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.

UPTIGHT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Blacklisted 40s Noir Director updates John Ford classic "The Informer" from the Irish "troubles" to post-Martin Luther King assassination Cleveland.

Uptight (1968)
Dir. Jules Dassin
Scr. Jules Dassin, Ruby Dee, Julian Mayfield
Nvl. Liam O'Flaherty
Starring: Julian Mayfield, Max Julien, Ji-Tu Cumbuka, Raymond St. Jacques, Ruby Dee, Roscoe Lee Browne, Frank Silvera, Juanita Moore, Robert DoQui

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Liam O'Flaherty's classic 1925 novel was the basis for his cousin John Ford's immortal 1935 film The Informer, the simple, powerful story about an alcoholic cellar-dwelling brute in the Rebel-cause who betrays his best-friend to the authorities during the Irish War of Independence. Uptight is a 1968 remake by blacklisted film noir director Jules Dassin (Brute Force, The Naked City, Night and the City) faithfully transplanting O'Flaherty's story to the civil rights revolutionary movement in America by replacing the burgeoning Irish Republican Army with a fictionalized rendering of the Black Panthers in Cleveland.

To say Uptight is a forgotten masterwork of 60s/70s American Cinema would not, in spite of its lower-budget pedigree and a few bits of roughness around the edges, be an exaggeration. It's an endlessly fascinating, evocative take on the tragic implications of Martin Luther King's assassination amongst African Americans who chose violence to meet the injustices of the "Ruling" class, diametrically opposing King's peaceful actions (which, of course, were met with violence).

Dassin, the American son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, had long-dreamed of setting the book in just this fashion and miraculously managed to successfully pitch the property to Paramount Pictures during the rich "Easy Riders Raging Bulls" period wherein the artist/inmates were briefly allowed to run the studio/asylums. Alas, the film appears to have been barely released and has indeed been largely forgotten.

Dassin's greatest successes as a filmmaker were to carefully blend legendary producer Mark Hellinger's heavy-duty combo of gritty location work with carefully matched studio art direction. Fleeing the House of Un-American Activities for his involvement in the Communist Party, he carried on this same tradition in Europe and made the heist film Rififi, inarguably one of the greatest crime pictures in the history of French Cinema.

With Uptight, Dassin assembled an absolute dream team with impeccable results.

In addition to a cast of America's greatest African American actors of the time (or any time), Dassin was blessed with a rich script he co-wrote with the film's Black stars Ruby Dee and Julian Mayfield, stunningly gritty cinematography on the mean streets of Cleveland by Boris Kaufman (On the Waterfront, 12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker), first-rate production design by Alexandre Trauner (Children of Paradise, Port of Shadows, The Man Who Would Be King) that astonishingly matched studio sets with the locations, the expert cutting of editor Robert Lawrence (Spartacus, El Cid, Fiddler on the Roof), costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge (1974's The Great Gatsby, Network, The Rose) and last, but never, ever least, a GREAT musical score by Booker T. Jones, including his massive 1962 Stax Records hit "Green Onions". (If you don't know Jones, or at the very least, Booker T. and the MGs, then you know NOTHING.)

Eschewing the redemptive approach chosen by John Ford and his screenwriter Dudley Nichols in 1935, Dassin and team use O'Flaherty's underlying literary material to drag us through a dramatically tragic and stylistically (albeit borderline) example of neorealism which is shaken (not stirred) with dollops of expressionism. Other than a sentimental death for a traitor on the steps of a church and the updated setting, Uptight is strangely familiar to the Ford picture (at least on a simple narrative level).

After a gorgeously edited montage of the immediate Memphis aftermath to King's assassination (all in glorious, grainy colour) and expertly blended with scenes introducing the anger of the Cleveland Black-Panther-like revolutionaries, we plunge immediately into the familiar tale (which won Victor McLaglen his 1936 Best Acting Oscar as the doomed informer Gypo Nolan). His counterpart in Dassin's film is Tank (Julian Mayfield, making a phenomenal acting debut, ignored not only by the 1969 Oscars, but like the film, most everyone).

The burly booze-hound is drunkenly responsible for a major screw-up during an arms heist. His best friend Johnny Wells (Max Julien) is identified as the ringleader and murderer of a security guard. Johnny's parter Rick (Ji-Tu Cumbuka) and head revolutionary B.G. (Raymond St. Jacques, adorned stylishly in a Nehru jacket) are so disgusted with Tank's repeated incompetence that they kick him out of the organization.

Since Tank lost his job at a steel mill, Laurie (Ruby Dee), the love of his life is forced to prostitute herself. Cut loose by the revolutionaries, he's got little to live for and is especially susceptible to the influence of the silver-tongued gay police informant Clarence (Roscoe Lee Browne). Seeing the reward money for Johnny Wells as a way out for himself and Laurie, Tank does the unthinkable and rats out his old friend.

Ah, but just one little drink is needed.

Instead of using the dough as a nest-egg for flight and a better life for Laurie, Tank is pumped up into thinking that for once in his life, he can be seen as a "big man", and he trolls from bar to bar, buying multiple rounds for himself and all his "friends". All he has left is $20 to put in a collection plate during Johnny's funeral (his old pal's been gunned down by the cops thanks to Tank's loose lips).

The inevitable demise awaits him - not on the steps of a church, but upon the slag heaps of a steel mill.

The picture is a heartbreaker, to be sure, but even though it's a period piece, Uptight is as resonant to race relations in America today as it was in the 60s/70s. A good part of this is thanks to Dassin's dazzling direction. The opening heist scene is tension-filled and reminiscent of the "silent" heist in Rififi, the dirty streets of Cleveland seem as foul as those in The Naked City and the violence as raw and unyielding as that seen in Brute Force. The locations and production design, so beautifully lit, pulsate with realism of the neo and expressionistic variety - everything from tenement back alleys to a shuttered old bowling alley (and, of course, the slag heaps of Cleveland). You'll also be treated to a horrifying distorted mirror sequence where Tank drunkenly stumbles amidst freakish bourgeois White folk - a thoroughly unforgettable series of shots.

Dassin's montages are also a thing of foul beauty. Not unlike Slavko Vorkapich's legendary montages, they're infused with the weight of social injustice and the sadness inherent in a world where slavery is still slavery, but with a different name - the status quo, a world in which one of the film's characters opines: "a nigger is still just a nigger".

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

Uptight is available on a bare-bones Blu-Ray from Olive Films, but the transfer gorgeously reproduces the film's glorious grain and dapples of saturated colour. Given that most people have not seen this important work about the African American revolutionary movement (rooted in Irish literature and remade from a great John Ford masterpiece), it's well worth buying - for those who care about cinema.


If you buy UPTIGHT or any of other related Jules Dassin/John Ford films directly from the Amazon links below, you'll be supporting the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner:

GETTING STRAIGHT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Important 70s examination of academia, civil unrest from Richard Rush, director of The Stunt Man, featuring a truly GREAT performance by Elliot Gould. This movie demands a proper Criterion or Kino Lorber edition featuring my dream commentary w/ Gould & Rush moderated by critic Kim Morgan!

Every kid growing up in the 70s wanted to be Elliot Gould because he was (and still is) so FUCKING COOL!

ELLIOT GOULD
with preppie/druggie
HARRISON FORD

Getting Straight (1970)
dir. Richard Rush
Starring: Elliot Gould, Candice Bergen, Harrison Ford, Brenda Sykes

Review By Greg Klymkiw

During the general 60s/70s American mayhem of the civil rights movement, Vietnam, protests, the draft and the JFK/RFK/King assassinations, one event still stands apart from the rest.

The Kent State University Massacre in Ohio of 1970 continues to send shudders through us all - that horrific moment when American National Guardsmen fired off live rounds of ammunition into throngs of innocent student protesters. As horrific as anything imaginable, this was a case where a government turned its fascist guns against its own people - its hope for the future, its youth.

Dissent would NOT be tolerated and Big Daddy Establishment was steadfastly unable to spare the rod against its seemingly spoiled, stubbornly non-compliant progeny.

During this period, the unrest was mirrored and examined in the popular culture – especially the movies, where filmmakers like Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Sam Peckinpah and many others sought to expose the violence and hypocrisy of American life. Many of these films were not only boxoffice hits in their day, but continue to be revered and recognized to this day. And then, there’s all the rest.

While there are several worthy forgotten pictures from this era, one in particular stands out – Richard Rush’s fascinating and entertaining Getting Straight, a counter culture drama based on Ken Kolb’s novel (with Robert Kaufman's screenplay adaptation) about post-secondary academic hypocrisy. Rush is a great, but hardly prolific filmmaker. His biggest claim to fame is The Stunt Man, a wonky, obsessive and utterly anarchic look at the blurry lines between fantasy and reality in the movie business starring a completely and deliciously over-the-top Peter O’Toole whose thespian excess in the picture is rivaled only by Rush’s controlled manic directorial style.

Looking at Getting Straight 45 years years since its release (during the very year of the aforementioned Kent State Massacre) and in the context of The Stunt Man, one is immediately taken with Rush’s fascination with the blurring of borders. In Getting Straight, the divides are simply and clearly between old and new.

Harry Bailey (Elliot Gould) is the mustachioed, side-burned and amiably rumpled protagonist of Getting Straight – a Vietnam veteran returned from the war and in the last year of his English Literature Masters degree and a sessional lecturer. Harry is a man without (so to speak) a country. He wants to teach – desperately, but is, alas, faced with the dilemma of being too world wise to be a true part of the youth movement he so desperately craves to reach and too hip to embrace the staid complacency of the established order of academia.

He wanders through the picture, not so much torn between both worlds, but observing them and wondering how he can be a part of both. This noble effort, on the part of the character makes for fascinating viewing as we take on his perspective, but it’s also probably the main reason why Getting Straight has disappeared into the ether.

Rush bravely chooses to maintain the perspective of a man divided to lead us through the narrative – a worthwhile goal and certainly not flawed, but over the decades, audiences have become so bludgeoned into needing a character with firm coattails to grab onto in order to - ugh! - root for him/her, that part of the picture's relative obscurity has probably been affected by this the most. Like Gould’s Harry Bailey, we, the audience, wander through a world where students protest the outmoded academic ideals of the institution and Gould himself tries to utilize new methods to reach his students, but he also craves to play the game of an establishment he wants to change. This, of course, is what makes the film so fascinating.

Two Harry Baileys.
Both went to war.
One Harry won
the Congressional
Medal of Honor,
The Other Harry
got screwed
by The Man.

Harry Bailey’s namesake is, of course, a character from Frank Capra’s stunning post-WWII classic It’s A Wonderful Life. The difference between the two characters is especially intriguing since Capra’s Harry is anything but indecisive. As Harry Bailey's big brother George (in the form of James Stewart) declares, “Harry Bailey went to war, he won the Congressional Medal of Honor, he saved the lives of every man” under his command. And when Capra’s Harry returns from the war, he knows EXACTLY what he wants.

Rush’s Harry is probably closer to Capra’s big brother figure, George. He wants to join the establishment in order to change it. In Capra’s post-war fantasy, George Bailey gets to do exactly that, but in Rush’s world, with roles clearly reversed, Harry learns that straddling the fencepost can never yield true change – it instead equals stasis.

Getting Straight falls a bit short of greatness, but in many ways, it's one of the few pictures that comes closest to capturing the complexity of the period in which it’s set. In this sense, it has NOT dated. It is genuinely a project of its time – perfectly reflective of the complexities of the blurred lines on both sides of the old and new world orders. The two main things that work against the picture’s bid for the kind of immortality it probably craved are as follows: the aforementioned passivity of Gould’s character – it’s right for the movie and right for the world of the movie, but at the same time, fights against what mainstream movie drama is MOSTLY made of – a clear goal, clear stakes and a satisfyingly wrought conclusion.

Rush does not achieve this, though in all fairness, it’s clearly not his intent to do so. The second roadblock facing the picture's grab for greatness, and it is (and must have been) insurmountable, is the utterly dreadful performance of its leading lady Candice Bergen as the Ice Goddess grad student who is in love with Harry. Bergen is horrendous. Her lines are delivered with the kind of soullessness, which goes well beyond that of the character’s cold shiksa-like station. Bergen’s deliveries are flat and so is her face. Though this movie was made well before the Botox revolution, Bergen wanders through the picture like a poster-child for the toxic protein of choice to render the flesh immovable and wrinkle-free.

That said, there’s just so goddamn much to admire in the film. Elliot Gould works boundlessly with his character's passivity, indecision, confusion, complexity and manages to always maintain a fun, funny, sexy and amiable screen presence. When Harry Bailey is called upon to be active, especially during a brilliant thesis-defense sequence, one can see precisely how and why Gould was such a big star during this period and why he hit such a responsive chord with audiences. He's a laconic wiseacre who saves his best explosions of force for when he needs them. HE IS SO FUCKING COOL you just WANT to BE Elliot Gould. (At least I did as a kid and probably still do.)

The film's supporting cast is marvelous, especially a very young Harrison Ford as a wide-eyed preppie-druggie. It's also great seeing sexy Brenda (Mandingo) Sykes and counter-culture star of Zachariah, John Rubinstein.

Rush’s direction is suitably obsessive and detailed. There is a protest scene that is as breathtaking and chilling as anything you’re likely to see and the numerous party scenes are all infused with the kind of immediacy that allows you to observe AND participate.

At the end of the day, Getting Straight accomplishes much of what it set out to achieve and is, finally, an evocative window into a time and place that seems so distant, and at the same time, so current.

Look around. Innocent people are being killed indiscriminately by The Man everyday.

In that sense, things never really change that much, do they?

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

Getting Straight is available on Sony Pictures’ inexplicably titled and oddly programmed DVD label “Martini Movies”. This movie is begging for a proper Blu-Ray release, transfer and special edition via Criterion or Kino Lorber. I also dream of a commentary track featuring Gould and Rush and, most importantly, moderated by Kim Morgan (whose piece on California Split for the L.A. Review of Books is a poster-child for WHY SHE'D BE PERFECT).

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THE SECRET TRIAL 5 - Review By Greg Klymkiw - HOT DOCS 2014 - Legacy of Canada's Thinly Veiled Fascists. This chilling, important documentary that details Unconstitutional Incarceration is a HOT DOCS 2014 MUST-SEE

STOCKWELL DAY:
CREATIONIST, SPORTSMAN, POLITICIAN
A MAN AMONG MEN

The Secret Trial 5 (2014) Dir. Amar Wala ****

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Before we take some time to consider Amar Wala's chilling and important motion picture The Secret Trial 5, which details the Canadian government's horrendous abuse of five men who were incarcerated for spurious and most likely racist reasons, let us consider Stockwell Day. He ultimately plays a large role in this film since he held the lofty Minister of Public Safety position during a crucial time in the lives of these men, their families and, frankly, all of Canada.

Stockwell Day was an avid supporter of the idiotic security certificate, a 50-year-old immigration tool that can imprison non-Canadians living in Canada for reasons of - ahem - national security. Evidence is never fully revealed, trials are held in secret and the real hope is that those arrested under them, will agree to just go back to whatever country it is they came from.

Unfortunately, since the security certificate became an anti-terrorism tool in Canada after 9/11, people arrested under their auspices would have been committing suicide by agreeing to scurry back. We're talking about political refugees here. Going back meant, and still means, torture and execution. Besides, these were people who'd already made lives here with family, friends, bright futures and contributing to the fabric of Canada's multicultural society.

In the film, however, we're treated to numerous instances of Stockwell Day defending the use of the security certificate and even finding ways to get around a Supreme Court decision that these tools were (and are) constitutional. The bottom line for those like Day and his ilk is that these people are under arrest, stripped of their freedom and pretty much have to rot until they make the "right decision" and bugger off.

Stockwell Day, an avid sportsman, preacher and believer in Creationism (Yup, mankind walking with the dinosaurs) was the Minister presiding over the horrendous incarceration of these five men at a time when they needed a champion in that portfolio instead of an enemy. Then again, this was the same man who suggested that legalizing abortion could lead to child abuse. Injusticebusters.org quotes Day from the Calgary Herald with the following tidbit:

"If you can cut a child to pieces or burn them alive with salt solution while they're still in the womb, what's wrong with knocking them around a little when they're outside the womb."

On homosexuality, the same source quotes Day from the Edmonton Journal with the following nugget of wisdom:

"Homosexuality is a mental disorder that can be cured by counselling [and is] not condoned by God."

Day also expressed that sex education might lead to teen pregnancy:

"There is a growing body of literature suggesting that, as sex education becomes more comprehensive, there is a corresponding increase in sexual activity."

These five guys never had a chance.

Watching this stunning film, I was actually feeling ashamed to be Canadian. That our country could be governed by the likes of Day and the other fascists currently in power is simply beyond the pale. We watch, helplessly, as the film details the abuses these men suffered. Adil Charkaoui, was incarcerated for 21 months and forced to live under house arrest for four years - WITHOUT CHARGES. Hassan Almrei was in jail for seven years, plus forced into three more years under house arrest - WITH NO CHARGES LAID. Mahmoud Jaballah was working as a principal in a Scarborough school when he was arrested, then incarcerated for six years and continues to live under house arrest - AGAIN, NO CHARGES WHATSOVER!!! Mohamed Harkat spent a relatively breezy 43 months in jail and has lived under house arrest since 2006!!!!! Guess what? No charges. The fifth individual, Mohammad Zeki Mahjoub, chose not to participate in the film, but we learn that he was imprisoned for seven years and has continued to live under the strictest house arrest since 2007.

The house arrest is especially harrowing to experience while watching the film. For an individual to be forced to suffer the indignities the film details is yet another aspect that made me ashamed to be Canadian. The aforementioned non-participant in the film has publicly requested to be returned to prison, insisting the cruel and unusual suffering under house arrest is worse than incarceration in a jail. What the film details here in the house arrest of the other participants is indeed, so sickening, it's almost impossible to blame him.

Sometimes, the importance of a film can take precedence over its importance as film art. Such is not the case here. Wala's picture is meticulously researched, surprisingly balanced (given its cinematic activism) and superbly crafted. But most of all, it IS an important work. On the eve of yet another Supreme Court challenge to the unconstitutionality of security certificates that could hopefully result in the release of Mohamed Harkat, every Canadian needs to see this film and raise the hugest ruckus imaginable.

In fact, audiences all over the world need to see this film. It's proof that IF a so-called benign democratic stronghold like Canada is willing to engage in such fascist activities, imagine just how horrendous the whole wide world is becoming with respect to the thug-like imposition of Orwellian measures to keep everyone in their place.

The Secret Trial 5 premieres at Toronto's Hot Docs 2014. For ticket info, contact the festival website HERE.

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

WINTER, GO AWAY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Klymkiw HOT DOCS 2013 HOT PICK

Winter, Go Away (2013) ***1/2
Producer: Marina Razbezhkina
Dir: Sofia Rodkevich, Anton Seregin, Madina Mustafina, Elena Khoreva, Anna Moiseenko, Dmitry Kubasov, Askold Kurov, Nadezhda Leonteva, Alexey Zhirayakov, Denis Klebleev

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Vladimir Putin is evil. He is the worst thing to happen to Russian since the Butcher Stalin. He is potentially another Hitler. Or at the very least, Stalin. And believe me, that's bad enough since Putin believes in nothing but himself and his cronies. He has no beliefs save for the fake sense of nationalism he uses as a public relations ploy to keep himself in power. Oh, actually, I erred somewhat in that last statement. He believes in brute force and open corruption.

This very cool and brilliantly edited documentary comes to us courtesy of Producer Marina Razbezhkina who, for my money, directed one of the genuinely great Russian films of the past twenty-or-so years - the exquisite and poetic avant-garde drama Harvest Time, 2004's ode to and very odd reworking of Dovzhenko's immortal farm collective celebration Zemlya.

Assembling 10 filmmakers to shoot events for the two months preceding Putin's third re-election, Winter, Go Away is not only a stunning portrait of a Russia ideologically and politically sliced in half with two diametrically opposed forces, but it's a harrowing up close and in your face exposé of a police state. If you didn't know or believe it before, the film makes it clear that all those whom Putin has bought and paid for to swing the election in his favour are utter filth. It's the worst Soviet style of wrapping peacekeepers and bureaucrats around one's finger.

The film's "balanced" portrait clearly demonstrates how those who believe in Putin seem as deluded as the Christian Right Wing in the United States. That said, we also see how splintered and disorganized the anti-Putin camp is - all their hearts are in the right place, but none of their bodies and minds come together at the right time.



Moreover the one thing that simply cannot be denied is the content during numerous sequences involving a near-litany of infuriating, flagrant disregard for basic human rights and free expression. With this, the filmmakers expose their agenda quite openly and in fact, the approach taken with the whole film is not unlike the kind of "balanced" portraiture the pro-Putin camp employs (albeit with far more money and power behind it than those who are against him). As far as I'm concerned, this is fine - the film, in spite of ten directors, has a powerful, cohesive and forceful point of view.

The movie on paper might sound like a patchwork quilt, but editor Yuri Geddert fashions a painful and frustrating narrative wherein Putin's win seems like a done deal from the beginning. And yet, we are introuced to so many brave and committed young voters who exude a collective belief system in a Russia free of the yoke of Putin's gangsterism. Just as maddening, however, is how disparate they all seem, but what unites the anti-Putin demonstrators and activists - at least within the context of the film - is seeing their hopes dashed as they are over and over again are beaten and incarcerated by policemen who care only about the status quo and their own, no doubt, healthy pay-offs to keep the peace - Putin Style.

By the time we get to election day, the flagrant abuses multiply exponentially and Putin will once more reign supreme. It's not especially hopeful, but the pure "fuck you" attitude of Russia's youth is something to embrace and champion,

"Winter, Go Away" is playing at the Hot Docs 2013 Film Festival. For tickets and showtimes visit the Hot Docs website HERE. The film is preceded by a short satirical piece entitled "Vladimir Putin in Deep Concentration" which, at just under ten minutes is about five minutes too long to achieve the effect it's trying for.

FAIR GAME - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Doug Liman's Tense Political Thriller in Style of 70s Paranoia from Pakula and Costa-Gavras

Fair Game (2010) dir. Doug Liman
Starring: Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Bruce McGill and Sam Shepard

****

By Greg Klymkiw

Politicians, our purported leaders, cannot be trusted. As instruments for the New World Order, they're out for themselves and their cronies. Even worse are the bureaucrats, administrators and snivelling minions below them - they're bigger whores than the elected officials since they do what their leaders want them to do either intentionally, or pathetically, because they're too stupid to know any better.

The cheapest whores of them all are the media. They're bought and paid for with junkets and dreams of exclusivity. It's a vicious circle wherein the losers are the very few amongst the aforementioned power brokers who actually want to do the right thing.

Such is the world of Fair Game, a terrific new fact-based political thriller by the estimable director Doug (Go, Swingers, The Bourne Identity) Liman.

In the tradition of such fine thrillers as The Parallax View, All the President's Men (both by Alan J. Pakula) and the best Costa-Gavras works such as Missing, Z and State of Siege, Liman's film uncovers one of the more regrettable (of the infinite) acts of deceit perpetrated by the American government against both its own people and the rest of the world.

Telling the story of former undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) and her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), the former U.S. ambassador to Niger, the film is set against the backdrop of the Bush administration as it seeks evidence that Iraq possesses Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Plame works to get Iraqis to speak the truth and in return promises anonymity and protection. Her bosses want someone to get evidence, but through more diplomatic channels. The bosses ask Plame to write an assessment and recommendation that Joe, her husband, is the right man for the job.

Needless to say, there are NO weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration chooses to ignore the espionage work by the husband and wife who risk their own lives and the lives of others to get this information.

When an irate Joe runs an op-ed piece in the New York Times that expresses his frustration and calls the American administration bald-faced liars, Bush and his sleazebag, knee-pad-adorned bureaucrats - along with the media - tar and feather Joe and his wife. Valerie remains stoic while Joe becomes openly hostile and critical towards the Bush administration.

Liman nicely balances the public and private, the political and the thriller and straight up delivers a maddening expose of a lie perpetrated by those who can't be trusted and how weasel bureaucrats deflect their fibbing and incompetence onto those who can ill-afford to withstand such an assault.

Those whom they deem expendable become the "fair game" of the title.

In reality, though, it's more than the handful of innocents who become "fair game", it's the electorate, the nation, the world as a whole who join the club of the expendables.

Both Penn and Watts sizzle in their roles and receive able support - notably from Sam Shepard as Plame's father and the fabulous character actor Bruce McGill. Liman surrounds all of them with his taut mise-en-scene which he not only directs, but photographs as well.

Watching the film will frustrate you and make you angry as hell. The exemplary filmmaking is so first-rate in clearly and simply illustrating how elected officials and their handpicked toadies in the administration and media are bald-faced incompetents, bearing little or no regard for the principles they've been chosen to uphold, but instead wade in a vat of their own fecal matter to cover their individual and collective sphincters.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my punditry for today.

Wolf Blitzer, move over.

"Fair Game" is available on DVD and Blu-Ray via E1 Entertainment.