Movie Reviews on Metro Morning
Death of a President, Black Eyed Dog and Cinematheque Rarities
by Jesse Wente
One of the most controversial films of the year, Death of a President, won an award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Death of a President is a speculative fake documentary, that's presented as being made in 2008, about a year after George W. Bush is assassinated while leaving a speaking engagement in Chicago.
Using traditional talking head interviews, manipulated archival footage, and manufactured images, the movie details how the Bush was killed, the investigation, and perhaps, the false arrests and prosecution of a Muslim man.
As a technical achivement, the movie is really quite something - they insert phony characters inside archival footage, just like Woody Allen's Zelig, and even more impressively, they craft footage to tell a new story - a speech Bush gives about North Korea gains new resonance, Dick Cheney is seen eulogizing Bush, and then becoming president.
This is quite fascinating to watch, and makes unexpected comments about news and the maleable nature of the modern media.
The film unfolds a bit like a mystery - or something close to a movie like Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line.
However, the film also undermines its documentary facade from the very moment it begins - the elaborate title and credit sequence, along with the pounding score is unlike any documentary I've ever seen.
The frequent use of a helicopter shots is also a tad rich for the genre.
The film also curiously omits interviews with obvious subjects - like the protestors outside the Bush speech who cause so much trouble.
The movie is ultimately telling us what happened as if we weren't there, which removes the sense that we are watching this from the future, not the past.
Ultimately, Death of a President doesn't really work as a fake documentary, and taken as a thriller, it lacks the action and punch needed to make it work.
As an experiment in media manipulation, and a comment on the war in Iraq, the movie is rather compelling as a social protest. Not nearly as sensational as it would have you believe, this is a great idea that suffers in execution, but one worthy of attention for the attempt.
Also opening today is a Canadian movie, Black Eyed Dog.
This is a new movie from Quebec director Pierre Gang, and it's a bit of an odd little movie set in a small fictional town along the Miramichi River in New Brunswick.
Sonya Salomaa plays Betty, a waitress in the local diner who is stuck with a crazy ex-boyfriend, his troubled younger brother, an over bearing boss, a cranky father, ill mother, coniving sister and to make matters worse, a killer has escaped and the biggest manhunt in history is turning the community upside down.
Black Eyed Dog is a drama, with a black sense of humor - some of the lines are quite biting and funny. The setting is gorgeous, and there's a nifty eerie quality about the whole thing.
What holds the film back is its attempt to explore so many stories at once. There's so much going on, that the movie struggles to make sense of one plotline let alone five or six. It becomes muddled, and fights against the better aspects - namely its atmosphere and the fine acting on display.
Black Eyed Dog is an intriguing movie with lots of ideas, it just needed a few less of them to fully explore its themes.
This weekend at the Cinematheque we also see the close of the program on the Vietnam war, and the beginning of a huge retrospective of Roberto Rossellini.
On Sunday, October 29, there's a rare screening of American filmmaker Fred Wiseman's engrossing documentary Basic Training. Wiseman is famous for his observational style - simply allowing the sunjects to do what they will, and capturing everything on film - here its training sessions, ironic rhetoric from officers, and more marching than you can imagine, as young soldiers are trained to fight in Vietnam.
On Wednesday, an even more rare treat - a screening of The Anderson Platoon, one of the greatest war documentaries I've ever seen, as journalist Pierre Schoendoerffer travels with a platoon, lead by Captain Anderson, for several weeks at the early stages of the Vietnam war. The footage is unbelievable, from the terror of firefights, to the odd contrast of R&R; in Saigon, this is a movie that fully explores modern warfare.
A truly remarkable film, The Anderson Platoon screens on Wednesday at the Cinematheque.
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