no
particular opinion on anything it's showing you, or on its own
existence. If it were an anecdote, it would be one that went on for
quite a long time, until the listener interjected, "Why are you telling
me this?"
"The Martian," Ridley Scott's story of an astronaut struggling to
survive by himself on a desolate planet, is at heart a shipwreck story,
one that just happens to take the form of a science fiction adventure.
But although the outline offers no surprises, the details and the tone
feel new.
Like all the variants of "Robinson Crusoe"—including "Cast Away"
and, of course, "Robinson Crusoe on Mars"—this film is about a man,
Matt Damon's Mark Watney, who summons all of his ingenuity and courage
to endure a seemingly impossible situation, then must deal with intense
loneliness on top of it all. If you've ever seen a film, you know going
in that things are going to turn out fine for Mark in the end—that no
studio is going to pay for a special effects driven epic about a smart,
likable castaway who dies horribly in the last five minutes. You also
know that, despite the Lone Man Against Nature plot line, there's a
reason why the filmmakers cast Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain
as the captain of the mission that's forced to abort its exploration of
the planet's surface after a sudden storm and leave Mark for dead—and
it wasn't so that she could turn tail and head for Earth with her crew
in the first ten minutes and never go back to the red planet. You also
know that, despite the heated discussions back on earth of how risky,
time consuming and expensive a rescue mission would be, NASA will still
have to stage one, and that any bureaucratic objections (mainly by Jeff
Daniels' character, the agency's director) will be washed away in the
name of doing what's right. Since what will happen is never in question, all that remains is "how."
The Martian Watch Movie Online
Fortunately, the hows are cleverly envisioned by Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard (who penned "The Cabin in the Woods"
and many episodes of ABC's castaway drama "Lost"), with thoughtful
attention paid to basic questions like, "What do you do if the face
plate of your helmet cracks?" and "How do you create a food supply on a
planet that can't sustain plant life?" The short answers to those
questions are, respectively, "apply duct tape" and "grow potatoes in a
makeshift greenhouse fertilized with the solid waste left behind by the
rest of the crew." Throughout the course of this long but never dull
film, Mark makes for an affable and centered lead character—a
wisecracking botanist who talks constantly to himself (and by extension
the audience) in video diary entries, and sees each new crisis as a
problem solving exercise, provided he can get his fear and despair under
control long enough to think straight, which of course he does.
I'm
making it sound as though "The Martian" is predictable. It is, but that
doesn't hurt its effectiveness. The most fascinating thing about the
film is how it leans into predictability rather than make a show of
fighting it. In the process, comes up with a specific tone that I don't
believe anyone has summoned in this genre, certainly not at this budget
level. Of all the stories you've seen about astronauts coping with the
aftermath of disaster—including "Mission to Mars" and the visually
superior and more aggressively melodramatic "Gravity,"
which is more of a self-help parable with religious overtones—"The Martian" is the most relaxed and funny, and maybe the warmest. Strangely
like "Alien," Scott's breakthrough 1979 thriller, and maybe
his follow-up "Blade Runner" as well, "The Martian" makes the future
look at once spectacular and mundane. For all its splendors, the world
that enfolds the characters is simply reality: the time and space in which they happen to be living.
At
times it seems as if the movie's greatest artistic inspiration is not
any particular previous film or novel, but the second act of "2001: A Space Odyssey,"
which features endearing throwaway images of Dr. Heywood Floyd
anxiously reading the instructions on a zero gravity toilet, and
sleeping on a Pan Am flight to an orbital space station like a
businessman taking the red eye from Los Angeles to New York. Much of the
film's soundtrack consists, hilariously, of disco, the only music
available to Mark (via his captain's abandoned laptop). The
juxtapositions of Scott's panoramic red-brown landscapes, Damon's grimy,
stubbly face, and 1970s dance floor classics like "Turn the Beat
Around," "Hot Stuff"
and "Rock the Boat" are sublime. They make Mark's predicament seem like
an elevated version of a tedious but necessary task, like tiling a roof
or repainting a garage. Hard work always seems to go faster when you
put some tunes on.
"The Martian" occasionally plays like an unscripted TV show
about a man stranded on another planet. There's a touch of "How to" in the
way Scott and Goddard tell the story. As Mark talks to himself, he
walks us through his processes, showing how, for instance, he liquefies
dried-out waste and mixes it into arid Martian soil, then inserts halved
potatoes into crop furrows and waits for a sprig of green to appear.
Cost-benefit analysis constantly comes into play, as when Mark drives several hundred kilometers in a rover to dig up tech left
over from another Mars mission, and has to decide whether to turn off
the heat in the cockpit to save power during the long journey (he
decides against it, because even though the heater eats up juice, he
can't function if his nether regions are frozen).
Chiwetel
Ejiofor's Dr. Vincent Kapoor, the head of NASA’s Mars missions, wants to
bring Mark home out of a sense of honor and obligation, and all of the
other characters—including Chastain's Capt. Melissa Lewis, Daniels'
Teddy Sanders, and Teddy's morally indignant right hand man, Mitch
Henderson (played by Sean Bean,
the ideal actor to play a man of conscience)—are basically on the same
page; it's not a question of whether everyone wants to do the
crowd-pleasing and heroic thing, but whether it's possible. It takes
quite a while just to get a radio message to Mars and back, and you
can't just send a spacecraft there like you're overnight-mailing a
birthday gift. The mission has to be paid for and prepped, and that can
take months or years. At one point the NASA people discuss whether to
skip safety inspections on an unmanned flight in order to make a
particular calendar window.
Through it all, people keep
acting like people. They say impulsive, even thoughtless things, and
then have to apologize. They crack jokes. The NASA technicians,
scientists and managers hold press conferences and work through
equations on wiper boards and worry about money and fuel and safety
issues, but for the most part they talk to each other without hysteria,
and some of the exchanges verge on workplace
comedy. So much of Scott's reputation rests on his ability to conceive
and
execute elegant images, often in service of grim stories, that it's easy
to forget how good he is at characterization and light comedy (see
"Thelma and Louise" and "Matchstick Men," among others). "The Martian"
fuses these sides of his talent better than any film he's made. At its
best, it has the serene assurance of a Howard Hawks buddy adventure in
which no predicament is so dire that it can't still feature a bit of
light humor.
The characterizations start out feeling a bit vague and flat, but deepen
through the accumulation of little details. Even supporting players who
show up for a scene or two have a life force, such as Donald Glover's
Rich Purnell, a brilliant but eccentric young scientist who lives so
deep inside his own head that he doesn't know the NASA director's name.
One of the best scenes finds Kapoor and communications expert Mindy Park (Mackenzie Davis)
interpreting the inflection of Mark's typed response to a radical
scheme to rescue him: "Are you f-----g kidding me?" Kapoor hopes that
Mark meant to indicate excitement at NASA's audacity, but deep down he
knows that's probably not it.
The film's ecstatic peak is its
most counter-intuitive sequence, a music montage near the climax that
interrupts the flow of the rescue action to show the astronauts on
Mark's old spaceship contacting their loved ones via satellite video: a
husband shows his wife a record album that he bought for her birthday,
and a father delights his kids by floating through the spaceship's
interior in zero gravity, swallowing water globules like a porpoise
going after minnows. Billions gather at the end to watch
Mark's rescue live on TV, but at no point do we get the impression that
all
other drama has ceased while the human race frets
over the astronaut's fate. For
Mark it's life or death, but we infer that there are
long stretches when the public has forgotten that he's stranded. The
most significant recurring images in the film are closeups of sprigs
sprouting from the potatoes that Mark buried in his greenhouse. Life
goes on no matter what.
For a film called “90 Minutes in Heaven,” this adaptation of Don Piper’s
2004 bestselling memoir spends an inordinate amount of time on earthly
ground. Only about three minutes of the film are devoted to portraying
the divine afterlife, and when they finally arrive, they aren’t worth
the wait. A better title would’ve likely been “121 Minutes in
Purgatory,” since that’s essentially where audiences will find
themselves residing during the entirety of this dreary slog down a
familiar road paved with painfully good intentions.
What’s especially dispiriting is the botched potential of the film’s
premise. Here’s a story about a Baptist minister who dies in a horrific
car accident, has a transformative trip to the Pearly Gates and suddenly
finds himself brought back to life, reciting the lyrics of a hymn sung
by a minister to his bloodied corpse. So taken was Piper with his vision
of Heaven that he began to lack the motivation necessary to continue on
his path toward recovery. He grew distant from his family and friends,
repelling the very acts of kindness that he used to administer on a
daily basis to those in need.
90 Minutes In Heaven Watch Movie Online
The role of Piper requires an actor that can involve the audience in
his emotional struggle, all the while being confined to a hospital bed.
Casting Hayden Christensen
is the film’s first fatal misstep. Once again mistaking pouting
expressions and mumbled line delivery for a vivid characterization, as
he did so notoriously as Anakin Skywalker, Christensen is an infuriating
presence from frame one. There’s a reason why the actor’s best film
remains “Shattered Glass,”
Billy’s Ray’s excellent 2003 profile of a deceitful journalist: the
actor is most convincing as a phony. It’s much harder for him to make
sincerity credible, which is a major problem in this case, since his
character is the one tasked with repeatedly declaring, “Heaven is real!”
If
that line sounds familiar, it may be because it bears a suspicious
resemblance to the title of last year’s highest-grossing evangelical
release, “Heaven Is For Real,” a film that is superior on every
conceivable level. That picture also recounted the fact-based tale of a
near-death experience, yet it actually dealt with the spiritual crises
and doubts that arose in its aftermath. “90 Minutes in Heaven” seems to
take for granted the notion that audiences will buy Piper’s story, and
thus exerts no effort to make it convincing, let alone interesting.
Think
of the limitless possibilities that the visual medium of cinema
could’ve provided to these filmmakers seeking to depict the
awe-inspiring sights Piper encountered after his soul left his body.
Aside from widening the aspect ratio, all writer/director Michael Polish—a filmmaker once lauded for audacious fables like “Northfork”—can
muster is sun-dappled green screen shots of cheery caucasians dressed
in their Sunday best. There are also two black women and an Asian man
among the smiling faces, but they’re merely glorified extras on hand for
the celestial photo op.
Another problem is the dialogue. Piper’s
narration has a tendency to introduce every character upon their
arrival with expository details of their godly virtues (such as military
service), even if they have no bearing on the plot. He also brings
unwelcome attention to the film’s obvious metaphors by literally
spelling them out via voice-over. After a brief spat with his wife, Eva (Kate Bosworth), she gazes forlornly at fireworks exploding out his hospital window. “Unfortunately,” Don moans, “these were the only fireworks left in our marriage.”
To
Bosworth’s credit, she emerges as the sole emotional anchor of the
piece, as Eva’s mounting frustration with her husband’s morose
unresponsiveness reaches its breaking point. Bosworth fares well in
scenes where Eva is simply reacting to the sort of stresses any
full-time caregiver will find relatable. There’s a terrific moment where
she finds herself, yet again, in a McDonald’s drive-thru and can’t
bring herself to order another meal. She rolls up her window and screams
in frustration, yet Polish undercuts the tension with a cheap laugh,
having the drive-thru clerk quip, “Sorry, that’s not on the menu.”
One
of the primary challenges facing a faith-based film like “90 Minutes in Heaven” is its reliance on the power of prayer as a deus ex machina.
What may seem miraculous in real life can often come across as lazy
screenwriting on film. There’s one key instance in this picture where
prayer leads to a red herring rather than salvation. After praying for a
sign that will aid her husband, Eva spots a billboard advertising a
personal injury attorney, played by Dwight Yoakam
in a thoroughly obnoxious cameo. He meets with her at the hospital
cafeteria, where they sit in front of an enormous mural displaying
mountains and grassy meadows. With his ten-gallon hat, Yoakam looks like
a Hollywood cowboy in front of a matte painting in these scenes, which
carry traces of the visual flair that once distinguished Polish’s work.
Needless to say, the attorney’s promises prove to be as bogus as the
artificial backdrop, and Eva’s hopes are dashed. The film frankly
could’ve benefited from a few more complications like this. Faith can’t
be strengthened if it’s never tested.
The worst thing you can say about creepy-kid horror thriller "Hellions"
is that there should be more where it came from. You have to temper your
expectations to enjoy a film of this small-scale and ambition to
appreciate what director Bruce McDonald ("Pontypool," "The Tracey Fragments") has accomplished here. "Hellions," a "Rosemary's Baby"-meets-"Children of the Corn"-style,
what-to-dread-when-you're-expecting chiller, would make a perfect
B-movie. McDonald focuses on unnerving ambience over plot, and crafts an
effective horror movie that's also basically a home invasion thriller
where the home invaders in question are creepy, murderous
trick-or-treaters and the home-owner is a pregnant 17-year-old. There
is, in other words, nothing new in "Hellions" that you can't get already
in earlier, more ambitious horror films. But McDonald delivers an
effective thrice-told tale, and he does it with enough avant garde flair
to show viewers that temper their expectations a good time.
Hellions Watch Movie Online
The set-up for "Hellions" is blessedly simple: Dora (Chloe Rose),
a typically moody high school senior, discovers she's four weeks
pregnant on Halloween. Dora is unsure of how to broach the subject with
chops-busting boyfriend Jace (Luke Bilyk) and approachable-but-overbearing mom Kate (Rachel Wilson). In fact, Dora can barely find the words to talk to sensitive gynecologist Dr. Henry (Rossif Sutherland).
But Dora doesn't have to wonder what she's going to do for long because
she's soon confronted with bigger problems: pint-sized,
costumer-wearing kids who start by egging Dora's house, then destroy
property and anyone who gets in their way. McDonald and screenwriter Pascal Trottier
frequently suggest that the events that viewers are watching unfold
could conceivably be all in Dora's head. Their commitment to Dora's
wracked point-of-view is selective, but they do often remind
viewers—through bath salt and stress-induced dream sequences—that
what they're watching isn't strictly objective reality. Dora's body is
no longer her own, making the home-invasion analogy a blunt but potent
metaphor for her feelings of powerlessness. Other horrors-of-new-mom-dom
analogies are effectively used throughout the film, particularly
womb-like Jack-o'-Lanterns, and raw chicken eggs splattering on
translucent window panes. But
again, the biggest shortcoming here is that McDonald and Trottier
aren't interested in doing more than what they feel is absolutely
necessary to establish mood and tone. "Hellions" consequently only
really comes to life when McDonald's signature avant garde flair
intrudes, and we're treated to trippy glimpses inside Dora's head.
McDonald is fairly non-chalant about these transitions, making random
weird-ness—including a sudden in-door tornado—feel perversely natural.
Rose-tinted fever dreams, and creepy visions of masked children who
giggle and brandish axes are especially effective, but they also fall
short of greatness. What
McDonald and Trottier don't do is establish Dora's baby-phobia as a
symptom of her character and not her age. That's admittedly a challenge
given the brief time we get to know Dora. But Rose, clad in a basic
halo-and-wings angel costume for Halloween, seems to represent a type,
not an individual. We arguably don't need to know much about Dora, but
there isn't much in the film about her dreams that don't make her seem
like a personality-less cypher. She's supposed to be average, and
McDonald refreshingly doesn't stigmatize her teenage pregnancy. In fact,
he goes out of his way to show that Doctor Henry is caring, and that
both Kate and Jace are friendly enough. Still,
Dora's visions of pumpkin patch ghouls and trippy conversations with an
alien-sounding interlocutor who keeps urging her to give "blood for
baby" aren't specific enough. This robs "Hellions" of specificity,
making the best parts of the film feel like an accomplished genre
exercise for McDonald, who has delayed his proposed sequel to brainy
zombie film "Pontypool" for years now. However,
there's something to be said about a relatively small-scale picture
whose creators embrace its limitations. The experimental dream sequences
and hallucinations that make "Hellions" a McDonald movie also make the
film a perfect, light midnight movie
that should go great with light drinks, good company, and a warm
blanket. If you're lucky enough to see the film projected at midnight,
go for it. This may sound like nostalgic hyperbole, but they really
don't make small-scale movies like "Hellions" much any more. It's not
without its shortcomings, but "Hellions" gets the job done.
“The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” opens with an old "Soul
Train" clip of musical legends, The Chi-Lites. “For God’s sake,” the
group sings, “why dontcha give more power to the people?” The Afro-clad
quartet deliver their message of protest with a funky groove, a
technique director Stanley Nelson
adopts for this documentary. A river of protest soul music runs through
the film, underscoring the visuals and influencing the smart editing
choices by Aljernon Tunsil. He and Nelson traverse a structured arc as
if designing great drama, presenting a slew of talking heads, film clips
and rarely seen photographs. The film avoids hagiography, and in doing
so, brings out the undeniable humanity of its subjects.
The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution Watch Movie Online
PBS strikes again with another fine documentary about the Black Power
movement. “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” would make a
fine double feature with 2012’s “The Black Power Mixtape.” That film
stunned me, leaving my mind racing with thoughts and ideas. The same can be said for Nelson’s documentary, but “Vanguard”
also added an unnerving sense of déjà vu. “If you live long enough,” an
elder once told me, “life starts to feel like a merry-go-round.” Viewers
will be struck by how eerily familiar and current the tactics depicted
in this film are. In the grand scheme of oppression, fifty years is
apparently long enough for history to repeat itself.
"Vanguard”
reminded me that every generation has its media-fueled boogeyman, and
it’s usually a brown one. The American majority of my parents’
generation was scared out of its wits by the Black Panther Party, an
Oakland-based group fighting for the civil rights of African-Americans.
Founded in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the Panthers had a
multi-point plan and a savvy command of the fine art of media
manipulation. They presented a tough, military-style image that ran
counter to the suits and Sunday-best attire of protest
marches and sit-ins. They published a newspaper, like the Nation of
Islam did, that detailed events and delivered news to the Black
community. They provided a breakfast program for poor kids. And they
used the Second Amendment to great effect by blatantly carrying loaded
guns in a state that had an open carry law. Whenever confronted about
this by the police, Newton would recite the California Penal Code that
made his weapon legal.
Throughout the film, Nelson turns to
members of the Black Panther Party to set the scene and tell their
story. He begins in 1966, where the tensions between police and the
community In Oakland, California were at the highest levels in America.
William Calhoun tells us that “there was absolutely no difference
between the way the police treated us in Mississippi as they did in
California.” As a result, the Black Panther Party started out as a
self-defense organization, acting as a watchdog for police brutality. As
Newton and others explain their methods to prevent undue violence
during arrests, Nelson alternates between their words and those of Ray
Gaul, an Oakland police officer describing the same methods. “It was
pretty intimidating,” Gaul says.
Far more intimidating was the
day-to-day existence of Blacks throughout the U.S. “Being Black in
America meant that you didn’t walk down the street with the same sense
of safety, and the same sense of privilege, as a White person,” says
Jamal Joseph, another Panther interviewed here. This lack of safety and
agency did not go away when the Panthers came on the scene. Instead,
their show of power was seen as an enormous threat to the American way
of life, a threat that caught the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. The
former head of the F.B.I. became even more fearful once the Panthers
acquired charismatic characters like Eldridge Cleaver and Fred Hampton, both of whom could work a crowd as well as Malcolm X and Dr. King.
Hoover
is as big a character in this tale as Newton, Seale, Cleaver and
Hampton. Nelson zeroes in on Hoover’s memos and his language, drawing a
parallel between the Black Panther Party and Black Lives Matter with no
extra effort. The similarities are striking. Hoover’s FBI was going
after a group whose origins were in protesting against police brutality.
He called the Panthers a racist terrorist group that wanted to destroy
America, and a certain faction of the media promoted this message by
playing up a manufactured scariness factor. The Panthers interrupted a
press conference held by Governor Ronald Reagan, proving they can also
play the media game to get politicians to listen. Hampton was illegally
gunned down by the cops, leading to a successful civil lawsuit against
the Chicago police department.
And in memos, Hoover was constantly
fearful of a “Black messiah” who will bend the ear of non-Blacks and
turn them toward the Black cause. That last one took me by surprise, but
there’s a sly, subversive reason Nelson puts it out there. Remember the
GOP’s favorite term for Obama during the 2008 election cycle? It was
“the Messiah.”
Though it masterfully highlights the similarities
between the “radical” organizations of yesteryear and today, “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” makes an even better cautionary
tale for today’s movement. After all, these institutions are run by
people who are subject to the best and worst of human emotions, people
who aren’t always right in their decision-making. This film shows how
the Black Panther Party fractured between its two leaders Newton and
Cleaver, and is unflinching in depicting what went wrong and how the FBI
exploited it using informants and counterintelligence. “We thought the
FBI wanted to kill us,” says Kathleen Cleaver. “I don’t think
we understood how insidious their plan actually was.” The damaging
elements of human nature turned out to be J. Edgar Hoover’s biggest
ally. After a certain point, he just sat back and let the dissention he
planted play out on its own.
The film also comments on whether the
Panthers were victims of the image they projected and their
underestimation of how powerful their enemies eventually were. “The
great strength of the Black Panther Party was its ideals and youthful
vigor and enthusiasm,” Calhoun tells us. “The great weakness of the
Black Panther Party was its ideals and youthful vigor and enthusiasm.
That can be dangerous, especially against the United States government.”
In
contrast to the song of protest and forward motion that opens his film,
Nelson closes with Gil Scott-Heron’s mournful “Winter in America.”
Against the hopelessness and exhaustion of that classic soul song, each
of the film’s talking heads recite from the Black Panther Party Platform
and Program. None of the platform demands are outrageous nor unusual.
All of them remain as relevant, necessary and timely as this
documentary. “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” deserves
to be seen, studied and discussed.
Some time in the first hour of “Labyrinth of Lies,” its lead
character—a
young, ambitious, late-'50s German prosecutor named Johann
Radmann—begins to learn the scope of the crimes he’s decided to
investigate in the
hopes of breaking out of trying traffic violation cases. A former Nazi
party
member has been found to hold a teaching position nearby; this violates
German
law, although most of the bureaucrats overseeing this sort of thing have
been
happy to look the other way. It emerges that the school employee was a
guard at
a place called Auschwitz. Although the Nuremberg trials have already
taken
place, German reporting on the international court had apparently been
sketchy;
Radmann’s never heard of Auschwitz, and neither have many of his friends
and
colleagues.
Labyrinth Of Lies Watch Movie Online
Radmann soon finds out enough, and when doggedly pursues justice,
never reflects on whether he might have bitten off more than he can
chew.
Neither does the movie itself, directed by Italian-born actor Giulio
Ricciarelli, most of whose filmography is German-based. Ricciarelli
co-wrote
the script with Elisabeth Bartel, and while the movie’s lead character is what
they call a composite, the movie is fact-based, concerning the first
prosecutions of Nazi war criminals within Germany itself. There’s a compelling
cinematic story here, perhaps, but Ricciarelli’s movie is too diffused and
scattered and, especially in its first hour, too reliant on commonplaces.
Radmann, played by the handsome but rather stiff Alexander Fehling, is an
almost too-good-to-be-true fiction, the guy who stands in the hallway in an
overhead shot while the rest of his colleagues are going to their offices, and
then retrieves from a wastepaper basket a document about that Nazi “case” that
none of his fellows want to touch with a ten-foot-pole. He collaborates with a
fiery, feisty German journalist named Gnielka (André Szymanski) who introduces
him to the world of postwar, pre-counterculture Euro bohemia, and these scenes
have a certain charm. But crusaders, victims, and perpetrators are all painted
with the standard contemporary brush; the bad guys have just enough banality of
evil, the survivors have the clichéd mix of defeated slouch and stiff spines,
and so on. It’s rather tiresome, with the bonus of making the viewer feel bad
about finding it tiresome. Which means, finally, that it’s a betrayal of the
reality it’s trying to portray, and one would be better of re-viewing “Shoah”
again.
Radmann becomes obsessed with tracking down one particularly
heinous Auschwitz denizen, one Dr. Josef Mengele. If you don’t know how that
pursuit turns/turned out, well I won’t “spoil” it for you…but by the same
token, you should be ashamed of yourself. As Radmann goes off on his own
tangents, his boss, the Attorney General Bauer (Gert Voss) tries to straighten
his focus, working an agenda of his own.
As the movie progresses, story themes emerge that are more
actively interesting, although they’re not explored with any particular
artistry. The deeper Radmann digs, the more Nazis he finds. Pursuing a line
fleshed out in the controversial history account “Hitler’s Willing
Executioners,” Radmann discovers that no one is innocent, not even those he
once most admired. This proves tough to him to handle. There’s a potentially
searing psychological drama in this kind of stuff, and while Ricciarelli does
use the material to underscore an object lesson on what the true nature of
investigation and justice ought to be, he doesn’t take any meaningful artistic
advantage of the material. So the movie winds up being—to put it kindly—mildly
intellectually satisfying while entirely emotionally flat. In an interesting
side note, an American Army officer who oversees wartime archives, and
reluctantly (at first) assists Radmann in his research, is played by one Tim
Williams, whom American viewers may recognize as the somewhat smarmy dude in
the ads for travel-discount website Trivago. He’s sarcastic but not
particularly creepy here and he speaks excellent German, for what it’s worth.
