Weekend docs.

"Sorry, Ken Blackwell fans," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon, "but Adam Del Deo and James D Stern's mole's-eye view of the 2004 presidential race in Ohio, ...So Goes the Nation, is not about how the Republicans gamed the system and stole the White House. (You can certainly find that perspective elsewhere.) This is a conventional political documentary with a conventional view of what happened in the Buckeye State and why, but it's no less fascinating for all that."

More from Ed Gonzalez at Slant: "You will never again hear this many Republicans admit to Bush using fear to regain control of the White House.... In expertly tracing how Republicans play a better game of politics than Democrats, it also provides the party of Kerry and Clinton with a handbook to switching the tables around in 2008."

O'Hehir again: "Even if you already know, or think you know, what a massive bonanza the Iraq war has been for private contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater, Robert Greenwald's latest guerrilla-distribution muckraking effort, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, will disturb you profoundly."

"Jesus Camp doubles as a perfectly entertaining horror flick for secular progressives - or anyone outside the evangelical community, for that matter. But to leave it at that would be wildly off the mark and just as parochial as the triumphalist evangelicals depicted." And so, for Alternet, Evan Derkacz talks with directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. A torrent of comments follow. More on the doc from JR Jones in the Chicago Reader, James RocchiJames Rocchi at Cinematical, David Jeffers at the Siffblog and Richard Schickel in Time: "Jesus Camp seems to me most interesting (and poignant) as a portrait of denied and even desecrated childhood." And more on the "furore" it's unleashed from Dan Glaister in the Guardian.

Jeffrey Overstreet objects to Jeff Sharlet's review in The Revealer: "If this is 'the best work of journalism' on the subject, perhaps that says more about the state of journalism than it does about the subject of Christianity. Where is the great journalism about the kind of Christianity that I've encountered in a lifetime of Christian education, Christian community, and, yes, for all of its ups and downs, Christian conservativism? So far, I haven't seen it in the mainstream press."

Back at Slant, Jeremiah Kipp reviews Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple: "The film not only asks what went so maniacally wrong in Guyana, but more revealingly what were the good intentions that drove people there."

Michael Guillén has a good long talk with American Hardcore director Paul Rachman and screenwriter Steven Blush. Rachman: "Most importantly, this is the story of this generation that fell between the cracks. We weren't Baby Boomers. We weren't Gen-exers.... The hippies had Woodstock. My parents had Frank Sinatra. We had this and it hasn't been acknowledged."

The latest indieWIRE interview: Steven Cantor and Matthew Galkin's doc loudQUIETloud: A Film about the Pixies. "Boring people who made extraordinary music, the Pixies are inexplicable," notes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "The 'where are they now?' question is answered: nowhere very interesting."

Posted by dwhudson at September 30, 2006 4:02 PM