Page One: Inside the New York Times (2011)

director Andrew Rossi
viewed: 05/19/2013

Despite the fact that it had been recommended to me strongly by a friend and co-worker, Page One: Inside the New York Times lingered in my rental queue longer perhaps than it should have.  In fact, I managed to see a different film also, to an extent, about the Times, Bill Cunningham New York (2011), which, while charming and interesting, was not nearly as fascinating and cleaved so closely with my interests as Page One.

Filmed in 2010, Page One already is a thing of its time.  Like the news itself, 2010 and many of the issues encountered by the New York Times newsroom in the duration of the documentary, are all items of a recently passed history.  It’s the onset of Wikileaks, which is a fascinating parallel for the Times in comparison with the Pentagon Papers, which they had helped publish four decades before.  It’s the storied and significant “paper of record” suffering the slings and arrows of the outrageous Internet Age and the corporatization of news media in the United States.  Those things are all still very potent issues today, three years later, but things have changed, ever so slightly, in the ever-evolving world that is our present.

This is not at all to say that the documentary is dated in the least.  In fact, it is a tremendous, if largely laudatory, portrait of one of America’s great institutions and some of the people and personalities that make it what it is.  More than anyone, media editor, David Carr, who I wasn’t personally familiar with until I stumbled on a panel he was on at SxSW in 2012 regarding media aggregators vs. traditional media companies.

I’ve worked in the web side of print publishing for most of the last 15 years, and while that wouldn’t presuppose a need to find the subject of journalism or technology’s role in the journalism/media world, I have found it inherently fascinating.  I had taken a class about 19th Century crime writing, as well, which led me to learn about the rise of literacy and the modern newspaper.  While I had taken journalism in high school and junior college, I learned nothing at all, but years later, working in a textbook store, I read a journalism textbook about ethics and in later years pined for journalism classes for both ethics and editing.  How this all somehow combined into a passionate belief in the need for ethical journalism, quality journalism, I’m not entirely certain.  I’m no journalist.  I am a reader.

By my thinking, the Times is an institution.  An institution of great value to the journalism and public discourse of the United States and by proxy probably a great deal of the world.  It’s not infallible (as noted in the film regarding the scandals of Jayson Blair and Judith Miller).  It should not by any means be the only source of news and information either.  This film, which follows the Times buffeted by the times of its day, seeking relevance, quality, viability, and information is a amazingly telling portrait however complete or incomplete it is.

I found myself wishing that this was a regular television show, though it’s probably much better that it isn’t.  Only that the times do keep changing and the issues evolving.

Journalism, to my mind, is an attempt at understanding the truth of the events around us.  And editorial oversight lends credence to which of those stories merit the most importance.  It’s something that is inherently subjective and imperfect but is also at the core of what a journalist/editor/newspaper is made to do.  And with the internet, corporate news organizations scaling back their foreign press, highly slanted television cable news, the idea of where we get our information is, to my mind, more and more important.  Today’s issues unfold more and more rapidly, and the newspaper, such as the Times, is not just the paper that is printed everyday but the corps of reporters, editorial staff, the whole entire make-up of their business and their many outlets.

Bottom line: after watching this film, I am going to pay my fair share for the New York Times online.  I support quality journalism, I support freedom of the press.

Girl Model (2011)

directors David Redmon, Ashley Sabin
viewed: 03/02/2013

Exports/imports.  Siberia sends beautiful young girls to Japan to model.  An American ex-model is the talent scout.  Her partner, a Russian agent gets some dough, considers himself a humanitarian, if not a saint.  Japanese agents shop them around.  Promised jobs/money/breakthroughs don’t come about.  The girls live in tiny Tokyo apartments becoming indebted to the agency.

The crimes and misdemeanors of Girl Model aren’t on the scale of horrifying.  Though that is only the crimes more explicitly on display.  What is vaguely suggested: sexual molestation, exploitation, ultimately prostitution is much more ominous.  But even in this film, these possibilities are given only the slightest investigation.

The film focuses primarily on one girl, 13 year old Nadya, a sweet, beautiful, tall, slender girl from rural poverty.  This opportunity could help her family.  She goes, is not met at the airport, speaks not a word of Japanese, gets no money, no jobs, is lonely.

The film also focuses on the American talent scout, Ashley Arbaugh, is the other focal point.  She’s a very beautiful woman herself, but just over 30, her days of modeling in Japan are long gone.  She continues to operate in the industry because it pays her bills, buys her a nice house.  She is not unaware of the reality of what these girls are getting taken in for, but she doesn’t care.  She’s dead somewhere inside it seems.  Or maybe inured into numbness.  She has no feeling or sympathy for the girls.  She seems quite aware that the girls will get ripped off, won’t make it, or maybe will move into prostitution.  For girls at the tender ages of 12 and 13, she keeps it moving right along.

It’s quite an ugly portrait.

But it’s a portrait that seems far from complete.  There are tons of compelling issues within the film, they are given the shortest of shrift, not enlightened, not investigated.  It’s as if the film-makers aren’t a whole step or two further away from Ms. Arbaugh themselves.  It’s a squandered film.

Beauty Is Embarrassing (2012)

director Neil Berkeley
viewed: 02/23/2013

Know who Wayne White is?  Then you were one more up on me before I first read about Beauty Is Embarrassing, a documentary dedicated to the artist, puppeteer, animator, set designer, and family man.

White is most famous for being one of the key set designers and puppeteers on Pee-wee’s Playhouse in the 1980′s, director of Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” and The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight” music videos, and now for his “word paintings”.  The word paintings are a series that he’s done where he picks up a thrift store landscape painting and then adds very stylized and humorous words towering across the landscape in a comic, surrealist style.

Hailing originally from Tennessee, the film recounts his childhood, his college years, his move to New York, work on Pee-wee, marriage, children, and eventual life in Los Angeles.  He also performs with his banjo quite nicely in some “old-timey music” tunes.

He’s a really cool guy.  A kind of guy you’d know or would like to know.  Inventive, talented, clever, funny, and utterly down to earth.

I’m glad to be aware of him.  If it sounds interesting, this documentary is worthwhile.  If not, no worries.

The Invisible War (2012)

director Kirby Dick
viewed: 02/13/2013

Rape is a horrible crime, anywhere and in any context.  According to the statistics cited in the film The Invisible War, derived from government reports, the ratio of rapes in the military are something like 2 to 3 times more common than in civilian life.  Victims are not just women, but one out of three women will be victimized, statistically, according to their data.

While all that is bad enough, the military’s disciplinary structure is such that criminals are rarely punished.  A soldier at any level is to report problems to their superior officer, and in some, perhaps many cases, that person is the offender or is complicit in the offense.  A crime that would in civilian life have clearer pathways to justice can be utterly ignored.  And the treatment of the victims is something of the dark ages of our times (though those dark ages are true today as well).

The stories told in the film are awful.  People are physically disabled and suffer from severe PTSD and many other psychological traumas.

The military’s attitude toward this issue is not unlike the Catholic church’s attitude toward sex abuse by priests.  The culture is totally enabling to the problem and doesn’t want anyone to know about it.

Military culture is an extreme of male-dominated rigor and rule.  It doesn’t shock me to hear that rape is such a huge issue there, nor that it is treated so cavalierly.  I respect those who serve or have served, very much so.  It’s a tough and dangerous world for military men and women.  It’s a sacrifice.  The sacrifice should not be at the hands of ones own fellow soldiers.

The film tells a pretty horrible tale.  As a film, it’s not as compelling or profound as other contemporary documentaries have been about crimes, horrors, misdeeds, atrocities.  These are facts that should be known, things that should be changed.

Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator (2002)

director Helen Stickler
viewed: 02/ 10/2013

I’ve been running into an odd problem of late in which I’ve found a very good article about a subject much, much better than an eventual, if acclaimed documentary.  In this case, the story of Mark “Gator” Rogowski, skateboard star of the earliest age of skateboarding, who ended up raping and murdering a woman…after finding God.  The article I read was from the Village Voice from 1992, and quite frankly, is a much more compelling narrative.  Stoked does add that element that only film/video can, the actual person speaking, showing his skating, seeing the faces and hearing the voices of interviewees.  That said, I’ve become quite a fan of “long form journalism” of late.  And I recommend the article.

The film does focus on the rise of “Gator” and the rise of professional skateboarding, which adds some context that would have been difficult when the article was written in 1992.  It’s been the subject of other films, too, most notably for me Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) which was made by Stacy Peralta and has stuck with me many years since.  Professional skating was hardly a thing until the mid 1980′s when suddenly a bunch of non-conformist dudes who spent their days hunting for empty pools to skate or ramps to fly high on were given lots of money, fans, and ultimately girls.  Rock stars minus guitars, when nothing like that before could have been imagined.

It’s not surprising that some of them fell flat.  Fame and fortune have had horrible effects on people before, especially those not ready to deal with it.

Gator’s story is pretty compelling.  I’d recommend reading the article and if you’re interested enough to know more, the film is worth seeing.