In today’s New York Times, Brian Stelter talks to muckraking filmmaker Robert Greenwald about his latest project, Rethink Afghanistan, which Greenwald calls “a real-time documentary.” Greenwald has posted the first two of five parts of the documentary on the Rethink website and is currently in Afghanistan shooting more; eventually, the video blogs will be “stitched together” into a full-length film for potential festival play, DVD release, and even theatrical distribution.

Greenwald says speed is his primary motivator for releasing his works in progress to the web in this way; with President Obama somewhat quietly escalating the war in Afghanistan, Greenwald (who titled the first chapter of Rethink “More Troops + Afghanistan = Catastrophe”) is hoping his film will impact policy. On the Rethink website, he’s already obtained over 36,000 signatures to a petition demanding congressional oversight hearings on Afghanistan spending, in the name of creating “a national conversation to address the many questions surrounding this war.” The YouTube comments on the first chapter would suggest that the film is already making it possible for that conversation to take place amongst the rabble, and at a surprisingly high level of discourse for the video sharing site.

One issue that Stelter and Greenwald don’t address is the fact that Greenwald is at liberty to work this way only because he has a massive grassroots base already built, and its members are already online, and he doesn’t need film festival accolades to raise his profile, and theatrical release for his films is an afterthought. Does the collapsing of distinction between online video and feature filmmaking become less significant when it’s simply a question of finding your audience where they live? Is this a model that any other name brand documentarian would be willing to play with at this point?

I’ve embedded the first part of Rethink Afghanistan after the jump; Greenwald is also Twittering from Afghanistan, natch.
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Severe Clear is the Iraq documentary I’ve been awaiting conscientiously if not eagerly. There certainly hasn’t been a shortage of retrospective examinations from a position of authority - e.g. the macrocosmic No End In Sight and the microfocused Standard Operating Procedure - or, in lesser quantities, on-the-ground reportage. The best-known of those is probably 2004’s Gunner Palace, which could be politely described - in internet slang - as Epic Fail. Well-intentioned though they were in spending time with soldiers both at rest and patrolling, Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein screwed up by including little you couldn’t have seen on the news - gore and atrocities discreetly off-screen - and also in basic competence, like providing audible sound.

Working from the footage of Marine Mike Scotti, Kristian Fraga does much better. An Afghanistan vet who voluntarily re-enrolled and went over to Iraq in 2003, Scotti took along a camera for documentation and kept a journal with the ultimate purpose of writing a book; the movie’s accordingly divided into titled chapters. Rarely on-camera, Scotti’s personal arc and perspective on the war is kind of beyond the point. There’s no revelations here; from the opening blast of Marine excitement to Scotti’s closing sense that something’s gone wrong, there’s no surprises. What there is is an utter lack of reserve, a jolting immediacy that could’ve come from Walter Hill, but one that never telescopes the war into its own bloodless movie.

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Upon its Russian release in 2007, Cargo 200 immediately provoked a national furor. Alexei Balabanov’s grim little movie centers around one Captain Zhurov (Alexei Poluyan), a police officer in 1984’s Soviet Russia who uses his position of authority to essentially institutionalize rape, prisoner beatings and all-round mayhem.  In a typical scene, he tosses the corpse of a girl’s soldier-fiance next to her while she’s chained to a bed and proceeds to read the dead man’s love letters.

When I first saw Cargo 200, I thought it was supposed to be black comedy, but it isn’t; its pitch-perfect production design is part of a whole package designed to check any nostalgia for the departed Soviet era, even if it summons up long-gone discotheques and hairstyles effortlessly. Cargo 200 itself is the code word for the boxes in which dead soldiers are shipped back from Afghanistan, which pretty much sums up the grim tone. Already available through Netflix, Cargo 200 receives a much-deserved if small release January 2; Balabanov’s film is appalling, but it’s also surprisingly elegant.

A few contextual things you may like to know: despite working as an interpreter for two year in the ’80s, Balabanov will only do interviews in Russian, so I spoke with him over the phone in that language. Balabanov is not what you might consider a tactful, soft-spoken guy: in an interview in 2007 with “Novaya Gazeta,” he responded to a question about charges of xenophobia with the terse statement, “In every country there are decent people and there are freaks.” Cargo 200 is his first film to be screened outside of festivals in the US in a decade, since 1997’s Brother, so I’ve included contextual notes as needed.

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Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), cinematographer Ellen Kuras‘ documentary directorial debut, was recently named to the Academy’s short list of potential Best Documentary nominees, and it’s certainly deserving. A film over wo decades in the making, its back-story is fairly remarkable. Kuras met her subject, Thavisouk Phrasavath, while looking for a Laotian translator for a film she planned to direct about a family from Laos then living in Rochester, NY, but then became so interested in her potential translator’s own refugee story that she turned the camera on him instead.

Kuras went on to essentially became a master at her day job accidentally; as she told indieWIRE when the film debuted at Sundance, she started her career as an “an associate producer, an assistant cameraperson on docs, and as an electrician on dramatic films (so that I could learn how to light),” and then as production on Nerakhoon continued on, she found herself “needing to take on other projects in order to pay for it.” Those jobs included shooting commercials directed by people like Spike Lee, and eventually films like I Shot Andy Warhol, Blow, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And yet The Betrayal remained a resolutely independent, low-to-the-ground personal project. Phrasavath, called “Thavi” on screen, is billed as co-director and editor, and often functioned as Kuras’ only other crew member, acting as “translator, cohort and production assistant.” Together he and Kuras combine freshly-shot 16mm material with archival footage, home video, and what look like ancient home movies into a collage of overlapping images. It’s an approach that fits the film perfectly: this world-class camerawoman has made a handmade document of a global-political story concentrated down into a single, extraordinarily intimate portrait, in which the “bigger” issues are mirrored but ultimately dwarfed by domestic tragedy.

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Kathryn Bigelow hasn’t made a feature film since 2002’s Harrison Ford starrer K19: The Widowmaker, unless you count the “blink and you’ll miss it” Mission Zero with Uma Thurman. The Hurt Locker returns her to real roots as a character-driven action director, and she gets some terrific performances out of relative unknowns Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie in this film about the war in Iraq.

In our interview, she discusses fictionalizing real war stories, what The Hurt Locker does that other Iraq films haven’t, and the everlasting legacy of Point Break.

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Waltz with Bashir is a stunning exploration of war, memory, and the disturbingly subjective nature of truth. It’s one of the few films that can claim to be both a documentary and an animated feature, and it uses both forms to a superb end.

The film opens with an animated Ari Folman, the writer/director/star, having a drink with an old friend from the Israeli Defense Force during the war with Lebanon in the early ’80s. His friend tells him of a recurring dream in which exactly 26 vicious dogs rampage through the streets on their way to devour him. The pack seeks revenge because of an incident in which he had to kill 26 Palestinian watchdogs so as not to be detected during night patrols. This exchange leads Folman to realize that he has almost no memories from that time. In an effort to piece together what happened and how he was involved, he begins to talk to others who were there.

A conversation early in the film strays from foggy war stories and onto the topic of memory itself. A friend tells Folman about a study in which 8 out of 10 people, when showed an photograph of a fair that has been digitally altered to include themselves as a child, will claim to remember the event, even though the memory is entirely false. It’s a strange point to make at the beginning of a film which is ostensibly about reconstructing memories to arrive at a clearer picture of the truth. Ultimately, Folman’s inclusion of that bit of pop psychology is a key step in helping it rise above films with similar subject matter. While the film does communicate a requisite amount of history, it’s really about the effect of war on soldiers, civilians, and how the sketchy nature of memory plays a role.

Watching the film, I couldn’t help but think of it as a cross between Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. I do not mean to accuse of Folman of making a knock-off of either film, Waltz with Bashir is nothing if not unique. But there are striking parallels in the flowing, roto-scoped dreamscapes of Linklater’s film. Animation allows Folman to control the image to a breathtaking degree, while keeping everything one step away from reality. It might be truth, but we can’t forget that it’s an artist’s interpretation, a memory, a dream.

As the realities of a brutal massacre come to light, an interviewee points out that Folman’s memory of the event can’t help but be influenced by his knowledge of his own parents’ experiences in Auschwitz. The parallel to Schindler’s List is not simply a mingling of subject matter, but rather the way both films probe the murky question of how humanity reacts (or doesn’t react) in the face of inhuman cruelty. While Spielberg’s film approaches this subject in classic, high-drama Hollywood style, Folman’s animation allows him to illustrate, quite literally, that war is always an inhuman act.

California may have spent the last five years under the rule of a Republican movie star, but news that major industry players are anything but super-lefty liberals still seems to strike many as a surprise. Responding to a story in which it’s casually mentioned that Dennis Hopper is expected to attend the Republican National Convention, Defamer’s Kyle Buchanan writes, “Did we miss the memo that said the countercultural director of freaking Easy Rider was a Republican? We’d assumed his appearance in the right-wing Zucker film An American Carol was a strict paycheck gig…”

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I wish I had smuggled the Polaroid snapshot of Nolte from my former employer, a men’s homeless shelter. Nolte wasn’t his real name, but I’ll be damned if the scruffy, gin-blossomed, gravel-voiced Vietnam veteran wasn’t a ringer for Nick Nolte playing a Nam burnout. He wore mirror shades and ratty field jacket festooned with medals and POW/MIA buttons. He complained that the thunder erupting from the building’s boiler at night gave him jungle flashbacks. There are cliches and there are cliches. Beyond the impossibility of his extreme Nolte-ness and 1,000 yard silences, the man was really suffering. One time he lifted his shades to show me.

Yesterday I was shocked to see Nolte again, up on the big screen in Tropic Thunder. This was my Nolte. A Nam vet whose acclaimed book of war stories inspires a cash-in film adaptation, the character played by Real Nolte emerges on the troubled set like Quint in Jaws, leading our comic heroes not out to sea but into the heart of darkness. In a shot mournfully photographed by John Toll, Nolte stares out at the jungle mists from a mountain perch and answers a query about a weapon with, “I don’t know what it’s called, but I know the sound that it makes when it takes a man’s life.” It’s like, out of nowhere, ten seconds of Malick or Herzog. Later on, Nolte’s heart-of-darkness act and its function in American mythology get deconstructed (or demolished) like Warren Beatty’s frontier pimp in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

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Elliot Gould said a few words Friday night before a BAM screening of Little Murders, the 1971 film based on Jules Feiffer’s play, which Gould starred in and produced for first-time feature director Alan Arkin. The event came towards the midpoint of a retrospective at the Brooklyn theater dedicated to Gould’s 70s-era peak, and the actor seemed humbled by the thought of so many snapshots of an era lined up for quick consumption. “It’s my life,” he said wistfully. Then, with a little wave of a hand and a vigorous shake of his head, he corrected himself: “Well, it’s all of our lives, isn’t it?”

Gould noted that he’d “probably never” seen Little Murders “with a real crowd”–when the film was released in the States in February of 1971, Gould was in Sweden shooting The Touch for Ingmar Bergman, and thanks to its disappointing box office, it didn’t have much of a life for a while. Not that Gould took time out at the time to dwell on its failure. After the screening, Gould’s answers to questions from both the audience and moderator Bruce Bennett continually circled around a kind of “fear” the actor experienced at the peak of his career. After a 1970 TIME Magazine story in which he was anointed both “the urban Don Quixote” and “a star for an uptight age”, Gould worked constantly because he was afraid that if he stopped to catch his breath––or picked the wrong project and fell on his face––his allure would cool off and he wouldn’t be able to find a job.

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This new bit of internet marketing for the forthcoming Tropic Thunder claims to be a trailer for a fake documentary about the making of the fictional movie that Tropic Thunder is also about the making of. Wait, what? On the one hand, I love the piling on of ridiculously self-referential layers, but on the other hand, isn’t this a bit confusing? Let me try this again, Tropic Thunder is a fictional film about a film production where the director decides to put his (fake) actors in real (fake) danger. And Rain of Madness is a fake mocumentary about the fake movie, or about the real movie about a fake movie?

Well, whatever the case may be, the above clip proves two things: One, Tropic Thunder would probably be better as a mockumentary, rather than a fiction film about a fiction film. And two, Danny McBride is hilarious: “I just beat nature today.”

Serge Bozon’s La France is a generic clusterfuck, but in the best way––a stunningly confident, category-defying, broken-down dream piece about loss and being lost. It’s a film about war in which soldiers are not only never seen actually fighting for their land, but in fact seem to have lost their way in vague and vain pursuit of a lost land to reclaim as their own. It’s a musical with just one song, performed by non-performers in a handful of mutations throughout the film. And it’s a love story, soaked in romantic delusion but ultimately fatalist in regards to the actual odds that love can overcome existential crisis. After a 14 month festival run (including stops at Cannes, New Directors/New Films and LAFF), it opens for a week in New York at Anthology Film Archives on Friday.

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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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“So I remember we– I had like two or three days or something and I rehearsed and choreographed and dressed my brothers. I choreographed them with the piece and picked the songs, picked the medley. And not only that. You have to work out all the camera angles and, oh, I direct and edit everything I do. Every shot you see, is my shot.” -Michael Jackson, on his preparation for an ’80s Jackson 5 performance. (Ebony Magazine, December, 2007).

Who doesn’t remember the worldwide shock and dismay when Michael Jackson announced his retirement from music in 1990, at the age of 32? But the real shocker was what came next. Mr. Jackson’s stellar career as a film director, now nearly 20 years on, seemed pure folly at the time. What magic could such a musical being possibly work with images? Surely, a performer who spoke so eloquently with his voice and feet would, with a movie camera, be all thumbs…?

We were spectacularly wrong.
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Artist on Artist: John Cusack and Diablo Cody

There’s a really strange moment in the above Artist on Artist video with Diablo Cody and John Cusack, where Cusack is all, “The mainstream media don’t understand my my shitty war satire movie, so I gave Liz Phair a copy and she gave me a blurb for my website,” and Diablo’s all, “Uh, yeah, I’ll give you my quote soon,” and she has this look on her face like, “Shit, people are actually doing that? Liz Phair’s actually doing that? I have as big a crush on Lloyd Dobbler as anyone but … seriously?” Maybe we like Diablo Cody better than we thought. Although this does come right after she says something about how blogging=good because “you don’t have to contend with The Man,” which is about as fresh a sentiment as any in War, Inc, so maybe her pullquote really *is* on the way…