SF Diplomat

REVIEW : Lagerfeld Confidential (2007)

Karl Lagerfeld first came to my attention when he appeared on French chat show Tout Le Monde en Parle.  Flanked by a model, the man sat like a microwaved toad with his black sunglasses and stern pony tail fanning himself distractedly while another of the guests explained how they’d had to wait hours for Lagerfeld to show up and, upon arriving, the diva had not deigned to offer any excuses or apologies for his tardiness.  Here was the fashion industry personified;  arrogant, aloof, preposterous and vain.  Lagerfeld Confidential goes some way to dispelling the myth but this documentary’s lack of analysis or even context combined with its subject transparently having control over what ended up in the final cut means that the film ultimately feels more like finely crafted but ineffectual PR than a proper documentary.

REVIEW : Going to Pieces (2006)

My review of the documentary adaptation of Adam Rockoff's Going to Piece : The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986 has gone live at THE ZONE.

It's an interesting documentary, not so much for the content (which is lightweight) as for the form.  Essentially, it's an attempt to update and transfer an encyclopedia of sorts into a documentary.  Such a drastic change in form and medium is reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman's screenplay for Spike Jonze's Adaptation.  However, instead of inventing a fictional twin brother or making a documentary about how difficult it is to make a book that drily states facts about a series of films into a documentary, Rockoff literally just lists film after film.  It's a great example of a documentary penned by a fan rather than a film critic.

REVIEW - Wal-Mart: The high cost of low price - 5/20

Reviewed for Videovista, this documentary is in the grand documentary tradition of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Supersize Me.  Rather than treating its viewers like adults by confronting them with the facts and letting them hear the arguments and make their own mind up, this film prefers to cloud the mind with sentiment and grandiose claims.

Wal-Mart is sophistry from start to finish.  Compare it to the intelligent, fact-based reporting of Enron - The Smartest Guys in the Room and you'll see a gulf in quality as well as in class.

REVIEW - Grizzly Man (2005) - 16/20

This review first appeared in this month's Videovista  , so go and have a look at it

Composed largely of footage from self-proclaimed Eco-warrior Timothy Treadwell’s thirteen summers spent living with the Grizzly bears of ... national park, Werner Herzog’s latest documentary also includes discussions with biologists, conservationists and government officials (most of whom had a negative opinion of Treadwell’s activities) as well as Treadwell’s friends and family (most of whom, unsurprisingly, supported him).

Despite extensive use of Treadwell’s beautiful and frequently dangerous footage of his time spent in the wild, this is not a nature documentary.  As much as it would be pleasing to hear it, you will not hear the monotone Teutonic voice of Werner Herzog whispering like David Attenborough.  Instead, what Herzog has produced is an incredible character study of a man who was lost in the human world but managed to find himself in the wilds of Alaska only for the wilds to turn on him and literally eat him alive.

Treadwell started off in life with a swimming scholarship but after a back injury he quickly gravitated towards acting.  After failing to get anywhere as an actor, Treadwell sank into a world of drink and drugs until eventually he nearly died from an overdose.  Taking the advice of the man that saved his life, Treadwell decided to spend a summer watching wild bears.  Over the years, Treadwell became increasingly emotionally involved with the bears, he named them and got close enough to touch them and would eternally shout out to them in a singsong voice “I love you!”  The peace Treadwell evidently found with the bears began to consume him as his tendency to create fictional narratives transformed him into the star of his very own movie.  This flamboyant and camp character was not a lonely recovering alcoholic but a campaigning ecologist who fought to keep the bears safe from poachers and even the US government as one of his on-screen and unhinged rants suggests he believed.  Indeed, the more Treadwell’s life as an environmentalist sucked him in, the more paranoid and alienated he became from his fellow humans as a chance encounter with some fishermen transforms into Tim the “gentle warrior” stalking some poachers and a friendly message left for him is turned into a threat to return and kill him.

Grizzly Man is an obvious return to the nihilistic themes that have characterised much of Werner Herzog’s back catalogue.  Treadwell is in many ways a typically Herzogian character.  As with many of Herzog’s earlier films, Treadwell’s story is one of a man who, when faced with the valueless nothingness of existence, devotes himself utterly to projecting values and beliefs onto that existence.  Treadwell brings meaning to his own life by casting himself as the crusading environmentalist despite most environmentalists believing that actually his actions brought more harm than good by familiarising the bears to human contact.  He projects meaning onto the bears that surround him by giving them human names and attributing to them human emotions and characteristics.  However, in true Herzogian fashion, nature proved largely indifferent to Treadwell’s actions and his reward for spending over a decade “protecting” the bears was to be eaten alive, along with his girlfriend, by an old bear too physically weak to hunt salmon before winter.

In one scene, Herzog listens to the tape of Treadwell’s final moments as he was eaten alive while his girlfriend tried to fight the bear off.  To the morbidly curious among us, Herzog’s decision to refrain from using extracts from the tape may seem like a bit of a swizz but Herzog compensates us by allowing the weird and theatrical coroner to tell the story of what happened at the end of Treadwell’s life, his strange attempts to turn this meaningless act of carnage into a tale with a moral is uninterrupted by Herzog who allows the camera to linger on the coroner’s face after he finishes speaking, as if giving us all an opportunity to see the same characteristics in ourselves; a tendency to spin meaning out of ultimately meaningless events.  Meanwhile the just plain morbid among us will be more than contempt with the commentary of a Fish and Wildlife representative who talks about how they pulled four dustbin bags full of “people” out of the bear’s stomach and how Treadwell was an idiot who deserved everything he got in the end.  Between the coroner and the employee of Fish and Wildlife, we see both sides of the human quest for meaning; the search for a beautiful story and the search for divine vengeance for every mis-judged action.

Grizzly Man is a deceptively moving film.  The beautiful images and Treadwell’s eternally upbeat persona suggest that his story is a sad one - one of a lost soul. However, after watching it you’ll realise that this story isn’t just Treadwell’s it is the same story lived by every single human on the face of the planet searching for meaning in the face of a cold and indifferent universe that casually snuffs each of us out without a second’s thought or a single care.  That isn’t sad... it’s devastating.

 

REVIEW - The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) - 15/20

Recently released in cinemas in the UK following its Oscar success, The Smartest Guys in the Room has already found its way onto DVD pretty much everywhere else in Europe.  Based on the identically titled book by ... The Smartest Guys in the Room tells the story of the fastest and most spectacular bankruptcy in US corporate history.

One of the most remarkable features of this piece of documentary filmmaking is its structure.  Making a documentary is in some ways like writing an essay in that you have to present some kind of argument and organise the facts so as to sell that conclusion.  The makers of TSGITR however have managed to give the film three separate but interlocking structures.  The film begins at the founding of Enron, taking you right up to the final court cases giving the film a chronological structure, telling the story as it happened.  But the film is also personal as it carefully takes the time to build a case against each of the key players.  But most impressively, the film keeps these structures in place but also presents a thematic structure, giving us details of three separate sets of business practices that each contributed to the fall of Enron.

The first practice is what is known as Mark to Market accounting.  Effortlessly explained by the filmmakers, this accounting technique allows companies to list not the money they have actually made from a certain line of business, but to log the potential earnings.  Immediately this meant that Enron’s earnings looked much better than they in fact were, especially when disasters were logged as effective successes because they could have made the company money.  This section is wonderfully made, damning not only Enron but also its crooked accountants and lawyers but also the stock market analysts who seemingly did not bother to look into how Enron actually made money until a journalist began questioning them.

The second practice was the use of “Raptor” companies.  The brainchild of Fastow the Chief Financial Officer of Enron, these were corporations set up only to do business with Enron and effectively served to take Enron’s mounting debts off their books.  This section of the film is somewhat less clear, particularly as to why the Enron CEO and Chairman would tolerate Fastow’s skimming of profits.  Indeed, once the idea was discussed, any lawyer or accountant could have set up Raptor companies... so why keep Fastow around?  The film does not make any suggestions, possibly for legal reasons, but the answer seems to be “plausible deniability”.  The CEO and Chairman needed to be able to say they had no idea what Fastow was doing in order to not be responsible.  How better to prove this than by allowing Fastow to pocket millions of dollars?  A further weakness in this section is in the film’s explanation of how the banks benefited from providing the cash for this enterprise?  Indeed, the film suggests that the banks themselves were buying Enron assets with promises to sell them back later.  Where the first section was clear and lucid as to what was going on, during this section the filmmakers are seemingly content to waffle about how stock was used to keep the banks sweet.  How is not clear and one suspects that the reason for this lack of clarity might again be legal.

The final section of the film is perhaps the most interesting.  It deals with the California energy crisis and how Enron would manipulate the energy market by switching off power stations, exporting energy and generally manipulating the market in such a way as to make themselves billions of dollars while plunging the Californian people into a world of rolling blackouts.  While intriguing and damning thanks to the audio footage from recorded phone conversations between energy traders, this section is slightly different to the other two.  Whereas the first two sections were concerned with explaining how Enron set itself up for a fall, this third section seems more devoted to character assassination by highlighting the antisocial tactics used by the Enron corporation.  The problems with this line of argument are A) it’s an argument that can be applied universally to all trade in stocks, shares, bonds or futures.  Anyone who remembers black Wednesday in the UK will remember how the financial markets can bilk the public out of billions perfectly legally.  B) This practice made the Enron Corporation billions of dollars and as such actually kept the corporation afloat and played no part in its downfall.  While no doubt a populist rant about the dark side of capitalism, this section seems somewhat off the point.

Indeed, if you look at the DVD extras an interesting fact emerges.  Whereas the film itself presents the politicians as powerless to stop Enron, a version of the final section cut from the film paints a very different picture.  The extra argues that former Governor Grey Davis (who was recalled and replaced by Schwarzenegger) had the power to stop Enron by calling on the national guard to take over the power stations and keep them on.  However, he chose not to because he was planning on running for President in 2004 and did not want to alienate Wall Street.  So, when you consider the DVD extra, the final section ceases to be an out of place and unfocussed rant about capitalism and starts to become something more interesting.  It effectively paints a picture of a climate where the US political classes refused to do anything to stop Enron, thereby suggesting that the third reason for the collapse of Enron was the government’s decision to turn a blind eye to its more “imaginative” business plans.

On the whole, The Smartest Guys in the Room is incredibly intelligent, well informed and beautifully made.  However, is prevented from truly being fantastic by what appear to be legal and commercial factors as the second section is toned down and the third section is a polemic about market capitalism rather than the deeply unpopular argument that actually the Democrats had a real hand in the rape of California and the fall of Enron.

Metal: A Headbanger's Journey (2005) A-

It would have been easy for Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey to be complete shit.  Documentaries about largely unknown or disliked sub-cultures only work if they successfully balance a number of frequently conflicting demands.  On the one hand, the film has to be entertaining, and this generally means showing the eccentric members of the sub-culture in all of their glory.  If you go too far down this road than the film begins to feel exploitative (as did Trekkies at times).  Also there is a need to balance the desire to intelligently analyse the sub-culture with wanting to just write an extended love-letter to it (which Uber Goober comes dangerously close to).  As both a metal fan and a trained anthropologist, Dunn not only successfully balances these problematic issues but also does so with considerable style.

The film is strangely mistitled.  The implication of the title is that Dunn goes on some kind of journey of discovery.  The ending of the film also supports this, as Dunn states that his motivations for making the film were to discover whether or not being into metal can be harmful.  The problem is that the film is not structured in such a way as to answer this question and doesn’t even need to be. 

The film is composed of a number of chapters.  Each chapter examines metal from a different perspective.  It begins with the historical roots of the genre and its musical characteristics before moving onto looking at the sub-culture and concludes with a trip to Norway and an examination of the anti-social and violent tendencies of some metal fans.

Intelligently, Dunn doesn’t limit himself to interviewing the musicians.  Instead he takes a wider perspective by talking to musicologists, critics, sociologists and writers who talk intelligently and compellingly about the genre and its place in musical and social history.  This aspect of the film reflects Dunn’s expertise as an anthropologist and is ultimately what elevates it above the other sub-culture focussed documentaries to have appeared in recent years.  Dunn manages to combine analysis with enthusiasm to produce a film of great analytical clarity that really should appeal to any intelligent filmgoer, especially as the celebrities and fans Dunn talks to stop the film from becoming dry or overly didactic.

Dunn talks to a number of metal luminaries such as Bruce “Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuun Tooooooooooooooo tha Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiills” Dickinson from Iron Maiden, Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath and Lemmy from Motorhead but the true stars of the film are not necessarily the most well known. Ronnie James Dio’s appearances are highly amusing as he appears to be about 5 feet tall, is as thin as a rake and is permanently flanked by what could be fans or could possibly be lovers, bodyguards and/or nurses.  Dunn also talks to members of the notorious Norwegian Black Metal scene who appear to take themselves horrifically seriously.  They either spew profanity at Dunn and his camera crew or theatrically talk about Satan and driving Christianity from Norway in a deadpan monotone voice.

Metal is an intelligent, enthusiastic, informative and highly entertaining look at a musical genre and sub-culture that is frequently mocked and misunderstood.  You really don’t need to be into metal to get anything out of it.  If this doesn't get a cinema release in the UK then there's something seriously wrong.

Midnight Movies (2005) - B

Midnight Movies is a feature-length documentary about the US underground cinema scene in the early to mid-70’s.  In the Seventies, underground filmmakers frequently struggled to find an audience for their work.  Too transgressive for the mainstream and yet too sensationalist for the art house crowd, this film considers six films that found audiences as “midnight movies” namely films that were screened only at midnight and usually only at weekends.

The film begins by considering Jodorowsky’s psychedelic pseudo-mystical spaghetti western El Topo before looking at Night of the Living Dead, John Waters Pink Flamingos, Henzell’s The Harder They Come, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Eraserhead.  For each film there’s an interview with the director as well as the cinema owners and they talk about the making of the films, the midnight movies phenomenon and cult films in general.

Bizarrely, for a film that is all about the wonders of cult cinema, Midnight Movies seems to be aimed at as wide an audience as possible.  The bulk of the run time is spent explaining to us that Divine ate dog shit in Pink Flamingos or that Night of the Living Dead had a political subtext or that people used to dress up to go and see The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Surely, anyone who has even heard of these films will know this?  This desire for accessibility would not be so tedious if it were not for the fact that it evidently comes at the expense of clarity or depth.  Midnight Movies neither gives us the background necessary for understanding the midnight movies phenomenon (it just talks about hippies and pot-smoking but remains silent on the state of Seventies cinema) nor backs up its claims regarding the influence of these films (the closest it gets is saying that Jaws was influenced by the work of Romero because Jaws and Night of the Living Dead are both quite scary).  As a result Samuels wastes the opportunity to gain any real insight from the directors he interviews.  Instead we are left with a bunch of smug talking heads and a documentary that struggles to rise above the level of such pedestrian fare as “The 100 greatest films”-style list programmes on Channel 4.  All that’s really missing is Peter Kay asking us whether we remember Spangles in his droning mongoloid northern voice.

Despite this being a missed opportunity, it is genuinely difficult to dislike Midnight Movies because it might well serve to raise awareness about a number of great films that have slipped from the popular mind.  While the film covers the over-exposed Rocky Horror Picture Show, Eraserhead and Night of the Living Dead, it also looks at the wonderful Pink Flamingos and El Topo, neither of which is currently available on DVD.  It would be nice to see this film help a wider audience appreciate these forgotten gems and even nicer if this film convinced The Powers That Be to release them on DVD *ahem*.  Anyway... it's impossible to be bored by anything with John Waters in it.  They should put him in Eastenders...