Director:  Davis Guggenheim, Watched in:  Theater Rating:  4/5.     Director Davis Guggenheim admits at the beginning of his sad and haunting film, Waiting For Superman, that he drives his own daughters to a private school every morning, passing by three public schools that are nearer to his home. His guilt over a decision he once promised himself he would not make has driven him to make this movie, a vivid and intimate examination of the crisis confronting education in America. Guggenheim tells the stories of 5 young students in California, New York and Washington D.C., all with eager minds but meager prospects for a quality education in their hometowns. Luckily, they are blessed with caring parents and grandparents, some of who are making up for their own lack of education by focusing with heartbreaking tenacity on the future of their children. They all believe that education, graduating from high school and going to college, is the key to a better life in America. They are right, but America—its politicians and its teachers’ unions—litter the path to academic success with bureaucratic obstacles. In the case of the families featured in Waiting For Superman, their only hope lies in a lottery, a literal roulette, to determine their acceptance into the few schools that qualify as institutions of learning rather than holding pens for future at-risk youth. Woven throughout this increasingly suspenseful story are the damning statistics and research that paint a pathetic picture of the last 40 years in American education. It seems that every president, from LBJ to [...]

Director:  Spike Lee, Watched on:  HBO, Rating:  5/5.     In his four-hour long post-Hurricane Katrina documentary, When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee and his team of filmmakers throw a wide net over all the neighborhoods of New Orleans, interviewing residents who fled Katrina, musicians who returned, politicians who passed the buck, journalists who wrote impassioned indictments of failed policy. At first, the movie feels overloaded with talking heads, too many faces, too many names, too many stories. But soon a pattern emerges. What Lee is doing with this film is telling the story of a diaspora, a great forced emigration of lost and wandering souls who left the only home they knew, and are now in danger of being forgotten. In story after story, anecdote after anecdote, with varying measures of rage, incomprehension, sorrow and survival, the people of New Orleans tell their story to the only audience that will listen: people just like them, homeowners with families, working men and women, children and grandmothers. As Lee makes clear in this movie, it will certainly not be the politicians who pay them any mind. This film is at its best when it is angry, when it is searing and honest about the failures of the Bush Administration, FEMA, Mayor Ray Nagin, and when it points a finger at the racism allowed for too long to fester in the seams dividing the Crescent City. Lee has created a vast and damning chronicle of one of the worst natural disasters–and one of the most inept federal responses–to befall our [...]

Directors:  Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  3/5.     In Jesus Camp, filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady were granted unprecedented access to a group of kids who practice a form of evangelical religion so deeply fundamental that it would be admirable if it weren’t so frightening. The pre-teens in this Oscar nominated doc are Pentecostal Charismatics—they live, breathe, cry, sing, and speak in tongues for Jesus. Their leader at the Kids on Fire summer camp, located in the ironically named Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, is a passionate general in an army they believe is led by George Bush, and their camp is a recruitment center for foot soldiers for Jesus Christ. That’s the impression left by this film, which is a surprisingly even-handed, non-judgmental look at a sub-culture of Americans who believe Harry Potter is a warlock, global warming doesn’t exist, and abortion is the devil’s work. Becky Fisher, the camp director, is a fervent crusader, and she makes no apologies for what she herself calls the indoctrination of her young campers into a fundamentalist movement equal in fervor and commitment to their Islamic radical counterparts in Palestine, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The kids in this film are all fresh-faced, middle class, and mostly white; and they are surprisingly articulate and open with the filmmakers, who were allowed to roam the grounds and be part of the revival meetings, sometimes with two or three cameras rolling simultaneously. As the directors themselves say in their voice-over commentary, some of these kids are “unnervingly mature”, and there [...]

Director:  Mark Levinson, Watched in: Theater, Rating:  1.5/5.     Judging by the packed house at an opening night screening of the new documentary Particle Fever, the movie seems to have a sizable niche audience. Telling the story of the Large Hadron Collider, an immense and expensive science experiment going on in a vast underground bunker in Switzerland, the movie is certain to thrill physicists, scientists, astronomers, philosophy majors, math geeks, nerds, braniacs and other lovable eggheads who see vast mysteries and thrilling possibilities in dense, convoluted equations. If you’re like me, however, whose last encounter with arithmetic was 10th grade geometry, the movie is likely to induce restlessness, as if you’re back in that high school class impatient for the bell to ring. Particle Fever tags along with several physicists working on the LHC, part of a vast international squadron of scientists teaming up to discover the origin of the universe. Their plan is to simulate the Big Bang within the Collider, crashing together atoms over and over again in order to break them apart and find evidence of the Higgs Boson. The Higgs is–if I followed this correctly–a sub-atomic particle that could potentially explain why we exist. Apparently this was a big deal last year when news broke of the discovery of the Higgs Boson, but what wasn’t such a big deal was that no one seems quite sure what to do with this knowledge. It’s a problem the documentary struggles with as well. After an engrossing, fast-paced and gently entertaining first thirty minutes during which [...]

Director:  Brian Knappenberger, Watched in: Theater, Rating:  4/5.   The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz documents the sad tale of the information activist and brilliant computer programmer who committed suicide in early 2013. The movie presents damning evidence of death by intimidation, perpetrated by the United States government against one of its own citizens, orchestrated by a paranoid national security apparatus and an overzealous Federal prosecutor. The Internet’s Own Boy will leave you angry, suspicious, even shocked; it is both a searing work of protest and rage, and a deeply moving portrait of a gifted, likeable young man driven to despair by the very country he loved and sought to help. Swartz was, by all accounts, a computer programming prodigy and technical genius. He helped develop the Internet protocol RSS, co-founded Instagram and the information hub Reddit. He worked as a researcher at Harvard and established the web-based Creative Commons. He could have made billions of dollars if he’d sunk his talents into Silicon Valley. Instead, he used his skills in areas of social justice and information access. Believing that knowledge is the ultimate power, and that all knowledge should be free and available to the public, especially if the public has already paid for it, Swartz aggressively and subversively mined vaults of data and information from privately owned websites with the goal of making it accessible to everyone. He considered himself an activist, and even dreamed one day of using his skills in politics. He wanted to eventually work in the White [...]

Director:  Charles Ferguson, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  5/5.     It is very provincial of me to say this, but Seattle may be one of the few cities in the country where audiences still applaud at the end of a film they enjoyed, and it is probably the only city where an audience will applaud at the end of a documentary. But Inside Job is that kind of film. The movie is a clear, detailed and thorough examination of the head-in-the-sand politics and back room criminal activity that created the financial mess of 2008.  The film was produced, written and directed by Charles Ferguson, the same filmmaker who investigated the folly that was the run up to the Iraq debacle.  That film’s title alone, No End In Sight, was not only prescient but could also serve as the title for this film as well. In both cases, there seems to be no way out of either the Iraq war or the so-called Great Recession, which has clamped itself on the American public like a set of manacles that may never be removed. Of course, we’re talking about the Great Recession that affects 98% of Americans; not the richest 2% who continue to make bundles of money in executive bonuses and use it to bribe politicians into passing ineffective financial reform and lobbying for tax cuts for themselves and their richest friends. Inside Job will not only enrage you, it will depress you. That may not sound like a great time at the movies, but if you want [...]

Director:  Andrew Rossi, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  3/5.     Page One: Inside The New York Times peeks its head in the doorway of the venerable newspaper’s building, peers around a few corners, and shuffles its feet in a couple of offices. It is not a gritty, in-the-trenches, behind-the-scenes expose on the day-to-day running of the most famous newspaper in the world, a subject more suited to a reality TV series than a 90-minute independent documentary. Given that, the movie’s title, or titles, are misleading. Page One: Inside the New York Times is not about the battle of various managing editors to get their department’s hot story on the front page of the paper and it’s more interested in what is happening outside the Times rather than inside. The movie’s main subject is the struggle of traditional journalism to stay vital in a world of blogs, on-line news and palm-sized screens. Within this limited scope, Page One manages to inform and entertain by avoiding, ironically, the use of slick, software-centric tools now available to all would-be, desktop filmmakers. There are no sequences stuffed with animated After Effects or fluttering graphics; no professionally lighted studio interviews or soaring crane or dolly shots. The director, Andrew Rossi, who shot much of the movie himself, is no slave to cinematic sophistication. He keeps the lens close to his subjects, pins a mic on their lapel, and turns up the gain on his handheld HD camcorder instead of setting up lights. It might be an old-fashioned approach, but as any reporter would [...]

Director: Sarah Polley, Watched in:  Theater Rating:  3.5/5.     In the documentary Stories We Tell, director Sarah Polley invites us into her cinematic scrapbook of home movies and family interviews with a playful, warm embrace. The film is both a memoir about her mother and a meta-commentary on the process of making a movie about memory. Beginning with a disarming montage of relatives settling down on chairs and couches for interviews, admitting their shyness and asking Polley if anyone really should care about their family history, the movie immediately establishes a non-threatening atmosphere of trust and familiarity. The story being told here may be unremarkable, but Polley’s deft command of structure, film formats and dramatic layering is polished enough to invite our intimacy. Her honesty is so genuine that when a third act revelation comes along, a revelation not in the story being told but in the method used to tell the story, it has the potential to destroy nearly all the goodwill the film has accumulated up to that point. Polley grew up the youngest child of a family of five. Her father dabbled in acting and writing but decided to sell insurance to support his family. Her mom was a housewife who also acted and sang, was beautiful and beloved, and who died of cancer when Polley was only 11 years old. Family lore had it there was always something fishy about Sarah’s birth. So, armed with curiosity and a camera crew, she set out to establish, once and for all, whether or not [...]

Director:  Davis Guggenheim, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  4/5.     There are actually two inconvenient truths in An Inconvenient Truth. The first truth is stark and unavoidable: the devastating effects of global warming are accelerating even faster than we want to believe, so fast that in 50 years floods may kill millions of people around the world and create millions more refugees, while corrupt politicians are more concerned with starting wars based on lies, securing the profits of General Motors and Haliburton, and making the United States safe from gay weddings. The second truth is more subtle, and to the easily distracted mainstream media, still debatable:  if the 2000 election was not stolen from Al Gore, and the voters who picked him, then he would have probably paid attention to the memo that said Osama bin Laden was determined to attack inside the US and Sept.11th, the war in Iraq, illegal wiretapping, secret torture, and the anti-gay marraige amendent would be nothing but fictions in a Scooter Libby bodice-ripper.  That’s a lot of truth for a documentary that is essentially an artfully filmed power point presentation.  But it shows you how powerful, and deeply depressing, the truth can be.  That’s why America’s gated community of politicians finds it easier to make stuff up. No matter what you think of Al Gore—his drone, his dry as dust wit, his stiff, serious, senior thesis approach to his material—you know he’s not making any of it up, and that’s why An Inconvenient Truth should be required viewing for every middle and [...]

Director: Haskell Wexler, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  5/5.     In Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, set during Chicago’s 1968 Democratic convention, vibrates with the intensity of watching history happen before our eye. Wexler, already an established veteran director of photography for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, In The Heat of the Night, and The Thomas Crown Affair, grafted the fictitious story of a news cameraman’s tentative love affair into his real-time street footage of the convention and ensuing protests, creating a one-of-a-kind film that is both politically astute and cinematically playful. Wexler was a master with the long lens. He was a student of montage. His scenes have a tactile momentum. A foot chase through a parking lot, a boy’s long wander through the city, and the aftermath of a fatal car accident are all staged with an attention to the process of cutting on rhythm, of building coherent sequences. His scenes crackle with a visual intelligence, even when they dawdle on the storytelling. Medium Cool is a commentary on many things: Vietnam (of course), political upheaval, the emerging self-importance of TV news, the dialectic of McLuhan’s hot and cool media, and the casual racism of white liberals (reflected in a scene where the cameraman and his sound guy find themselves uncomfortably challenged by a room full of black radical intellectuals). The cameraman, played with the right touch of arrogance by a young, intense Robert Forster, falls in love with a woman (Verna Bloom) from Appalachia, whose pre-teen son has begun to forget his own father, who [...]