Docs, 8/8.

"For those of us who were there, the tone of current nostalgia for mid-70s NYC seems a bit disingenuous; those were some seriously fucked-up times," writes Will Hermes in the Voice. "The VH1 'rock doc' NY77 is a nicely textured if circumscribed portrait of the city's music scene that year, co-written by Jonathan Mahler, who wrote the masterful urban history Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City."

"My biggest beef with Michael Moore is that he's not about to win over anybody who isn't already on his side," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly:

Wouldn't a sober, nonpartisan recitation of inconvenient truths do more to win over hearts and minds? Are the silly music cues, cheap shots and hammy star turns from attention hogs like Moore and his annoying acolytes Morgan Spurlock and Kirby Dick really necessary to make a point these days?

Jean-Luc Godard once said the best form of film criticism is to make another movie, and so Charles Ferguson's astonishing No End in Sight has arrived just in time to show the agitprop crowd exactly how to open a productive conversation. With a marked absence of partisan editorializing and nary a hint of snark, this no-nonsense, just-the-facts-ma'am chronicle of our ill-fated Iraq occupation turns into a chilly autopsy of what might be the biggest foreign policy clusterfuck of our lifetimes.

I've never made a pronouncement like this before, but this is a film every American needs to see.

"Three years ago, Charles Ferguson's film might have made a difference," counters Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "A young Marine officer who has been testifying to his disillusioning experience during the war asks the camera rhetorically, 'Is this the best America can do?' But what is he responding to? The administration's record? The media's ineffectuality? Or is he warning us that if we withdraw before 'the job is done,' the battered US military will have fought and died in vain? That notion added several years and several thousand casualties to the toll of Vietnam. What we could use now is a documentary that gets it right before it's too late to mean anything."

"Maybe No End in Sight needed another two hours in length, like Spike Lee's extraordinary When the Levees Broke, a superior 'What the hell is wrong with our government?' documentary," suggests Brad LaBonte at the House Next Door. "Through ferocity or cool detachment, No End in Sight should have built to an explosion, but it fizzles out. The facts are moving, but the film is not."

Joe Garofoli has a long profile of Ferguson in the San Francisco Chronicle, noting, "he's hooked on making films. His next project: 'It's basically a movie full of conversations primarily about our contemporary romantic-marital commitment, our erotic condition.'" Earlier: "No End in Sight."

War Made Easy "uses Norman Solomon's recent book to perform an autopsy on the now-zombified propaganda surrounding post-1940s US war," writes Johnny Ray Huston in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "[Loretta] Alper and [Jeremy] Earp's doc skips smart-ass sarcasm and the usual air of incredulity in order to make complex points clear, and it does so skillfully and quickly."

"In most respects White Light/Black Rain is a graceful, elegiac treatment of one of history's most painful topics," writes Andrew O'Hehir, introducing his interview with director Steven Okazaki for Salon. "But Okazaki has included some devastating film footage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that has hardly been seen outside military archives.... These images of the devastated cities and their devastated people may haunt your dreams."

Related:

• Cathleen Rountree speaks with Okazaki as well.

• Michael Guillén's taken notes from a Q&A at the Pacific Film Archive.

• Cynthia Fuchs writes at PopMatters: "White Light/Black Rain's argument is at once simple and infinitely complex. Whatever courage emerged in the face of such devastation, however admirable the survivors surely are, the bombs were disasters, man-made and calculated. And that's the tragedy, at last, that any nation or group of individuals would be able to conjure and commit such brutality, for whatever reason."

Darcy Paquet at Koreanfilm.org: "For me personally, Our School was intriguing, but not nearly as involving and thought-provoking as Kim Dong-won's Repatriation, to name another local documentary that became a theatrical hit. I also found myself being more drawn in by another recent documentary that examined the relationship between Japan and Korea: Kim Deok-cheol's People Crossing the River (despite that film's structural faults)."

"Summercamp! is one of the better depictions of childhood I've seen in recent years," writes Steve Hyden, introducting his interview with co-director Sarah Price at the AV Club.

"In a show that flits among more composers and directors than it has the time to accommodate, [Francis Ford] Coppola offers the most trenchant commentary," writes Stephen Holden in a New York Times review of Lights! Action! Music!, a doc that can be seen on a few PBS stations. "Many of the rest of the comments by various composers are reduced to hyperbolic sound bites included to give viewers a chance to connect a director or composer's face with a few shallow observations."

Zoe Williams talks with Jennifer Fox about Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman for the Guardian.

For the Telegraph, Philip Horne previews Ten documentaries that shook the world, a season at BFI Southbank. August 11 through 31.

AJ Schnack catches up with his notes and pix from Silverdocs.

Posted by dwhudson at August 8, 2007 2:05 PM