The biggest corporate scandal of our time, explained. Before I saw this, I feared to see the ruthless and ingenious machinations of evil people would get me agitated without offering a way out. But to see the ruthless machinations of evil people leaves me incredulous for their lack of ingenuity, and the problem turns out not to be a few crooks, but a fundamentally flawed system. None of it should have happened, but scores of investment bankers and brokers fell for the nude emperor, because they had stock in non-clothing. Sure enough, there are a few monstrous moments, as when the Californian energy grid is played for money, but overall, it’s just business as usual. How horrible.

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Chomsky doesn’t deserve the movies made about him. Manufacturing Consent was an adequate representation in both content and style of the man who often appears to be the only sane person in a large room full of fanatics, but Distorted Morality and Power and Terror, both done by Jon Junkerman, are little more than badly edited recordings of public lectures, with no thread or narrative at all. What quality there is, is in Chomsky’s arguments, with the few ideas of moviemaking that went into it actually detracting from that. Junkerman opens chapters with a blank screen and a sentence or phrase taken from the lecture or interview segment that is to follow. The the original segment follows without a noticeable gap, making for a logical jump between the two things we hear Chomsky say, and the confusion is intensified when seconds later he repeats word for word what we just heard him say. It’s meant to structure the movie, but it’s entirely superficial and doesn’t work anyway. In the final scene, we see Chomsky on a stage far away, asking us whether we can hear him, clumsily alluding to the fact that he’s not very widely listened to and a lone caller in the darkness. It’s too bad that bad movies like this one contribute to that.

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This is an almost literal translation of Capotes book to the screen, and it compares very favorably both with his writing, and the recent movie “Capote”, about his own role in the trial of Hickock and Smith and the role of the book in his life. Some odd choices aside (why did the script change Capote’s name?), this is a gripping true murder story, intense, yet never sensational. The central ambiguity of the title, which refers both to the act and the punishment, is made too explicit for my taste in some of the lines toward the end, but the subject is just important enough, that a bit of preaching is forgivable.

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This biopic of the Dalai Lama would impress me much more, and be a much more valuable contribution to understanding and solving the plight of Tibet, if it didn’t look like Cirque de Soleil on dope. While I can’t blame the traditional garments and designs of Tibet for having been appropriated to an updated version of the myth of the noble savage western progressives seem to love so much, I can blame Scorsese for presenting the struggle between what clearly is a feudal society where extreme poverty and lavish palaces stand side by side and the upheavals of the modern age, namely the invasion of technology and the Chinese cultural revolution, in a way so heavily slanted as to lose its trustworthyness. It’s too bad, because I suspect even a fully realistic depiction of the Tibetan aristorcracy would make the communist Chinese look quite bad. But cinematography, scope and acting compensate handsomely for these ideological squabbles.

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This is a very entertaining and cinematically inspiring movie, but oddly that’s not due so much to how it tells its tale – which, in fact, drags a bit toward the end, and could have lost a few of the lengthier asides – but to what that tale actually is. The history of LA based Z channel’s amazing programming, and the simple fact that it did exist, bringing all of those offbeat und underrated movies to an intelligent audience, essentially counteracting the stupid culture suppressing forces of market and money, is both heartening and disturbing. For if it’s possible to do TV without simultaneuously numbing the viewers mind and cranking up their aggression with marketing, why is it not happening anywhere? Give us more programming tailored to that “Uncommon Denominator” Z worked so magnificently toward, you bastards!

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I guess I first have to say how touching this film is, nor how necessary it is to provide an, albeit small, window into a hidden world of hopelessness and despair, and the inspiring quality not only of the movie, but also of the photographers heartfelt need to do something to help save the futures, and indeed probably lives, of the children she taught in Calcutta’s red light district. Now that’s out of the way – I was actually wondering at several points during the movie, if the portrayal of these kids as very talented artists, while certainly true, does not mislead the audience into separating the victims of social injustice into those whose ruin will be a loss to us connoisseurs of the arts, and those who won’t be so sorely missed. Surely, if we could save the precious ones, things would already be much better.
Nobody should have to live in those conditions, whatever the quality of their drawings or their grades at school, and there remains a bitter taste of defeat in the end, when out of the nine kids all but three seem to be falling back into their doom. But in another sense, a single saved child is already a triumph, so maybe I’m quite wrong. It’s a great movie either way.

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I will refrain from making any spelling jokes in this review, tempting though it may be. The spelling bee, to my still somewhat European eyes, seems a very alien tradition, though I’d be hard pressed to say just what exaclty it is about fidgety bespectacled eleven year old kids with overzealous parents spelling words much harder than “overzealous” or “bespectacled” that is so disturbing. But it is. It is also very funny and fascinating to get a look into a world of success and ambition that couldn’t be stranger to me if it were made of cheese and looked like the moon, but I think I said that already.

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Johnny Cash was an amazing artist, and his recent death has been a great loss. I love the recent American Recordings series of records as well as his older stuff. Sadly, he is not quite as amazing an author, and Carr’s co-authoring didn’t fix the shortcomings. There are cool stories in this book, but they are often told in a laundry-list fashion, where people, events and facts roll by without much coherence or reflection. Biggest eye-rubber: Cash’s admission that he and June avoided shopping in towns that had no Wal-Marts and even graded them by the number of evil moneysucking behemoths (“tomorrow is a two Wal-Marter”). Biggest chuckle: to get out of a contract with a record company in the early nineties, Cash wrote a whole abysmal album, including a song called “Chicken in Black“. It worked.

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The story of lunar exploration, from Apollo 11 in July 1969 to Apollo 17 in Dezember 1972, in a beautiful collage, narrated from the original recordings and additional comments from the people who have been up there. Amazing footage gives you a glimpse of what it might be like to go where now man has gone before. It’s a bit unfortunate that they emphasized a seamless narrative over historic accuracy, blending the 7 missions into one long trip to Luna, but in the end, it doesn’t matter.Earth, floating in blackness, yet struck by the intense light from the sun, made me realize for the first time the intuitive oddness of space close to a star: dark and empty, not for lack of light, but for lack of illuminable things. That’s got to be an analogy for something.

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Herr Tod startet um neun, Herr Todgucker leider erst um zehn vor. Damit sich beide trotzdem treffen können, das hat Herr Todgucker berechnet, muß er sich eilen. Schnell also läuft er. Wo, fragt er einen Passanten, wird Herr Tod sich zeigen? Die Antwort fällt beunruhigend aus, die Entfernung ist größer als gedacht. Schneller läuft also Herr Todgucker. Der Atem wird ihm knapp, als endlich das Kino am Horizont auftaucht. Er erreicht es um 2 Minuten nach neun, schnappt nach Luft, kauft die Karte und sieht, aus dem Augenwinkel, daß Herr Tod, der armselige Verrückte, erst um viertel nach Neun mit seinem Film beginnt.

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