Last night, while re-embedding the video on my post Favorite Movies: All That Jazz, I found myself obliged to revise and substantially expand the original text. To back up a step: yes, I did say “re-embedding the video.” As a consequence of my decision to shift the handling of photos and videos here on C&B from the Floatbox Plus plugin to the simpler Highslide 4 WordPress plugin, I have to go back and re-embed all the videos in my old posts. I could go into detail about why this is necessary, but I’d like to keep my readers awake if possible. My point—and I do have one—is that since writing the original All That Jazz post I have notched at least one more viewing of the movie, not to mention three and a half more years of overall insight (for better or worse). So you see, my hand was forced. Go check it out—even if you don’t care what I wrote and you just want to see the awesome video of the song-and-dance number.
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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.
Jeff Chen recently asked, “Since everybody else is making lists of their top ten films of the decade, does that mean I have to, too?” I wouldn’t presume to speak for him, but my own answer to the same rhetorical question is a sheepish “yes.” Jeff ended up making his list, too, although I don’t know how sheepish he felt about it.
Anyway, here are my top ten…nah, screw it—twelve favorite movies of the decade just completed, i.e., 2000-2009.
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Dogville (2004)
Trailer
Add to Netflix Queue
Mike D’Angelo, The Man Who Viewed Too Much:Inevitably, von Trier’s spartan aesthetic has American critics citing Our Town, but in both method and spirit Dogville has much more in common with Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan (written in Denmark, ironically), another sorrowful disquisition on the mercenary aspects of human nature. Anything this ostentatiously artificial demands to be read as allegory, of course, and charges of anti-Americanism aren’t entirely groundless — certainly the film is very, very critical of the way that the U.S. treats its underclass, and to argue that Von Trier isn’t entitled to feel that disgust without having set foot in the continental 48 is patently absurd.
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Capturing the Friedmans (2003)
Trailer
Netflix
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader:
If Capturing the Friedmans were less shapely and less of a masterpiece, I’d find it less troubling. Both times I’ve seen it I’ve felt that by the end practically everyone associated with the film seems tarnished in one way or another: the ostensible subjects (the Friedmans, an upper-middle-class Jewish family in the Long Island town of Great Neck), the members of their community who helped destroy much of their lives, the filmmakers, and the audience. We’re all tainted by the graphic exposure of family wounds, diminished by what we think and feel–and by what we don’t think and don’t feel.
So there I was, browsing through the various free downloads available at NPR Music (recession-friendly shopping, as I think of it). I had found some stuff I liked pretty well—at the very least, well enough to download it for free. Then I stumbled across something that I found truly exciting, and I reacted the way any music lover would: I thought, “I must blog this.”
Unlike the other artists whose music I’d just downloaded (stuff by The Decemberists, K’Naan and Heartless Bastards, among others), I’d never heard of the British band The Heavy. Well, now I have… and you have too. Watch this:
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The second season of HBO’s brilliant drama series In Treatment is finally almost here. I haven’t been this geeked for the next episode of a TV show since The Shield ended.
If you didn’t act upon my entreaty to watch In Treatment during its first season, don’t beat yourself up, because I couldn’t walk the walk myself. I was going without any TV service at the time, and after the first 15 or so episodes HBO stopped streaming them for free on its website. Now, fortunately, there are remedies for dramatic completists like me who need to catch up:
- If you have HBO, you have until March 15 to check out any of the first 20 episodes via HBO on Demand. Presumably, after that they’ll have episodes 21-43 available the same way.
- HBO’s bogarting of the In Treatment Season One DVD set ends March 24. So great is my esteem for the show, I may just pre-order it.
If you’re not familiar with the show, here’s my attempt at a brief run-down. Psychotherapist Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne, pictured above) conducts weekly sessions with four different clients, and each session is depicted as one half-hour episode of the series. Paul’s Fridays are dramatized as his weekly visitations of his mentor Gina (Dianne Weist), who apprehensively counsels him on his own abundant issues despite questionable ethics of doing so.
In a broader sense, In Treatment is all about ethical dilemmas. Read the rest of this entry »
A Boy and His Blog
If this is your first visit to C&B you may be wondering, “Who the hell is this guy, and why does he have a blog?” It’s a fair question, so I’ve dedicated an entire page to answering it: check out About.
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