Oscars

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HarlanCountyDVD

Harlan County U.S.A. (1976) Directed by Barbara Kopple; watched on Criterion Collection DVD. An urgent, immersing documentary of an Appalachian coal mining community’s more than year-long strike against corporate overlord Duke Power. The camera gets itself everywhere you would hope it could – the families’ homes, union meetings, planning sessions by the miners’ wives (who show at least as much grit as the men, often more), on the picket lines when the strikebreaking gun thugs attack, a mile underground in the mines themselves, at Duke Power shareholder meetings, and more. Unforgettable characters emerge, underscored by the raw honesty of the area’s indigenous bluegrass songs vocalized by subjects of the film. Parallels to recent WV mine explosion & 29 deaths are, unsurprisingly, present in several instances. A work of passionate storytelling, made at no small personal risk, richly deserving of its Best Documentary Academy Award, and absolutely among the great documentary films of the last 50 years. See it.


May 1, 2010 | 1 comment

Happy Non-Crap Time to You

February 2, 2006 | Permalink

Let me qualify the following by first stating that I loooove movies. I’m continually surprised by what a broad and flexible medium cinema is, encompassing expressions as diverse as the quiet contemplation of Persona, the farcical excess of Airplane! and the bold, sweeping provocation of JFK. I love the American film industry, long referred to (as I will hereinafter) by the geographic moniker “Hollywood.” In fact, I love Hollywood in the mature “warts-and-all” sense, i.e., enough for it to have the power to drive me absolutely nuts, which it often does.

Right now it’s Awards Season here in Tinseltown, which means that attention is focused on the better products (mostly, anyway) that Hollywood has turned out in recent months. Tuesday’s announcement of the Oscar nominees has prompted the studios to re-release or widen the release of films with prominent nominations, all of which means that I still have a brief window of opportunity to see movies like The Constant Gardener and Capote in the theatre.

I’m doing my best to enjoy it while it lasts… because once the statuettes have all been handed out, Roger Ebert has returned to his hotel to doff his once-yearly tux, and two large dark-suited men have assisted a drunkenly belligerent Russell Crowe into a limo as they collapse the tent on the Governor’s Ball, the multiplexes will be awash in third-rate crap until summer blockbuster time. Unless, that is, the summer blockbusters turn out to be third-rate crap as well, which is quite often the case. Come to think of it, with summer blockbusters my hope is usually that they are first-rate crap.