Sunday, July 28, 2013

Sunday Globe Special: Morris's Movies

I haven't seen any of them.

"For Errol Morris, cameras never stop rolling; Filmmaker already has grand legacy, but he is focused on future" by Ty Burr |  Globe Staff, July 28, 2013

CAMBRIDGE — Errol Morris, the 65-year-old filmmaker, is a Boston institution and a national treasure for the nine documentaries he has made during the past 30 years. 1988’s “The Thin Blue Line” freed an innocent man from prison. 2003’s “The Fog of War,” in which Robert McNamara broods over his part in the Vietnam War, won an Oscar. And 2008’s “Standard Operating Procedure” probed the nature of photography and the sins of Abu Ghraib. “Gates of Heaven” (1978) remains the greatest film about pet cemeteries ever made.

Never saw through the fog of war, although McNamara was one of the few war criminals who ever showed some regret.

Related: The Globe's Weekend Movie 

Didn't go that weekend.

Yet at the moment Morris is busier than he has ever been — active not just in film but on all fronts. He has published two books in the last three years; the most recent, “A Wilderness of Error,” opens up the 1970 Jeffrey MacDonald murder case for reappraisal. He is putting the finishing touches on “The Unknown Known,” a documentary on former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to meet the fall film festival season, after which it should go into theatrical release. “Inevitably, there will be comparisons to ‘The Fog of War,’ ” the director says, “but it’s a very different kind of story. It’s a story about someone absolutely convinced of their own rectitude.”

I don't think I'll be seeing that one, either. Looks as bad as the world according to Dick Cheney.

His essays on history, imagery, evidence, and the knowability of facts spill onto the New York Times website and Slate.com. He’s an active, if not obsessive, tweeter. Morris has also signed up to direct not one, but two fictional feature films....

For all that, the most important thing Morris may do this year is put his name on another man’s movie. “The Act of Killing,” a unique documentary in which the squad leaders of Indonesia’s mid-1960s mass killings confront their crimes by reenacting them for the camera, is the work of the young Harvard-educated filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer....

Anything about the CIA giving them the lists of suspected communists and the reason for the coup?

Related: This Post About Indonesia is Smoking!

Fires must have been put out fast because that's the last I saw of them in my Globes.

Also see:

"A QUAKE'S RUINS -- A girl walked in the rubble of a mosque leveled by an earthquake in Blang Mancung, Indonesia. Dozens of people were killed, rescuers were searching for 12 people believed missing, officials said Thursday (Boston Globe July 5 2013)."

Well, you couldn't have seen that unless you bought a printed Globe -- and thus would never have know about it if only viewing the website. 

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“I think it’s a great movie,” Morris says of “The Act of Killing,” which opens in the Boston area on Friday. “Because of its strangeness, its ambitions, because in many ways it extends what I think a documentary film could be. I’ve never thought of doing anything like this. Of getting the perpetrators of a crime to reenact it? I mean, what a crazy idea. Can you imagine a movie with Whitey Bulger and Steve ‘The Rifleman’ Flemmi reenacting their crimes?” Not surprisingly, Oppenheimer’s film has stirred controversy, with some accusing him of collaborating with war criminals and others — like Morris — rushing to his defense....

I was just going to say, why aren't these guys before the bar at the Hague? Because they are not African or poor white Serbs that won't go along with the program?

Morris says he’s excited to talk about “The Act of Killing” and the moral conundrum it forces upon its subjects and its audience.

“Here’s another thing about why what Josh has done is good. The role of a good documentary is not to convince you about what happened, but to force you to think about what happened. And if it does that, then it really has done its job.”

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Like Michael Moore and Ken Burns, Errol Morris is a brand name of the documentary renaissance, but his brand connotes a very particular and quixotic investigative sensibility — one that has widened the genre and arguably made an audience for a film like Oppenheimer’s possible.

“To me, ‘investigative’ means something specific,” says Morris. “It means you don’t know where you’re going when you start out. ‘Thin Blue Line’ is a good example. ‘The Act of Killing’ is a good example. Where you’re drawn into a story and it changes as you go along, sometimes radically.”

He could be talking about....

9/11! I mean, it turns out Muslims didn't do 9/11Israel and her helpers in various western governments and intelligence agencies did.  I'm eagerly awaiting Morris's make on that.

Morris’s very active TV commercial business also helps him stay in Boston while keeping him apart from local colleagues. Though his peak of productivity might have been the Miller High Life “High Life Man” campaign of 1998 through 2005 — more than 100 TV spots done in a whimsical faux-macho style — he still logs 30 to 40 commercial shoot days a year....

So he's a pitchman as well!

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Related: Nominated For Your Consideration: Hollywood as History 

What do you mean it is all distortions and lies? 

Who do they think they are, an AmeriKan newspaper?