June 30-July 6, 2005

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Newark Black Film Festival (starts Thu., June 30, 7 p.m., New Jersey State Museum, 205 W. State St., Trenton) On Wednesdays in Newark and Thursdays in Trenton through Aug. 4, the Newark Black Film Festival has assembled an impressive lineup of African and African-American film, as well as special guests to make it worth the trip. Opening night is a tribute to the late Ossie Davis: Gone Are the Days!, Davis' adaptation of his play Purlie Victorious, and the documentary Unstoppable, a memorable roundtable with Davis, Melvin Van Peebles and Gordon Parks. Guests include Unstoppable director Warrington Hudlin and producer Philip Rose, who adapted Purlie in 1981. Upcoming screenings: City of God (July 6-7), Dirty Pretty Things (July 13-14), Beah: A Black Woman Speaks (July 20-21), Moolaadé with actress Fatoumata Coulibaly (July 27-28) and Slam (Aug. 3-4). Details at www.newarkmuseum.org/nbff/schedule.html.

Twist of Faith (Thu., June 30, 9:45 p.m., HBO2) A married father of two with a loving wife and a decent job, Tony Comes might be the poster boy for surviving sexual abuse. Molested by a Catholic priest who, as Comes recalls, would go from fellating teenage boys to officiating communion in the space of an hour, Comes first appears in Kirby Dick's documentary as a stoic, nose-to-the-grindstone sort, not afraid to cry but not eager to either. But when Comes and his family move into a new house unaware that the priest who molested him lives five doors down, Comes' feelings of anger and shame return, as does his fury at the Ohio diocese that quietly took his complaint while falsely telling him he was the only one. But then, as a harrowing sequence makes clear, all of the six men who came forward thought they were alone; one, interviewed in silhouette, even admits to feeling scorned when he learned there were others.

While all report continuing nightmares, what seems to hit Tony the hardest is not the abuse itself but the church's unwillingness to confront it; having come this far by faith, he becomes despondent when that too is shaken. Dick too often relies on text to move the story forward, particularly as Tony's home life threatens to disintegrate, but the amateur footage shot by Tony and his wife is often stunning: While many first-person docs inevitably slide into exhibitionism, that can hardly be what prompted Tony to set up a camera before telling his daughter about his abuse and warning her to stay away from their new neighbor. Dick isn't the first to hand cameras to his subjects, but few subjects have used them with more awe-inspiring honesty.

It's All About Love (premieres Sat., July 2, 8 p.m., Sundance Channel) Shitcanned since its disastrous premiere, Thomas Vinterberg's long-in-the-making follow-up to The Celebration renounces the Dogme95 vow of chastity, along with coherence, credibility and common sense. And yet oddly, this dystopian near-future tale is worth watching, if only for the spectacle of a director seizing the rare opportunity to carry a personal vision into the outer limits. Joaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes play estranged spouses in a world where love is a rarity, as is warmth of any kind; people drop dead in the street of loneliness, and a periodic cold snap freezes every drop of water on the face of the earth once a year. The confluence of emotional and climatic frigidity is indicative of the way It's All About Love makes no distinction between text and subtext. Everything is served up on a platter; though the film is structured as a mystery, there's no mystery to it. Even the most obvious symbolism is spelled out by characters who exist only for that function — notably a wild-haired Sean Penn, who spends the entire movie on a jumbo jet and periodically phones in CliffNotes for the imagery-impaired. In a sense, Vinterberg has stumbled into the stylistically inert sci-fi that Lars von Trier invented Dogme to wean himself from; in another, he's merely stealing every trick Nicolas Roeg didn't nail down. Anthony Dod Mantle's cinematography is typically thoughtful — his 'scope imagery is the only reason to lament the film's lack of a theatrical release. But Phoenix and especially Danes can do nothing with the script's oddly formal English; you half-wonder if Vinterberg made their characters Polish just so he could write stilted dialogue for them. Despite its title, the movie's biggest failure is its lack of romanticism. For all the talk of the world's lack of love, Vinterberg never suggests for a second that love can save the world.

The Edward R. Murrow Collection ($59.95 DVD) Recent polls suggest two things: A majority of Americans have begun to lose faith in the Bush administration, and they've done so without regaining their faith in the national media. Of course, as with Bush, there are good reasons to doubt the media: not just the high-profile scandals, but the sense that even once-august outlets have succumbed to a culture that makes the next fast-talking fabricator inevitable.

Television, it goes without saying, is the worst, a wasteland of vapid talking heads and sharp-tongued attack artists with more lung than brain power. But Edward R. Murrow never yelled. His most potent weapon, unsheathed at periodic intervals over the four discs of The Edward R. Murrow Collection, is a low, sonorous basso, not unlike a schoolmaster's stentorian tone, that told you the truth had been definitely pronounced. Unlike such latter-day haircuts as Brian Williams, who'll happily don a NASCAR outfit every time the network tells him to beef up the demographics, Murrow was no entertainer: He sits in his chair, cigarette perpetually burning in one hand (though damned if you see him take a drag), and tells it like it is. It's still theater, of course — that smoldering ciggie didn't end up in the corner of the screen by accident — but of a subdued, almost minimalist sort, as stark as the blank white background behind him.

Murrow could be stern, almost scolding. He opens Harvest of Shame, the epochal 1960 broadcast devoted to the plight of migrant workers in America, by thrice reminding the audience that they live in "the best-fed nation on earth." But Harvest, broadcast in 53 uninterrupted minutes on CBS (imagine!), stands as an exemplary work of advocacy journalism, its outrage undulled by its relatively modest presentation. The direct cinema revolution was still around the corner, but Murrow's crews lugged their equipment into tarpaper shacks and caught workers and bosses alike out in the fields. A young boy shows a reporter the puncture wound in his foot and explains that his mother treated it with alcohol; when the interviewer asks what made the holes in a nearby mattress, he makes the boy repeat his answer, as if he can't believe what he's heard: "Rats. Rats."

More shocking, at least to these ears, is the sound of Murrow publicly denouncing a sitting senator on national TV. Granted, it is Joe McCarthy, but it's hard to imagine any of today's pundits launching a similar volley, at least from the left. The Collection devotes an entire disc to Murrow's McCarthy broadcasts, including a characteristically unscrupulous counterattack by a punch-drunk McCarthy. The other discs feature a clip-rich profile of Murrow and selections from the groundbreaking See It Now, which brought filmed oral history into American living rooms for the first time.