Alternative Reel recently placed Frederick Wiseman’s groundbreaking 1967 cinema verite doc Titicut Follies at the number 2 spot in their list of the Top Ten Banned Films of The 20th Century (what made number 1? Why, Cannibal Holocaust, of course!). The film, which offers a cold and often disturbing look at the lives anf treatment of criminally insane patients at a mental hospital inside a Massachusetts prison, was unavailable outside of educational use for 25 years, after the state Supreme Court declared it violated the patients’ rights to privacy. It’s now widely available––so widely available, in fact, that after about four seconds of digging, I found the film in its entirety on Google Video (see above). It’s an upload from a VHS tape, so it’s not perfect quality, but it’s adequate. For a wider screen, go directly to the Google Video page.
Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing has a fascinating entry on a documentary called The Great Happiness Space: Tales of an Osaka Love Thief. I don’t know how I managed to make it this long completely unaware of this film, as it played about 100 festivals last year and was even nominated for a Gotham Award for Best Undistributed Film (it lost to Steve Barron’s Choking Man). Regardless: the film is about Japanese “host clubs”, which, as Xeni puts it, are home to “sharp-dressed, good-looking 20something guys who are paid to make women feel loved. No, not to perform sex acts, but to feel cared for.”
The fact that there’s a need for this kind of thing in contemporary Japan seems to be in line with a lot of issues explored in a documentary that I *have* seen, Mike Mills’ Does Your Soul Have a Cold? That film, which explores the relatively recent explosion of anti-depressant use in Japan, is essentially a verite examination of loneliness and sadness. Great Happiness seems to take a more stylized approach to describing similar problems.
As far as I can tell, Great Happiness is still without a distributor, but the entire film is available for viewing on Google Video. I’ve also embedded the trailer above.
***The National Legal and Policy Center has released a report intended to “shame” Google for failing to block access to pirated films on Google Video. Among other things, the NLPC charges that Google gives preferential treatment to copyright holders “it makes business deals with.” In response, a Google spokesman implied that some companies don’t want their copyright material removed from the site. “Copyright status can only be determined by the copyright holder, and their preferences vary widely.”
***Michael Tolkin, the author of The Player, has been hired to adapt the Fellini-inspired Broadway musical Nine for the screen. The Weinstein Company is producing the film; Chicago helmer Rob Marshall will direct.
***September’s Toronto Film Festival will host a Gala screening of David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises. The thriller re-teams the director with his History of Violence star, Viggo Mortensen.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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***The National Legal and Policy Center has released a report 
