Gateway Cinephiles

Review: Standard Operating Procedure

2008
Director: Errol Morris
Viewed: May 29, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Most Americans who follow current events have seen the pictures. We think we know what they represent. We think we have a handle on the story that they tell. During 2003, prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were sexually humiliated and molested, terrorized with dogs, brutalized, tortured, and murdered. By Americans. The abusers were military police, military intelligence, private contractors, and CIA interrogators. Errol Morris’ new film, Standard Operating Procedure, opens the photo album on Abu Ghraib and initiates an inquiry both indebted to and a world apart from the fleeting sensationalism of the mainstream media’s coverage. The film’s taste for the dramatic might provoke accusations that Morris is aiming for cheap agitprop. Nothing could be further from the truth. SOP is a spellbinding film about a grave and inflammatory topic, a vital rumination that upends one stone after another and then holds up a microphone to the emerging grubs. Morris’ refusal to utilize the Abu Ghraib scandal as a political cudgel might be noble or disgraceful, depending on your outlook, but with SOP, he has unquestionably crafted a haunting work that digs deep and cuts deeper.

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Review: Young@Heart

2007
Director: Stephen Walker
Viewed: May 19, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

If someone had summarized the premise of Young@Heart to me a few weeks ago, it would have raised my condescension hackles to critical levels. “This is a documentary film about a community chorus that performs rock, pop, R&B, and soul songs. Oh, and all the performers are over 70 years old. Funny, huh?” Fortunately, Young@Heart is not the terrible documentary it should have been. In fact, I’ll go further than merely admitting and retracting my suspicions, however well-founded. Young@Heart is a damn good film. There’s nothing especially artful to it, and it probably would have worked just as well on cable television as on the big screen. Yet it pulls off a tricky storytelling feat: It treats a subject matter strewn with perils in exactly the right way, juggling an array of reflective themes about age, death, art, performance, pop culture, and human worth. It’s a triumph of the first principles of documentary filmmaking: take an interesting topic, construct a narrative, keep things moving, and make it sing.

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Quick Review: Shine a Light

2008
Director: Martin Scorsese
Viewed: April 12, 2008
Format: IMAX Theatrical Print

Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light, depicting a two-night Rolling Stones performance at the Beacon Theater, aims for something a little higher than mutual artistic backslapping, just not much higher. This is Stones worship at its purest, but that purity is fairly stunning. The undisciplined tendency that has at times infected Scorsese’s more recent dramatic work is nowhere to be found in this endeavor. If nothing else, Shine a Light is a work of cinematic virtuosity. Shot with plethora of cameras placed jaw-droppingly close to the action, it boasts an intimacy that vividly captures the Stones’ everlasting fire and their sheer joy at performing. It’s dizzying to contemplate the challenge that this film must have been to edit. Scorsese doesn’t strive for the genuine exploration of Gimme Shelter, but he does utilize the medium to discover something akin to a live concert experience, yet also something different and distinctly cinematic. Shine a Light has an undeniable and sustaining energy, but there’s not much to it other than great music from artists you’ll never be this close to again. If that’s enough for you—and it should be—you’ll regret missing an opportunity to catch it in IMAX.

Review: The Rape of Europa

2006
Directors: Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newham
Viewed: March 9, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Whether or not any given viewer will find The Rape of Europa to be engaging will depend to a large extent on whether they find the subject matter itself engaging. The directors seem shamefully reluctant to utilize the medium of film to convey anything that couldn’t be gleaned from the book of the same name by Lynn Nicholas. The result is a documentary that rests only a notch above the standard History Channel fare. The Nazis’ plundering of European artwork and cultural heritage is a topic that, I will admit, fascinates me. The Rape of Europa is as comprehensive and courageous a treatment as one could expect in a two-hour feature. Anyone not dazzled by the subject at the outset, however, might find their interest fading as the film wears on.

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