Welcome to The Penny-Pinching Cinephile, a weekly spotlight of the best free flicks on the web. ‘Cuz sometimes you gotta eat.
1.) Harlan County U.S.A.
This Oscar-winning documentary is one of the most powerful and influential in the medium’s history. Barbara Kopple’s portrait of a coal miners’ strike in Harlan County, Kentucky is both a gripping drama and a potent endorsement of unionized labor. The political activism of the film stems from Kopple letting the coal miners speak for themselves. These people may not be educated (or have any dental care to speak of), but they know one thing for sure: their livelihoods depend on the union. The gun-toting scabs sent in to break the strike are perfectly villainous, spouting the same anti-union rhetoric you still hear from the GOP today.
The “Company,” as the miners call it, a faceless, heartless corporation owned by Big Oil, refuses to grant the miners any healthcare benefits, pensions, bargaining rights or living wages. The miners’ strike goes on for an agonizing thirteen months, and it’s not until a young man is murdered do the powers that be finally relent and give in to the miners’ demands. Harlan County U.S.A. is a great portrait of recent American history and a terrific portrayal of average citizen fighting–sometimes to the death–for their Constitutional rights. It’s must-see filmmaking.
2.) Grizzly Man
Werner Herzog has a knack for discovering interesting subjects; it’s what makes him a great documentary filmmaker. Timothy Treadwell is perhaps Herzog’s most Herzogian subject: eccentric, obsessive, half genius, half madman, and deeply passionate–to the point of his own destruction. Treadwell, an “amateur naturalist” (with no formal scientific training), lived among grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilderness for thirteen summers, until he, along with his girlfriend, were killed and eaten by a grizzly in 2003. Herzog’s film uses Treadwell’s own footage–much of which is stunningly photographed and in its ominous depiction of Treadwell’s dangerous intimacy with the bears, totally chilling.
Herzog intercuts Treadwell’s footage with interviews of his friends, colleagues, and bear experts, all of whom have their own opinions on Treadwell and his death. Watching Grizzly Man, it’s hard not to form a judgment of this man who plays with bear cubs, swims with these giant, man-eating animals and repeatedly proclaims his love for bears, seemingly, above and beyond his own life. Timothy Treadwell wanted to become a bear; it’s difficult not to look at his behavior and not think, well, the man got what he deserved. The controversy surrounding Treadwell’s extremism lends the tension to this totally gripping film, which is full of breath-catching moments and incredible footage of bears that occasionally boarders on the surreal.
3.) Last Train Home
One of the most beautifully photographed documentaries I’ve ever seen, Last Train Home lends elegance to an otherwise ugly subject: the millions of Chinese migrants who travel from the cities back to their country homes to celebrate the New Year. With 130 million migrants making the sojourn every year, it is the single largest human migration on earth. As an American who’s never visited the country, it is almost impossible to imagine the sheer mass of people that exist in China, let alone the amount of travelers in this mass migration (for scale, 130 million is about one-third the population of the United States).
Director Lixin Fan beautifully captures the hoards of weary travelers in gorgeous and awe-inspiring long shots where the bobbing heads of the migrants form impressionistic images. Fan’s subjects, the Zhang family, are typical migrants: the father and mother left their newborn child at home in the Sichuan province to work at a dingy garment factory in the city. Their daughter, now 16, bitterly resents her parents’ absence, even while she contemplates her own migration to the city to find work. Cutting to the heart of this family drama set against the larger backdrop of China’s rapid industrialization creates an emotionally charged dramatic tension. Fan perfectly balances the intimate with the epic, all of it rendered with a harsh but persistent beauty.
4.) Beat the Devil
Directed by John Huston, scripted by Truman Capote and starring Humphrey Bogart, you’d thinking Beat the Devil would be better known. Its bizarre production history (Huston & Capote wrote pages as they were filming) and unusual-for-the-time genre mash-up style (film noir/adventure/comedy?) made the film a commercial and critical failure upon release and makes it an outcast in classical film history today. Although Huston’s two previous films (The African Queen and Moulin Rouge) had garnered a combined 11 Academy Award nominations, Beat the Devil has slid into the public domain, resulting in many copies of the film being in terrible shape. Despite, or perhaps because of this complicated back story, Huston’s film has gained something of a cult reputation; Roger Ebert noted it might be the cinema’s first “camp” film.
Nothing about it is taken seriously. Bogart et al. are a pack of disreputable criminals waiting at an Italian port for a boat to be fixed so they can sail to Africa in search of uranium. Or something. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is Peter Lorre’s improvised dialogue, Gina Lollobrigida’s décolletage and Bogie’s rakish, wolfish grin. Beat the Devil spoofs the self-seriousness of the dark crime movies of the ’40s (of which Huston made several of the best) with a wink and a smile. It’s enjoyable from frame one.
5.) Synecdoche, New York
One of the strangest mainstream films of recent years, I suppose it’s an exercise in the obvious to say that writer Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut is a little bizarre. Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) is a brilliant writer, and a singular visionary. The ambition of Synecdoche, New York is certainly admirable for a debut feature, even if the final result is more puzzling than illuminating. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden, a theater director whose mysteriously ailing health triggers a series of bizarre occurrences (or is it vice versa?). Unable to control his life from spiraling out of control, Caden, now divorced from his wife and estranged from his daughter, embarks on the construction of a theater piece which meticulously recreates every aspect of his life.
He casts actors to play his friends and family, including a man to play a doppelganger of himself. Throughout this bizarre exercise, Caden attempts to connect with several different women (played by a host of fantastic actresses, including Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton and Dianne Wiest). At times, the film itself feels like one of Caden’s obsessional exercises; less of a film and more of a jigsaw puzzle–something to be admired but not to be loved.
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