For those few people who don’t know anything about the West Memphis Three, three young men (teenagers at the time) were charged and tried for the horrific killings of three children in Arkansas in 1993 and 1994. Both the first and second documentary follow the trials of the accused. It’s best not to know anything about the case going in, although that’s probably unlikely given the amount of publicity generated in the subsequent decade and a half by both the trials themselves and these documentaries.

Rather than speak directly to the style and substance of the docs themselves, I was struck on this second pass by how the original films are less documentary and more non-fiction advocacy films. In the first movie, directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky follow the investigation and trials with a staggering degree of access to the courts, the lawyers, the parents of both the victims and the defendants, and the accused themselves and it provides a fascinating fly-on-the-wall look into the inner workings of justice system in the deep south. By the time they shot the sequel in early 2000, state and legal representatives had severely limited the filmmaker’s access to the courts and their clients, the obvious result of how damaging some of the footage is in the first film.

As acclaimed and celebrated as the Paradise Lost trilogy has become, the films themselves represent a bit of a dilemma for proponents of a purest documentary form. On the one hand, the films are demonstrably about real events and they contain no reenactments, actors portraying someone they aren’t, snazzy graphics connecting unlikely circumstances or voice-over narration leading us to specific conclusions. That said, the original film specifically, is edited and presented in a way that leaves far too many obvious questions and lines of inquiry unmentioned, let alone explored in any depth. With much of the first trial focused on how the investigating officers led one of the accused (over 12 hours of interrogation for which written records do not exist) into confessing to a crime he quite obviously didn’t commit. This leading-the-witness strategy finds parallels in the way film is structured and presented to the audience and it’s gone weirdly unacknowledged in any of the reviews I’ve read on the films. There are several scenes, obviously filmed at different times, spliced together to make it appear as though they weren’t, and their inclusion in the final cut seems to be for effect. It isn’t particularly dishonest, but it does make one wonder how often the directors took liberties with the chronology and specifics of the story. Despite their near-universal acclaim, these films have a clear and obvious agenda from the outset which one could argue moves them outside what a documentary, at least in it’s purest form, is supposed to be – the documenting of a story, unencumbered by the subjectivity and opinions of its maker. It could be countered that with the state, the police, the courts and the system itself obviously colluding to railroad the three young outsiders toward a guilty verdict, that the filmmakers took up a counter position, but does the end justify the means, even if the filmmakers were right in the final analysis?

So here’s my question; at what point does editing become editorializing? It might well be impossible to make a feature-length documentary that’s purely objective, but in the Paradise Lost trilogy, the documentary boundaries are certainly tested. In some ways, the films, particularly the middle one, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations seems to be a rallying cry for the subject’s legal defense fund and while it’s completely understandable why the filmmakers felt the need to come to the West Memphis Three’s defense, to package these films as pure documentaries implies that a degree of objectivity existed during their making. There wasn’t.

I’m not sure any of that matters in the final analysis. The Paradise Lost series is a fascinating watch regardless of what category the films belong in. I only wanted to point out that, in many ways, these acclaimed docs aren’t as far removed from the works of Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock and Nick Broomfield as you might think.

Forty years ago, at the 1972 Academy Awards, a documentary sporting a bizarre scientist, a farmer and a lot of spectacular close up cinematography showing disgusting insects devouring each other won in the best documentary feature category. I bring this up for a few reasons – firstly, the film,

 The Hellstrom Chronicle combines elements of documentary and sci-fi to present a disturbing depiction of the Darwinian struggle for survival between humans and insects. It was conceived and produced by David L. Wolper, directed by Walon Green and written by David Seltzer, who earned a Writers Guild of America Award nomination for his screenplay. The film was photographed using stop-motion photography with microscopic and telescopic lenses and the results are BBC Nature Unit quality.

Dr. Nils Hellstrom guides viewers throughout the film. He claims, on the basis of scientific-sounding theories, that insects will ultimately win the fight for survival on planet Earth because of their adaptability and ability to reproduce rapidly, and that the human race will lose this fight largely because of excessive individualism and democrats. The film combines short clips from horror and science fiction movies with extraordinary camera sequences of butterflies, locusts, wasps, termites, ants, mayflies, other insects rarely seen to that point on film. If this all sounds a little like the plot of Starship Troopers, you’re in the ballpark.

 There’s a little curve-ball at the end of the film that is best not known going in. I suppose I should have seen it coming, but I was too engaged in the microscopic insect battles going on and too stunned every time Dr. Nils Hellstrom opened his obnoxious mouth to notice.

 Oh, and the film that it beat at the 1971 Oscars? …Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and the Pity, considered by many to be the greatest documentary of all time.

To be fair, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is a better film than the first one, but not to the degree that the conflicting reviews they garnered might suggest. The first film is a pure action flick, a variation on SWAT transplanted to Rio and the pitched drug wars that play out in the streets and hillside slums of this Brazilian City of 16 million. The sequel is political – about systemic corruption within the state and the police force. In addition to being a more interesting story, it helps contextualize the struggles of the honest cop at the centre of the story, framing it in terms the audience can identify with.

After a prison hostage rescue attempt ends in carnage, BOPE Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura, excellent… looking like a Brazilian version of Mark Ruffalo) is shuffled up the ladder and into a high ranking government security position. Before long, he is unwittingly assisting corrupt government officials seeking votes from Rio’s vast slums and the paramilitary groups that they use to control them. With the drug kingpins out of the way, corrupt militia overlords step in to fill the power vacuum for profit and political gain.

In some ways, The Enemy Within plays like a Nixon-era Hollywood vigilante flick (think Dirty Harry meets HBO’s The Wire). The local political machine is fundamentally broken and it requires an honest man who isn’t afraid to wielding a little hyper-violence to get it back on track. The lead is the most flushed out character in a film that has a few too many cardboard cutout bad guys, but all in all it works pretty well.

Elite Squad 2 is an exciting, well-paced and angry piece of filmmaking from director José Padilha and it’s worth a look for fans of foreign policiers and political thrillers.

They were first noticed in the early 1980’s and since no one has ever come forward to claim authorship of the tiles, the mystery of the “Toynbee Tiler” remains irresistible to amateur sleuths. Director Jon Foy’s remarkably-sincere documentary debut Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles follows one such detective, an oddball musician/artist from Philadelphia named Justin Duerr.

Duerr has been tracking the mysterious Tiler since 1994 and as he learned more about just how widespread the Tiler’s installations were, (New York, Boston, Baltimore, Detroit, Toledo, and several cities in Chile and Argentina) his interest grew into an almost obsessive quest to discover the who and why at the heart of the mystery.

While this project likely started as an effort to document that journey, over the course of the film you begin to realize that it’s actually a documentary about the amateur detective himself and not the Toynbee Tiler. Justin Duerr is a remarkable character – intelligent, humble, gentle and focused. It’s obvious that self-identification has something to do with Duerr’s fixation and that he relates to the reclusive outsider he seeks to discover. The film unfolds in two threads, a search to uncover who the Tiler is, and to understand the meaning of his message. Duerr is assisted by fellow Toynbee sleuths Steve Weinik and Colin Smith and together they followup leads from the Northeast U.S. to Buenos Aires, from Internet chat rooms to shortwave radio conventions, and from crazed conspiracy theorists to David Mamet (yup, that David Mamet), before ending up eerily close to where they started: back in modest working class neighbourhoods of south Philadelphia.

A few reviewers found the end of Resurrect Dead ultimately unsatisfying, but I think they might have missed the entire point of Foy’s film. It’s about outsiders and the world they live in, not some cheesy prime time special about discovering the secrets in Al Capone’s vault. There is a poignancy in the way this filmmaker observes his subjects and their basic humanity (particularly Duerr’s) is a breath of fresh air in the ever more self-obsessed society we live in.

In the end, this is a film about taking the road less traveled and living outside the rules. Despite appearances, the unusual characters in Foy’s Resurrect Dead have more integrity and grace than the subjects of most documentaries typically display… even the really-famous, good looking ones.

A winner.

3 (FBW/FBE DVD)

ANONYMOUS (FBW/FBE DVD & BR)

HAROLD AND KUMAR A VERY HAROLD… (FBW/FBE DVD & BR)

LADY AND THE TRAMP (Reissue) (FBW: DVD & BR, FBE: DVD)

SUNSET LIMITED (FBW: DVD & BR, FBE: DVD)

TEXAS KILLING FIELDS (FBW/FBE DVD & BR)

Street Date: February 14, 2012

TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN PT1 (FBW: DVD & BR, FBE: DVD)

AGNOSIA (FBW DVD)

ASSAUT (ASSAULT) (FBW DVD)

DEAD (FBW/FBE DVD)

ELITE SQUAD: THE ENEMY WITHIN (FBW/FBE DVD & BR)

HOW TO DIE IN OREGON (FBW DVD)

INTERRUPTERS (FBW: DVD & BR, FBE: DVD)

MILL AND THE CROSS (FBW: DVD & BR, FBE: DVD)

OTHER F WORD (FBW/FBE DVD)

RUM DIARY (FBW/FBE DVD & BR)

TAKE SHELTER (FBW/FBE DVD)

Street Date: February 21, 2012

HONEY 2 (FBW DVD)

J. EDGAR (FBW/FBE DVD & BR)

LONDON BOULEVARD (FBW/FBE DVD & BR)

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (FBW/FBE DVD & BR)

TOWER HEIST (FBW/FBE DVD & BR)

WAY (FBW/FBE DVD & BR)

Street Date: February 24, 2012

PUSS IN BOOTS (FBW/FBE DVD & BR, FBW 3D-BR)

Street Date: February 28, 2012

HUGO (FBW/FBE DVD & BR, FBW 3D-BR)

JOHNNY ENGLISH REBORN (FBW/FBE DVD & BR)

MANDRILL (FBW/FBE DVD)

The Mill and The Cross is definitely an art-house film and it requires some patience and contribution to engage with. The film is, in essence, a cinematic exploration of another art form – an art piece about an art piece if you will – and if that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, it probably isn’t. To discount it out of hand however, would be a shame because a fascinating story unfolds over the movie’s slightly-too-long 92 minute running time. As all paintings do, Way to Calvary tells a tale, but it’s not one you might expect because it is, in fact, a rather subversive work.

Bruegel’s Flanders was at that point occupied by Spain and the local population suffered under the oppression and brutality of Spain’s king and the Catholic Church (in the midst of their rather nasty “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” period). Being branded a heretic brought about certain death so Bruegel hid within the painting all manner of political, social and religious commentary. How he went about this makes the film worth a look for anyone with an general interest in art history.

A few quick points about the look of the film. It would seem that more than a few critics felt it came off looking flat and slightly artificial, but I wonder whether that wasn’t intentional. When the painting is shown at the end of the film, it has a kind of flattened perspective that I thought Majewski captured quite effectively within the framing of the film. The colour is stunning and digital effects lend themselves beautifully to the project.

And a final comment – the local’s bizarre Morris-Dancing during the final few frames of The Mill and the Cross proves, without a doubt, that white people simply don’t have any rhythm.

 None.

Recommended if you’re in the mood for something contemplative …while you’re baked.

1. The Interrupters

2. Nostalgia for the Light

3. Project Nim

4. Cave of Forgotten Dreams

5. The Arbor

6. Bill Cunningham, New York

7. Dragonslayer

8. Senna 

….and none of these films made their way to the nominee shortlist?

Come on.

For the record, the 5 nominees are;

· Hell and Back Again

· If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front

· Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory

· Pina

· Undefeated

I watched both Hell and Back and If a Tree Falls over the last couple of days and I just don’t get it. Neither film was awful or anything, they simply weren’t award-worthy and didn’t hold a candle to a dozen other, much-better docs released last year. Where, for example, is Senna, a film many count amongst the finest films of the year, let alone in the documentary category? I’ve not seen the last three on the Oscar shortlist, but if Paradise Lost 3 is half as good as the first two in the series, it certainly deserves to be here. Wim Wender’s Pina also received some solid reviews.

 Perhaps the most glaring Oscar oversight is Steve James’s The Interrupters, a documentary almost universally agreed upon as the best of 2011. I wonder if it was disqualified for some technical reason. Bill Cunningham, New York is a brilliant piece of filmmaking and so is Project Nim… and to be fair both of these were on the longer Oscar nominees list.

I recognize that pruning down a list of films for the various Oscar categories can’t be an easy job, but to have missed all 8 of the most highly-regarded examples of documentary filmmaking from last year is simply inexcusable. Hell and Back Again covers a lot of the same ground the similarly-themed Restrepo did the year before, and while it’s a good film, there are dozens of documentaries that broke new ground and presented their subjects in far more innovative ways than this one did. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front is an earnest, but even-handed documentary about a naive and whiny ecology activist named Dan McGowan who was arrested along with his entire cell in 2005 for a number of firebombings dating from four years earlier in Oregon, Washington and Colorado (no one died, but 1200 acts of property destruction are attributed to the ELF in this period). Members of the ELF were charged and sentenced under U.S. domestic terrorism laws and the documentary manages to make the point that these activists shouldn’t be categorized with the likes of a Timothy McVeigh, in spite of the fact that that’s exactly what happened. A good film?.. yes. A great film?… no.

It’s obvious that we need to pull together a festival wall of the best doc’s from 2011 and offer a better cross section than the Academy has. The Interrupters comes out next week and we’ve got a good number of the other missing films in stock already.

Kill List is a seriously-creepy descent into madness that would make Ken Russell proud. There are moments of jet-black humour, an excellent supporting cast, terrific cinematography and pretty much everything about Kill List is letter perfect. There is a problem however. At the risk of overstating the issue, Kill List does contain several scenes of sickening brutality and it begs revisiting a question that comes up regularly these days on the issue of how best to portray graphic violence in modern cinema. In one corner, Wheatley hasn’t sanitized the act of killing someone like so many modern filmmakers have and, in the other, its unfiltered presence manages to keep the film from being accessible to all but the most-committed cinephiles. For better or worse, his camera doesn’t turn away from several cringe-inducing depictions of utter brutality. The result serves (or maybe, more to the point, doesn’t serve) the audience in two ways – firstly, it brings an honesty to the proceedings that’s lacking in many other films and secondly, it forces the viewer to decide when they need to look away… and you will look away. In point of fact, Kill List is probably less violent than the latest Transformers movie, but in Wheatley’s efforts to present the act of murder with a kind of horrific realism (rather than by and on surrogate toys/machines in the case of Michael Bay’s PG-rated orgy of destruction), his film comes off seeming 1000 times more savage. I’m not sure which one is more disturbing.

I’ve come almost full circle on the issue of cinema violence in recent years. I guess I’ve come to acknowledge the hypocrisy of celebrating sanitized onscreen bloodletting. The psychopaths portrayed in Wheatley’s Kill List are decidedly more accurate and unsettling than the Dark Knight’s Batman and Joker and yet the MPAA ratings and critical discussions about films like these would have you believe that the more inaccurate the portrayal of violence on the screen, the more acceptable and palatable the movie becomes. It’s a ongoing dilemma that cinephiles need to rationalize in their own viewing choices because the issue sits front and centre in more than a few interesting and thought-provoking independent productions these days. Kill List is one of those films.

What’s perhaps even more interesting is just how dramatically-raw the balance of this film is. The lead character Jay (played with absolute fearlessness by actor Neil Maskell) seems a bit of a Cockney-knob in the opening few scenes. He’s been out of work for 8 months, loafs around the house and whines too much. His gorgeous wife (MyAnna Buring) has had enough of his belly-aching and is pressing him to return to work. It takes us a while to figure out that Jay isn’t the IT professional he claims to be, but rather an ex-private-security heavy from the Iraq war who is now a hit man. His last job in Kiev went south. Although it’s unlikely that you’ll find yourself ever rooting for him, by about half-way through the film, Jay’s efforts to keep from drowning in the sea of unrelenting evil strangely becomes a bit of a life ring for the viewer to hold on to.

If you can self-modulate how much violent imagery you’re willing to take in by averting your attention when the time(s) comes, you’ll be hard-pressed to shake Kill List from your conscience for a few days. Whether the nightmarish final scene can survive logical investigation hardly matters because, by the time it comes along, you’re neck deep in a maelstrom of bizarre ritual horror that will leave you winded and discombobulated. At some point along this terrible journey, you probably realized that Jay’s odyssey could only end badly, but the finale of Kill List completely shocked me nevertheless.

So there you have it – a film that’s all at once bordering of greatness and yet nearly impossible to recommend… once again. No word on the North American DVD release of this one, but I’m guessing it will come out later this spring. The PAL copy will be available in the FBW sometime next week.

Even though documentary filmmaking comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, Curtis’s output still falls a little outside the norm. Where Morris focuses on quirky individuals, Burns on American mythology, Pennbaker on pop culture and Apted on his ongoing Up series experiment, Adam Curtis seems more interested in the larger issues that shape and define modern society. His many critics contend that he’s just a faux-brow conspiracy theorist who only appeals to paranoid leftwingers and that his arguments are disturbingly thin, but his works remain thought-provoking and regularly challenge conventional interpretations of our recent history, and for that reason alone, Curtis’s work is worth searching out.

I obtained a copy of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace from some lefty bookstore in L.A. (I ordered one for each store, but only a single copy arrived – a followup email has yet to be responded to… fucking lefties). It’s a decent enough burn of the the original BBC broadcast and hopefully the FBE copy will show up next week. The first episode, which I watched tonight, covers the rise of the computer in the financial industry and how that simple occurrence has ultimately reshuffled and re-stacked the power structure in the West and put bankers in charge of politicians… instead of the other way around. As I always suspected, it’s Ayn Rand’s fault. In many ways, this episode covers more ground and offers significantly more insight into the machinations of our financial overlords than the similarly-themed (and Oscar-winning) documentary Inside Job by writer/director Charles Ferguson. The second and third episodes focus on how the imprinting of machine language and system philosophies onto the natural world (and, to a greater degree, on ourselves) has changed how we see ourselves and our place in the world. It’s a fascinating and extremely provocative journey.

Back to the Film Comment issue. They also picked Tree of Life as the top film of 2011 and the rest of our own Best of 2011 list mirrored theirs fairly closely as well. If nothing else, it would appear that we’re on the right track in promoting some critically-acclaimed films that aren’t on everyone’s radar.

And while on the topic on blowing our own horn, it would appear that the TIFF Cinematheque curators are finally getting around to acknowledging Nick Cage’s place amongst the acting geniuses in film history with a retrospective of his early works. I seem to recall we did that a year or two ago.

A final comment comes from one of our wholesale suppliers at KRK Media. According to Gord, the two hottest DVD properties for them these days are Downton Abbey and The Human Centipede 2. Wow.

Drive has been dubbed a “neo-noir”, a cinematic term that’s come to describe modern crime films with downbeat tones and unhappy endings. The term, an obvious shout out to the classic film noir canon of the ’40s and ’50s, is a bit of a misnomer, but it does manage to capture something of the spirit of a film like Drive. In my opinion, Drive is less an extension of the classic noir flick than it is an updating of the early ’70s crime film – titles like The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Walter Hill’s early films and a few others come to mind. What the plot lacks in existential angst is more than made up for by Drive’s stylized look and Tangerine Dream-inspired soundtrack. Ryan Gosling’s turn as the titular driver is nicely understated and delivered with conviction and maturity. Several scenes of intense, head-turning violence are interspersed within the plot’s mostly-serene pacing and Refn manages to create an undertone of almost constant tension and uncertainty throughout. Drive is an accomplished bit of filmmaking with a star turn by Gosling, who is fast becoming one of Hollywood’s most interesting young actors.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Drive, however, is how it was received. A quick glance over at Metacritic.com’s user reviews section (http://www.metacritic.com/movie/drive/user-reviews) paints a truly-interesting picture. Drive’s audience seems to have assigned one of two ratings to it – a “10” or a “0”. It stands to reason that a film like Drive won’t appeal to everyone, but the either/or rating it received speaks to the ever-increasing split between cinema (the artistic result of the creative film making process) and the movies (the formulaic, audience-tested/adjusted escapist commodity the studios focus almost exclusively on these days). After several decades of this kind of assembly-line, film-by-committee production, an entire generation (or two) of movie watchers have been exposed to hardly anything else. The modern-day Oscars have furthermore come to celebrate, reward and promote the very kind of film that Drive is decidedly not (and despite the fact that any serious cinephile instantly dismisses the Academy Awards as a yearly industry circle-jerk of mediocrity, it is representative of how the industry and, by extension, the mainstream modern film audience have come to measure and quantify filmmaking excellence).

Many of the negative audience reviews listed on Metacritic.com cite Drive as being a film seemingly designed to generate positive critical acclaim (“critic’s bait” is a nicely-recurring term in these reviews). This is yet another manifestation of how our world has changed in recent decades – the idea that the expert’s viewpoint (in this case that the professional film critic’s) is somehow tainted by elitism and therefore irrelevant. I’m constantly fascinated by the degree to which unbridled popular opinion and fanboy musings have come to eclipse the rational, measured and learned observations of the expert. It occurs in every walk of life, but because creative media (movies, music, books, etc.) remains so accessible to (and, perhaps even more importantly, financially dependent upon) the shifting taste and mood of its intended audience, the divide between popular opinion and critical analysis seems more pronounced when it comes to media.

Drive may not be a masterpiece, but it’s a very good movie. It’s an exercise in stylish film making that successfully marries a few modern day cinematic sensibilities (graphic, unflinching and realistic scenes of violence, for one) with the moody, broody pacing and look of a downbeat ’70s crime flick. The ending felt a little rushed and there are a few moments along the way that seem as though key plot elements ended up on the cutting room floor, but these are modest criticisms of an otherwise stellar example of a film maker and star willing to step outside the boundaries and self-imposed limitations of Tinseltown’s typical present-day output. That it appealed to so many gives cause for celebration and proves that, regardless of the recent studio trend to to the very centre of the Bell Curve and the proclivity for the Academy Awards to stack calculated, sentimental dross like Warhorse and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close ahead of films like Drive (or Melacholia, Take Shelter or any of 50 other superior films), a core audience remains for works that challenge and confound us. Drive is one of those films.

At the very least, I now have another online filtering tool to search out films that might prove interesting. I intend to watch anything and everything described as “critics-bait” in audience movie forums.