RobertGreenwald Tagged Articles at Cinematical

What if you could make your own film presenting your take on the Harry Potter character (someone in Georgia might be interested) or your opinion of what should have happened in X-Men: The Last Stand (comic book geeks everywhere wish they could)? Unfortunately, most fictional films involve intellectual properties and copyrights and other things that (legally) cannot be messed with by just anyone.

The same isn't true for documentaries, which tend to present facts or deal with truth, concepts that people don't regularly own or control. These facts and truths are often debatable, though, and can be argued or debunked via other documentary films. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was answered with Alan Peterson's Fahrenhype 9/11. Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me led to both Bowling for Morgan and Me and Mickey D. Robert Greenwald's Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price was responded to with Ron Galloway's Why Wal-Mart Works: And Why that Drives Some People C-r-a-z-y.

The latest rebuttal doc is aimed at Al Gore's claims in An Inconvenient Truth. Steven Hayward has begun work on An Inconvenient Truth ... Or Convenient Fiction?, a documentary that will be formatted in the same way as Davis Guggenheim's award-winning doc on global warming. Hayward, like Gore, will present his own thoughts on the issue through a similar lecture and slide show. But he isn't going to disagree with global warming altogether, just specific points that Gore supposedly got wrong.

The holiday season is the time to ask for those big items you've been wanting all year, those toys or gadgets or appliances or DVDs that were just too expensive to splurge on with your own money. And now, with the holidays being so associated with the expectation of gifts, Christmas lists (and Hanukkah lists and Kwanzaa lists, etc.) are made by kids and adults alike. Nobody wants to receive a gift they don't desire, and nobody wants to buy a present that the recipient will not like, so it is now common to go ahead and tell Santa, your parents, your spouse and/or your friends exactly what you want from them. And depending on the gift-giver, you probably will wish for ask for tell them to get you something big.

When it comes to movies, single-title DVDs just aren't going to cut it. Criterion editions are almost there, but not quite. No, for your present demands, you need something bigger, like a box set. The same can be said for DVDs as it can be for CDs, that box sets are the greatest gifts for the holidays because few people purchase them at regular times of the year. Nowadays there are DVD sets for just about every movie fan. For the documentary lover, however, there are some titles that must be purchased in a box set (due to them being series), and many of them are essentials.

Be sure to be specific on your list, because there are a lot of cheap doc sets out there that might be interesting to watch, but which are not well made and which were definitely bought at the nearby drugstore rather than the video shop. Don't let your gift-giver be confused and/or frugal. And if you are the gift-giver, this list may be a good source for ideas for what to buy your gift-receiver, but keep in mind that documentaries can be an acquired taste for some. Sure, a baseball fan may be into Ken Burns' Baseball and a jazz fan should enjoy Burns' Jazz, but you really never know for sure unless they tell you so directly. And at doc box prices, you don't want to go wasting your money.

It is no surprise that someone is planning a documentary about the Abu Ghraib scandal; there will probably be a few. Already there is Robert Greenwald's latest, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, which deals with one aspect of the prisoner abuse, and the PBS series Frontline has included the incident in its recent episode titled "The Lost Year in Iraq". However, there's a good chance that no others are or will be as good as the one Errol Morris is set to make. The project was announced Sunday by Diane Weyermann of Participant Productions (An Inconvenient Truth) during the American Film Market.

Morris has a habit of making docs that stand out even in the non-fiction genre, which despite having a seemingly general form is still comprised of distinct and divergent subgenres and styles. It is also important to point out that there is no way of knowing how this film will look or sound, considering none of Morris' films are anything alike. It is interesting, though, that he is going for another politically-tinged subject after making The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, for which he finally won his first Oscar (his most worthy, The Thin Blue Line, was ineligible for unfair reasons). As much as I will look forward to his take on Abu Ghraib, I kind of hope that he'll follow it with something less topical. There's enough political docs out there already, and Morris doesn't, or shouldn't, require such marketable subject matter.

Sony Classics, which also released The Fog of War, is already on board to distribute the film when ready.

Despite the unveiling of footage of Sicko in Toronto, we still have a while before Michael Moore's next documentary hits theaters. So, while he takes longer and longer to give us the politically charged films we crave, let us celebrate the quicker filmmaking of Robert Greenwald, who last year gave us the controversial Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (I keep fudging that title as "the high cost of living" -- anybody else?). In case you haven't been reading Cinematical for more than a few months, that film received a lot of attention; so much that I have decided to limit related links to this original story.

Greenwald's follow-up is already finished and is available on DVD next week (it is also receiving his usual scattered and limited theatrical screenings). Titled Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, the doc focuses on the private corporations charging exuberant prices for goods in Iraq (a six-pack of Coca-Cola for $45?), much of which is, in the end, paid for by American taxpayers. Among these corporations, Haliburton is obviously given great attention, and the company has already spoken out against the film calling it, "a theory in search of a conspiracy."

Personally, I keep hoping that Greenwald will deliver a follow-up to Xanadu (at least the soundtrack, anyway), but as I'm in the minority there, I'm glad that fans of his other films can keep getting more and more from him.

Robert Greenwald, the man behind both Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, is taking his aggressively liberal brand of filmmaking back to television. In collaboration with the Sierra Club and the ACLU, Greenwald - who has an extensive TV background - and his company Brave New Films are producing series that explore issues of interest to those groups, and about which they feel Americans need to be made aware.

The Sierra Club's series - logically entitled Sierra Club Chronicles - focuses on environmental issues, "consisting of seven half-hour episodes on topics like the lingering effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and how air pollution affected workers at ground zero in New York City." Playing only on a satellite channel called Link TV (What the heck is that, anyway?), the series is likely to get much less exposure that the ACLU's, which is being shown on both that channel and Court TV. The latter series, called The ACLU Freedom Files, is "a series of 10 30-minute episodes featuring real cases like that of Lindsay Earls, the Oklahoma high school student who ended up going all the way to the Supreme Court to challenge mandatory drug testing by schools."

As part of a continuing battle to combat the perceived conservative bias of the news media, Greenwald hopes to bring even more progressive issues before the public - he even talks of eventually purchasing a television studio in order to defray production costs. Given the disappointing impact of Al Gore's much-hyped Current TV, though, one wonders how much of an effect Greenwald's television work might realistically have.

According to director Robert Greenwald, the sale of the distribution rights to Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price after its Berlin screening have come despite the fears of some distributors that the mega-retailer will retaliate against them by refusing to sell their other films in its stores. A Wal-Mart spokesperson, of course, poo-pooed the very idea: "To say that we'd retaliate against a distributor for carrying this film is simply preposterous." Does that make you feel better, European distributors? Interestingly, Wal-Mart stores in the US are carrying neither Greenwald's film nor its company-sponsored response, Why Wal-Mart Works: And Why That Drives Some People C-r-a-z-y.

As a result of its well-received screening, Greenwald has arranged distribution for his film in Germany, the UK, and New Zealand and Australia, and a representative told reporters that "he expects to close on Spain, Benelux and France this week." According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film's subject matter is of great interest to much of Europe, where Wal-Mart is already massive retail force.