#abacus small enough to jail

[spector]

ive decided to watch a letterboxd combo of 4 documentaries set in new york. why documentaries, bc i love them. why new york, because i played ps5 spider-man game and i rly liked the way they depicted the city in the game so im hankering for more of that, depictions of a city in a visual artform

im writing down some movies id like to see when im back at my place and i have proper internet and im writing them here bc i dont wanna log onto letterboxd on this borrowed laptop

pretend it’s a city (currently watching)

dark days (this has been on my watchlist FOREVER and i tried watching it but the stream is soooo choppy :((()

abacus: small enough to jail (I ALSO TRIED WATCHING IT ON THIS SHITTY LAPTOP B UT THE STREAM IS TOO CHOPPY)

the booksellers (who doesnt love a doco about bookshops)

jean-michel basquiat: the radiant child (im sooo overdue on some basquiat doco)

[leaarong]

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

[denimbex1986]

'Christopher Nolan’s mega-hit Oppenheimer features dozens of historical characters, but among them you won’t find Ted Hall. And yet Hall, who went to work on the Manhattan Project as a teenage wunderkind physicist, occupies a significant place in the overall story. As a fresh-faced and idealistic youth, he shared top secret details of the atom bomb’s design with Soviet agents — but he was never prosecuted for it.

The incredible tale of Hall’s act of espionage, and the moral considerations that motivated him, is told in Steve James’ new documentary A Compassionate Spy. Magnolia Pictures opens the documentary in limited release today.

“Ted was an extraordinary person, and it’s an extraordinary story,” observes James, the Oscar-nominated director of Abacus: Small Enough to Jail and Hoop Dreams. “Here’s this guy who graduates from Harvard in physics at the age of 18, is selected to become a junior physicist at Los Alamos…. He voluntarily makes the decision that he is going to pass secrets to the Soviets, and he does so, and he gets away with it.”

At the Los Alamos laboratory, where research on the Manhattan Project took place under the highest security, Hall played an important role on a team designing the critical implosion system for the bomb that eventually was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Unbeknownst to Hall at the time, one of his colleagues on that team – Klaus Fuchs – also was passing secret information to the USSR.

“Klaus is portrayed very, very briefly [in Oppenheimer],” James notes. “You meet him in one scene [when] he is put in charge of the implosion team, which is where Ted ended up working… When it’s revealed [in Oppenheimer] that Fuchs was arrested for espionage, Nolan has to do a flashback to remind us of who this very minor character was. So they don’t really get into it. It’s really much more focused on the pursuit of Oppenheimer as the guy that was probably the spy, not the guys who actually did the spying. Ted is not mentioned at all.”

Nolan’s film shows how J. Robert Oppenheimer became the target of increasing suspicion during the Red Scare of the 1950s, and his Communist sympathies as a young academic two decades earlier were used to justify the revocation of his security clearance. That effectively ended his capacity to continue research in nuclear physics.

James says Oppenheimer, which he calls “very accurate to the history,” prompted him to reflect on the similarities between the subject of that film and Ted Hall, and where the paths of the two scientists diverged.

“They both were Jews, they both were leftists. Ted, all of 18 and 19 years old, seems to have had a much deeper understanding of the threat and danger posed by what they were creating than Oppenheimer did until after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then Oppenheimer — it really kind of hit him like a ton of bricks,” James tells Deadline. “It’s understandable in some ways. Oppenheimer was in charge of this entire endeavor. He couldn’t afford to probably have the kind of misgivings that Ted could, but it is amazing to me that this young man — not even a man; he’s 19, a teenager — and with no access to the president or Gen. Groves [director of the Manhattan Project] or any of the upper echelons of what’s going on in the U.S. government, he gleaned what he gleaned to be the potential danger.”

That danger, in the eyes of the young Hall, was that a world in which one country – and one country only — controlled such an awesome weapon of mass destruction would be inherently dangerous and unstable. He could see – and there was evidence to support his view, given what the U.S. had done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – that a nation possessing this capacity to the exclusion of all other countries would be inclined to use it.

“In my mind, this was a question of protecting the Soviet people as well as all people from wanton attack,” Hall explains A Compassionate Spy, “preventing an overall Holocaust that would affect the entire world, really.”

Hall’s remarks in the documentary come from interviews recorded shortly before his death in 1999. Remarkably, James was able to speak with someone who had intimate knowledge of Hall’s thinking – his wife Joan Krakover Hall, a brilliant woman in her own right. Ted and Joan met in Chicago after World War II, and fell intensely in love, their bond strengthened by a common sense of moral obligation to forge a more just world. They were married for more than 50 years before Hall’s death. The director interviewed her at her home in Cambridge, England in 2019 (she died just last month at the age of 94).

“I was just really taken with Joan and taken with what an amazing woman she was and this kind of amazing marriage that they’d had,” James says. “I came away from it saying to my colleagues, ‘This is certainly an espionage story, and it’s a story about geopolitics and World War II and the Bomb, but it’s also a love story.’ And I love the idea of sort of looking at these huge, important things in history through this lens of this couple.”

Ted Hall, in the archive interviews, appears a quiet and desiccated figure – bearing a resemblance to the Mr. Burns character in The Simpsons. He wasn’t incapable of humor, however, mentioning at one point, in reference to his Communist leanings, “I saw the world through rather pink-ishly colored glasses.” Joan, in her 90s, remained a dynamo with crystal clear recall. “She’s the firebrand in the couple,” James muses.

To visualize Joan and Ted’s recollections, James filmed dramatizations of their early years together and their close friendship with another young man, Saville “Savy” Sax, who had acted as a courier to transmit Hall’s information to the Soviets in the 1940s.

“I felt like it was essential to bring this story to life, because the stories that Joan and Ted are telling… they were so specific,” James says, “and in my mind, quite dramatic that there would be no way to bring them to life unless we did recreations.”

Among the scenes James dramatized was one where Joan, Ted and Savy realize government investigators are zeroing in on their espionage activities. They converse in a park in wintry Chicago, conscious that they’re being watched.

“We need to get the handlers a message,” Savy (Nicolas Eastlund) whispers anxiously. Ted (J. Michael Wright) responds tensely, “Take it one day at a time, but admit nothing.”

“We both realized that the risk was horrible,” Joan says of she and Ted. “I quail inside even now when I think how my parents would have reacted supposing that we were arrested.”

How can it be that neither Ted, Savy, nor Joan – who could have been considered an accessory after the fact because she knew what her husband had done – were never prosecuted? The film emphasizes that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who are described in the film as “small fish” compared to Ted, were executed for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union, but the Halls and Sax remained free.

To reveal the answer would constitute a spoiler. But it has to do with Ted’s older brother Ed, a genius-level engineer too; as a colonel in the Air Force he designed the intercontinental ballistic missile system.

“Even when [investigators] pressured [Ed] subsequently to provide information about his brother, he refused at risk to his own career,” James notes. “Talk about an incredible devotion between two brothers.”

A Compassionate Spy can be seen as a film about loyalty – between spouses, between two brothers, between a person and their ideals. Did Ted Hope owe more loyalty to his country, or to humanity, which he saw as imperiled by the U.S. holding a monopoly on atomic weaponry? That’s for an audience to decide.'

[greensparty]

2023 IFFBoston Wrap-Up

From April 26 to May 3, I got to enjoy my favorite film festival in Boston, in Massachusetts and possibly the world is Independent Film Festival Boston (read my coverage here). I have a special place for this festival: in 2014 my documentary Life on the V: The Story of V66 had its World Premiere at the festival, and in 2015 I was on the Documentary Jury. Here is my lightning-round of this year’s fest:

Wed. 4/26:

Brooklyn Sudano’s intro at IFFBoston

Opening Night Film was the documentary Love to Love You, Donna Summer. Co-director Brooklyn Sudano (daughter of Donna Summer) did an intro and post-screening Q&A. The doc premieres on HBO this month. This is a solid doc about a pop icon. Some parts make you want to dance, not just the music in the doc, but the pacing and editing make you want to tap your feet. But then the doc brings it down a notch for some of the more serious aspect of Summer’s life. 

Thurs. 4/27:

I caught the low-budget quirky indie comedy Free Time. A young NYC Gen Zer decides to quit his job, not be confined to his job and enjoy his 20s - but then realizes he might’ve made a mistake. There were some inspired laughs and definitely things New Yorkers will identify with, but overall I felt like this was a short film that got stretched into a feature.

Fri. 4/28:

Penny Lane (left) doing a Q&A at IFFBoston

Penny Lane has made some great docs in the past: Nuts! was one of my 10 Best Documentaries of 2016, Hail Satan! was one of the highlights of the 2019 Boston Underground Film Festival, and Listening to Kenny G. was really good too! Now she has turned the camera onto herself as she donates a kidney in Confessions of a Good Samaritan. Penny is both the subject and the documentarian as she decides she wants to donate a kidney to a stranger and not only does she document her own journey to this procedure but she speaks to experts in altruism and organ donation. It looks at a lot of different layers and important questions this asks. It was highly thought provoking and nothing but respect for Penny in turning the camera onto herself in this deeply personal experience.

Sat. 4/29:

The Dogmatics and crew at IFFBoston

When I was making my V66 documentary a few years back, I interviewed members of Boston garage rockers The Dogmatics because they were popular on the 80s music video TV channel V66. Skip ahead to 2019, I had heard about a documentary being made about The Dogmatics, so I reached out to director Rudy Childs and producer Jada Maxwell. We met up, talked shop and I stayed in touch with them about the project over the years. A few months ago I was lucky enough to see an early screener of The Dogmatics: A Dogumentary and I am proud to be a Consulting Producer. Even though I saw a screener months ago, I liked it better watching it with an audience. This is very much an audience movie!

Sun. 4/30:

Dave Lindorff (left) at IFFBoston

One of my favorite documentarians Steve James (Hoop Dreams is one of the greatest docs ever and I was a big fan of his docs Life Itself and Abacus: Small Enough to Jail) returns with A Compassionate Spy about controversial Manhattan Project physicist Ted Hall. I didn’t know much about him before this doc, but it was truly fascinating. Many of his docs are him following the subject as their story is happening. Here it is more of a traditional documentary with archival footage, modern day interviews with Hall’s widow and re-enactments. Following the doc was a Q&A with producer Dave Lindorff. 

Dave Habeeb at IFFBoston

Later on I went to Somerville Theatre to see the doc (big year for docs at IFFBoston!!!) Beautiful Was the Fight about several Boston female musicians and their struggles in the music community. I didn’t know some of the musicians featured here, but I was really intrigued by it. Structurally this is different from a lot of Boston music docs, but it made a point about not just sexism, but also Boston as a music city without much industry representation, making it in the music world in the digital age and a larger question of what qualifies success. Director Dave Habeeb (a graduate of Fitchburg State, my alma mater!) did a Q&A afterwards!

Mon. 5/1:

When Mary Tyler Moore died in 2017, much of her legacy that was memorialized was The Mary Tyler Moore, one of my favorites. To this day the “Chuckles Bites the Dust” episode is one of the greatest episodes in sitcom history! But she left behind such a body of work in TV, theater and film, as well as philanthropy. In the doc Being Mary Tyler Moore, she gets the documentary treatment she deserves. I wasn’t too familiar with her background, but her comedic skills on The Dick Van Dyke Show and her own show were actually matched by her dramatic skills as well in such films as Ordinary People. Watch for this when it’s on HBO.

Tues. 5/2:

I went to see the upcoming HBO doc Time Bomb Y2K, which was produced by Penny Lane, whose doc Confessions of a Good Samaritan I saw on Friday. In the mid-late 90s there was tons of concern about the Y2K bug of computers not being able to understand the year 00 and how they could cause mass chaos for everything connected to computers, i.e. banks, public transportation, utilities...pretty much everything. Was the world going to end on Jan. 1, 2000? This doc is made up entirely of archival footage showing the countdown from 1995 to the year 2000. I dug this because even though it was a legit concern, from the standpoint of 2023, looking at a time before the terrible things we’ve faced since, Y2K hysteria seems tame by contrast.

I also caught the Shorts Gloucester Documentary shorts program. I went because my friend James Rutenbeck (who has had docs at IFFBoston in the past), had a short doc Nixon’s Reversal that was in the program. It looked back with both scholars and archival footage at a brief moment when President Nixon supported a policy that would guarantee American families basic income. This is a piece of history I didn’t know about and was intrigued by. That Nixon of all people was on board with this was mind-boggling. Hats off for the archival footage too.

Wed. 5/3:

Celine Song at IFFBoston

Closing Night with Past Lives. I’d been hearing a lot of great things about this in recent months and honestly, it was my favorite movie of this year’s IFFBoston. It shows Nora and Hae Sung, a girl and boy in Seoul. Their budding romance ends when her family moves to Canada. Twelve years later, they re-connect on social media and begin talking while she’s a student in NYC and he’s a student in Korea. Then twelve years later they reconnect again when he visits NYC, this time Nora is now married. I really got into the way the story was told over the course of 24 years and how people change, evolve, process and move on. Director Celine Song did and intro and then did a Q&A with festival director Brian Tamm. A24 is releasing this in June - go see it!

Cheryl, Rudi and me at IFFBoston after-party

Afterwards, I went to a wrap party, where I got my picture taken with Cheryl Eagan-Donovan (director of All Kindsa Girls, the doc about The Real Kids), Rudy Childs (director The Dogmatics: A Dogumentary), and me (director of Life on the V: The Story of V66 about V66)! Three Boston music documentarians walk into a bar....

It was another great IFFBoston and now I need a nap from all of the films and activity I did in that 8 day period!

For info on IFFBoston: https://iffboston.org/

[pdremaster]

Abacus: Small Enough To Jail - Official Trailer [Upscaled 4K]

[heatexhaustion]

[tardisman14]

Documentary Feature

“Abacus: Small Enough to Jail,” Steve James, Mark Mitten, Julie Goldman “Faces Places,” JR, Agnès Varda, Rosalie Varda

“Icarus,” Bryan Fogel, Dan Cogan

“Last Men in Aleppo,” Feras Fayyad, Kareem Abeed, Soren Steen Jepersen “Strong Island,” Yance Ford, Joslyn Barnes

[aioinstagram]

Darkest hour The square” värd att vinna is Trending on Wednesday January 24 2018 http://www.aioinstagram.com/darkest-hour-the-square-vard-att-vinna-is-trending-on-wednesday-january-24-2018/

Aftonbladet says: The square” värd att vinna

Top 1 articles about Darkest hour:

Gary Oldman borde vara lika säker vinnare för rollen som Winston Churchill i ”Darkest hour”. En mycket gripande roll i en film som utspelas under samma vår 1940 som ”Dunkirk”. Oldman har haft en imponerande karriär och har gått från Sid Vicious till

Trending Images of Darkest hour on Instagram:

This Darkest hour’s photo Trending 1 on Instagram, Photo credit to Instagram

Description: @Regranned from @daniellepate4 – “I believe grief is our most powerful confession, because it cracks our hearts wide open. The Spirit prays for what we need in that moment, in ways we can’t imagine. This kind of physical expression of confession keeps our hearts clean. Tears are a soul-cleansing way to release any seeds of bitterness. Deep grief can take us to new depths of brokenness and surrender. In the depths of grief we realize mourning brings the comfort of God, and above all, God is waiting to rescue us in our darkest hour. Isn’t that what faith is all about—trusting God is working something beautiful and beyond our wildest imagination? Jesus, in the flesh, joined our sufferings in life and death. But the third morning after his death, at dawn, he gave us an example of exceeding abundance. A promise of hope for all who believe.” #grief #brokenhearted #brokenness #painfulseason #focusonhim #soulcleansing #griefandloss #comforted #weepingmayendureforanight #joycomethinthemorning #joycomesinthemorning #needforcomfort #mourning #darkesthour #grievingprocess #sensitivesoul #bottledupemotions #expressyouremotions – #regrann

This Darkest hour’s photo Trending 2 on Instagram, Photo credit to Instagram

Description: In preparation for Darkest Hour (2017), Gary Oldman spent over 200 hours in makeup undergoing a radical transformation that necessitated ‘fattening’ his body with prosthetics weighing half his own weight. Also according to Gary Oldman the cigar budget alone for the film was over £18,000.

This Darkest hour’s photo Trending 3 on Instagram, Photo credit to Instagram

Description: Brief moments of Gary with former co-stars Jason Clarke and Denzel Washington at SAG Awards

(standing ovation

)

#GaryOldman #DenzelWashington #BookofEli #JasonClarke #Lawless #Child44 #PlanetoftheApes #DawnofthePlanetoftheApes #SAG #SAGawards #SAGAFTRA #DarkestHour #WinstonChurchill #BestActor #awards #standingovation #actorslife #filmmakers #entertainment #events #gentleman #dappermen #elegance #menwithstyle #menwithclass #highfashion #gentlemanstyle #LAlife #LAevents #Hollywoodlife

This Darkest hour’s photo Trending 4 on Instagram, Photo credit to Instagram

Description: Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman) baru saja diangkat menjadi Perdana Menteri Inggris ketika terjadi Perang Dunia II. Namun ia langsung dihadapkan pada sebuah pilihan untuk mengikuti perjanjian damai yang dinegosiasikan Nazi dibawah Komando Adolf Hitler atau memilih berdiri teguh untuk memperjuangkan cita-cita dan kebebasan bangsanya. Ditengah ancaman invasi dan bombardir yang menimpa Inggris. Churchill harus bertahan di masa kelam, menyelamatkan 335.000 serdadu mereka yang terjebak oleh tentara Nazi di wilayah Dunkirk dan berusaha untuk menggalang dukungan untuk memunculkan perubahan. Dibintangi oleh: Gary Oldman Kristen Scott Lily James Stephen Dillane Ronald Pickup === #bioskop #bioskoptrailer #darkesthour #b_darkesthour

This Darkest hour’s photo Trending 5 on Instagram, Photo credit to Instagram

Description: Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman) baru saja diangkat menjadi Perdana Menteri Inggris ketika terjadi Perang Dunia II. Namun ia langsung dihadapkan pada sebuah pilihan untuk mengikuti perjanjian damai yang dinegosiasikan Nazi dibawah Komando Adolf Hitler atau memilih berdiri teguh untuk memperjuangkan cita-cita dan kebebasan bangsanya. Ditengah ancaman invasi dan bombardir yang menimpa Inggris. Churchill harus bertahan di masa kelam, menyelamatkan 335.000 serdadu mereka yang terjebak oleh tentara Nazi di wilayah Dunkirk dan berusaha untuk menggalang dukungan untuk memunculkan perubahan. Dibintangi oleh: Gary Oldman Kristen Scott Lily James Stephen Dillane Ronald Pickup === #bioskop #bioskoptrailer #darkesthour #b_darkesthour

This Darkest hour’s photo Trending 6 on Instagram, Photo credit to Instagram

Description: #DarkestHour wins two Critics’ Choice Awards for BEST ACTOR and BEST HAIR & MAKEUP! Congrats to Gary Oldman and Kazuhiro Tsuji.

This Darkest hour’s photo Trending 7 on Instagram, Photo credit to Instagram

Description: Gary Oldman and Millie Bobby Brown in a few lovely pictures at the SAG Awards

#GaryOldman #GiseleSchmidt #MillieBobbyBrown #SAG #SAGawards #SAGAFTRA #DarkestHour #WinstonChurchill #StrangerThings #BestActor #awards #actorslife #filmmakers #entertainment #events #eventphotography #gentleman #dappermen #elegance #menwithstyle #menwithclass #highfashion #mensgrooming #gentlemanstyle #mensaccessories #womenstyle #womenfashion #LAevents #Hollywoodlife

This Darkest hour’s photo Trending 8 on Instagram, Photo credit to Instagram

Description:

@sagawards a great brief excerpt from Gary’s emotional and beautiful speech accepting the SAG award for his Winston Churchill in @darkesthour. So well deserved!!!

#GaryOldman #SAG #SAGawards #SAGAFTRA #DarkestHour #WinstonChurchill #BestActor #awards #speech #video #media #actorslife #filmmakers #entertainment #events #gentleman #dappermen #elegance #menwithstyle #menwithclass #LAlife #LAevents #Hollywoodlife

This Darkest hour’s photo Trending 9 on Instagram, Photo credit to Instagram

Description: The nominees for the #AcademyAwards have been announced. Here are the contenders for #BestPicture. Which one is your favorite? #MagicHausFilms

[10oclockdot]

True/False 2017 Festival Report, part 1:

in which I give capsule reviews of films that I viewed on March 2 and 3, the first two days of this year's True/False, in order of best to worst.

Casting JonBenet (Kitty Green, 2017) True/False alum Kitty Green, whose film Ukraine is Not a Brothel divided audiences at the fest three years ago, returned this year with a major work, fresh off its triumph at Sundance: a hybrid documentary experiment called Casting JonBenet. Green put out a casting call in the Boulder, Colorado area -- the site of the murder of child beauty pageant participant JonBenet Ramsey two decades ago -- looking for locals to audition for the roles of JonBenet, her parents, her brother, and a few more figures close to the case. One by one, these actors sit down in front of the audition camera, framed as precisely and hauntingly as an Errol Morris interview, and talk to Green about their knowledge of the case, their theories about the case, their everyday lives, and the tragedies in their pasts that would help them to get into their roles. The audition footage, shot in 4:3, comprises the bulk of the film, but is occasionally intercut with 2.35:1 footage of fragments of what looks like a larger JonBenet Ramsey project that was never made. Lest you assert that this was all underhanded and exploitative to hold an audition for a non-existent film, Green explained in the Q&A that she apprised the auditioners of the nature of this experimental project, and apparently all participants agreed to have their unscripted audition tapes turned into a documentary. Green added in the Q&A that it was quite difficult to explain the project to the auditioners since no one had made a film like this before (though it's actually pretty similar to Mohsen Makhmalbaf's 1995 film Salaam Cinema, but with some added formal ornament). Though the experiment has limited documentary value in the traditional sense, it nevertheless takes the temperature, albeit obliquely, of the community that's lived in the aftermath of this unsolved case. You also get to meet some regular people with stories nearly as bizarre as the role they're auditioning for. What's more, the film opens up inquiries into the nature of documentary truth and how it relates to the different orders of truth that an actor might seek when inhabiting a role. I found it mesmerizing throughout, and a few moments even had me bolt-upright in my seat. For instance, after playing footage of some auditioners discussing the theory that JonBenet's killer was actually her brother (who was a young boy at the time), Green cuts to a montage of child actors attempting to split open a watermelon by beating it with a flashlight. And as if moments like that weren't enough, it all ends with majestic staged sequence in which about two dozen of the actors perform as multiple copies of the same characters on a set of the Ramsey house. It nearly evoked a live-action remake of Rybczyński's 1980 short Tango, but far more operatic and far sadder.

The Force (Peter Nicks, 2017) A couple years back I happened to catch Peter Nicks's debut film, The Waiting Room, a Wiseman-esque documentary about the goings-on a major hospital's emergency room. His institutional focus continues in his sophomore project, The Force, which embeds the viewer in the troubled Oakland Police Department. The film opens just before a police academy graduation, where we see the graduating officers in a tight prayer huddle. The moment the prayer ends, they break into a raucous chant celebrating their identity as the 170th Academy class. And so the film establishes its dialectic: will this department base its esprit de corps on militaristic chest-thumping masculinity, or on a spiritual quest for their better angels? The film takes us on a two-year journey through that question, at times making me believe that the Oakland PD is absolutely reformable, and at other times making me believe that police departments in general, by some basic flaw in their institutional structure and ideological foundation, are beyond saving.        The Force is full of great insider footage that gives insight into the trials that beat cops and commissioners alike go through on a daily basis (during an excruciating tear gas training, the cadets are told, "You don't have the right to panic."). Eyewitness on an important moment in police history (2014-2016), the film tells the thorny facts of that history well. But throughout the film, Peter Nicks also deploys a series of subtle and utterly brilliant innovations on the art of observational documentary editing. Let me describe a few moments. Early in the film, a police officer is asking a man questions in a gas station parking lot when the suspect takes off running. Nicks's camera follows the action as well as it can, and a block away the officer tases the man as he's climbing over a fence. A moment later, as the officer describes the incident to justify his use of force, the footage from the incident replays, now intercut with the officer's body cam footage. These two pieces of tape corroborate his story. I know that the replay of footage doesn't sound like a major innovation (it's been around since at least Gimme Shelter), but the moment I saw it, it felt like a quiet breakthrough, or at least a powerful reminder of the evidentiary capacity of documentary, as well as the polytensuality of documentary images. Later in the film, another officer experiences a tense confrontation with an agitated man on the street. The officer manages to prevent violence from occurring, but by this point in the film we've already been made to realize multiple times that the Oakland PD is understaffed and its officers have to work 12-hour shifts that see them going from call to call, non-stop. As the officer drives away (we see him in close-up, with a thousand-yard stare), Nicks intercuts clips from the confrontation along with body cam footage of the same. Here, the replay functions as beleaguered memory. The empathy of the moment is remarkable.        There's plenty more to say about this expertly-made film, but it all boils down to one thing: I never thought I'd feel so much sympathy for the Oakland Police Department. From the very beginning, it's clear that Chief Whent sincerely desires to end corruption, that he cares about the community, and that he wants his officers to understand the validity -- even the patriotism -- of the anti-police protests. He tells them, "The core foundation of this country was a mistrust in government. And we are the most visible sign of that government." Elsewhere a Community Liaison pastor invited to address the unit adds, "The past stole your identity and ran up an incredibly high bill." It's a lesson we can all benefit from: we must know our history to know ourselves.

The Road Movie (Dmitrii Kalashnikov, 2016) True/False 2017 marked the North American premiere of this compilation documentary, an alternatingly rollicking and harrowing journey through the Youtube phenomenon of Russian dashcam footage. Director Dmitrii Kalashnikov said he went through over 3000 publicly-posted dashcam clips to make this film, which runs a bit over an hour and features a little over 100 clips ranging from driver's ed disasters to weather-related accidents to forest fire drive-throughs to surreal encounters with drug-addicts, swat teams, meteorites, and wedding parties. As a work of editing, it has some notable qualities -- particularly Kalashnikov's interest in oscillating between the funny and the horrifying -- but apart from its obvious voyeuristic enticements (in the Q&A, Kalashnikov said that all documentaries were voyeuristic), its main strengths are conceptual. For instance, what does it mean to take Youtube off Youtube, transforming it from a private diversion to a public, collective spectacle? What does it mean to make a supercut not of professionally-produced footage, but of amateur footage? If we accept the axiom that footage uploaded to Youtube marks a site of interest or desire (that is, people presumably do not upload footage that they do not find interesting, since they desire that others will take an interest in it), then what might such an aggregation of footage express about the collective fascinations and desires of the culture that produced it? Finally, I also noticed that throughout the screening, many audience members had trouble suppressing an impulse to issue hushed directives or invectives at the drivers of the cars on screen. The perpetual POV must have made it feel like we were watching a friend play Grand Theft Auto -- a friend who clearly, given the number of disasters we saw, definitely needed our advice.

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (Steve James, 2016) Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Stevie) is a towering figure in documentary. His latest project was made for Frontline, so it's somewhat smaller in scope and ambition, but his skill has not faltered, and the story is an important one. The film chronicles the story of Abacus Federal Savings Bank, which to date is the only bank against which a fraud lawsuit was brought relating to the 2008 housing collapse. If you haven't heard of this story before or this bank before, don't feel bad. Abacus is, the film tells us, the 2651st largest bank in America: a little community savings and loan serving the first-generation immigrant community in Chinatown, New York City. The prosecution was, the viewer infers, a careerist move from the District Attorney's office. They must've figured that the Sung family, which founded and runs the bank, wouldn't fight it. But the family did fight it, spending millions over the course of six years. And that's the real story here: not our leaders' hopelessly unjust response to the 2008 financial crisis, not the DA's ignorant (possibly racially biased) targeting and concomitant underestimation of the family, not even the subtle but important cultural differences in the way first-generation Chinese think about loans and money in general (though that part's fascinating), but rather the story of the family itself: pulling together, fighting tooth and nail, and, sometimes hilariously, arguing with each other for minutes on end over little things, like what their father's eating for lunch. Even if this film didn't strike me as a major work by a long shot, the True/False audience was clearly behind the Sungs, even breaking into spontaneous applause when the not-guilty verdict was read. In the Q&A afterwards, Steve James said that from now on he'd like to have the True/False audience for all his films.

Stranger in Paradise (Guido Hendrikx, 2016) Stranger in Paradise is one of those agit-prop experiments with a great concept but not-so-great execution. It opens with a montage of footage from all over, from Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat to news footage of the refugee crisis. Voice-over intones the tale of a spherical lump (earth) on which there emerged a conflict between North and South, "the worship of a god who supplies and demands," and a moral crisis of human movement and hate. It was a bracing way to get us started. Act 1 stages an experiment in which a white male actor portraying the xenophobic political perspective of Europe addresses a room of real refugees (men and women of color) stuck on the island of Sicily, speaks cruelly and superciliously to them, and improvises responses to their real questions. Act 2 repeats the scene with a different group of real refugees, but this time the white male actor argues the opposite: that refugees help the economy, and that it's Europe's moral duty to give back to the people groups from whom so much was stolen during the colonial period. In Act 3, the same actor holds a kind of mock hearing for each asylum-seeker, explaining why they will or won't be granted entry into Europe, and in the Epilogue, a single long take, the actor holds a semi-staged conversation with some passers-by on the street, talking about the project we've just viewed. To be sure, the film's heart is in the right place, but the edge of its satirical knife is dulled by two factors: second, it's simply not shot very well, and first, for all its attempts to satirically subvert the reactionary narratives of the refugee crisis, it still puts a white European at the center and relegates the voices of asylum-seekers to secondary importance. It wishes it were a Peter Watkins film, but it isn't.

[film-book]

Filmmaking Round-Up: Justin Lin’s ABACUS Adaptation Gets a Financier, Alicia Keys Set to Produce Jay Pharoah-led Rom-Com, Lionsgate Titles Ditch Theatrical Releases, & More http://filmbk.me/RdSNW3

[filmbook-netflix]

Filmmaking Round-Up: Justin Lin’s ABACUS Adaptation Gets a Financier, Alicia Keys Set to Produce Jay Pharoah-led Rom-Com, Lionsgate Titles Ditch Theatrical Releases, & More http://filmbk.me/RdSNMK

[yeswecancan]

Films in 2018 #26 Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, 2016. Directed by Steve James

★★★★★★ - - - -

[pacingmusings]

Seen in 2018:

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (Steve James), 2016

[frostahesmegabite]

The Judgement of Carrion

@daily-writing-challenge - Day 4 - Accomplish/Macabre [ Content warning: Blood, Guts, Gore, Bits of Torture, That sort of stuff. While there aren't pages and pages of it, it is present in this short story. I tried to find a balance of detail and keeping things light without going into ‘Hostel’ territory. ]

Human forts were a dime a dozen, easily found and half of them forgotten or falling to ruin due to the numerous war fronts that were constantly moving across the face of Azeroth to fight one force or another. Some lost to time, others to ruin, some to marauding forces and others simply abandoned because they were no longer needed. It was one of these Forts that Megahes had put to use for himself and probably his most comprehensive and long lasting pastime.

Clever little devices put into play to keep things looking abandoned and misused, neglected and falling to ruin. The place had not only been repaired but also reinforced with Magical and Mechanical Goblin ingenuity that was built upon with knowledge gained over the past several decades.

Inside of this fort, despite the fact it was never intended to receive an actual willful audience, was decorative furniture made of fine dark woods embroidered with rich velvets, soft silks and the finest wools and cottons coin could acquire. Tables stretching about with plates and goldware that no man or woman other than Megahes would ever see sat to present an atmosphere of riches on display. Trophy cases and stands line the walls with numerous weapons of both magical and mundane descent that perch over Armor Stands holding protective metal layers meant not just for Goblins, but all races.

If any ever came to somehow find the place and took the time to inspect any of it, they’d find that all of these items weren’t as ‘pristine’ as they may appear at a distance. Damage came to them all at some point or another. Blunted blades, shattered axe heads assembled to look presentable. Armor with gashes, pierced helmets or chest pieces, greaves with shorn metal by the thighs that most likely led to bleed outs.

The more one could look, the more they’d note that all of the gear was like walking through a museum of deathly wounds. All that stood or hung from the walls had a story of defeat and loss and probably before then, great triumphs, valor and victory… just to have their stories end here.

Megahes pays no mind to these things now though as he walks with his back rigid and straight, his arms back behind him with hands clasping the other arms elbow in some overly formal glide across the stone floor. His bright white and gold attire is a stark beacon amongst the dark colors and atmosphere of the room that one should have found comforting, but for some reason, only brought worry and dread with it as he moves about his untold business.

[ Artwork by the Magnificent Fishadee. No Fire or Light Shards floating about in this scene, purely put for clothing example. https://twitter.com/fishadee ] He stops, not worrying to look around for any watchers, for he knows there are none as he stops at a small wall just behind a staircase. “Rehorur decno Kudex.” A series of flashes occur around our Goblin and once completed a small stone panel slides off to the side and Megahes puts his hand into the slot. A sudden sharp ‘shing!’ sound is head and Mega’s neck tenses but for a moment before his hand is withdrawn. A mechanical but feminine voice perks up from the slot. “Welcome back.” “Hmm.” The only sound Megahes makes before he takes a step back and then to the left. The stone wall jars forward at an alarming speed, spikes erupting from her stone crevices meant to impale and kill any would-be intruders while giving Megahes the solitary moment that was needed to pass behind the crude defense into the wall beyond. Whether by measured practice or perhaps sensors, the trap quickly retreats and returns to normal, giving off no telltale signs of a hidden door or of Mega’s earlier passing.

The reason for all this secrecy? Hidden at the end of the staircase Mega was already descending. Humans had their specialties sure, jacks of all trades those people. But the one thing they never fail to make well?

Jail Cells and Prisons.

It was this singular reason that Megahes took over this once ramshackle Fort for himself. Though there weren’t many cells, there was no need. Three of them sat in a row at the bottom of the stairs, each outfitted with custom Arcano-tech that allowed for the arrival of a singular occupant that was soon set to magical and electrical suppression to keep them docile and incapable of action while time slowly allowed them to become dehydrated and starved to where strength or speed was no longer an issue either.

The work put into this place was one of Mega’s hidden creations of pride and in the past, its use went towards a sorted pastime of torturing whoever was unfortunate enough to get caught by one of his traps. Times change however and with Mega’s newfound religion, came the need to change how and why he did things while applying them to old hobbies. Today’s hobby however, only involved one other person beyond himself and Mega comes to stand right before him as electricity pulses through his frail, nearly starved frame.

“Brother Abacus.” A stupid name, false to be sure, but one that Megahes didn’t really care about either way. “I realize you don’t know who I am and that’s quite alright.” He leans in, voice dialing down as he speaks through the bars just as another tide of electricity bombards the ‘Brother’, causing him to whimper and whine in pain. “You have been found guilty of being a member of a Twilight Cult, one in fact, that was run by Dinthoqaf the Defiler.”

The cultist looks up, arms shaking in heavy tremors as he tries to look his would-be captor in the eye. They give out however, causing him to hit the ground with an exhale. His cracked and bleeding lips wobble, trying to say something, but the lack of strength made their efforts near useless. It was sad really, or at least it would be if Megahes cared about the man's condition in the slightest.

Megah glides over to a control panel on the wall and proceeds to flip a series of switches and dials which cause several mechanical tendrils to tear from the wall in Abacus’ cell that soon lash him to the same wall they originated from. His body was quickly drawn into an ‘X’ shape with limbs pulled tight and to their limits.

“You see. Your former… Employer? Boss? Leader.” Megahes hands lift and tumble in slow methodical circles as he tries to find the right word, but leaves it be. “Him and I don’t get along very well and thanks to his efforts, I find myself needing to improvise my tactics a bit. While I know he’s dead, face turned to slag and glass, I wanna make sure I get the job done correctly, meaning none of his followers try to take up his mantle. I’m sure you understand.”

He turns around and heads into the cell, worry of electrocution now gone thanks to the current state of affairs. “You see. I have this…” He pauses. “...Macabre little ritual I have to do every so often and believe me.” The Goblin laughs while looking up at the man while proceeding to straighten up his clothes, as if it mattered. “As much as people might want me to say I hate doing this… I don’t. I’ve been doing this to people way before you all found me and now. Now I get to put my hobbies to better use.”

Megahes’ hand comes up, his index finger pressing to his lips to tell Brother Abacus to be silent. His smile fades with the gesture and he reaches up, pressing his black and gold painted claw against the clothing of this man's thigh. Downward, slowly, it runs. Fabric quickly turns from a peasant-y brown to a heavy red and brown as flesh below seems to split before the clothing itself can.

Magic? Possibly. Insanely sharp claws? Not likely. But whatever it was, the man's thigh split open as if by scalpel and despite his starvation, he thrashes weakly in an effort to pull away. The machines holding his wrists tighten and continue to do so until the sound of bone is heard crunching.

This process continues on not just for mere moments but stretches of hours, lines drawn across flesh like sand. Megahes had nothing else to say and so, despite the protests and pleading, begging to let him go and he’d tell no one, Mega continued.

Soon, details were carved away, facial features, scalp and its rooted hair, ears. Nearly anything that could be taken and removed without outright killing this poor cultist was taken in some macabre movie of silence and torture and finally, when the man was nearest his end, Megahes opens his own shirt.

The metal embedded into his Chest that shines with the Light like a beacon in this squalor, practically vibrates as Mega runs his blood coated hands across its surface. Red blood made semi-translucent by the sheer shine, soon was baked and cooked black, all Vitae devoured, leaving Megahes to sigh in relief.

“I would ask you to tell the Defiler thank you for giving me this. But… we both know you’re never going to have that opportunity.”

Megahes runs his hand up from Brother Abacus' groin clear up to his collarbone, shearing clean through flesh and muscle alike. What came next was a grotesque shower of innards that began to fall and slop to the floor, leaving our would-be cultist inanimate and lifeless.

“Now to clean up and go home. Tonight’s my date night and I have so many things to accomplish before She gets home…” Soon, the jail cells were left dark and eventually the slow trickling of blood and various other liquids came to silence in the dark, waiting to be cleaned up and for a new subject to be taken.

[greensparty]

BEST DOCUMENTARIES OF THE 2010s, Honorable Mentions

In the 2010s, I, myself made a labor-of-love documentary Life on the V: The Story of V66. Working my tail off on tracking down old footage, interviewing countless former employees and musicians, and researching as much as I could and then promoting it at the 2014 premiere onward, I truly became a part of the documentary filmmaking community. I know how hard it can be make a good doc. Whether it is shining a light on a subject very few know about or profiling something that has been over-analyzed but in a new way, the strongest docs of the 2010s were the ones that didn’t play it safe and took chances. It was also a decade where there were more docs than ever being made. Between everyone having access to technology to shoot and edit and access to information online, just about anyone can make a doc now. Something to keep in mind with my list is that it’s my ranking of the best documentaries. In some instances I wasn’t even a fan or familiar with the subject. In other cases I was a fan of the subject but the documentary didn’t do it justice. As you can tell, I gravitate towards documentaries about pop culture, but there’s a variety of subject and themes. Here are the ones that mattered most (I disqualify Life on the V from this list BTW):

Honorable Mentions:

De Palma

2015  Noah Baumbach / Jake Paltrow

Out of Print

2014  Julia Marchese

Birth of the Living Dead

2013  Rob Kuhns

Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel

2011  Alex Stapleton

Filmworker

2017  Tony Zierra

Waiting for Superman

2010  Davis Guggenheim

Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles

2014  Chuck Workman

John G. Avildsen: King of the Underdogs

2017  Derek Wayne Johnson

Back in Time

2015  Jason Aron

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail

2016  Steve James

Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World

2017  Catherine Bainbridge

Amy

2015  Asif Kapadia

Searching for Sugar Man

2012  Malik Bendjelloul

SuperMensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon

2013  Beth Aala / Mike Myers

Boys of Summer

2010  Keith Aumont

[thefilmstage]

We used to kind of think of documentary as genre, but that’s a wholly inadequate way to categorize a form of filmmaking that really traverses every kind of genre imaginable. There are comedy documentaries, there are horror films. What is The Act of Killing, if not a horror film? There are thrillers and caper films. That film about the dolphin slaughter, The Cove, was like the documentary version of Oceans 11. The medium is expanding in so many ways, including pushing the boundaries of what we define as non-fiction with re-enactments, animation, all manner of manufactured realities that then become documentaries. I think these questions of ethics are more with us now and more urgent than ever. 

Steve James on documentary ethics, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, and capturing Chinatown.