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Reviews
Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (2002)
Nothing More than Propaganda
As one can easily tell from the beginning of this film with its sponsors, the ones talking to you are the individuals who run corporations and third-world sweatshops. The documentary covers the debate between Liberal and Conservative (neo-liberal/capitalist) economics, claiming that this is the centralized economic battle that results in protests, riots, and social unrest. On the contrary, this social unrest has little to do with either of these establishmentary positions. The narrator calls it "a century-long battle over the economy." Sorry to burst your bubble, but the arguments over economy were MUCH HOTTER in the 1800's at the dawn of the industrial age than they are now. "How will we best organize our economy?" the narrator asks. He does not discuss Libertarian Socialism (George Orwell), social democracy (August Bebel), cooperatives and syndicates (Rocker, Bakunin, Goldman), etc., etc.. The only two options for world economy organization are the two that most closely resemble each other on the key principles: the value and necessity of an authoritarian regime, an enormous division of the two classes into a small elite with complete power and a vast, poverty-stricken majority, and the idea that the economy must be directed by the private interest of corporations. On the contrary, this isn't so much a documentary about what economic organization best suits human needs -- it's a documentary about what economic organization best suits THEIR NEEDS.
Punishment Park (1971)
Realistic Film on American Authority, With Its Questionable Points
The strong points in the film were clear for the beginning and middle part of the film. It showed how a very violent, reactive authority might react to resistance. Filmed in the fashion of a documentary, the director captures what would have happened if the United States enacted martial law. Volunteering for "punishment park," a training ground for cops where you're bullied and harassed, would offer you an out to this dire scenario. It switches between the court trials for those facing accusations, those who are in the park escaping police attention, the training of officers preparing to handle these prisoners, the judges in their leisure time, among many other things. It was a very strong, deeply moving film.
The only fault I had with this was its realism. Officers are often seen holding their pistols like they were seven years old with a plastic toy (i.e. a 90 degree bent elbow when pointing a gun in someone's face, or the way one cop just makes it look like it's hard to kick someone when they're down, etc., etc..). It starts out as an honest and interesting attempt to capture a very critical state of political affairs. By the end of the film, the viewer is slowly reminded again and again of the prejudices of the director and the producers. The antagonist characters in the story start out as genuine, real human beings and then slowly progress into "stereotypical, objectifiable forces of evil" by the very end. The mistakes they make are stupid, the force they demonstrate is unreal and unlike the way real police act, the judges during this court hearing are shown making stupid and unreal mistakes, among many other things.
The realness of the movie started to fall apart when it became evident that this was just another blank-check attempt to make government look bad. And that's coming from an Anarchist. The scenes at the end started to get hokey, unreal, and a thousand times over-dramatic. Still, for the earlier part of it, it promises some very moving storyline.
Chinjeolhan geumjassi (2005)
Highly Unsatisfying
There was very little in this film that interested me. "Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance," by the same director in the first of the vengeance trilogy, contained meaningful violence with character and story development. "Oldboy" was even better, creating a world of vengeance where the viewer was constantly in doubt of everyone's motives. This film was unsatisfying. Anyone can tell that the movies by Chan Wook-Park have progressively gotten less and less violent. It seems that this same director tries to shock the audience in other ways, and his new formulas produce badly put-together scenes with unmotivated characters.
Both "Oldboy" and "Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance" were journeys. They gave you an unlikely scenario and the extreme reactions that people were forced into. "Sympathy For Lady Vengeance" is an annoying, poorly edited film. Some directors like to edit films so as to switch between difference scenes in a meaningful and relevant tone. That is completely absent in this. Instead of being a journey, "Sympathy For Lady Vengeance" carries more of a documentary tone: nobody is changing or evolving. The viewer is just hearing more and different details about the same thing in a randomized, irrelevant order. It's boring. Scenes lead up to what would be presumed a possible conclusion, and instead of revisiting what happened, we just get barraged with fifteen minutes of someone walking through the forest or watching a snowflake. Would you call that good-film writing or a movie that disarms its audiences, lacks true inspiration, and fails to make the story real?
Two out of ten. I'm disappointed in you, Chan-wook park.
Grass (1999)
A Good Overall Capture of Marijuana
As a documentary, this film is invaluable. It has footage pertaining to marijuana use from 1920's onward. Government-sponsored radio and television ads, footage of medical testing of THC on humans, interviews with scientists, doctors, legislators, senators, lobbyists, and political activists. For the value of the footage alone, I'd rate this as one of the best documentaries on Marijuana -- of course, that's not to say that what you would learn here you couldn't find in the average introduction to any thick Marijuana book. That's just to say that Marijuana documentaries these days are quite limited, mostly due to institutional censorship and an international legal ban on experimentation with Cannabis. At moments, the video sequences of this movie are a bit hokey and overplayed. For a few seconds, there's goofy cartoons as a "hit-meter" counts up the amount of money the government has wasted on the war-on-drugs. They do this every fifteen minutes of the documentary, too. It's the only part of the film I would've left out. As a baseline statistic, it's too insignificant. The amount of suffering caused by America's War on Marijuana is more than just calculable in lost tax dollars. There are patients who have suffered from disease for years, waiting for a medicinal form of THC. There are those rotting in the prisons, our sons and daughters. To keep seeing this statistic of national debt is boring. And regardless -- no respectable documentary should be reduced to using dancing bunny rabbits as its statistics are being generated.
Overall, I'd say 8 out of 10 stars.