In continued honor of editor Karen Schmeer, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver last weekend in New York, last night I screened The Fog of War, the most acclaimed film she worked on. I was surprised to see that she was one of three editors listed in the film, which is directed and produced by Errol Morris. Which leaves me curious why Morris uses more than one editor on many of his films. I did a little Googling and found an interview in which Morris explains how he went through half a dozen editors on this first film before he could find someone who could make a film out of his footage. Fog of War, though, began as TV series he ran briefly, called First Person, in which Morris interviewed interesting people for 30-minute episodes. He had the idea of inviting Robert McNamara, and the 30 minute interview was so good, that he knew it had to become a film.

Synopsis: Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, widely regarded and reviled as the architect of policy that resulted in the Vietnam War, recounts the story of his life and muses on the lessons he’s learned about the limits of power.

Story Structure: The film is interview-driven, and structured around  11 lessons from McNamara’s life, which serve like chapters in a book to break the film into distinct parts, which loosely follow a chronology of his life. The classic elements of Morris filmmaking are all here: Penetrating eye contact with the interview subject, supported by news footage, historical photos, and occasionally the voice of Morris asking questions.

Cinematography: Memorable shooting/editing technique: This is the first time I’ve ever seen a sequence played in show motion, with fast-motion layer running over it simultaneously. The result is a dreamy state, a pause in the pace to reflect on the words that are being said, a disassociation with reality, stepping into another world. It’s a device used repeatedly throughout the film, and it’s killer. It was used when someone is flipping through pages of an open book, and also to show people walking down a street. He uses it again to show the Vietnam Memorial – with people lingering in slow motion while people rush past at a fainter percentage of visibility. It’s a beautiful technique that I’m totally going to borrow and build on in my own work.

There’s a memorable scene which plays forwards and later in the film backwards, which shows dominoes falling across a map of the world. This is of course a reference to communism taking over the globe, the rationale for getting deeper involved in Vietnam. It’s shot at a high frame rate, and played in silky slow motion. The b-roll of tape recorders (with shallow depth of field) is also shot in slow motion, looks really beautiful, and works against the tape recordings it’s paired with.

The film is wrapped up with a series of shots of McNamara driving in his car through rain-soaked streets. It’s beautifully shot: close up on his glasses reflecting trees passing by, but with his eyeball huge; top of his head and rain-dropped window above. It reminded me a little of the driving scenes of Al Gore in Inconvenient Truth, only Gore as a passenger in those. The fact that McNama is driving himself seems to portray how his time and come and passed.

Editing: What’s different about this film from most Morris films, and mildly disconcerting, is the amount of jump cutting. I’m pretty sure it was included for a reason: to show how difficult it was to get McNamara to answer in complete sentences, and to show how much he attempted to steer the conversation.

An interesting editing technique (which might more probably be called an animation or special effect technique) was a shot in which the camera floats down a column of falling bombs (animated, presumably, but begins with a still B&W photo and it’s like we can travel into the photo, and down among the bombs, which drift past us as we continue down into them. It’s way more powerful than the typical zoom and pan on photographs for it’s impact to draw you in.

Playing things backwards is also a recurring device used in this film to show that things we thought happened actually didn’t. For example, the torpedo boats that supposedly attacked US warships in Vietnam, and were the inciting incident for massive bombing by the US, in fact never happened.

The film ends with a powerful line delivered by McNamara, who is quoting TS Elliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Music and Sound: Philip Glass again provides the soundtrack for the entire film, as he does on previous films like Thin Blue Line. My main critique is that if you’ve heard one Glass soundtrack, you’ve heard them all. The music is almost invisible to me in the film, and maybe that’s why Morris keeps returning to this composer, to keep the attention on the subjects with as much force as his Interrotron.

The first thing I noticed about Robert Greenwald’s filmmaking in Rethink Afghanistan is how seriously he cut corners to make the film. For example, seconds into the film, the image quality takes a huge hit as we watch footage he must have pulled off YouTube. Soon after that is an interview that sounds like it was recorded in an echo chamber, the result of inexcusably sloppy audio work. So, is it any surprise that the second thing I thought was: if he cuts corners this seriously in production, with what care does he handle the facts?  I’m sympathetic with the primary charge he levels with this film: that this war is having in many cases the opposite effect from the story we tell ourselves. But there’s something off about a filmmaker who’s in such a rush to make a film that he can’t move the microphone a little close to the subject’s mouth to get a clear recording.

Synopsis: In a rapid-fire sequence of interviews, news footage, and photos, Greenwald lays out evidence for the case that the United States is making a huge foreign policy mistake by pursuing the war in Afghanistan, and in fact, making the situation there worse.

Story Structure: The film is breathlessly structured around a series of “myths,” which are each quickly brushed aside by a fast-moving parade of interviews and other evidence. For example: “Women are better off in Afghanistan now that the US has removed the Taliban.” Cut to photo of a woman whose face has been eaten away by acid splashed on her by Taliban for showing her face in public. Cut to interview of an Afghan woman saying she fondly remembers the Taliban days, because at least they could stay inside and be safe. Cut to an academic talking about how women are bearing the brunt of violence in the war. The only thing we never cut to is someone acknowledging anything other than horror. Come on, there’s NOTHING good about the Taliban being gone? I’d be more likely to believe his evidence if he at least acknowledged some of the upside. There are so many fast-moving facts, that it seems, there’s no time to even acknowledge other points of view.

Cinematography: Bad. The interviews have no consistency between the way they were shot and lit and many have appalling audio. In fact, it was difficult for me to tell from watching the film whether the filmmaker was actually IN Afghanistan at any point in the filmmaking – it feels like the whole thing is stitched together from news footage and photographs, and interviews that could have been made just about anywhere. Because the quality of the footage varies so greatly, it feels like it was all found somewhere rather than being shot for the film specifically. To give some credit, the b-roll does support the things the interviewee is talking about, often very literally, rather than with much finesse.

Editing: The pacing of this film is way, way too fast. I found myself holding my breath at times, because I thought I was drowning in facts. Facts that I didn’t even have time to question in my own head before new facts were trotted out as further evidence, which are in turn replaced with further, different facts. Makes you crazy after awhile.

Music and Sound: One sound effect I liked is the “swoosh” sound effect that accompanies the flash transition used in the film. The music is in the background adding to the relentless rush of the film.

Bottom line: While I appreciate the filmmaker’s intentions, this film is what low-budget journalism would look like if it didn’t have to drag the burden of fairness around. By slowing down, doing a better job in production, and at least acknowledging the existence of alternative points of view, this could have been a much better film.

Seth Godin did something he doesn’t usually do earlier this week: he raved in his blog about a documentary film. “The Lemonade movie is so professional, engaging and inspiring that you’ve probably already seen it. If not, here it is.” I wish it were true that possessing those qualities made it probable that a film would find an audience. If so, there would be as many people crowding into theaters to watch The Cove (my Oscar pick for best doc) as there are lining up to see Avatar. But that’s another story.

Synopsis: Devastated when they are laid off from their ad agency jobs, former employees tell how they found courage and means to turn their perceived misfortunes into golden opportunities to create businesses that better reflect who they are and how they want to live.

Story Structure: Interviews are the spine of the film, which are structured in three acts: 1. Laid off – oh crap. 2. What am I going to do about it? The characters reach a point where they decide to take matters into their own hands. 3. As a result, they find happiness and inspire others.

This structure, incidentally, is essentially the same structure of our film Shine, except that our first act was people leaving by choice, because they hated their jobs.

Cinematography: One word: stunning. These are some of the most beautifully lit and shot interviews I’ve ever seen in a film. The production values were very high, from gorgeous introduction sequence with lemons bouncing around shot at a high frame rate and rendered in silky slow motion, to the detail shots of characters hands, to the sparse but stunningly beautiful b-roll from the lives of the characters. Who are mostly all beautiful. Most everyone is fairly young, too. It looks like the film was produced by an ad agency. Oh wait, it was! Ha ha. They did a great job applying their skills to the task, and the result is an effective sales pitch for DIY career management that looks like an ad for a BMW.

It had to have been shot on a Red Camera or maybe just a Canon 5d. Something with one hell of a fat sensor, because the depth of field is so shallow, they had a hard time keeping the interview subjects in focus – if they leaned forward to make a point, even an inch, they were out of focus. It’s the kind of cinematography that I call “shallow depth of field porn.” One thing about lighting: it appeared to be relatively simple soft source key, without any rim light. There was always darkness surrounding the interviewee for drama, but light in background to set them off the background, which was carefully exposed just right so the highlights were never completely blown out. The background light often has a soft color to it – the orange of a lampshade for example.

The b-roll was often very small things, details: hands fidgeting, lots of focus pulling, limbs cartwheeling through yoga class, coffee beans that looked good enough to eat, milk being poured into coffee as if it were a Starbucks commercial, veggies being chopped. Still photos were jump-zoomed into like you see on network TV – from small to medium to big in three distinct steps, rather than zoomed steadily into, which is the more filmic way. They even found a way to use the side angle of the interviewee’s face as b-roll, cutting to shots of person just looking at camera while their voiceover continues. It all adds up to make them larger than life, heros.

Editing: Spare use of b-roll to accompany the interviews, which are shot so beautifully that I’m glad they stayed on the faces as long as they did. An interesting departure was no slates for any of the characters. Instead, at the end of the film they all state their names and we cut through all of them, sort of like all the performers take a bow at the end of a play. The recurring use of lemons worked but felt a little overdone, but they look so good you can’t help but but enjoy watching them roll by in slow motion or get chopped up or just glide by. Editing did a great job of intercutting the different characters so that they are all talking about the same thing, moving the story forward together by completing each other’s sentences almost.

Music and Audio: Music (credited to Caspian) is mostly quiet guitar riffs build the mood. Soft, sparkly keyboard riffs.

A lot of talented people worked on this film, and it shows. Bravo for an inspiring film that raises the bar on what documentaries of this kind can look like: gorgeous.

Well tomorrow’s a big day for a select group of documentary filmmakers – the official Oscar nominations will be announced tomorrow morning at 5:38 am Pacific. I wasn’t planning to be awake for that. But tonight after screening one of the films in contention, Food, Inc., I’m not sure I’ll be able to get to sleep at all. Don’t watch this film if you aren’t prepared to change your eating habits. This film won’t necessarily make you a vegetarian, but it will send you to the free-range, organic isle for life. See you there.

Synopsis: Think that FDA stamp of approval means your steak is good? Think again. Filmmaker Robert Kenner teams up with two investigative journalist authors, Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, to uncover the ugly truth: faceless megacorporations have taken over the food chain. If you’re a carnivore, you might be thinking soybeans … until you learn that one company is forcing virtually all farmers in America to plant its genetically modified beans. Despite the grim reality, this is a hopeful film, reminding us that as bad as it is, Big Tobacco was until recently in the same place is Big Food is today.

Story Structure: The opening sequence of this film is my favorite ever. Not only does it surprise and delight, but it makes a subtle comment about labels on food in general: we think we have a cornucopia of choices, but we really don’t. In fact, we hardly see brands and labels at all, not realizing that just a small handful of companies are delivering most everything on the isles. And what they are delivering leaves something to be desired. But I digress. The story is narrated by the two authors who the filmmaker teams up with to make the film: a pair of investigative journalists, who we return to over and over in the film to regain our bearings in an otherwise dizzy array of facts. The film makes use of everything from home movies of a boy who died from an e-coli outbreak, to interviews, to news footage, to hidden camera footage shot by employees of one of the 6 meat packing plants that server the entire USA.

Cinematography: This was a tough film to shoot, because the big food companies don’t like it very much when filmmakers look below the surface of their expensive logos and pr departments. That means we’re treated to fly-overs and drive-bys of feed lots, more often than the thing itself. Which make them a lot prettier than they really are. The filmmakers are a lot more polite than Michael Moore would have been in gathering footage, but they do manage to get meat packing plant employees to carry a hidden camera that reveals a tiny slice of the horrors awaiting pigs, chickens, and Mexicans who manage to avoid being captured by the INS long enough to work in these pits. In one memorable scene I spotted a LitePanel sitting on the dash of a pickup truck driven by a farmer who ends up not allowing filmmakers to film his chickens. At least his face was beautifully lit while he caved to the man.

Editing: The rotating business card animation is my take-away editing trick from this film. It’s that thing otherwise known as “revolving door” in which lobbyists and industry big-wigs get plumb government jobs in between commercial gigs. If they were your friend, you’d have a hard time remembering which email address to use to invite them to your daughter’s graduation. Or funeral.

Music and Sound: The got “The Boss” to chip in a song at the end. What more do you want.