Movie Review: The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley **** / *****

Directed by: Alex Gibney.

Written by: Alex Gibney.

 

Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney has made several films about scams, liars and scandals over the years – he really made his name with Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and he’s made films about Eliot Spitzer (the underrated Client 9), the clergy abuse scandal (Mea Maxima Culpa) and Scientology (Going Clear). His latest film, The Inventor, is about Elizabeth Holmes – founder of blood testing company Theranos, which was going to revolutionize the way we have our blood tested, except for the fact that what she wanted to do may in fact be impossible, and even if it’s not, she certainly didn’t figure out how to do it. And yet, despite the fact that she founded the company at the age of 19, after having dropped out of Stanford, so she didn’t really have the medical or engineering training needed to pull it off, she was able to make Theranos into a multi-billion-dollar company, with powerful men like Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch and Joe Biden involved as investors or board members or simply fans. She was a star in Silicon Valley and beyond – after all, how many of these tech geniuses who found revolutionary companies are young women? She embodied the ethos of Silicon Valley – which is fake it, until you make it – basically pretending that she had already accomplished what she set out to accomplish. That would be bad enough – but not as immoral as it becomes here, because she actually roles out her company to test real people’s blood, and delivering them real results – for which they rely on to make health care decisions.

 

The documentary is fascinating – and a good recap for those who haven’t followed along with John Carryou’s work at the Wall Street Journal, or his book, where he exposed all of this – or didn’t listen to the excellent podcast The Dropout – which did the same thing. Gibney’s documentaries often seem to take this approach – taking complex stories, and distilling them down to their essence for those who haven’t been following along at home. He does it very well here – so even if it’s hard to argue that he does anything new here, he does get the essentials of this story out in just under two hours. And the advantage that he has over a podcast or articles/books, is that there is a wealth of footage of Holmes that make for fascinating viewing.

 

The basics of what Theranos did was simple – they said they were developing a system where instead of have to draw lots of blood from patients to run a test, you could draw just a pinprick worth of blood from a patient’s finger, and then test that for more than 200 different issues. It is a genius idea – and one that really could revolutionize lab testing. The problem, of course, is that Holmes had no idea how to do that – and no one she hired did either. They kept telling her what she wanted wasn’t possible the way she wanted it done. The machine used for testing – the Edison – would need to be a lot bigger than the sleek machine Holmes wanted. She styled herself after Steve Jobs – and throughout the film, you may well find yourself thinking back to Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin’s Jobs movie – where he was an asshole, who insisted on his way, and eventually got it. The problem, of course, is that if you’re going to insist on things like this going this way, you have to deliver. Holmes never did – and yet she rolled it out into Walgreens in Arizona anyway. Desperate to protect the fact that her company couldn’t do what she said it could, she bought a lot of commercially available testing equipment, and just pretended her machines were doing the work. Many patients thought they’d only need that pinprick the company advertised – only to find out they needed a more traditional blood draw. The people who had their blood tested the way Theranos said they would, got results that didn’t make a lot of sense.

 

Gibney also seems – particularly early in the documentary – to be taking quite a few veiled shots at fellow documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. Morris, one of the best documentary filmmakers ever, was hired by Theranos to make a promotional film for them – and even if Morris usually has a sharp sense of sniffing out bullshit, it failed him here. He was used to make propaganda for company doing immoral things – and didn’t realize it. Early in the film, when Morris’ is brought up, it feels like Gibney is aping his style a little bit – in the music choices, the style of montages he is putting up, etc. Even if I love Errol Morris – and I do – he deserves the shots he takes here.

 

I do think that missing in the film is a question about what role Holmes’ gender played into what she was able to get away with for so long. Was she able to charm these older men into investing because she was charming and persuasive and conventionally attractive. Gibney kind of approaches this – and backs away. It goes unspoken in the film – which is a shame. Many of the women in the film seemed to see through Holmes quicker than the men did. Perhaps a female filmmaker may have been able to get to something more here. Gibney, it seems, is more interested in the facts.

 

And overall, I think that is an approach that works for him – and it works here. Yes, I think there is more to this story – more than the documentary tells to be sure, that we’ve already heard, but more that we haven’t fully explored yet. Regardless, whether you already know this story or not – The Inventor is a documentary you should seek out. It’s fascinating from beginning to end.

Movie Review: Zero Days

Zero Days

Directed by: Alex Gibney.

Written by: Alex Gibney.

 

Alex Gibney is one of the most prolific documentary filmmakers working today – as hardly a year goes by when he doesn’t have at least one, and sometimes two or three, movies opening. While his interests are wide ranging, he often does go directly into the political. In films like Client 9, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room or We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, Gibney doesn’t so much uncover a bunch of shocking information about his subjects, as he is able to assemble all the information we do know in one, two hour package that acts as a smart overview of a complex subject. Zero Days is somewhat different – at least for me – because it tells a story that I wasn’t overly familiar with – but has huge ramifications, even if people are not much talking about it. Sooner or later, we will.

 

Zero Days is about the STUXNET malware virus – described as the most destructive piece of Malware ever created. In the wake of America’s invasion of Iraq – and the disastrous consequences that followed – President George W. Bush faced another challenge – the threat of Iran getting nuclear weapons, and Israel’s intent to bomb Iran to get them to stop. No matter scenario American intelligence came up, it all ended the same way – they would have to get involved in another war in a Middle Eastern country, because Israel couldn’t win this one on their own. Bush didn’t like that he – and future Presidents – only seemed to have two options when it came to Iran – an Iran with nuclear weapons, or an Iran that America had to nuke. Intelligence eventually gave him another option – cyber warfare. What the Stuxnet malware did was infect the Iranian nuclear system – causing their centrifuge’s to spin either too fast or too slow – and self-destruct to get what was necessary. The virus worked – but it wasn’t really a success. After all, it didn’t stop Iran – it just slowed them down. And it introduced Cyber Warfare into the mix – something that countries are using on each other – perhaps in more and more damaging ways, as they find ways to escalate to scarier and scarier levels.

 

What’s frustrating about Gibney’s doc – to him more than anyone – is that no one involved will actually talk to him about Stuxnet – or anything else. Person after person – from American or Israeli intelligence – comes onto the screen basically to say that they don’t know anything about it, and even if they did, they cannot talk about it. This is true even though Stuxnet happened years ago – started in the Bush years, and continued into the Obama years – but it remains “over” classified. While most would think it reasonable that the government keep some secrets from its citizens when it comes to intelligence gathering and National Security, etc. – what Zero Days makes clear is that government wants to keep this so secret that even though it’s in the public domain in some ways, they will not allow anyone involved to talk about it. This not only stifles debate – but makes it virtually impossible. How can citizens or elected officials know what is being done in their name, if no one will talk about it?

 

The consequences, of course, can be severe. Iran has already retaliated against America. Russia hacked into the DNC computers for the express purpose of swaying an American Presidential election (whether it was those e-mails or not that helped Trump win, I don’t know – but it sure didn’t help Clinton). Everyone had a big laugh about Trump’s comment at the debate about not knowing if it was Russia or China or some 400 pound guy in his parent’s basement – but this is serious and scary stuff. And now Trump, who seems to have no idea what the hell he’s talking about when it comes to Cyber Warfare (among other things) will be in charge – a thought that should scare us all.

Movie Review: Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
Directed by: Alex Gibney.
Written by: Alex Gibney based on the book by Lawrence Wright.

When it comes to religion, I am an atheist – but not one of those asshole atheists who want the whole world not to believe as well. My basic stance is this – you let me believe or not believe in anything I want to, and I’ll do the same for you. That extends to every religion – including Scientology. If you want to believe in Xenu and Thetans and all the rest, then go right ahead, I don’t care. Every religion would seem more than a little strange to people who have never heard the story before (think about for a second, and if you had no idea of the Christ story, would you believe it, if you heard for the first time as an adult – the same can be said for all religions, really). Where my tolerance ends for other people’s religions however is when they start to abuse their power, and hurt people. Alex Gibney’s documentary, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, makes a persuasive case that Scientology is actually doing just that. They are abusing their tax exempt status, pressuring its members to give them more and more and more money, while paying its clergy next to nothing, and uses threats and intimidation to keep its members captive. The film uses testimony from many former members who recount their stories – many of them horrible – of how they were mistreated, how their children were mistreated, and how the religion tears families apart by forcing them to “disconnect” with what they consider to be “suppressive people” – even if that means your own family. It also assets that Scientology will do just about anything to silence and discredit their critics. In the wake of the film’s debut at Sundance, the Church came out swinging towards director Alex Gibney, the film itself, and the movie critics who reviewed the movie – saying among other things that the movie is biased because no one from the Church was interviewed, even though, of course, when asked by Gibney they refused.

Gibney has a skill for documentaries like these. Over the years, he has made Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) about the famously crooked energy company. Casino Jack and the United States of Money (2010) about Jack Abramoff, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer (2010), about the former Governor brought down by a prostitution scandal, Mea Maxima Culpa (2012) about clergy molestation in the Catholic Church, and We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks (2013), about Julian Assange and his organization. (He has also, by the way, directed way more films – he is insanely prolific, but these are the ones that more closely resemble Going Clear). As in those films, I don’t think gets at a lot of “new” information here – the film is based on the book of the same name by Lawrence Wright (which I have not read), and piggybacks on a lot of what was in there, and other articles by Wright and others. If you’ve followed along with this story, you probably know a lot of this – but Gibney turns into one entertaining, enlightening, lively documentary.
 

The film stars, as anything with Scientology must, with its founder L. Ron Hubbard. Through a few videos of the few public interviews Hubbard gave, along with the diaries of his ex-wife, and the testimony of some ex-members who actually knew Hubbard, the film paints him as a troubled, perhaps mentally ill, and certainly paranoid man who turned some of things he had been playing at in sci-fi novels into the basis of a religion with his Dianetics books. Although the Church has a longstanding feud with psychology, many of its tenants sound very much like it – and the movie asserts that much of what Hubbard did was a way of trying to help himself and his own problems. Hubbard was charismatic enough to draw some other people along with him. He made a ton of money, and didn’t want to give any of it to the government, which started the long standing feud with the IRS – that only ended in the early 1990s, years after Hubbard died, when essentially the IRS gave up – tired of fighting the war, and the lawsuits. I wouldn’t say that the movie offers a sympathetic portrait of Hubbard – but it does go easier on what it sees as troubled man than it goes on the people who took over for him – notably David Miscavige – who has run the Church since Hubbard died. From the testimony of some of the men who worked alongside him for years, what comes across about him is how ruthless he can be. He got to be the head of the Church because of it, and has stayed there for decades because he’s willing to do what it takes.

The film is full of one damning interview after another. Paul Haggis, whose story made up much of Wright’s work, is probably in the movie the most. Between him, and the other former members, they lay out the different levels of Scientology – how you have to pay to keep moving up, how its only gradually revealed to you what the tenants of the religion are (when Haggis finally read about Xenu, he thought that perhaps it was an insanity test – meaning if you believed it, they threw you out). They talk about the infamous auditing process – and how information gleaned in those sessions may well be what keeps members in the Church. At one point, someone refers to John Travolta, one of Scientology’s biggest names, as a captive of the Church. The theory goes, if he leaves, than everything they know about him becomes public – and he doesn’t want that. If the movie’s most damning portrait is of Miscavige, than its second most damning must be of Tom Cruise, who in footage from Scientology events and interviews, comes off far worse than he ever has before.

The Church of Scientology denies almost everything in the movie, of course. They paint the people who spoke to Gibney – and Wright before him – as liars, criminals and perverts. They will refute specifics – like the search for Tom Cruise’s post-Nicole Kidman girlfriend – but don’t seem to dispute many of the more general things the movie is saying about the religions standard operating procedure. Those, they just don’t talk about.

Overall, Going Clear is an entertaining, fascinating documentary. Gibney may make a lot of films, but he knows what he is doing here, and while much of the film is talking heads and archival footage, he does do some interesting visual flourishes. What’s missing from the film though is, I think, a more human side of things. Gibney comes out swinging in Going Clear – he’s making an expose of Scientology and its sins, and he’s going to pack as much of those into the film as he possibly can. If you’ve seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), his masterpiece that was loosely based on Scientology, you will see a lot in this film that seems familiar, because Anderson already dramatized it. What Anderson also did though was have sympathy for the people in The Cause (what he called it in the movie), and made it clear why people were attracted to it in the first place, and why they stayed for years. Going Clear doesn’t really do that. After watching the film, I feel I know a lot more about what the Church of Scientology has done over the years, but I still know very little about the religion itself – why people come to it, and why they stay. Any film – documentary or otherwise – has its limitations of course, and the narrower scope of Going Clear is necessary. But how much more interesting would the film be if I didn’t feel it was first and foremost a hit piece? Perhaps a hit piece on a organization who deserves it – but a hit piece just the same.

Movie Review: Finding Fela

Finding Fela
Directed by: Alex Gibney.

Fela Kuti was an important figure in African culture during his life. As a musician, he created a genre – Afrobeat – combining many different genres into something wholly original. Through his trips abroad – to London and Los Angeles – he grows a social conscience, and when he returned to Nigeria, he incorporated his newfound politics into his music. All throughout the 1970s, he poked fun at the corrupt leaders who ruled his country – an assortment of military dictatorships – who didn’t like what he was doing, but didn’t really stop him either. During his life, Fela was hugely famous and influential – both in Africa and outside of it. But he wasn’t a saint either. He basically had his own harem – he married 26 women at one time, and believed women should know their place. He used drugs – mainly pot – throughout his life. He died young, at 58, from AIDS – a disease he refused to admit he even had.

The documentary Finding Fela struggles to find a way to tell his story – but its struggles somehow make the film all the more fascinating. It was directed by Alex Gibney – undeniably the most prolific documentarian working today. His breakthrough film was Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) – and he won an Oscar two years later for Taxi to the Dark Side. Finding Fela is his 10^th feature documentary since that Oscar win (and that doesn’t even include various shorts, TV docs – including the excellent Catching Hell about poor Steve Bartman, who many believe cost the Cubs the World Series with a fan interference call. Almost all of his films are good – some of them are even great – but I wonder if they would be better if he made fewer of them. In 2015, we may get 3 more from Gibney – one about James Brown, one about Frank Sinatra and one about Scientology.

Finding Fela feels like two competing documentaries throughout its running time. One is a straight forward biographical documentary, charting Fela's rise, his time at the top, the controversies that he caused, and his eventual death. This is a mixture of archival footage – concert footage and interviews with the man, and present day talking heads, talking about his music and his life. One of the most interesting things about these interviews is that Gibney actually includes some analysis of Fela's music – what made so revolutionary – instead of just paying it lip service. The other documentary is a making of stage show documentary, following Bill T. Jones as he struggles to find a way to turn Fela’s life into a musical – which he eventually did with Fela! Fela’s life presented many challenges for Jones – how to deal with the women, the complicated politics that Jones knows most audiences will be clueless about, how to handle his illness and death (that last one, Jones chose to cut out) – and perhaps most importantly, how to translate the music into a typical musical format. Fela’s songs were not typical songs – they would go on for 20 minutes or more, slowly building until they become an all-encompassing force. You cannot do that in a stage musical – nor can you do that in documentary. So, oddly, the second documentary – the making of musical stage show – mirrors the difficulty that Gibney himself must have had translating Fela’s life into a movie.

 
Like most documentaries focused on a famous figure then, Finding Fela is probably best for people who don’t know anything about its subject – which fortunately includes me. Gibney seems to be of the same opinion as Jones was when he crafted the musical – that the audience for the film wouldn’t have any clue of the complex political system that Fela fought against, or anything about his music. The film certainly feels like it just skims the surface of the complex man, his times and his music. To a certain extent, it also feels like an advertisement for the musical it portrays as well. The film is never less than fascinating – and if I get a chance, I may well check out the musical at some point. But more than anything, it makes me want to seek out a concert doc of Fela’s. I have a feeling that by watching the man himself on stage for a couple of hours, I may get an even better appreciation for him – and

Movie Review: The Armstrong Lie

The Armstrong Lie
Directed by: Alex Gibney.
Written by:  Alex Gibney. 

Director Alex Gibney is a smart guy. Since his breakthrough film in 2005 – Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room – he has also been the most prolific documentary filmmaker I can think of – making a series of feature documentaries, as well as documentaries for TV and as part of omnibus films – ranging from political films to sports films to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church to portraits of artists and writers to his last film before The Armstrong Lie – We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks. We seemingly cannot go a year without at least one new Gibney film coming out – often more than that. He won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side – which is a great film in itself, even if I think his Eliot Spitzer documentary, Client 9, or the Enron doc are even better. In short, Gibney has made a nice career for himself as a documentary filmmaker – often telling stories about people who are liars. That was one of my problems with The Armstrong Lie – which is basically a fine documentary, albeit a none too surprising one. In 2009 Gibney was given access to Armstrong and his team as he attempted his comeback at the Tour de France after three years away. Armstrong wanted to win again, and erase all doubt that he cheated by using performance enhancing drugs – and Gibney says he wholeheartedly believed Armstrong – and felt betrayed when it was proven that Armstrong did in fact cheat – not just in 2009 but in all his Tour de France victories. My question is this: Did anyone really “wholeheartedly” believe in Armstrong in 2009? There was already enough evidence to at least cast doubt – and certainly someone like Gibney, who made many docs about liars, should have at least been suspicious.

The film jumps around in time – perhaps a little too much – from 2009 when Gibney had more access than anyone else to Armstrong (still not complete, as Armstrong and his handlers try desperately to control his public image) to the aftermath of the final proof that Armstrong did in fact cheat, and his interview with Oprah where Armstrong came kind of clean – but still justified everything he did by basically saying “Well everyone else did it. I just did it better”. And then we also flashback to the 1990s as Armstrong battles back from cancer, and to his various other Tour de France victories – and all the allegations that followed each and every one. Basically the film becomes a portrait of a man who lies nearly constantly – and his lies are so big and so bold that many people believe them. They believe them because they want to believe them. It’s too good a story for a cancer survivor to come back from death’s door to become one of the greatest athletes on the planet not to want to believe it. Which, of course, is precisely why we shouldn’t have believed it in the first place. Armstrong isn’t even that good of a liar – he freezes, he pauses, he gets overly defensive, his smile seems phony. Of course, I say that in retrospect when we know he’s lying, but there are plenty of people who didn’t believe him Armstrong the whole time. After all, if everyone else who finishes near the top of the Tour de France is caught cheating – and they all were – how the hell could Armstrong not be cheating? How much better can he possibly be?

Rare for a Gibney movie, he places himself in the thick of the action for this film. He isn’t normally a Michael Moore type who thrusts himself into the movie, but although we don’t see Gibney often, we hear him a lot – and this is not typical third person documentary narration, but very personal narration. Gibney is mad because Armstrong looked him in the eye and lied to him – and because Gibney believed that lie and now feels betrayed. Gibney’s personal narrative in the film didn’t interest me much – mainly because I didn’t buy it. However, there is a bigger story here about Armstrong, lying and the culture of professional sports where the attitude has become win at all costs. We were probably naïve to think it was ever anything but win at all costs – but I don’t think we can anymore. The Armstrong Lie isn’t one of Gibney’s best documentaries – but it’s a fascinating one just the same. Besides, I’m sure they’ll be another Gibney doc along any minute now. Maybe that one will rank higher.

Movie Review: We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks
Directed by: Alex Gibney.

If you’ve followed the strange, ever twisting story of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, you probably aren’t going to learn all that much new information in Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. But Gibney – who is seemingly able to churn out a new documentary about once every six months, with a surprisingly high level of consistency, has a skill at bringing everything together in one, neat little two hour and ten minute package. Here is the kind of documentary about a controversial subject that I like – it will (and has) angered Assange’s many, many passionate supporters, and will likely anger his many, many passionate detractors as well. Which is a complicated way of saying that Gibney probably gets most of it right. Things are never as simple as the people on either extreme would like us to think they are.

Perhaps the saddest thing about WikiLeaks is the fact that on some level, we need an organization like this. When the U.S. Military gunned down reporters from Reuters – bizarrely claiming their cameras looked like guns, and then killed a father in a van who was simply taking his kids to school, there was little outrage – it was a minor story, dismissed by the Obama White House as an unfortunate accident, and quickly forgotten. That is until Assange got his hands on the videotape from the helicopter that showed what happened. Apparently those in the military like to trade these “kill tapes” amongst themselves – and eventually they found their way into Assange’s hands, who put them on his website in all their gruesome horror (including some sickening jokes being told “I just ran over a guy” one soldier says while practically chuckling.) Later, when all the PFC Bradley Manning leaked those hundreds of thousands of documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he didn’t go to a major news outlet – he went to Assange. And although the New York Times and The Guardian partnered with Assange to publish the most scandalous of the documents, they quickly backed away from him once they were through. Assange is useful for the mainstream media to do their dirty work, but they really don’t want anything to do with him.

Which on some level is understandable. After all, as the movie makes clear, Assange didn’t care if publishing all those documents got some people killed. One reporter at The Guardian recounts the time when Assange told him that “If an Afghan civilian co-operated with U.S. forces, they deserve to die”. Assange simply doesn’t care what consequences these leaks may have – he’s an idealist who believes that no information should be secret. That is, of course, until the information is about him.

The first half of the movie is better than the second half – as it documents Assange’s rise from obscure, genius hacker and his merry men of likeminded geniuses, to one of the most famous men in the world due to the leaks. This part is complex, because on one level you have to admire Assange for sticking to his ideals, and on the other, you can dislike the means in which he goes about things – and the ego maniac you can tell is forming. The second half of the movie isn’t quite as good – as it documents Assange’s fall – where he goes from genius idealist, into paranoid fanatic.

Did the U.S. government set up Assange with the two rape charges in Sweden, like Assange, and many of his supporters claim? Not likely. As the documentary points out (actually, a news clip from Assange’s own lawyer), it would be far easier for America to get Assange from the Brits than from the Swedes, so if they were going to cook up charges against him, it makes no sense to do it in Sweden (and, of course, there is the fact that the U.S. has no charges pending against him). But the two rape charges – which are still outstanding – is really what hastens Assange’s – and by extension WikiLeaks – fall. Assange grew increasingly paranoid, starting asking WikiLeaks employees to sign the type of non-disclosure agreements their sources often had to ignore to give them their stories. And then, last year, instead of going to Sweden to face the charges – which may or may not be trumped up depending on who you talk to (and Gibney talks to many people, including one of Assange’s accusers, who has had to face bizarre, misogynistic attacks by his supporters), he took refuge in the Ecuador Embassy in Britain – a nation he calls “principled”, but has a history of jailing reporters.

The hole in We Steal Secrets is the fact that Gibney couldn’t get an interview with Assange himself – claiming, in the documentary that he met with him several times to work out an agreement for an interview, but finally couldn’t work out anything when Assange insisted on $1 million to appear in the film (Assange denies this, saying he never intended to take part). But this isn’t as big a hole as you may think considering that Gibney has interviews with many, many others involved in the story – and access to the many, many interviews Assange gave to practically everyone else on the planet other than Gibney.

The other fascinating story thread, that Gibney weaves into the Assange’s narrative, is that of Manning – the whistleblower who gave Assange all those documents. He may never would have been caught if he hadn’t have been stupid if he hadn’t confided in the wrong person on the internet – a former hacker, who eventually turned Manning in. The portrait of Manning is far more sympathetic than the one of Assange – a lonely, sexually confused kid, who somehow had access to all these documents, and decided the world needed to see them. He took a moral stand – and has now been horribly mistreated in jail (but don’t worry, people have assured Obama he’s being treated fairly), where he’ll probably spend the rest of his life. Surprisingly, there are some former government officials who argue that there are too many secrets as well. Manning knew the potential consequences of his actions, and took the risk anyway, for something he believed in. I can feel sympathy for that. I don’t feel much sympathy for Assange though. Whatever situation he’s in, he got himself there – and now, he’s trying to avoid facing the consequences.

Movie Review: The Last Gladiators

The Last Gladiators
Directed by: Alex Gibney.

I am a huge hockey fan. I have been a fan of the L.A. Kings since I was 6 years old, when they got my favorite player of all time – Wayne Gretzky. Yes, I was a bandwagon hoper back then, but since I suffered through 25 years with the team, I believe I can call myself a true fan now, and last year when they won their first Stanley Cup it was perhaps the greatest moment of my life that I really didn’t have anything to do with. The NHL has changed since I was a kid, and Alex Gibney’s The Last Gladiators shows one of the ways in which it has – fighting. There is no doubt that fights still happen in the NHL – and even if the media wags a disapproving finger at the NHL for allowing it to continue, fighting will always be a part of the game. But it isn’t as big of a part as it once was. Watching The Last Gladiators takes you back to a time when bench clearing brawls were common. And the speed and ferocity of the fights in those days seem much worse than today. Fighters today are a little more concerned for their own safety – as well they should be – and do a better job of protecting themselves. But back in the 1980s, two men simply squared off and starting pounding on each other until one of them fell over.

One of the toughest fighters back then was Chris Nilan, who is the main focus of Gibney’s documentary. Nilan admits he wasn’t a great hockey player – he couldn’t skate very well, shoot very well, or pass very well. But what he could do was fight. He wasn’t afraid of anyone, and for years as a Montreal Canadian, he would go toe-to-toe with anyone who dared mess with one of his teammates. He got better at hockey over the years – his coaches and teammates helped him work on the fundamentals of the game, and he even scored 20 goals one year. He didn’t get “pretty” goals like Gretzky or Mario Lemieux, but you plant him in front of the net, he couldn’t be moved, and he'd whack in a rebound goal. If that sounds easy, you try it sometime.

But Nilan, like many former NHL tough guys – or enforcers or goons or whatever you want to call it – has had a rough time since leaving the NHL. The movie has an interview with Bob Probert – probably the most infamous of these guys from that era – and will later show his funeral. He died of a heart attack, after years of struggling with alcohol and drug abuse. He was only 45 years old. The autopsy also showed signs of brain damage – from all the concussions Probert got in his career as a result of fighting. The documentary features other tough guys – Nilan, Tony Twist, Marty McSorley and others list all their injuries and surgeries they had over the year to repair the damage to their bodies they inflicted on themselves and each other over the years.

What always strikes me when I see these enforcers interviewed is that they all seem like nice guys. You would think that guys whose job it is to beat people up game in and game out, would have a screw loose, or be violent, nasty people in their day-to-day lives, but for the most part, they aren’t. Nilan is filled with regret for some of the things he did outside of hockey – yes, there were some fights – but mainly it was his drug addiction (to painkillers) and alcoholism that he regrets. And these tough guys have a code – they don’t really want to hurt each other. They just want to fire up their team, or defend their teammates. The most telling example of this “code” comes not from Nilan, but another tough guy who says when he was fighting one time, his shoulder popped out of the joint and he let out an audible gasp of pain – the other fighter asked him what was wrong and when he told him the shoulder popped out, his opponent said “Okay, fight’s over” and stopped. Many of these guys became good friends after their playing days were over.

Fighting will probably always have a place in hockey. None of the fighters interviewed think it should be taken out of the game, and every time they do a poll of players in the NHL, the overwhelming majority think it has a place in the game (I believe the last one I saw was at 98% for fighting). But the debate around fighting in hockey has ramped up in recent years. Concerns about concussions are real – and how they affect the quality of life of players after their playing days can be horrific (not quite as bad as football players, but not good either). Many in the media want to take out “staged” fights, but leave non-staged ones in the game. If staged fights got eliminated, so would the jobs for these enforcers – because of the most part, all their fights are staged. Many see this as a good thing – after all, most enforcers aren’t very good hockey players – certainly not NHL level at anything other than fighting.

But to wrap up the fighting debate in the cloak of player safety, and go after just “staged” fights doesn’t make much sense to me. You can get a concussion or a major injury in a fight whether it’s staged or not. What the NHL needs to decide is if fighting has a place in the game or not – and then either let it go, knowing the risk the players are willingly taking, or eliminating it completely. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

I know that most of this review has turned away from Gibney’s documentary and talked about fighting in hockey, but, well, that’s just the way it is. The Last Gladiators is a must see for all hockey fans. Seeing what Nilan and other tough guys have gone through since their glory days may well make them think twice before cheering on hockey fights. And the debate about fighting in hockey is real, and should be had – just like the debate about concussions in football must be had as well. As fans, we don’t really see hockey players as “people” – they are out there on the ice playing for our amusement – we cheer for them, or boo them, as we see fit, and when their playing days are done, for the most part, we don’t think of them ever again. What The Last Gladiators does is make us see Nilan, who always seemed like the toughest guy in the world on the ice, as a real person who has paid a hefty price. Only part of that is because of hockey, but undeniably hockey contributed to his demons. I still don’t really know what I think of fighting in hockey – as a kid, I loved it, but for the most part now when a fight breaks out, I yawn, and wait for the game to start again. The Last Gladiators is an essential addition to the debate about fighting in hockey.

Movie Review: Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
Directed by: Alex Gibney.

I am an atheist, but I have always believed that most Catholic priests are good men. Men who devote their lives to their faith, and try their best to help those in their congregations. And even after all the clergy molestation scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church in recent years, I still firmly believe that. I also firmly believe however that those in positions of power in the Church are more interested in keeping that power, in protecting the Church and their assets, then they are in actually helping the victims of the monstrous actions of the minority of Priests, who take advantage of their positions of power to prey on children. Watch a movie like Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (or Twist of Faith or Deliver Us from Evil, two other excellent documentaries about the same subject) and I think you will find it impossible to disagree.

Mea Maxima Culpa focuses mainly on one case – the case of Lawrence Murphy, who was a Priest at a school for deaf children between 1950-1974, and molested countless boys during that time. That he preyed on children at all is deplorable, but preying on deaf children is somehow even worse – especially when we hear that he picked out the students whose parents didn’t speak American Sign Language, so it would be even harder for his victims to tell their parents about the abuse.

The film was directed by Alex Gibney, one of the best and most prolific documentarians working today (although he is dead wrong on Zero Dark Thirty, but I digress). He interviews many of Murphy’s victims, who sign their answers, and we hear the voices of famous actors (like John Slattery, Chris Cooper and Ethan Hawke) translate their painful words for us. The readings by these actors are very good, but the pain these victims feels really doesn’t need translation – it is written all over their faces, as it tells their stories.

The molestation scandal that has rocked the Church is obviously bigger than Murphy and his victims – and the movie gives us a wider ranging portrait of what was done in this case – how the complaints made their way up the food chain where they were ignored at each and every step – and how those responsible for covering up the crimes of Priests goes all the way to the top. Pope Benedict, before he was Pope, was in the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, and wanted to see every report on priests molesting children, although he didn’t really do anything about them. And the beloved Pope John Paul II, who seems to be on the fast track for Sainthood, is not above criticism either – considering his support of Marcial Maciel Degollado, who even the future Pope Benedict wanted to investigate, but Pope John Paul II protected (according the documentary, an investigation was finally launched – on the very day Pope John Paul II died).

Mea Maxima Culpa is the type of movie that inspires outrage and anger, but more than that sadness. Sadness because these Priests had a duty – took a sacred oath – to protect those in their care and help them, and instead used their positions to permanently damage them. Anger and outrage because it has become increasingly clear that those in positions of power didn’t want to see what was directly in front of them – didn’t want to know what had happened, and took the easy way out, shunting the problem off the side and ignoring the victims. One expert, who has testified at trials on behalf of the victims, says he is often asked how often he testifies on behalf of the Church – and he says “Always”. Because it is the people, not the priests or those in power, who are the real Church. If only those who had it in their power to change things believed that, this scandal would never have become so far reaching, such a permanent black mark on the Catholic Church, and so damaging to the victims. And also, it must be said, so damaging to all the good Priests out there – the majority of them – who really DO care, but are now looked upon with suspicion. There are no winners and losers in this case, just more sadness and anger than any child should have to feel.

Movie Review: Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer ****
Directed By: Alex Gibney.

Eliot Spitzer had it all. As Attorney General of New York, he had become one of the biggest names in the Democratic party in America. Had his stint as Governor of New York gone as well as his time as Attorney General, he could have easily parlayed that into a run for President at some time in the future. But as we all know, it didn’t go that well, and after just over a year in office, Spitzer resigned when he was connected to a prostitution ring as a john. Charges were never laid against him, but the accusations were true – Eliot Spitzer spent thousands of dollars – his own, not the taxpayers – on high-end prostitutes. His political career was over immediately, and he became a national joke – mocked by late comedians and practically everyone else.

The question everyone wants answer, of course, is why? Why would Spitzer jeopardize everything he had to have sex with prostitutes? Alex Gibney’s new documentary, doesn’t really answer that question. The only person who really knows is Spitzer himself, and although he gives a rather candid interview for the filmmaker, he never really answers that question. Perhaps even he doesn’t know. He admits it was stupid and he admits that his downfall is entirely his own fault, but he never really comes out and says why.

What Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer does do – which makes it one of the best documentaries of the year – is paint Spitzer’s rise to the top, and the enemies he made along the way, and how that rise, and those enemies, contributed to his downfall. True, he had sex with the prostitutes, yet it seems at least plausible to suggest that if he hadn’t made such powerful enemies earlier in his career, his mistakes later – that in fact really have nothing to do with his job – may have never had come out.

Spitzer made a name for himself almost immediately after becoming Attorney General in New York. Seeing that the SEC was either unwilling or unable, to do anything about the corruption on Wall Street – corruption that eventually led to the economic crisis America is now faced with – Spitzer went after them hard. He forced the CEO of AIG out of the company, and he attacked the head of the New York Stock Exchange, who got a $140 million retirement bonus, among other cases. Wall Street hated him from the beginning, but he became a hero to many Democrats. He made powerful enemies – not just because of the cases he took, but also because his confrontational style. He seemed unwilling to compromise, and wanted everyone to agree with him. When you are Attorney General, you can get away with this – but once he became Governor, it was much harder. But he seemed to be finding his footing when the scandal hit, and he was forced out. A career with limitless potential flamed out.

Gibney does a great job finding the right people to interview – there seems to be almost no one involved that Gibney was not able to convince to speak with him - although there is no interview with Ashley Dupree, the prostitute who became a household name because of her involvement with Spitzer. That doesn’t matter too much though, since she has been practically everywhere else talking about it. And besides, as Gibney found out, she wasn’t even Spitzer’s “regular” girl – he spent only one night with her, but dozens with a different girl. This girl did talk to Gibney – but didn’t want her name or voice in the movie. In the films one misstep, Gibney hires an actress to play this prostitute – using his original transcript of the interview he did. The result gets the information out there, but rings false because, documentaries really shouldn’t be using actresses, and not only that, the actress they did cast isn’t very good (she sticks out like a sore thumb even before Gibney reveals that she’s an actress).

But Gibney does do an excellent job at exploring the different worlds that are involved in this story. You want to know what it’s like to work in a high priced call girl ring. Client 9 has your answer. He has interviews with several of the prostitutes, who hardly seem like the victims prostitutes are normally portrayed as in movies (then again, these are the high end girls, and not the street walkers who are poverty riddled), and even an interview with the giggly “Madam” who ran the company. It also paints the Wall Street world as one of entitlement, which is why they hated Spitzer so much, because he was willing to challenge them. Some of these Wall Street tycoons even go so far as to blame Spitzer for the economic crisis – saying if he had let the CEO of AIG stay in place, they never would have collapsed (they were well on their way there though when he left). The politics involved in being Governor of New York is also portrayed – a State Government that is generally viewed as corrupt, Gibney even gets an interview with Spitzer’s biggest rival in State politics – a State Senator who has an unearned air of superiority concerning Spitzer when you consider he was indicted for corruption not long after Spitzer left office.

I suppose the real question Client 9 asks is how much worse was Spitzer’s crime than any of the other ones we see, both in terms of the people in the movie, and other scandals outside? Bill Clinton is still as popular today as ever, despite the fact he has oral sex in the Oval Office with an Intern. Newt Gringrich had numerous affairs, and left his wife while she was in the hospital recovering from life saving surgery. There has even been other politicians implicated in prostitution scandals, who have kept their jobs. And isn’t the corruption of politicians, and what is happening on Wall Street, more important than what Spitzer did? There are legitimate questions to be asked about why Spitzer got caught in the first place. The official story, about a money order than drew suspicion, doesn’t quite sound right. And Spitzer’s enemies either claim to have reported this to the FBI, or seem to know a hell of a lot more about it than anyone else did, before the scandal broke.

Yet none of this really changes the facts of the case. No matter what role his enemies played in his downfall – if any at all – they wouldn’t have been able to do anything if Spitzer hadn’t of screwed up. He spent time – not just once but multiple times – with prostitutes. He brought upon his own downfall. All Client 9 really asks you to do is to open your mind and see the whole picture – and put Spitzer’s crime into perspective. He screwed up – big time – and he is to blame for what happened to him. But is what he did any worse than what his rivals did? It’s an interesting question, and makes for a fascinating documentary.

Movie Review: Freakonomics

Freakonomics ***
Directed by: Seth Gordon (Introduction and Interludes), Morgan Spurlock (A Roshanda by Any Other Name), Alex Gibney (Pure Corruption), Eugene Jarecki (It’s Not Always a Wonderful Life), Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady (Can a Ninth Grader Be Bribed to Succeed).
Written By: Seth Gordon and Jeremy Chilnick & Morgan Spurlock and Peter Bull & Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki and Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady based on the book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

The omnibus film has been around for decades. While the idea of gathering a group of highly respected filmmakers together to make short films, all based around a single theme, seems like a good idea, the result is rarely very satisfying. The new film, Freakonomics, applies the formula to the documentary genre – taking the best selling book by Steven Levit and Stephen Dubner as its model. And while the film is not great, it is entertaining, involving and fascinating. In this instance, it actually worked.

The film assembles documentaries Seth Gordon (The King of Kong), Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight) and Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp), all of whom, except for Gordon who provides the introduction, and various other interludes between the other longer segments, take a section from the book and make a documentary out of it. While all the films are different, I think they are about equal in terms of quality.

Spurlock’s A Roshanda By Any Other Name, is the first segment. As a filmmaker, I find Spurlock increasingly annoying and smug, but his segment has an undeniably fascinating subject matter, that although Spurlock sticks his nose into a little too much, he cannot ruin. The film looks at the effect something as simple as a name can have on a person. For instance, one social scientist did a study where he sent out the exact same resume to the exact same companies – half with the typically white name Greg, and the other half with the typically black name Tyrone – and discovered that Greg got called for an interview more often than Tyrone did. The film also looks at what effect a name can have on your personality, and what it says about your socio-economic background. The result is a fascinating, amusing documentary about identity.

The next segment is Alex Gibney’s Pure Corruption, which is probably the best of the four docs on display. It looks at a very strange issue – cheating in the world of sumo wrestling, which is supposed to be a very pure sport. The result of analysis of the data suggests that cheating runs through sumo from top to bottom – and most people overlook it because they consider the system pure. Each sumo tournament has a wrestler go through 15 bouts – if you win 8 or more battles, you get more money and more prestige, and if you lose 8 or more, you are shamed. The study finds that almost every time a wrestler with a record of 7-7 goes against a wreslter with a record of 8-6 in the final round, that the 7-7 wrestler almost always wins, yet the next time these two wrestlers meet, the 8-6 wrestler wins. The system is so ingrained in their sport, that violence and even murder have been perpetuated to keep people silent about it. Gibney is on shakier ground when he tries to extrapolate this to the larger, political and economic system in America (if he had more time perhaps he could have done this part properly and more thoroughly – but the result is a fascinating little doc nonetheless.

Eugene Jarecki’s It’s Not Always A Wonderful Life is the most innovative, and controversial, of the shorts. Intercutting scenes of the Frank Capra classic, with animation and statistics, the documentary tries to explain the decrease in violent crime of the early 1990s with the Roe vs. Wade decision. The documentary claims that all the factors given as to why there was such a dramatic decrease in violent crime represented only about 50% of the reason – the other 50% is because a generation of unwanted children – those being the most likely to turn to crime – were not born. It’s a controversial theory, one that cannot wholly be backed up – but offers much food for thought – especially when it shows that those states where abortion was legal before Roe vs. Wade experienced a drop in crime ahead of the rest of the country, and in those states where abortions are more widely available, the crime rate dropped even more. This film is undoubtedly controversial, but like the best documentaries, offers you something interesting to think about.

Finally Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s segement, about a test where they tried to get 9th graders to do better in school by bribing them. Each student who maintained a C or better in every one of their classes, received $50 a month, and a chance to win an additional $500. The results of this test were disappointing – seemingly many kids simply don’t care about getting an education – but the process of the testing itself – and why it worked for some and not for others, was fascinating in and of itself.

Freakonomics is not a great documentary. For one thing, because of its format, none of these issues, which could probably each be a feature doc, were given quite as much time as perhaps they deserved. But the film does offer a lot to think about, and puts it all in an entertaining package. The result may not be great – but it sure is interesting.

DVD Review: Casino Jack and the United States of Money

Casino Jack and the United States of Money *** ½
Directed By: Alex Gibney.
Written By: Alex Gibney.

Jack Abramoff represents American politics at its worst and most corrupt. He was never elected to public office – never even had his name on a ballot – and yet he controlled much of what happened in Congress and the Senate. He was a lobbyist, who for a hefty fee, would represent your special interest group, and bend the ear of notable politicians. Because he was so close with Tom Delay, who at the time was the leader of the Republican party in Congress, he had a great deal of influence. He would take money from special interests, and then funnel it to politicians – after taking a healthy cut of the money himself. He became rich and powerful, and yet he kept pushing things further and further to the point where he was using his clients money to get politicians do things that were favorable only to Jack Abramoff. His clients, including numerous Native tribes who hired Abramoff to try and either get permission to open a casino, or to shut down a rival one, were billed millions upon millions of dollars, and got nothing back in return. Eventually, when the whole scheme became known, it caused one of the biggest political scandals in Washington since Watergate.

Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side) is one of the best documentary filmmakers in the world right now. His films have a way of taking an incredibly complicated issue – and one that you would think would make for a horribly boring movie – and making it easy to understand, and even entertaining. Casino Jack and the United States of Money won’t really tell you anything about Jack Abramoff or the scandal he was involved in than you already know if you followed the case closely when it erupted into a scandal during the Bush years, but still offers a valuable service – it gathers and distills everything that happened into one two hour, entertaining documentary package. Watching the film, you may be shocked at home deep the corruption really went – Jack Abramoff may have been the worst apple in the barrel, but he was hardly the only rotten one.

The movie paints a picture of Abramoff as a man who never did anything unless it benefitted himself. He got his start in politics with the College Republicans in the early 1980s, where he was around many of the people who would make up the Neo-Conversative movement, and he would exploit these contacts in future years when they rose to power. Abramoff tried his hand at movie producing – thinking that an action movie like Red Scorpion could reach more people with its anti-Communist rhetoric than anything else he could do. But that quickly failed, and Abramoff was in Washington remaking himself as a lobbyist.

The movie displays the tangled web that Abramoff wove – how he exploited Native tribes and their casinos, to fill his own pockets, how he became involved in buying a group of floating casinos, and did so using connections he had that themselves were related to the mob. Also how he exploited a group of small islands, technically under US control, but not subject to their labor laws, to allow a system of forced servitude and prostitution. It’s a ugly picture.

When the scandal finally came to light – helped along by other lobbyists who reported Abramoff to the Washington Post, perhaps because they were really disgusted with what he was doing, or perhaps only because he was better at it, everyone was quick to jump on Abramoff and distance themselves from him. The hearings, run by John McCain, who had his own reasons to hate Abramoff (he had backed Bush in 2000, and funneled all his clients money to him, and not McCain) offered up a scapegoat in Congressman Bob Ney (who deserved it, but was far from the only one involved), forced the resignation of Tom DeLay, but was really just a bunch of sabre rattling. McCain, gearing up for his next Presidential run, didn’t want to upset Republicans too much, so he didn’t.

But what Casino Jack and the United States of Money makes clear is that the whole system is corrupt. It costs a lot of money to run for any public office, and if you cannot get people like Jack Abramoff to steer their clients to you, you cannot get the money you need. If you want to advance in your party, you had better be able to fundraise, and to do that, again you need people like Jack Abramoff. Abramoff essentially was the lobbyist who got his hand caught in the cookie jar – he was stupid enough to put everything he was doing in writing in e-mails to his partner Mike Scanlon, but he is hardly the only corrupt lobbyist in Washington. Although this scandal involves Republicans, there are Democrats who do the same thing. And the system is not likely to change – since the people with the power to change it, are the same ones that benefit most from the system being corrupt. I suspect that in the future, we will see more Jack Abramoff’s – the system as it currently is requires there to be.

Note: In December, George Hickenlooper’s Casino Jack, a dramatic film with Kevin Spacey as Abramoff will open in the hope of an Oscar run. I saw that film at the Toronto Film Festival in September, and it as well is a highly entertaining look at Abramoff. The two films would make an interesting double bill – this one being an up close examination of what Abramoff actually did, and Hickenlooper’s being a dramatic representation of the man himself, who for obvious reasons barely appears in the documentary except in the form of video clips. The two films enhance each other.