My initial reaction was that I love Sally Potter but do I really want to watch a movie on my iPhone? I gave it a try, and it was an interesting experience. Each installment is around 18 minutes, so I made sure the phone was plugged in to avoid battery drainage. I watched the first two in quick succession, but then didn’t get around to viewing the rest, as I found it hard to find 18 minutes where I wanted to hold my phone in landscape mode. There is no crosscutting or editing at all, except to change from one interviewee to another, so it definitely feels like something shot on a phone.

The film itself is interesting enough; with a star-studded cast (Steve Buscemi, Dianne Wiest, Jude Law, Judi Dench…), and some intrigue, it holds attention. I ammore interested in the context , however — will people who watch this on mobiles form a different opinion from those who first see it in theaters or online?

The film. I went into this film with medium-to-low expectations.  I liked Sicko, and I generally enjoy Moore’s films with some reservations that I’ve already mentioned. This film is his best. It contains some of his trademark antics, such as driving a Brinks truck to banks to get the taxpayers’ money back, and, as usual, he does lengthy  interviews with victims of the crisis — people who have lost their jobs and homes while corporate CEOs get richer.

But instead of only attacking, ridiculing and exposing, the film also performs a good analysis of and potential solutions to the underlying problems. He traces a lot of the crisis to Reagan’s program of massive deregulation of the financial industry and subsequent gutting of the FBIs white collar crime division. The film gives a lot of time to the Republic Window and Glass takeover of December 2008, as well as to a couple worker-owned businesses, and calls for greater democracy in the workplace as well as in the economy.

Perhaps the most striking portions of the film are those involving Toledo Congressowman Marcy Kaptur, who opposed the bailout, calling bank CEOs criminals and accusing them of hijacking Congress. She has also called for people to stay in their home is evicted, and challenge the banks to produce an actual mortgage, which may be impossible in many cases, due to bank practices of chopping up loans and trading them.

The thesis of the film is that Americans are no longer in control of the economic system in the United States, and that we must act to reintroduce democracy into all areas of government. For Moore, capitalism as it is practiced today is antithetical to democracy, as it concentrates 95% of the wealth into 1% of the population, who then control financial regulations, tax codes and, generally, congress. He does a good job supporting this through historical analysis as well as anecdotal examples.

My biggest reservation about the film is the treatment of President Obama. The film posits Obama’s campaign as a desire for change in the system, which makes sense, but fails to evaluate his actions so far. It mentions that all of the major banks contributed heavily to his campaign, and it attacks Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, and company, but without making the relevant point that (as Aaron Petcoff points out) Obama appointed them, or without explicitly drawing the connections between the campaign contributions and the appointments. There is a case to be made the Barack Obama so far has done little or nothing to fix these problems. I suspect Moore doesn’t criticize him too much because it is early in Obama’s presidency, and the main point is not to  sit back and rely on elected officials, but to take action to keep them accountable.

This film should energize those on the Left. For those on the Right, I hope criticism of the film goes beyond ad hominem attacks (Moore is a hypocrite because he makes so much money in a capitalist economy; Moore is fat and loud and obnoxious, etc.) or taking small snippets out of context. I don’t really hold out much hope for this, but maybe this film, if nothing else, can spark serious discussion of our economic situation.

The observation is not about the movie, but the audience. Both times I saw this movie, first at about 1pm on weekday and next on Sunday night at 8pm, there were small children present. This film is extremely violent and has some explicit sexual imagery. Now, I’m not telling anybody how to raise their children, but last night I was watching the small girl, maybe 7 years old, down the row. During the sex scene, her mom was covering her eyes, but not during the violent scenes, like when Rorschach repeatedly drives a butcher knife into someone’s head. What message does this send about sex and violence? Violence = no problem, but sex, the thing that 99% of the world’s population will engage in and what many consider to be a natural, beautiful thing? Unfit for small children. I do realize that I sound like someone with no kids, and maybe I’m missing something, but that’s my unsolicited two cents.

Yes, it is faithful, and yes, it is good. David Edelstein said that the 1980s setting makes it seem dated; he even used the word “embalmed” to suggest the lack of life in the preservation of the comic. While it is set during the Cold War in the 80s, and Richard Nixon is still president somehow, the film speaks to contemporary issues and fears, which I will get to in a minute.

First, the cinematography is beautiful. The film looks a lot like the graphic novel. The soundtrack is well chosen, consisting in large part of popular songs from the 80s. Narratively, it follows pretty closely, with a lot of flashbacks and character development, which means that there isn’t really any masked crimefighting until almost two hours in, and which might be the factor that most contributes to the mediocre reviews this film is receiving.The special effects are good without being overwhelming. The fight scenes — well, they’re fight scenes (I’ve never been real big on that sort of thing and one must wonder how such long-retired heroes can suddenly spring back into action in acrobatic fight scenes, defeating dozens of foes without missing a beat, when I can’t even run around the block without stopping and gasping for air).

About the relevance to today:  the film is set in the 80s, and/but there are several shots in which the twin towers of the WTC are very conspicuously displayed. In one of the early scenes, Veidt gives a speech about power and fear and enemies, with the twin towers behind him, as a blimp slowly travels in the direction of one of the towers. During the entire shot, I couldn’t take my eyes off the blimp, waiting for the impact, which, of course, never happens. The speech he is making (and I will have to edit this later to include more specific reference to it, as I have already forgotten the details) has obvious connections to global terrorism and our response to it. Later, Veidt lectures a bunch of investors about the evils of fossil fuels, and how they are the root of the world’s problems. Linking oil and terrorism is nothing new, but the film posits many other connections to today’s geopolitical situation, and the conclusions it (along with the original) draws are not very uplifting.

I realize that the above analysis is clumbsy, but suffice it to say that the film is rich with complex philosophical and political allegories, as well as being well made and fun to watch, at least especially for those who have read the original.

This film tries to sketch out not a conspiracy theory, but the lines of influence in global capital and how entrenched these influences are in policy decisions. It also depicts the genesis of a couple of suicide bombers, who seem so innocent and likeable through most of the film. They become not mindless evildoers, but small parts of a larger machine created in part by the U.S. (the weapon they use in the end was provided inderectly by a CIA operative), and in part by religous ideologues. Even the religious zealotry is informed, in part, by economic policies.

As far as performances, George Clooney plays this role pretty subtly. He barely speaks, seeming like a hardened, almost beaten down operative, as if he’s seen and done too much and can no longer deal effectively with daily life, such as his family. He is more at home in Lebanon than in the U.S., and will do anything to escape the threat of a desk job. Matt Damon is, well, Matt Damon, as a partner in a financial firm/husband/father whose child dies. I think Jeffrey Wright, who plays corporate attorney Bennett Holiday, does a fine job of holding a lot of the film together. He plays the part quietly, with a constant look of restrained disgust, even as he moves to increase his own position by making paving the way for a huge coroporate merger, covering up some wrong-doing, sacrificing a few people to the government, and basically playing the power game from a seemingly weak position.

I will admit I didn’t know much about the film walking in, beyond Clooney and Damon, and that it was about oil and power. I found myself comparing it to Traffic, so I am not surprised to learn on checking imdb just now that the writer/director won the Best Screenplay Academy Award for Traffic. I kept wishing it had the color-coding cinematography Soderbergh used, but in the end I think one is supposed to take away impressions, vague ideas that incomprehensibly big and complex things were happening and that no event had a single cause.

via Hacking Netflix

As an echo to my comment at Julie’s, can someone tell me again why I switched my dissertation topic from Errol Morris to digital media?

The dialogue seems less forced, and is more explicitly political than vaguely philosophical as in the first, but that’s there too. She works for an environmental group, and there is a lot of talk about American imperialism, waste, consumerism, war and environmental issues. The philosophical is tempered by more practical, political concerns, especially on her part.

While the movie is, on the whole, satisfying, I found myself drifting from time to time. Linklater does a good job of varying the mise-en-scene with long tracking shots through Paris and various decors, like a cafe, or a boat on the Seine, but it is difficult to listen to people talk for 80 minutes. This is where I think Linklater succeeds better in Waking Life, a film where there is much more talking, in different venues and registers, spanning philopsophy, science, politics and religion, but where the use of rotoscoping holds the viewer’s attention and actually contributes to the meaning of some of the vignettes.

But Before Sunset is not meant to be challenging, at least not in that way. The challenge of this film is following and developing characters over years in a series of more or less uneventful films. In the DVD extras, Linklater says he would like to make several films with these two characters, creating a “document” of a relationship over decades. He must have been thinking about this when he put the two actors together in bed in Waking Life, blurring the line between reality and dream by having characters cross the boundaries between films and genres. Perhaps it is this as much as anything that I find compelling about Linklater: the willingness to experiment with character and situation, not only within a movie but over an extended period of time. If he continues with these characters, I would be happy to read the document.