Opening ThisWeek
PAt Berkeley
Runs Fri., Dec. 6–Thurs., Dec. 12 at Northwest Film Forum. Not rated. 244 minutes.
In his close looks at how systems function, the esteemed documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman favors the fly-on-the-wall style. Some of those systems are as large as Madison Square Garden or the Paris Opera ballet, some as small as a homely boxing gym in Austin, Texas. Given his free-ranging curiosity about subject matter, it’s surprising it took Wiseman this long—At Berkeley is his 42nd film—to come to a major U.S. university. But it turns out his timing was very, very good.
The film was shot in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley, not long after the housing bubble and recession; the school now gets a fraction of its former state funding. Wiseman finds administrators scrambling to make ends meet and students searching for ways to voice their fury about rising tuition at a once-free public institution. It will take Wiseman just over four hours to burrow through the layers of life at Cal, and the length allows him to challenge your expectations of what a 21st-century university must be like. A long early classroom sequence at first appears to embody the kind of liberal hand-wringing that is assumed to go on in progressive schools (the lecture subject is race). But watch the sequence continue and see how forthrightly the students stake out their own nuanced positions while listening to others give theirs.
Although we graze through classrooms and hear about Thoreau and physics, the real meat of At Berkeley is in the administrative conference rooms, where the overall impression is of decent, occasionally exasperating people actually trying to thrash their way to good decisions. This is mostly true even when, in the film’s second half, the “story” is dominated by a student protest. Here, the school officials try to devise proper responses while students try to figure out what exactly they’re protesting.
Wiseman’s hands-off style is ideal for letting us think what we want about all this, but the cumulative effect of At Berkeley is a ringing appreciation of discourse itself. Yes, the bureaucratic terminology and careful back-and-forthing of department meetings must be wearisome at times, but the movie is insightful in its depiction of the value of people sitting together in rooms and talking. Which sounds a lot like one of the founding ideas of a university. Robert Horton
Caught in the Web
Runs Fri., Dec. 6–Thurs., Dec. 12 at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated. 117 minutes.
The title promises another tired warning about the Dangers of the Internet, and so does a thumbnail description of the plot: A young woman is rude to an elderly gentleman on a bus, the incident is filmed on a cell phone, and when the video goes viral, it leads to serious problems for her and the people in her life. Undeniably, Caught in the Web is about this surveilled aspect of modern life, and maybe the Chinese authorities who approved the movie liked the cautionary tale of the risks associated with freewheeling cyberspace.
Funny thing is, the film itself is less a wag of the finger about the online arena than a slice of life in contemporary China. It depicts a cold world of corporate skullduggery and media opportunism—which makes you wonder whether veteran director Chen Kaige might’ve been sneaking his disenchanted portrait past the powers that be. A member of the breakthrough “Fifth Generation” of Chinese filmmakers, Chen’s output has been maddeningly inconsistent, ping-ponging between arty triumphs (Yellow Earth) and Hollywood-style melodrama (Farewell My Concubine), all the while negotiating the complex business of being an artist in China. If Caught is no classic (the musical soundtrack is notably poor, for instance), it is nevertheless a lively outing in this director’s career.
The woman on the bus is Lanqiu (Gao Yuanyuan, from City of Life and Death), and the reason she’s so rude is that she’s just received a grim cancer diagnosis. Drawn into the fallout from the viral video are her reptilian boss (the terrific Wang Xueqi) and his high-living wife (Chen Hong), both of whom are allowed more color and complex motivations than we might initially assume. An ambitious reporter (Yao Chen) and her boyfriend (Mark Chao) round out the key circle of players—there are enough rich characters and cross-purposes to stretch this premise out into a couple of seasons’ worth of a cable-TV series. Lanqiu’s diagnosis forestalls that idea, and also leads the movie toward a sentimental conclusion, but not before Chen has lifted the lid on a particularly nasty group of vipers. Forget the trendy cyber-subject: This is an old-fashioned, and clear-eyed, view of choices and consequences. Robert Horton
PLet the Fire Burn
Runs Fri., Dec. 6–Thurs., Dec. 12 at Varsity. Not rated. 95 minutes.
Before Waco or Ruby Ridge there was Philadelphia’s MOVE collective, a vocal band of black separatists founded circa 1970. The group had a violent confrontation with the cops in 1978, a policeman was killed, and another standoff began in 1985. By then, Philly had its first black mayor, Wilson Goode, with uncertain command over an overwhelmingly white, vengeful police force. When MOVE barricaded its headquarters and built a wooden “bunker” on the roof, a live-televised siege began. The cops finally dropped a firebomb (!) from a helicopter, killing 11 MOVE members—including five children—and burning an entire city block.
Two decades later, it’s hard to imagine such an insane escalation of force. But in stitching together original news footage of the event and subsequent hearings on the raid, director Jason Osder forgoes any retrospective analysis. There’s no narrator, no journalists to comment, only the voices of the day—angry, defensive, racist, reasonable, supplicant, and scared. Like a lot of big cities during the ’60s and ’70s, Philly was being rocked by white flight and new racial politics. Given such context, MOVE clearly lacked the media savvy and panache of the Black Panthers. “John Africa,” the nom de guerre of Vincent Leaphard, and his followers were a dirty, dreadlocked cult that eschewed electricity, raised their children naked, and had no coherent philosophy. Let the Fire Burn tells us almost nothing of how the group formed (though there are occasional intertitles); the power structure of Philadelphia—including the notorious Mayor Frank Rizzo—is rather more self-evident. The term “terrorists” is heard more than once, and MOVE’s children somehow fell under that catchall.
What’s the old phrase . . . to save the village, we had to destroy the village? Crouching behind his TV truck, bullets whizzing overhead, a reporter says, “It’s like another Vietnam War out here!” And like the American military after Vietnam, the police have since learned to keep reporters far from the action. Here, we can see in ’78 and ’85 how the cops both created and aggravated a tense situation. Goode never seems in control, telling the press that MOVE will be removed “by any means necessary,” perhaps the oddest-ever citation of Malcolm X by a politician.
There are frustrations to Osder’s entirely archival project, an absence of context and history. A very limited postscript omits any mention of police reforms or Goode’s fate. Were any cops charged or convicted for the firestorm? The answer will leave you burning. Brian Miller
The Punk Singer
Runs Fri., Dec. 6–Thurs., Dec. 12 at SIFF Film Center. Not rated. 80 minutes.
Kathleen Hanna’s return to music receives considerably more fanfare with this new documentary than did her inexplicable retirement. After bursting onto the early-’90s scene with the Evergreen College–spawned riot-grrrl band Bikini Kill, then later shifting to a mellower key with Le Tigre, Hanna seemingly dropped out of music in 2005. Why, apart from her marriage to the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz, did she stop performing?
More a fan than a director, Sini Anderson mostly gets to the bottom of such questions in The Punk Singer (also available on iTunes and VOD). Back in the day, Hanna was wary of the male-dominated rock press, and she’s now in full control of Anderson’s access. Generously sourced with testimonials from the likes of Joan Jett, Corin Tucker, and Kim Gordon, the doc is less a career assessment than a companion reel to Hanna’s relaunch as a performer. At 45, she probably doesn’t want to go back to her angry punk roots—who can maintain such energy and outrage 24/7? But if Gordon, Madonna, or even Marianne Faithfull could continue their careers past 40, why shouldn’t she? (With her new group The Julie Ruin, Hanna played Neumos in September.) So if The Punk Singer partly feels like an infomercial, full of praise for Hanna, it also has a medical, service-y aspect on the dangers of Lyme disease, which led to her health collapse.
“I thought I was having a stroke,” says Hanna of a health incident at a Planned Parenthood rally in 2008, before her diagnosis. Her ongoing treatment looks to be unpleasant, with a regimen of pills and shots that hasn’t yet returned her to full strength. In a down moment, she asks her husband, “Do I look horrible?” “No,” Horovitz quickly shoots back. You’d like to see more of these domestic scenes, as when Horovitz recalls meeting Hanna on tour in the ’90s: “Kathleen was like a force—a car accident, but a good car accident.”
After a difficult upbringing (Hanna hints at sexual abuse), there’s no reason a middle-aged punk rocker shouldn’t now enjoy a comfortable boho/bourgeois life in Manhattan. She’s earned it. And if nothing else, her story is a reminder to check yourself for tick bites in the Hamptons. Brian Miller
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