DVD Review | Women He's Undressed

After a Fashion

by Thomas Delapa

In today’s dressed-down, flip-flops and uber-casual world, we seldom hear that “clothes make the man” anymore. But in classic Hollywood, fashion not only made the man—and the woman—but it made the movies too.

Where would The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy Gale be without her ruby slippers, Joan Crawford sans her shoulder pads, Marilyn Monroe less (ahem) her skin-tight gowns or Cary Grant minus those impeccably tailored suits?

Like other low-profile collaborators, especially in our grandiose age of the director as auteur, motion-picture costume directors rarely grab the spotlight and even less the microphone. Classic film fans may be familiar with the celebrated career of Edith Head, but otherwise public knowledge of Hollywood’s leading costume designers is skimpy if not threadbare.

Despite its odd-fitting title, Women He’s Undressed means to makeover that legacy, taking the measure of Australian-born Orry-Kelly, who for three decades was one of Hollywood’s larger-than-life, A-list designers. His career included a long, tempestuous stint at the Warner Bros. studio, dressing such stars as Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart and Olivia de Havilland, and was crowned by three Oscars for costume design, the last for Some Like It Hot in 1959.

An Australian-made documentary directed by the veteran Gillian Armstrong (Little Women, My Brilliant Career), Undressed won’t win ribbons for opulence, but it does stitch together the life and times of Orry-Kelly, born Orry George Kelly in New South Wales. Armstrong’s style clashes in spots, starting with the fanciful inclusion of her subject (Darren Gilshenan) addressing the camera while paddling in a rowboat. As an allegory of his roiling ups and downs it is, well, a bit out to sea.

As a gay man in Hollywood who rarely hid in the closet—at least among his friends— "Jack" Orry-Kelly was renowned for his talents, tart tongue and artistic tantrums. He could be difficult and demanding, but he managed to navigate the treacherous shores of the studio-system fiefdoms. While most found his boss Jack Warner a tight-fisted, crass (and macho) tyrant, Orry-Kelly formed an uneasy alliance, smoothed over by his long friendship with Warner’s wife, Ann. Undoubtedly his most famous work was with the notoriously prickly Bette Davis, including the brazen “red” ball dress her character flitted about in the 1938’s black-and-white Jezebel. 

Except for that foundering rowboat, Undressed is outfitted in a conventional style, embroidered with interviews (among them, Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury), newsreel footage and photos. But it’s also spangled with fascinating tidbits about fashion design in Hollywood’s bygone Golden Age. Especially revealing are the sleight-of-hand tricks Orry-Kelly used to transform diva Davis (she of a large but “limp” bosom) that showed off the positive while cloaking the negative.

Glamour, illusion and fantasy were Orry-Kelly’s stock in trade, but his private life was bold as brass, despite begin hemmed in by a homophobic culture that threatened exposure for anyone—especially men—daring to tip-toe out of the closet. Armstrong and her writer Katherine Thomson sew the villain badge on Englishman Cary Grant (né Archibald Leach), who turned his back on Orry-Kelly once he became a matinee idol. While it is now well-known that Grant and Western star Randolph Scott lived together as roommates and more, the film speciously suggests that Grant’s subsequent marriages were strictly a cover for his homosexuality.

What’s most durable in Armstrong’s material is the flamboyant character of Orry-Kelly as both artist and survivor. Fired from Warners in 1944, he hit the bottle hard, successfully chased by rehab (“sanatoriums” back then) and surfacing in a wave of comebacks in the 1950s, culminating in the sparkling triumph of Some Like It Hot. Not only did he outfit Marilyn Monroe in those diaphanous, barely-there gowns that seared the screen, but he also dragged cross-dressing Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis into hilarious movie history.

Orry-Kelly was also a brash and oft-catty wit who was loath to keep his mouth zipped—he famously quipped that “Hell must be filled with beautiful women and no mirrors.” In old Hollywood’s bright firmament, you can still see Orry-Kelly’s twinkling reflection in the timelessly elegant fashions he created. 

 ---------------------------------

8/5/16

Film Review | Food Chains

AlterNet / By Thomas Delapa

No justice, no peas ... or tomatoes?

'Food Chains' Documents the Shameful Exploitation of Migrant Workers

November 25, 2014  |  

 

In H.G. Wells' prescient The Time Machine (1895), the seminal British science-fiction author foretold of a dystopian future in which the indolent, lotus-eating Eloi live off the toils of a race of devolved humans—the Morlocks—who barbarically survive running incessant machines in underground caves. 

Wells’ gloomy future was set in the unfathomably far-off year of 802,701, but don’t tell that to Bangladesh sweatshop workers, Chinese smartphone assemblers—or Florida tomato pickers. His dismal vision of humanity is nearer than you may think. And like the Eloi, we above-ground 2014 dwellers may be the ones running out of time.

Today is no great present for the legions of migrant workers who toil in our fields for what often amounts to a few dollars an hour for backbreaking labor. A new documentary on their plight, Food Chains, plucks out the unsavory links between American agribusiness, grocery behemoths and the voracious U.S. consumer, who continues to labor under the illusion that cheap products don’t come with an insidious hidden cost.

Produced in part by Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and actress/advocate Eva Longoria, Food Chains serves up bitter facts and figures about how farm workers have become fodder for corporate food giants like the Florida-based Publix stores. Touched off by the entrance of Walmart into the grocery business in the 1980s, the industry has distilled into a Darwinian handful of top-feeding corporations, including Kroger and Safeway. These multi-billion-dollar chains now have the unprecedented power to drive the hardest of bargains with suppliers, forcing prices way, way down for their products. That may be good for penny-pinching consumers, but inevitably bad for the producers and their workers, especially small-potatoes farmers.

To that witches’ brew, add and stir in NAFTA, the seismic 1992 agreement that mowed down trade barriers between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. One of the main unintended byproducts of the Clinton-engineered pact was that scores of south-of-the-border farms went under, driven out of business by competition from lower-priced American foodstuffs. And here’s the bitter frosting on the funnel cake: As a result, thousands of unemployed and displaced Mexican nationals fled to El Norte—the vast majority undocumented, to find menial work in American fields and factories.

Director Sanjay Rawal’s tract doesn’t always go down easy, and no one will mistake it for such delectable documentary fare as Food, Inc. or Super-Size Me. His 82-minute film is more of a rallying flag, boosting the crusade of a coalition of Immokalee, Florida tomato pickers and sympathizers in their decades-long fight to squeeze out a pittance more in wages (through their “Fair Food Program”) from the highly profitable, employee-owned Publix chain.

Rawal and his producers grasp for, but barely touch the bigger picture of the long history of worker exploitation in U.S. fields and farms. We hear of the seeds of labor agitation planted in the 1960s by Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers, but Rawal could have better forged the deep-rooted connections between the grocery giants, the restaurant industry and the omnivorous American consumer.

To broaden his scope, Rawal ventures far afield from Florida, planting his cameras in California’s lush Napa Valley. Here migrant grape harvesters are priced out of the ritzy housing market and many are forced to live in shantytowns many miles away from the fields. Like so much of post-Reagan America, this is a land of two classes, two divided cultures, existing side by side yet certainly not seen in Alexander Payne’s boisterous wine-country tour Sideways. As for the Napa growers, they surely must feel some sour grapes at Rawal’s claims, since narrator Forest Whitaker omits mention of the public housing the county specifically built for seasonal workers starting in 2002.

Food Chains is most sobering when it doesn’t pick and choose its facts. It takes us back in time to Thanksgiving 1960, when the CBS-TV landmark Harvest of Shame plowed up the pervasive poverty among America’s farm laborers. Back then a Southern farm owner admitted, “We used to own our slaves, and now we just rent them.”

In an American agribusiness dependent on cheap, exploitable labor from newer generations of huddled masses, it’s not only grapes that may ripen with wrath.

-------------------

TV Review | Big Men

AlterNet / By Thomas Delapa,
August 8, 2014  |  

They Might Be Giants

The PBS documentary 'Big Men' is a refined, methodical probe into wildcatting capitalism and corporate neo-colonialism.

If there was gold in them thar hills, there must be black gold in them thar oceans.

That might have been the operating motto powering Texas-based Kosmos Energy when it went drilling for petroleum off the coast of Ghana a decade ago. In 2007, they hit a gusher, tapping into a huge oil reserve—now the aptly named Jubilee field—leaving Kosmos-nauts as well as Ghanaians with visions of barrels of petro-dollars dancing in their heads.

But before Ghanaians and their government fantasize about their own colorized remake of the Beverly Hillbillies in the Sahel, they only need look next door to Nigeria to see what happens when a poor, undeveloped African nation strikes it big in oil: There will be blood... as well as greed, corruption and war.

In the new season of PBS’ award-winning POV documentary series, filmmaker Rachel Boynton’s Big Men (Monday, Aug. 25) stands lean and tall, digging into a cautionary tale that merges Fortune magazine with Joseph Conrad at his grimiest. The end product is a refined, methodical probe into wildcatting capitalism and corporate neo-colonialism, but one that nonetheless runs a little dry in bedrock analysis.

Boynton takes her cameras and crew from the streets of Ghana and the deltas of Nigeria to the slick boardrooms of New York City; from America’s entrepreneurial one-percenters to Africa’s wretched of the earth. Shot over five years, her 95-minute chronicle is a hefty accomplishment, giving viewers a multifaceted, fly-on-the-wall probe into how the gears of 21st-century Third World turbo-capitalism work—and the grease that keeps it all running.

If Boynton has a protagonist, besides Ghana itself, it’s Bill Musselman, a straight-shooting, old-school oilman who spearheaded Kosmos’ African explorations as CEO. The upside to Boynton’s considerable access to Musselman and other Kosmos execs is their chatty, off-the-cuff comments; the downside is the relative rarity of provocative questions or research that dig deeper than her objective style permits. Yet for all of Musselman’s amiability— even when Wall Street bears begin biting in Great Recession 2009—he revealingly spouts off when a Norwegian official argues that the best way to prevent Ghana from being exploited is to heavily tax the multinational drillers. Like any good free-marketer in our regressively Ayn Randian era, Musselman views taxes as bad business, if not sludge.

At the beginning of Big Men, Boynton quotes U.S. capitalism high priest (or witchdoctor) Milton Friedman, who sermonized that the “world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests.” The Chicago School economist scarcely qualified his “I got mine” mantra, but Boynton pours out examples of the destructive absurdities of such a crude individualist credo. We’re taken to oil-rich Nigeria, where greedy and corrupt elites have so wildly pursued their interests at the expense of their country that they’ve created a brutally stratified, stagnant land of haves and have-nots. This is a place where the destitute villagers secretly sabotage pipelines just to be hired back to repair them, and where armed militants in ski masks set hellish fires to oil refineries. (It’s also worth mentioning that Nigeria is where poverty and despair ignited the barbaric Islamic backlash of Boco Haram.)

Big Men’s title comes from an observation of a Ghanaian tribal leader who says that “everybody wants to become a big man" and get fat from a diet of oil money. The ultimate question that Boynton poses is if Ghana can break the Nigerian (and Mideast) mold by democratically sharing the wealth from its share of that oil money—some $444 million in 2011 alone.

But the deeper question, and not only for Ghanaians, is who exactly owns the Earth’s diminishing natural resources, and how much they should profit by them. Musselman and venture capitalist Jeffrey Harris claim that the great risks involved in exploring for oil justifies their enormous takes on the back end. But what’s the bottom line and who really pays when a corporation (BP, anyone?) recklessly befouls our precious waterways and coasts for generations to come? And don’t the Jubilee field and discoveries like it just keep gasoline relatively cheap, prolonging our bottomless addiction to fossil fuels and the amoral corporate pushers that pump them?

The answers from Big Men are sizeable but they don’t always measure up to the well of questions Boynton implicitly raises. To wit, how’s this for a toxic gusher: Kosmos Energy CEO Brian Maxted was a monstrously big man in 2011, fueled by $58 million in salary and stock options.
--------

Film Review | The Kill Team

Improvised Explosive Devices  

Documentary 'The Kill Team' Captures Nightmare of War

 

AlterNet /July 30, 2014   By Thomas Delapa

 

In 2009, when Army PFC Andrew Holmes saw his first combat action in Afghanistan, his immediate thought was of the over-the-top, gung-ho heroics of Top Gun, capped with the strains of “Danger Zone” ricocheting in his head.

Dizzying jump cut to six years later: Holmes has no medals, no trophies and not even a kiss from Kelly McGillis. Found guilty in a military court, along with other members of his notorious “Kill Team” platoon in the murders of unarmed Afghan civilians, Holmes is currently serving a seven-year sentence in Leavenworth prison.

How Holmes, Adam Winfield and Jeremy Morlock spiraled down from front-line U.S. warriors to disgraced war criminals is the main mission behind The Kill Team, a brief, choppy but incendiary documentary that registers yet another tragic beat in the American heart of darkness during the post-9/11 era.

With director Dan Krauss doing triple duty as producer and cinematographer (as well as editor and co-writer), The Kill Team is nearly a one-man operation, and the stitches in this postmortem sometimes show. Krauss trains his sights primarily on Specialist Adam Winfield, once a proud member of the Fifth Stryker Brigade, Bravo Company, stationed in Kandahar province from 2009 to 2010. You won’t get the big picture of the decade-long U.S. counter-terrorism war in Afghanistan; rather, Krauss’ closeup cinema-verité campaign is to embed himself into the lives of Winfield and his distraught parents, Chris and Emma, as the military begins its murder trial against their son in Fort Lewis, WA. For background ammunition, Krauss drops in footage captured from the soldiers’ camcorders while on patrol as well as from Winfield’s actual 2010 Army interrogation.

Baby-faced, soft-spoken and slight of frame, Winfield hardly fits the profile of a macho, battle-tested veteran. A patriotic idealist when he joined the Army at age 17 (“I loved being in the military”), while echoing his father’s Marine footsteps he soon discovered that the Army wasn’t at all like those glorified Be All You Can Be commercial come-ons. Winfield and his fellow soldiers experienced firsthand the damning disconnect between the military’s historic search-and-destroy raison d’être and the ambitious, yet perhaps impossible mission of nation-building— this in a desolate tribal country mired in the Middle Ages. Faced with the collateral foes of boredom and frustration, Bravo Company went medieval itself in short order. “This sucks... a lot,” we hear a disgusted Winfield say on patrol.

In a déjà vu flashback to the U.S. quagmire in Vietnam, Bravo Company had to contend with elusive Taliban guerrillas nearly impossible to pin down, nerve-racking daily threats from roadside bombs, as well as indifferent and suspicious, if not outright hostile, villagers. But what really lit the fuse in the squad was the entrance of Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, a burly Iraq veteran who was, by most accounts, a Rambo-esque psycho. In only one of Gibbs’ kick-ass pathologies, his idea of R&R was fashioning a ghastly bone necklace made from the fingers of enemy dead.

You don’t need to be a military (or movie) historian to flashback to Oliver Stone’s 1986 Oscar-winning Vietnam War film Platoon, in which  young Army recruit Charlie Sheen is divided in his loyalties to his two sergeants—a ruthless Tom Berenger and the altruistic, Christ-like Willem Dafoe. But in Krauss’ grimly un-Hollywood war story, there was no casting call for Gibbs’ counterpart. Bravo Company’s soul was lost to the sergeant’s savage scheme and conspiracy to rack up kills, even if it meant planting evidence (using “drop weapons”) on innocent civilians, and then claiming self-defense.

A classic sociopathic bully, Gibbs uniformly cowed his squad into going along and falling in place with his savage schemes. Most got a rush out of the blood lust, especially back at the base, where they were greeted as “heroes” and "made men." But at least one soldier initially disobeyed orders and couldn’t stomach the Kool-Aid. That was SPC Winfield, who in early 2010 began e-mailing his father in distress, pleading, “I want to do something about it.”

The rest of Winfield’s nightmare war story is a long gray line of military screw-ups, treachery and scapegoating. Of all the images in The Kill Team, perhaps none is as tragic or ironic as that of the manacled Winfield in his camouflage fatigues, ruefully telling his account to Krauss’ camera. There are other voices equally as expressive—like that of Morlock, serving a 24-year sentence—but Winfield commands attention, if only because he sounds so earnest, even heartbreaking.

In the interminable war on terrorism filled with such blowback disasters as Abu Ghraib, “enhanced interrogation,” and the Iraq invasion in toto, how can the U.S. government even think about winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people when it can’t even win those of its own soldiers?

-------------

Film Review | Fed Up

AlterNet 5/20/14

The Kids Are Not All Right

Inside the World's Child Obesity Epidemic

by Thomas Delapa 

When the curtain came down on Clifford Odets’ legendary 1935 New York opening of his agit-prop broadside Waiting for Lefty, audience members rose from their seats and stormed out of the theater, shouting “Strike!” in solidarity with the taxi-cab drivers and the Depression-era working class portrayed in the play.

Once the lights go up in theaters following Fed Up, audiences may have the urge to race down to their grocery stores, fast-food outlets and school cafeterias, yelling, “We’re as mad as hell and we’re not going to eat it anymore!”

An appetizing, bite-sized brand of advocacy documentary, Fed Up is an alarming yet tardy wakeup call on the crisis of U.S. childhood obesity. This is not a syrupy, feel-good story à la My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It is the sad, stomach-churning saga of my big fat American child.

Filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig (Tapped), narrator/co-producer Katie Couric, and author Laurie David team up for a 90-minute serving of facts, figures and interviews on how American kids have been increasingly super-sized over the past 30 years, largely the result of a sugar- and fat-heavy diet that is literally to die for.

Fed Up might go down as the Inconvenient Truth of the pediatric health crisis, a plus-size omnivore's dilemma not limited to expanding U.S. waistlines, but globally too. Over the course of two years, Soechtig and her cameras check up on the misfortunes of a small group of corpulent kids, each struggling to battle the bulge with the help of their parents. This is not some cheesy, sensationalized Biggest Loser reality show, but the real story of children who can’t seem to win against a powerful, hydra-headed foe made up of food and beverage industry giants, commercial media and U.S. government policies that have sucker-punched kids square in the gut.

Of course, the plight of overweight kids (and adults) has been on the plate of U.S. news reporting for years, but Soechtig and company slice it up into easily digestible, fact-driven portions. To name a few:

• Over 80% of the products in a typical grocery contain added sugar.
• Two out of three Americans are overweight or obese, costing billions of dollars each year in rising healthcare costs, not to mention the psychological price paid in depression and poor self-esteem, especially in teens.
• A generic 12-ounce can of soda is loaded with a shocking 10 spoonfuls of sugar, which takes an hour or more of brisk bike-riding to burn off.

In one big gulp of not-so-fun facts, we learn that sugar is sugar, metabolically speaking, whether it’s called sucrose, dextrose, cane sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. The skinny on sugar is that it is fiendishly addictive, and when digested without the fiber normally associated with good diets, simply leaves us hungry and craving more. In one study, sugar was found to be eight times more addictive than cocaine.

It’s bad enough that kids today are targeted by a caloric cornucopia of TV commercials, marketing schemes and insidious product placements, all formulated to prod them into stuffing their faces with junk food. School cafeterias were once a haven for healthy (if bland) balanced lunches. But since the infiltration of the fast-food industry into cash-hungry public schools, they’ve been made over into “7-11s with books.” Pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, fries, fried chicken, cookies, and those nasty nachos are high on the daily McMenu. Now kids have it their way every day, enabled by soda machines they can’t just say no to.

Soechtig persuasively offers that the U.S. government—and specifically the Department of Agriculture— have a place at the table of nutritional shame. On one hand, the government is tasked to protect children through lunch programs and “food pyramid” guidelines; yet it is also asked to serve the food and dairy industries, doling out regulations as well as billion-dollar yearly farm subsidies and loans. And any time politicians place an order for tougher dietary demands (like Sen. George McGovern did in 1977), armed-to-the-teeth agribusiness lobbyists go into a feeding frenzy. Beware, you may gag when a McDonald's spokeswoman earnestly shills, “Ronald McDonald never sells to children...he inspires through magic and fun.”

Even Michelle Obama, first mom and initiator of the ballyhooed “Let’s Move” campaign aimed to push kids into exercise, has had to take the “demonizing” of junk food off the front burner. To experts such as Michael Pollan (Food Rules) and Gary Taubes (Why We Get Fat), dietary ditties such as “energy balance” and “eat less, exercise more” cooked up by industry apologists are empty panaceas, essentially laying all the blame on the overweight and obese. Soechtig shows the kids trying their best to run and swim to shed pounds, but her cameras also catch one slouched in an easy chair, gobbling down chips while eating up a TV show. A lower grade for her failure to note that gym classes have also been victims of crash budgetary diets; meanwhile, back at home suburban parents drive their kids everywhere, making walking to school—and play—as old-school as saddle shoes. 

Are soda and other junk foods the “cigarettes of the 21st century,” as one expert warns? Other countries have begun banning junk-food ads expressly aimed at children. In the U.S. those ubiquitous “nutrition facts” labels fatuously omit recommended daily allowances for sugars.

Let’s not sugarcoat it: American children are hugely at risk, and if parents and teachers aren’t sick to their stomachs yet, they’ll never be.
-----------------------------------

Film Review | The Unknown Known

The Madness of King Don

by Thomas Delapa

 

AlterNet, April 5, 2014   

 

 

 

 

So what do we know now that we didn’t after documentarian Errol Morris’ 100-minute Q&A with Donald “I Don’t Do Quagmires” Rumsfeld in “ The Unknown Known”? Only that the former U.S. secretary of defense is still a master strategist of evasion, contradiction, misdirection and malapropism.

As a footnote, here’s what we do know to date about that dirty little Iraq War that “Rummy,” the George W. Bush White House and their nincompoop Pentagon neo-cons cooked up and spoon fed to the omnivorous American public: more than  4400 U.S. military deaths and 32,000 wounded, at least  100,000 to as many as 500,000 Iraqi fatalities, millions more displaced, and an estimated price tag of  $3 trillion, give or take a few hundred billion. 

Yet like most of the questions that Morris tosses—gently—at his subject, any such factual horrors are sidestepped, parried and danced around by a fitfully nimble Rumsfeld. Relaxed, nattily dressed and imperiously self-assured as ever, Morris’ hollow yet overstuffed man does his imitation of “Hogan’s Heroes” Sgt. Schultz (“I know nothing, nothing”) while implausibly denying personal culpability for any stink that blew back from the Iraq War, whether the phony Weapons of Mass Destruction raison d’être, prisoner torture or the fictitious links between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. 

In his Oscar-winning “ The Fog of War,” Morris at least got Lyndon Johnson-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to shoulder some of the blame for the Vietnam War quagmire. But Rumsfeld is impishly unapologetic, even as his own words are shot down by Morris’ juxtapositions with TV news footage culled from the run-up and catastrophic letdown to the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent U.S. occupation. Yet it’s clear that Morris’ mission isn’t to catch his subject in a Captain Queeg-style meltdown that would cause Rummy to shout “Good gracious” or “Henny-penny” and storm off the set. 

Rather, Morris is chiefly interested in the infernal meta-narrative of how those in the pinnacles of power can delude themselves for so long and so often that—perhaps—they don’t even know what the truth is anymore. This is a man seemingly without an ounce of introspection and one who surely sleeps well at night, confident he did all the right things, from his time as the youngest (44) secretary of defense, during the Gerald Ford presidency, to his Freddy Krueger-like return to the Pentagon as prime architect of the shock-and-awe Iraq and Afghanistan U.S.-led invasions.

Morris goes out of his way to humanize Rumsfeld, including humdrum details of his marriage while tracing his long career as Republican White House insider and go-to warhorse who trumpeted “peace through strength” and other hawkish mantras. We hear Morris’ off-camera questions, but the slippery answers are challenged only indirectly via news footage and period headlines, not by contrary interviews that would offer known arguments to Rumsfeld’s self-serving explanations. 

The film’s title is a quote from one of the enormous number of official memos Rumsfeld generated over the decades. In one wacky rumination from 2004 (Subject: What You Know), he writes of the “things that you think you know that it turns out you do not.” For Morris, this is a four-star analogy for his subject, a polarizing public figure who indeed is a riddle wrapped in an enigma—and cloaked in an impenetrable armor of Orwellian double-talk. As running metaphor, Morris cuts back and forth to images of a deep blue sea, significantly more fathomable than Rumsfeld himself. 

As to any possible policy misfires during his Washington tenures, Rumsfeld blithely chalks them up to the unintended consequences of war, executive decision-making and the inevitable inability for leaders like him to anticipate everything, for Pete’s sake: i.e., heck, Stuff Happens. This expedient philosophy can rationalize pretty much any horrors stretching from Abu Ghraib to Gitmo. If only Emily Littella were still on active duty, I know she’d just say, “Never mind.” 

And so it goes in Rummy-speak, as Morris sends his cameras down the rabbit hole into an upside-down universe where government morality and mea culpas have no standing, yet mad tautologies like “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence” do. In the question of those well-known phantom WMDs, such inane statements can justify anything, including interminable wars in which bodies are still piling up, peace is not won, and mass Mideast destruction marches on.

------------

Film Review | Anita: Speaking Truth to Power

 AlterNet,  | March 29, 2014  | By Thomas Delapa 

'Anita: Speaking Truth to Power' Reignites Fury Over Sexual Harassment and Political Might

Two decades after Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Freida Mock documents the confirmation of Clarence Thomas.

  

There she was, polite and poised in her smart, turquoise dress suit, facing off against a murderers' row of aging, not entirely august, white men, an ebony Joan of Arc versus a court of incredulous grand inquisitors. To a bitterly divided 1991 America, University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill was either witch, scorned woman, martyr or feminist heroine. In any case, when the smoke cleared it was Hill who was burned at the Senate stake.

Twenty-plus years after the most incendiary and indecent Supreme Court confirmation hearings in U.S. history, filmmaker Freida Mock flips through the sensationally lurid pages of Anita Hill v. Clarence Thomas in Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, a documentary sure to re-fan the flames of righteous indignation among anyone, man or woman, sitting to the left of Strom Thurmond.

If, as legendary attorney Clarence Darrow argued, “almost every case has been won and lost when the jury is sworn,” Anita Hill was toast as soon as she sat down to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee that steamy October weekend in 1991. Chaired by now-Veep Joe Biden of Delaware, the all-white, all-male committee wasn’t quite a kangaroo court, but it resembled something from Down Under the Mason-Dixon Line, circa 1930. Rather than hostile witnesses, this was an open-and-shut case of hostile politicos, aghast and appalled that a Supreme Court nominee and “pornography,” “pubic hair” and “penis size” could be publicly uttered in the same sentence. 

For investigative reporter Jane Mayer (then with the Wall Street Journal), the televised hearings—“Judge Judy” crossed with the Playboy Channel—were just a smokescreen for Democratic and Republican senators alike: “It wasn’t about the truth ... it was about winning.” Despite a majority of Democrats on the committee, Hill was largely led to the dogs alone. Ted Kennedy sat mostly sullen and stone-faced as a bit player.

An Oscar winner for the superior documentary, Maya Lin: A Strong Vision, Mock may not win votes from the pro-Thomas minority, but she pointedly sets out to give Hill back her voice, free of the clumsy, tedious and badgering questions posed by Biden and company. Between long, still-shocking reruns from that R-rated C-SPAN sur-reality show watched by millions in 1991, we are presented with evidence that Hill has moved on, literally, leaving her beloved small-town Oklahoma life for the greener (and far bluer) pastures of Massachusetts and Brandeis University after years of death threats, hate mail, vicious phone calls, and public confrontations.

As for Thomas himself, not surprisingly he’s nolo contendre except for his infamous, scenery-chewing costarring role as self-professed victim of a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.” Through all his indignant denials to the committee and the nation regarding any hint of sexual harassment toward Hill (Coke? Never touch the stuff) while she was his assistant at the EEOC and the U.S. Department of Education in the 1980s, Thomas didn’t just play the race card, he dealt the whole deck to the committee members, who promptly folded under pressure. Only Sen. Paul Simon from the Land of Lincoln objected to Thomas’ nomination, while a few days later the uber-conservative Thomas eked out a win in the full senate 50-48. In one of American history’s most unjust ironies, Thomas replaced the revered Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court justice and the victorious voice behind the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Civil Rights decision.

But from the ashes of Hill’s public humiliation, a new wave of female empowerment rose up from Phoenix to Washington, D.C., and beyond: witness the 1992 “Year of the Woman” at the ballot box, renewed political vigor by females of all parties and races, and a new awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace. Today Anita Hill lives on as both a woman and a symbol. For her legions of admirers, she’ll always be standing on the mountaintop.

---------------

DVD Review | Stories We Tell

Capturing the Polleys

by Thomas Delapa

For critics and serious filmgoers who’ve given up on the Academy Awards, especially after last year's Seth MacFarlane fatuous hosting fiasco, here’s another reason to shrug and say "I told you so": Despite being one of the best and most talked-about documentaries of 2013, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell was shockingly shut out of the Oscar nominations.

The Canadian actress/director may take cold comfort in the fact that the Oscars have regularly been on the wrong side of cinema history. Leading the nominations for worst Oscar snubs: Alfred Hitchcock (nil directing awards), Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather (loser to Cabaret’s Bob Fosse), and the snub of all snubs, Orson Welles’ nonpareil Citizen Kane bested by How Green Was My Valley. Vice versa, does anyone outside of Robert Osborne remember the lachrymose Luise Rainer, winner of back-to-back best actress Oscars in the 1930s? And post Y2K, let’s just fugetabout The Departed, the noxious 2006 best picture winner that should be left to sleep with the fishes.

Almost as myopic in Oscar oversights have been the erratic, often obscure choices over the decades in the Best Foreign Film category. Since the Academy only allows one entry per country each year, voters are forced to dole out the nominations in globally “let’s all share” fashion, not so unlike ribbons handed out to all the kiddies on Field Day. While films from major directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson and Japan's Yasujiro Ozu have never been nominated, most of the nominees—and more than a few winners— have faded out in movie memory. 

Polley can also take some solace in her own award for Best Canadian Film (and the $100,000 prize that went with it), while U.S. audiences can now see her extraordinary narrative recounted on DVD. In our era of one-sided, deceptively manipulated “docu-fictions,” Polley lyrically reconstructs (and deconstructs) an extremely personal story, generously bringing in a kaleidoscope of disparate, sometimes contradictory viewpoints.

In a near oedipal odyssey, Polley documents her search to uncover a maternal secret that lay hidden in her family's closet for 28 years. The main character in the mystery is Polley’s mother Diane, a onetime Toronto casting director and actress. While not literally present to tell her own story, Polley mere nostalgically appears in a series of glowing home movies (some actually recreated). At the other end of the Freudian spectrum is Polley’s dad Michael, a British-born actor who settled in Toronto in the 1950s to marry and raise a family.

A la Charles Foster Kane, the life of Diane Polley is reconstructed, in jigsaw-puzzle fashion, by those who knew her best as well as by those only on the family’s borders. Vivacious and rebellious, Diane was a woman before her time, unhappy with the rigid roles of middle-class marriage and family, yet also, by most accounts, a loving if mercurial wife and mother.

A clever raconteur, Polley reveals key facts of her chronicle in measured doses, never letting us know too much of this remarkable, often touching saga at once. A 3-D puzzle of sorts (without those silly glasses), the film is skillfully glued together with a complex array of stylistic devices, from competing voice-overs (one from a prepared script read by Michael Polley) and disjunctive dubbed dialogue to standard talking-heads interviews, punctuated with lingering close-ups that speak volumes.

Polley is also smart enough to realize that “truth” is often, um, relative, particularly when people have something to gain or hide—Rashomon told us that. But in this meta-home movie that continually examines its own assumptions (sometimes to a fault), Polley unveils not simply the small story of one woman’s family secret, but by extension poignantly leads us to bigger, roomier stories about marriage, motherhood, love and life itself.  

----------------------

2/4/14

DVD Review | Blackfish (2013)

Blue Water, Black-and-White Death

by Thomas Delapa

Oceans away from the feel-good New Zealand fable Whale Rider, Blackfish swims in the same roiling documentary school as The Cove, the Oscar-winning 2009 exposé about the grisly annual slaughter of dolphins at a seaside Japanese village.

But Blackfish strikes closer much to home and lands like a punch to the gut. Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite methodically reels us into her fact-heavy investigation that fatefully begins with the much-publicized death of a SeaWorld Orlando orca trainer in early 2010. “Death” is an innocuous term for what happened to Dawn Brancheau, who was caught and shredded by Tilikum, a six-ton, twenty-foot killer whale. 

Cowperthwaite—a TV sports documentarian—is never sensational in recounting the gruesome details of this and other attacks by Tilikum since he was captured off Iceland in the 1980s. The darkness lurking at the heart of Blackfish is that the attacks were suppressed by SeaWorld officials, if not altogether deep-sixed, at least according to the gallery of former SeaWorld trainers interviewed for this scathing tract. The sheer number and sincerity of these testimonials will likely convince audiences that this is no mere mammal-hugging fish tale. And those still not hooked need only note the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s 2012 ruling and fine against SeaWorld in the wake of Brancheau’s horrid death. 

Cowperthwaite constructs her tract as equal parts horror story, mystery and marine-biology lesson. Few recent documentaries have so deftly utilized video and film footage to make such a devastating, if didactic, case. In our sea-to-shining-sea world of security and surveillance cameras, seeing is believing, and we’re afforded compelling replays of the events in chilling detail. It’s almost as if Cowperthwaite were on the trail of a cold-case murderer, as the life of “Tilly” is traced from his capture to his stay at a low-rent Canadian sea park and finally on to Florida, where his aggressive past was ignored and he became the “big splash” at Shamu Stadium.

SeaWorld visitors on any coast know that these majestic creatures (called blackfish by Native Americans) are the stars of the show, performing with their trainers in a revue of risky tricks and stunts in big-top outdoor pools. To the casual observer, the whales are happy, docile, gentle giants—Flipper’s super-sized cousins. But the ex-trainers and experts testify to a dark side, speaking candidly about the volatile nature of these massive, intelligent predators that can turn on their handlers in a heartbeat. From a natural habitat of the wide blue sea, living in tight matriarchal family “pods,” these captured orcas are torn from their kin, trained (mostly by amateurs) through strict behaviorist discipline and housed essentially in underwater cages—the net long-term result often being neurotic and aggressive behavior.  

Of all the chilling footage featured by the filmmakers, perhaps none plunges deeper into the shadowy sea-park abyss than the sight of trainer Ken Peters as he’s helplessly dragged underwater like a bathtub toy by an angry orca. Adams survived to tell about it, but Brancheau and several other mangled victims weren’t nearly as lucky.

Audiences may well agree that the tagline hook for Blackfish could be lifted from a poster carried by a recent SeaWorld animal-rights demonstrator: "Free Tilly."

---------

Blackfish, a Magnolia Pictures release, will be available on DVD Nov. 12, 2013.