It’s already been called the most important civil rights film of the decade, but only time will tell if Milk has any real impact on the gay marriage issue or any other related civil rights matter. Obviously the film, which is set thirty years in the past, can be appropriated by the campaign to overturn Proposition 8, but if that campaign is successful, it will be difficult to prove with certainty Milk contributed to the end result.

The Birth of a Nation may have inspired a reformation of the Ku Klux Klan and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner may have opened some minds to wider acceptance of interracial marriage (which had just recently been legalized). However, as Time magazine reported earlier this year, it’s quite rare for cinema to really change the world. A movie like Philadelphia easily gets moviegoers thinking about AIDS and discrimination, for instance, and Sicko exposes some of the supposed benefits of universal health care, yet most of these kinds of message films preach primarily to the choir.

But at least five films have made an actual difference, either on a local or national level. Will Milk join the small group of movies detailed below?
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When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces a shortlist for one of its Oscar categories, many critics immediately focus on what titles are missing. Religulous was snubbed! Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired was punished for having a “secret” qualifying run! The Academy’s rules for eligibility must be amended! Such reactions were seen all over the web last week as awards season pundits looked at the narrowed-down list of 15 Feature Documentary hopefuls and criticized the Academy for its omissions.

But the better response (which is the one SpoutBlog had) is to primarily address and celebrate the included films, not just for being contenders for the Feature Documentary Oscar but also for being showcased in general. The wonderful thing about shortlists is that they expand further the idea that it’s great just to be nominated. For feature documentaries, particularly those without a lot of media and major distributor attention, it is also great just to be shortlisted. Non-fiction film fans may now see this as an opportunity to take note of some documentaries that weren’t previously on their radar (unfortunately none of these films are actually allowed to advertise their recent achievement of being shortlisted).

But the Academy Awards are, of course, still a competition. So, while we take notice of the 15 semi-finalists for the Feature Documentary Oscar, we shall also weigh their chances of being selected for the final five and predict which titles are likely to be announced as nominees on January 22.

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AJ Schnack has posted the Academy’s shortlist for the Best Documentary Feature nomination. As expected (at least, by me), Ellen Kuras’ The Betrayal, Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, and Sundance winners Man on Wire and Trouble the Wire all made the cut. It’s also nice to see a few smaller films on the list, including In a Dream and They Killed Sister Dorothy. But there are also a few notable omissions, including Religulous and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, both of which had their semi-secret shortlist qualifying runs at the Creative Entertainment Coliseum Quad on 181 Street in the nosebleed section of New York City. Coincidence?!?? Probably! (For what it’s worth, Expelled, Religulous‘ political polar opposite, also failed to make the cut.)

The full list can be found here. Expect chatter and analysis in the days to come (probably not least from the snubbed Bill Maher).

If you opened up a movie trade publication or read a movie-focused blog between October 2007 and February 2008 the odds are good you saw at least one story about how the massive influx of Iraq War-themed films that were being released (The Kingdom, In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, etc) were not only all failing but were causing havoc in the independent film world.

Their less than fantastic box-office success was not always attributable to the quality of the movie. Nor was it always to do the audience’s perceived lack of interest in movies about our current military situation. But these were easy journalistic hooks on which to hang a story and so became part of our entrenched conventional wisdom.

Indeed there were some high-quality films released about this subject matter in the last year or so that are deserving of a broader audience. But release patterns don’t always line up with audiences. That’s why the appearance of films such as Heavy Metal in Baghdad on distribution sites like SnagFilms (a Spout partner) is so important: by flattening the distribution field to allow for anywhere, anytime viewing, the audience (at least that portion of it that’s tuned into online viewing, a percentage that’s growing steadily) can find movies that will interest them regardless of whether or not it’s playing at their local multiplex.

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I have no idea what to do with Josh Fox’s Memorial Day, a sporadically engaging––but far too simple-minded to be as troubling as it wants to be––hypothetical slice-of-life which exists to explain away Abu Ghraib via spring break. It seems to be consensus that this is, at the very least, the ballsiest film at this festival, although it certainly has fewer defenders than detractors. I found it to be alternately mesmerizing, infuriating, boring and eye-rollingly facile. I think it fails as a narrative film, even as it occasionally stuns as a work of pure cinema. And yet, I don’t think it’s dismissable outright.

Executive produced by Michael Stipe, Memorial is the brainchild of a New York theater rabblerouser named Josh Fox, and is loosely based on his “traveling, site-specific theatre event” Death of Nations 1: The Comfort and Safety Of Your Own Home. Dressed in all in black with standard-issue hipster-lectual glasses, Fox rocked a frustrating evasiveness at the Q & A following the film’s CineVegas premiere; when asked to unpack his intentions, Fox responded, “I don’t really do that.” He did admit to being a tourist to the world his film depicts. “I’m from New York,” the first-time filmmaker said more than once, ultimately invoking an old Spaulding Gray line about living “off the coast of America.”

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The night before Sony Pictures Classics planned to open Errol Morris’ Abu Ghraib doc Standard Operating Procedure in two theaters the Tribeca Film Festival hosted a screening of the film, followed by a conversation between Morris and Jarhead author Anthony Swofford.

Beat to the festival circuit by over a year by Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (which debuted at Sundance 2007 and later screened on HBO), Morris’ two-hour dissection of the Iraqi prison schedule retreads a fair bit of ground that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the scandal closely and/or seen the previous film. But where Kennedy was primarily concerned with depicting the psychological climate that led to the abuses (of both detainees and power) and their photographic documentation, Morris is more concerned with revealing the discrepancy between what those iconic photographs seem to be documenting, and what the testimony of the indicted soldiers suggests is closer to the truth. “We looked at the photographs and thought we knew everything about Abu Ghraib,” Morris said after the screening. “We knew nothing.” …Read more

• Charlton Heston died last weekend.
• Prompting Kevin to recall the best trailer mashup of all time.
• And making it a bad (or good) time to announce a new Ben-Hur miniseries dedicated to his honor.
• On Film Couch: Indie cinema has become cliched.
• Karina attended the Sarasota Film Festival, where she reviewed Throw Down Your Heart and Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story and they paid tribute to Liv Ullman.
• Then she went directly to the Moving Image Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing.
• Meanwhile she found time to pre-order the Mister Lonely book tie-in.
• A few anticipated films allowed our expectations to be lowered a bit, as Maggie Gyllenhaal dumbed down the Dark Knight marketing campaign and a script leak dumbed down Oliver Stone’s Bush biopic.
• I support Uwe Boll’s filmmaking (however, the number of people who want him to die stop making films is now up to 180,000).
• Congratulations to the Webby nominees.
• Pierrot Belmondo is 75.
• Errol Morris makes fiction comedically while James Cameron makes 3D seriously.
• New York was only well represented on film in the 70s. Undestroyed, anyway.
• Watch an Alicia Keys documentary for free.
• Watch a Kanye West video using 2046 footage he may have gotten for free.
• Watch an unspectacular yet wonderful clip from Tarsem’s The Fall.

It didn’t work out so well for Michael Moore, but who is to say other documentarians can’t succeed in fiction filmmaking? Recent notables to make the switch have included Nick Broomfield (whose unscripted yet dramatized Battle for Haditha opens at New York’s Film Forum next month), Barbara Kopple, Andrew Jarecki and Seth Gordon, who originally seemed to be crossing the line to remake his own The King of Kong as a narrative feature but has instead become attached to other fiction projects.

The latest, though, is a bit of a shocker, even if he is famous for making a dramatization-heavy doc. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Errol Morris’ next project is a comedy, which he’s currently writing. Titled The End of Everything, the script is at least based on a true story and Morris says the film will be, “a new idea of how to blend drama with reality.”

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• Deals, deals, deals: Strand has acquired Bruce LaBruce’s gay zombie satire Otto or Up With Dead People; Miramax will release Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky in North America.
• David Hudson gives the Leigh film, which he calls “the only real out-n-out comedy to screen in Competition so far,” a B+. More letter grades at the link.
• AJ Schnack has a round-up of reviews of Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure. He’s found two raves to offset Todd McCarthy’s almost-pan.

The biggest news of the day thus far coming out of the Berlin Film Festival? Madonna’s directorial debut screened…and it wasn’t that bad. Let’s go to the Twitters:

IDrinkYourMilkshake.com mastermind Jurgen Fauth manages to squeeze a headline and a rating into 140 characters: “Berlinale Shocker: Madonna’s Filth and Wisdom not awful at all! ***” And Andrew Grant of Benten Films/Filmbrain fame more or less concurs. “Madonna’s directorial debut Filth and Wisdom could use more of both, but surprisingly it aint half bad!”

Of course, there could be some crazy festival alchemy in the works here––as we know, the critical crowds have been somewhat underwhelmed by the competition offerings thus far, and it would be hard to imagine a film for which expectations could have been any lower. But still, it’s rather heartening to hear that an aging, walking punchline of a pop star can still swoop in to an international film festival and steal attention away from an apparently mediocre issue film directed by a name-brand, Oscar winning filmmaker. Hooray for meritocracy!

Above: a sample of Madonna’s recent musical output. I saw the title and really hoped it was a cover of the Van Halen song, but alas…

• Juno is honored as a work of “Cinema For Peace” on the same night a Czech party runs out of beer. Mike Jones enumerates those, and other signs of the apocalypse.
• Brit Withey isn’t feeling the doomsday vibe––he’s just bored. “So, halfway into the festival and so far, at least the competition screenings have been met with a general ho-hum-ness.”
• Unfortunately, it looks like Brit is not alone. With half the competition slate already screened, There Will Be Blood is apparently the clear front-runner for the Golden Bear, but no one wants to give an award that’s supposed to be about discovery to an Oscar-nominated Hollywood film.
• Variety offers a pre-screening feature on Errol Morris’ Abu Ghraib doc Standard Operating Procedure. Says Michael Barker of the film’s distributor, Sony Classics: “One of the things that I love about the film is that you watch it and you are in the shoes of the common soldier who committed all these acts, and you tell yourself, ‘That could be me.’” We doubt such testimony will win over skeptics, but early word from the choir (ie: my super-liberal Facebook friend) is positive.

The International Documentary Associaton (IDA) just released a list of their picks for the 25 Best Documentaries Ever, to coincide with the Association’s 25th anniversary. Predictably, the list isn’t very interesting–as is usually the case with these things, it’s very American and very weighed towards recent releases. Box office hits and Oscar winners are well represented; non-white people are represented as subjects, but not so much as makers; there’s one film on this list directed by a woman, and another one about women. Michael Moore, Errol Morris and the Maysles own a full third of the list real estate between them.

Maybe in theory, as Anthony Kaufman scathingly implies, we should have expected better from an international body of filmmakers and champions, but in practice the list falls victim to the familiar muddling of consensus. As I’ve said before, the populist nature of these things always seems to ensure their mediocrity. Grizzly Man was probably the only Herzog film that made it on to multiple ballots, and that’s why–Fata Morgana and Little Dieter fans be damned–it’s the one that makes the list.

Maybe we just need to call for a moratorium on voted lists––”Thou shalt not call on the wisdom of the crowds to numerically rank works of art based on perceptions of their quality!” Or, maybe, we should all just get together at the end of the year and fill out wildly baroque ballots to select The Best and Worst Film Lists Of 2007––after all, why should The Reeler have all the fun? Or, maybe, we should just accept the fact that lists do more to gratify the list-maker than anything else, and find something slightly liess futile to argue about.

Anyway. If you care, IDA’s Top 25 is after the jump.
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On today’s edition of FilmCouch, Paul and Kevin referenced Errol Morris in their discussion of Charles Ferguson’s even-tempered (yet incendiary) documentary, No End in Sight. So I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you to the most recent post on Zoom, Morris’ New York Times blog, which he filed this past Wednesday. Perhaps this is where it should be noted that although technically, Zoom is published in blog format, Morris is really using it as a platform to release long, critical essays on photography about once a month.

The August installment is about the infamous image of the hooded figure standing on a box at Abu Ghraib. Morris has done much research and rumination on this subject, as his next film, S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, uses issues surrounding representation and photographic evidence as jumping off points to examine the events at Abu Ghraib within the larger context of the war on terror.

In this latest post on Zoom, Morris discusses a bizarre case of mistaken identity associated with that photograph. One Iraqi prisoner, who was given the nickname Clawman, told the NY Times that it was him under the hood; he even, according to Morris, “printed business cards with a drawing of the hooded-man displayed next to his name.” Later, it was discovered that Clawman was not actually the man in the photograph–the soldier in charge of watching him said that Clawman was never placed on a box, and in fact was a large enough man that “If Clawman had been put on a box, he would have crushed it” — and the NY Times published a retraction.

Morris explains that one of the reasons why Clawman’s story was able to fly was because the Times ran a photo with their story in which Clawman’s own, slightly deformed left hand was cropped out of frame. The actual photo of the man in hood is blurry and his fingers appear to be curled in. If you saw it juxtaposed with language professing it to be a photograph of a man with a deformed hand, you’d that claim accept at face value. As Morris puts it,

Photography presents things and at the same time hides things from our view. It allows us to not-see at the same time that it allows us to see. But language plus photography provides an express train to error.

The photograph should be a constant reminder of how we can make false inferences from pictures. And of how pictures and language can interact to produce falsehood.

The problem was not a lack of research. Yes, there was archival material that could have cast suspicion on the claim that Clawman was the Hooded Man. But the mistaken identification was driven by Clawman’s own desire to be the iconic victim, to be the Hooded Man, and our own need to believe him. It is an error engendered by photography and perpetuated by us. And it comes from a desire for “the ocular proof.” A proof that turns out to be no proof at all.

You can read the full story here. At the end, Morris thanks readers for their feedback and says he “intends to respond”, so if you have a question for the man you may want to leave it in the Zoom comments.

Several blurbs of note to report in the documentary world this late Thursday:

***Anthony Kaufman has the news that Errol Morris is blogging for the New York Times. Kaufman interprets Morris’ first entry–a long consideration of photography, truth, interpretation and meaning–as “a sneak peak into what I expect are the theoretical underpinnings” of Morris’ upcoming Abu Ghraib doc, Standard Operating Procedure.

***This is not a TV blog, so we won’t waste time making obscene hand gestures about most of the Emmy nominations. However, it’s worth noting that Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina doc When the Levees Broke picked up several nods, as did two recent festival hits: Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, and Stanley Nelson’s Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple. A.J. Schnack has further details.

***John Anderson has a review of Your Mommy Kills Animals, a doc on the animal protection debate which begins a one-week Oscar qualifying run today. Calling it “a miraculously evenhanded treatment of a snarlingly divisive debate,” Anderson also notes that the film also makes “it pretty clear that blinkered self-righteousness and unwavering belief in one’s cause don’t much differ, whether you’re a member of the Animal Liberation Front or Al Qaeda. The corollary question is whether anything less than the most militant action will move corporations away from committing cruelty to animals.”