Saturday Matinee: From JFK To 911 Everything Is A Rich Man’s Trick

Source: Top Documentary Films

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy lingers as one of the most traumatic events of the twentieth century. The open and shut nature of the investigation which ensued left many global citizens unsettled and dissatisfied, and nagging questions concerning the truth behind the events of that fateful day remain to this day. Evidence of this can be found in the endless volumes of conspiracy-based materials which have attempted to unravel and capitalize on the greatest murder mystery in American history.

Now, a hugely ambitious documentary titled Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick adds fuel to those embers of uncertainty, and points to many potential culprits whose possible involvement in the assassination has long been obscured by official historical record.

Authoritatively written and narrated by Francis Richard Conolly, the film begins its labyrinthine tale during the era of World War I, when the wealthiest and most powerful figures of industry discovered the immense profits to be had from a landscape of ongoing military conflict. The film presents a persuasive and exhaustively researched argument that these towering figures formed a secret society by which they could orchestrate or manipulate war-mongering policies to their advantage on a global scale, and maintain complete anonymity in their actions from an unsuspecting public. Conolly contends that these sinister puppet masters have functioned and thrived throughout history – from the formation of Nazism to the build-up and aftermath of September 11.

The election of President Kennedy in 1960 represented a formidable threat to these shadowy structures of power, including high-profile figures within the Mafia, crooked politicians, and the world’s most influential and notorious war profiteers. Thus, a plot was hatched which would end Kennedy’s reign prior to any chance of re-election, thereby restoring the order and freedoms of these secret societies.

At nearly three and a half hours, Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick examines a defining event of our times from a perspective not often explored. While it may or may not win over viewers who remain skeptical of mass-scale conspiracy, it presents its findings in a measured and meticulous manner which demands attention and consideration.

Saturday Matinee: Midnight Special

Source: Deep Focus Review

People put their faith in the strangest things. Some feel their god will return to cast down judgment on humankind. Others are certain beings from another solar system planted genetic material on Earth to create life. And some believe, or perhaps not, that a flying spaghetti monster lives in the sky. Here’s another one: Folk music history tells us a train called the Southern Pacific Golden Gate Limited ran near Sugar Land prison in Texas, where legendary Blues man Lead Belly heard it passing. He and other inmates believed the train represented some sign of hope that soon they would be set free. Lead Belly later popularized a song about it, called “Midnight Special”, featuring a lyric in which he asks the train to “shine a light on me”. Apart from memorable covers by Harry Belafonte, Bob Dylan, and Credence Clearwater Revival, Lead Belly’s folk song informs the title of writer-director Jeff Nichols’ fourth film, Midnight Special.

People in the film believe some strange things, too. Some of them believe a young boy will grant their way to salvation, while the government believes that same boy is a threat to national security. But more on the specifics later. These belief systems pervade Nichols’ screenplay, a slow-burner infused with soulful character depth and science-fiction underpinnings. Midnight Special has much in common with Nichols’ excellent Take Shelter (2011), about a working-class family plagued by the father’s apocalyptic premonitions. That otherwise grassroots, southern-fried suspenser contains fantastical elements, though really it’s about the extremes people will go to chase what they believe. Nichols has explored similar American spirituality in his other two films, Shotgun Stories (2007) and Mud (2011). Each of his films demonstrates the potential danger inherent to blindly following our beliefs and convictions.

Nichols’ calculated opening demands the audience take time to figure out what’s happening and why, who the good guys are, and in the end, what just came to pass. It’s a picture audiences must feel their way through in the best possible way. An Amber Alert blares across the television screen, a reporter notifying us a young boy named Alton has been kidnapped by a man named Roy. As the shot pulls back, we find ourselves in a motel room with Roy (Michael Shannon, severe as ever) and Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), who, behind an ever-present pair of swimming goggles, reads a comic book by flashlight. Also in the room is a crew-cut man of action, Lucas (Joel Edgerton). They’re waiting until the sun goes down to continue their getaway. Lucas drives fast and without headlights, wearing night vision headgear to see the highway in the pitch dark.

Nichols cross-cuts to things at “The Ranch”—a Texas compound not unlike David Koresh’s Branch Davidians—populated by old-world types in hand-sewn garb. They’re led by a quietly intense organizer named Calvin (Sam Shepard), who wants Alton returned to him. The FBI raids The Ranch and puts everyone on buses to a secure location. They ask questions about Calvin’s people buying guns and about Alton’s kidnapping. A bookish NSA specialist named Sevier (Adam Driver) wants to know about Alton, who came in contact with him, and what they know about the boy’s abilities. And so we must wonder, why so many questions about this boy? The answer: When Alton is exposed to the sun, beams of light shoot from his eyes; he seems to speak in tongues; he can give people visions; in space, satellites meant to detect nuclear explosions spy an energy source emitting from him; he also picks up radio signals in his head.

But what is he? Nichols never answers that question outright. Over time, we learn Roy is Alton’s father, and Lucas is Roy’s friend, and together they’re protecting Alton from The Ranch and the government. All parties concerned feel a great power exists inside the boy and, though they don’t completely understand it, they fearfully pursue and defend him. Soon Alton’s mother (Kirsten Dunst) joins Roy and Lucas, aware of the entire plan. We learn all of Alton’s peculiarities have a hidden encryption, coordinates that point to a certain spot on a specific day. Everything depends on getting him there on time. And gradually, as men from The Ranch get closer to recapturing Alton, and the government goons track down their perceived threat, we get a greater—but not clearer—sense of what might occur if and when Alton arrives at his destination.

Rather than frustrating, that lack of transparency is engrossing, as Nichols drops hints here and there, while he binds us to the often moving, unquestionably engaging proceedings through subtle character work. So what is Alton? He finds great interest reading a Superman comic, so perhaps he’s something like Superman, a powerful alien. Perhaps he’s a messiah sent to protect people at The Ranch. Maybe he’s an advanced form of human with mutant powers, a time traveler, a living weapon, or an inter-dimensional being. Whatever the answer, it’s less important than the real-life descriptions of the humans on Nichols’ journey. His actors carry impressive weight and gravitas, particularly Shannon, who has appeared in each of Nichols’ films. But the entire cast brings substance to their performances, involving the audience in the tense, measured development of the story.

Both narratively and technically, Nichols has used the films of Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter to inform Midnight Special, but not in such a way that it feels distractingly derivative. From the perspective that the film operates as a road movie driving toward some manner of grandiose sci-fi conclusion, the film feels like Close Encounters of the Third Kind; the ending, too, resembles Spielberg’s wondrous 1977 effort. Elsewhere, Starman (1984) comes into play, as everyone who meets Alton gravitates to his kindness, soulful sureness, and power, just as everyone in Carpenter’s film found Jeff Bridges’ alien character a kind of angelic figure. Even the ending seems to combine the finales of these two films, with a touch of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. The film also bears some similarity to Tomorrowland, although the association is undoubtedly unintentional. All the while, Adam Stone’s textured 35mm lensing captures familiar lens flares and widescreen compositions from Carpenter and Spielberg that influenced Nichols.

Questions about what happens in its marvelous climactic scenes aside, Midnight Special shines a light on the audience by offering a unique combination of the realistic and out-of-this-world. Nichols develops thoroughly dimensional characters, even among the not-irredeemable “villains” of the story. The director cares about Roy’s heavy brow and Sevier’s sense of unsure awe; with them, he develops intimate moments that effectively resonate further than the sci-fi gimmick. He never overplays the drama, such as a scene in which Alton tells his father not to worry about him. Roy replies, “I like worrying about you.” The understatedness of Nichols’ drama, the poignancy, renders a picture about how people react to what they believe or do not understand. Some embrace it; some fear it. No matter the reaction, Nichols finds a way to represent that through an engaging metaphor in his profoundly affecting and, in many ways extraordinary thriller.

Watch Midnight Special on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/14507307

Saturday Matinee: Blood of the Condor

Source: Wikipedia

Blood of the Condor (Quechua: Yawar Mallku, Spanish: Sangre de cóndor) is a 1969 Bolivian drama film co-written and directed by Jorge Sanjinés and starring Marcelino Yanahuaya. The film tells the story of an indigenous Bolivian community receiving medical care from the Peace Corps-like United States-backed agency Cuerpo del Progreso (“Progress Corps”) which is secretly sterilising local women. The story, which was based on accounts by the indigenous people to the filmmaker, provoked an outrage in the public which led to a government investigation about the Peace Corps’ actions in Bolivia, which ended in the expulsion of the agency from the country.

Saturday Matinee: Punk: Attitude

“Punk: Attitude” (2005) is a documentary tracing the roots, meaning and enduring influence of the punk movement of the late 70s and early 80s. Directed by Don Letts, the film offers an insider’s perspective because Letts was a catalyzing agent for the developing London punk scene, having run a clothing store called Acme Attractions and hosted parties as a reggae DJ, both often frequented by band members of groups such as The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Pretenders. Letts later managed The Slits and began his film career as a director of Clash music videos.

Punk: Attitude also features interviews with artists directly and indirectly involved with the early punk scene including Wayne Kramer (The MC5), Mick Jones (The Clash), Jello Biafra (The Dead Kennedys), Chrissie Hynde (The Pretenders), and David Johansen (The New York Dolls) among many others. Though some punk fans may dispute the relevance of certain featured musicians or feel others were overlooked, the film provide a candid, fairly comprehensive and at times contradictory overview of punk rock as iconoclastic, raw and diverse as the music itself.

Saturday Matinee: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

By Jonathan Romney

Source: Film Comment

A term beloved of French film critics—and one I never tire of borrowing, just because it pinpoints its referent so well—is OVNI, meaning “UFO.” It’s used to refer to a film, usually a first feature, that’s next to impossible to categorize, that seems to have come out of nowhere, to have been made entirely against the odds—a film that appears to originate if not actually from other planets, then from some parallel cinematic dimension where the usual rules don’t apply.

Little could qualify more for OVNI-dom than an “Iranian vampire Western,” as Ana Lily Amirpour’s first feature has been dubbed. In fact, the skewed quality of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is accentuated by the fact that it both is and isn’t “really” Iranian. That is, the film is in Farsi, and stars a cast of Iranian or Iranian-American actors, but was shot in California, not far from Bakersfield, where writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour grew up. Taft stands in for Bad City, as the subtitles call it—or “Shahr Bad,” which may possibly be a Farsi play on words—a run-down, isolated burg where weird things happen by night, and nothing too ordinary takes place by day.

The Girl of the title (Sheila Vand) is a gamine-ish music fan who likes to dance alone in her poster-decorated den. But when she steps out onto the streets, she’s not the imperiled victim that the title—misleadingly, cleverly—would have you expect. She’s a figure of menace: a marauder who wears a chador over a very Gallic stripy matelot top, adding a curious dash of indie-kid chic to her image as a ghost figure who glides rather than walk. In fact, her gliding gait comes from the fact that she’s commandeered a terrified child’s skateboard. Spreading her robe like black wings, the Girl haunts the night like an Islamic descendant of Musidora’s Irma Vep, lawless masked heroine of Louis Feuillade’s silent serial Les Vampires.

The Girl is indeed a vampire, and more than a match for supposedly the scariest presence on this city’s mean streets—thuggish drug dealer Saeed (Dominic Rains), who has “SEX” tattooed across his neck, a sleazy drooping moustache on his chops, and a pad filled with big-bad-hunter tat (deer’s heads, tiger-print throws…). The predatory Saeed practically licks his chops at the thought of feral sex when the Girl’s canines pop out to full length with an almost comical sound effect; he doesn’t look so happy once she snaps his finger off.

The Girl can be downright terrifying: the young boy who loses his skateboard probably hasn’t done anything to merit being chilled to the bone by her, when she leans in to ask him if he’s been good, then warns him (in one of the most authentically ghoulish horror-movie rasps since Mercedes McCambridge did voice duty for Linda Blair), “I can take your eyes out of your skull and give them to the dogs to eat.” We don’t, by the way, see the dogs of Bad City, but the local cat is unsettling enough: a naturally charismatic starer which looks like it’s taking a break from sitting in a Bond villain’s lap, and which gets the best close-up in the film.

Meanwhile in Bad City, a devilishly handsome young man named Arash (Arash Marandi) is coping with the depressed excesses of his overweight junkie dad Hossein (Marshall Manesh), and working as gardener and handyman to a rich family whose spoiled daughter, the recent recipient of a nose job, sees him as her latest toy.

Things take an overtly comic turn when Arash—something of a sweet-natured dork despite his quiffed rebel demeanor—attends a Halloween party as Dracula. Walking home the worse for wear in a too-baggy cape and really ill-fitting fangs, he meets the Girl, who “lures” him to her den—or rather, wheels her decidedly floppy prospective beau back to her place on the skateboard. Things turn romantic, at once chastely and very sensually, in a beautiful extended take, as Arash approaches her and she closes in—not, as you’d expect, on his neck, but on his chest. It all happens in swoony slow motion, but with a mirror ball spinning round and filling the room with sparkles at crazy speed: a magnificent, and inexplicably romantic, paradox of pacing that adds to the eerie romance of the scene.

The couple later tryst at dead of night at the local power plant, itself lit up like a jeweled city. Why at the power plant? For the chiaroscuro, of course—that seems to be what motivates Amirpour most. This is one of those films that are shot in black and white because a director is genuinely in love with the affective and expressive possibilities of that visual choice, and especially with its ability to draw magic out of night scenes: I’m reminded of another piece of black-and-white small-town dream romance, Eric Mendelsohn’s Judy Berlin (99), which used an eclipse as the narrative excuse for its midsummer night’s encounters. In her own nightscapes, Amirpour doesn’t mess around with half-measures: DP Lyle Vincent saturates his shadows with the inkiest of blackness (as does the graphic novel that Amirpour has created to accompany the film).

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a wayward, genuinely oneiric creation—look at its sudden arresting focus-pull on some oil derricks, and its graceful, gratuitous interlude of a transgender cowgirl figure dancing with a helium balloon. It manages to be tender, chilly, comic, and willfully bizarre all at once, but never has you wishing it would choose one register and stick to it. In his very enthusiastic recent review, David Thomson invokes not only David Lynch, but Vigo, Cocteau, and Buñuel, no less. Perhaps more modestly, A Girl Walks reminded me most of early Jarmusch, and of the general spirit of  late-Seventies/early-Eighties punk-influenced U.S. cinema (names like Scott B and Beth B, Amos Poe, Slava Tsukerman of Liquid Sky), because of Amirpour’s brisk disregard for genre norms, for the sense that she’s up for telling whatever story she wants to tell, any way she wants to tell it. While manifestly very polished and composed, the film nevertheless gives the impression that it’s making itself up—or dreaming itself into being—as it goes along.

There’s an oddly innocent blazing-youth romanticism about it, especially when the Girl and Arash bond over music. That feeling comes across all the more strongly because non-Farsi speakers will depend on the subtitles: it adds a tender but absurd irony to the revelation that the last song the Girl listened to was, of all things, Lionel Richie’s “Hello.” Fortunately, there’s cooler stuff on the soundtrack: the Tom-Waits-in-Tehran opening number by Iranian band Kiosk, and some Morricone-ish fanfare by Federale, a group from Portland.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is bound to cause a stir in academic circles for the way that it blurs its Eastern and Western codes so thoroughly: making manifestly American settings stand in for an imaginary Iran, playing provocatively on the chador as Islamic garment and as vampire-cape substitute, having its heroine at once tender lover and murderous monster in a way that neither Anne Rice nor Stephenie Meyer would quite recognize. Overall, Amirpour’s film feels like an elaborately punkish code-scrambling gesture rather than a fully formed organic statement, but that doesn’t matter—it has style, grace, and imagination, and as artistic gestures go, could hardly be more devil-may-care. By the time it takes a final Aldrich-esque drive into the shadows, A Girl Walks Home has more than earned your attention—and got you wondering where that shadow-steeped road leads, either for its romantic duo or for Amirpour as audacious writer-director.

Watch A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/product/girl-walks-home-alone-night

Saturday Matinee: 1984

A scary reminder of how easily totalitarian ideas and ideals crop up in societies and take fierce hold.

Film Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

Source: Spirituality & Practice

Winston Smith lives on Airstrip One, a part of Oceania. He resides in a shabby one-room apartment where his movements are monitored by a two-way telescreen. Winston works for the Ministry of Truth, where he rewrites history according to the party line.

Big Brother dominates the lives of Oceania citizens through psychological manipulation via the media. The totalitarian state seems to be in a constant state of war with either Eurasia or Eastasia. Hate rallies are designed to encourage allegiance to Big Brother; dissenters are publicly executed; and natural sexual behavior is forbidden.

Winston defies the authorities when he begins keeping a diary of his feelings. He goes a step further by beginning a love affair with Julia, another rebellious individual. O’Brien, a member of the privileged Inner Party, befriends Winston but later betrays him. The maverick is taken by the Thought Police to the Ministry of Love. Then in the notorious Room 101, O’Brien proceeds to torture and brainwash Winston. His ultimate goal is to replace the man’s love for Julia with love for Big Brother.

This screen version of 1984 is unrelentingly grim and ominous. Airstrip One seems more like a dank and dreary prison than a city. John Hurt is just right as Winston Smith, a stubborn individualist who refuses to reduce his life to a series of reductive slogans. Despite the haggard look, this British actor vividly conveys his character’s inner fire. Suzanna Hamilton plays Julia as flinty outsider who savors sex and sees it as a sacrament. In his final screen performance, Richard Burton plays O’Brien with convincing clout; he is an efficient bureaucrat whose cool demeanor masks an ugly love of raw power.

Although screenplay writer and director Michael Radford (Another Time, Another Place) gives the drama’s ending a twist that goes against the grain of George Orwell’s 1984, this intense film version of the book succeeds very well in depicting the totalitarian tendencies which tend to crop up in societies all over the world. The human spirit is violated when war is made into a vehicle for peace, when truth is twisted into disinformation and language is turned upside down; when loyalty to the state is built upon paranoia and neighbor begins betraying neighbor; and when surveillance takes away personal privacy and makes all dissent a crime. While many refuse to acknowledge the present reality of this Orwellian nightmare, others know that creeping totalitarianism thrives best when it moves quietly in the shadows.

Watch 1984 on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/11080278

Saturday Matinee: Vermilion Pleasure Night

“Vermilion Pleasure Night” (2000) was a Japanese late night variety show incorporating live-action and animated skits that run the gamut from surreal, sexy, profane, disturbing and satirical. Director Yoshimasa Ishibashi is an acclaimed artist whose installations have been featured at New York’s MOMA and London’s Tate Modern.

This premiere episode provides a sample of the recurring vignettes featured throughout the series including the Fuccon family (a dysfunctional family of smiling mannequins), Starship Residence (chronicling the misadventures of an alien bachelor and his neighbors), One Point English Lessons (a satire of English language learning programs), Midnight Cooking (a macabre musical cooking show), Cathy’s House (a live action skit evoking the setting and aesthetics typical of Barbie dolls), and random short scenes directed in the style of David Lynch films.

Saturday Matinee: Cold Case Hammarskjöld

Review: COLD CASE HAMMARSKJÖLD, Pretzels of Truth and Performance Art

By Kurt Halfyard

Source: Film Anarchy

“This could either be the world’s biggest murder mystery, or the world’s most idiotic conspiracy theory.”

Two years before the JFK assassination, on the 18th of September 1961, the world was shocked by the suspicious death of the second serving Secretary-General of the United Nations. In a plane crash in Ndola, Rhodesia, Dag Hammarskjöld was the only person on board not horribly scorched in the ‘accident.’ Instead he was bloodied, and a playing card was tucked in his shirt collar.

Nearly six decades later, the UN is still (nominally) investigating the details of what was thought first thought to be an accident, then a targeted assassination, of a man who had designs on the political and financial independence of the African continent. In fact, U.S. President John F.  Kennedy himself described the Secretary General as “the greatest statesman of our century.” The assassination theory holds several motive possibilities – various industrial interests active in the region (both then and now) or various clandestine military or mercenary operations taking orders from the US, the UK and Europe who had designs at odd with the ‘activist’ Secretary General.

There are crimes, and then there are crimes. Outside of the small circles of Denmark Television or offbeat cinephiliia, Mads Brügger is criminally unknown. The journalist, comedian, satirist, filmmaker, but above all, provocateur, has been twisting the documentary form into pretzels of truth and performance art for more than a decade.

In 2006, he toured an autistic theatre troupe though North Korea, cascading through a collection of political handlers and bureaucrats, to make a point about propaganda and totalitarian fear imposed on the so-called Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. As if that stunt, The Red Chapel, was not fraught with enough risk, he then purchased illegal diplomatic credentials from the Central African Republic (CAR) to set up his own personal blood diamond operation (under the front of a match factory whose product would be manufactured by the local Pygmy population). By the time The Ambassador wowed Sundance attendees (and yours truly) in 2011, several of the ‘characters’ in the film, political figures in the CAR, had disappeared or been killed.

The Danish filmmaker takes large risks, some might say indefensible ones. Along with his countryman Lars Von Trier (whose outfit Zentropa produced The Ambassador), Brügger keeps plenty of his own skin in the game of his cinematic endeavours — for the sake of your education, and entertainment. He is a hell of a talented filmmaker.

With Cold Case Hammarskjöld, things go the full Errol Morris (WormwoodA Wilderness of Error) investigation route. With the help of Göran Björkdahl, a Swedish activist/investigator who is in possession of the only part of Hammarskjöld’s plane that was not buried under the soil of the Ndola airport, Brügger uses every trick in the documentary playbook: re-creations, animations, historical footage, official and redacted document scavenging, and a lot of interviews with people who where sidelined, ignored, or simply unknown at the time.

Above all, Brügger recreates, in glossy cinematic terms, himself making the documentary itself. Form as function, as with any good conspiracy theory, things start to fold back on themselves in increasingly avant garde ways.  

But there is purpose in this narrative trickery. By filming himself, twice, it offers Brügger the storyteller the opportunity to rope a Zodiac-level ‘filing cabinet ‘of names, facts, dates, and political organizations, together into a ‘lean in’ yarn of far reaching proportions. Two hundred old Secret Marine Societies, megalomaniac villains dressed in white, biological guerrilla warfare, the fallout of Apartheid, World War II fighter aces, assassins leaving Playing Cards in their victims’ collar, and of course, the fate of both a continent, and a fledgling World Government Body are all tethered together.

To say that the film’s 128 minutes is dense, is an understatement. Via this experimental technique (which of course the filmmaker acknowledges, in somewhat of a mea culpa, at one point) along with some pretty detailed, rational, detective work, makes the whole thing as seductive and addicting as Serial or The Staircase.

At one point, Michael Moore-style, Brügger and Björkdahl arm themselves with a high powered metal detectors, shovels, and a cigar (in the off chance they are successful), and go scouring the back-fields of the Ndola airport looking for the 50+ year old burial site of the plane. The authorities arrive. They are polite, but firm, regarding this activity. You are simply not welcome to do this kind of digging.

Cold Case Hammarskjöld has caused a stir in ‘papers of record’ such as The New York Times and The Guardian, reacting to the film compelling presentation and investigation of SAIMR, the South African Institute for Maritime Research, and its quack doctor, Lord Nelson cosplaying Commodore, Keith Maxwell, the “man in white”, who is said here of not only co-ordinating the murder of Dag Hammarskjöld, but also weaponizing AIDS virus for genocidal purposes, and ostensibly participating in bad amateur theatre.

The former may have been at the behest of the CIA and MI6, the latter was on his own personal time. Maxwell was a surreal combination of L. Ron Hubbard, and Colonel Kurtz, and Brügger condemns, mythologizes, exposes, at several points even mimics, him in the way only larger than life cinema can.

If there is a signature image across several of the films of Mads Brügger, it is that of an impeccably dressed man, wildly out of place, sitting on a skinny boat drifting on the current of a wide, and fast moving body of water. Here it is Göran Björkdahl, no closer to the truth of the matter, but still floating on the river of possibilites. We have learned things, both true and untrue, along the way.

Cold Case Hammarskjöld is the most engaging (and entertaining) documentary of the year.

Watch Cold Case Hammarskjöld on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/product/cold-case-hammarskjold