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Political Documentary

• Directed by Errol Morris

We all know Lynndie England…or we think we do. She’s the young, seemingly carefree soldier photographed taunting prisoners in those infamous Abu Ghraib prison photos. In other words, she’s the very bad apple that ruined the worldwide image of the brave American soldier.

Errol Morris want you to see England and many of her former companions in a different light. He interviews them extensively in Standard Operating Procedure, shows us the letters they wrote home, and uses actors to re-enact some of the most gut-wrenching scenes they witnessed and were involved in. The result isn’t an easy film to watch. It has you squirming in your seat, trying not to turn away your eyes. It also forces you to ask yourself some very tough questions.

And the obvious question is: Do we really need another documentary on Iraq. After No End in Sight, Taxi to the Dark Side, and I’ve lost count of how many others, what more is there to say?

Plenty? Morris lets people we’ve turned into villains tell their side of that very sad story. We learn the mistakes England made as a 20-year-old girl in love with a 34-year-old man (nothing new there). We discover how the commanding officer warned her superiors of basic problems and was told that no prisoner, under any circumstances, must ever be released. And we discover how agents from the CIA, FBI, and other government acronyms would arrive, take a prisoner into the shower or another isolated room, and do the unspeakable.

Are the stories self-serving? Of course they are. Sabrina Harman tells us that she took all of those photos, and posed in others, to document the atrocities. But she must also explain why in so many photos, including one with an obviously-tortured corpse, she’s smiling and giving a thumbs-up. And it’s worth noting that while the film humanizes and comes close to exonerating England and other notorious interviewees, the uninterviewed Charles Graner (still in prison and thus unavailable) remains a monster in the eyes of the film.

Self-serving to its subjects or not, this is an important film. By placing us into Abu Ghraib from an American point of view, it brings up serious questions of who we are as a nation, what people are capable of, and who is ultimately responsible.

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Documentary

• Directed by Daniel Gold and Judith Heifand

The first question Everything’s Cool brings to mind is “Why do we need another documentary about global warming?” The people distributing Everything’s Cool must have aksed that themselves, and came up with an answer: “Because this documentary about global warming is funny.”

But calling Daniel Gold and Judith Heifand’s picture a “toxic comedy” is about as accurate as calling global warming a myth. I think I chuckled once, not because the jokes fell flat but because there are no jokes.

But Everything’s Cool has a purpose, and covers a side of the issue that other docs barely touched on: the struggle to get the American people who understand that it’s real and important. This film examines the misinformation campaign put out by the fossil fuel industry and administration, and profiles a handful of brave souls who fought to get the truth–already recognized by the scientific community–out to the people at large.

It seldom gets above serviceable, however. It’s best scenes involve the Weather Channel’s Dr. Heidi Cullen, a climatologist who must learn how to be a TV personality to get her message across. The other subjects are all admirable people, but their stories seldom get beyond giving you good guys to root for. There are also, of course, plenty of bad guys to jeer.

One good guy is surprisingly almost entirely absent: Al Gore. An Inconvenient Truth gets one brief mention in a television newscast. It seems as if Gold and Heifand, in documenting the struggle for public opinion, didn’t want to touch that struggle’s turning point.

Everything’s Cool opens Friday at the Roxie.

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Documentary

• Produced and directed by Gary Hustwit

Director Gary Hustwit clearly feels passionate about typefaces. So do the graphic designers he interviews. Some consider the ubiquitous san serif font for which the movie is named to be brilliant and almost sacred–the perfect choice for everything. Another, only half joking, blames Helvetica for the Iraq war.

Unfortunately, Hustwit fails to pass this passion on to the audience. Helvetica has its interesting moments–a narrative about the font’s creation in Switzerland in the 1950’s, a font designer’s explanation of his work methods–but not enough to fill 80 minutes. So Hustwit fills it with dull opinions and duller montages of street signs all printed in, of course, Helvetica.

Had I known more about the subject, I might have enjoyed Helvetica. It’s no coincidence that its best moments are the few where it offers facts instead of opinions. I wanted more facts. How come  the lettering on all those signs looked so different when they were all the same font? How much can you change the look of a font before it’s a different font? And what does Linotype, the company that owns Helvetica, actually own? The name? Certainly not the right to sue Microsoft for copying Helvetica and calling it Arial.

But Hustwit doesn’t seem interested in these basics. He appears to have made a documentary for people already familiar with the subject.

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Music Documentary

Written and directed by Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher

You’ve got one night–Friday, November 9–to catch Dirty Country at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. And if you like raunchy humor, you should catch it.

Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher of Found Footage Fame (or Found Footage obscurity) built this documentary around Larry Pierce, a small-town factory worker with a side job writing and recording joyfully obscene country western songs. He infuses his songs–with titles like “You Make My Peter Stand Up” and “I Like to Fuck”–with catchy tunes, clever rhymes, a real joy of sex, and what’s clearly a deep and romantic love for his wife. The movie takes him through bad times (he lost his job while the documentary was in production) and good ones (his first real concert), and introduces us to other singers specializing in dirty music.

I rarely wish a film was longer, but Dirty Country could really have used more concert footage. Good, clean, dirty fun.

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• Documentary
• Written by Bill Haney and Peter Rhodes
• Directed by Bill Haney

Catch this film if you need another reason to feel guilty about eating sweets.

In fact, catch this film if you care about basic human decency. It’s one of the best documentaries of the year.

Billy Haney’s expose of the Dominican Republic’s sugar industry takes us into a world where illegal immigrants from Haiti effectively become slaves. Kept behind barbed wire and controlled by armed guards, they’re imprisoned on the plantation and paid in vouchers redeemable only at the company store.

Rare for a documentary, The Price of Sugar has a hero: Catholic priest Father Christopher Hartley. The son of a wealthy Englishman and a Spanish aristocrat, Father Christopher seems a strange choice for the part. But he’s determined, compassionate, and if he isn’t fearless, he’s able to master his own fear and not back down in the face of setbacks, propaganda campaigns, and death threats.

He’s also multilingual, articulate, and photogenic.

The conditions he exposes and tries (with moderate success) to change are horrifying. The sugar company smuggles laborers in from over the border and never allows them to leave. Their “pay” scarcely covers their dietary needs. There’s no medical care, and half the adult population has tuberculosis. Anyone who manages to escape is an illegal alien in a country where Haitians are deeply despised.

Haney built his documentary like a suspense movie. As Father Christopher works to help these people, the plantation owners and the government threaten him and run a high-level smear campaign. The climax involves an anti-Hartley, anti-Haitian demonstration that may or may not turn into a riot.

My one complaint. Celebrity narrator Paul Newman adds nothing. Considering how much we hear Father Christopher’s voice, onscreen and off, third-person narration feels superfluous. And Newman sounds so flat and disinterested you can almost see him reading the script.

Besides, it’s a little odd to hear a man who sells cookies talk about the evils of sugar.

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Documentary

Written and directed by Doris Dörrie

Cooking and Buddhism make a tasty combination in Doris Dörrie’s documentary. And in the world view of its subject, Edward Espe Brown–Zen master, gourmet chef, and author of The Tassajara Bread Book. The camera does little more than follow Brown as he gives cooking classes, discusses the importance of thinking about what you eat, and drops pearls of wisdom like “If you have a little bit of shit on your nose, everything smells bad.”

Not that Brown comes off as possessing a Buddha-like temperament. He freely admits tendencies to get impatient and angry, and we get to watch him control his frustration as he tries to open a vacuum-wrapped package of cheese. And he’s anything but serene as he realizes that several students aren’t sure they’ve added salt to a mix–you must pay attention to what you’re doing if you want to master breads or zen.

Life is full of troubles, many far worse than leaving out the salt. Brown suggests we roll with them like a duck on the Atlantic (a metaphor he got from his dying mother). And that we try to turn our anger into useful energy.

At 100 minutes, How to Cook Your Life runs a bit long. Near the end, I found myself checking my watch in a far-from-Zen mindset. But when I left the theater, I wanted to renounce junk food and spend the rest of my life eating only wholesome foods made from scratch.

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