Day: September 3, 2012

I felt moved but irritated and occasionally infuriated by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon‘s The Central Park Five, a PBS-funded doc about the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape case and the five Harlem youths who were wrongly found guilty of the crimes and imprisoned for years — a travesty. I saw the two-hour film yesterday afternoon at the Telluride Film Festival and subsequently discussed it during yesterday’s Oscar Poker podcast.

I could write thousands of words about this but let’s just deal with the basics and my problems with the doc.

The Central Park Jogger case was about (a) an assault and rape of Trisha Meili, at the time a 29 year-old Wall Street worker, on 4.19.89, and (b) five coerced and nonsensical video-taped confessions by four innocent black males in their mid teens — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise. (A fifth suspect, Yusef Salaam, “made verbal admissions but refused to sign a confession or make one on videotape,” the Wiki page says.)

There was no proof that the youths were guilty, certainly not from any DNA. The guilty party, a convicted rapist and murderer named Matias Reyes, confessed to the rape in ’02. But the kids having idiotically confessed (even though they recanted a few weeks later) sealed their fate, and they all did serious prison time and had their lives half-ruined. If anyone deserves to be financially compensated for a perversion of justice, it’s these guys. Their lawsuit is currently unresolved. But I was still bothered by the following:

Question #1: It was one thing when one mentally challenged defendant in the West Memphis Three case confessed to having killed three boys, but the mind reels at the idea of four guys who weren’t mentally challenged confessing to the Central Park rape, and with their parents or guardians in the room! Four kids plus four guardian/parents — that’s eight instances of massive stupidity. The kids had been grilled and pressured by NYPD detectives because they’d been involved in a “wilding” incident that same night in which a gang of about 30 kids from their general neighborhood had randomly attacked and beaten up a couple of victims inside the park. But the absurdity of four kids confessing en masse to something they didn’t do because they were tired and wanted to go home is mind-boggling. And the filmmakers barely touch this. It is simply explained that the confessions were coerced. Madness.

Question #2: Why the hell was the victim, Trisha Meili, jogging in the vicinity of 102nd street on a dark road inside the park around 10:30 pm? I know New York City and that is flat-out insane. A sensible single woman shouldn’t jog in Central Park after dusk, period, much less above 96th street, much less above friggin’ 100th street. The only thing she didn’t do was drape a sign over her jogging outfit that said “attack me.” Everybody knows you don’t tempt fate like that. And no one in the film, not a single soul, even mentions this.

Question #3: The five unjustly convicted youths were not blameless angels, although the film tries to indicate this. They were part of a roving gang that was harassing and beating the crap out of anyone they happened to encounter. The five say in the film that they were just watching this activity and going “wow,” but I don’t believe in my gut they were just onlookers. It was the metaphor of a sizable gang of black kids hurting victims at random and the inflaming of this by the media and politicians that got the five convicted as much as anything else, and I resented the film trying to sidestep the likelihood that they were bad-ass teenagers at the time who were up to no good.

Question #4: Not only does Trishna Meili not speak to the filmmakers, but a photo of her isn’t even used, despite her having written a book, “I Am The Central Park Jogger.” Her injuries were so severe and traumatizing that she’s never been able to remember the incident, but to not even explain the whys and wherefores of her absence from the film seems strange. She may not have wanted to be in the film, okay, but why not at least explain that? And why wouldn’t she want to be in the film if she’d written a book about the attack and her recovery? The film doesn’t even run a pertinent quote or two from her book. Incomplete and irksome.

I wasn’t initially enthusiastic about visiting the Telluride Film Festival. Concerns about work and other problems made it difficult to settle down about flying to a secluded canyon town, seven hours southwest of Denver, to watch movies for three days that only included one “sneak” (which turned out to be Argo). I couldn’t understand why hundreds of people from around the world would put up with 45 minutes of air-pocket turbulence in a tiny plane for this festival. But then I arrived.

Telluride doesn’t feel like Sundance or Toronto. There aren’t any flashing cameras, red carpets or lavish parties; just flocks of rich white people in North Face clothing enjoying themselves. It’s also beautiful and serene every time you walk out of a theater and gaze at the arching peaks a mile or so away. That said, I saw ten movies, and came out really bananas for only five.

I had a wonderful time with Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha and Ziad Douieri‘s The Attack, but for completely different reasons. I didn’t know anything about Douieri, and a critic we spoke to confided that he sensed in Frances Ha a slightly possessive boyfriend element, as Baumbach and star Greta Gerwig are a couple. But that didn’t materialize, and Gerwig’s lead performance felt like the most genuine I was ever going to see from her — it was perfect.

Frances Ha has a floating Brooklyn mumblecore pace and vibe, and is about a 27-year old dancer (Gerwig) who is lost when her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner, daughter of Sting and Trudie Styler), falls in with a rich boyfriend.

You can’t help but compare to HBO Girls, but it’s not that at all. It’s not about gross, uncomfortable-to-watch-sex; Baumbach already accomplished that with Greenberg. The writing is sublime, really tight and filled with pockets of hilarious improvised dialogue. The whole house was giggling and adoring Gerwig despite dealing with a 20-minute delay wen the film began without the center dialogue track.

The Attack, on the other hand, hits you in the gut and opens you up to perhaps the most heartbreaking story you could imagine, which is tied to the fundamental dynamic behind the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Perhaps most affecting about the film was Douieri’s pre-film speech about how he almost lost confidence in himself during fundraising and pre-production. Knowing this and following this story of an Arab-born Tel Aviv surgeon trying to find out why his wife became a suicide bomber made this film, for me, a real triumph.

Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers: A riveting documentary about Israel’s anti-terrorism organization, Shin Bet, told by former directors of the program over the last 40-odd years. It’s amazing the kind of access Moreh got with this documentary as it really sheds light on how even the biggest war hawks in Israel’s government feel how assassinations are ultimately pointless and/or self-defeating

Pablo Larrain‘s No: A great true story about how an influential advertising campaign led to the ouster of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1988. But Larrain’s decision to use a 1983-era video camera (or a simulation of same) to convey the atmosphere or the times and to blend with 1988 ads and newscasts was, I think, risky. It got in the way. While No provides a compelling story, it would be seen by many as an even greater film if it had been shot with top equipment.

Ben Affleck‘s Argo: This was a really tight Hollywood thriller with a kick-ass cast that blended nicely with the Arab-esque theme of this year’s festival. As everyone else points out, the film really takes you home during the final 20 minutes. Affleck is getting better as a director.

Bill Murray and his Hyde Park on Hudson pallies — costar Laura Linney, director Roger Michell, screenwriter Richard Nelson — took a bow before last night’s screening at Telluride’s Chuck Jones cinema.

Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson (Focus Features, 12.7) is a mildly appealing, well-finessed historical parlor piece, subtle and dryly comedic and aimed at older audiences. It’s a movie for your moms and dads. But apart from one richly affecting scene between President Franklin D. Roosevelt (engagingly played by Bill Murray) and his guest, King George VI (Samuel West), it feels mild and trifling and slight. Not offensively or dismissively, mind. It’s just nothing to get riled about either way.

Richard Nelson‘s script is basically a presentation of two disparate tales involving FDR — his intimate (i.e., faintly sexual) friendship with Margaret “Daisy” Suckley (Laura Linney), which apparently began sometime in the late 1930s and lasted until his death in 1945, and FDR having received King George VI and his wife Elizabeth at the Roosevelt retreat in Hyde Park in June 1939.

These two story lines do not intersect in any meaningful or corresponding manner. We are shown that FDR’s thing with Daisy is pleasantly underway as the King and Queen arrive for their visit, and it’s soon evident these twains will never meet or combine in any way that will amount to bupkis, nor should they.

What occurs? FDR clearly likes Daisy and vice versa. Daisy gives FDR a handjob. Daisy is hurt and shocked (in a rather trying, adolescent and tantrum-y way) when she realizes she is not Roosevelt’s only girlfriend — Missy LeHand (Elizabeth Marvel) has also been his “friend.” (This in addition to FDR’s longstanding relationship with Lucy Mercer.) But she gets over it. The King feels nourished and soothed by a boozy, late-evening chat with FDR — truly the film’s centerpiece. The King and Queen agree to be good-humored guests at an outdoor picnic, at which the King eats a mustard-basted hot dog.

The Queen is very bothered by the prospect and the metaphor of hot-dog consumption. The film brings it up..what, three or four times? No motion picture in history has ever paid so much attention to red weiners on a bun. No, that’s not a double entendre.

And everybody smokes cigarettes. Trust me, his movie is as much about the presence of constantly lighted and inhaled cigarettes as anything else. Literally every five or six minutes somebody lights up and takes a nice deep drag….yessss. Hyde Park on Hudson is one of the most persuasive advertisements on behalf of the tobacco industry to come along in a long, long time.

Hyde Park on Hudson is Murray’s show, for the most part. He doesn’t deliver an impersonation of FDR as much as a conveyance of his personality, manner and assured vibe. I wasn’t knocked out as much as pleased that he got through it by feigning smooth, old-world charm with a hint of melancholia.

But forget any kind of performance laurels thrown to Linney — she’s playing a very slight person, and hasn’t much to work with. (Those Gold Derby subscribers who predicted Linney would get awards heat need to be taken outdoors and spoken to. Tom O”Neil? That’s your job.) The always enticing Olivia Williams has very little to say or do as Eleanor Roosevelt, which was the way it was in real life as Eleanor and Franklin’s marriage had, by 1939, been mostly about appearances for a couple of decades. West is vulnerable and appealing as King George, but Olivia Colman‘s portrayal of Queen Elizabeth is a portrait of a joyless prig…sorry.