ARCHIE'S BETTY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Personal Search for the "real" Archie delights

Archie's Betty (2015)
Dir. Gerald Peary

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Who in their right mind didn't read Archie Comics? Millions upon millions of fans all over the world dove into the world of this loveable carrot-topped high school student who lusted after the mega-hot brunette Veronica, but who alas, couldn't always see the forest for the trees - that the best romantic bet was (the equally hot) blonde Betty.

Dappled with a lovely array of supporting characters, Archie comics presented a riotously funny and culturally astute world of average clean-cut teenage life in post-War America. Keeping a happy non-political microscope trained upon these kids, we were able to follow their adventures all the way through the Korean War, Vietnam War, the Cold War, massive social upheavals, student unrest, the civil rights and all those turbulent anti-war/anti-draft movements. If you slavishly devoted yourself to Archie comics, you'd ever know any of that stuff was happening anyway. Archie provided a safe haven for all.

The villains, if they can even be called that, included the conceited rich boy Reggie and the teachers/administrators of the sleepy Riverdale high school. Even the latter weren't really villains in any traditional sense, they just wanted the kids to stop goofing off and do well in school.

No Red Skull, Doc-Ock or Doctor Doom plagued the kids of Riverdale.

For me, I restricted my Archie reading to the Saturday colour comic pages and daily B/W strips in the newspaper. Being a snob even back then, I'd never be caught dead actually buying Archie in any comic book store. Those purchases were left up to my little sister. I would, however, read all her Archie comics in a tantalizing closet of shame (replete with Portnoy-inspired Mounds wrappers for added intimacies).

For years, though, I harboured a grudge against Archie. All the comic books in our family home were stored in cardboard boxes in the basement. During a horrendous sewer flood, my Dad insanely tried to save as many of my comic boxes as possible. Some of them "drowned" forever. Alas, poor, desperate Dad couldn't distinguish between what was painstakingly marked on the boxes in bold, black felt. Upon surveying what was saved, I discovered that all my precious Golden Age Marvels - most of which would have increased in value (to the tune of thousands of dollars) - were lost forever. What remained were several boxes of my sister's Archie Comics.

The aforementioned tragic event occurred 25 years ago and remained as a black stain upon my heart the whole time. Luckily, filmmaker/critic Gerald Peary's sweetly obsessive feature documentary, Archie's Betty, was what finally restored my faith in the ageless carrot-top of Riverdale.

Before succumbing to his eventual dotage, Peary chose to embark upon an incredible journey with his co-producer Shaun Clancy to seek out the real-life inspirations for original cartoonist Bob Montana's Archie comics. And yes, they're out there. They exist. Archie and all his friends are living, breathing entities. (Well, some more living and breathing than others, but surely you catch my drift here.)

Using a nice array of archival materials, graphics, personal reminiscence and interviews, Archie's Betty proves to be a lovely, nostalgic journey into the very thing which captured (and continues to capture) the imaginations of loyal readers and aficionados numbering in the mega-millions. What's especially engaging is that the picture is rooted in Peary's own personal obsession with Archie. As such, the picture has a gentle rag-tag quality with Peary himself narrating the story. Playing beautifully with the fanboy aesthetic, he's crafted a fine documentary which sprints along nicely with the sprightly cutting of editors Aleksandar Sasha Lekic and David Reeder.

He spins the true-life yarn of a young Jewish kid (Peary himself), the first in his family to be born in America. He discovered Archie comics on trips with his Dad to the local Flat-Top-styling barbershop in his hometown. Peary's parents, having fled the horrors of Jew-hating Nazis and Pogrom-happy Russian Cossacks, hilariously and ironically lived in a variety of American locales in which they were the only Jews for hundreds of miles. (In a contemporary context this is not unlike being the only Muslims living in Alpena, Arkansas.)

Here, the geeky, bookish, movie-loving Peary (who eventually became one of America's most esteemed film critics) found plenty of laughs, solace and boners (mostly over Betty). Acting on a good tip, Peary begins his pilgrimage to Montana's hometown - Haverhill, Mass. Peary's obsession leads him (and us) on a Willard-like quest up the big river known as America. Seeking neither Col. Walter E. Kurtz, nor the Heart of Darkness, Peary ferrets out all of Archie artist/scribe Bob Montana's old girlfriends, pals and acquaintances.

Mysteries abound. Some folks clearly seem to be inspirations for the beloved comic book, others appear to be amalgams. Many are still living. Some are dead and here Peary must place a Deerstalker cap upon his brainy, fevered noggin to piece together the lives of those who've joined the late Montana in the clouds of comic book Heaven.

What drives Peary like a cattle stampede in a John Ford western, is Betty - Blonde Betty - the love of Peary's early manhood. the real-life Betty - Archie's Betty. This is the most compelling and deeply moving search of all and the results are guaranteed to open the ocular sluices.

The journey will be a treat for all, but none more so than Archie fans young and old. In fact, Peary's film is so delightfully and humorously reverent, that it will no doubt add even more lucre into the gaping, bottomless maw of Archie Comic Publications Inc. And yes, the film not only helped me make peace with my Archie enmity, but thanks to one of Peary's interview subjects, the Archie expert Natalie Pendergast, I learn that her perspective is one that must have been shared by generations galore. As she explains:

"Before I knew anything about comic book theory or the scholarship of the comic and graphic novel, I was first a huge fan of Archie comics as a young child. As a girl I felt like I could relate much more to the characters. because of the scenarios - romantic, focusing on problems with friends, parents, school difficulties and what-not."

I thought about my little sister, over forty years ago and even my young teenage daughter now, at least ten years younger than the astute Pendergast, and the generations upon generations of young women who sought out Archie for those things that were more familiar than the usual macho posturing of comics. Hearing Peary's tales and then experiencing as he finds real-life inspirations for these characters, made me think of my own deeply submerged love for Archie.

I look at those rescued boxes of 40 year old Archie comics differently now. I sometimes even open the lids and reach into the treasures within and enjoy them now, not just in a closet, but openly and delightedly as I share them with my own little girl who now has the real thing to cherish in addition to her huge collection of thick, paperback-bound Archie comic compilations.

If anything, Archie's Betty places Bob Montana and the Archie Comic Publication's work within the context of being based on real people and as such, continues to speak to kids of all ages, all over the world, for God knows how many more generations.

Or, as Archie oft said, "Fantastic!"

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Archie's Betty is currently in platform release in the USA in cinemas, cinematheques film festivals and comic book conventions. Feel free to visit the official website for more information HERE and to buy it on DVD click HERE.

In Canada, the official Canuck premiere will be in early 2016 as
a theatrical engagement at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto.

HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Environmental Activism THRILLS!

How To Change The World (2015)
Dir. Jerry Rothwell

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Preamble: A few things about Robert (Bob) Hunter that contribute, for me personally, to his legendary perch in Canadian history.

"If we wait for the meek to inherit the earth, there won't be anything left to inherit" - Robert Hunter

Robert (Bob) Hunter was many things. Mostly, I just always thought he was cool. And well, you'd kind of have to be that to have accomplished so much in so short a time (he died of cancer at age 63).

As a dyed-in-the-wool Winnipegger, I especially thought it was cool, given Robert Hunter's deep concern for Canada's Aboriginal people, that he was born in the City of St. Boniface which eventually amalgamated with all the wonky neighbourhood city-states along the Red, Assiniboine and Seine Rivers of Manitoba to become - you guessed it, Winnipeg.

All this rich land, which not only became the city we all know and hate/love (plus all points north-south-east-and-west) historically belonged to the Metis Nation, but was torn from their possession by the Canadian Government's land transfer scrip system which was virtually useless except to rich white guys who knew how to push it through the complicated bureaucracy to actually cash it in. The vast majority of uprooted Metis were starving, so they sold their scrip to the rich white guys, for pennies on the dollar.

Even more interesting to me was that Hunter's birthplace in St. Boniface ended up being the one community which contributed the most to Manitoba becoming (even now) Canada's largest French-speaking region outside of Quebec. Why? Many of the displaced Metis were also targets for violence because of the 1870 Louis Riel wars against the corrupt rich white guys of Winnipeg and the eastern power-brokers who held a vicelike grip upon the government of Canada. This resulted in a huge number of Metis forcing their Native heritage underground and bringing their French heritage to the fore and living in - you guessed it, St. Boniface.

His tenure as a columnist at the Winnipeg Tribune and Vancouver Sun was before my time. I didn't even become aware of him as a journalist until I moved to Toronto in the early 90s and began watching CITY-TV (when it actually had a real personality thanks to its eventually-departed head Moses Znaimer). Here, I began to enjoy the amazingly cool, almost Hunter S. Thompson-like "environmental reporter and commentator. I was soon compelled to begin reading his books wherein I discovered that he was Bob Hunter, the heart, soul and public face of the environmental group Greenpeace.

This, for me, was virtually cooler-than-cool and when he passed away in 2005, I was genuinely saddened that we'd lost him. Thankfully, this film now exists. It's not a biographical documentary of Robert (Bob) Hunter, but in many ways, it might as well be.



And now, the Film Review proper:

There were many things about Hunter I didn't know after all these years and I'm grateful to director Jerry Rothwell for his almost-epic-like motion picture documentary How To Change The World which presents a side of this great Canadian that was not only fresh to my already-admiring eyes, but kind of jettisons Hunter into some supreme inter-stellar glowing orb of coolness.

Rothwell poured over hundreds of 16mm rolls of film that had been canned and unopened since the 1970s. Seeing, pretty much before his very eyes, the visual history of the Greenpeace organization, Rothwell consulted with Hunter's colleagues, foes, conducting fresh interviews with all of them, blending the result of Herculean research and expertly selected and edited footage from the Greenpeace Archives. (The fact that Hunter was so brilliantly media-savvy pretty much accounts for this wealth of material even existing.)

What we get is the story of a respected counter-culture columnist who aligns himself with a motley assortment of friends and colleagues (most of them of the 60s/70s "hippie" persuasion) to head out on a boat in an attempt to stop nuclear testing on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean and then, with the same bunch, to go tearing after Russian sailors butchering whales up and down the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The campaigns continued and somewhere along the way, the movement of Greenpeace was formed.

With both the existing archival footage and the new interviews, Rothwell has painted an indelible portrait - not only of the key events in the movement, but the individuals themselves - as disparate a cast of characters you could ever imagine. What makes them cool is how different they are as people, but as such, they each bring individual qualities to the movement that had a symbiotic relationship - for a time. As is the won't of anything or anyone growing beyond initial beginnings, egos as well as legitimate desires/directions begin to rear their ugly heads and minor cracks in the "vessel" become tectonic plates, yielding high-Richter-scale fractures.

In addition to the dazzling filmmaking, I was swept away onto the high seas and weed-clouded back rooms of Greenpeace thanks to the perfectly selected and abundant readings of Bob Hunter's exceptional reads. Embodying Hunter is the magnificent character actor Barry Pepper who delivers us the man's words with the kind of emotion which goes so far beyond "narration". Pepper captures the soul of Hunter impeccably. It's a brilliant performance. (If anyone does a biopic of Hunter, Pepper is the MAN!!!

The first two-thirds of the movie is compulsive viewing. The first third, focusing upon seafaring derring-do is nail-bitingly thrilling. With Bob Hunter at the helm of some totally crazy-ass dangerous antics - like some mad, dope-smoking, Sterling-Hayden lookalike - Rothwell creates a veritable action picture on the high seas with an obsessive Captain Ahab targeting not whales, but the hunters of whales. (So much of the film is charged with a great selection of period hit songs and a gorgeous original score by Lesley Barber also.)

Who'd have thought environmental activism could be as thrilling as Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin "Master and Commander" adventures? The middle section begins focusing on the leaks in the organizational battleship that became Greenpeace. Mixing in more derring-do with internal conflicts is easily as thrilling as the intrigue-elements of O'Brian's high-seas swashbucklers.

The final third of the film tends to fall by the wayside a touch. It's not Rothwell's doing, as that of - gasp - real life. There's a great deal of sadness and acrimony in this section of the film and part of me wishes that life didn't throw the kind of curve-balls that surprise your favourite batter at the plate into striking out. This is ultimately a minor quibble though, in light of the sheer force, power and entertainment value of the picture. What epics don't suffer from a sag or three? At least this one eventually builds to a note of well deserved and earned high notes and the movie finally packs a major one-two emotional punch. When this happens, tears might well be flowing amongst many and the lapses of real life will be fleeting, especially when you exit the cinema feeling, "Goddamn! That was one HELL of a good show!"

The Film Corner Rating: **** Four Stars

How To Change The World is a Kinosmith Release that place across Canada at the following venues:

August 7
Toronto - Bloor Hot Docs Cinema
Montreal – Cinema du Parc
Vancouver – Vancity

August 14
Waterloo – Princess

August 21
Cobourg – The Loft

August 28
Ottawa – The Bytowne

October 1
Regina – RPL Film Theatre

October 16
Barrie Film Festival

With more cities to follow.

BIKES VS. CARS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Fredrik Gertten Doc Opens July 31

THIS JUST IN:

BIKES vs CARS

opens theatrically in Toronto via Kinosmith

on July 31, 2015 at The Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor St. W.)

with other Canadian cities to follow.

Bike Valet will be provided by "CYCLE TORONTO"

for the opening weekend screenings.

Your Valet Stub will get you DISCOUNTS for yummy treats
@ THE BLOOR CINEMA concession stand, but you
MUST RIDE YOUR BIKE TO THE SCREENING!

Director Fredrik Gertten will be in attendance

in Toronto for the first weekend to do Q+A’s

following each and every showing.

AND NOW, HERE'S WHY YOU CAN'T MISS THIS TERRIFIC MOVIE:

Bikes vs Cars (2015)
Dir. Fredrik Gertten
Starring: Rob (Crack Smoking Ex-Mayor of Toronto) Ford, Denzil (Former Rob Ford Apologist and Toronto Deputy Mayor) Minnan-Wong, Aline Cavalcante, Dan Koeppel, Ivan Naurholm, Raquel Rolnik, Nicolas Habib, Don Ward, Don Ward, Joel Ewanick, Joshua Dysart, Christina Deckwirth, Liliana Godoy, Fabio Mendonça

Review By Greg Klymkiw

We are on the brink of worldwide environmental collapse. One of the biggest culprits in this deadly folly is the power held by the transportation and energy interests which have been plunging the Earth ever-deeper into an apocalypse we might never recover from. Filmmaker Fredrik Gerrten tackled the inhumanity of the Dole Corporation and its use of poisonous chemicals in the production of fruit with his powerful films Bananas!* and Big Boys Gone Bananas!*. Now, Gertten is back with Bikes vs Cars, a terrific new picture infused with his unique, super-charged, aesthetically dazzling cinematic style of activist cinema, providing a fascinating Around the World in 80 Days eye-opener into just how people get around in some of the biggest cities on God's Green Earth.

Personally, I'm an inveterate driver of cars. So much so, that when I lived in Winnipeg, I lived across the street from a supermarket and prided myself, not on walking to gather my groceries, but, in fact, driving my car across the street to stock up on my soda pop, potato chips, cookies, frozen pizza, toilet paper and plastic Glad garbage bags. In fact, though my apartment had an in-suite laundry and dryer, I shoved all my dirty clothes into the aforementioned Glad garbage bags and drove, from the extreme sound end of the city to the north end of the city for my Mother to do my laundry for me (until my mid-30s). When she was done her maternal duties, I'd make the long trek - by car, naturally, to pick up my Downy-fresh clothing.

I have to admit that anytime I see a movie or television program with pro-bicycle losers whining about cars and how evil they are, I want to punch them in the face. That said, Bikes vs Cars is a Fredrik Gertten film and as he's not the typical documentarian, but a REAL FILMMAKER, I did indeed have to gird my loins and grit my teeth and watch it.

And yes, I'm glad I did. It's not only great filmmaking, but it did indeed provide the kind of alternate viewpoint that was far from didactic. Not once did I feel like I was being clobbered on my noggin with a bag of fucking granola wielded by some granny-glasses-adorned, pony-tailed, bearded, sandal-wearing hippie who dared refer to me as "Man."

You see, I have not been on a bicycle for 40 years. I have to admit, though, that I loved this film so much that the next time director Gertten visits Toronto I might try to interview him as we take a bicycle ride through the streets of the city once ruled by the crack-smoking Mayor Rob Ford who fought mightily during his term of office in what he perceived to be a "War Against Cars". (Maybe we will even take a bicycle ride together to Rob Ford's house in Etobicoke and, of course, the infamous crack house where he sucked back the elixir that led to his troubles.)

Oh, uh, Rob Ford is in the movie, but frankly, Gertten introduces us to a lot more interesting people than that. (Though in fairness, Ford delivers plenty of outrageous redneck comedy relief.)

Focusing primarily on the cities of Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, Toronto and Copenhagen we meet a variety of cyclists, car drivers and everyone in between. We learn about various individuals and their love of cycling as a viable mode of transport, but we also experience, first-hand, exactly how their very lives are at stake on their bikes.

Gertten captures some unbelievably terrifying footage as insane car and truck drivers madly careen through the streets, narrowly missing cyclists, cutting them off, forcing them into near-deadly situations. These sequences are so harrowing, I must admit to even biting my nails to the quick for the filmmakers being out there on the mean streets to capture this footage.

Contrasting this, though, are clearly sequences where Gertten manages to capture the sheer joy and beauty of what these cyclists experience as well. Night rides on empty streets, group rides where the sheer amount of riders create safety in numbers, children utilizing cycling as part of their curricula and, strangely enough, we even experience the adrenalin rush of cyclists blasting through the most congested streets.

Of course, no documentary is without the facts and figures and Gertten does not shy away from presenting these, but never are they strictly informational, but are woven expertly into the fabric of his narrative.

He also provides so many moments that are heartbreaking - memorials and memorial services to fallen cyclists, ghost bikes of deceased riders, affixed to posts with clutches of flowers clinging to them, urban headstones and monuments to the dead.

One of the coolest sequences is when Gertten follows a cyclist through a neighbourhood in Los Angeles and we discover the ghost-town-like remains of a massive bike transport system which once allowed 25% of the city's population bike to and from their places of employment.

Contrasting all the urban nightmares where cars outnumber bikes, Gertten follows the daily adventures of a cab driver in Copenhagen. I have to admit, even as an inveterate automobile advocate, that it was pretty funny watching this poor schlub try to make his way through the sea of cyclists and admit. more than once, that he's a man with several tons of metal in his grasp, yet he is ultimately bereft of any real power on the streets.

As this is a Fredrik Gertten film, I'd be mightily disappointed if he didn't expose us to the sad and terrible truth of the matter behind the transport industry. I suppose I could have guessed this if I bothered to think about it at all, but Gertten provides us with the historical and contemporary secrets behind the corporate lobby of car manufacturers and the oil companies. Their money and power are responsible for blatantly squelching every form of alternative transport to the point where people believe that cars are the only way.

Bikes vs Cars is yet another terrific celluloid feather in Gertten cap of cinema. I especially love how the film is structured, paced and cut. He leads you in ever-so slowly and subtly and it doesn't take long before you're hooked on the narrative threads of his subjects and the overriding subject of them all - the conflict between bikes and cars. The movie stealthily and brilliantly draws you in, but as the film progresses, his canny approach is to catch you so off guard that before you know it your sucked into a compelling tale.

The movie, and by extension, Gertten's entire mise-en-scene and editorial structure, sneak up on you. Once he and the film have you in their clutches, there's very little to do but wend your way freely through the picture, perched very comfortably on what feels like a bicycle built for two.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Bikes vs Cars opens July 31, 2015 at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto via Kinosmith.

My interview with Fredrik Gertten and review of BIG BOYS GONE BANANAS!* HERE

My article on the crowd funding for BIKES vs CARS HERE

THE LOOK OF SILENCE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Powerful, important, deeply moving and utterly chilling companion piece to Joshua Oppenheimer's "The Act of Killing"

The Look of Silence (2014)
Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer

Review By Greg Klymkiw

A sure-fire way to avoid insanity after killing someone is to collect a couple of cupfuls of the victim's blood as it gushes from their jugular, then drink it all down: hot, steaming, sweet, salty and savoury.

If, after repeatedly hacking someone with a machete, and they're still alive, cut off their penis.

If you're interested in merely killing someone and not torturing them, feel free to hack off a woman's breast before she's dead in order to examine what it looks like.

These are a few words of wisdom imparted by men who, with smiles on their faces and infused with great pride, contributed to the wholesale slaughter of over one million innocent people during a foul genocide perpetrated some 50-years-ago.

Yup, you guessed it, Joshua Oppenheimer, the documentarian with the art of filmmaking hardwired into his very DNA is back in town and I steadfastly deliver you this following iron-clad guarantee:

You have not seen, nor will you ever see a movie like The Look of Silence. Never. Ever. Unless, of course, you've seen The Act of Killing, to which this film is a companion piece and one in which I made a similar guarantee when I reviewed that earlier work.

The Look of Silence proves to be an equally brave and cinematically brilliant look at the violent 1965 aftermath to the fall of Sukarno in Indonesia when the country shifted to a military dictatorship. Indonesians who opposed the new government were accused of being communists - a crime punishable by death. In less than a year with aid from the west, most of it from America (naturally), over one million "communists" were murdered.

Yes, many of the victims were communists, but so many others were simply labelled as such to justify killing them. Though the killings were sanctioned by the army, they were, in fact, carried out by civilian militias - squads of bloodthirsty garden variety psychopaths eager to taste blood for the "good" of their country.

THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
THE ACT OF KILLING
THE LOOK OF SILENCE

The only serious and good dramatic feature film to focus on the beginnings of this tragedy is Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously starring Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hunt in her brilliant Academy Award winning gender bending performance. Not that it's a factual document or anything, but it's a stylish fact-based fictional look at the events leading up to the genocide, placing things in a digestible manner. Given how sickeningly powerful Oppenheimer's documentaries are, the Weir picture isn't at all a bad place to begin before diving headlong into the horrors of both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.

Kudos are to be extended to Oppenheimer for creating an equally affecting companion piece that can work just fine as a stand-alone piece, bringing a completely new perspective to the tragedy. His first film on this subject focused the killers. Here, we focus on the victims.

Oppenheimer pulls out all the stops on his filmmaking prowess as an original cinematic storyteller by following Adi, a young 40-something travelling optician whose older brother was butchered during the genocide. Adi's route to offer eye examinations and to sell glasses takes him into the homes of the still-living killers (still feared, all rich and revered by the government as heroes) where he checks their eyesight and probes them about their parts in the genocide. If you want it, metaphor and irony abound in this odd tag-team of eye exams and hardline questioning, but for most, the story and the storytelling here will be the overriding element.

The look of a brother

Oppenheimer bounces between Adi watching interview footage with the various killers in the district (including those men describing gleefully how they murdered Adi's brother) and Adi on the road, confronting the same men he's seen in the videos. In most cases, these confrontations are chilling, the killers dropping unsubtle hints that Adi might be a communist himself and in need of extermination.

His Mother and wife are both terrified for Adi, but also for themselves and Adi's children. Adi's Mother lives everyday with the horror and pain of her son's murder while taking care of her blind, infirm husband whose own memories have been erased by the onset of senility.

The look of a killer

Adi, however, is a man obsessed. He's driven to ask the questions about the brother he never knew. He MUST ask the questions nobody dares to ask. At one point, a killer is so upset with Adi's questions - often relating to morality, culpability and guilt - that the sleaze bucket points out that not even Joshua with his interviewer cap on ever asked such penetrating questions. Oppenheimer, of course, intentionally kept a cool distance in his previous film to allow the killers a chance to "hang" themselves with their bragging, but here, he keeps another form of distance altogether to tell a story - that of Adi's powerful journey to confront the killers of his brother.

This is highly potent and explosive material and once again, Oppenheimer delivers a motion picture that's not only an important document of history, but a magnificent, harrowing and consummate work of art. The fact of the matter is this - most documentary filmmakers are not filmmakers. They're journalists and/or committed activists wanting to present a point of view with respect to information and/or interesting subjects. Oppenheimer transcends those staid notions of documentarians, though. He's a genuine filmmaker, an artist of the highest order. His work is not ephemeral in the least and will survive long, long after he and the rest of us are six feet under.

Though The Look of Silence lives now, it will, most importantly, live forever.

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

The Look of Silence begins its theatrical release in Canada at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto via Blue Ice Docs.

BIKES vs CARS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The war between bike riders and corporate pigs

THIS JUST IN:

BIKES vs CARS

opens theatrically in Toronto via Kinosmith

on July 31, 2015 at The Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor St. W.)

with other Canadian cities to follow.

Bike Valet will be provided by "CYCLE TORONTO"

for the opening weekend screenings.

Your Valet Stub will get you DISCOUNTS for yummy treats
@ THE BLOOR CINEMA concession stand, but you
MUST RIDE YOUR BIKE TO THE SCREENING!

Director Fredrik Gertten will be in attendance

in Toronto for the first weekend to do Q+A’s

following each and every showing.

AND NOW, HERE'S WHY YOU CAN'T MISS THIS TERRIFIC MOVIE:

Bikes vs Cars (2015)
Dir. Fredrik Gertten
Starring: Rob (Crack Smoking Ex-Mayor of Toronto) Ford, Denzil (Former Rob Ford Apologist and Toronto Deputy Mayor) Minnan-Wong, Aline Cavalcante, Dan Koeppel, Ivan Naurholm, Raquel Rolnik, Nicolas Habib, Don Ward, Don Ward, Joel Ewanick, Joshua Dysart, Christina Deckwirth, Liliana Godoy, Fabio Mendonça

Review By Greg Klymkiw

We are on the brink of worldwide environmental collapse. One of the biggest culprits in this deadly folly is the power held by the transportation and energy interests which have been plunging the Earth ever-deeper into an apocalypse we might never recover from. Filmmaker Fredrik Gerrten tackled the inhumanity of the Dole Corporation and its use of poisonous chemicals in the production of fruit with his powerful films Bananas!* and Big Boys Gone Bananas!*. Now, Gertten is back with Bikes vs Cars, a terrific new picture infused with his unique, super-charged, aesthetically dazzling cinematic style of activist cinema, providing a fascinating Around the World in 80 Days eye-opener into just how people get around in some of the biggest cities on God's Green Earth.

Personally, I'm an inveterate driver of cars. So much so, that when I lived in Winnipeg, I lived across the street from a supermarket and prided myself, not on walking to gather my groceries, but, in fact, driving my car across the street to stock up on my soda pop, potato chips, cookies, frozen pizza, toilet paper and plastic Glad garbage bags. In fact, though my apartment had an in-suite laundry and dryer, I shoved all my dirty clothes into the aforementioned Glad garbage bags and drove, from the extreme sound end of the city to the north end of the city for my Mother to do my laundry for me (until my mid-30s). When she was done her maternal duties, I'd make the long trek - by car, naturally, to pick up my Downy-fresh clothing.

I have to admit that anytime I see a movie or television program with pro-bicycle losers whining about cars and how evil they are, I want to punch them in the face. That said, Bikes vs Cars is a Fredrik Gertten film and as he's not the typical documentarian, but a REAL FILMMAKER, I did indeed have to gird my loins and grit my teeth and watch it.

And yes, I'm glad I did. It's not only great filmmaking, but it did indeed provide the kind of alternate viewpoint that was far from didactic. Not once did I feel like I was being clobbered on my noggin with a bag of fucking granola wielded by some granny-glasses-adorned, pony-tailed, bearded, sandal-wearing hippie who dared refer to me as "Man."

You see, I have not been on a bicycle for 40 years. I have to admit, though, that I loved this film so much that the next time director Gertten visits Toronto I might try to interview him as we take a bicycle ride through the streets of the city once ruled by the crack-smoking Mayor Rob Ford who fought mightily during his term of office in what he perceived to be a "War Against Cars". (Maybe we will even take a bicycle ride together to Rob Ford's house in Etobicoke and, of course, the infamous crack house where he sucked back the elixir that led to his troubles.)

Oh, uh, Rob Ford is in the movie, but frankly, Gertten introduces us to a lot more interesting people than that. (Though in fairness, Ford delivers plenty of outrageous redneck comedy relief.)

Focusing primarily on the cities of Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, Toronto and Copenhagen we meet a variety of cyclists, car drivers and everyone in between. We learn about various individuals and their love of cycling as a viable mode of transport, but we also experience, first-hand, exactly how their very lives are at stake on their bikes.

Gertten captures some unbelievably terrifying footage as insane car and truck drivers madly careen through the streets, narrowly missing cyclists, cutting them off, forcing them into near-deadly situations. These sequences are so harrowing, I must admit to even biting my nails to the quick for the filmmakers being out there on the mean streets to capture this footage.

Contrasting this, though, are clearly sequences where Gertten manages to capture the sheer joy and beauty of what these cyclists experience as well. Night rides on empty streets, group rides where the sheer amount of riders create safety in numbers, children utilizing cycling as part of their curricula and, strangely enough, we even experience the adrenalin rush of cyclists blasting through the most congested streets.

Of course, no documentary is without the facts and figures and Gertten does not shy away from presenting these, but never are they strictly informational, but are woven expertly into the fabric of his narrative.

He also provides so many moments that are heartbreaking - memorials and memorial services to fallen cyclists, ghost bikes of deceased riders, affixed to posts with clutches of flowers clinging to them, urban headstones and monuments to the dead.

One of the coolest sequences is when Gertten follows a cyclist through a neighbourhood in Los Angeles and we discover the ghost-town-like remains of a massive bike transport system which once allowed 25% of the city's population bike to and from their places of employment.

Contrasting all the urban nightmares where cars outnumber bikes, Gertten follows the daily adventures of a cab driver in Copenhagen. I have to admit, even as an inveterate automobile advocate, that it was pretty funny watching this poor schlub try to make his way through the sea of cyclists and admit. more than once, that he's a man with several tons of metal in his grasp, yet he is ultimately bereft of any real power on the streets.

As this is a Fredrik Gertten film, I'd be mightily disappointed if he didn't expose us to the sad and terrible truth of the matter behind the transport industry. I suppose I could have guessed this if I bothered to think about it at all, but Gertten provides us with the historical and contemporary secrets behind the corporate lobby of car manufacturers and the oil companies. Their money and power are responsible for blatantly squelching every form of alternative transport to the point where people believe that cars are the only way.

Bikes vs Cars is yet another terrific celluloid feather in Gertten cap of cinema. I especially love how the film is structured, paced and cut. He leads you in ever-so slowly and subtly and it doesn't take long before you're hooked on the narrative threads of his subjects and the overriding subject of them all - the conflict between bikes and cars. The movie stealthily and brilliantly draws you in, but as the film progresses, his canny approach is to catch you so off guard that before you know it you're sucked into a compelling tale.

The movie, and by extension, Gertten's entire mise-en-scene and editorial structure, sneak up on you. Once he and the film have you in their clutches, there's very little to do but wend your way freely through the picture, perched very comfortably on what feels like a bicycle built for two.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Bikes vs Cars opens July 31, 2015 at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto via Kinosmith.

Bikes vs Cars will be unveiled to the world at the esteemed South by Southwest SXSW Film Festival on Sunday, March 15, 2015 under the stars in the Republic Square Park, March 16, 2015, AND THEN at the VIMEO THEATRE (ATTENTION SAM TOLES from VIMEO, check this out in Austin - you're gonna wanna get your mits on this one) and finally, March 18, 2015 at the SXSW Satellite Venue: Alamo Slaughter @ 5701 W. Slaughter Ln. This will be followed by film festival screenings all over the world.

My interview with Fredrik Gertten and review of BIG BOYS GONE BANANAS!* HERE

My article on the crowd funding for BIKES vs CARS HERE

BIKES vs CARS - TRAILER II from WG Film on Vimeo.

1971 - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Brave historic activism against FBI's illegal activities

Justifiable Criminal Action. Target: The FBI

1971 (2014)
Dir. Johanna Hamilton

Review By Greg Klymkiw

1971 by Johanna Hamilton might be one of the most important American documentaries in years, but it's not just the subject matter which demands accolades, but the filmmaking itself is of the highest order.

Long before the brave actions of exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden, a (technically) criminal action was perpetrated upon America's Federal Bureau of Investigation (The FBI). In 1971, a small group of young Philadelphia activists formed "The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI" and carried out a hair-raising break-in upon a sleepy regional FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Lifting hundreds upon hundreds of secret FBI files, these brave souls risked everything to discover and expose the insidious illegal actions of the famed domestic criminal intelligence arm of the United States government.

Their actions exposed one of the most heinous breaches of civil rights in a supposedly democratic nation. The Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was devised and overseen by the seemingly untouchable thug J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's notorious longtime kingpin, and its goal was to illegally spy upon American citizens to fight against what Hoover believed were un-American activities. Most of the targets were normal, perfectly innocent citizens, including groups of women meeting regularly to discuss women's liberation. Some of the more high profile citizens the FBI spied on included anti-Vietnam movements, the Black Panthers and Martin Luther King.

COINTELPRO included such sleazy, illegal actions as implanting spies amongst these groups and even communities of normal citizens. The plants were to gather information, seed dissent and to even go so far as to implant criminal "evidence" to make persecution/prosecution easier.

CRIMINALS: Richard Nixon & J. Edgar Hoover

Director Hamilton effectively utilizes all the tools of great documentary filmmaking to tell this stunning story, but furthermore, she employs all the best elements of filmmaking period to generate a movie that's as nail-bitingly suspenseful and harrowing as any great fictional political thriller. Call it The Parallax View with real people. Her protagonists in this group include hardened, up-front political activists as well as the astonishingly normal, suburban husband and wife team of Bonnie and John Raines.

Expertly weaving extraordinary archival footage, contemporary interviews with the original members of the Citizens' Committee, plus journalists instrumental in breaking the story, Hamilton manages to generate a film which blows this year's Oscar-winning Snowden documentary Citizenfour off the face of the map with the sheer force of expert filmmaking. 1971 is cinematic art of a very high order. Citizenfour has all the extraordinary Snowden footage, but as filmmaking, its sole importance lies in its subject matter, whereas 1971 - as cinema - transcends its important subject to place itself on a grand perch of sheer movie-making excellence.

Where Hamilton winds us aesthetically is by employing dramatic reenactments that are so brilliantly shot, cut and acted, then expertly blended into the archival and interview footage, that she pulls off the impossible. She out-Eroll-Morisses-Eroll-Moriss and for my money, has generated the best dramatic reenactments I've ever seen in any documentary.

Just a normal American family of heroes/criminals.

Throughout the film we're not only served up with important historical documentation of a turbulent time in American history, but we're plunged into the utter humanity of the Citizens' Committee to a point where we feel a combination of both pride and dread in their ongoing activities. The protagonists and antagonists are as clear as any great thriller, though they are superbly fleshed out with ever-creepy, danger-fraught and insidiously mysterious shades of grey.

This is great filmmaking. It must be seen by everybody.

Now, more than ever, it's especially important for Canadian audiences to see. Canada is on the verge of the most despicable federal legislation in our country's history. As reported in the Jan. 26 edition of Toronto's Globe and Mail, Chancellor Stephen Harper and his ruling Nazi Party of Canada "says his government will introduce promised new national-security legislation…including a provision that draws a line between free expression and endorsing terrorism. [Harper says] he will protect Canadians from homegrown extremists by giving authorities new powers – including the ability to prosecute people for 'the promotion of terrorism.'"

Who will protect Canadians from Harper and his proposed Gestapo?

See 1971. In a vital historical context, it will provide some answers to that question in terms of what might have to happen if Harper follows through with this insane act of terrorism upon our country.

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

1971 is a Blue Ice Docs presentation that's currently playing at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto. Demand it be played in YOUR city, town, hamlet, school, community centre and wherever else normal Canadians can get a whiff of what America did to its populace and how we, in this day and age, will be subject to equally immoral, totalitarian and downright criminal activities perpetrated by our own government.

MARMATO - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Sundance Award-Winner from Grieco & Reid preems Hot Docs "Doc Soup" and details the plight of poor Colombians under the iron fist of the Canadian Government, Canadian Corporate Scum, Colombian Corporate Filth and, of course, the Colombian Government which, with the help of an agency of Canada's "Il Duce" Harper, has labeled people fighting for their homes and lives as terrorists!

Marmato (2014)
Dir. Marc Grieco
Scr. Grieco & Stuart Reid
Prd. Stuart Reid

Review By Greg Klymkiw

When you and your father and their fathers before them and when, in fact, 500 years of your ancestors have lived on one of the largest, richest mountains of gold in the world, the last thing you want are foreign investors, corporate pigs and a corrupt government decimating your homes and livelihood. This, however, has been the reality suffered by the people who do most of the living and working and dying in Marmato, Colombia.

Mamarto is the result of six long years of following the plight of miners and independent mine owners in a Land of Oz that encircles their homes like a veritable Yellow-brick Road. To say the film is an important documentary reflecting the exploitation of the poor by the very rich is an understatement.

For me, as a Canadian, it's especially shameful since some of the biggest scum-buckets screwing these people are Canadians - proving, one supposes, that America's seemingly benign neighbours to the north of the 49th Parallel are just as happy as Uncle Sam to shove burning metal rods up the cumulative sphincters of the disenfranchised. The only difference is that Canadians sound more polite as they engage in their proverbial anal rape and, we suspect, have something resembling an education.

That all said, I do take considerable pride in the fact that it took a young Canadian, Stuart Reid, to co-write and produce this film with the brilliant director-cinematographer-editor Mark Grieco and, not-so surprisingly, without any official investment dollars from any Canadian Government Agencies, especially since one of the final nails in the coffins of the beleaguered Colombians was hammered by an official Canadian Government Agency (CIDA) under the rule of Canada's Totalitarian Dictator, Prime Minister Stephen "Il Duce" Harper.

This movie has to be seen to be believed, but let me try to describe what you're in for.

The film astutely takes considerable pains to lay out the individuals in Marmato, their families, their homes, their culture and the dangerous back-breaking work they engage themselves in. Placing an intimate human face to workers and their culture against the factual backdrop of how much money their hometown brings in. As the poor keep filling the bottomless pockets of corporate pigs who've purchased huge swaths of the mountain the people live on, is the very thing that places us firmly on their side. However, it's important to note that Grieco and his creative team (including ace co-editor Ricardo Acosta), keep the story chugging along on an even keel and allow the people and events to speak for themselves. This allows viewers with a heart to make the obvious choice in terms of whom they will side with. (The rest can go to Hell, which is where they're headed to serve their cloven-hoofed Master.)

The independent mine owners have long held out being swallowed up by corporations unwilling to pay a fair price for the mines while the mine workers themselves view their work as linked inextricably to where they live. The filmmakers allow us to understand that Marmato is more than a place to work - it is a home, a real home and one so gorgeous that it's impossible to imagine why any of these people would want to live anywhere else.

Though many of the physical houses and buildings on the land show considerable wear and tear and the kind of decay that normally would come from living on a mountain with the seismic shifts inherent in such a location, we get the sense that much of this has more to do with abject poverty rather than the ongoing threat of geological disaster.

As the aforementioned Canadians descend upon Marmato with the blessing of the Colombian Government, one wonders how meagre the bribe payments might actually have been, if such a thing actually - ahem - occurred. The Canucks essentially want to destroy the mountain and build a humungous pit from which to do the mining. As for little details like where the actual town of Marmato and its citizenry go, there's a whole lot of Beaver-and-Maple-Syrup-breath expended by the Canadians upon how they'll be creating a whole new and exciting life for these people. Whether the people of Marmato would be more than adequately compensated for being completely uprooted is another story altogether.

The scumbag Colombian Corporation that owns a whack of the mountain are typical of their ilk. There's one horrendous sequence involving a huge party thrown by the corp. to celebrate the first day of school for Marmato's future: THE CHILDREN! The hot babe CEO announces that her company is generously donating school supplies to every child and it's quite an impressive whack of stuff - really nice backpacks full of coloured pencils, readers, rulers and notebooks, among a myriad of other things. Here's the rub - most of the parents have already bought supplies for their kids, all the school supplies are identical and emblazoned with the corporation's logo (no individuality needed, thank you) and the hot babe CEO turns the whole affair into a sickening photo-op with her, the company logo and the children.

If that's not bile-inducing enough, this same company closes all the mines to force the will of the people and with the help of the Colombian government, bans the transport of mining materials into the town, especially dynamite. The government rules that any miners accessing the "company" property and/or exploding any dynamite (kind of necessary to mine pretty much anything) will be labeled a terrorist and arrested, then prosecuted as such. This extends even to private, independent mine owners.

Here. the filmmakers continue to bravely cover the resistance. This turns into an all-out battle between the people of Marmato and the government (or, take your pick, the corporate pigs). What transpires is as riveting and shocking as a Costa-Gavras incendiary political thriller. The difference, though, is that what we see is actually happening.

Yes, including armed soldiers.

I wish I didn't have to spoil things, so I won't completely, but I will say that even though battles are won, the "war" continues and I'm doubly ashamed to be a Canadian to admit that our government provided Colombia with the "mining guidelines" needed to further persecute and prosecute the good, hard-working people of Marmato.

Let this be a clarion call. Similar things are happening all over the world - including, perhaps, your backyard.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** Four Stars

Marmato plays at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto as part of the popular "Doc Soup" series.

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WHITEY: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA V. JAMES J. BULGER - Review By Greg Klymkiw

A modern masterpiece of chilling criminal shenanigans by Master filmmaker Joe Berlinger is now playing at the Hot Docs Bloor Cinema via Video Services Corp. (VSC) DARE NOT MISS IT ON THE BIG SCREEN!

Alcatraz Mugshot of Boston Mob Boss Whitey Bulger

Whitey: The United States of America V. James J. Bulger
Dir. Joe Berlinger (2014) *****

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Movies seldom open with the kind of chilling first few minutes that Joe Berlinger's new picture delivers. Stephen Rakes, a gentle white haired teddy bear of a man speaks with a born and bred South Boston accent - the tail-end "r" becomes the telltale "ah", "ing" is always the contraction "'in" and the letter "o", a slightly elongated "aahh". His first few words are an immediately identifiable amalgam of long-ago-lost hope and sadness:

"30 years ago my wife and I purchased a liquor licence and we had the liquor store up and runnin' by Christmas. We poured our heart and soul into it."

A young couple's dream come true becomes a nightmare.

Then lo and behold I gets a knock on my door one night. I'm at the house and my wife is down at the liquor store workin'. And there's Kevin Weeks and Whitey Bulger at the door. . . what the hell did they want? He [Whitey] says 'Ya gotta problem.' I says, 'What problem?' He says, 'Listen, we were hired to kill you. . . you gotta understand, the other liquor stores, they hired us to kill you. . . but what we're gonna do instead of that is we're gonna become your partners.'

Deadly tools of the trade

I says, 'No, you're not becomin' my partners.' And Bulger's just starin' at me and he's grindin' his teeth: 'You don't understand, we're takin' the fuckin' liquor store.' I says, 'It's not for sale.' [Then he says] 'I'll fuckin' kill you. I'll stab you and then I'll kill you.' And then they pulled out a gun and I was like, 'Holy Fuck'. They picked up my kid, my daughter's only a year old. He says, 'It'd be terrible for this kid to grow up without a Father.'"

Stephen Rakes Imitates Whitey Bulger

From here, we're slam-bang even deeper into one of the most harrowing crime pictures ever made. This is no drama, however, but it's certainly imbued with a compulsive narrative expertly unfurled by ace documentary filmmaker Berlinger, co-director with Bruce Sinofsky of the classic West Memphis Three trilogy: Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996) Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000) Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011) and his powerful solo effort Crude (that exposed Chevron and its part in destroying the health and lives of tens of thousands of Ecuadorians when a huge chunk of the Rain Forest was irretrievably polluted by oil drilling).

Focusing on the extraordinary trial of Whitey Bulger, Berlinger's new film film works on several levels. First and foremost, it's a savage indictment of the extent to which the F.B.I.'s involvement in Bulger's crime kingdom went far over the line and, in fact, assisted with his reign of terror. Secondly, Berlinger has seemingly unfettered access to archival footage, F.B.I. surveillance film, the prosecution and defence teams, key witnesses (including Bulger's trusty right hand, killer Kevin Weeks) and the myriad of Bulger's victims. Finally, the picture superbly, nerve-shreddingly yields the shocking rags-to-riches rise of Bulger - an epic, Scorsese-like crime thriller presented with the rat-a-tat-tat of a 30s Warner Bros' Slavko Vorkapitch/Robert Wise-edited Gangster movie montages and a kind of jack-hammering "News On The March" coldcock to the face.

Now this is filmmaking!

The picture leaves you breathlessly agog at the utter brutality and sordid corruption of a system that allowed a monster like Bulger to get away with his crimes for so long. The human factor, as represented by Bulger's victims, is often heartbreaking to the point where one is moved to tears. Even more stunning is that Berlinger followed the convoluted trial for so long and with such dogged persistence, that we, the filmmaker and a friend of a key witness are actually present for the sickening on-camera revelation that a victim of Bulger's evil is rubbed out before he gets a chance to testify.

Bulger's kingdom of crime lasted 30 years without a single indictment thanks to the corruption of America's Federal Bureau of Investigation. It's a blight upon the institutional crime fighting apparatus of a government long notorious for looking the other way when it served the most nefarious needs for both individuals to feather their own nests and to shield a country fraught with pure evil in its highest echelons of power and supposed enforcement.

Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity, indeed.

As far as I'm concerned, Whitey: The United States of America V. James J. Bulger already has masterpiece status affixed to it and will, no doubt remain a classic of great American cinema long after all of us have gone from this Earth. It's what cinema should be - it's for the ages.

Whitey: The United States of America V. James J. Bulger is now playing at The Bloor Hot Docs Cinema via the visionary Video Services Corp. (VSC). For further information about playmates, showtimes and tickets, please contact the Hot Docs website HERE. The film's international premiere was held at Hot Docs 2014 after its world premiere at Sundance.

Here is a lovely selection of VSC (Video Service Corp.) titles you buy directly from the links below, and in so doing, contribute to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner: