fahrenheit 911 Tagged Articles at Cinematical

With the news that the musical score from The Dark Knight has been disqualified from Academy Awards consideration on the grounds that too many people were credited with composing it, outrage against the Academy's stringent, complicated rules has erupted afresh. In the interest of fueling this indignation and making the world an angrier place, let's take a belligerent march down memory lane and look at seven other controversial disqualifications.

The Jazz Singer disqualified for being a talkie. When the very first Academy Awards were held in May 1929, honoring films released between August 1927 and July 1928, everyone was talking about The Jazz Singer -- the first feature-length movie to use recorded sound in some of its talking and singing scenes. So great was the attention that the Academy disqualified the film from the inaugural Best Picture category, reasoning that its use of sound put it on an uneven playing field against the films still stuck in silence. Instead, the Academy gave Warner Bros. a special award "for producing The Jazz Singer, the pioneer outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry." It's true, too! I don't know if you've noticed, but pretty much all movies nowadays have talking in them.

Young Americans disqualified from Best Documentary category ... after it already won. Whoops. This is a sad case, and a unique one. The documentary, about the peppy Young Americans show choir, won the Oscar at the 1969 ceremony for being the best feature-length documentary of 1968. But a few weeks later, the Academy discovered that the film had screened at a theater in October 1967, making it eligible for that year's awards and not for 1968. The Academy actually took back the Oscar statues from the filmmakers, Alex Grasshoff and Robert Cohn, and gave the award to the film that had been first runner-up. When Grasshoff died earlier this year, his widow told the Los Angeles Times how heartbroken he'd been. Can you imagine?

By now we all know that Michael Moore doesn't make documentaries like our grandfathers did. He's a master of polemics, using his films to rail against corporations, guns, governments, insurance companies, and whatever else riles up his David vs. Goliath sensibility. When his most recent project was announced in May, it was described as a sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11 that would "tackle what's going on in the world and America's place in it," as pointed out by The Hollywood Reporter. Now, however, THR says the film will focus on "the global financial crisis and the U.S. economy."

Moore is still "feverishly shooting" and it's hoped the film will be ready for release next spring. At first blush, though, it sounds like he decided to make the mid-project adjustment in reaction to (or in anticipation of) the Democrats' victory. Without Bush to bash, and without the Republican Party in control of Congress, how much mileage could he get out of criticizing U.S. foreign policy with a new President steering a (presumably) different course?

Unlike many documentary filmmakers, Moore appears to start with a conclusion on his projects and then search for footage to back it up. Documentarians often say they don't really 'find' their film, or discover the story, until they're knee-deep in editing, but it doesn't sound like Moore works that way. Which doesn't mean his films lack meaning or substance or entertainment value, just that they're more like personal essays than traditional docs.

The latest documentary from Michael Moore will be released exclusively online beginning September 23. FOR FREE. Yes, that's right, and it's a dream come true for both Moore's fans and those millions of anti-fans that despise him. For the followers it's obviously good because they don't have to wait very long to own a copy of the movie. For the enemies it's good because they can check out the movie without giving the man a dime. Or be witnessed buying a ticket.

The 97-minute film is titled Slacker Uprising (formerly Captain Mike Across America), and it's about Moore's 62-city tour during the 2004 presidential election, as he attempts to rally young "slacker" voters. The premise doesn't sound quite as intriguing as his last election-year release, Fahrenheit 9/11 -- which may be part of the reason this one is not receiving a proper theatrical opening. But Moore also says this method is particularly to thank his fans as the 20th anniversary of Roger & Me approaches.

It wasn't that long ago that documentaries carried the stigma of being educational first and entertaining second. As with foreign-language fare, an audience for them lingered on the fringe, and an industry was willing to offer them their very own awards, but they really weren't terribly high-profile box-office prospects... that is, until the '04-'05 summer successes of Fahrenheit 9/11 and March of the Penguins made it seem perfectly okay for audiences to see, and for studios to market, a film without so much as one measly explosion in it.

But then along comes American Teen: a film openly marketed as - and arugably assembled to be - anything but a documentary that finds itself underperforming in its current limited runs (it goes wide this Friday). Last May, I witnessed a group of young women leaving whatever indie they caught at Washington D.C's Landmark E Street Cinema as they approached the film's poster and wondered aloud if someone was remaking The Breakfast Club, with a tone that suggested neither horror nor concern, nor any great interest in the big, fat what-if scenario placed before them.

What I wonder now is, at what point did we begin to craft documentary filmmaking specifically to the masses, and then what happens when the masses simply don't show?