I caught The Other Final tonight as part of Duke's "Soccer Politics" series. Personally I thought the movie actually flinched a bit from the difficult political issues it (briefly) raises, especially those regarding race and coloniality—but it's good fun anyway. Must-watch for soccer fans. Unbelievably, the film seems not to have a U.S. distributor, but it is (for now at least) on YouTube.)

Movies I think my readers will enjoy: Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a documentary all about one of science fiction's most fascinating personalities, the great Harlan Ellison. Lucky for us it's on Netflix.

Friday links 2.

* Cinéma vérité vérité: Trailer for an upcoming documentary about Arrested Development. Via Kottke.

* What liberal media: Why would the Washington Post fire one of its best reporters and columnists? Glenn Greewald is on the case
(here's more), while Steve Benen takes a look at the amazing balance in evidence on the Washington Post's editorial page post-Froomkin.

* Still casting about for ways to pacify the LGBT community without having to actually do anything, the Obama administration has announced it is "looking for ways" to include same-sex couples in the 2010 census. Pam at Pandagon has a more in-depth rundown.

* ThinkProgress reports 'Iranian soccer players reportedly suspended for wearing green wristbands.'

* TPM catches Colbert out of character.

Movie recommendation minute: Gonzo is fantastic.

"What are some of the best documentaries available to watch instantly on Netflix?" is the sort of question that makes me sorry I've fallen out of the habit of reading AskMetafilter.

As a side note, Netflix now supports "Watch Instantly" for Macs. The player isn't the greatest, but it's still a great leap forward...

Poli-Sci-Fi Radio (live 4-6 every Sunday!) turned me on to Confessions of a Superhero, an excellent independent (but Netflixable) documentary about the people who walk Hollywood Blvd. dressed in superhero costumes, taking photos for tips. Naturally, the subject matter makes for a sort of perfect tragicomedy.

Here's the trailer:



Once you've seen the film you can also check out Wonder Woman's MySpace page...

The top 25 documentaries, as ranked by the International Documentary Association in October 2007. Via kottke. Here's the top 11:

1. Hoop Dreams (1994), Steve James
2. The Thin Blue Line (1988), Errol Morris
3. Bowling for Columbine (2002), Michael Moore
4. Spellbound (2002), Jeffrey Blitz
5. Harlan County U.S.A. (1976), Barbara Kopple
6. An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Davis Guggenheim
7. Crumb (1994), Terry Zwigoff
8. Gimme Shelter (1970), Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin
9. The Fog of War (2003), Errol Morris
10. Roger & Me (1989), Michael Moore
11. Super Size Me (2004), Morgan Spurlock

I've been sitting on some bookmarks of s.f. lectures and documentaries for the last few weeks, waiting till I had the chance to take them in. That day was, at long last, yesterday:

* At Cynical-C, Isaac Asimov on the Golden Age of Science Fiction;

* At Boing Boing, Neal Stephenson on problems of genre and criticism in contemporary s.f.;

* Via MetaFilter, A Day in the Afterlife of Philip K. Dick;

* And also via MetaFilter, the Sun Ra documentary Brother from Another Planet.

Enjoy!

The documentary I was so impressed with back in January, Mardi Gras: Made in China, comes out on DVD tomorrow.

The House Next Door has a review of A Promise to the Dead: The Journey of (Duke's Own) Ariel Dorfman.

Bruce is coming to Greensboro tonight, and I've got tickets, so all is right with the world. It's my first Springsteen concert since Summer 2000, which is much too long to take the sacrament.

* The New York Times goes inside the world's last pinball factory.

* The British science fiction series I've always wanted to see, Blake's 7, is going to be remade a la Battlestar Galactica.

* Who is Tom Bombadil?

* Elizabeth Edwards takes on the media for its shoddy coverage of the presidential primaries thus far.

* Few people are writing more cogently about George Romero's zombie movies than this post at The Pinocchio Theory.

* And I'm trying hard to think of a movie I've seen this year that was more fun than Air Guitar Nation.

A Guide To Armageddon simulates the effects of an atomic bomb drop on London.

Science Sunday!

* Evidence that fish can count to four.

* In addition to being the biggest explosion ever recorded, Gamma Ray Burst 080319B is the most distant and the brightest object ever recorded.

* What life is like for compulsive hoarders.

* And in climate news, we're all screwed.

Stuff to look at.

* This week's blog icon is one of my favorite pieces from Eric Joyner, whose website is a virtual treasure trove of robots and donuts. Eric, of course, is the artist who provided the cover image for Backwards City #3.

* Jacek Yerka, painter of fantasy worlds. Via RaShOmoN. The one at left is called "Pearl Harbor."

* I enjoyed watching The King of Kong, the recent documentary about intense rivalries in the arcade community, but it's now obligatory to follow up that admission with a link to the criticism of the film on both factual and aesthetic levels.

* And xkcd explains how it works.

I wanted to throw up a quick recommendation for a great recent documentary on the realities of exploitation in global capitalism, Mardi Gras: Made in China, which seeks to answer one simple question: Where do Mardi Gras beads come from? Even for someone who pays attention to this stuff, it's eye-opening.



There's now a timely follow-up: Kamp Katrina.

Pauline Kael called it "as clear a piece of Communist propaganda as we have had in many years," but 1953's Salt of the Earth—widely denounced and then buried in the McCarthyite political climate of its time and the only blacklisted film in American history—is of course nothing of the sort, simply a powerful celebration of bravery, sacrifice, and the transformative power of solidarity in a company town in New Mexico where miners (and eventually, notably, their wives) are forced to strike against their East Coast bosses for nearly a year before negotiations are begun. Based on a real 1951 strike against Empire Zinc in Bayard, NM, the film has only a handful of professional actors, including its lead actress, Rosaura Revueltas, who after the filming was deported to Mexico for her involvement; most of the cast was drawn instead from the local area, including many members of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Local 890.

And it's in the public domain, so you can watch it on Google Video with an entirely clear conscience.



(via, unsurprisingly, the film class I'm TAing)

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek has seen Sicko and has just about the same review as everyone else:

"Sicko" is a blunt, effective picture, and there's no doubt that Moore feels passionately about this subject, even discounting his own considerably bloated need to be the center of attention. A sentence like that is almost always followed by a "but," and here it comes: It's perfectly valid to agree with Moore's thesis and still have problems with his filmmaking, his choices of what to put where, his way of eliding certain realities lest they weaken his (already considerably strong) case. And while "Sicko" is, in my view, the most persuasive and least aggravating of all of Moore's movies, it still bears many of the frustrating Moore earmarks -- most notably, a deliberately simplistic desire to render everything in black-and-white terms, as if he didn't trust his audience enough to follow him into some of the far more complex gray areas.

...Unfortunately, he reserves Samuel Barber's overused weeper for another scene, featuring footage from 1996 government hearings into managed healthcare standards in which a doctor formerly employed by Humana testified that (among other horrors) physicians in the system were actually given bonuses for denying healthcare. The sequence would have been powerful enough by itself, but Moore just can't resist cranking up the poignant music. Nor can he resist tucking in, here and there, his trademark found film footage, often run at high speeds -- you know, comic clips of doctors sawing off limbs and the like -- accompanied by silly cartoon music: If only Moore could recognize that his showboating doesn't enhance his message; it only gets in the way. Toward the end of "Sicko," Moore tells us that the fellow who runs the most successful anti-Michael Moore Web site nearly lost everything when his wife became seriously ill and he found himself overwhelmed by medical bills. Anonymously, Moore sent him a check for $12,000. Good for Moore (and for that couple who needed it). But by choosing to include the story, Moore slyly gets to be both the anonymous good Samaritan and tell us about his -- you should pardon the expression -- largesse.

This is what irritates me about people who complain about Moore - yes, he makes a big self-aggrandizing show out of himself, but I fail to see how it invalidates any of his actual political points. Christopher writes this in the comments of the previous post, and it's a fair point as far as it goes. The problem with Moore's ego isn't that it somehow negates the rightness of his arguments—it doesn't—but that it inevitably makes the cultural conversation on these issues about Moore rather than about any actual policy. And this isn't Moore's fault, exclusively, either, insofar as this is the strategy that is always used by our corporately owned media outlets and the conservatives who dominate them to diffuse all criticism of the American corporate state (See also: $400 haircuts, Al Gore's big house, etc)—but it's happened to Moore a bunch of times now and you'd think he would have started to learn his lesson.

What drives me crazy about Moore, whom I've always admired, isn't that he becomes the target of this sort of discourse but that time after time he seems to intentionally go out of his way to create scandals for the media's idiotic talking heads to chew on, and in effect provide people with excuses not to listen to anything he says.

I watched it last night, and Sicko is in many ways a great political film. There's a documentary reversal about twenty minutes in that's probably one of the best I've seen, in which Moore briefly profiles four young women in what seems to be the movie's next segment, only to suddenly reveal that three have already died from lack of care and move on. The stories Moore tells can be truly gut-wrenching and infuriating, and they resonate because every person in this country has seen the ways in which insurance companies lie, cheat, and steal their way out of paying people what they're owed. The segment on Rep. Billy Tauzin in particular had me ready for a lynching. And the comparisons to Canada, Britain, and France could be enough on their own to genuinely change minds on the issue; each looks more and more like paradise alongside corporate America's betrayal of the country and its people. This movie puts the lie to the so-called "ownership society" and the ideology of "personal responsibility" as effectively as just about anything ever has.

Even the already infamous trip to Cuba in the movie's final third works in the sense that it's incredibly moving, tapping as it does into the mess of feelings and regret surrounding 9/11 and the perpetually denied dream of universal siblinghood. But it's also, plainly, the film's Achilles heel—if you wanted a reason to tune out, if you wanted a rhetorical stick to beat Moore with, here it is, gift-wrapped. And Moore follows the Cuba episode up with a stunt to my mind is even worse rhetorically—a brief coda in which he "anonymously" pays a year's health-care premium for one of his biggest Internet detractors to make some sort of point about community and everybody pulling together. Great thing to do, obviously, except that the placement in the movie makes it seem like the nastiest anonymous donation in history, and because now it's the other only thing people will talk about, and because it really has nothing to do with the fact that our health care system is FUBAR and everything to do with Moore's bottomless desire to be idolized.

Whether he's right or not, he's just handing ammunition over to his enemies for no good reason, and that's the problem.

My hope for Sicko is that the movie does for social programs what An Inconvenient Truth did last October for global warming, and I think there's real hope for that. It is, as I said, a moving and great film, even a brilliant one. And Americans are fed up with their health care, fed up with plutocracy, and ready, I think, to finally join the twentieth century and the rest of the Western world on this. What we need now is leadership on the issue, not more hilarious cowardice from the Democrats or self-inflicted wounds from liberal spokespeople—which will only happen if Sicko starts conversations that aren't about Michael Moore.

Acephalous has another early review of Sicko, written after the movie's brief appearance last night on Google Video. (Unfortunately, it's since disappeared. If you didn't happen to be online last night like *ahem* some people, you'll have to find your digital bootleg some other place.) Acephalous is generally positive towards the movie, but his distaste for Michael Moore's tendency for self-aggrandizing stunts—a distaste I certainly share—causes him to inevitably turn on the movie:

I don't mind cheap (but effective) showmanship. Anonymously paying the founder of Moore Watch $12,000 so he can pay to keep the site up and his wife insured is both classy and opportunistic. Such is the life of the showman. Bringing victims of 9/11 to Gitmo so that they might retrieve the same quality health-care as the terrorists works. Bringing them to a Havana hospital for treatment? Not so much. It has long been known that foreigners paying in hard currencies receive preferential treatment in Cuban hospitals. Despite the benefits brought about the emphasis on preventative medicine, one of the highest doctor-to-patient ratios in the world, and the availability of cheap generic drugs, Moore neglects to mention that he was taking advantage of the system, that the people with him only received the treatment they did because they weren't Cuban. Just as I was furious when I learned that he had met Roger while filming Roger & Me, I'm pre-incensed at his future revelation that he knew all about Cuba's medical tourism industry. In both films, he overreaches, providing his detractors with ammunition against him. He undermines the valid points he raises about the outsourcing of American jobs and the crisis in American health-care for what can only be seen as narrative goals. He wants the perfect ending, the perfect finish, the perfect irony. He doesn't need it. When I taught literary journalism, I convinced my students, and myself, that the most human story is human by virtue of its imperfections, by the way its mundane realities defy the simplistic narrative conventions of the Hollywood hack. Would that Moore could learn this.

I'd never heard that Roger & Me thing before, and if it's the same incident mentioned in the Wikipedia page I actually think Acephalous's criticism is a little unfounded. However, his larger point certainly holds—time after time, Moore's narcissism gets in the way of his polemic. From all indications Sicko, despite its good points, is no exception.

Regular readers may remember my longtime interest in Golden Gate Bridge suicides, so it's no surprise that I rented and watched The Bridge. I found it a pretty stunning project—in addition to direct, hidden-camera footage of suicides leaping off the bridge, there are interviews with family members and even one survivor. It's an experience; there's really no other movie like it.

The best article on the subject, I think, is still The New Yorker's:

Almost everyone in the Bay Area knows someone who has jumped, and it is perhaps not surprising that the most common fear among San Franciscans is gephyrophobia, the fear of crossing bridges. Yet the locals take a peculiar pride in the bridge’s notoriety. “What makes the bridge so popular,” Gladys Hansen, the city’s unofficial historian, says, citing the ten million tourists who visit the bridge each year, “is that it’s a monument, a monument to death.” In 1993, a man named Steve Page threw his three-year-old daughter, Kellie, over the side of the bridge and followed her down; even after this widely publicized atrocity, an Examiner poll that year found that fifty-four per cent of the respondents opposed building a suicide barrier.

The idea of building a barrier was first proposed in the nineteen-fifties, and it has provoked controversy ever since. “The battle over a barrier is actually a battle of ideas,” Eve Meyer, the executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention, told me. “And some of the ideas are very old, ideas about whether suicidal people are people to fear and hate.” In centuries past, suicides were buried at night at a crossroads, under piles of stones, or had stakes driven through their hearts to prevent their unquiet spirits from troubling the rest of us. In the United States today, someone takes his own life every eighteen minutes, and suicide is much more common than homicide. Still, the issue is rarely examined. In the Bay Area, the topic is virtually taboo. One Golden Gate official told me repeatedly, “I hate that you’re writing about this.”

In 1976, an engineer named Roger Grimes began agitating for a barrier on the Golden Gate. He walked up and down the bridge wearing a sandwich board that said “Please Care. Support a Suicide Barrier.” He gave up a few years ago, stunned that in an area as famously liberal as San Francisco, where you can always find a constituency for the view that pets should be citizens or that poison oak has a right to exist, there was so little empathy for the depressed. “People were very hostile,” Grimes told me. “They would throw soda cans at me, or yell, ‘Jump!’ ”