errol morris?

You get to see the interrotron in action, too, which is pretty damn cool!

gates of heaven is pretty fuckin grate imo

roger ebert otm

morris' next film is some kind of fiction/adaptation feature, which gives me the same feeling i get when i hear that herzog's next film is not a docu.

Herzog has made a lot of great non-documentaries though - I don't see the comparison.

it's kind of a shitty comparison because i haven't seen any non-docu stuff by morris, also.
BUT just re: herzog's recent features versus his docus.

just finished watching through the first person series and it is unbelievably good. several of the episodes are among his finest work, imo.

was going to start a poll to see which of the segments would come out on top but then i realized that it is possible that no one other than me and abbott would vote

i added it to my netflix queue so i'll have watched it by 2015 at the rate i'm going

First Person is top quality material. I think about one or another of the people he talked to at least once a week – most recently the lady who started the dead body cleanup business. It's really stayed with me! Makes "This American Life" look like some pansy bullshit by comparison.

Ha looks like I made that snub earlier.

I don't know why, but Gates of Heaven & Vernon, Florida are both $3.98 at Amazon right now.

That's just a normal price, too, not a sale...it seems.

man, i rewatched gates of heaven recently. i'm telling you, if i never tell anything else again, please watch your dogs for heartworm.

has a new docu coming, too, before the feature he's also making
http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiff/2010/tabloid

The fiction feature he's working on has a great hook, ironically (given the bashing upthread) taken from an ep of This American Life. Fuckin' stoked for the doc, though.

The one that I liked best was Mr. Death. I hesitate to say this (I've only seen each of them once), but I didn't get much out of Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, or Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. I've got the first two on DVD, and will definitely go back for a second look. (I especially feel like I shortchanged Gates of Heaven, which I know is one of Ebert's Top 10.) The Fog of War is good; maybe not as good as what I'd hoped for, but it's another one I have to look at again.

tabloid's good. it made me realize how much luck can go into making a great doc - being in the right place at the right time, or just being 'lucky' enough that a key interview subject is alive and willing to talk to you on camera. feel like this would've been a stronger movie if they could've interviewed KJ or Kirk.

the two grizzled old tabloid guys give you the most to chew on, the way their cynicism and bluntness and sort of... affected mordancy collides with joyce's flakiness. the telling of the story definitely feels more significant than the story itself, which is not very remarkable (funny how captivating a story becomes if it involves a beautiful woman) - which i guess is why it's called Tabloid.

yeah the peripheral info surrounding the main "manacled mormon" story is p good content -- all her escort services background, disguising herself a lot @ the time and then all the more recent stuff w/ the cloned dog.

agree that a major hole is info abt Kirk -- it never comes across at all like why he was loveable or worthy of all this trouble

i can imagine really digging a fictionalized vers of this w/ anna ferris as joyce

It looks like First Person is out of print on DVD
I guess I shouldn't have waited 2+ years to buy it

he's directing two narrative features!

http://www.deadline.com/2013/07/errol-morris-holland-michigan-director-thriller-le-grisbi/

Really liked the first half of The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography, but I felt like it tapered off a bit in the second half. My favorite moment was when Dorfman was going through old prints and blurted out "There's Jonathan!"--I thought it was going to be a photo of her son or something, but it was Jonathan Richman.

http://archive.elsadorfman.com/photos/elsa-disk33-0049.3.jpg

I wish he'd gotten to make his cryogenics society movie

Weird, as this thread was revived I was watching his Brief History of Time which I ran across on YouTube. It was...ok.

I mean, good, but it's impact dulled from my reading the book a long time ago and watching whatever that movie was about hawking a few years ago.

so the new thing, 4 hours, Netflix and theaters

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/wormwood

Surprised not to read more about Wormwood on here. Described by someone in the know just now as "Trippy, complex and miserable". Really looking forward to it!

same. i'm gonna check it out this weekend probably!

devoured it in one sitting fwiw

So, uh, a Steve Bannon movie?

Steve Bannon mostly comes off as a giant loser in American Dharma. At one point even comparing himself to Falstaff as someone who Trump had to throw aside - it was his 'dharma'. Bannonism was always insignificant and it's completely dead.

Wally Brando: My family, my friend, I have criss-crossed this great land of our countless times. I hold a map of it here, in my heart next to the joyful memories o the carefree days I spent as a young boy here in your beautiful town of Twin Peaks. From Alexandria, Virginia to Stockton, California. I think about Lewis and his friend Clark, the first Caucasians to see this part of the world; their footsteps have been the highways and byways of my days on the road. My shadow is always with me, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, sometimes to the left or sometimes toe the right. Except on cloudy days or at night.
Sheriff Frank Truman: Yes, well, Wally, it’s great to see you again. And may the road rise up to meet your wheels.
Wally Brando: That’s a lovely turn of phrase. Thank you. (pause) My dharma is the road; your dharma, [gestures at the town of Twin Peaks].

At one point even comparing himself to Falstaff

when u think yr being tragically banished but really yr being thrown out w the laundry

This'll only work if you listen to 'Revolutions', but Bannon thinks he is Pancho Villa when really he is Pascual Orozco.

This is something I’d like to see. Bannon strikes me as the ideal Morris subject, and most profiles I’ve read have either been overly credulous or superficially dismissive.

I don’t know if I’d agree that Bannonism is completely insignificant. It still seems to be felt in Trump’s policy priorities.

Bannonism as described by Bannon in the film is an attempt to turn the GOP into a new workers party, albeit a populist one. That's dead and gone. The racism is still there, sure, but that was never Bannon.

I think his influence still lingers in immigration policy and China policy, both of which he sees as part of his pro worker nationalism. He believed strongly in a more confrontational stance toward China.

For the most part I agree that the traditional republican agenda has still dominated Trump policy, but I’m not sure how clearly defined Bannon’s vision even was.

The racism is still there, sure, but that was never Bannon.

i'm assuming i'm misunderstanding what you wrote here. i guess you mean it was there before bannon, therefore bannon didn't create it, so it's not "his"? (but no one would argue that bannon created it - he just throws fuel on the fire at every opportunity, as his life's mission)

i for one would love to see bannon launch a lollard insurrection

frankly surprised bannon didn't openly compare himself to ernst rohm

i'm assuming i'm misunderstanding what you wrote here. i guess you mean it was there before bannon, therefore bannon didn't create it, so it's not "his"? (but no one would argue that bannon created it - he just throws fuel on the fire at every opportunity, as his life's mission)

― Karl Malone, 31. marts 2019 17:58 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh, yeah, surely Bannon is racist. But they talk about the racism in the doc, and the firestarting - there is literally a fire starting at one point, it's not a subtle film - but Bannon claims that is not the point, that are just ways to get to the point. The point is a new anti-elitist working class populism. And that project is dead. Bannon even says at one point that they are mostly losing the battle for control of the Republican party because they are fighting against the money and the interests, etc.

Of course, that begs the question: If you want to creating a party dedicated to working class populism, why would you choose the Republican party? You would either have to fight Republican anti-worker sentiment, or Democratic anti-populism sentiment, and which fight would be toughest? There are so much more money on the anti-worker site than on the anti-populism one. But the obvious answer seem to me to be that the semi-fascistic policy of a guy like Bannon is never really an anti-elitist battle, it's an alliance between money and nativism to guard against progressiveness.

American Dharma is definitely worth seeing. Like the 2018 Roger Stone doc, it lays out the same playbook that’s going to be used against Biden this year. And Morris does argue with Bannon, making himself present in a way that he didn’t in earlier docs.

There are grandiose portrait-like shots of Bannon, but they’re what Morris does and if anything play into Bannon’s own perceived grandiosity rather than elevating him.

Just saw this and after following the controversy about it over the last 18 months I gotta say I was astonished at how critical of Bannon it was. You'd have to be a vegetable to see this movie and not think that morris finds bannon anything other than a reprehensible monster. Like ffs Morris says things like "you scare me" to his face, the whole thing is presented like a horror movie.

Crazy to think that Morris followed up his big Oscar-winning film with a doc that literally presented the guards from Abu Ghraib in a sympathetic light and hardly anybody noticed or made a peep. 10 years later he makes this film and people think hes an alt-right stooge for not going full-on John Oliver "Donald Drumpf small hands covfefe!"