DOASKDOTELL MOVIE REVIEWs of Poles Apart and other films from the 2001 Minneapolis-St Paul international film festival

Seven Songs from the Tundra (2000) (Seitsman laulua tunralta), Finland; directed by Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio; produced by Tuula Soderberg; screenplay, Anastasia Lapsui, 90 Minutes.

This is the first film in my recollection to be make entirely on location in Lappland—in this case, Finnish and apparently Russian, in an Arctic coast area west of Archelangelsk or Minsk. Shot in grainy black-and-white it has the look of a 16mm film, a simple recreation of communist infiltration of the Lapp peoples. The film is structured around several folk songs, almost as if it were a symphony with pictures; the musical score has echoes of Sibelius in his quieter moments. The simple off-the-land customs of a nomadic people—the Nenets—is choreographed as the hardliners move into teepees and cabins, demanding that tribespeople make and share their hunting and fishing quotas and even their living spaces, even threatening to intrude into parent-child relations when parents object to state-sponsored schools. The simple dialogue is in the Nenet language (resembling Finnish I think) and the people have an appearance that is a mixture of European and Mongoloid. This film ought to be noticed by the libertarian community, especially given the controversy in Minnesota over Profiles in Learning.

I don’t know where you can find the Lapp songs on the Internet, but here is a site, PSR Tech, for native-American music: http://www.virtualnetspace.com/culture

D.L. Maybery award for best short subject in 2000

The Quiet Storm, produced and directed by Scott Sterling, Zenith Films, 52 minutes.

First, this film title reminds me both of “The Quite Man” and of “The Perfect Storm,” and it can go head to heads with anything from the major studios. The script concerns a teenage relationship that goes awry, the male captivating his girl friend with almost psychopathic lies, clearly designed to “blame” her for non-events. Unable to resist his charm and false charisma, she falls into inviting his abuse. Eventually, well, the boy doesn’t stay out of jail—and the inside of a Hennepin County jail cell, with its steel commode and nothing else, makes for a chilling encounter of a young man going nowhere—although maybe he is caught in time to be redeemed. The script has the intensity of some of the great ones, like Traffic, Virginia Wolf and Year of Living Dangerously. As with many independent films, everything is shot on location (no sound stage), on streets upon which I have walked myself. This film has an intimate reality rarely found in larger studio films. The only question on the script was the interweaving of before-looks and after-looks, which might work better if the script were expanded to feature length. (I love that line, “I bombed my English test”—Oh, do I remember those tests on Shakespeare!) This film was originally produced for educational purposes, but if expanded to feature length it could look pretty attractive to more progressive distributors (like Artisan, Lions Gate, USA).

D.L. Maybery award for best feature in 2000

Poles Apart, produced and directed by Greg Stiever. This documentary chronicles the first all-female trek across Antarctica in 1992-1993, in the “summer” (Nov-Feb)—and indeed the snow never melts. The two “poles” refer also to an earlier trip in Greenland. The women, including St. Paul native Ann Bancroft, raised all their money through grass roots and were rudely surprised by last minute financial demands by their charter air service from Patagonia (have you ever paid $300,000 for air fare?) There is some discussion in the documentary of the lesbianism of some of them, a one time a source of concern for the public support of their undertaking, something that in a merely cultural sense will enhance their “unit cohesion” on the journey (in fact, they rotate tent mates to maintain the proper level of tension and cooperation between team members). In fact, the U.S. military might learn something from this film.

The on-location scenery is stunning, especially the Thiel mountains and then the South Pole itself, where surprisingly the women find civilization.

For another voyage film visit Rock the Boat.

Bill’s Gun Shop, from Dangerous Films, directed by Dean Lincoln Hyers, produced by J. Michael Tabor, written by Rob Nilsson, starring Scott Cooper, John Ashton, Victor Rivers, Tom Bower, James Keene, Carolyn Hauck, Sage, Jacy Dummermuth. Again. The independent, locally produced film (this was shot on location in the Twin Cities and in southern Minnesota) imparts an urgency and tension lacking in the glitz and polish from bigger operations (and, again, why does Hollywood have to cover up real companies and real locations when small filmmakers don’t?). In fact, the film has stunning photography (seems wide screen) and a pinpoint digital sound track. And we identify with the 23-year old Dillon McCarty (Scott Cooper), starting out his adult life with a bit of personal schism, between being a mild-mannered (almost impotent) “good guy” and wanting to emulate his movie-star police heroes and marshals. He goes to work for a gun shop and gradually sinks into a rather scary world. (I didn’t know that gun shop employees are expected to wear guns going to and coming from work.) Eventually he goes on a bounty run and has to get himself out of an impossible situation, generating a lot of rooting interest from the audience. This film played to a full house at the Heights Theater, and comes across as a level-headed treatment of guns and self-defense for mainstream Americans (the film also covers racial tensions pointedly), and not just an activity on the rightwing fringe. Compare to Tim Gordon’s short film “Trigger Effect” (2007 – don’t confuse with 96 Universal film) reviewed on my movies blog Sept. 15 2007, here.

Stroke , directed by Rob Nilsson, starring Edwin Johnson, Teddy Weiler, Omewene, Robert Vihoro, Gabriela Maltz Larkin. Nilsson produced this dark look—filmed wide-screen in a dusky black-and-white—of San Francisco’s underbelly with his Tenderloin Y group, using real residents of the area. The story centers around a faltering 55-year-old poet struggling on the streets and slums after a series of strokes. He looks haggard, feral, and fetal with his pot belly and disintegrating skin. The artist has failed adaptively, possibly even before his health failed. Falling through the cracks of a social safety net and extended family, he struggles with other street and poor people who help him. In one harrowing scene, a friend is evicted from a tenement for having him up in the apartment. Another, a female friend risks herself sexually with him, to the tune of the second movement of the Sibelius Violin Concerto. At the end he starts to recover his speech, and then, well… People disappear, people fall through the cracks and it is a moral issue. The film contains a few other Robert Altman-style subplots that seem the meander too much.

SOME SHORT FILMS from Minnesota in 2001. Scott Bowman offers an interesting short, Spaceboy, in which an introspective young man performs is own self-counseling by working on a spaceship. There is a staccato of mathematical philosophy—references to the importance of the tetrahedron as a container for consciousness, and to the ideas of Buckminster Fuller—which build up until the day the boy has a serious accident. Whether the subsequence experience is “real” is up to the viewer. Let’s say there are the appropriate references to HAL in 2001 as well as the style of the movie Pi. The “adaptive” life is shot in gritty black-and-white, and the question is posed—how much is really “out there” if one transcends one’s reality (“in colocr”) and gets to find out. It’s your knowledge of good and evil problem. There is also the mini-film “Once Upon a Time” by Keith Hurley, which presents a minamalist version of “Atlantis” or perhaps even of the Ring. The distributor is Flatland Productions. For more, visit http://www.cranekick.com/ and IFP Minneapolis-St. Paul.

STAND-BY, from director Roch Stephanik (2000) was the closing night film for the 2001 Minneapolis-St, Paul International Film Festival. It tells the claustrophobic story of a woman who, abandoned almost penniless by her husband at Orly Airport in Paris before they are due to take off for Buenos Aires, survives and prospers by becoming a hooker. The wide screen format does not comport with the excessive yellows and browns in the filtering. But the consumerism of the European airport looks all the more glitzy

The Young Unknowns, (2000),directed by Catherine Jelski, starring Devon Gummersall (as Charlie) and Arly Jover (as Paloma), Eion Bailey and Cassandra, 87 minutes. This film comes across as an etude in audience manipulation over heterosexual stereotypes of gender roles and the associated bad behaviors. Charlie, as 23-year-old showbizzer living well in the fast lane but behaving very casually and contemptuosly, gets a dose of “humanity” when his mother dies. That half-way brings him out of the trap of drugs and drifting with his buddies. But the movie is supposed to make the audience mad at the characters, either at men for the way they treat women as “sex objects” or at the women for manipulating their false femininity. Now, I know people in show-biz and the behavior in this movie is not typical. Real life is really better than this, much better. Why make a film to “manipulate” the viewer and then not really say anything? This sounds like a film school master’s thesis that gives one the expected filmmaking credentials; a manifesto it is not. Anyway, I had to do “unknowns” in qualitative analysis lab in chemistry. I remember getting “one too many.”

Those Who Looked Away (or They Looked Away), 55 min., directed and written by Stuard Erdheim, is a documentary producing evidence that Allied bombers knew the locations of the crematoriums at Auschwitz-Berkenau and other concentration camps during the 1944 bombings after D-Day, in which they often hit oil refineries and similar targets very close by. I visited the Auschwitz site (40 miles from Krakow, Poland) myself in May 1999. The film is shown with a 45-documentary, The Last Nazi, about a war criminal thought to be living in Syria today.

Memento (2001 (and Insomina (2002)) http://www.doaskdotell.com/movies/mmemento.htm

In 2003, New Market gave us a second big release Whale Rider, written and directed by Niki Caro, from New Zealand, based on a novel by Witi Ihimaera. This is a modern day period piece about native New Zealand Maori culture, which sound like it could resemble a native American film. A tribal leader Porougani (Cliff Curtis) aspires to keep his seafearing tribe together with a male heir, but when fraternal twins are born only the girl Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes) survives. She will grow up to be more courageous in rituals than most of the boys, including a harrowing and poetic climax where she saves a herd of beached whales by riding one of them, holding on to barnacles. The communal and ritual nature of the culture, even in the modern world, comes through as the teenage boys must demonstrate their manly worthiness in collective “Big G” chestwork exercises. The film gains realism by using real Maori people to play the roles, and the medical problems associated with westernization (obesity and probably diabetes) come through. Some of the people look like products of intermarriage with Europeans. The film also gains power with on-location photography with the most effective use of film stock and hues and saturation on an immense wide-screen canvas, giving the effect of epic filmmaking.

Amores Perros moved to this link.

21 Grams moved to the same link as above.

Startup.com, (not in festival) from Artisan Entertainment, a docudrama by Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujlam, about the rise and then crashing and burning of Internet startup GovWorks.com (ezgov.com in the movie), as started by thirtyish entrepreneurs Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman. The “idea” was to attract local governments to a site that would have people pay traffic fines, taxes, file tax returns, and interact with local governments in various ways. Again, this is the paradigm that you come up with a relatively simple transaction that people want, replicate it in the desired variations on the Internet and become a millionaire. There’s not much real creativity or intellectual substance (you know, the difference between authoring and publishing), except the adrenalin rush of building a business and maybe getting rich. The friendship of Tuzman and Herman is chronicled as the share hotel rooms to save money when traveling for venture capital, then breaks when things go sour and Tuzman wants Herman to go. And, well, he has to rationalize completely firing him. The conversation is always muted in simple phrases. The company has rah-rahs and retreats for its employees, singing, esprit de corps … something that would be a complete turnoff. Maybe it’s OK for a 25 year old to put in 80 hour weeks there on somebody else’s agenda if he learns something but, according to Star Tribune reviewers, people were fired without severance when the film went down. Herman and Tuzman get their friendship back in the end and well turn to vulture capitalism, a new industry in 2001. Herman, gentle in manner, was interesting, apparently a single parent with an adopted opposite race three year old girl. Girl friends are not very apparent. This is no business for family men. The film is dusky, it appears to be a DVD transfer. Hegedus had produced The War Room (October Films, 1993) about the Clinton 1992 campaign. And Bill Clinton, sure enough, appears with Tuzman in the film.

Ambush (Tie Rukajarven) (1999), available as far as I know only by direct import from Finland (MRP) by non-profits (such as the University of Minnestoa Film Society). In Finnish, with subtitles. Directed by Olli Saarela, written by Antti Tuuri, starring Peter Franzen (as Lt. Perkola) Irina Bjorklund, Karl Keiskanen, 123 minutes, suggest NC-17 because of graphic violence and full nudity. This is one of the most stunning war epics ever filmed, somewhat in the style of “Enemy at the Gate.” It is set in the Finnish-Russian conflict in 1942, when Lt. Perkola takes his men on a strategic march through the Karelia lake country, to get a baptism of fire in infantry combat, as graphic as any I have ever seen in film. The wide-screen photography of the Finnish countryside is stunning, as are the sets and images of troops on bicycles (no tights, please). This is a big picture, on a scale of Pearl Harbor yet very little known here. The Perkola character is played with great charisma by Franzen, another young actor waiting to become an overnight sensation. Conscientious, intellectual, well-educated and philosophical-- and preoccupied with a volunteer nurse he met on the front, he must learn how to discipline his men and deal with their all too human errors (like the man who drops his bicycle in the river crossing an improvised plank bridge). The unit cohesion issues (and even bonds of affection) are well developed from the very first scene, when an older soldier almost drowns when his buddies “baptize” him. The film is modern, taking difficult ideas into a counterpoint of thinking rather than mapping them out to a simple plot, as in Pearl Harbor. I hope that Sony Pictures Classics or Lions Gate will pick this one up pronto.

Chopper (2001), from Image Entertainment and Mushroom Films, an Australian company. The Mushroom corporate trademark is literally an H-bomb going off over Sydney harbor (homage to Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach, and not In the Wet). And violent, super-violent this film is. It’s NC-17, --that is, persons under 17 will not be admitted. It is a “fictional biography” of author Eric Read, played by comic Aussie actor Eric Bana. Well, Read is a mega-criminal, a sociopath who knocks off drug dealers and other undesirables in the most brutal ways imaginable, Dahmer-like. He is charged with only one such shotgun murder and acquitted, but while in jail commits other violent crimes on camera. We watch people bleed to death, vomit, etc. on camera. There is little sex, except for explicit talk of castration. Well, Read is all tattooed in a presumably anti-social way, his body hairless to make room for the body art. So are the other characters. The tone of this film is relentless, there is nobody to like. He equates college education to homosexuality (and there are rampant homophobic slurs in the script), and brags that he becomes a best-seller without being able to spell. Well, he winds up living in Tasmania, the most homophobic state, so he deserves it. The Aussies make great crime and detective films (like The Interview in 1999). But not this one. Sorry, a big “thumbs down.” It’s not funny.

A reader emailed me angrily that Read is a best-selling author in Australia, whether I like it or not. (I don’t.)

Six Days in Roswell Moved to http://www.doaskdotell.com/movies/mroswell.htm

A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES (2000) from Badham Ghobadi of Iran, won the Camera d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival. It traces the odyssey of several Kurdish children trying desperately to get Madi, a 15 year old dwarf born with graphic birth defects, an operation to live a few more months. The kids traverse the border between Iran and Iraq during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. Barters of livestock, dowries and arranged marriages ensue in an attempt to pay for the surgery. The Kurds, a bit of a mystery people, were the victims of Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons. Their standard of living is abysmal because they are not free. In Farsi and Kurdish with subtitles..

THE ROAD HOME (Sony Pictures Classics, 2001), from Chinese director Zhang Yimou, tells the tender story of a young man returning from the city back to his village when his father, who had taught school for 40 years, dies. His relationship with his mother is explored. She cannot understand why he has deserted his elders to follow his own life in the city, and he doesn’t want to talk about why he doesn’t have a “nice girl” in mind as a potential marriage partner. The fact that they are breaking away from arranged marriages is itself progress. The film, actually rated G, is stunning visually (with northern Chinese winter scenery) and provides a telling commentary on the transition to individualism.

DIVIDED WE FALL (Sony Pictures Classics, 2000, Czech and German), winner of the Sundance Best Foreign Language Film, presents a somewhat funny story that could be compared to The Diary of Anne Frank (recently remade by ABC for TV), as a couple houses a Jewish escapee in a small town during Nazi occupation. There is a surprising plot twist involving fecundity and “family values.”

Directed by Jan Hrebejik, with Bolek Polivka, Csongor Kassai, Jaroslav Dusek, Anna Siskova.

CITY OF GOD (Cidade de Deus) (2003, Miramax/Lumiere, dir. Fernando Meirelles, Portuguese w Eng subtitles, R, 130 min, with Sandro Cenoura, Matheus Nachtergaale, Mane Galinha, Seu Jorge, Alexandra Rodriquez, Firmino Da Hora) is an acclaimed docudrama of the drug underworld of Rio De Janeiro. Nobody gets rich here, as the “City of God” seems to be the slummy exoskeleton of the city that I used to hear referred to as a gay playground by my gay dentist back in New York in the late 1970s. You see young boys shooting down opponents in cold blood, and the most mundane sequences in poor neighborhoods, chasing down chickens. But this film gives you an on-location look at a world you wouldn’t want to visit, and it would be pretty hard to work there as a volunteer, in the Peace Corps or anything else. Most of the characters are black, but occasionally they interact with young white (gay??) males as “innocent” customers. Of course, you can moralize: making drugs illegal makes drugs the one possible route out of poverty for most residents of Cidade de Deus. But the route dead-ends. The disco scene is one of the best ever on film—when it leads immediately to catastrophe on the dance floor and off. This film also brings to mind Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco (“the Law of the Weakest”) (1981, dir. Hector Babenco, from Unifilms, about the “life of crime” of a boy in the streets of Sao Paolo.

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN (2002), from IFC and Good Machine, directed by Alsonso Cuaron, with Maribel Verdu as Luisa Cortes, Gail Garcia Bernal as Julio Zapata, and Diego Luna as Tenoch, presents a comic road movie about two rich Mexican teenagers and their simultaneous involvement with a girl who will die of cancer. Mexico looks too good a lot of the time here. The two boys overflow with uncontrollable libido, and this NC-17 movie shows everything. Their sexual energy carries them psychologically until they grow up a bit, then discover each other (predictably) before separating permanently for college.

The winners of the Maybery award for 2001 were The Atlas Moth, by Rolf Belgum, and Bill’s Gun Shop (above). Belgum’s film was a kind of rhapsody about rural entomology, hunting, rock music, auto mechanics (the infamous U-joint) and brain chemistry. The shorts were Mike Hazard’s “Eugene McCarty: I’m Sorry I was Right” and “An Idiot’s Guide to Running for President,” by Jim Taylor.

Okay, these next two films aren’t from this festival, but here goes:

Gregg Holtgrewe directs his fantasy, Waiting All Day for the Green Face of the Hummingbird (If I Were a Lily) (Crew Works, 2002, about 55 min.) in which a young man (played by A. C. Spencer) gets lost in David Lynch-like fantasies over the apparent loss of his mother (remember the original 1960 Psycho) and disconnection with real spouses (or girl friends, maybe) as mannequins and real women become interchangeable. It’s more like Lost Highway than Twin Peaks. But it’s heterosexual. This was screened at Bryant Lake Bowl (Minneapolis) in June 2002.

And then there is Melody Gilbert’s documentary Married at the Mall (2002, Frozen Feet, 60 min.)a film that she uses when teaching documentary filmmaking techniques. Here the subject matter and “problem” deal with couples who marry in the chapel at the Mall of America near Minneapolis. Often they are older people who have already led several past lives. The film does illustrate the basic techniques of filmmaking well, with the variety of shots and layers and evolution of the subject matter through showing rather than just telling. The look tends to be metallic and pink and consumerist, like the Mall itself, until it gets outside on honeymoons. There is a particularly interesting shot at the Spring Creek campground of a tunnel on a motorcycle trail (it reminds me of the Sparta tunnels in Wisconsin).

A Prairie Home Companion

Map of the Human Heart (1993, Miramax/Polygram, dir. Vincent Ward, is a grand looking pre World War II adventure when a pilot takes an Inuit with tuberculosis to a Catholic foster home, after which she falls in love with a Frenchman, who will hire the pilot again for reunification while fighting the Nazis, and run in to all kinds of family loyalty problems.

In the summer of 2002 Lot47 released the daring epic film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, directed by Zacharias Kunuk (172 minutes, filmed in Beta digital). This provides an intimate look at adaptive Inuit (Eskimo) life in the Baffin region of the Northwest Territories, Canada. The story builds slowly in terms of typical jealousies, and builds to a climax as one of the characters escapes by running barefoot across the ice pack. At the end, the matriarch of one of the tribes evicts some of the men. The rituals and occasional primitive violence, as well as the scenes inside igloos, are stunning. It is stunning how much can be done with a screenplay about a primitive-looking society in which much more goes on than we would imagine.

Shortly after I moved to Minneapolis in 1997, a graduating Hamline University college student helped me get on television with a lecture on my book, and in the course of things I heard a lot about college-student group-house (not exactly frat house) life (the notorious “1521 Club”). Well, here is a movie about such a property at the University of Minnesota. The film is Camcorder, from One Camera Productions, produced, written and directed by Dave Gillette. It is a bit more than a home-movie account of campus life, framed at different screen aspect sizes for different levels of narration. The students interact in gentle ways, talking about part-time jobs (like flood control), hangovers, student loans, homecomings. There’s no real mystery. The living conditions look a bit crowded. Toward the end the film progresses towards graduation. Jesse Ventura punctuates the narrative, with inevitable epigrams like, “you don’t have the automatic right to feel good about yourself until you accomplish something.” True, that’s the libertarian idea—and part of the culture wars. The lineup for Cinema Lounge at Bryant Lake Bowl in August 2000 also included WOEFUL BALLAD by Charles Mruz, AUS BLUE by Brian Dehler and JENYA by Freya Rae, hosted by Marti Lufkin. A certain well-known Minnesota movie star is said to appear clandestinely at Bryant Lake bowl with a white cap. You never know whom you might meet; it’s a small world.

Regarding roommate setups, in 2003, Fox Searchlihgt released L’Auberge Espagnole (The Spanish Inn), directed by Cedric Klapisch, in which a French graduate student Xavier (Romain Duris) travels to Barcelona in an exchange program and has to interview a group of exchange students from Germany, Italy, Denmark, and England to get a room in an overpriced “group apartment.” The film plays games with the idea of European identity (there is one professor insisting in teaching in Catalonian), and covers a lot of plot setup with time-lapse shots and fantasy sequences. Barcelona is absolutely spectacular. For once, we have a director who rejoices in the natural, hairy-chested male, and the idea of giving up the corporate-government world to become a writer. .

Returning to the subject of digital video, Final Cut, iMovie and the like (and, for that matter, filmmakers who swear by 16 mm), there is an example of the disaster that can result when a big budget Hollywood director (Steven Soderbergh) tries to have the fun of a filmmaker or writer who has an income from something else (a “day job”) and writes or films what he wants. When amateurs do it in Cinema Lounge, it works, but not when “established” Hollywood pros try to imitate the freedom of us kiddie filmmakers. The mess is Full Frontal (101 minutes, Miramax, rated “R”, 2002), reviewed at the link shown here.

The Central Standard Film Festival (run in Minneapolis at the same time as the SoundUnSeen film festival in September 2002), featured a number of little gems. Two 50-minute documentaries add more substance to GLBT arguments. Shades of Grey (Tim DePaepe) presented the debate of the proposed “Simply Equal” non-discrimination ordinance in Lawrence, Kansas (aka Smallville, the home of Kansas University, where I attended graduate school). Fred Phelps makes his “God hates f__s” presentation in a way that is especially chilling, reminding one of other videotapes from, shall we say, the other end of the earth (although Phelps maintains that he does not believe in discriminating against race). (The reader can do his own searching on Google about this person, I will decline to give links.) More revolutionary was Daddy and Papa (Johnny Symons), which traces several gay fathers in San Francisco. At least one is single, and prefers raising a child to cocktail parties and trips to Greece. One gay male couple is taken through the adoption process, including a home inspection visit from the social worker who asks about drugs and weapons and inspects the home closely for safety issues such as medicine cabinets that do not lock. “F__k and you’re a parent. If you’re gay, you have to go through the Inquisition to become a father.” There is even a scene with the family bed, and a boudoir is converted to a play pen, complete with lego trains. One odd scene has a father talking about being a dad while being kneaded by his cat.

Alvin Ecarma produces Lethal Force (Diversity Films, 2001), not to be confused with Lethal Weapon I, II, etc. This wonderful little satire is just plain gore. Cash Flagg. Jr. plays the indestructible hit man, who finally gets it at the end. You get to see impalements, eye gouging, and faces blow off. Okay, you cab “check it out.” It reminds you of the Dollars movies, Hannibal (there is an allusion to the dinner party), Reservoir Dogs, The Wild Bunch, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, even (below) Pieces.

An interesting exercise in “abstract film” comes from Shane Nelson with his prosaic 16mm A Film in Three Parts (2002), shown at Cinema Lounge by IFPMSP in Minneapolis in October 2002. The title rather reminds me of Igor Stravinsky’s “A Symphony in Three Movements.” No, Mr. Nelson didn’t use Stravinsky, choosing current rock as a very detailed digital soundtrack to accompany the clips on “extreme sports” followed by a mock adult encounter. But the effect – of technique and manipulation away from feeling—is rather like Stravinsky. In any case, we get to see stunts that you would expect from an James Bond or Van Diesel movie—skateboarding and ski jumping. The three “movements” are “Technique” (OK, Allegro), “Style” (OK, Andante), and “Who Give….” (OK, a concluding romp of a Rondo).

Shane offers other short films, like the NOFX video “Seeing Double at the Triple Rock,” (2006, dir. Justin Staggs)in which Jesus appears during the performance of a rock band. For details, visit Omni-Fusion.

Another of Shane’s films is Jon Robinson Audition for Temptation Island, shown May 2003 at a presentation by Cine-Magic. Here there was some comic allusion to reality TV and Elimi-date, particular the propensity of producers of those shows to choose the least aggressive, “masculine” and “attractive” male to go home with the girl. (The producers choose the winners, not the girls.)

Blue Car (2002) is one of the highlights of the 2003 Festival (Miramax, directed by Karen Moncrieff, produced by Peter Oppenheimer, Amy Sommer and David Waters, starring Agnre Bruckner, David Strathalm, Margaret Colin, Frances Fisher); it was the centerpiece of a benefit (at the Minneapolis Riverview Theater) for Corner House (Corner House Interagency Child Abuse Evaluation and Training Center), a legal and assistance facility for sexually abused children, with Twin Cities native actor Josh Harnett as one of the hosts. (After the benefit, the audience surged forward for autographs, although the Minneapolis Police did not allow him to autograph for more than a few minutes.) The story with the breaking of a family, as the father drives away in a blue car, leaving the artistically gifted Meg to grow up in a low income Ohio single parent family with a little sister who may grow anorexic later. Her middle-aged male English teacher discovers her talent for writing poetry, and soon she clamors to go to Florida for a competition. She can’t afford to, and of course that is what generates the “must do” in the plot. Well, her behavior does not reflect well on her character, and neither does that of the teacher—and at this point I will say that the denouement is too predictable for me. The show included a trailer for Josh’s new film “Hollywood Homicide” in which his character “wants to be an actor rather than a cop”

The Retreat (2002), a 30-minute horror war drama by Darin Heinis (and Aaronstokes), won a special jury award at the Tucson, AZ film festival. The film portrays a presumably fictitious incident during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 when Allied armies stumble upon supernatural remnants from the Germans, with some bizarre consequences. Jeff Gilson, normally known for athletic comedy, plays a private whose head wound will make the audience grit teeth and remind one of Hannibal (as well as Saving Private Ryan). At one point he really makes you think you can prolong your life by field-stripping a cigarette and inhaling, almost as if in Army Basic (where they taught the sucking chest wound in G-3 First Aid class). The look of the film is big, widescreen and professional (somehow Miramax-like) even as the mood is appropriately menacing, as if it were a study for a large independent war film (like the Finnish masterpiece Ambush, reviewed above). It was filmed around Rosemount, MN yet does evoke the Ardennes. I actually auditioned for the part of “El Capitan” at a NE Minneapolis warehouse on a bitterly cold early March Saturday in 2002. Try enough of these auditions and I will eventually get a part. I am a good ad-libber.

Confidence (2003, Lions Gate), directed by James Foley and written by Doug Jung, provided the closing night gala for the Twin Cities International Film Festival. It is a complex crime caper with a hint of black comedy, where grafter Jake (played by Ed Burns) goes after a mafia bill collector and runs into a gay crime boss Winston King played magnificently by Dustin Hoffman, who obviously seems tempted by Jake’s masculinity. The story builds from one situation to another, much of it referring to the kind of creative derivative accounting that brought down Enron. James Foley did a spirited Q and A afterwards, in which he expressed his passion for making movies a bigger amalgamation of arts and life experiences rather than a formulaic storytelling exercise to bring in shopping mall audiences and make quick profits. Foley also mentioned his preference for anamorphic (widescreen) lenses. Even son, this film, at least, displays tight narrative and storytelling.

The Usual Suspects

Sling Blade

The Spanish Prisoner

Four Feet (2002), a short film by Lisa Schiller, produced by Ann Luster, with Shelby Robin and Brittany Shoberg. A 14-year-old girl has just lost a leg in a car accident and is being introduced to life with a prosthesis. In her hospital room, a roommate afflicted by cystic fibrosis arrives (“four feet” away) and soon demands all of the attention, invoking all kinds of artsy fantasies of the playground late autumn world outside the window. The CF patient quickly becomes medically desperate, coughing phlegm into basins on camera but still trying to keep her hopes. Happy endings are relative in a micro-universe like this. This was shown at IFP Cinema Lounge in May, 2003.

Death and the Maiden (1994, Fine Line, dir. Roman Polanski, play by Ariel Dorman, 103 min, R, UK) is a famous political thriller where Sigourney Weaver plays a housewife Paulina Escobar and grassroots political activist in a somewhat Fascist South American country (it seems to be Chile) is convinced that her lawyer husband (Stuart Wilson) has fallen victim to a neighbor Dr. Miranda (Ben Kingsley) who may have raped and tortured her during an old regime. She arranged to kidnap him to get at the truth. Quite a clever plot. The title of the movie comes from the name of the famous d-minor string quartet by Franz Schubert, which is often played. At one point, she says, “did you know that Schubert was a homosexual?” It’s not clear if he was.

Trainspotting (1996, Miramax / Polygram / Channel 4, dir. Danny Boyle, R, 94 min) is a graphic picture of the drug scene in Edinburgh, Scotlandwith Ewan McGregor as Renton, living a life that winds up in toilet stalls. Pretty unpleasant.

Milk and Honey (2002

In June 2003, Bryant Lake continued its iconoclastic offerings. There was a thirty-minute documentary by Texas filmmaker Dorothy Ibes Baby’s Memory Book, in which a young man recounts his troubled growth into a redneck adulthood, tempered by marriage and becoming a dad, yet somehow unable to stay away from drugs and jail. Much of the narration focuses on fishing for catfish (remember “Okie Noodling”) and the way such past-times contribute to father-son bonding, yet this seems lost. Minnesota documentary filmmaker Melody Gilbert contributed to the concept. There are some odd camera angles in the young man’s soliloquys, as he lies in bed on his back and the camera tries to climb over his chest hair.

Then Jeff Gilson once again turns on his own kind of subtle comedy in John Sarraccoi’s Decision, a kind of miniature Jerome’s Razor, where a young men escapes career decisions in the office to take to the open roads – from Minnesota I-35 to the hiking trails in its state parks where Gilson’s character gets drawn into his own delusions, where his world seems walled off by animated billboards and where trails and hikes can come to dead ends, like Clive Barker’s “Erasure” in Imajica.

Britain’s James Blunt has AOL’s “worst video” with James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful (AOL, 6 min), in which he slowly disrobes on a winterscape (waist up) while singing "You're Beautiful" and then jumps into an icy ocean, soap opera style. It would have been more interesting if someone else had defrocked him; he is very "attractive," all right. The video is followed by a behind the scenes look at the artist. (Blunt sings this in the background of the Smallville Season 5 episode where Clark “tells” Lana, sort of.)

Winged Migration moved to http://www.doaskdotell.com/movies/mendur.htm

Shine moved to http://www.doaskdotell.com/movies/mmusic.htm

Paper Clips moved to http://www.doaskdotell.com/movies/mhitler.htm

Well, after participating as an extra in a Twin Cities Actors’ Forum short film Scalpers, in which a Twinbies ticket scalper (Justin Overlander) gets scalped himself by a broad with kids and medical bills in collections to pay, I waltzed over to the Boom where Saloon stage dancers (even those from The Churchill) congregate on Tuesday nights, and watched the Bravo video Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which is a well-structured documentary about a makeover, if you have maybe $500000 from a TV network to blow. A pot-bellied guy with scruffy beard and unconvincing body hair gets the full treatment, starting with waxing, although they confine most of the on-camera epilation to an eyebrow trim. (His chest, somehow, partially survives but he never should have been allowed to wear shorts in public to begin with.) Next they take him to a men’s shop (sorry, Target and Wal-Mart won’t do) where you would have gone in the past to satisfy EDS dress codes. Then they do his Great Neck, N.Y. home (sorry, not Beverly Hills this time) the way stereotyped fag interior decorators did it in the 50s. He doesn’t really come out thinner, though. You can’t hide a soft mushy body forever. Oh, I got to do one other little miniature, too, playing Mr. Burns in the Simpsons, folding his hands and saying excellent. That film has no name. (Since I wrote this in early 2003, this show has become a tremendous franchise on NBC and Bravo, even in prime time. The Fab Five have authored and published (by Clarkson Potter) a book, offered in garish cover colors that resemble those used for grade school texts, with great illustrations and witty advice on all kinds of lifestyle pursuits in areas like grooming, cooking, decorating, entertaining.

Then Minneapolis and Community Technical College student Ryder Seeler produces a short film Angry Pursuit (about 10 min, 2003) in which a young writer who mimics Barton Fink has to evade hit men who don’t like what he writes. Seeler told the Minneapolis Byrant Lake Bowl audience that the film was somewhat inspired by the story of Salman Rushdie with his 1988 novel Satanic Verses, that led him to live in London in hiding from Shiite Islamic fundamentalists from Iran for blasphemy. Of course, we live in a world now where Google can make any blogger famous for a well-articulated social message, and that brings up the question: what happens when the famous blogger, by drawing angry attention to himself (perhaps even from terrorists), inadvertently involves others such as his family or workplace. I take on that a bit in my own screenplay treatment of Do Ask, Do Tell with a scenario involving lawyerly ambulance chasing. The deeper question, though, is the dichotomy faced by the modern writer: to write what he wants to say, or to write what others will pay him to say, as in the recent film The Trip.

The same July evening, we watched an art film of previews from City Council Productions The Making of Smoke Fire, which makes fun not just of Hollywood summer movies, but of all the big production companies (Village Roadshow, Intermedia, Beacon, Regency, Castle Rock) that make them—and of the stars that populate them. Put Josh Hartnett and Austin Powers together and you get Josh Powers. And then there is The Tox That Rocks that brings up memories of Danny Boyle and Trainspotting, even when showing the Stillwater drawbridge as a relief from a detox center that doesn’t measure up to Betty Ford’s standards.

In August 2003, just before moving back to the DC area, I saw most of Blogumentary, by Chuck Olsen, at Bryant Lake Bowl on Lake Street in Minneapolis. The filmmaker says this is the ‘first open source documentary film.” In the Q&A afterwards he conceded that bloggers have been fired from jobs before over supposed conflicts of interest or confidential disclosures. (See also [you may have to paste into the browser url window to make it work] http://chuckolsen.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_chuckolsen_archive.html.)

Also on that program was Neil Orman’s Dotcommies Revisited, which traced the Idea to a dotcom, followed by the bust with the entrepreneur living with folk and working in a video store.

Critics have been holding up The Station Agent (2003, Miramax, 88 Minutes) as an argument for small films, and a lesson for filmmakers in to how to make them. That is perhaps the problem. The visuals (railroad yards and depots in New Jersey, model trains) are detailed, interesting and well filmed technically, and the characters touching (most of all Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage), the dwarf who inherits the depot. But the movie comes across, to me, at least, as a series of effective scenes and low-key characters without a lot of tension or story direction. Maybe the grittiest moment is at the end, when Finbar, lecturing a grade school class about railroads, is interrupted by a kid blurting out, compulsively, “how tall are you? … I am taller than that…” and the teacher says “Come with me.”

Another small film that is winning fans is In America (2003, Fox Searchlight/Hells Kitchen), directed by Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot). The story is a kind of reverse of Angela’s Ashes. Here a poor Irish family arrives in New York in the 1980s and moves into a tenement in Hells Kitchen. Johnny (Paddy Considine) and Sarah (Samantha Morton) are the couple, and Johnny is a struggling stage actor trying to learn his lines, break in to off-off-broadway, support his family with grunt work (in his case, driving a cab, and showing how he could negotiate NYC’s medallion system for cabs could have been interesting had it been included), and dealing with problems like no health insurance when Sarah has a premature baby. The family’s life will be transformed by a feisty African artist Mateo (Djimon Hounsou) after his two small daughters make contact trick-or-treating. Early on, the daughters say “In America, we demand, we don’t ask.” Later Mateo forces the issue when he says something like this to Johnny: "I love your wife. And I love you. And I love your children." And Mateo lives up to the idea of agape love as he meets his own destiny. What I liked was the way the movie showed the problems of artists who really have to make a living by what they do at some point. That’s the way people compete.

Lost in Translation: Moved to http://www.doaskdotell.com/movies/mlost.htm

Fear and Trembling (“Stupeur et tremblements”) (2004, BAC/Cinema Guild/Studio Canal, dir. Alain Corneau, adapted from an autobiographical novel by Amelie Northomb, 1992) in French and Japanese, R, 114 min) is a satire of the authoritarian and presumably cronyistic and inefficient culture of Japanese corporate life, at least as it was around 1991. Amelie (Sylie Testud) is a Japanese-speaking interpreter from Belgium, and she takes a one year contract in a Japanese company as a language intrepeter. Well, that doesn’t work (speaking Japanese in front of clients implies a potential breach of trade secrets), and the roughshod bosses (even the lesbianesque Fubuki (Kaori Tsuji) who are not afraid of corporal contact, assign her to increasingly demeaning work, finally leading to 7 months of latrine duty, instead of firing her. She grows increasingly and proudly incompetent under the pressure, and imagines flying over Tokyo. The film’s humor is underscored by the music score, a number of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations for harpsichord. But the setup is too manipulative and funky to matter.

Chocolat (2000,Miramax,dir. Lasse Hallstrom, UK/France, 121 min, PG-13) has Vianne Rochet (Juliette Binoche) and her friends open a shop as chocolatiers in 1961 in a small French town in Provence, and shake up the morals of the community during Lent. It makes a good correspondence to some of today’s moral debates. It even snows in France in this movie.

Boys Don’t Cry moved to http://www.doaskdotell.com/movies/mtrans.htm

Monster; and Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer moved to http://www.doaskdotell.com/movies/maileen.htm

Boxing Helena, Pieces, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (both), The Collector at http://www.doaskdotell.com/movies/mboxing.htm

Secret Ballot (2001, Sony Pictures Classics, G, 105 minutes, Iran, dir. Babak Payami, with Nassim Abdi and Cyrus Ab, is an exercise in abstraction about a serious issue: an election. A female election agent is sent to an unidentified island to collect ballots in an unspecified election, and plays out the issues of how she is taken as a woman in a patriarchal society in an essentially alien setting. The film is considered timely in light of the Bush v. Gore fiasco after the 2000 election (or perhaps recent controversies over automated voting systems). The simple but expansive imagery and subtle colors (even the burkas of the women against the landscape) are compelling visually, as is the final scene when the cargo airplane lands in the distance to take her away with her ballot box from this low tech world. And this film is actually rated G.

The Clearing (2004, Fox Searchlight, 91 min, R, dir. Pieter Jan Brugge) pits Robert Redford against Willem Dafoe in a somewhat straightlaced kidnapping story thriller, reminding one of Ransom, but much quieter. As usual with independent film, the on-location settings are real: here, it’s the Pittsburgh area, with its metro and many auto tunnels. Dafoe is the disgruntled fired employee, harboring a grievance for years, and in one speech in their walkabout Redford tells him to act like a man, take tough love, and pay his dues to the working class after his management job was downsized and he was permanently marginalized. It’s the employee’s fault, not society. Meanwhile, the FBI sets up shop in his home, for a long time, with the passage time indicated by snow coming and melting. Then, there is a twist worthy of Days of Our Lives.

The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg

Thirteen (2003, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Working Title, dir. Catherine Hardwicke) presents a teenage girl Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) going from honor student (albeit 7^th Grade) going down before her alcoholic mother (Holly Hunter), with the “help” of temptation from friends. Some good old teenage rebellion that seems to me not to get out of girltalk. There are disturbing scenes, and some tempting ones with boyfriends, and some pseudo-lesbianism. The critics liked this; I found it rather going for sensationalism that renders silliness. In the 70s, they would say, landlords fear young girls as tenants more than anything else, throwing lavender paint down the toilet and stuff—this film could have used queer eye. There is an earlier independent film from the Y 2000 called “Thirteen,” no relation to this one (see suntimes.com/Ebert and search). There is also “13 Days” from Newline, again no relation, obviously. According to an NBC Today report on July 26, 2005, the film presents the dangerous teenage practice of “dusting” (or “puffing”), with computer cleaning equipment, to get high.

Eros (2005, Warner Independent Pictures, 104 min, rec NC-17) is an experimental trilogy of three short films. (1) “The Hand,” dir. Wong Kar-Wai, in Mandarin Chinese; (2) “Equilibrium,” dir. Steven Soderbergh, (3) “The Dangerous Thread of Things,” dir. Michaelangelo Antonini (in Italian). Critics seem to like the first film, a tale about a prostitute who challenges a humble tailor to perform (early on, she makes him take his pants off, a challenge to masculinity that struck me as rather clinical). It is set in Hong Kong as a typhoon approaches and seems contained and claustrophobic. The second film was my favorite. The centerpiece is some good old-fashioned black-and-white movie making, making you feel that you’re really at the movies. In the mid 50s, a psychiatrist (Alan Arkin – remember he was the boss Mr. English in “Thirteen Conversations about one Thing”) manipulates his over-the-hill heterosexually married client (Robert Downey, Jr.) who has recurring dreams (shown in blue) of a voluptuous woman. The psychiatrist does stuff while the patient lies on the couch, kid stuff like sending messages across the street by paper airplanes to whom he believes to be the femme fatale, in another New York office building. Soderbergh shows some real germinal Haberstrom-like interest in 50s social values and mores in this miniature, suggesting possible future interesting projects. The third film is a bit of a rondo, as a man named Christopher bounces between his wife and another woman, particularly at a villa that could be out of “Vertigo”—leading a confrontation and climax that could easily be solved if both women gave in to lesbianism.

Oldboy (2003, Tartan/Egg Films, dir. Chan-wook Park, 120 min, R) is a dark thriller in which a man Oh Dal-su (Park Choel-woong) is kidnapped and imprisoned for fifteen years in a dingy hotel for a mysterious, forgotten (perhaps by amnesia) crime, and forced to keep up with the world (including 9/11) through videos, then must find his captor in five days. The video rendition of the external world for the imprisonment period provides an interesting device for layered storytelling, although I think the idea could have been carried even further. The film becomes gruesome towards the end (there is a wonderful metaphor in the script of aging one year with every step taken, but it is not shown—it could have been), but has spectacular wide-screen vistas of Soeul, rural Korea and New Zealnad.

In April 2007 some news commentators claimed that this film (Oldboy) may have been imitated by the shooter in the Virginia Tech tragedy. That seems to be related to the revenge motive of the movie, as well as a specific photo of Cho Sueng Hui with a hammer. Stephen Hunter has a story in The Washington Post, C01, April 20, “Did Asian Thrillers Like ‘Oldboy’ Influence Va. Tech Shooter,” at this link. He also discusses the movies of John Woo, like “The Killer”.

Chicago Stories

Lost Boys of Sudan

The Boys of Baraka

Raising Cain

The Waterdance (1992, Samuel Goldwyn, dir. Neal Jimenez, Michael Steinberg, 106 min, R) is a classic indie film about overcoming disabilities resulting from tragic accidents. Writer Joel Garcia (Eric Stolz) has broken his neck while hiking and is slowly regaining some abilities in a rebab center, even eventually love. Toward the end, Stolz takes over the performance with a great deal of charisma. In one scene he writes on an Apple computer with the best technology of the day. Gradually he has an affect on the other patients, causing confluct and drawing them out into actual battles. Helen Hunt is Anna, and other patients are played by William Allan Young and James Roach.

The Ice Storm

The Ice Harvest

The Devil’s Pond

Murder in My House

The Secret Club (Den Hemmelige Klubben), Gay Pioneers, Rainbow Pride, One Wedding and a Revolution.

Men;s Mix 1: Gay Shorts Collection (2004)

A Trip to Bountiful (1985, Island/Bountiful, dir. Peter Masterson, play by Horton Foote, 108 min, PG) is a sweet film about an elderly, impoverished woman Carrie Watts (Geraldine Page) saving up and “escaping” (from her daughter-in-law Jessie Mae (Carlin Glynn), on a bus trip from Houston (in the 1940s) to see her childhood home Bountiful. John Heard is the submissive son Ludie. The hymn “Coming Home” prevails in the sound track. I saw this at the Inwood in Dallas on a Sunday afternoon.

Into Great Silence (“Die Grosse Stille”, 2007, Zeitgeist, 162 min, NR) is a reality documentary examining the Carthusian Order of monks at the Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps. There is a detailed discussion on blogger.

On July 10, 2005, CBS “60 Minutes” covered the assassination (in Amsterdam) of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh for his 12-minute TV short Submission, which depicts the putative mistreatment of women in some practices of radical Islam. The film shows Koran texts attached to the bodies of some women. Dutch Parliament member Moslima Ayaan Hirsi Ali helped make the film. She is from Somalia and has incurred anger in her family for rejecting some of the ideas of radical Islam. Review now here.

The DC Shorts Film Festival, Washington DC, Sept 14-21, 2006, at Landmark E Street Cinema and the Canadian Embassy. Some of the films were made locally. They tended to take simple concepts and embellish them with “creative” images and music. Some had no dialogue.

I saw a selection of the “best” (8 films). The details are on my blogspot movie entry.

The DC Shorts Festival also held a one day Lunafest event on Sept. 21, 2006 at this theater, with women’s films (8). Here is the blogspot review.

The Million Dollar Challenge

WACO films (Waco: The Rules of Engagement; In the Line of Duty: Ambush at Waco)

Russian Ark (2002, Wellspring, dir. Alexsandr Sokurov, Russia, 96 min) takes us through 300 years of Russian history with a continuous tour through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, all 33 rooms and with three orchestras. This film advertises itself as the first feature movies made in one continuous shot, although I think that is not true. (How about Rope?) The history of the Romonovs and other families shows in the pictures; I’m not sure of how many of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition show up. There is tremendous style and wintry color, and the place would do Donald Trump proud.

Lost in La Mancha (2002, IFC/Eastcroft, dir. Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, 89 min) documents the horrible production problems in trying to film Terry Gilliam’s “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” (based on Cervantes). Interesting lessons on the geography of Spain, much of which is high arid plateau with sudden rains. IMDB does not show that this project was ever completed. Maybe it will be tried again. The most recent complete film of Don Quixote was a TV 2 hour film from Hallmark in 2000, dir. Peter Yates.

Paris, Texas (1984, Argos / Fox Searchlight, dir. Wim Wenders, wr. Sam Shepard, 147 min, R) Curious indie film about a man with amnesia, found in the desert by a brother, and recovering his life, before going back out. Actually, the real town is in the East Texas pine forest.

Blowback.

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic (2005, Roadside Attractions, dir. Liam Lynch, 72 min, R). Can you really a movie of a standup comedy routine by turning it into a rondo with various little episodes involving the speaker’s fans? Most of this little film is Sarah Silverman’s standup performance, with some songs “Porn Queen”) and lots of gags attacking social proprieties. She is the Jewish girl made big with dirty comedy. Christianity is defined by making Jesus “magic.” But all of the sexual and scatological jokes ring hollow compared to her potential. Maybe the “best” line, “the best time to get pregnant is when you are a black teenager!” Or “American was the first Airline to go through the Towers.” She stages an episode where gays and blacks, when challenged in a movie studio lot, call themselves “faggots” and “niggers” respectively. She has a lot of jokes about 9/11 and they are not too funny. There are some gags about female private part hair and waxing, but this is hardly threatening to the men. Oh, yes, movies are a visual medium, and we can see that she shaves her underarms. Brian Posehn and Laura Silverman make an ungainly couple for some of the rondo interludes.

Fatal Lessons: The Good Teacher

Dying to be Perfect: The Ellen Hart Pena Story.

Knights of the South Bronx

Rome: Engineering an Empire

Hurrican Katrina Coverage: (Oprah Winfrey; Storm that Drowned a City)

CNN: We Were Warned: Tomorrow’s Oil Crisis; Undercover in the Secret State

Liberty: The American Revolution: The Reluctant Revolutionaries

Gospel of Liberty (2005, Gateway, dir. Andrew Gardner, G, 37 min) is a documentary of the history that led to the Statute for Religious Freedom in Virginia in 1786, signed by Thomas Jefferson, five years before the federal Bill of Rights in 1791. In the 1730s the Anglican Church was still exacting heavy taxes on Virginia residents. The efforts of preachers George Whitfield and Samuel Davies, with independent preaching, sometimes starting in homes and in town squares, would lead to pressure for formal religious freedom. Some of the narration is from a TJ actor standing in the Capitol in Williamsburg. See also Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot

The War that Made America.

Slavery and the Making of America

Thomas Jefferson (1997, PBS “American Stories”, dir. Ken Burns, 180 min) moved to http://www.doaskdotell.com/movies/mjeff.htm

The Great Quake