cinemactivist Reviews

Bloodline (I) (2008)

Suspenseful, shocking, and brilliant!

[10/10 · 8 April 2008]

I was lucky enough to see Bloodline before it hits theaters next month.

The documentary follows the director around France who is piecing together clues from the past to figure out if Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child. He interviews members of the secret Priory of Sion and those who have also been searching for the truth about this long held mystery. As the film goes on, the mystery unfolds.

Anyone who is interested in the Priory of Sion, Mary Magdalene, the Catholic church, or Christianity should see this film. It's beautifully shot, suspenseful, and an overall well crafted documentary. You will sit on the edge of your seat during the entire film, begging for more.

Cocaine Angel (2006)

Difficult, rough, gritty and honest!

[10/10 · 14 February 2008]

"Cocaine Angel" is a difficult film to watch and a difficult film to review. Therein lies both its virtue and its short-coming. This is a rough, gritty, honest portrayal of the life of crack addicts and cocaine junkies – not to mention your assorted pill-poppers – that opens very graphically and shocks you into their world. Writer and main actor Damian Lahey takes you places that most "average" people don't want to go or even visit for an afternoon, the world of people whose only thought is their next high. These people are rude, ungrateful of any help offered, spiraling toward the abyss fully conscious of the trajectory.

For anyone who has lived in urban or suburban American and known anyone who was a serious substance abuser, the ring of truth tolls throughout this feature film. That is what makes it such a difficult film to watch and to review. While admiring the honesty portrayed on screen, one cannot but come away from this film feeling soiled and depressed.

The film is the debut directorial effort of Michael Tully and made the festival run from Rotterdam to South-by-Southwest (SXSW,) Jacksonville (FL) where the film is set, Sarasota (FL) and the Raindance film festival. My fellow film reviewers, like Dennis Lim at the Village Voice and the un-bylined reviewer at Filmmaker Magazine have hailed the work as a "minor masterpiece." I shan't go that far. I will quote Filmmaker Magazine's take on the piece though. They wrote, "…caked in legitimate, unforgettable grime, one that makes similar Hollywood efforts seem as fake as an orange juice commercial." No argument from this quarter with that assessment.

This is an unremittingly grim picture of the addicted with no holds barred. The few bits of humor in it are left-handed. For example, Lahey limps through the film wearing one shoe, while his other foot is bare - except for a bloody makeshift bandage he wears as he hobbles and bobbles through his so-called life. And then there is Mary, his putative lover, the thematic cocaine angel of the title. She is a sometimes hooker, hoping to get back to see her daughter who lives in another state. Mary is harsh, crude, angry and unrepentant. We are led to believe that there is some love between she and her loser boyfriend, Scott, portrayed by Lahey, but the signs of love are few and far between.

I don't do spoilers in reviews. I leave it to you to decide if you'd like to see this film and how the tale plays out. Follow its tawdry twists and turns if you dare look into the dark world of addiction. Don't expect to come away from it without being a bit taken aback and chastened.

By Rod Amis a CinemActivist

Caravan/Prague (2007)

A journey of adventure, self-discovery, and humor!

[10/10 · 14 February 2008]

"Caravan Prague" is an affecting, effective piece of documentary film-making. It documents the progress of a bike caravan moving five hundred miles across Europe, from Hannover, Germany to Prague, The Czech Republic. The purpose of the journey, in which over a hundred people from various countries participated, was to bring focus on the theme "Money or Life" as they cycled to Prague to join other activists attending a protest of the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in 2000.

As background, it should be noted that the Prague protest was viewed the participating activists as an appropriate follow-up to the previous year's Seattle, Washington, USA protests. The Seattle protest actually overshadowed the proceedings of the World Trade Organization (WTO,) which the activists had come to address, in most international press outlets. The massive numbers of citizens from various countries and walks of life in Seattle in 1999 brought to many people's attention around the world the issues of economic globalization and the lack of transparency in the policy-making processes of many international economic organizations.

Thus, a meeting of the IMF and World Bank representatives would be a flash point in the push for a dialogue and the reformation of these organizations.

The theme of the Caravan, "Money or Life," was meant to present an alternate example to the policies of these two organizations. The hundred-plus young people from Europe and North America participating in the caravan had set themselves the goal of establishing a rolling Utopian community where all decisions were established on a consensus basis. Meanwhile, the German and Czech police authorities were committed to warding off another Seattle.

A constantly moving action, with people camping out or sleeping in squats as they proceeded, because they had little money, presented a special challenge for police authorities. Ironically, we are thus presented with two caravans, that of activists and that of the police trying to constantly monitor them. This presents Winestine with humorous footage as the two caravans wend their way through some of Germany's most beautiful countryside.

The entire, feature-length documentary is seen from Winestine's eye and he provides narration. He takes us inside his head and through his special journey of adventure, self-discovery and humor in an especially optimistic voice that most viewers will empathize with, I predict. He comes across as youthful, intelligent and engaging, still exploring options for bringing about a better world.

Of course cycling has its own rhythms and that too comes through in the film. As said, the German countryside he shares with us is postcard beautiful. The interactions between the members of caravan itself run the gamut from slapstick to argumentative.

By Rod Amis a CinemActivist

Giuliani Time (2005)

A journey through Giuliani's tenure.

[10/10 · 14 February 2008]

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani became an international hero. But before his sudden deification, he was a much-maligned and often confrontational political figure who, by the end of his two terms, was despised by a majority of New Yorkers. "Giuliani Time" (2006), a new documentary from former cinematographer Kevin Keating, effectively details the numerous controversies that plagued America's Mayor throughout his tumultuous reign. Through interviews with both friends and foes – the latter seem to outweigh the former – Keating weaves a telling, though sometimes long-winded tale that paints Rudy as a controlling autocrat whose hell-bent quest for a more orderly city often trampled the rights of its citizens.

"Giuliani Time" starts with Rudy's rapid rise from working-class Brooklyn to becoming an ambitious U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he made a name for himself going after mobsters and crooked politicians. Once Reagan was ushered into office, Giuliani become Associate Attorney General, the third-highest office inside the Justice Department. As a harbinger of things to come, he sought to deny the rights of Haitian immigrants fleeing from the political repression of Jean-Claude Duvalier. After meeting personally with Duvalier, Giuliani misleadingly testified that the alleged repression did not exist. Keating focuses on this as a seminal moment in Giuliani's career, one that foretells his crackdown on New Yorkers when he becomes mayor in 1994.

Following a bitter rematch against former mayor David Dinkins, Giuliani barely nudged his way into office on a promise to fight crime by fixing broken windows, a zero tolerance policing policy that focuses on quelling public nuisances in order to prevent major crimes. Keating delves deeply into Giuliani's use of the broken windows theory to tighten his grip on the city, first by removing the homeless and the dreaded squeegee men from the streets, then by cutting welfare rolls while using the unemployed to sweep sidewalks and take out trash. He also details Giuliani's unleashing of the police to do whatever necessary to enforce the law, which ultimately led to numerous accusations of brutality, and two highly-publicized cases where one man was brutally sodomized with a plunger handle and another shot forty-one times while unarmed.

Keating does a nice job going step-by-step through Giuliani's troubled tenure, thankfully keeping mentions of 9/11 only at the beginning and end. Clocking in at close to 120 minutes, "Giuliani Time" does get carried away from time to time, going off on excursions that occasionally stray too far from the subject, while the most interesting aspect of the Giuliani story – his public meltdown in 2000 while running for a U.S. Senate seat against Hillary Clinton – gets the short shrift. But in the end, what we get is a fascinating portrait of a man who overstepped his bounds in his quest for power and seemingly lost everything, only to be reborn in our nation's most tragic moment.

By Shawn Dwyer a CinemActivist

The Hole Story (2005)

Take a step into the mind of a filmmaker.

[10/10 · 14 February 2008]

or the most part, when reviewing independent films, especially documentarians, you find that everyone is so serious. It's therefore refreshing when you find an Indy filmmaker who is whimsical and even comedic. That's the case with "The Hole Story" written and directed by Alex Karpovsky. Not only is this film a great comedy, it touches on profound subjects while never losing its footing.

That latter fact explains the number of festival awards and stellar reviews it has received from the Boston Globe, Minneapolis/St Paul City Pages, Filmmaker Magazine and others.

Matt Zoller Seitz of the New York Press had this to say about the film:

I fell in love with it and have not been able to get it out of my head… It was one of my favorite unreleased films of last year and one of the saddest and funniest debuts I've ever seen." Michael Tully of IndieWIRE refers to "The Hole Story" as "Equal parts Woody Allen and Werner Herzog… " Though the film is a work of fiction, it is based on an actual phenomenon that occurred at North Long Lake in Minnesota. A crevice suddenly appeared for two years running, unexplained warm water in the Lake in the middle of frigid winters, that was so unusual as get international coverage and make the cover of the Wall Street Journal. From this unprecedented event, Karpovsky spins a whimsical tapestry of a tale about an obsessed, aspiring cable television producer who wants to make a pilot to sell about provincial mysteries in American small towns.

When he arrives in Minnesota, the hole is gone, and therein begins the story of this film and the downward spiral of the main character – which Karpovsky names after himself. Before the journey of this film is completed, the protagonist loses his girlfriend and his film crew, and then things go from horrible to horrific before a light appears at the end of a very long tunnel.

The calm inventiveness of this film is a joy to observe. It's well worth your time and attention.

By Rod Amis a CinemActivist