Jimmy Carter Man from Plains
April 1st, 2008
If you drive a couple of blocks down Konrad-Adenauer-Ring from where I was born, you come to what used to be the biggest American military hospital in Europe. It was here that in 1981, the diplomats that had been held hostage in Teheran made their first stop after they were released. Jimmy Carter, the first U.S. President I was ever aware of, came to Wiesbaden to meet them. My parents went down to witness the excitement and later reported that they had, in fact, seen the back of Jimmy Carter’s head.
It ain’t much, but it’s the best Jimmy Carter story I’ve got. Jonathan Demme’s documentary Man from Plains only mentions the Iranian hostage crisis in passing as we follow Carter on a 2006 tour promoting his controversial book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. More snapshot than full-blown portrait, the film is as much about the elder statesman’s ongoing struggle to bring peace to the Middle East as it is about the ways in which the American media deflects complex and controversial issues. For more, check David Hudson’s roundup of reviews.
Jimmy Carter Man from Plains. Jonathan Demme, 2007. ***
Breaking News
July 2nd, 2007
Cops, killers, bandits and the media clash in a Hong Kong apartment complex full of hostages, hand-grenades and Internet hookups. Johnny To’s (Triad Election, PTU) 2004 thriller begins as a straightforward police adventure but complicates our shifting sympathies between the hard-nosed inspector (Nick Cheung), the pretty commissioner (Kelly Chen), and the savvy gangster (Richie Ren) with a taste for explosives. Satisfying.
Daai si gin. Johnny To, 2004. ***
