CinemaWriter.com

Reviewing Fahrenheit 9/11, I described Michael Moore as the P.T. Barnum of documentarians. His polemics have all the subtlety of a carnival barker’s shtick, but, you have to admit, there’s little arguing with what’s at the heart of his movies: the portraits of working class individuals who’s circumstances illuminate the festering inequities allowed to thrive in America, inequities that enable the rewarding of the rich and the marginalization of the poor. He’s a master showman, a populist muckraker, to be sure, but his moral outrage against the greed-driven excesses of corporations and the corruption of government is palpable, infectious, and, I think, much-needed in a society that too often feels under the thumb of shareholders, lobbyists, and politicians.

In Sicko, Michael Moore dissects the American health care system and doesn’t come up with very good news. He examines a cross-section of American families and individuals, all of whom are suffering in some way by the bottom-line profiteering and ruthlessness of our major health care companies. Some of his subjects have gone bankrupt, others forced to face serious illness on their own after their carriers abruptly dropped them for getting sick in the first place. Moore investigates the conditions in hospitals where the more “burdensome” (i.e. uninsured, costly, and mentally ill) are regularly thrown out, and left to the mercy of shelters. We also get firsthand accounts of the relatively more compassionate forms of health care that’s the norm in other countries; Moore travels to Canada, the UK, and France to dig up the “dirt” on the socialist modes of care, and finds that their populations live longer and healthier than America’s. Most affecting perhaps is his portrait of several 9/11 rescue workers, all of whom suffer from a range of conditions, from respiratory ailments to PTSD, who’ve all either gotten by mountainous health care bills or gone bankrupt by the same, meeting only apathy from a government that professes to care so much for them.

As is the case with even Moore’s best efforts (and Sicko ranks among his best), the man’s showboating and penchant for staging silly, attention-getting stunts undermines the powerful and poignant message at their roots. In Sicko, the director wields his megaphone and tries to gain his group of 9/11 workers entry into the Guantanamo detention center, a gambit that, no surprise, goes nowhere. But, for the most part, Moore the prankster is muzzled in favor of Moore the social chronicler, and that works to Sicko’s benefit immeasurably. This is a polemic, for sure, but, in uncovering the realities of people — all of them not too different from the rest of us — foundering in a broken system, the movie’s imperative for change, spiked with ironies and salved with sly humor, gets a vital, impassioned dose of urgency.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Michael Moore
Written by: Michael Moore

Michael Moore casts his gaze at the institution of Capitalism and the wreckage of bankruptcy, corruption, disillusionment and broken lives it’s left across America. The financial meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent propping up of the banking industry inform much of Capitalism: A Love Story’s outrage and Moore’s questioning of a system that’s devoted predominantly to fattening the wallets of CEOs, boardroom suits, bankers, and the politicians who serve as their functionaries in Congress. Moore’s overripe sentiments and silly showmanship — at one point, he enters a financial institution and declares he’s there to make a citizen’s arrest of the company’s CEO for pillaging Americans’ tax dollars and, shortly after, he covers the perimeter of the building in police tape — all work to undermine the inherent power of Moore’s subject. Such antics don’t fool anybody, and, as viewers, we become impatient, anxious for this activist-filmmaker to get past the gags and on to the heart of his story, and to what he does best: Bring into vivid relief profiles of ordinary, embattled Americans. Here, Moore singles out poor families evicted from their homes, striking union workers, and overworked airline pilots, creating portraits of lives ruined by the mortgage crisis and jobs threatened by companies eager to cut corners, while baring for view the nexus interconnecting America’s corporations and its government. By exposing the dirty underbelly of American Capitalism, Moore doesn’t necessarily tell us anything new, but it’s his gung-ho pursuit of accountability and compassion for working-class victims and crusaders that make his movies — and Capitalism: A Love Story among them — worthwhile inquiries into how we live today.

Grade: B

Directed by: Michael Moore
Written by: Michael Moore

Decades ago, Europeans introduced the predatory Nile Perch into the waters of Lake Victoria in Tanzania. The perch, alien to the lake’s ecosystem, ravaged all the other species of marine life that had naturally evolved in Lake Victoria over eons. This per se is not the subject of Darwin’s Nightmare but merely a metaphor that Sauper develops in chronicling the exploitation of Lake Victoria’s human inhabitants by their European economic colonizers. The fishing and processing of the Nile Perch for the European market is at the heart of this exploitation, as, everyday, transport planes from Europe buzz into lakeside airfields where locals load them up with perch so that the planes can ferry them back to rich European nations where the fish are regarded as a haute couture delicacy. Sauper limns this metaphor immediately over his movie’s opening credits, training his camera on the shadow of a transport plane as it glides over the lake’s waters like a shark nosing in for a kill.

Indeed, both figuratively and literally, killing is the main order of business on the lake. The local fishing industry, involving in perch fishing, is geared predominantly for the European market. The locals are left to forage for scraps because the high-tech processing of these fish for consumption renders them too expensive to sell at the local markets. Meanwhile, the lakeside villages are left to fester in poverty and filth. Poverty, of course, breeds desperation, which, in turn, breeds anger and hatred. The latter are essential in fomenting regional antipathies and civil wars–both all too rife in today’s Africa–and, in Sauper’s most damning argument, something Europeans are also keen to exploit. A lengthy portion of Darwin’s Nightmare concerns the issue of guns, whole planeloads of them supplied by Europeans and ferried in by the pilots of these transport planes. These guns are distributed to regional militias like so much kindling to stoke the bonfires of local feuds. This vicious cycle keeps Tanzania’s fishing industry, along with its consumers and the transport pilots, all of them employed, paid, and well fed.

Sauper’s absolutely brave, unflinching camera, like a gutting knife, bares for view the unimaginable hardships in the locals’ lives. In their beleaguered yet resilient eyes, we sense a hope for change, but their words–their cracked voices–betray the sense of defeat that each of them feels. One moment, Sauper’s camera follows a group of children squabbling over a bowl of rice; in another, he fixes our gaze on other youngsters numbing themselves from their own lives by sniffing glue in an alleyway. An impoverished half-blind woman dries scraps of fish on racks in the sun, bracing herself from the toxic fumes emitted from fish scales; young boys dream of better lives, of not following in their father’s footsteps; prostitutes plying their trade among the Russian pilots holed up in the town in between transport runs speak of the rampancy of physical abuse. All are heart-rending to see and listen to, but Sauper’s most eloquent subject is a nighttime security guard–smiling, grizzled, handsome–who doles out the practical wisdom of doing what it takes to survive, whether it’s holding down a job or killing a man purported to be your enemy. To him, it’s all in a day’s work, swearing loyalty to whatever clothes and feeds you. Then, as world-weary as he is, his eyes light up as he contemplates a better future for his own son, far away from the lake.

At the end of the day, though, business is business. Sauper’s documentary stops short, rightfully I think, from indicting any single player in this cruel game–whether it’s the owners of the fisheries, the pilots of the planes, the EU leaders touting the lake’s resources–because each is simply jostling to survive. It’s a perversion, truly, of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, but the mechanism involved is the same, and poignantly serves Sauper’s harsh allegory.

Grade: B

Directed by: Hubert Sauper
Written by: Hubert Sauper
Cast: Hubert Sauper (interviewer)

Thoroughly middle of the road doc that tries to deconstruct a legendary vaudeville joke replete with incest, scatology, sodomy, bestiality and all that fun stuff. The snag is that none of those aforementioned hobbies is inherently all that funny, and neither is the joke itself. The repertoire of comedians on display here, all doing their schtick, sometimes hits a comic bulls-eye so, really, it’s all in the execution. Still, one has to wonder did this material deserve a ninety-minute running time? Well, no. A half-hour uncensored segment on Comedy Central might’ve been more appropriate. And another thing: The Aristocrats is appallingly edited. It’s as if the filmmakers tossed all their footage into a cuisinart and cranked it on high. The editing is erratic, breathless, and hugely irritating–quite ironic, I think, considering that comedy is all about rhythm and timing, neither of which this documentary maintains particularly well. A tedious dud that sparks once or twice with big laughs.

Grade: C

Directed by: Paul Provenza
Cast: Jason Alexander, Hank Azaria, David Brenner, Drew Carey, George Carlin, Billy Connolly, Andy Dick, Phyllis Diller, Whoopi Goldberg, Gibert Gottfried, Eric Idle, Larry Miller, Martin Mull, Bob Saget, Sarah Silverman

Magic, painting, literature, filmmaking and so on, it’s all a big fake. A good fake is the crucial and decisive ingredient if an artist is to pull the wool over the viewer/reader’s eyes and achieve the illusion of an alternate experience. We revel in fakery, and celebrate the makers of fakery, whether they be magicians or filmmakers. In F for Fake, Orson Welles — the ultimate master of the fake (his radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds could be among the 20th century’s greatest fakes) an artist who used inventive devices in radio, theater, and cinema to seduce audiences into deeper realms of the imagination and illusion — contemplates the whole idea of Fakery. The notorious master art forger Elmyr de Hory and the equally notorious writer Clifford Irving, whose faux biography of Howard Hughes turned him into a tabloid sensation, are the subjects around which Welles pivots his wryly funny and personable essay on the testy relationship between illusion and authenticity, and between art and commerce.

Where do we draw the line between art and forgery? Does the fraudulent nature of what de Hory and Irving do so well automatically invalidate and diminish the value of their works, though as observers we marvel at the impeccable perfection of their forgeries? Welles’ essay isn’t striving for conclusions, but it entertains the notion of art as illusion with humor and self-reflection. That discursive quality in the film is also, to some extent anyway, its undoing, as Welles’s narration turns over and over on itself, one idea overlapping another, replacing or muddling the last, threatening to obfuscate the filmmaker’s entire enterprise. Sometimes we don’t know where to look or which of his observations to retain and take with us through the rest of this otherwise compelling journey.

Welles structures F for Fake as an extended monologue, a point-counterpoint speculation on how and why de Hory and Irving pulled off their respective fakes, so much so that they built success and fame out of their practice. The tone is clever and light, the editing at once whimsical and complex as Welles cross-cuts between his original footage and archival documentary footage of de Hory and Irving. That interplay makes F for Fake a surprisingly dynamic, constantly engaging experimental documentary, a personal essay that gives the viewer the feeling that he’s in Welles’s expansive company around a dinner table while he considers and pontificates on a pet topic. That in itself is a privilege, and reason enough to check out F for Fake, the filmmaker’s last and among his most cherished personal projects.

Grade: B

Directed by: Orson Welles
Written by: Orson Welles
Cast: Orson Welles, Oja Kodar, Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving, Joseph Cotton, Francois Reichenbach, Richard Wilson, Paul Stewarak