About Elly -- Movie Review Deep Web -- Film Review Love and Mercy -- Film Review Salt of the Earth -- Film Review
About Elly
Directed
by Asghar Farhadi
This is a contrived, manipulative, ridiculous piece of
melodramatic fluff that provides a very uncomplimentary depiction of Iranian
culture. If you think American culture
is bad -- and I do -- this is much worse.
No wonder a simple weekend outing turns into a grotesque nightmare. These people are intolerable. They can't do anything right. Everything they do is stupid from beginning
to end. Part of the problem is that the
filmmaker seems to be improvising the story line as he goes along. He's got a boring subject with boring people
and he keeps looking for ways to jazz it up and keep the audience from falling
asleep or getting up and leaving.
Nothing is convincing, though, and the outcome does not make sense and
is so unconvincing that I would argue that Elly is not really dead and the
idiot that looked at her body in the morgue misidentified her.
The film is Iranian.
It is in Persian with subtitles.
One of the features of Iranian culture that I discerned from this film
is that it is a group culture, where one's participation in the group is more
important than one's individuality. It
is a busybody culture where the group knows everyone's personal business and is
very much involved in regulating and directing the personal life of each
member. I wouldn't be able to stand it,
and in fact, it is exactly that feature of this group culture that gives rise
to all the conflicts that make up the substance of the film, if you want to
call it that.
Another difficulty, from a western observer's point of view,
is that this group culture makes it difficult to get to know the members of the
group as individuals. You come away from
this film not really knowing who the characters are, with one exception that I
will mention later. Everything is done
in a group and even conversations are group conversations. The conversation goes on with all members of
the group participating at once. So when
you read the subtitles, it is hard to connect the subtitles to the particular
individuals making the utterances, because they are coming so fast and almost
at once. As the film goes on, individual
personalities begin to emerge, but "character" in the usual sense
that we understand in a western film is decidedly downplayed.
The subtitles must have been done by someone who is not a
native speaker of English. What gives
this away is a discussion they had about someone "ululating" during
some horseplay the night before. How
many Americans know what "ululating" is? It suggests that somebody found the word in
the dictionary, but didn't really understand how (rarely) it is used.
The film is marred by a number of arbitrary turns whose only
purpose seems to be to create melodrama, like leaving young children unattended
on a hazardous beach when there are about eight adults present who could watch
them. This is what I mean about these
people being dumb. They're careless,
shortsighted and irresponsible -- not to mention manipulative and deceitful. They have all kinds of hang-ups about women
and personal relationships. They get into
these huge squabbles over small interpersonal trifles. It's very tiresome. They're uncivilized. If you want to watch a bunch of morons argue
and bicker and fight amongst themselves about a bunch of nothing, then this is
the movie for you.
There is one beautiful woman who has potential as an actress
in this film. Golshifteh Farahani who
played Sepideh in the film is a gorgeous woman with beautiful captivating
eyes. It is unfortunate that she had to
play this badly written role in this lousy movie, but she has the magnetism and
the physical presence as well as the skill to be a heavyweight in a really good
film. But she is not enough to make this
film worth sitting through. I hope she
will get a better chance in something else.
Deep Web
Directed
by Alex Winter
This is a partisan, advocacy film that champions the legal
cause of Ross Ulbricht, who was convicted of heading the website Silk Road,
which was the E-bay or Amazon of every imaginable illegal drug on the
internet. I was rather dissatisfied with
the film from beginning to end. The film
is naive and hypocritical and its audience is basically Silicon Valley tech
nerds and people who want to buy and sell illegal drugs on the internet.
I have been cynical about the so-called "War on
Drugs" since it was declared by Nixon in 1971 and amplified by Reagan in
the 1980s. The film is not about the
longstanding folly of the misguided Drug War.
It is narrowly focused on the case of Ross Ulbricht, who in my view is
simply another casualty of this poorly conceived governmental policy. Ulbricht and his collaborators tried to set
up a website that could be used anonymously to traffic in illegal drugs. Well, the government found out about it,
hatched an undercover operation, and brought it down and arrested
Ulbricht. It is probably true that the
government used illegal means in its assault on the Silk Road. It is probably true that Ross Ulbricht's
trial was not fair, that the government fabricated evidence, trumped up false
charges, tried to smear him in the media and so bias the trial against
him. But this is standard procedure in
these drug cases. The filmmakers are
shocked and appalled that the government would behave this way. But this has been going on for decades in
this country and there are thousands, perhaps more than a million people in
jail in this country who were put there the same way. Why do they think there have been riots recently
in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore?
What do they think of all the unrest all across the country about police
heavy handedness and brutality?
I have never regarded anything that is done or communicated
over the internet as private: e-mail,
"chat," business transactions, anything bought or sold, anything
looked at, shopped for, searched for, read, photographs, pornography,
anything. My attitude is that there is
no such thing as anonymity or privacy on the internet. So my expectations are extremely low. Everything can be recorded, everything can be
saved, everything can be traced. Nothing
is secret. Don't even think about
it.
The people who invented the Silk Road and other similar
sites, as well as the filmmakers, don't believe this. They think that secrecy on the internet is
possible, that anonymity is possible, that it can be mechanically constructed
and preserved indefinitely. But the case
of Ross Ulbricht demonstrates that a determined adversary can thwart such
illusions. It is a chess game that can
probably go on forever. But it does not
really interest me. If you really want
secrecy and privacy, keep it off your computer and pay in cash. It is very easy, and very old fashioned.
Ross Ulbricht, the filmmakers, and the intended audience are
mostly white, upper middle class younger people who grew up in a comfortable
bubble playing video games and never really knew what was going on around
them. Suddenly they are waking up to find
that they can't freely buy marijuana and other drugs that they want. But the United States has been moving toward
a fascistic, authoritarian governmental system for at least fifty years. It is a very steady progression that can be
seen and measured by anyone who cares to look carefully. Nixon was forced to resign from the
presidency for ordering a burglary of the offices of his political rivals. At the time that was considered a great
vindication of the justice and righteousness of the American system. Today Obama orders extrajudicial murders all
around the world, even of American citizens, and no one bats an eye. It's just another day in the news.
In 1970 there were less than 200,000 people in prison in the
United States.1 Now (2007),
according to the Pew Research Center, there are 2.3 million incarcerated, and
if you count all the people on parole and probation it comes to 7.3 million.2 Do the filmmakers care about all of those
people? No. They care about Ross Ulbricht because he is
one of their own. He is white, upper
middle class, and a techie. But the film
is also naive about Ross Ulbricht. They
paint him as a kind of libertarian idealist, who set up this website where
people could buy and sell illegal drugs for the good of humanity. They give an inordinate amount of time to
Ross Ulbricht's mother and father, who are squarely in his camp. What they did not do was follow the
money. How much money did Ross Ulbricht
make running the Silk Road, and where is it?
They never bothered to ask themselves that question.
I wish the film had been a more comprehensive exposition of
the so called "Deep Web," websites that are not readily accessible
with the usual browsers and require special anonymizing software to gain
access. I have no knowledge of this
aspect of the internet and would be curious to see how it works and see a broad
overview of the kinds of communications and transactions that are carried on within
it and who uses it. But this film was
not educational, although it did lament that the vast majority of computer and
internet users have no understanding of the deep web and how to use and access
it. But the film did nothing to dispel
that ignorance and incapacity. It
actually made it seem all the more remote and inaccessible for the average
computer user.
This film is very insular.
It is for tech insiders, not a general audience. It champions the cause of a rather dubious
individual engaged in flagrantly illegal activities. It is mostly oblivious to social and
political trends that have been going on in the United States for a very long
time. It represents a kind of awakening
for people who have been asleep and who are suddenly realizing to their shock
and horror that the world they live in is nothing like the world of their
dreams. I was not impressed with it at
all.
We have a government that has kept people in Guantanamo
prison for over a decade without charges, without a judicial hearing of any
kind, contrary to the Geneva conventions to which it is a signatory, and
contrary to our own constitution, and legal tradition going back to the Magna
Carta. It kidnaps people off the street,
renditions them to foreign countries where they are held anonymously in secret
prisons and tortured. And you expect
this government to respect your privacy? Who do you think you are kidding? Our government wants secrecy for itself, but
not for you. They
would love to get their talons into Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, just
like they did to Chelsea Manning. They can come after you any
time they want for any reason or no reason.
All citizens and non-citizens are vulnerable in a society where the
government does not abide by its own laws, does not respect its own
constitution, and allows the executive and the police to rule by decree. This is the consistent trend in the United
States over a very long period of time.
I have watched this progression over the course of my life time. Things are not getting better. They are getting worse. And I don't think this small group of bold,
tech savvy hackers is going to change that long term trend. The forces behind it are powerful and deeply
entrenched. The monster is more likely to do itself in before they will. Seen at the San Francisco International Film
Festival, May 4, 2015.
Notes
1. Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce American's Prison
Population. JFA Associates, November
2007.
2. Pew Center on the States, One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections. Washington, DC:
The Pew Charitable Trusts, March 2009
Love and Mercy
Directed
by Bill Pohlad
This is a superb rendering of the life and music of Brian
Wilson, the creative force behind the Beach Boys of the 1960s and 70s. It is a fascinating, complex story -- and distinctly
incomplete. When they introduced the
film at the San Francisco International Film Festival, they mentioned that
Brian Wilson had seen the film and pronounced it an accurate depiction of his
life.
Brian Wilson struggled with severe mental illness. He was certainly psychotic at times in his
life, although his psychologist's (Eugene Landy) diagnosis of paranoid
schizophrenia was later repudiated by doctors at UCLA. It is not so important for our purposes to
try to pin down an accurate psychiatric diagnosis, but Brian Wilson has
presented a number of psychotic symptoms in his adult life. He
heard voices, had delusions, extreme anxieties, he has been extremely withdrawn
for long periods of time, at one point spending up to three years in bed. He drank a lot, abused many drugs, overate,
became obese, engaged in many forms of self destructive behavior. Nearly died.
But he was lucky. At crucial
points in his life he was able to find people who pulled him back from the
brink. One of them was Eugene Landy, a
psychologist who was nearly as crazy as he was.
Landy was controlling, manipulative, and corrupt, but his overbearing
style might have been just what a man who was completely out of control needed,
at least for a while. However, Landy's
"treatment" -- which amounted to taking over Brian Wilson's life and
overdoping him with a plethora of drugs -- might have killed him if he hadn't
been rescued by the woman who became his second wife, Melinda Ledbetter
(Elizabeth Banks).
The film is divided into two parallel stories. One of them is this saga of Melinda
liberating Brian from Eugene Landy. The
other is the struggles and tensions of the Beach Boys at the height of their
fame and Brian's creative output, concentrating on the character of Brian
Wilson. The film is skillfully put
together and these two parallel narratives work well without getting in each
other's way. Elizabeth Banks, is
beautiful, sensitive, and perfectly suited to her portrayal of Melinda
Ledbetter. Her beauty and personal
magnetism give this film much of its strength. I wouldn't say that she takes over the film,
but she is a very strong, dominating presence.
You can't help but be captivated by her.
The film does what it does expertly and effectively, but at the same
time it awakens further interest in this extraordinarily complex individual,
the incredible struggles of his life, and the fabulous music he was able to
produce in the midst of it all. Seen at
the San Francisco International Film Festival May 4, 2015.
Salt of the Earth
Directed
by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado
This documents the life and work of Brazilian photographer
Sebastião
Salgado. Salgado was one of my own
photography teacher's favorites and I went to see an early exhibit of his in
San Francisco, probably around 1990, of South American Indians. I remember being impressed by the quality of
his prints and his compositions. This
film confirmed the correctness of that early impression and showed how much
Salgado has developed in the intervening years to the point where I would call
him one of the greatest photographers of all time. He belongs in the company of Adams, Weston,
Steichen, Steiglitz, Cartier-Bresson, Evans, Frank, Strand, Maier, and Mapplethorpe
-- although Mapplethorpe was mostly a studio photographer, he had the same eye
for quality, composition, and human sensitivity. Salgado is the very top level
of photography. Whether he is
photographing landscapes, portraits, refugee camps, dead bodies, burning oil
wells, portraits, or his wife, he is always an artist. He is always aware of composing the image for
the maximum aesthetic power and emotive effect.
His mastery of light and how to use light in a photographic composition
is equal to or beyond anyone's. The film
did not say whether he makes his own prints, but I was able to find out from an
excellent interview by photographer Anthony Friedkin with Salgado's gallery
dealer Peter Fetterman, that Salgado works with several printers, at least in
his later years, and he is very hands on in supervising them, going over
contact sheets himself with a loupe, and directing the darkroom work in
creating the prints. The interview with
Peter Fetterman is lengthy and excellent and I highly recommend it.1
Salgado went through an interesting evolution in his work
and within himself that the film presents to great effect. In his early years he documented the plight of
the poor and the downtrodden. He
photographed native peoples, workers, refugees.
He traveled to war zones, famines, refugee camps, burning oil wells in
Kuwait, Africa, Rwanda. He was
interested in destruction, genocide, starvation, human brutality, indifference,
and suffering. After decades of
immersing himself in the abyss of human cruelty and suffering he came to the
conclusion that "we are a terrible species." The most destructive and pathological that
evolution has produced. The darkness
within human capability is unfathomable and horrifying.
And then there was a change, a
turnaround. Since about 2004 he has been
documenting the beauty and renewal of the earth. He discovered that there is as much going on
in the world that is good as there is evil.
And so his recent work, called Genesis,
is a compendium of magnificent landscapes from around the world, especially
Siberia, Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands, and Africa, coupled with the human
interest photos of which he is a master. This inner transformation, from being preoccupied with destruction and
brutality to growth and renewal, expressed outwardly in his photographic
work, is one of the most interesting aspects of the film and of Salgado's
life.
In a world where everyone is a photographer and more pictures
are being taken of everything than can ever be imagined or ingested, Salgado
stands out as one at the very pinnacle of quality and substance. This film is a beautifully made presentation
of his life and work and I wholeheartedly recommended it with high
accolades.
1. Interview with
Peter Fetterman by Anthony Friedkin.
September 13, 2013. http://www.samys.com/blog?action=viewBlog&blogID=-103189848642139966&dest=/pg/jsp/community/printblog.jsp