THE KENNEDY FILMS OF ROBERT DREW & ASSOCIATES - BluRay Review By Greg Klymkiw Criterion Collection presents one of its finest and perhaps most important releases!

President John F. Kennedy in CRISIS

The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates (1960) (1963) (1964) (2015)
Dir. Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, D. A. Pennebaker
Featuring: John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy,
Hubert H. Humphrey, George Wallace, Jacqueline Kennedy

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Robert Drew told true stories in pictures - moving pictures so vibrant that they placed you directly in the eye of the storm - and as such, changed documentary cinema in America forever (and frankly, for the better).

Visionary filmmakers, however, need delivery methods of equal vision.

The visionary Criterion Collection continues to dazzle us with one important release after another. There is, however, something especially noteworthy about The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates. In our current year of American presidential primaries, upcoming election and some of the most horrific strife in the country's history, the astonishing films collected in this package provide a window into the history of similar events which occurred over fifty years ago. As well as giving us a historical mirror by which to assess current events, the entire BluRay/DVD sheds light upon the aesthetic ground broken in the area of Direct Cinema (or, if you will, Cinema Vérité).

In the 50s, Robert Drew, a former Life Magazine correspondent, decided to turn his quest for truth in journalism away from the still image to the moving image. Not satisfied with the standards of television journalism at the time, which relied too heavily upon commentating (narration) over every image and/or straight-up interviews, Drew became a man obsessed with creating documentary cinema in which the audience could feel like they were with the subjects themselves.

Some of Drew's best work were his Kennedy films. Armed with a team of filmmakers (Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, D. A. Pennebaker) who would all go on to create their own individual work in later years, Drew captured four key moments in the life of America's greatest leader, John F. Kennedy.

THE KENNEDY FILMS of Robert Drew

The first film in this series was Primary. Drew was fascinated with the young Senator John F. Kennedy, a man who, at the time, appeared to have no chance to win the Democratic nomination. In addition to his youth, he was Catholic, filthy rich and from the "east" - certainly not presidential material to win the hearts and minds of America's heartland.

Drew approached Kennedy with his idea of following the Wisconsin primaries with a team of cameras. He assured Kennedy that he was in the business of breaking new aesthetic ground; that he wanted his cameras to be up close and personal, as if the cameras weren't even there. Kennedy understood the historical significance of this, but maybe more importantly, he tuned in to the artistic importance of Drew's approach. Kennedy even knew the film might be completed in time to assist in his election efforts and yet, this meant very little to him. The film was everything.

The resulting work, especially when one compares it to the ludicrous coverage we've been assailed with in the past year involving the respective Democratic and Republican primaries of Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump, Primary is an unparalleled look at the process of seeking nomination in America.

What's especially interesting is seeing Kennedy and his chief Democratic opponent Hubert Humphrey operating almost solely on a grassroots level. Seeing the juxtaposition of Humphrey cracking corny jokes to meagre assemblies of grim-faced farmers and Kennedy surrounded by throngs of admiring babes is not only hilariously telling, but prescient beyond words. The film and the campaigns it captures are truly the definition of "up close and personal".

Once Kennedy won the nomination and his eventual election was in the bag, Drew visited JFK again, and again he convinced the Great Man about the historical and aesthetic importance of capturing the first days in office. Kennedy agreed and Drew had unprecedented access to inside the White House. Adventures on the New Frontier is (at least to my recollection on the matter), the only film to be plopped so intimately into the Oval Office as a President acquaints himself with the new job.

One of the coolest moments occurs early on when JFK meets his Joint Chief of Staffs for the FIRST TIME. The camera follows the events right from the pleasantries and on to some fairly sensitive discussions. One of the stern generals points to the cameras and JFK turns and realizes, with that winning smile, that perhaps it's best if the cameras leave the Oval Office for the rest of the meeting.

After this film, Drew wanted to capture the President in a moment of crisis. Alas, the crisis could not involve other countries for reasons of national security. No matter, Crisis would be made eventually, and when it was, it dealt with a crisis on American soil - a racist Governor defying the Federal Government.

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy Battles
Racist Idiot Alabama Governor George Wallace
who plans to physically stop two black students
from registering at the University of Alabama.

Given the current disgrace of racism in the "justice" system of America (and the country overall), this is a film that might prove to be one of the most important of Drew's Kennedy films. Alabama was the last state to allow full racial integration in its universities. JFK was having none of this and via a court order issued by his brother Robert Kennedy, America's Attorney General, Alabama had no choice but to open its doors to Black university students.

The Kennedy boys, however, had a formidable adversary in the rabidly racist Governor of Alabama, George Wallace. The plucky, nasty Black-hating psychopath had it all figured out. Accompanied by Alabama's National Guard, Wallace himself planned to defy the court order, march over to the University of Alabama and stand in the doors leading to the registrar's office to physically block the university's first pair of Black students from entering.

What transpires over the course of the film's running time is as suspenseful as any political thriller (especially since we're privy to the plan to have the Alabama Guard pledge allegiance to the Federal Government). That Drew and his team had the access they did (including the permission of Wallace himself) seems impossible, fictional even. There's plenty of drama, alright, but none of it is fiction. Crisis brings us into the thick of a showdown right out of the Old West, or rather, the antebellum South.

Again, with a great team and unprecedented access to the players, Drew masterfully orchestrates the genuine conflict in the story, but he also provides a window into the characters of RFK (who takes the driver's seat) and Wallace via some clever juxtaposition. On one hand, the cameras follow young Robert Kennedy at home on the morning of the confrontation. We feel like we're in a real home - warm, congenial, a Dad and his kids, a yummy breakfast being served up and sun streaming through the windows. At the very same time, over at George Wallace's Alabammy mansion, built on the backs of slaves, we see a cold, spotless home adorned with Southern Civil War paraphernalia. Even more appalling is seeing Wallace kibitz with a group of Black prisoners from a nearby prison who have been enlisted to work as labourers on the grounds of the Governor's mansion.

This is truly the stuff of great motion picture drama.

ROBERT DREW (1924 - 2014)

Drew's final Kennedy film is a heartbreaker. Faces of November focuses on those who have come to mourn JFK on the day of his funeral. The title says it all. The "faces" tell the whole story of an event so sad and shocking that very few people in the world weren't glued to their radios and televisions. At the age of four, my own memories of the news of the assassination and the subsequent funeral, are still vivid and haunting. Drew's film allowed me, some 53 years later, an opportunity to share my memories - of my grief as a child (as a Canadian I had no idea who the Canadian Prime Minister was and thought Kennedy was our leader), the grief of my mother (who was weeping for days) and now, at this point in time, to share the grief with a myriad of faces, all tear-stained and shell shocked by one of the saddest and most shameful events in America's history.

If the Criterion Collection release was only the gorgeously restored and transferred films themselves, it would be enough. That the package includes what might be the best supplements I have ever experienced on any home entertainment release is yet another reason to applaud a visionary company's commitment to capturing visionary films with equally visionary documentary and interview footage. This includes the brilliantly edited 30-minute documentary on Robert Drew himself, Robert Drew in His Own Words.

The pedagogical value of this collection is unparalleled. The Criterion Collection has delivered a work that is now and forever - a work that will enrich and enlighten audiences, students, teachers and scholars for decades to come.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates from the Criterion Collection is blessed with: New 2K digital restorations of all four films; an alternate, twenty-six-minute cut of Primary, edited by filmmaker Richard Leacock; audio commentary on Primary, featuring excerpts from a 1961 conversation between Leacock, filmmakers Robert Drew and D. A. Pennebaker and film critic Gideon Bachmann; Robert Drew in His Own Words, a new documentary featuring archival interview footage; a new conversation between Pennebaker and Jill Drew, general manager of Drew Associates and Robert Drew’s daughter-in-law; outtakes from Crisis, along with a discussion by historian Andrew Cohen, author of "Two Days in June"; a new conversation about Crisis featuring former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder and Sharon Malone, Holder’s wife and the sister of Vivian Malone, one of the students featured in Crisis; a new interview with Richard Reeves, author of "President Kennedy: Profile of Power"; footage from a 1998 event at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, featuring Drew, Pennebaker, Leacock, and filmmaker Albert Maysles; and an excellent essay by documentary film curator and writer Thomas Powers.

MEDIUM COOL - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The Haskell Wexler Classic is an important and influential work of the Cinema Vérité movement. It's exciting, urgent, vital and a worthy addition to the Criterion Collection.

Medium Cool (1969) *****
Dir. Haskell Wexler
Starring: Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianna Hill, Harold Blankenship

Review By Greg Klymkiw

“I hope we can use our art for love and peace.” So said cinematographer Haskell Wexler as he accepted an Oscar last April for his work on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? His seriousness and obvious sincerity startled the Academy Awards audience, long used to the standard thank yous to co-workers and producers. “I realized I might never get another chance at an audience of 60 or 70 million people. It seemed too big an opportunity to miss. What was I supposed to do – thank my gaffer and Jack Warner?”

Kevin Thomas

Los Angeles Times, 1 June 1967

A car off the highway. Metal twisted. Open door. Woman's body splayed on the asphalt. Blood gushing. A photographer attached to a movie camera hovers above - shooting - like a vulture circling its prey. One gruesome shot after another. Every conceivable angle caught on film. Real film. Real movie camera. Real cameraman - or so we think. We pray he isn't real because when he's sucked as much life out of his quarry as possible, he packs up and leaves the woman to bleed and presumably die. Alone.

The cameraman is John Cassellis. He is played by Robert Forster. Yes, we're watching a movie, but WHAT a movie! When Medium Cool was unleashed upon the movie-going public, nothing like it had ever been seen before and without question, not much (if anything) like it has been seen since.

Written, directed and photographed by Haskell Wexler, the celebrated cinematographer of such films as In The Heat Of The Night, The Thomas Crown Affair, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as well as two Oscar-winning turns for Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf and Bound For Glory, he crafted what might be the ultimate auteur film made in America. To this very day, Medium Cool is an important and influential work of the Cinema Vérité movement. It's exciting, urgent and vital - impossible to take your eyes off the screen while watching it, almost impossible to blink for fear of missing a frame and most of all, impossible to get out of your head once you've seen it.

On the surface, it might seem very simple - deceptively and cleverly so. Cassellis doesn't seem to care about much of anything unless he sees it through the lens of his camera. He loves shooting to the exclusion of all else. The only thing that matters is what he sees is what he shoots. The image is everything to him. It's not even especially important what story he's telling so long as he's telling it, so long as he's capturing his perspective on the world around him. He shoots, then hands off his negative (yes, kids - negative - ever hear of that?) to a helmeted motorcycle rider who crazily zips through the Chicago streets in the film's great opening title sequence.

The shots are in the can. What's next for him to plaster onto negative? He's like a junkie. He needs another shot. All that counts is the shot. From his eye, through the lens and bouncing back from his target and captured on unexposed stock greedily demanding a chemical bath in order to spool itself through the projection sprockets of a telecine and then, beamed over airwaves, mediated through a cathode ray screen and into the eyes, hearts and, hopefully, minds of its viewers.

His aim is true. What's done with it afterwards might not be.

Certainly Cassellis seems untroubled with his own part in journalistic exploitation and this is hammered home by his purely sexual relationship with a sex-drenched young fuck-buddy (Mariana Hill). He needs to SHOOT - film AND sperm. It's only once his life has been touched by a chance encounter with a pair of Appalachian expats in the slums of Chicago - a single mother (Verna Bloom) and her only child (Henry Blankenship) - that Cassellis opens his eyes to the insidious manner his images are being disseminated.

When he discovers that the corporate pigs running the stations and networks are furnishing his potentially incriminating footage of civil unrest to law enforcement officials (most notably, the FBI), he flies into a rage. The film builds to a harrowing climax involving a riot where his eye, so fixed on the events he's shooting, misses the plight of the people closest to him and eventually (and literally) jettisons both himself and the audience smack into a shocking conclusion.

The eyes of Cassellis remain shark-like, though the emotion fuelling his actions shifts from obsession to a form of vengeance. Nothing, however, can match the eyes of the mother and her son - especially her son - they're the battered and bruised receptacles of America's indifference and their part in Wexler's film reaches heartbreaking proportions.

The corruption and collusion of mainstream media and its relationship to both corporate interests and government are today a given fact, but in the late 60s, when Medium Cool was made, such a thing seemed unthinkable. When Wexler fashioned this film it was a shocker, but somehow in the context of today's world - our own strife amidst uncaring governments, in turn the puppets of a new world order of corporations - this picture is more important than ever. Its importance to both history and the art of cinema is virtually a given, but its importance to exposing and keeping all of us aware of contemporary political gangsterism has seldom been matched.

Films that focus upon media have never been uncommon, but only Federico Fellini in his 1960 film La Dolce Vita pre-dates Medium Cool with any significance. Via the character of Paparazzo (a name Fellini derived from Italian dialect to describe the buzzing of mosquitoes), the Maestro's masterwork is often credited with generating the etymology of paparazzi to describe the European phenomenon of photo journalists who use their lenses to capture celebrities in poses of compromise.

Certainly, Wexler's horrific opening pre-dates the death of Princess Diana and the photographers who chased and surrounded the twisted metal - shooting with abandon as life painfully drained from her. Years after Wexler's picture, writer Paddy Chayefsky and director Sidney Lumet delivered Network, the savage satire of news becoming "entertainment" and being rooted in corporate greed rather than any altruistic desire to deliver news in a traditional journalistic sense. Finally, though, Medium Cool is the yardstick to measure all cinema dealing with media and I'd argue that nothing even comes close to matching it.

America was on the precipice of massive upheaval and there was an overwhelming sense that major shit was going to hit the fan in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention - which, of course, it did. Wexler designed his film to shoot on location during this time and what he captures is probably the most powerful cinematic game of "chicken" between documentary and drama ever made.

He populates his film with a mix of great actors, non-actors and the real thing in the midst of actual events Cassellis and, by extension, Wexler's film, both capture so indelibly.

Robert Forster is the revelation here. Handsome, rugged, nicely buff - he's handed the difficult task of being often mute, bereft of real passion or caring - until, of course, it's too late - and even then, he switches into obsessive auto-pilot. Forster's performance here is one of the great performances in contemporary American cinema. Cassellis is a superbly etched character - seemingly passive, but active where it counts. His early years as a boxer (which he continues to train as) are the sort of physical skills cameramen absolutely require to get the brilliant handheld footage they need.

His motion picture debut was a couple of years earlier in John Huston's magnificently insane adaptation of Carson McCuller's novel Reflections in a Golden Eye. This was a brave way for any actor to expose himself in his first film. Playing the apple of Marlon Brando's closeted military officer's homosexual eye, Forster taunts Brando by riding a horse nude in eyeshot of the smitten military man, and in turn, obsessed over Brando's sexually frustrated wife played by Elizabeth Taylor, he repeatedly enters her bedroom nude and jerks off into her dirty panties as she dozes deeply within the Land of Nod.

Most actors today would greet such a role as a bad career move, but if they were lucky enough to have a director as visionary as Wexler, they'd go from one great role to another, as Forster did by going from Huston to Wexler. Forster, by the way, never hit the heights of stardom he should have and instead had a hugely successful film and TV career as a "working" actor until Quentin Tarantino displayed the same vision Huston and Wexler were imbued with and cast him in the world weary male romantic lead bail bondsman opposite Pam Grier in the wonderful Jackie Brown.

If anything, though, Wexler might well have handed Forster the role of a lifetime here - especially within the context of a medium like cinema that has the power to inform, entertain and effect real change. The shooter Cassellis is always alert to the possibility of those images and Forster always commands our attention to this fact with his expressive eyes. His powerful body helps him hoist that camera and aim it where his eye wants to go.

Wexler captures so many genuinely real events during his drama and it is Forster who is always at the centre of them. Whether we see riots, national guardsmen in mock training during protest march scenarios, the lives and milieu of Chicago's most racially segregated areas of Chicago - it's Casselis who is our onscreen tour guide as we see what Wexler sees via Forster - and it is ALL TOO REAL; the looks of hatred and mistrust upon the faces of those living in the neighbourhoods, the poverty stricken naked kids splashing through fire hydrant water in the blistering heat, encounters with revolutionaries in tenement slums, Wexler uses this great actor to allow us into a world of reality.

It's a mediated reality, to be sure, and this is always Wexler's aim.

But where the film, its intentions and ultimately, its impact become all too clear is the breathtaking, salient moment when Wexler trains his lens upon Cassellis and Forster so evocatively utters one of film history's great lines:

"Jesus," he says with a hint of passion that escapes from his seemingly cold, detached demeanour, "I love shooting film."

And so he does. He loves shooting film with a purity that is eventually soiled by both corporate and government evil. What then is left for a man when he discovers that his lifeblood is being perverted, subverted and sucked out of him - not for the good of man, but for the good of profits and maintaining the Status Quo? What finally is left, is that which Wexler shockingly provides us in his movie.

It's not a pretty picture.

What's truly terrifying to me and utterly disgusting (because it continues today with even more frequency and intensity) is that Wexler was strongly urged to re-cut his film as the corporate giants at Paramount were being pressured from so many levels of influence to mute and ultimately emasculate the film's power. Wexler refused. He had the power to do so. Instead, a brilliant filmmaker who had just won a fucking Oscar had his work initially manhandled and censored by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). For one brief scene of nudity and a handful of cuss words, the film was slapped with an X-rating which was effectively a kiss of death as it relegated Wexler's film to the same status of hard core pornography.

Nobody in their right mind would believe the rating was due to the aforementioned language and nudity.

Medium Cool was being censored for being too political and worse, not the capital "R" RIGHT political.

"Jesus, I love shooting film."

This is the sin more grave that those laid down in the Ten Commandments since loving to shoot film often means we must expose the evils of God and Country.

And God only knows, we can't have that now, can we?

The Criterion Collection Blu-Ray and DVD of Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool is perhaps one of the best packages the company has ever put together. Wexler's haunting images are gorgeously transferred for our edification and the entirety of this disc is bursting at the seams with a wealth of material.

There are two audio commentaries, one with historian Paul Cronin and the other with Wexler, editing consultant Paul Golding and actress Marianna Hill, as well as a new Wexler interview.

The real gems are extended excerpts from Look Out Haskell, It’s Real!, Cronin's documentary that has interviews with Wexler, Golding, Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Chicago historian and the film's intrepid consultant Studs Terkel and a myriad of others, as well as excerpts from Sooner or Later, Cronin’s documentary about Harold Blankenship, who plays Verna Bloom's son in the picture. Both of these documentaries form an important and near-epic look at a film AND a time and place when America was on the precipice of the eventual decline it's experiencing now. They both look great on this disc and present enough salient details for most viewers, though, in fairness, versions can be accessed in full unexpurgated form outside of the disc. They don't look "pretty" and suffer a bit from the editorial decisions made by Criterion, but part of me wishes they'd been presented in their whole on this disc in addition to the excerpts.

The other absolute gem is Wexler's new documentary Medium Cool Revisited which focuses on the Occupy movement’s protests during Chicago's 2012 NATO summit.

As per usual, the disc includes a trailer and a fine booklet with a new essay by film critic and programmer Thomas Beard. This is a keeper. If you care about cinema, you'll want to own this. I've only had this disc for two weeks and I've already spent hours and hours pouring over it.

In USA and the rest of the WORLD - BUY Medium Cool - HERE!

In Canada - BUY Medium Cool HERE, eh!

In UK BUY Medium Cool HERE

THE PATRON SAINTS - Review By Greg Klymkiw

"WHAT AM I DOING HERE?"

The
Patron
Saints
(2011) ****
dir. Brian M. Cassidy, Melanie Shatzky
Review
By Greg
Klymkiw


"What am I doing here? Please tell me." says the old woman. She wants to know why she isn't home with her mother. She wonders if she'll ever go home to be with her mother ever again. And then, "I don't know where I am. I don't know how I got here."

The old woman is in a nursing home, of course. She's not going home. She's there until she dies.

"All around this place are these hills with trees on them and they're so nice to look at," says a fat, seemingly punch-drunk old goodfella from the bed he never seems to leave. He's been institutionalized for most of his life - from foster homes to prison and now a nursing home. A bit of nature, even though it's in the distance, is just what the doctor ordered for a man whose only freedom were those ever-so brief moments when he held a gun in his massive fists while striding into liquor marts, convenience stores or banks to hold them up. At least, that's what we imagine.

The joy those distant hills give him is short-lived. The sentimental symbol of escape into the natural world yields slightly cynical and forced laughter. The hills, he explains, are really piles of garbage that could be stacked no higher and were covered over with sod and seed, resulting in trees sprouting to the heavens from mounds of filth.

"I believe in God. He wants me to lose a little more wright and He's going to get me up walking. I don't pray for nothing. I pray to get out of here." says the old goodfella. "God's got a plan for all of us. Though I'm really not sure what He's got planned for all of us in this nursing home."

His question is no doubt on the minds of most of the nursing home's residents - at least those who have something resembling their faculties. Looking at one resident, a blind, twisted, toothless and bed-ridden old woman, one can only guess what God's plan is for her. Spending a lifetime of rape and abuse at the hands of her brother, a brother who is still allowed supervised visits to the sister he brutalized, one can only imagine what plan God has for her?

And what, God forbid, does she dream about? What will be those final images flashing in her mind before she's enveloped in the darkness and light of death?

The Patron Saints is an unremittingly agonizing documentary film by Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky that focuses its lenses upon the residents of a nursing home for the aged. As harrowing as the experience is, the filmmakers employ a strange amalgam of fly-on-the-wall direct cinema techniques with a dash of cinéma vérité. In the former documentary style, the lives of the inmates are presented without narration, no questions, no overt manipulation and seemingly no intrusion on the part of the filmmakers. To the latter style, however, there are subtle, skillfully engineered aspects to the process in that one can recall nary a single shot that is not stunningly, gorgeously, sumptuously composed.

The filmmakers not only point their cameras in the direction of the inmates. We are shown the dedication and compassion of those who try to make the lives of these people better. And yet, for all these affirmations of man's kindness to man, the filmmakers punctuate many sequences with exterior images of airplanes flying endlessly over the facility, the weeds sprouting like an ocean around the institution itself and yes, those mounds of garbage in the distance, adorned with flora to hide the filth beneath.

And if we do get images of flight, of escape, they're presented from within the back of an ambulance, a motionless body strapped to a gurney, leaving its place of incarceration, its spirit hopefully journeying to some better place.

There's a strong sense that the camera, like those forests touching the skies whilst rooted within the filth of the landfill below, perform a similar service. In fact, I'd say the filmmakers provide a twofold service. The camera, through the eyes of the artists, captures the last days, weeks and/or months of this mass of forgotten humanity - sometimes with humour, but mostly through an unremitting sadness which, in direct cinema terms is completely and utterly unavoidable given the circumstances. Much as we might want to repress it, what the cameras expose is the reality of where ALL of our lives are headed, unless of course we mercifully die before. As life itself is dichotomous, so too is the reality as presented by the film. In a sense, the cameras provide these people, in spite of the aforementioned bleakness and whether they're aware of it or not, a voice and a presence in the outside world. Most importantly, though, the beauty and artistry of the compositions provides a kind of love and compassion - the eyes of the artists deliver a terrible beauty to these peoples' lives and in so doing, force us, the audience, to do the same.

No matter how dire and desperate the final days of these people are, it is finally cinema that speaks for them.

This is the power of movies and ultimately, thanks to the talent and sensitivity of the filmmakers, it is why The Patron Saints is one of the most haunting, moving, original and important documentary portraits of the elderly ever committed to film.

"The Patron Saints" is currently unspooling at Toronto's Royal Cinema via Vagrant Films and will roll out on a platform release prior to a variety of home entertainment formats. It's a big-screen experience. Intimacy on this level deserves more than watching it on a small screen.