jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Sicko is Michael Moore’s most mature work to date and almost certainly his best film. As Hillary Clinton found out the hard way, health care isn’t a particularly sexy topic, but with his usual populist’s touch, Moore has crafted a film that’s intellectually and emotionally gripping from start to finish. Without oversimplifying the complex issues involved, Moore deftly reduces the problem to its most basic elements: don’t we all have a responsibility to look after the weak and the sick? No less strident a polemic than Fahrenheit 911 or Bowling for Columbine, at heart, Sicko is a passionate plea for solidarity and compassion.

The rest of my review is up at About.com. Sicko opens today.

Sicko. Michael Moore, 2007. ****

For once, a life worthy of a memoir. Leni Riefenstahl tells the gripping story of her rise from dancer and star of silent mountain films during the Weimar Republic to Triumph of the Will, Olympia, and “Hitler’s filmmaker,” followed by her long fall after the war, the Nuba, scuba. Riddled with contradictions, dubious statements and suspicious omissions, the book is also a thorny tangle that raises complicated questions about moral responsibility, political culpability, aesthetics, and ambition. Leni’s extreme unreliability (I had the uncanny sense that she started lying around page 5, about a playground incident) adds a layer of uncertainty that makes the book even more intriguing, down to the heartbreaking (or calculated?) last sentence.

After the war, when landmark achievements and intimate meetings with the Nazi elite–Goebbels, Göring, Hitler, Speer–give way to frustration and a string of canceled projects, the book slows down considerably. As Riefenstahl faces increasing hardship, it becomes difficult not to admire her dogged vitality and feel a certain degree of empathy for her. Regardless of your opinion on her life, work, and guilt, this book is bound to muddy some certainties. I’ll have to look at the two new biographies to see how some of her assertions hold up (not well, apparently), and I’m rewatching The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl for yet another take, but I don’t hope to come to terms with the confounding implications of the case Riefenstahl any time soon. Riefenstahl died in 2003, at the age of 101.

Leni Riefenstahl, A Memoir. 1987. ****

Previously on Muckworld:

• The Blue Light
• The White Hell of Pitz Palü
• Triumph of the Will

Leni

• Leni Riefenstahl - Official Site
• Leni Riefenstahl’s Photography at Fahey/Klein Gallery
• Leni Riefenstahl on Wikipedia

The New Biographies

• Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl by Steven Bach
• Leni Riefenstahl: A Life by Jurgen Trimborn
• Sleeping with ‘Hitler’s filmmaker’
• Clive James’ dismissive review in the Sunday Times
• Michikio Kakutani’s review

The diving sequence from Olympia:

Or, Carville goes South. What happens when a slick DC consulting firm is hired to run a campaign for President of Bolivia? Short answer: the wrong guy wins. Quite fascinating.

Our Brand is Crisis. Rachel Boynton, 2005. ***

• Rotten Tomatoes: 92%

[tags]politics, documentary, bolivia, james carville, consulting, campaigns, 3 stars[/tags]

In this very scary documentary, Christian fundamentalists brainwash their children (”they’re so usable!“) to create God’s army and bring about the end of days. Pastors Becky Fischer and former Presidential advisor Ted Haggard come off as complete creeps; the children are victims of what amounts to abuse. This is well put together, and Air America Host Mike Papantonio adds some much needed perspective & commentary.

Jesus Camp. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2006. ****

[tags]documentary, film, 4 stars, religion, creepy, jesus, christianity, fundamentalists, america, politics, heidi ewing, rachel grady, mike papantonio, ted haggard, becky fischer[/tags]

No doubt, HBO programmed this documentary about voting machine fraud near the elections to be “timely,” but it’s obvious it should have been made, say, four years ago. Hacking Democracy doesn’t really tell you much that you couldn’t have read for yourself on the Internet a long time ago, but it tries its damnest to jazz up the dry source material about memory cards and negative voter totals with cheesy “rockin’ road trip” interludes and dramatic late-night web surfing sessions (”Then I clicked a link!”)

The cheese is well worth sitting through for a final experiment with wide-ranging implications. To see a gleeful hacker by the name of Harri add an excecutable file to a memory card and effectively throw off vote totals with no way to retrace or prove that there was tampering is absolutely shocking, no matter what you’ve read. Diebold’s record of stonewalling and lies isn’t exactly news to anyone who’s paying attention, but seeing the spinmeisters at work is always more infuriating than reading about it in the second-to-last paragraph of a news story.

No matter what happens today, it’s obvious that American Democracy has been broken for a while now, and that the results of US elections cannot be trusted–and that goes for 2006, 2004, and 2000.

• Talking Points Memo is following events & problems today closely, especially the developing robocall scandal.
• Black Box Voting
• Watch Hacking Democracy in its entirety on Google Video

[tags]politics, tv, documentary, voting, fraud, diebold, elections, democracy, 3 stars[/tags]

“I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”