by Bobbobthebob on Mon May 09, 2016 10:57 am Korengal
Named after a dangerous valley in Afghanistan where this documentary is set. A sequel of sorts to Restrepo which focuses much more on the emotional/psychological lives of the soldiers involved. Almost as good too.
Killing them Safely
Documentary about Taser International's record of denying all deaths associated with their product and their rather shady behaviour with regards to testing and listening to the scientific evidence from their own research. The documentary is not particularly even though and very little analysis is done against alternative scenarios where a cop's only choices would have been pepper spray or a gun. A taser killing a small minority of victims is probably still better than gunshot wound survival rates. It also doesn't pay enough attention to police use of tasers which has creeped from occupying a firmly self-defence role to being used to force compliance and often triggered several times in a row - a scenario apparently not used in human tests by Taser but still an option they allow in their product.
Son of Saul
A Hungarian holocaust film. Saul is in the sonderkommando - a group of Jews singled out as being strong enough to labour in the death camps for a while before being condemned themselves. In the midst of all this he finds the body of a boy he claims is his son and becomes obsessed with getting the correct, full Jewish rites to be said over him before burying him. You follow Saul as he sneaks past soldiers and overseers, deals with understandably reluctant inmates and pulls every trick he can to get this dead boy a rabbi. Everything is shot with Saul in close-up, often occupying 2/3rds of the frame and leaving the surroundings out of focus. While I think what the film does in terms of giving an eye on the ground feel for the industrial scale of the Holocaust, I don't think the camera angle gimmick really helps the film much. Coupled with some spotty subtitling and it gets very hard to understand whats going on a lot of the time.
Capt. America - Civil War
I think I'm tiring of comic book films or I've forgotten how to turn my brain off. I actually read the comic when it came out and it had interesting things to say about the war on terror, national allegiance and expectations of privacy that were a big deal in 2003. It wouldn't take much modification now to have it focus on government spying and the abuse of other countries' sovereignty would probably make good topics that work with the story. Instead we get cod philosophy and pensive frowns as justification for some rather stupid and self-contradictory behaviour. The big action set pieces were great (Antman's contribution in particular), the humour and wise-cracks were what we've all come to expect from Marvel films but the screenplay was a plodding mess from an actually interesting source material
The Lobster
A weird, disjointed examination of human relationships and single life. In some sort of dystopian future, people without a partner are rounded up and taken to a complex where they must find true love within a certain number of days or be turned into an animal of their choice. Intelligent, darkly funny and always with an undertone of viciousness, it gets a little exhausting by the end but well worth a watch.
Dirty Wars
A documentary on an important subject (extra-judicial killings by the Americans in countries where they are not at war) narrated by a self-aggrandizing journalist who needs his close-up in 50% of the shots and edited by someone with no imagination whatsoever.
Nostalgia for the Light
A Chilean documentary film set in the Atacama desert. He interviews the astronomers who take advantage of the clear, dry sky to see into the cosmos and hunt for our universal past, archaeologists searching for a more recent past - finding mummies, petroglyphs and pot shards in the perfect dry conditions; and widows and bereaved sisters whose loved ones were taken from them by Pinochet's government and whose mummified remains continue to turn up to this day in bleak corners of the desert. Somehow Guzman marries these searchers, their concerns and the underlying history into something really compelling. The visual comparisons between stars and dust, between bone shards and asteroids are really quite remarkable.
Cowspiracy
A basic intro to the environmental argument against animal agriculture. This will possibly make you a vegan, especially if the statistics associated with meat production were unclear to you before. Unfortunately if it's fairly familiar stuff, you're left with a mumbling, slightly stoned hipster who is hard to take seriously when he tapes interviews where he spends the whole time slouched in his chair and wearing a cap indoors. Once again, important content poor presented
