Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

The Back of Her Head  (2007)

“Smart, absurd and heartwarmingly innocent, Joshua Safdie’s The Back of Her Head is a dessert short, that euphoriant treat that could in endless play still mesmerize with its sweetness and richness of story,” writes Noralil Ryan Fores at ShortEnd Magazine. The above clip “is in a way, a trailer for the film,” according to its YouTube synopsis.

This is as good an excuse as any for me to point you to redbucketfilms, the YouTube channel of Josh and Bennie Safdie and their filmmaking cohorts. There’s a bunch of stuff there: shorts, trailers, fragments, a minute of footage of Albert Maysles walking around an art gallery (and then, sitting and yawning epically) billed as “an observational documentary about a man at a party, who makes observational documentaries.” Etc.

The vast left wing conspiracy against Expelled has kicked into high gear! Behold the arguments from heretics, like Scientific American! And, um, Fox News!

• The Onion’s Amelie Gillette mocks Ben Stein for equating intelligent design to punk-rock rebellion. You know, just like we did two whole months ago. Flattering!
• Scientific American has put together a list of Six Things In Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You To Know. Ominous, right? Most damning, as far as I’m concerned: the film’s selective editing of a passage written by Charles Darwin, in order to suggest that Darwinism is fundamentally responsible for the Holocaust. Via Digg.
• The National Center for Science Education has put together a site called Expelled Exposed, with details on the producers’ quasi-ethical interview tactics, and fleshed-out stories on “what really happened to the people [the film claims] were persecuted for their views.” Via Kate Coe.
• Fox News gossip columnist/finger-on-the-pulse cultural critic Roger Friedman lashes out at Expelled for being “sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring)” and declares that Stein “is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck.” After pausing twice to make fun of Ben Stein’s “whiny” voice, Friedman rails against the release plan for the film, which will put prints in front of “rural and poor” viewers at the expense of the Beverly Hills elite. “If I lived in the Deep South, I’d boycott the filmmakers for thinking of me as this gullible and unsophisticated.” Hint hint, Mississippi!

Under discussion:

The Ground Truth  (2006)

Iraq in Fragments  (2006)

The War Tapes  (2006)

Stop-Loss  (2008)

Lions for Lambs  (2007)

Redacted  (2007)

Taxi to the Dark Side  (2008)

Body of War  (2008)

Filmmaker and former Marine JD Johannes is selling a compilation DVD called Outside the Wire on his website. The DVD contains three short documentaries that Johannes shot himself whilst embedded with troops in Iraq (a trailer is embedded above). On a blog on the site, Johannes positions his “pro-victory, pro-troop” films in opposition to docs like Body of War and The Ground Truth. “Actually going to Iraq, living down in the dirt with the grunts and making documentaries about what is happening on the ground appears to be a rather novel concept, but I think the best way to understand Iraq is to see it from 5′10″ off the ground,” he writes.

Fair enough. But wait––there’s a gimmick! Johannes is trying to sell 2,900 copies of his DVD in six weeks, in order to match the domestic box office gross of Brian DePalma’s fall flop Redacted.

I haven’t seen Johannes’ movies, and I’m certainly not opposed to as many views of the war as possible getting out into the market place. In fact, I’ve argued previously that the reason why films like Lions For Lambs and Stop-Loss are so disappointing creatively and commercially is due to a homogeneity of perspective––the anti-war choir really doesn’t need to be pandered to anymore.

But what is a little illogical to me is that Johannes has chosen Redacted as the target to beat. Redacted, a film widely panned by critics and pundits from all points on the political spectrum. Redacted, whose box office gross was potentially diluted by its day-and-date release on VOD and DVD. Redacted, instead of an actual documentary, such as Iraq in Fragments (also shot independently, by a cameraman/director, on the streets of Iraq) or Taxi to the Dark Side or The War Tapes (which, to my mind, is as honest a documentary about troops on the ground in Iraq as is conceivable, being that it was shot by the troops themselves), all of which grossed many times more than Redacted’s pitiful $65k domestic.

Isn’t this setting the bar a bit low? I don’t argue that grossing $65k through direct DVD sales would be a victory for the usual independent filmmaker, but Johannes has higher aspirations. “My thesis is this: If it can be demonstrated that a pro-troop, pro-victory documentary can succeed in the market place by beating the domestic box office gross of an anti-war film like Redacted the money loving side of Hollywood will back a pro-troop movie.” I wish him luck in his endeavors (after about three weeks, he’s 34% of the way to his goal, according to the “Beat Hollywood!” graph on the sidebar of his site). I just don’t see how “beating” Redacted––a film no one in Hollywood or elsewhere was impressed with––will make much of an impression.