..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

..Images from 9 ..9 Trailer ..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Weekend

Capitalism: A Love Story, Fame, Bright Star and more ...

Capitalism: A Love Story (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Michael Moore, 2009
    
Capitalism? A Love Story?
    
Why not? Michael Moore‘s cheerfully and sometimes tearfully agitprop documentaries, of which Capitalism: A Love Story is the latest and ballsiest, almost always move and amuse me -- mostly because they take me right back to my college days at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, when the war in the streets against the Vietnam War was raging, rallies and tear-gas were common, the young Beatles, Stones and Bob Dylan provided the sound track, Bonnie and Clyde and The Battle of Algiers were in the movie theatres and lecture halls. and it was a badge of honor to mix radicalism and a certain brand of democratic pop culture Americanism.
     
Back then, my friends and I -- including more than a few eventually well-known filmmakers, critics and actors to be --  saw no incongruities in  championing a revolution, digging rock and loving John Ford movies. Indeed, many of us felt that, if you really understood Ford and The Grapes of Wrath, -- not to mention Orson Welles and Citizen Kane, and Sergei Eisenstein and  Potemkin -- you should believe in Power to the People (even if the still living Ford, despite his late protestations of being a “liberal democrat” and a “rebel” to Bertrand Tavernier, had veered to the right).
     
There were many other views on campus, of course; even Dick Cheney was lurking around somewhere, attending classes and gathering ammunition. But, back in the high ‘60s, the idea of a specifically American re-Revolution was common, before the spoiled-rich-kid fits of the Weather Underground gave rebellion a bad name.
        
Moore still fights and sings that old time revolution though, and Capitalism: A Love Story is one of his strongest ballsiest, funniest and most moving blows against the empire.
       
In a way, this movie is a bookend to his powerful, sometimes hilarious first feature, Roger and Me, in which, confronted with the collapse of the auto industry in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, the younger but no leaner or meaner Moore tried to assault the halls of General Motors and breach the offices of chairman Roger Smith, with a camera and microphone (and was rebuffed, to rich comedic effect).

At the climax here, after a films worth of interviews, analyses, jokes and sad personal stories about the post war rise of right wing anti-regulation economics and its disastrous 2008 consequences, he “tries” to make a citizen‘s arrest on Wall Street of some of the financial miscreants, greed-crazed creeps and inept CEOs of the recent crash, and ends up wrapping some of the great gray buildings and financial houses in yellow and black crime scene tape, while shaking his fist and avowing that, like Henry Fonda’s Tom Joad, he won’t go away. (From America that is, not Wall Street.) “Childish! Irresponsible!” his detractors will pronounce. Well, yeah, but it’s funny. And it’s an effective way of telling the story, which is what most of his detractors really dislike about him.
      
As always, the info is provocative and the jokes are funny -- though, as Moore‘s righter wing attackers never tire of saying, his journalistic tactics are open to question and besides, they are not amused. (So, watch something else. It‘s a free country.) Moore shows us some of the devastation wreaked by the 2009 mortgage-money meltdown -- foreclosed homes, abandoned factories, the rise of bottom-feeders like a self-proclaimed mortgage vulture -- and then whips us through a comic primer course on how we got there: how Wall Street and investment houses like Goldman Sachs (which almost seems to have taken over several administrations) turned the stock market into a huge gambling casino, but without any good lounge acts.
     
Along the way, Moore shows how divorced most of the players seem from both reality and the rest of America, and how thoroughly their money and political donations had enchained the two-party political system, Republicans and Democrats alike. (Moore, unlike Fox news, doesn’t spare the party he votes for.)  He also shows how hard it is to get a definition of key financial terms like the cursed “derivatives” from even the main players. (Derivatives, a prime cause of some of the collapse, are basically side-bets made by investors on market activity, another lamentable product of the Greenspan and post-Greenspan era of deregulation.)
     
Moore’s finest moment here is his presentation of a lined, aging but compelling (and previously unshown) film clip of  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, toward the end of the war and near his approaching death, announcing and detailing his support of an expansion of the Bill of Rights, to include economic security and universal health care. This is a major discovery, the kind of journalistic coup Moore’s opponents feel he can’t or doesn’t get. And, with FDR‘s face here looking haggard, ill but determined, it’s also an emotional wallop, as moving as all Moore’s tales here of the common people screwed.
     
The movie of course, will be dismissed by some as another product of fatuous infatuation with Marxism. But that’s not so. Russian Marxism collapsed, the Chinese communist regime has gone more corporate and is now one of our biggest lender/bankers, and the big bete noir in the health care battles these days is something righties call “European socialism” -- the conservative-cable news bugaboo responsible for the uncomfortable fact that all of the industrialized West nations have extensive government health care plans for their citizenry, except the riches and most powerful one: Us.
    
Was FDR a commie? Ri-donk-ulous, as my friend and Stones fans Jackie would say. No, Roosevelt was simply another left-winger who believed in a modified and he thought, improved version of the American dream. Right on.
         
It’s said sneeringly that Moore is not really a proper documentarian. But his detractors conveniently forget that the documentary tradition -- including the Robert Flaherty tradition here and the John Grierson movement in Great Britain -- was, often heavily leftist from its roots, and that documentaries are not necessarily the evening news, but, in their classic form, personal, often lyrical (and in Moore‘s case, funny) views of reality. The ending of Capitalism is not as poignant as the last scenes of Roger and Me, because Moore looks a little too grave, not impish enough; he may even be taking himself a bit too seriously as a Quixote. And I‘m also not convinced that the Empire’s (or at least the Wall Street casino’s) end is nigh. But, hey, Power to the People, anyway.      ________________________________________________________

Fame (Two Stars)
U. S.; Kevin Tancharoen, 2009
      
Why do a remake of Alan Parker and the Gore family‘s 1980 musical about the New York City High School of the Performing Arts, if you’re going to junk most of the songs and rewrite the script? Well, obviously somebody likes the idea of the show -- four years and a lot of talented and energetic kids at NYC’s famous entertainment and arts school -- and they’re right. Also, the old movie’s then-omnipresent title anthem, as sung back then by Irene Cara, plays smashingly here as the credits song.
    
But, if the old “fame” wasted its premise on a lot of corny mini-melodramas, so does this one. Here’s what we get: the brilliant Beethoven classical pianist who’s really a knock-‘em-dead pop belter (Naturi Naughton, with swell pipes), the fledgling rapper (Collins Pennie), the singer who needs some soul (Kay Panabaker), several sets of seemingly ill-fated lovebirds and a ballet hopeful from Iowa, the kids who want to put on a show, the sage out-of-the-commercial-fray teachers (Kelsey Grammer), and Paul Iacono as the fledgling filmmaker who wants to put on a mix of The Life Aquatic with The Bad and the Beautiful. (Talk about movies you don’t want to see!) On and on they come. The moviemakers here can and do stage exciting, beat-heavy musical numbers, but they can’t avoid a cliché.
    
Still, the credits do end it with a bang: Fame.
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Bright Star (Three Stars)
U. K.; Jane Campion, 2009
   
Jane Campion’s feverish tale of the blighted love affair between doomed genius romantic poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and opinionated neighbor/clothes designer Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), is, like most of Campion‘s work, edgy and beautiful. It’s not as compelling as her best (The Piano) though, and I felt myself longing for more of Keats’ poetry on the sound track (some here, but not enough), just as I wanted more of Henry James’ bewitchingly convoluted novel narration in Campion’s attractive but over-heavy film of The Portrait of a Lady.
        
Bright Star (the title is from the Keats poem) is both intelligent and ultra-romantic. The best performance of a fine cast is not from  either of the lovers, even the excellent Ms. Cornish, but from Paul Schneider as Keats’ shaggy patron-colleague Charles Armitage Brown, a portrait of a gentleman smitten. The film, also marks  of two superb photographic jobs by Greig Fraser out this week. (The other graces The Boys are Back). Both are remarkable and quite different in style: Boys’ cinematography is as crystalline as Star‘s is misty, smoky and reverie-strewn.

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The Boys are Back (Three Stars)
Australia; Scott Hicks, 2009
    
Scott Hicks (Shine) gives us the fact-based domestic drama -- based on a book by Simon Carr -- of an Aussie dad and self-indulgent sportswriter named Joe Watt (Clive Owen), who, when his second wife dies, has to grow up to be a proper dad to both his sons, one of whom has himself grown up with a (divorced) mother in England. Hicks is fine at adult soapers, and this one has very good acting, a good heart and a stunning visual style. Despite Owen‘s crisp portrayal of self-indulgence chastened though, it’s a sympathetic but largely unsurprising drama.

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Coco Before Chanel (Three Stars)
France; Anne Fontaine, 2009
   
Another biographical love story of a legendary figure, this time portraying the French queen of fashion, Gabrielle “Coco”  Chanel (Audrey Tautou), and her (again) ill-fated affair with the bedroom-eyed British upper-crust swain Arthur “Boy Capel" (Allesandro Nivola). As with Bright Star, the film is lustrously shot (by Christophe Beaucarne), and the acting honors go once again to the third side of the triangle: lusty, ever-urbane, gravel-voiced Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde). The usually charming Tautou often seems too remote here: a spectator at her own life. But the film is full of style, and a love of style. In French, with English subtitles. 

Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs


- Michael Wilmington
September 24, 2009

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