Sock Puppets of Cité Soleil.

You may have read about the Wall Street Journal's expose and all the fallout over the revelation that the CEO of Whole Foods has been blogging for years on behalf of his own cause under the faux-biblical Internet alias of "Rahodeb". He's far from alone, as we've seen in the much-publicized Lee Siegel case at the New Republic.

Sockpuppetry is also alive and well in the world of movies, and in the latest case that's surfaced, we see that it has moved far beyond the pre-blog practice of creating "film critics" and parading their flattering judgments in ads and on posters, as Sony did with the reliably quotable "David Manning" back in 2001.

Updated through 7/20.

In an email sent out Friday from the address asgerleth79@gmail.com to asger_leth@yahoo.com, someone who gives the impression that he's Asger Leth, director of the documentary The Ghosts of Cite Soleil, is sending out a review entitled "Leni Riefenstahl Goes to Haiti," by Charlie Hinton of the Haiti Action Committee. Hinton has been a public critic of the film. The Leni Riefenstahl comparison tips you off to what's coming, an attack on the documentary that is purportedly endorsed by the director himself, even though the film is stigmatized as this era's version of Nazi propaganda. (And we thought that we had almost figured out what the neologism "blogofascism" actually meant.) In the message, "Asger Leth" praises the review that accuses him of carrying water for the Bush administration and neglecting crucial facts about Aristide.

Reached in his native Denmark, Leth claimed that neither "Asger Leth" address on the mass email was his and laughed at the effort at impersonation. "They want to discredit the film as much as they can, but they're pissing up against a hurricane," he said, citing a high percentage of positive reviews of the documentary. He described Hinton as an "Aristide freak."

In a previous dispatch, I described attacks on Leth at the San Francisco International Film Festival by Bay Area Aristide supporters who treat the former Haitian president with the same reverence once reserved by American leftists for Fidel Castro. Now, if you see a message that begins, "Fantastik!.... as you know for nearly 3 years I have worked tirelessly to bring my dark vision of Santo Domingo into the light...," you'll know: That's not Asger Leth.

- David D'Arcy.

Updates, 7/20: "What makes Ghosts of Cité Soleil so gripping, and so troublesome, is the intimacy that the Danish director Asger Leth has engineered with the Chimerès, without which there would be no picture," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman:

Several times during this film, I thought of Man Bites Dog, the 1992 mockumentary in which the complicity of a camera crew in the life of the hit man they are filming increases until they are raping and murdering along with him. Leth doesn't cross the line into criminality, but you can't be entirely sure that he wouldn't comply if 2Pac asked him to pass those bullets, or load that gun.

It doesn't make me proud to admit it, but that moral ambiguity is what gives this documentary its heat, and its edge. As with the best work of Errol Morris or Nick Broomfield, you never know from one scene to the next where your sympathies will fall.

"Leth's movie is politically and morally illiterate," argues the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. Yikes.

But at the AV Club, Noel Murray argues that "Leth has made something undeniably exciting" and gives the film a B-.

Posted by dwhudson at July 17, 2007 4:28 PM