Dogs Bark

Turn Out The Lights - - The Last Days Of Vietnam (2014, USA, Color, 98 min) - - 24 August 2015

Recommended. Although The Last Days Of Vietnam was made by PBS for the series, American Experience, it was shown in theaters first, gaining a Sundance invite and an Oscar nomination for its creator, Rory Kennedy (Ethel), the daughter of Robert Kennedy. The production maintains the routine level of excellence of that series. The treatment is mostly even-handed, with the late Ambassador Graham Martin first shown as obsessively refusing to admit the need for an evacuation plan, then obsessively attempting to stay until the last refugees are lifted off the Embassy rooftop. After pretending to attain “peace with honor,” Ford and Kissinger turned their backs on the whole FUBAR. The Last Days Of Vietnam is a perfect vignette for most of the last 60 years of US militarism. Regardless, several stories of individual American and Vietnamese heroism, many directly disobeying a Presidential order, offset this unexceptional chapter in the American Experience.

Apologists Not Accepted - - Merchants Of Doubt (2014, USA, Color, 96 min) - - 16 August 2015

Strongly recommended. If you follow my advice just once, watch this movie.  Even if you know that climate change is real, human caused and that there’s no opposition to this among working climate scientists, Robert Kenner’s (Food, Inc.) brilliant documentary (based on Harvard professor, Naomi Oreskes’s book) is worth a viewing. Kenner uncovers the deceitful campaign of confusion by the carbon-dioxide-producing industry that uses a small group of former weapons scientists. The shock is that many of the same scientists similarly supported other beleaguered industries all the way back to the 60’s tobacco company battles.  Against this dreary news, the film’s sense of humor and drama is also surprising. A true, mustache-twirling villain - - Marc Morano, a climate-denying, non-scientist who posts e-mail addresses of researchers - - is the penultimate character but the last brave word goes to conservative, former-Congressman Bob Inglis, defeated by the Tea Party for his belief in real science.

A Job In Camel Hair - - A Most Violent Year (2014, USA, Color, 125 min) - - 10 August 2015

Recommended. In college, I briefly roomed with a guy whose father was a New York plumbing contractor. He claimed that the construction trades were so corrupt that his dad had no choice but to cheat and bribe his way to profitability. Didn’t buy it then and still don’t but that’s the operative conceit in A Most Violent Year, a most interesting - - but modest - - picture by J.C. Chandor (Margin Call). In his previous films, Chandor has toyed with the line between right and wrong, sanitizing a relativistic morality that viewers really shouldn’t accept and here . . . a way too tidy ending.  Regardless, this is a well-crafted film. I’m not sure I bought Jessica Chastain’s (Zero Dark Thirty) Daughter to the Mob but Oscar Issac (Inside Llewellyn Davis), as a fuel oil capo, constructs perfectly believable befuddlement as his troubles multiply.  Let’s call A Most Violent Year a mostly entertaining couple of hours.

Creature Without Fear - - Leviathan (2014, Russia, Color, 140 min) - - 30 July 2015

Strongly recommended. Leviathan is a story that’s retold many times in Western cinema: a little man’s home is in the path of corrupt powers and he fights back.  In the West - - unrealistically - - he usually wins and this doesn't spoil Andrey Zvyagintsev’s (The Return) brilliant, Golden-Globe-winning tale.  It is the full tapestry of this struggle that’s the point of the film, not the thread of its main character. Like director Gus Van Zant (Elephant), Zvyagintsev allows images and music (Phillip Glass) to comment on the story. In fact, we know little about the real reason that the dastardly mayor of the town (Roman Madyanov) wants Kolya’s (Aleksey Serebryakov) home until a devastating reveal in the final reel. Regardless,  Zvyagintsev never defines Leviathan by the petty evil of God or man. Rather . . . it is the monstrous beauty and cruelty of the Russian land that ultimately breaks the hearts of its people.