Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2013.10

This is a Steve Coogan vehicle which is kind of like a documentary about Steve Coogan making a movie of the essentially unfilmable post-modern novel Tristram Shandy, a humorous, rambling book that is describes as follows in Wikipedia:

“ostensibly Tristram’s narration of his life story. But it is one of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything simply, that he must make explanatory diversions to add context and colour to his tale, to the extent that Tristram’s own birth is not even reached until Volume III.”

Coogan is backed, as usual, by Rob Brydon, who plays an excellent foil. It had the same vibe as The Trip, in which the film’s flow is constantly interrupted by Coogan’s caprices and ego trips—in a way that is also similar to Sterne’s original novel. Cameos by Dylan Moran, Stephen Fry and Gillian Anderson add some spice and humor. Kelly Macdonald plays Coogan’s real-life wife, who is quite good and is just one of several people in the movie who is far more familiar with the novel than Coogan himself. Decent, but not recommended.

Jennifer Jason Leigh is a video-game designer; Jude Law is the man with whom she’s on the run after an attack on her life. Ian Holm and Willem Dafoe play bit parts. In this near/alternate future, video games are played via a “bioport” found near the base of the spine. Organic-looking umbilicals attach the player’s spine to the even more organic-looking controller, which looks like a squashed fetus. It’s classic Cronenberg, written and directed.

It’s a very early movie about virtual reality and does a decent job without a lot of CGI. At one point, Leigh wanders around, checking sounds, echoes, smells (does the pump smell of gas?) and physics details (does kicked dust fall back to the ground believably?) to determine whether she’s in reality or in a game.

The most unbelievable part of the story, though, is that her employer allows her to carry around the only copy of the game on her biopad (the aforementioned organic-looking controller). Source control, anyone? The second most unbelievable part is that the game cost only $38 million to develop. Virtual reality is a foil that smooths over all plot holes, though, especially when the writer/director is known for bizarre plot twists. If something seems impossible to believe, it’s more than likely an indication that you’re already in the matrix.

Together, they finally get into the game and start to play, going through the pre-programmed script—or so they suspect. Overtones of Matrix and Inception here—especially when they plug in different biopods in the game. Things get even more bizarre from there, with game worlds and reality mixing with standard video-game tropes (talking to NPCs, pausing the game, building weapons from game-world elements, rote and stilted dialogue, etc.).

Then time seems to be folding in on itself and we’re not sure even when the movie became virtual reality. Did we see the start of it? If so, when was that? Or was the start before the beginning of the movie and the whole film has been virtual so far? Are there fixed missions to accomplish (e.g. building a weapon and assassinating someone)? And are our heroes the only players in the game? She keeps calling him different names and he keeps doing stuff under some game-world compulsion maiking it hard to know which actions we can attribute to “him” and which belong to his game character. The script briefly opens up issues of free will, as well.

The reptiles and amphibians, bones and gristle, guts and blood are very off-putting, but not unexpected for Cronenberg. There is also the nastily sexual manipulation of the gamepod as well as the way that bioports are accessed. Elements of addiction and misplaced emotions for non-reality as well as corporate espionage and capitalist overtones round out the smörgåsbord of themes. It’s quite interesting stuff, especially considering it was made in 1999 before a lot of this in-game VR had really taken off. Highly recommended.

This is a documentary film about mountaintop-removal mining in the Appalachians and West Virginia in particular. Robert Kennedy Jr. is an outspoken protester who says that “we do not have the right to destroy something that we cannot recreate.” The film covers the environmental impact, including extremely suspicious cancer and brain-tumor clusters caused by pollution. It naturally progresses to an analysis of Massey Coal’s business practices—because pretty much all coal mining in Appalachia belongs to that company.

Massey is strongly anti-union and the stark contrast between this documentary and the Wobblies documentary previously covered is evident. The Wobblies has well and truly been defeated in the pathetic remnants of American labor and manufacturing.

A little while later, Kennedy has a sit-down with a representative of Massey Energy. Kennedy lays out his case that 60,000 violations of the Clean Water Act by Massey have resulted in no fines. None whatsoever. He compares it to robbing a bank, saying it’s worse because kids die from the pollution. The rep responds that Massey keeps the lights on for Kennedy and his family. Are they all prepared to live without electricity? Well then shut the f@#k up and let the men do the work. This is the classic Colonel Jessup “you need me up on that wall” speech[1], but delivered by a slimy corporate toady who could not give two shits about children dying as long as he gets his bonus.

He claims to be protecting jobs, but those are jobs only as he and his company define them. There are more eco-friendly, lower-profit ways to get energy out of those hills. And those ways would likely be more labor-intensive and involve more jobs. On the other hand, Kennedy’s argument is more likely “we should stop coal-mining entirely if we want to have a prayer of preserving anything approaching a decent lifestyle for future generations.” That is the mathematics of it. Kennedy should have interrupted him to restate the argument as “we think the loss of life in the region is the minimum amount of damage that can be done while still generating coal for vital energy and, of course, and absolutely not least, our massive profits.”

The discussion goes on to include coverage of non-violent protest as well as the insidious influence of money in the destruction. Since coal makes up more than half of all goods transported by rail in the U.S., the rail industry also lobbies heavily to keep things as they are. Since newer power plants are subject to more restrictive air-quality controls, coal companies just keep the old, dirty ones limping along, spewing their horror into the atmosphere. It’s a sobering documentary. Recommended.

In the spirit of the day, this movie is based on a true story about a young, Irish, union leader named Danny Greene in Cleveland. He’s played by a very charismatic Ray Stevenson and married to the adorable Linda Cardellini. Christopher Walken, Vincent D’Onofrio, Fionnula Flanagan and Val Kilmer have supporting roles.

Greene’s only tangentially involved in unions, though. It’s more like he uses the unions to muscle the mafia and to slice out a piece of the pie for himself. His wife leaves him, he goes to jail for four years and he comes out and slowly gets back into his old life, almost immediately picking up a tremendously young-looking girl played by Ellie Ramsey. She’s adorable, but the disparity between the gigantic, bear-like Greene and this baby-skinned, tiny girl is a bit jarring.

It’s a good thing for retro-American movies that there are so many dilapidated-looking neighborhoods to choose from: the locations were all very run-down middle-American authentic.

He’s an interesting character: a vegetarian-curious, fitness-crazed teetotaler taking on the whole mafia on his own. They take the whole Irish car-bomb thing a little too seriously, with cars blowing up right and left and right again. Things get more earnest when the East-coast mafia decides to shake a good deal harder to get this Irish flea off of its back. The “cleaner” they hire, Ray Ferrido, finally takes him out with an unavoidably well-placed bomb. Danny Greene is portrayed as one cool cat. Recommended.

More by dumb luck than anything else, I managed to select another Val Kilmer movie, where he once again plays a cop. Stephen Dorff plays an assassin with—you guessed it—amnesia. The flashback scenes are a shaky-cam/quick-cut mess of grayscale that are tough to watch. But watch you must if you want to pick up clues as to what’s going on.

Just as a totally bizarre aside, but when Dorff and some old folks look up something online, they use Opera and they seem to be using it from a Linux box—definitely just the kind of machine that two old folks in West Virginia would have.

Sooooo…we have a made-for-TV Jason-Bourne copy on our hands, I guess. To drive the point home, Dorff looks at his hands several times after killing some goons as if to say: “did I do that?” Caterina Murino is a welcome addition, an Italian replacement for the German Franka Potente in the Bourne series. You know you’ve got some story problems when your characters end up talking for almost 15 minutes to clarify all of the plot points and get all of the alignments and affiliations lined up.

In the second half (it’s a three-hour mini-series), we segue into a 24/Homeland vibe. This is not a good thing. This might as well be a marketing campaign for torture. The main torturer, who seemed to be overarching Nazi-level cruel and evil? He turns out to be an OK guy who’s just doing his job. Brutal torture of “enemy combatants” is just part of the job in the States. Puts my teeth on edge. If, however, you like torture and unquestioning loyalty to…whatever, this might be your cup of tea. For those people, I would recommend asking themselves how they would feel about a version of this garbage in Farsi. The production values are relatively high, but how much of this terror-attack-is-imminent crap do we really need in the States? Not recommended. At all.

This is a documentary about anti-Semitism and the degree to which it actually persists today. It is largely in Hebrew and partially in English. The director and narrator is an Israeli who sees references to the Holocaust (Shoah) and anti-Semitism in his newspapers every day. So he wants to investigate how these reports are created and possibly to meet and follow the lives of the people who are promulgating it.

His journey takes him to the ADL (the Anti-defamation League) where they point him to cases of anti-Semitism. These cases are almost exclusively about taking time off from work. These are held up by the ADL as proof of anti-Semitism, but it’s clear that the cases are nothing big. However, the major newspaper in Israel gets most of its news about attacks and increasing hatred directly from the ADL.

In another segment, the director travels with a school class to Poland, where they are to visit Holocaust sites. Their level of indoctrination is so high that some girls cannot even understand a basic interaction with some old men they meet. They have been programmed to see hatred everywhere, regardless of its actual presence. Interviews with students in Israel are similarly sobering. The children and teenagers are just being what they are: vessels for information, false or not.

But their easy lies as they cement false memories that will guide their worldview for life is tough to watch. The teenage trip is an exercise in indoctrination worthy of any cult. The most bizarre part is at the end, where they pose in a typical class portrait under the entry gate to Auschwitz, under the “Arbeit macht frei” sign, all in their white hoodies and all saying “Auschwitz” with big grins on their faces. No sense of irony at all.

Soon after, they show the students finally crying, after initially having worried that they weren’t “really feeling it”. Not to worry, the indoctrination is complete as they now feel emotionally connected to crimes committed over 60 years ago, ready to let the lamp of these emotions light the way to a lifetime of ignorance. They speak as if these events had physically happened to them…or could, at any moment. Interestingly, it’s the girls who are bawling; the boys are stoic, and presumably still worried that they aren’t showing proper emotion for the situation.

Where he finally does encounter anti-Semitism is in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, where interviews with people in the street reveal a startling level of misinformation—several of the people were convinced that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a history book (one guy said it was written in 1890 and was about how Jews used TV to control people).

And then he switches back to traveling with Abe Foxman (president of the ADL) as he visits dignitaries around the world. There is an interesting interview with two older Americans that succinctly shows what the training we saw earlier in the teenagers looks like after steeping for 50 years. The misinformation of the older, New York Jews is just as bad as that of the Crown Heights blacks.

And then there’s good old Norman Finkelstein:

“There’s a kind of pathological narcissism, navel contemplation. When you are the richest, wealthiest, most successful ethnic group in the United States, you’ve got the world on a platter and you sit around and you’re talking about anti-Semitism. It’s just kind of shameful, I think.”

And good old Uri Avnery:

“Everybody is scared of anti-Semitism because of its history and Jews have always been terrified. In America, where Jews are so strong and influential, they are scared of their own shadows. Every moment, behind every tree, an anti-Semite hides. Bullshit! There is nothing like that. Anti-Arabs, anti-Muslims, anti-Black, anti whatever you like, yes. Anti-Semites? You’d need a magnifying glass to find them. And there are people who are walking around with this magnifying glass, like Sherlock Holmes, to find anti-Semites.”

And there is extensive coverage of Mearsheimer and Walt as well as David Hirsch from England who is called out as being an anti-Semite at an academic conference in Israel when he’s considered a right-wing Jew-lover in England. When told that Mearsheimer and Walt think that the ADL is damaging to Israel and the U.S., Foxman says,

“that’s not their god-damned business. Who the hell asked them to decide what’s good for you? Who are they, who are they, to come to a judgment what will provide safety and security for you? C’mon! That’s not their business.”

Again, the irony was entirely lost on him.

An interview with an Israeli visitor at Auschwitz was also quite good, echoing parts of Finkelstein’s earlier tirade that Israelis are constantly invoking Nazism and calling one another Nazis and comparing everything bad to Auschwitz (Finkelstein’s examples came from his family, as he was growing up):

“We live with the feeling that death is always with us. Whether that feeling is good or not, I don’t know. It is always hanging over us, and here in Auschwitz you see how it became an industry, an industry of death. The Germans started it all, and we are perpetuating it. I thought about it a lot, whether this March of the Living is good or bad, this death industry…We perpetuate death, and that’s why we will never become a normal people: because we emphasize death and what happened. We have to remember, no doubt, but we live too much in it and it’s preventing us from being a normal people.”

And, finally, one of the schoolgirls dictates the lesson she learned in Auschwitz:

“Girl:When you see it you say, ‘I want to kill the people who did this!’ Actually, no, because even if I become more racist, there will still be someone more racist than me, and it will never end.
Interviewer: Who would you like to kill?
Girl:Who would I like to kill? All of them…
Interviewer: Who is all of them?
Girl: The Nazis, our enemies who did this.
Interviewer: But you know that they are dead…
Girl: Yes, but they have heirs, they may be different but they’re there.”

Highly recommended.

This is a documentary about Russian penitentiaries, discussing conditions there and how the prisoners interact. Tattoos in this system have meaning (or used to) and allow for quick assessments of new prisoners, all without a word being spoken. Because of this, many of the interviews are with shirtless men, even those with former prisoners. The prisons look very tough, although malnutrition and boredom seems to be more of a problem than solitary confinement. Toward the end of the film, we see the tiny, single-seat cells that serve as solitary cells all lined up in a wall. They kind of look like outhouses. And then there is the deep pit that qualifies as “outside time”, where prisoners pace back and forth with no direct sunlight, meters below ground.

In discussions of “the Black Swan”, one of the meanest prisons, advocates for prison reform say that the prison is worse now than it was under Stalin. They tell of super-TB that cannot be cured with antibiotics raging through the over-crowded prisons. The prisoners are almost uniformly thin and sickly. And here we get back to the home-made tattoos, made with home-made machines and burned-up boot soles for a deep black color and mixed with urine to make ink. Home-made tattoos and shared needles lead to TB spreading like wildfire.

The prisoners say that “it was better to be in prison under the Communists. They gave sane prison terms and the laws made sense.” And the focus on honor has changed: tattoos mean nothing anymore because anyone can get any tattoo with enough money. There is a generation gap between the old-guard “Zeks” and the new prisoners, mostly younger guys who’ve grown up without communism and responsibility (their words). And drugs are apparently a much larger problem than they used to be.

The visit to a woman’s prison is also interesting. There they interview a former national-team skier who took up drugs after an horrific accident. She’s covered in self-inflicted tattoos that designate her as an “addict” (the genie of addiction coming out of a bottle, for example). They discuss sexual life in prison much more openly than the men, who only discussed the “downcast” (bottoms, presumably).

The film is in Russian with English subtitles. At 73 minutes, it’s quite short but positively packed with information. I’d read about it after watching “Eastern Promises”, a Cronenberg film starring Viggo Mortenson. The interviews are deeply philosophical. Highly recommended.

This is an utterly brilliant look at teaching a class of 14- and 15-year–olds in a tough Parisian neighborhood. The teacher is François Bégaudeau and he plays brilliantly, trying like hell to teach kids that think they already know everything and are often actively hostile to anyone who purports to know more than they. They interrupt so much that he is quickly off of the standard course material and the class turns into more of a therapy session. The kids then chastise him for prying into their lives, but they’re the ones who won’t shut up about themselves in the first place. If they were that concerned, they could just stick to the non-invasive standard material.

Their questions come hard and fast, often feeling more like a classroom-full of nine-year–olds[2] than like teenagers who’d had some educational experience. They ask interesting questions sometimes, like why they need to learn the imperfect subjunctive when no one ever uses it. It’s hard to tell them that if they don’t learn it, they will limit themselves to a local maximum in their immediate neighborhood and that the world will prey on them indiscriminately. To learn how to defeat the masters of the world, you must first learn their ways, but without losing the essence that makes you different from them. It’s a difficult balancing act and one that is all the more difficult to teach to kids who suspect your every move and who have been betrayed many times before.

In balance to this is the staff meeting, which depicts the highly educated teachers using the worldly wisdom they’ve acquired to argue about the price of a cup of coffee in the staff room.

The French school system is amazing, though. There are student representatives present during the evaluation of the other students. Naturally, they were disrespectful and sniggering throughout, but they were there. And the teacher is unbelievably patient—until he loses it and tells the two class representatives, in front of the class, that they were behaving like “two skanks” (pétasses). Though striking back may have felt good, it led to trouble for him.

He went to confront the girls who reported him and asked what they meant to accomplish. Punishment, they responded. Short-sighted, petty punishment. Of course, they’re stupid people. Worse, stupid teenagers. They didn’t see beyond the immediate gratification, that they might easily lose a teacher who is far less bad than all the others. People suck. Young people suck far worse. Their triumphant looks when you see one of their own going—as they see it—toe to toe with the teacher (as Carl does in one scene), is sad. They have no understanding for the big picture whatsoever. In this, they are no different than most.

They have no understanding of consequences, that if the risk is big, then they should shut their mouthes and be wary of the consequences. Instead, they think that someone (like Suleymane) who has a lot to lose if he falls out of the system should therefore never be punished for bad behavior. I admit, it’s a form of logic, but not a fair or just one.

On the other hand, when expulsion is almost incontrovertibly linked with much direr consequences, the temptation to not judge them for their youthful foolishness is great. Their ill-founded superiority could drive one to drink, though. Heavily. Just as you’d given up hope, in an end-of-the-year interview, one girl—Esmerelda—after initially saying she’d learned nothing (of course), cops to having read Plato’s The Republic in her free time. This, of course, ignites, once again, a spark of hope. Totally worth the two hours of reading subtitles. Recommended.

Jason Statham stars as a down-on-his-luck SAS agent with a heart of gold who gets his life back together after stumbling into a posh London apartment that has been abandoned for the summer by its owner. He makes himself at home and, after an initial further descent into booze, pulls himself together, starts working out again and gets a real job with a Chinese restaurant.

After seeing how he handles himself with some rough guys, the Chinese gang hires him to drive for them—and to keep his mouth shut. Flush with cash, he continues to give to the church mission that provided him with so much support during his dark days. Things get a good deal more complicated as the nun who is trying to save him has a crisis of conscience herself.

But they all straighten up and fly right and he gets ready for his messianic mission to right all wrongs and risk his life and newfound wealth doing it. The movie gets pretty dark, actually, where Joey positively hurls himself into a plummeting redemption. He explains it by saying that “when I’m sober, when I’m healthy, I hurt people. I drink to weaken the machine they made.” It’s a decent ending, not at all what the genre would lead you to expect. And the best part? They did it all without shaky cams and crazily loud firefights.

This is a documentary that incorporates a lot of interviews with Bruce Lee fans as well as people who knew him. It tells the by-now familiar story of Bruce Lee, from his trek from China to the U.S and back to China. He was a really cool guy, admired by people from all walks of life. Bruce’s emphasis on not getting his ass kicked was what led him to Ip Man, Wing Chun and finally to developing Jeet Kune Do.

There is a surprising and almost inordinate emphasis on his sexiness. “He was like a coiled cobra. Even in conversation, you could feel his explosive power.”

It’s quite well-done, actually, well worth watching if you’re either a fan or always wondered what the big deal was. I was not aware that Bruce Lee once fought Boom Boom Mancini (he won) or that Ed O’Neill is either a martial artist (Ji Jitsu) or a fan of Bruce Lee. Kobe Bryant is featured heavily and I learned that he speaks Italian.

There is an interesting discussion of just how good he would be against the best fighters today. Many fighters today have benefited from having trained using his style and they’re much bigger and equally fast, so no, he probably couldn’t kick the ass of any given attacker. Still, they call him the father of MMA, which I don’t think is 100% accurate since JKD is a style of no style—and no rules. The documentary goes into detail about his push back against classical styles, styles that taught rote and historical moves rather than maximum efficiency and optimization of the human body.

I still like the interviews with him the best: he was very charismatic and described his philosophy well. He was much more of a renaissance man, actually, tuning everything at once to create a person worth being.

This film was written as an alternative to the Christmas Carol by Rod Serling, who would go on to write the Twilight Zone TV shows. It stars Ben Gazzara and Sterling Hayden, but also has Peter Sellers, Robert Shaw and Britt Ekland. It’s a very interesting retelling that is more modern and more appropriate—even though it’s already 50 years old. Instead of showing the effects that the rich have on their immediate neighbors (like the original), it shows the global impact of the rich.

It starts off as a rehashing of a discussion between Fred and Uncle Dan (Daniel Grudge). Dan is a staunch libertarian and anti-communist who’s an unbelievably ignorant asshole who would fit right in with American political discourse today. He’s stupid, shallow and powerful, so he gets to be right, if only in his mind. Fred is the socially liberal and politically and historically aware college professor with a modicum of foresight. It’s a very good presentation of the two sides of the argument (such as they are) that was aired without commercials and sponsored by the Xerox Corporation back in the 60s. It’s interesting how they discuss isolationism as if that were at all the American intent for the last century. Profiteering was more the philosophy rather than true isolationism.

The Ghost of Christmas Past takes Grudge back to Hiroshima, where he was stationed during the war, where he was confronted with the horror of it—and utterly failed to comprehend it. It takes a special kind of monster to stand in the middle of a freshly bombed Hiroshima—and to justify it. The Ghost of Christmas Present pigs out while he shows Grudge displaced persons. Grudge yells at him that he can’t eat while they’re there. But that’s what he himself does every day—what, in fact, we all do. Out of sight; out of mind. The Ghost of Christmas Future presents a dystopic post-nuclear–war world populated only by surviving egocentrists, led by their king, the King of Me: Peter Sellers. His speech is a tongue-in-cheek refutation of the Randian philosophy:

“Now then, [the bleeding hearts] don’t come right out and say that they want to take us over—they’re far too clever for that. But that’s what they want. They wanna take over us individual Me’s. And if we let them seep in here from down-yonder and cross-river, if we let these do-gooders, these bleeding hearts, propagate their insidious doctrine of involvement among us, then my dear friends, my beloved Me’s, we’s in trouble. Deep, deep trouble. Because we have now reached a pure state of civilization. The world of the ultimate Me is finally within our grasp. A world where only the strong will exist, where only the powerful will love, where finally the word “we” will be stamped out and will become “I” forever! We are each the wise, we are each the strong, and we are each the individual Me’s!”

He continues,

“And now my friends, next on the agenda, we must go out and dispose of those people from down-yonder and cross-river who want to come in here and “talk”. We must dispose of them, you understand?! […] We must carry our glorious philosophy through to its glorious culmination! So that the end, with enterprise and determination, the world and everything in it will belong to one individual Me!”

The crowd and scene reminded me of the Idiocracy and the Imperial Me reminded me of President Camacho. I wonder how much Mike Judge cribbed from this film? When the crowd laughs at Charles during his uplifting (but social) speech, I couldn’t help thinking the signature line from the movie, “he talks like a fag and his shit’s all retarded.”

In fact, that would be the problem with showing this type of Christmas show these days: the language—even at a distance of only 50 years—is too high-brow and complex for the modern TV-viewing audience. It’s a very interesting discussion of the kind that doesn’t seem to take place in public American discourse anymore. The basic issues have not changed one iota, despite our supposed advanced state of technology. Hat tip to Chuck Mertz of This is Hell for pointing it out. I would love to have watched this and thought “interesting, but it applies to a past version of society, not ours”. It’s sad to have to think that absolutely nothing has changed in 50 years.

A film with Dylan Moran in it, who’s just a brilliantly funny, Irish, stand-up comedian and actor. He plays Pierce, self-describes as follows (in an AA meeting):

“My name’s Pierce. I’m a write-stroke-director…and a waiter. Right? [sits down]

“[stands back up] And, um, I have, in the past, as I’m sure some of you have, eh, been drinking … certainly drinking, a lot of – no getting away – and, uh, I thought, this is too much, this is…too many drinks at the same—in the same time…frame. And, uh, I … alcohol is been part of that. Certainly in the pub. And I have thought on occasion that this is the kind of thing an alcoholic does. [sits back down]”

The movie’s about Pierce and his friend Mark, both sad-sacks with no prospects. Mark lives in an apartment that’s falling apart, he can’t pay the rent and his oh-so-patient girlfriend is leaving him. The lack in repairs leads to tragedy—several times within minutes. It’s dark comedy and quite nicely filmed. As befits a dark comedy, things only get absurdly worse and out of control. And Moran seems to be a fan of movies that are about themselves—at the top of this article is a review of Tristram Shandy, in which he also played, that had a very similar vibe to it. When Mark describes the bizarre happenings of the last few minutes, Moran says “that’s a crap plot. It’s farce. No one does that nowadays.” Belied, of course, by the fact that that is exactly what they are doing in their own movie.

This is a Romanian film about a young police officer pursuing a case of petty drug-use by teenagers in a small city in Romania. The film depicts his rather boring and seemingly meaningless life in which he painstakingly follows petty suspects for crimes that will probably not even be crimes in a few years. He questions the ethics of bringing in such young people for victimless crimes that will cost them years of their lives in jail.

The policeman’s life is far from glamorous: he works all the time, spends long hours staked out in the cold, eats pathetic soups for his meals, eats and drinks alone and seems to live a very lackluster life, somehow in the past. In his office, he has an old CRT; at home, his wife has a nice LCD computer. He is constantly checking his ancient Nokia telephone.

In their discussion of the meaning of song lyrics, his interpretation is almost stiflingly literal whereas hers is much more philosophical and refined, even sophisticated. This is reinforced further in another conversation with his incongruously pretty wife, in which she corrects his grammar in a report, telling him in meticulous detail about the exact tense and usage. He expresses interest and wonders who comes up with new rules like this, intimating that this must be a very tedious job. The irony escapes him.

There are interesting little reinforcements of this difference between Cristi (the cop) and the rest of the world. When he talks to the secretary, she offers him chocolate—a sinfully sweet delight—he pauses longer than necessary, as if not even comprehending the concept, before politely refusing.

The tedium is fascinating because we have such bizarre notions of how policemen operate in foreign, less advantaged countries, such as those of the former Eastern Bloc. Instead of busting down doors, Stasi-style, they work like all other boring, good cops: slowly, within the system, trying to make ends meet, picking up fag-ends in the street to see if they’re hash. Boring; by the book.

Watching him deal with the recalcitrant functionaries at his office was eerily reminiscent of working with people at any larger company. There is a great, lengthy, single-shot meeting with the precinct captain—who is also a complex, philosophically intellectual guy—in which the captain tries to help Cristi resolve his moral quandary by having him look up and read aloud the definitions for “conscience”, “law”, “moral” and, finally, “police”. As expected, there is no great revelation. Instead, the film shows what we should already know: life is full of moral quandaries. We solve them in less spectacular ways, choosing ourselves over others, and continue. Perhaps this is the beginning of a longer slide for Cristi. Perhaps not.

The pace is glacial, but it paints an appropriate picture, showing without saying. It’s hard to imagine to whom I’d recommend it, though, as it’s a glacially paced film about petty crime and the ethics of the drug war (i.e. making the common citizen a criminal) in Romania. Saw it in Romanian with English subtitles.

This is a documentary about the drug trade in the United States, depicted as a kind of video game where you keep leveling up to the next level, from street hustler to kingpin to head of an international cartel. It includes a lot of interviews with former and current drug dealers at all levels as well as researchers and scholars.

David Simon has some very good insights, as you can well imagine. The sentencing disparity between whites and blacks is discussed as well as the sheer brutality of the “just say no” program, which Simon compares to telling people to just say no to working at the only factory offering work in your home town. He calls it one America utterly failing to understand how the other part of America lives. And not caring. As Simon says, “we hadn’t given the slightest bit of thought as to what these people should be saying yes to. And we still haven’t.”

The documentary also addresses how the asset-forfeiture laws seizes billions of dollars of assets, all without an arrest, a warrant or anything legal. Police departments are encouraged to go out scavenging for vehicles and equipment, making up excuses to just seize what they need. Not only that, but the incentives are extraordinarily negative, leading to cops making useless busts just to build up statistics for which they will either receive money from the federal government or that they will directly seize. The increase of no-knock, military-style raids—it’s just inconceivable that these are legal—is even more terrifying. The natural consequence is that cops no longer really know how to do actual police work because they’re only there to do S.W.A.T. raids. Murders, rapes and other actual crimes remain uninvestigated.

Woody Harrelson, Susan Sarandon and Arianna Huffington introduce the segment that discusses the industries that profit massively from the drug war, like the prison lobbies, which will happily fill the coffers of any politician with a tough-on-drugs attitude. And next up is Chris Rock, telling us that the government “doesn’t give a fuck about your safety. The government: they don’t want you to use your drugs; they want you to use their drugs.” This introduces the segment of how big pharma and its bought-and-paid-for politicians decide which drugs are legal and which are not. Marshall Mathers (Eminem) discusses his addiction to Vicodin and other prescription drugs.

Recommended.

This is a more down-on-the-streets complement to the previous documentary How to Make Money Selling Drugs. It’s a discussion of the drug war and its effects on poor communities, which literally have no other opportunities. They’re not even trying to get rich, necessarily. As one young small-time drug dealer puts it, “basically it’s just about survival.” The war on drugs is invisible to a large part of the population—one class—and the cops and the lower classes are left to fight it out, senselessly. As one cop puts it “[e]verybody involved just hates what’s going on.”

The documentary covers the sheer short-sightedness of the drug war and the utter hopelessness that it creates for whole generations and large swaths of the population. It has already caused enough damage and threatens to tear the fabric of American society irreparably asunder—assuming that it has not already done so.

David Simon returns in this documentary,

“The drug war created an environment in which [professionalism and craft] were not rewarded. A drug arrest does not require anything other than getting out of your radio car and jacking people up against the side of a liquor store. Probable cause? Are you kidding?”

Cops describe how they work geographically, sweeping up people in a region, because they need to make arrests. Why? Money. Overtime.

“The problem is, is that that cop that made that cheap drug arrest, he’s gonna get paid. He’s gonna get the hours of overtime for taking the drugs down to E.C.U. He’s gonna get paid for processing the prisoner down to central booking. He’s gonna get paid for sitting back at his desk and writing the paperwork for a couple of hours. And he’s gonna do that 40, 50, 60 times a month, so that his base pay might end up being only half of what he’s paid as a police officer.”

Now this is an interesting tie-in to the Romanian movie I just watched before. In that one, a cop had a moral quandary about sending kids to jail for drugs. He decided, in the end, to make the arrests based on the letter of the law—and to protect his job. In this documentary, we see how the low-level soldiers in the drug war are just looking out for number one, piling up overtime, but at the same time doing so by unfairly targeting and imprisoning the poor and the downtrodden. I got mine, Jack.

David Simon is again very eloquent, as he was in How to Make Money Selling Drugs. Cops who make dozens of shitty and unfair drug arrests look better on paper than cops making single arrests for real crimes. Drug cops get promoted…and end up approving the promotions for the next round of sergeants. Guess who gets promoted? It’s a vicious cycle.

“Compare that guy to the one guy doing police work, solving a murder, a rape, a robbery, a burglary. If he gets lucky, he makes one arrest for the month. He gets one slip signed. And, at the end of the month, when they look and they see officer A, he made 60 arrests. Officer B, he made one arrest. Who do you think they make the sergeant? In a city like Baltimore, where I’m from, our percentage of arrests for murder, for rape and robbery, are half of what they once were.[3] Our drug-arrest stats are twice of what they once were. It makes the city unlivable. It makes a police department where nobody can solve a fuckin’ crime.”

Cops are not all bad, but they are human and they can fool themselves into believing that what they’re doing is right just because it’s legal. They may have initial qualms about simply seizing vehicles for themselves or for seizing money and using it to buy themselves and their departments new equipment, but it quickly passes as the tedium of repetition teaches them that this is the new normal. This is not to excuse them, but to try to explain how these seemingly fascist and lawless practices can become so prevalent among those ostensibly charged with upholding the law.

No discussion of the drug war is complete without a discussion of the disparity in sentencing laws, which are clearly designed to incarcerate people of particular classes and races. In the early 20th century, laws against opium were designed to capture Chinese (even though opium was used by everyone, including affluent and middle-class whites), and now laws against crack are used to capture blacks. Whites use crack just as much as blacks. In fact, usage statistics show that 13% of crack users are black, just like 13% of the U.S. population is black. Then why are over 90% of the people arrested for crack possession black? Explain that while at the same time maintaining that the U.S. is a post-racist society.

On we go to an examination of why in God’s name we would continue to do things this way when it causes so much suffering. In explanation, the documentary’s next stop is a prison-industry trade show. Oh, and David Simon is back with another eloquent summary,

“You know, a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century, which is that we shrugged off so much of our manufacturing base, so much of our need for organized labor, for a legitimate union wage, for union benefits, for the types of jobs in which you could raise a family and be a meaningful citizen. We got rid of so much of that that oops…we marginalized a lot of white people. And lo and behold, when they are marginalized, when they are denied meaning, when they’re denied meaningful work, they become drug addicts too. And they become involved in the methamphetamine trade and they start turning themselves over to the underground economies that are the only ones there to accept them. Capitalism is fairly color-blind in the end. Our economic engine, when it doesn’t need somebody, it doesn’t need somebody and it doesn’t give a damn who you are. White people found it out a little later than black folk, but they found it out.”

Another guy puts it more pithily:

“The way to take a problem and make it a huge problem is, first, you ask the wrong question and then you feed us the wrong answer.”

Another very good documentary. Highly recommended for all Americans.

This is a Darren Aronofsky film about a mathematician/savant named Max working in the stock market and trying to unlock the mysteries of the universe by detecting the patterns buried in the mathematics of existence. Early in the film, he encounters a talkative guy in a diner who asks him about the Kabbalah and I was immediately reminded of Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum which also dealt with extracting meaning from patterns that may or may not exist. The black and white filming as well as the raw print quality reminded me a bit of Lynch’s Eraserhead.

Max has a very Gilliam-esque machine named Euclid into which he types his daily assumptions to generate the next day’s stock predictions. The machine starts to misbehave, supposedly. It’s hard to tell what’s real, though, since Max also gets utterly violent reality-altering headaches the ad-hoc treatments for which he also meticulously documents in his daily journal. The film is told partly in his conversations with his odd, old professor played brilliantly, as always, by Mark Margolis (look him up; you’ll recognize him). His life is filled with jarring noise—the shrill noise of his headaches is truly terrifying, the phone is jarring, his attractive neighbor can be heard entertaining next door.

It’s got a cool techno soundtrack and a cool overall style. It’s not for everyone, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Said enjoyment is maybe not unassociated with my having a current obsession with completing a jigsaw puzzle that is 1/3 blue sky—500 pieces all of nearly the same color.