Something about this Hurricane Sandy time-lapse video soothes me out. It was captured yesterday from the N.Y. Times site by Richard Shepherd. I hate the Times policy of refusing to provide easy embed codes so congrats to Shepherd for busting through that. Here‘s the camera. Update: Here’s another one, apparently taken from the Brooklyn side of the East River.

Producer Glenn Zoller has been riding my ass to post this “Fifty Ways to Hate Obama” video, which I frankly don’t agree with. I’ve told Glenn I really don’t think it’s reflective of the current mood or zeitgeist. Obama is not in a down cycle in which people are beating him up left and right. He was during the budget crisis but that was then. I just don’t agree with it.

On the other hand Glenn has been kind enough to give me free shelter at Telluride for the last two years. And the singing is pretty good with pro-level recording. And there are millions of assholes determined to hate Obama no matter what so whatever…fine.

I saw Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson‘s Samsara the night before last. It’s a kind of ohm movie…ohhhmmm! A fixed-tripod, tableau zone-out film without any dialogue or lip movement even, but a drop-dead beautiful 70mm forehead-smacker. It premiered over a year ago at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival. Fricke has become a Zen master of movies in this vein — he co-shot Koyaanisqatsi (’82), and directed Chronos (’85) and Baraka (’92). Oscilloscope opened Samsara in August, and it might become one of the Best Feature Doc Oscar nominees.

But if you get beyond form, it’s something else. A friend asked me what I really thought of it, and I wrote the following:

“It’s stunningly beautiful, and it’s a nice concept of getting everyone in the film to just pose and stare at the camera and not move. No moving mouths, no smiles, no overt feeling. So yes, it’s very beautiful but — I’m sorry but this has to be said — an extremely cold and emotionally remote film. It gradually envelops you with its coldness, like a ghost.

“It left me with the feeling that there are way, way too many struggling third-world people in the world. What a truly miserable existence for so many hundreds of millions. The world is just swarming with millions and millions of people….millions of swarming ants… and they’re all choking on their garbage and working in soulless factories with millions of dead pig carcasses and love dolls and slaughter houses in which small chickens are suffocated and tortured and killed and cut into pieces and their guts fall in heaps on the damp cement floor.

“I’m used to a realm of my own making…we’re ALL used to that realm…in which there is space that I have carved out and decorated, and that otherwise I live in a world of hygiene and open roads and large homes and nice shoes and Oriental carpets and colorful socks and black high-thread-count T-shirts with a sense of clarity and refinement and a certain degree of aesthetic attractiveness, and a certain amount of caring and compassion and serenity and stillness.

“Samsara shattered that feeling for me. It’s a spiritual journey film but more often a tour of a massive, overcrowded garbage dump filled with human ants. It really depresses me to think that I’m an ant, but that’s what I am, I guess. That’s what you are, what we all are…we’re all fucking ants, scampering here and there. How cold, how horrid, how truly miserable, how immensely and suffocatingly depressing.

“But it’s a very handsome film. Mesmerizing, transporting, fascinating. Technical kudos to all involved. Truly magnificent photography. Beautifully scored. And welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to a world of SWARMING ANTS PRAYING DURING RAMADAN and SURROUNDED BY DEAD CHICKENS & MOUNTAINS OF STINKING GARBAGE AND LOVE DOLLS and ORANGE-OUTFIT PRISONERS DOING LONG SENTENCES DANCING IN PRISON YARDS. It took me hours to recover from the depression.

“The world that once was, the Lewis & Clark world of centuries past, a How The West Was Won world of cleanliness and mountain streams and open spaces and greenery and John Colter and Woody Guthrie and Fritz Weaver and Marthe Keller and reasonable amounts of people, seems to be a memory in Samsara. What a bummer.”

For the record, Fricke didn’t shoot the other two “qatsi” movies — Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi.

Samsara is Sanskrit term that roughly translates as “all I need now a cup of coffee and a blowjob.” Seriously, it means “continuous flow” and “cycles of life.”

If you were Joshua Jackson, wouldn’t you feel a tiny bit slighted by the art on this one-sheet for Stephen Frears‘ Lay The Favorite (Weinstein Co., 12.7)? The poster is clearly indicating that Jackson (lower right) is professionally known as Vince Vaughn. Vaughn is allegedly in the film but it’s hard to spot him in the trailer. Jackson is definitely a Favorite costar, but the poster is conflicted about that fact. At war with itself.

Vaughn is in our film, and…wait, who’s the guy on the bottom? You don’t care and neither do we, frankly. His name is…wait a minute…Jackson, Josh Jackson. Why did we put him on the poster if we don’t even know who the hell he is? You tell us. We don’t really know. It probably has something to do with Jackson playing a semi-prominent role in the film but this is not what marketing is about, giving credit to unknown guys. Why can’t we just put Vaughn’s face on the poster and be done with it? Trust us, we’re just as confused as you guys are.

After I-forget-how-many-years of announcing, shooting, editing and promotion (going back to least 2008 if not 1997, depending on shifting definitions of when it really began), episodes of Oliver Stone‘s Untold History of the United States will finally start airing on Showtime on Monday, November 12th, and will continue…what is it, eight or ten weeks? Ten, I think.

Screenings of the first three episodes at the 2011 NY Film Festival were cancelled because they weren’t quite ready. So they screened instead at the 2012 NY Film Festival, or about three and half weeks ago. A 120-minute segment is screening at the Aero on Thursday night followed by Stone doing a q & a. I can’t attend due to the AFI Fest prmiere and the first showing anywhere of Hitchcock.

Stone is an entrenched anti-corporate, antiwar-machine lefty from way back. I’ve come to know him fairly well through personal contact over the years and through mutual friends, and he’s always been extremely bright, engaged, inquisitive, insightful, and bold-strokey in his thinking. It gioes without saying that Untold History of the United States will not contain the usual homilies and rote history-class statistics. History outside the safe zone. That’s what Stone does time and again (except when he made World Trade Center).

Example: Two and a half years ago Stone noted that Adolf Hitler “did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people.” This statement is certainly not inaccurate.

According to a Wikipedia WWII death chart, the total number of Russan deaths, both military and civilian, during World War II came to 23,954,000 — a little more than 14% of the total Russan population. That’s a staggering figure. (The total number of U.S. military/civilian deaths during that conflict was 418,500, which represented 1/3 of 1% of the population at the time.) The total number of Jewish Holocaust deaths during World War II was 5,752,400.

And yet the Holocaust, according to U.S. media and history books, is the reigning horror of World War II, and not the fact that almost one in seven Russians were killed by Nazi Germany. This impression is due, of course, to the racial hatred behind the Holocaust and to the coldly methodical manner in which German officers and soldiers carried out the attempted extermination of European Jewry. But why is it that awareness of the scale of Russian WWII deaths barely registers alongside the Holocaust in this country?

Stone was essentially observing that the most historical authorities have placed an understandable but disproportionate emphasis on the Holocaust in considering the totality of horrors caused by Nazi Germany, and that certain powerful figures in this country’s big media constellation have probably had a hand in this. That doesn’t seem like a hugely crazy thing to say. Not that awareness of the Holocaust isn’t an immensely important lesson for each and every citizen to learn and reflect upon. But where are the Russian death museums in this country? Where are all the Russan death documentaries that have either won or been nominated for Oscars?

Lucasfilm will always be a respected name for post-production services, but it means relatively little if you’re talking about audience-attracting brands or franchises outside of the Star Wars films, and you have to a strenuously unhip person to be excited about seeing another Star Wars flick in this day and age. The series creatively peaked 32 years ago with The Empire Strikes Back, for God’s sake. So can somebody please explain Disney paying $4.05 billion for the company and pledging to make another Star Wars flick by 2015? “Lucasfilm” generated real excitement in the ’80s, but this is now.

I’ve accepted a generous invitation to visit and cover the 2012 Hanoi Film Festival (11.25 through 11.29). I’ll leave a few days before Thanksgiving to visit Danang and Hue before returning to Hanoi for four days of moviegoing, interviewing and event-covering. I’m figuring there will have to be at least four or five Asian-produced films worth savoring. It’ll be a chance to learn, open up and breathe in fresh aromas.

“This is one of those movies that depend on your not thinking much about it; for as soon as you reflect on what’s happening rather than being swept up in the narrative flow, there doesn’t seem much to it aside from the skill with which suspense is maintained despite the fact that you know in advance how it’s going to turn out.

“Nothing hangs on the way it turns out. Once the deed is successfully done, there’s really nothing much to say, and anything that is said seems contrived. That is the virtue of an entertainment like this; it doesn’t linger in the memory and provoke afterthoughts. One need not, and should not, pause for an instant while consuming it. It is a confection — perhaps that’s the message; everything is confection; movies, diplomacy, what’s the difference? — and it goes down well, leaving no aftertaste whatsoever.” — from a 10.29 N.Y. Times “Opinionator” piece by Stanley Fish, author and professor of humanities and law at Miami’s Florida International University.

Fish’s comments echo my own to some extent.

New York City needs to do more than simply admit error in case of the wrongly-convicted, wrongly-imprisoned Central Park Five — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam. Nine years ago the five filed a federal lawsuit against the city, seeking $50 million each in damages or $250 million total. “If anyone deserves to be financially compensated for a perversion of justice, it’s these guys,” I wrote seven weeks ago.

I came to this conclusion after seeing Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon‘s The Central Park Five, a PBS-funded doc about the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape case, at the Telluride Film Festival. Earlier this month the N.Y. Times reported that “lawyers for New York City want to explore if much of the film’s unpublished interviews and unreleased footage might help them” defend against the above-mentioned lawsuit. Let’s hope that they lose and that the five receive full financial compensation.

But at the same time let’s not go overboard with praise for The Central Park Five, which I don’t feel is honest and inquisitive enough to warrant Oscar consideration. Its heart is in the right place, but its embrace of a rotely compassionate liberal approach to the facts is, in my view, overly emphatic as it either ignores or fails to sufficiently explore certain points. A real-deal doc exposes all the facts of a given situation as much as possible, warts and all & let the chips fall. By my sights The Central Park Five doesn’t do this. Instead it pushes an argument against the wrongness of the city’s prosecution of the five youths (which we all agree with) and offers a pat, incomplete portrait of the five as well as the 1989 rape victim, Trisha Meili.

I spelled this out in my 9.3.12 Telluride piece, titled “Incomplete, Less Than Forthcoming.” Here are the basic points:

* “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.”

* “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.”

* “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 got into trouble (i.e., accused of insensitivity by liberal p.c. bullies) when I explained my final dispute, so let me try and explain a little better this time:

* Why 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. Nobody of any gender or size with a vestige of common sense should’ve jogged in Central Park after dusk in the late ’80s (when racial relations were volatile and Manhattan “was a completely schizophrenic and divided city”), much less above 96th street and much less above friggin’ 100th street. Everybody knows you don’t tempt fate like that. When Meili was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey in 2007, Winfrey said the following: “When I first heard about you, I thought, ‘Why were you running alone in Central Park at night?'” ** And no one in the film even mentions this, not even anecdotally. This was my very first thought when I heard the facts of the case. Five year olds who’ve had Grimm Fairy Tales read to them know that wolves lurk in the forest in the black of night.

These shortcomings aside The Central Park Five is a thorough-minded, well-ordered and commendable exploration of a miscarriage of justice. It’s certainly worth seeing. But it indulges in too much sidestepping to be nominated for Best Documentary Feature.

** Meili responded to Winfrey as follows: “You’re not the first person to say that. For me, running was a release at the end of the day, and I had this feeling that, ‘Hey, I have every right to run where I want, when I want.’ Wells response: Of course she had that right. Just like a visitor to the Florida Everglades has the right to go wading in the swamps with alligators swimming about.

“I’d been running in the park for two years,” Meili went on. “It was not a smart thing to do. Believe me, I’m not sitting here trying to justify it. Yet that is absolutely no justification for what happened to me.” Wells response: Of course not. No one’s talking about blaming the victim for anything. The point is simply “what constitutes common sense and what doesn’t?”

“But the idea of running alone in Central Park is a foreign concept to me,” Winfrey responded. “You had to be the kind of person who either thought you were invincible or who was just nuts.”

“I wouldn’t say I was nuts,” Meili replied. “Maybe I thought I was invincible.”