movies

Encounters at the end of the world was a bit boring.

The documentary maker travels to Antarctica to interviews various people living there. The problem is that the subjects aren't very interesting, and the film never really takes off.

The film Man on Wire is a delightfully entertaining documentary about Philippe Petit, who walked on a rope between the Twin Towers in 1974.

When we saw the initial screening at Full Frame it the audience gave it a huge applause, and later it was awarded the Audience Award of the festival.

In the last couple of years there have been a lot of movies and documentaries about Katrina and its aftermath. Trouble The Water is the best I have seen so far.

I saw this movie on the last day of the Full Frame Festival, when it was screened again on Sunday morning since it had won the Grand Jury Award.

Two 'street hustlers' in the 9th ward in New Orleans have no car, no money and decide to stay in the city during the hurricane ("we have no wheels"). With a hand held camera they record everything that happens during the hurricane, when the levees break, and in the weeks afterwards. The main characters are full of live, and they try to stay upbeat during everything that happens.

The government is completely overwhelmed by what happened, and the film shows how this impacts their lives and that of others around them. It was a great movie, and while I prefer Nerakhoon to win, this documentary is worthy of the Oscar nomination it received.

Betrayal is an absolutely amazing documentary. The movie is filmed during a period of over 23 years, and starts in Laos, where the filmmaker and main character of the movie lives with his parents. They are forced to leave Laos when the Americans lost the war in Vietnam and the Communists come to power in Laos, because the father worked with the Americans.

After many travels the family ultimately migrates to the States, arriving in a very bad neighborhood in Brooklyn. They are without the father who had been sent to a 'reeducation camp' in Laos. I won't give away what ultimately happens in the film, but it's breathtaking to realize that this is an actual, real-life documentary and not a fictional movie. Very gripping, very beautiful.

Sasha and I saw this documentary last year at the Full Frame festival in Durham. It is now nominated for an Oscar.

We saw Slumdog Millionaire last weekend, an impressive movie about a boy from the slums who participates in Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

The film provides a glimpse of life at the bottom of society in India. It has a strange combination of despair about the desperate circumstances the main characters live in, and happy optimism and humor. Over-all it's an upbeat movie with beautiful camera work and great music.

Definitely recommended.

Friday afternoon on the Full Frame Festival I saw Bigger, Faster, Stronger*, a movie about American sport culture. The films asks why anabolic steroids are illegal and forbidden in sports, while so many athletes use it and there are so many similar drugs and techniques in use. "Is it still cheating if everybody is doing it?"

It was an amusing documentary, but it fails to make a strong case. The style of argumentation is that of Michael Moore, albeit less stark. There are lots of insinuations but hard data and solid arguments are lacking. I didn't care for the part where the main character talks to his congressman, who is not completely up-to-date of all the facts and has to consult with an assistant. A cheap shot on somebody who was only sideways involved. Over-all, I don't believe this movie made a compelling case.

Nevertheless, it is an entertaining and interesting film. It does a really good job of mixing general commentary with the personal history and developments of the family of the main characters, three brothers who grew up working in a culture of weight-lifting. The main character is trying to determine for himself whether or not it is all right to use steroids, and among other things looks at his brother, a failed WWE wrestler. The film keeps an upbeat tone, and the part about the LA Times picture was very funny. The incorporation of old family video material is well done.

The asterisk (*) in the title refers to the by-line: "* The side-effects of being American". A good film, interesting and entertaining.

The Full Frame Festival 2008 Awards were announced an hour ago. Not surprisingly, Man on Wire won the Audience Award and got an honorable mention from the Jury (we saw the film last night and it was amazing). The Jury award went to Trouble the Water, a movie about Hurricane Katrina.

Two other movies that I saw received awards: Lioness and At the Death House Door.

This afternoon I went to the Durham Armory where the tickets are being sold and I was in line from 2.00 pm so I was the first one to buy tickets -- Sasha and I will see Betrayal at 3.45 pm and in the evening I'll see Trouble the Water. Betrayal is playing in Cinema One, a small venue, so it was getting sold out quickly.

The third movie I saw on Full Frame this year was To See If I'm Smiling. The movie is about six Isreali women who look back at their compulsary military service, and their experiences. So somehow I saw 3 movies in a row about female warriors. Of the 3, I liked Lioness the best with My Daughter the Terrorist a close second, but To See If I'm Smiling is a strong film as well.

The title refers to a picture that one of the main subjects talks about. The subject of the film is not just female soldiers, but also on the behavior of young men and women serving in the border zone of Israel. One of the women talks honestly about crossing the line -- how at one point she made Arab civilians stand in the sun for many hours for example, to punish them for the death of one of her friends she just learned about. She knows that the civilians have nothing to do with that death, and so do her soldiers, but she's honest about how stress and war-like circumstances make good people do bad things. Another woman says that serving in the military has learned her that she has an utterly evil side.

The film isn't always very strong in its technical execution -- the interviews feel a bit artificial at times. However, the story it tells is powerful and this quite makes up for the technical deficiencies.

It's interesting to see three different approaches to female warriors. The United States military has not quite figured out how to deal with female soldiers (it's only in the last 15 years or so that female soldiers have been deployed in large scale into war areas), whereas in Israel men and women both are expected to serve in the military service for two years. The Tamil Tigers have no trouble with using women in their rebel rmy and they take this to an extreme by training them for suicide terrorist attacks.

To See If I'm Smiling won an award last year at IDFA, a documentary festival in Amsterdam.

The movie opens with a beautiful nature shot of a river in Sri Lanka, and the camera moves to two heavily armed girls of around 18 years old. They are soldiers in the Tamil Tigers rebel army.

The personal story of the girls shows why they choose to join the rebels at the age of 11 after attacks by the military on their village. The father of one the girls is killed in an air raid as is told in moving interviews with the girl's mother. The mother hasn't seen her daughter in year since the girls now live and train in a rebel controlled area. In conversations with the two girls it becomes clear that the girls are trained to become suicide bombers, who at one point will strap a mine to their body to attack 'high value targets'.

The film is directed by Beate Arnestad and produced by Morten Daae. It is amazing how much access the filmmakers had to these two girls, and they did a great job providing context to their story and the civil war that's going on in Sri Lanka. The audience gets a bit of an understanding of why and how people can become ready to kill themselves for a Leader; the movie also shows some of the tragic results these suicide attacks have on the civilian population. When I searched for more information on the civil war there I found a newspaper article that just today, Sunday April 6th, a suicide bomber killed 12 people at the start of a marathon in Sri Lanka.

An eye opening film; one of the best I've seen on the festival this year. I'm now sitting in the Armory, waiting for the results of the juries decisions and hoping to be able to buy tickets for the winning movies.

The first documentary I saw on Full Frame this year was Lioness, a film about female soldiers in the U.S. army deployed in Iraq. It is directed and produced by Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers.

The policy of the U.S. military is that female personnel cannot participate in direct combat. This documentary shows how difficult it is to maintain such a policy and what it means for those involved. The films shows the experiences of women in various roles in the Iraq War, from a base commander to soldiers in desk positions who are then assigned to Team Lioness, and are asked to join in ground operations to help calm down female civilians down and perform security checks on women if necessary.

An important problem with the official policy is that the women have received far less training than the men and this brings them into problems. A striking example of this is shown when one of them is asked to join a combat mission with the Marines and finds herself isolated from her combat group in a battle because of this lack of training.

The film shows the cost of going to war for soldiers, not only for those who die but also for those who come back and find it difficult to adjust. An impressive film.