lake of fire Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Back in January, we wrote about director AJ Schnack's (Kurt Cobain: About a Son) efforts to create awards for non-fiction filmmaking that would be ... somewhat more relevant than the Academy Awards. Back when the Oscar shortlist for docs came out, Schnack wrote an angry diatribe about the process and the films selected (and, more importantly, those that were not selected) that echoed the sentiments of many of us who write about, or make, documentary films.

Although I'm not at all displeased that Alex Gibney ultimately won the Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and would have been equally happy if No End in Sight had won, there were some glaring omissions in the Oscar shortlist that were truly appalling, most notably In the Shadow of the Moon and King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

What surprises were on Oscar's shortlist for Best Documentary? Which worthy contenders didn't make the cut? How is the documentary field changing in the face of new technologies? Does "Reality TV" really have an effect on documentary audiences? And is Michael Moore's long shadow finally moving on after years of looming over the field? Joining James this time on The Rocchi Review is journalist and performer Tamara Krinsky -- the Associate Editor of Documentary Magazine and the co-host of "That Indie Film Show" on Iklipz.com. You can download the entire podcast right here -- and we hope you enjoy; those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.

Documentary filmmakers deserve much more love and attention than they receive. One way to get more attention is to make the list of 15 documentaries short-listed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Variety has this year's list and cites three Iraq War-themed films as being "center stage": Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro's Body of War, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight (which Cinematical's Kim Voynar gave high marks when it played at Sundance) and Richard Robbins' Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.

Kim is a self-styled "documentary dork" -- her words, not mine -- and wrote a column two months ago about films she thought "have (or ought to have) a shot at Oscar gold." She included No End in Sight, as well as the following docs that all made the short list: Sean Fine and Andrea Nix-Fine's War/Dance, Michael Moore's Sicko, Daniel Karslake's For the Bible Tells Me So, and Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's Nanking. Kim was pulling for Logan Smalley's Darius Goes West, which sadly did not make the list. Other notable exclusions included David Singleton's In the Shadow of the Moon and Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

Here are the remaining eight that did make the list. First, the ones we've covered so far: Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire, Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen's The Rape of Europa, Weijun Chen's Please Vote for Me and Peter Raymont's A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman. Next, the ones we haven't seen yet: Steven Okazaki's White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which has played on HBO), Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side (due for release in January), Bill Haney's The Price of Sugar and Tricia Regan's Autism: The Musical.

Now the Academy's Documentary Branch will review the 15 films and narrow the list still further to the final five nominees, which will be announced on January 22.

Over on The Hot Blog, David Poland has the weekend box office numbers up, and the one thing that popped out at me, probably because I just saw and reviewed the film last week, is that Lake of Fire, which opened at Film Forum in NYC this weekend, did not do nearly as well as might have been expected. There's some discussion in the comments on Poland's post speculating on the whys and wherefores of the film's less-than-stellar opening, the main gist of which is that either the film did not appeal to people because no one wants to see the abortion process on a big screen while they're munching their popcorn, or because the film doesn't take a side on the abortion issue, and people who are passionate about it on one side or the other do not want to see the other side treated fairly.

I pondered this for a while this morning as I lingered over my Monday morning coffee. As I noted in my review of the film, Lake of Fire does give both sides of the debate equal weight, but I also think that the way each side will be perceived is in the eye of the beholder. I could see the film playing well in red states, because the film doesn't portray right-to-lifers (on the whole) as a bunch of nutcases. Sure, there are some some interesting folks in there, but there are also attractive women in there talking about why they are pro-life. And even the folks that a liberal might view as off-their-rocker (such as Assembly of God preacher John Burt and Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry) would probably be viewed by a lot of fundamentalist Christians as good, God-fearing guys who are simply passionate about their beliefs on the subject.

Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited and Ang Lee's Lust, Caution continued to duel one another for the top spot on the indie box office charts. Both expanded from their extremely limited Manhattan engagements last weekend, with The Darjeeling Limited earning $28,950 on average at 19 locations and Lust, Caution pulling in $21,530 at each of 17 locales, according to estimates by Leonard Klady of Movie City News.

The top earners in limited release were Michael Clayton, the heavily-advertised legal thriller starring George Clooney, which averaged $46,130 at 15 locations, and Blade Runner: The Final Cut, which earned $45,600 at just two locations. In his review of Michael Clayton, our own James Rocchi wrote: "I was hoping for a film along the lines of classic '70s Sidney Lumet or Alan J. Pakula; what I got was something more along the lines of an above-average '90s John Grisham adaptation." After a brief theatrical run, Blade Runner: The Final Cut will hit DVD in various incarnations on December 18.

Among new releases, Justin Lin's Finishing the Game scored the highest, bringing in $14,700 at one theater in Manhattan, while widely-discussed documentaries My Kid Could Paint That (average $3,390 on eight screens), Kurt Cobain: About a Son (average $4,700 on two screens) and Lake of Fire ($2,330 at one theater) struggled to find audiences. Jake Paltrow's The Good Night scored $6,250 each at two locations.

Several specialty releases increased their theater counts and at least three held up well. Sean Penn's Into the Wild expanded onto 135 screens and earned $9,410 on average, artful Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford rolled onto 61 screens and made $6,610 per screen, and Julie Taymor's musical Across the Universe played well at 364 theaters, averaging $5,030 per screen.

A key moment in Tony Kaye's black-and-white abortion documentary, Lake of Fire, sums up the film's philosophical stance on the issue quite succinctly: Alan Dershowitz, says simply, "Everybody is right when it comes to the issue of abortion." And although the film includes what could be considered "shock footage" -- things like a doctor casually washing off and examining the dismembered parts of a 20-week-old fetus in a colander to make sure he got it all out -- the film carefully avoids taking a clear stance on one side or the other of the abortion debate.

In that sense, Lake of Fire rather reminded me of last year's Jesus Camp, directed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, which also examined religion and politics with an eye toward objectivity. In both cases, your take on the message of the film will depend largely on your philosophical point of view. To a lot of people watching Jesus Camp, the evangelical Christians teaching children to be "soldiers for Christ" were downright scary; if you're an evangelical Christian, though, the film views almost like an infomercial or recruitment video for your cause -- of course it makes sense to convert souls for Jesus from the cradle up, and to raise children to be wiling to fight and die for their God. The same can be said of Lake of Fire, though if you lean strongly toward one side or the other of the abortion debate, Kaye's objective eye may be harder to discern.

After serving ten years in director's jail for declaring war on New Line Cinema over final cut of his debut film, American History X, Tony Kaye has been released for good behavior and gone back to his favorite subject: American extremism. His new documentary, Lake of Fire, is ostensibly a balanced look at the abortion debate in America, and two sides are certainly represented, but when you have Noam Chomsky in one corner and a snake-handling, chromosome-missing, relative-of-Leatherface type in the other corner, is that really a fair framing of the debate? Perhaps you think so, but either way, Kaye's film places such an overwhelming emphasis on abortion-clinic shooters, beady-eyed Biblical literalists and other non-negotiable types that his film ultimately comes across as pro-choice even if it's not intended to. In a film that lasts 150 minutes, there are perhaps five minutes devoted to exploring the position of, say, pro-life liberal Nat Hentoff, who lays out what I would consider a perfectly defensible argument for his beliefs. Couldn't we have had more of that?

Even though the film doesn't present the best possible argument for both sides in the debate, it also can't be denied that Kaye's natural strengths as a filmmaker -- his uncompromising eye and willingness to shock the audience -- are at full-tilt in this film. Specifically, he doesn't shy away even one iota from showing us exactly what an abortion is, what it costs everyone involved, and what is left behind after it's over. In what may be some of the most gruesome footage ever contained in a theatrically-released film, and boy am I not kidding, Kaye takes his small crew inside of abortion clinics and then points his camera (and our faces) directly into the medical waste that remains when an abortion is completed: fully-formed and dismembered hands, feet, heads, torsos, eyeballs, and all the rest of it. If you go in to see this film, know in advance that you'll have to see something that, whatever you choose to call it, is indistinguishable from a small baby cut up into pieces and floating in a pan of liquid gore.

With plans to screen 100 documentaries in just six days, SilverDocs 2007 gets under way Tuesday, June 12 with Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, directed by Jim Brown (no, not that one; this one), which promises to interweave folk music, social upheaval and Seeger's life and music. Among the six films competing for the Music Documentary Award will be Hip Hop Revolution (history of hip hop in South Africa), Kurt Cobain About a Son (the late musician narrating his own journey) and Nomadak Tx (from Spain, about two musicians and a "magical instrument"). The Beyond Belief program explores "faith, fanaticism, spirituality and ethics in civil society," according to the press notes, and includes the world premieres of Living Goddess (a young girl worshipped as the incarnation of a Hindu goddess lives peacefully in traumatic times) and Orthodox Stance (love that title: a young immigrant in New York City must balance his Hasidic beliefs with his rising career as a boxer).

Politically-charged movies are certainly on the agenda. Just three higher-profile titles that caught my eye: 14 Women (Mary Lambert examines the lives of female US Senators), Lake of Fire (Tony Kaye on abortion; the press notes say it's "carefully balanced," but this is Tony Kaye, whose insane career Erik just wrote about) and State Legislature (Frederick Wiseman spends 217 minutes on "the inner workings of the democratic process," specifically in Idaho). And then there's the latest by Liz Garbus (Coma relates the stories of four victims), Mike Mills (Does Your Soul Have a Cold?, in which Japanese marketers tackle antidepressants), Helvetica (which James reviewed at South by Southwest) and the local premiere of the controversial Nanking (which Kim reviewed at Sundance). Artic Tale is the closing night presentation. My head is swimming with the possibilities. Even if you aren't planning to attend, the film guide is well worth checking out to see the wide range of material that's screening this week in and around Silver Spring, Maryland.

If you're not at all familiar with Tony Kaye, then I suggest reading this new Telegraph interview with the infamous artist/filmmaker/lunatic. In it, they explore Kaye's entire career -- from growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home aspiring to be a painter to suing New Line for $275 million after they wouldn't allow him to credit himself as Humpty Dumpty on the final version of American History X, the man has pulled more elaborate stunts than ... screw it; no one has pulled more maniacal stunts than this man. Some might consider the man a genius (he's won a whopping 23 design and art direction awards throughout his career), but his wild temper and nonsensical actions once brought him to a point where no one in their right mind wanted to work with him.

For example, when New Line wanted to make changes to Kaye's first cut of American History X, the director proclaimed, "I'm fully aware that I'm a first-time director, but I need the same autonomy and respect that Stanley Kubrick gets." And that was him being nice. From there, he spent $100,000 of his own money taking out advertisements in the trades denouncing Edward Norton and the producer, he would show up to studio meetings with a Priest, a Rabbi and a Tibetan monk, and was so upset about the eventual 18 minutes of footage that was added in, he hasn't watched the finished film in 10 years. But that's just the short version; how in the world they found a way to get a great film out of this experience is beyond me, but reading about it is almost as much fun as watching it. The best part is that Kaye is finishing up a documentary about the whole experience called Humpty Dumpty, and guess who's distributing it? Yup, New Line.

But after spending 10 years in Hollywood prison, Kaye is currently prepping his first narrative feature since AHX, Black Water Transit. This time he's older, wiser -- and hopefully he's learned his lesson. Humpty Dumpty is set to get a small theatrical release, and then New Line will put it on the 10th anniversary DVD re-release of American History X next year -- a DVD I will purchase, even though I already own an older copy. Kaye's abortion documentary, Lake of Fire, finally premiered last year at Toronto after the director had been working on it for years. ThinkFilm will distribute later this year. What's your favorite Tony Kaye story?

Santa Barbara seems like a pretty cool place to hold a film festival; nice people, fancy cars, great weather, swanky restaurants ... and oh yeah, the movies. The Santa Barabarians are presently gearing up for their 22nd annual film festival, and I'm here to tell you what they'll be playing. Well, some of what they'll be playing. Well, the big titles anyway.

Based on what Variety tells me, the SBIFF will be offering a solid handful of world premieres, including Joel Schumacher's The Number 23 (which stars Jim Carrey and Virginia Madsen), Lake of Fire (a documentary about abortion that comes from the guy who directed American History X) and Christopher Plummer in Man in the Chair, which is a story about the last-surviving Citizen Kane crew member. Interesting.

Not premieres, but potentially quite interesting are "that Dakota Fanning movie" Hounddog, George Hickenlooper's controversial Factory Girl, Michael Apted's Amazing Grace and Sue Kramer's Gray Matters. The fest folks will also take some time from their busy screening schedule to honor filmmakers like Forest Whitaker, Bill Condon, Helen Mirren and Will Smith.

Plus a whole lot more. So if you live within, say, 40-some miles of Santa Barbara and you want to see some interesting flicks between January 25 and February 4, now you have something to do.