Undefeated (2011)

Undefeated bucks the recent trend of investigative documentaries and goes old school.

The gimmick: watch a coach take charge of an underdog team and turn it around in one year by stressing on character, integrity, hard work, and transcending beyond race and class.

Watch for: a sports documentary that's a natural allegory for Being American.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 28 November 2012.

Marley (2012)

What do we remember about the 70s? Free love, weed, and rock and roll? Musicians addicted to weed?

Going from the birth of Robert Nesta Marley in rural Jamaica to his childhood in Kingston and growth from a young man and novice to a spokesperson for reggae music, Kevin MacDonald's documentary puts Bob Marley and his music in proper personal and historical context.

Marley reclaims not just the musical legend but also an entire decade from demonisation.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 22 August 2012.

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (2011)

Forcing MacDonald's to adopt healthier menus and advertising is a tough opening act to follow.

This time round, Morgan Spurlock learns about about product placement by setting out making a film that is 100% funded by product placements - and this is the same film that you are watching.

Cheeky, meta humour, and a willingness to poke fun at himself makes Spurlocks investigation of product placement in film and TV far less hectoring and highhanded than one might expect.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 5 October 2011.

Glee: The 3D concert movie (2011)

This film is an awkward, jarring mixture of prerecorded clips from the Glee concert tour, backstage footage with the cast being in character, and documentary-like footage of fans who went for the show.
This does not spell success as a concert movie, a documentary, or a film adaptation of the series.

Watch only if you're a fan.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 31 August 2011.

Justin Bieber: Never say never (2011)

If you crossed the vanity flick and the documentary, JB:NSN is what you might get.

It's nominally a documentary but one does more than its fair bit of celebrity myth-making instead of revealing the world behind the showbiz curtains.

You won't find out anything about the music empire manufacturing Bieber. Thank goodness he can sing.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 13 April 2011.

Facing Ali (2009)

Living with Parkinson's disease, "The Greatest" gets a tribute in a documentary summarising his youth and boxing career.

The gimmick here involves Muhammad Ali's life and career narrated by a parade of 10 of his greatest friends and professional foes.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 15 December 2010.

Bébé(s) (2010)

Childhood is a social construct. But what about infanthood? Shouldn't it be as natural and universal as we think?

Thomas Balmes follows 4 very different infants from around the world in their first year of life to see if we're right to assume this.


Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 9 September 2010.

Oceans (2009)

James Cameron gets all the limelight for developing camera and submersible technology in order to produce Titanic.

Jacques Perrin spent 7 years to produce underwater documentary Oceans and from the looks of it, I daresay he ought to get even more limelight for his efforts. Which deserve to be seen on IMAX, where available.

Read my full review on Fridae, first published on 8 July 2010, as well as the essay which came out of an hour-long interview with David Reichert, one of the set photographers.

Unmistaken child (2008)

Tibetan Buddhism teaches the transmigration of souls and more specifically, the reincarnation of its high lamas. It falls to the task of every high lama's most favoured disciple to seek out his reincarnation.

Yet who knows if reincarnation even works?

We find out from the point of view of the Tenzin Zopa's favourite disciple at the point of his death, the institution of the search committee, and various points of his search.


Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 26 May 2010.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008)

There are two ways of making a documentary. One is to present a balanced case with point and counterpoint, to arrive at some sort of an objective truth. The other is to present the case for one side so clearly that one would be forced to agree with it.

This documentary makes the case that a man whose guilt was never in doubt in a statutory rape case was a bigger victim than the girl he had relations with.


Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 19 May 2010.

Taking Woodstock (2009)

Dream a little dream

As the joke goes about Woodstock: If you remember it, you weren't there. On a more serious and bleak note: If it is seared into your cultural consciousness as a mythical feel-good event, chances are you weren't born then.

While not a direct indictment of the 1960s, Ang Lee's adaptation of the reactionary melodrama The Ice Storm (1997) depicts the social and existential aftermath that followed the bursting of the decade-long dream. We are not surprised at its reception in the US: when wide-eyed optimism, social liberation, and activism fail to solve any of the world's problems, the social pendulum swings back into reactionary conservatism. The backlash guarantees that even 'decent liberals', in very embarrassing attempts to gain credibility, have to badmouth the decade and engage in wholesale character assassination of the Left, SDS, flower children, hippies, et al. In short: commemorating Woodstock, Stonewall, the sexual and chemical liberation, love and peace - all this is a lost cause in American cultural politics.

But don't tell that to Ang Lee. Lee was still in a Taiwanese middle school when Woodstock kicked off, but he certainly has a good impression of the decade and its flower children. If The Ice Storm was a downer on the 60s, this movie tells us what the decade stood for and the hope it held out to a generation.

The very modest Ang Lee shies away from recreating Woodstock in Taking Woodstock. In the interest of diminishing disappointments, let me forewarn that what you get in Taking Woodstock is the making of Woodstock. You won't get a re-creation of the legendary festival itself. There will be no documentary footage or re-enactments of the now-legendary performances by Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix. Bob Dylan does not appear as himself. You will not see the stage or the crowds at the stage.

Instead, what you'll get is the the organisers' misadventures in getting the festival up and running, from inception to cleaning up, almost like a reality show done as a feature film. There are plenty of boo-boos, close shaves and pure mayhem to provide the laughs: recurring gags feature closeted protagonist Eliot Tiber who gives up his big city life, returning to save his very eccentric parents' decrepit motel from going down, his avaricious money-pinching mom's antics, and a local theatre company with a penchant for public streaking. And that's just for starters. Who would've thought Ang Lee had a healthy sense of humour?

Lee instead builds the festival from the ground up, from the perspectives of not just the organisers or the local community but the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who went there, got caught in the traffic gridlock, ended up miles from the stage, and turned the music festival into a good-natured, sprawling picnic, carnival, and camp site. I am told Lee was impressed that this beyond critical mass of counter-cultural youth did not spark a riot - this movie conveys that impressiveness and I think could go some way to rehabilitate the cultural memory of the 60s.

What Ang Lee brings to this retelling of Woodstock is not just his non-judgemental respect for the decade and its actors, but his treatment of Woodstock as one of those logistical nightmares - say a Chinese wedding banquet. It is perhaps from this cultural perspective that Lee treats his comic characters with equal reverence and concentrates on the celebrants who were there for more than just the music itself. The man understands that Woodstock wasn't really a music festival but something far greater, something whose meaning was collaboratively created by the majority who came but never got to see Janis Joplin, Jimmi Hendrix, or Bob Dylan.

Son of the Northeast, ลูกอีสาน (1982) (SIFF 2009)

The anxiety of influence

Ostensibly, Son of the Northeast is a historical drama set in the 1930s Thailand, in its Isan (Northeast) province, telling the travails of a small clan of subsistence farmers and their village as a particularly bad drought reduces them to bush living.

I suppose one could enjoy this movie on a literal level, which is encouraged by director Vichit Kounavudhi's moving, documentary-like presentation of this work of fiction. The story plays out like a Thai version of Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (পথের পাঁচালী), but like many other films, history has caught up with Son of the Northeast, and we can no longer watch it with naive eyes.

I'm referring to the unfolding political turmoil in Thailand, where the source of the troubles hail from its Northeast province and its turbulent denizens - the only beneficiaries of the otherwise questionable reign of Thaksin Shinawatra, and understandably the only parties angry enough to derail the post-Thaksin political process.

And I'm also referring to the fact that the Northeast province has historically been troublesome for Bangkok: the last territory to be incorporated (or annexed) into the Kingdom during its final stage of expansion just prior to the 20th century, its culture, language, and people are more Lao and Cambodian than Thai, and politically rebellious. That the province was renamed "The Northeast" at the beginning of 20th century is a hint at the Bangkok's simultaneous nation-building agenda and anxiety of influence, under which the film actually operates.

While this story is set in the 1930s, the director behind the camera and the author holding the pen are strictly creatures of the 1980s, an era where Bangkok was already casting its nervous to the Northeast.

The nation-building message and its corresponding anxiety over Isan in the film becomes more apparent and unsubtle through time: the villagers (coded as Thai) are set against their ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese and Laotian neighbours (coded as foreigners), who fight a cold war between themselves. The villagers are entranced by a gramophone playing a nationalist song praising the monarch and the unity of the Thai state. They happily send their children to Buddhist temples that double up as schools for the Thai language - a function that came only with the region's annexation by Thailand. And best yet, they call themselves Northeasterners.

With that heavy a burden of historical revisionism and nation-building, it is no surprise then that the film does not end up being the Thai Pather Panchali. As a straightforward documentary-like drama, the film is more than watchable in its recreation of rich ethnographic detail of early 20th century life in Isan, but far more can be gleamed if one is aware of the political anxieties expressed inadvertently in this work.

Village People Radio Show (Apa khabar orang kampung) (2007)

Malaysia's last malay communists

It wouldn't be a mistake to think of Village People Radio Show as a follow-up to Amir Muhammad's previous movie on Chin Peng, The Last Communist, but it'll be a pity to see this documentary as merely a continuation of Amir's investigation of surviving members of the Malayan Communist Party and its armed forces. The key to this documentary lies in its subject, the 10th regiment of the Communist Party of Malaya, composed almost entirely of Malay volunteers and activists. While Chin Peng may have been an ideal launching point for a documentary on the fading legacy of the communists and the disproportionately long shadow they cast on Malaya, this sequel of sorts arrests the convenient national propaganda (undertaken by both Malaysian and Singaporean governments) that has demonised Chin Peng and the Malayan Communist Party as some sort of Yellow Peril, the ChiCom threat.

And so, it might be more rewarding to regard Village People Radio Show as a corrective educational piece that parades before its viewers elderly Malay men and women, who dedicated the better parts of their youth - and then some more - to the ideals of the Communist Party of Malaya, who volunteered in the anti-colonial struggle for independence, and then were rejected by the new leaders of Malaya, and fought a long guerilla war in the jungles before retiring to Thailand. These are the same elderly Malay and women who pray dutifully at their village mosque, construct probably the last remaining authentic Malay stilt villages on the Peninsular, and spend their evenings playing traditional music together. These people, because of who they are and what they do, because of the language they speak, are the gravest threats to the official propaganda of Malaysia. And because of their age, they may no longer pose a threat to official history of a PRC-backed Malayan Communist Party that lost out to more democratic forces because it could never touch the hearts and minds of non-Chinese in the Peninsular.

And so, Village People Radio Show, being aware of its duty to history, is more serious and less whimsical than The Last Communist. Amir Muhammad duly lets the camera roll as veterans of WW2 and the Emergency speak of their life histories and activities as members of the Party, and their life after the signing of the armistice in 1989. It is unclear whether Amir had pushed his subjects hard enough during the interviews, but at times, their reluctance to discuss the party's attacks on civilians becomes disturbing, like an elephant in the room or an itch that cannot be scratched.

Like The Last Communist, the Village People Radio Show has a narrative within a narrative, a Thai radio play that apparently is an adaptation of A Winter's Tale. At times whimsical and overdramatic, it speaks of a sense of lost and exile that must surely haunt the surviving members of the Malayan Communist Party. One only wishes, on the documentary strength of the material in Village People Radio Show, that Amir Muhammad had instead made a far more serious documentary trilogy on the party, interviewing (and not just commenting ironically from the sidelines of his road trip) Chin Peng, the Malay communist soldiers, as well as surviving politicians and fighters on the side of the colonialists and their successors in Malaya. That would surely be documentary project far more worthy of its subjects of inquiry, instead of 2 film essays that just feel incomplete.

First published at incinemas on 10 May 2007

Kallang Wave, The (2007)

Ole, ole, ole!

As the filmmakers of the Kallang Wave (fans of Singapore soccer themselves) point out, the local game has been in decline and free fall since 1995, when the Football Association of Singapore (FAS) withdrew the country withdrew from the Malaysia Cup and set up the S League. Match attendance has declined, falling in tandem with news coverage of local matches, and some say the quality of the local league. Kallang stadium and its brethren, once the carnivalesque home of passionate fans, have fallen silent despite the intensive nurturing of local football talent that the S-League and the Sports School represent. With football fanatics more likely to don the colours of Manchester United, Chelsea and Real Madrid instead of Balestier Khalsa FC, watch ESPN's international broadcasts of soccer matches instead of S-League match highlights on local television, Singapore football is as good as finished, aside from the occasional Tiger Cup finals match at the stadium.

And so in the coming decades, if anyone asks "Who killed Singapore soccer? Enquiring minds want to know!" they might want to skip the National Archives, hundreds of thousands of back issues of the Straits Times and The New Paper, and go straight for The Kallang Wave, a documentary that investigates the reasons for the decline of local football, in a series of interviews with football fans, local football players past and present, reporters from the newspapers, and the immense S-League officialdom. The better part of the bargain, should you choose to purchase tickets for this movie, are the footage of past Malaysia Cup finals. With the loss of most of the old broadcast archives in the Caldecott Hill fire, The Kallang Wave is the easiest avenue to relive past glories and view the image of stadium-sized Singaporean crowds celebrating and cheering their team on.

The almost forensic approach to the team's investigations generate many long talking-heads segments which thankfully alternate with the more gut-pleasing footage from the National Stadium. Each group of stakeholders are singled-out, a la Who Killed the Electric Car? as prime suspects of the demise of local soccer: lack of fans, lower standards of the local league, a media uninterested in playing up interest in the local league, and even the EPL is fingered as well.

The filmmakers are silent on where they personally stand, but it is difficult to ignore the fact that underlying the mutual fingerpointing is a mistaken sense of "entitlement" each group feels: Why should fans feel entitled to have a premier league with star players? Why should the S-League officials feel the press should, as a matter of patriotism, cover their games automatically? And why should the press feel that it is merely their duty to report what the masses are genuinely interested in, but expect the S-League to generate its heroes, hype, and excitement on its own? Perhaps this documentary missed a chance to truly examine the "problem" of the decline of local soccer, and doesn't take long before all 3 groups start blaming Singaporean society and culture. Cue the list of alternate suspects that the groups can agree is killing enthusiasm for the sport: fast paced society, kiasuism, paper qualifications, overpressured schoolchildren - and the movie slips into Singapore Movie Territory, where filmmakers cannot take Jack Neo out of their hearts even when they make their own films. Of course, this may actually make the movie more accessible to the common moviegoer, who might not be that great a soccer fan, but remains a true blue Singaporean heartlander.

Thankfully, the love and conviction for the sport is all but evident in the faces of all the interviewees despite their mutual fingerpointing and very Singaporean complaints, in the narration of the filmmakers despite their sometimes high-flown language and mythmaking language. As a record of the passions of local soccer and simpler times, The Kallang Wave is an excellent movie that every Singaporean - soccer fan or not - should watch.

As a good old-fashioned investigative documentary though, the movie's record is mixed: audiences may leave wondering why the murder mystery never even makes a case against the butler. Missing a chance to examine the institution itself, the filmmakers free S-League's management, coaches, and players from questions about its organisation, recruitment policies, and justification for existence. It becomes impossible to imagine the S-League is responsible for the eclipse of local football, if one equates the S-League is local football. Deserving every bit of our respect, football legend Fandi Ahmad is the only official who manages to pinpoint the flaw of the entire system, and puts it blunting. Otherwise, the documentary is missing all mention of the promotion and abandonment of Goal 2010, the initial explanations by then-Prime Minister Goh that the league would create community and regional identity and bonding, or even the simple fact that Singaporeans have had to put in longer and longer hours of overtime work since 1994.

Audiences will derive more satisfaction from The Kallang Wave if they watch it not as a documentary like Who Killed the Electric Car?, but as a non-fiction movie that captures neatly the mood of football mania from previous decades, like Glastonbury. This movie, despite its rough spots, is a sincere and well-meaning celebration of the love for soccer.

First published at incinemas on 25 March 2007

Glastonbury (2006)

Shut out and listen to the music

Julien Temple comes with great credentials. He was the director of the 1980s Sex Pistols documentary The Great Swindle, which captured the punk scene accurately, as well as demolishing the carefully cultivated public image of the band. Between his other Sex Pistols documentary in 2000 (this time authorised by the band), Temple’s documentary and musical films lack the brilliance of his maiden effort.

And then, we come to Glastonbury. Its premise is simple: unleash the filmmaker on the Glastonbury Festival from 2002 to 2005, let him hunt down additional footage and amateur home videos from the first instalment of the festival to now, and put together a documentary film that should provide an immersive experience of how it’s like to be at Glastonbury, as well as track its changes over the years.

Well, one could hope. But what Julien Temple delivers is a middling music video that goes on for far too long, and a film that is useless as a documentary. Glastonbury is a series of musical performances by various bands, matched with footage of crowds from over the years – crowds who never met those bands at the Festival. There is footage of absurdist street installation performances by some visitors, as well as shenanigans of latter, more unruly, violently antiestablishment and anti-Thatcher punks, and the smiling crowds from this millennium. And lots of people talking into the camera about how they get the Glastonbury vibe, or just performing for the camera. And of course, Michael Eavis, the gentleman farmer who started it all, occasionally enters the screen as he gets down to the task of planning and organising another year’s Glastonbury Festival, and dealing with the ever-increasing numbers.

That’s fine if all you want is to shoot a music video, but by decontextualising footage in such a cross-stitching exercise, much of how the festival has really changed from a small hippy gathering to an annual musical event (on the level of Womad) is glossed over. Despite the occasional voice-over historical segments, the visuals and music conspire to create a timeless, contextless, lump of always-now that is resistant to analysis.

Questions that could and should be asked cannot be asked because of this approach: Given that Michael Eavis admits the festival has evolved through the years, how and why exactly did the festival change from hippy flower power to anarchism to… well-behaved commercialism? Did certain crowds stop attending, replaced by new ones with different expectations of what to do at Glastonbury? What do the crowds do when they’re not at Glastonbury – Do they party elsewhere? Aside from Michael Eavis, what other groups were a semi-permanent or stable fixture at the festival? How did they contribute to the festival? Did the attending bands stay for the festival or did they just airlift themselves in and out just for the duration of their performances? How are bands chosen to perform at Glastonbury? Has the criteria changed? Could we have some interviews with the earlier participants and performers from the previous decades? When did commercial companies begin to put up tents and booths at Glastonbury? How does this compare to the Burning Man Festival in the US, the only other long-running counterculture music and social gathering?

All these questions are never asked or raised by the filmmaker, making Glastonbury more of a feel-good piece of merchandising for the festival than a serious documentary. It’s almost Julien Temple wants us to shut off our brains and just enjoy the music. The only realistic thing about this documentary is Mr Temple’s choice of music, which reflects the extremes of quality and taste that music programming at similar festivals; there is the unbearably bad stuff, the occasional gem, and the rest is simply overcommercialised music that feels completely out of place with the ethos (original? Discarded? Evolved, but into what?) of the festival.

Afraid to raise the big questions and the small questions, uninterested in delving deeper than the pretty surfaces, and intent on creating a mood that never really existed through matching period singers with modern crowds, Julien Temple’s documentary may provide the big party atmosphere and interesting visuals, but fails to document the festival. The whiff of Temple’s self-indulgence wafts through the air, as he bookends the movie with quotes from William Blake. Those verses may have meant something in Jerusalem, but feel ponderously pretentious and self-important when married to an anarchist and self-mocking festival. Like everything else in this movie, it just feels mismatched.

Viewers might be interested to know that better documentaries and musical captures of Glastonbury Festival exist. I recommend Glastonbury the Movie (1996) and Glastonbury Fayre (1972).

First published at incinemas on 16 November 2006

An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

Truth or consequences!

Watching this documentary, you will come to the realisation that losing the US presidential election in 2000 was the best thing that ever happened to Al Gore. He has a sense of humour now, speaks in a genial and relaxed manner, and introduces himself publicly as "the man who was the next President of the United States".

Although he’s not a scientist, Gore learnt about global warming while taking a course at Harvard under the scientist Roger Revelle, and has kept up-to-date with since then. Gore’s political career as a congressman, senator, and vice-president consisted of patiently organising hearings by leading climate scientists, pushing for climate reform policies, and making detailed speeches to a crowd of legislators who remained unappreciative, sceptical, and in denial of the real and very dire problem.

Al Gore has won by losing the elections. He now spends his time travelling around the planet giving public presentations (last count: over 1000) about global warming to lots of people. Those are people who can be swayed by the generous body of evidence Gore marshals to his cause. Those are people who can be jolted into enacting change or to lobby their leaders to change. You could be one of them. In fact, this movie is a compilation of the same presentation Al Gore gave to different audiences in 2004-5, spliced with cuts to the environmental crusader explaining his decision to embark on this mission while at work, in his Tennessee ranch home, and in his travels around the world.

For what is essentially a 100 minute Keynote presentation, Al Gore puts his case in an easy-going manner, like a good-natured uncle having a chat with a favourite nephew or niece. At no point does the allegedly ponderous politician come across as tedious, patronising, superior, or insincere. Gore just simply shows us the facts – the statistical trends, the before and after photographs of ice caps in Greenland and Antartica, the increasingly severe and unpredictable climate patterns (droughts in Africa, hurricanes in New Orleans and Brazil) – explains how these facts fit in with global warming, why the current observed weather trends should be a cause for worry, and why we need to act sooner rather than later. For dessert, Gore also explains why the global warming issue hasn’t been reported, and reported accurately in the media, who continue to insist, completely without basis, that global warming is merely a theory whose existence isn’t supported by that many scientists.

Remember, it’s just one man and lots of animated Keypoint slides. You might step into this movie as a sceptic yourself, but after that many photographs, charts, projections, testimonies from respected and peer-reviewed scientists, and (most importantly) South Park cartoons, you might want to accept all this is incontrovertible proof of global warming. Far more incontrovertible than say, Colin Powell’s claim of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the UN Security Council.

You will be sceptical and amused. Then, you will be shock and awed by the evidence. Then, you might be angry at why nothing has been done to address this in a serious manner – especially while we still are capable of solving the problem entirely. If you take this movie serious and do your part to reduce global warming, then this may be the ultimate triumph of the human race. If Al Gore can reach out to thousands with his travelling presentation, imagine the real change he can do by reaching out to millions with this movie.

Watch it, then ask your local cinema distributor why they aren’t bringing in Who Killed The Electric Car?, and then your local politician what measures Singapore will be instituting to implement the full Kyoto Protocol.

3 Things I learnt from this movie

1. American automobile manufacturers cannot sell their vehicles in the PRC because they fall short of Chinese emissions standards.

2. It is actually not difficult to reduce global warming right now. It just takes a little political will from our leaders.

3. They actually managed to fix the ozone layer problem! (see point 2)

1 Thing I learnt, but not from this movie

Singapore has the highest per capita energy consumption in East Asia – higher than South Korea, and the highest per capita carbon emissions in East Asia – higher than Taiwan.

First published at incinemas on 26 October 2006

Murderball (2005)

Seize life by the balls!

The natural sex ratio for human societies is about 105 boys to 100 girls at birth. That brings up a problem: what happens to the surplus males? We expect the more macho of them to succeed in life, the so-called Type A theory, if you will. Jocks snag the girls when they are young, become boardroom warriors when they are older. That’s plain wrong. What happens to overaggressive males of the population is simply called natural selection. These young men lead the type of wild life that snag the girls, but they often get killed doing one of their impressive but dangerous stunts, or in a pointless brawl, for example. That’s how the adult sex ratio gets evened out slowly. Those overaggressive males who survive their teens? Historically, they get themselves in the army. It’s a convenient way for societies to get rid of their surplus males once in a while, by sending them into battle. That’s natural selection.

But what happens when natural selection doesn’t finish the job?

Meet the cast. Aside from two cases of childhood diseases (polio and meningitis), the rest are victims of natural selection. There’s the jock who drank himself into a stupor, lay down in the back of his friend’s truck, and was catapulted into a river when the truck crashed. There’s another jock who got into a brawl and was hit in the throat, severing vertebrae in his neck. There’s another one who simply says he was thrown off a balcony at a drunken party. We assume he must’ve tried to pull some silly party trick, or worse, that was his silly party trick. Now quadriplegics and wheelchair users for life, with varying control of their four limbs (or stumps), you’d expect them to be more circumspect, but these people aren’t going to let natural selection get the better of them!

Instead, they play wheelchair rugby, a game that is played in an indoor basketball court. As star player Zupan explains, the sport was originally called murderball, “but you can't market Murderball to corporate sponsors.” It’s even an official sport in the Paralympics, and the cast are players on the US team for wheelchair rugby. And there’s Joe Soares, an ex-player in the US team until he was taken out for old age. Believing he can still contribute, Soares is the coach for Team Canada and the nemesis of Team USA in this documentary, which refuses to play like a weepy Hallmark matinee feature. Instead, the filmmakers take great care not to cast a pitying eye on the athletes, and open the film with a bold and fresh concept: show viewers who these players really are: jocks.

And by that, I mean arrogant, overaggressive, assholes. In an interview, Chris Igoe (the friend with the truck) explains: "Joe Soares is an asshole. He was before his accident. and he is now." There’s no love lost between Soares and Team USA, but Soares is just as obnoxious and arrogant an asshole as any member of his former teammates. That’s refreshing! How bad are they? We get to see match-long displays of utter unsportsmanlike behaviour from everyone on the field, off the field. The grudge match is so deep ("If he were on the side of the road and on fire I wouldn't piss on him to put him out") that the traditional handshake between players before the match is accompanied by trading of insults between the Canada and US teams.

The game itself is a joy to watch. Wheelchair rugby is a contact sport, where players build and customise their competition wheelchairs to the point where they describe these machines as “something out of Mad Max”. These contraptions have a front bumper, which are designed to crash into opposing wheelchairs, and the best result of a crash is seeing an opponent’s wheelchair getting toppled. No worries, the referees simply right the contraption over for the player.

Yes, every one in the court plays to win the game. They’re jocks after all. The filmmakers are pros, taking their time to slowly – using the first half of the film – to disabuse audiences of the notion that these are pitiable people. Whether on court, in practice, at play, or at home, most of the players are simply unpleasant people to live with. I respect the filmmakers’ decision, because by refusing to take the easy way out, they set themselves the gargantuan task in the second half, of persuading the audience to give a care for the players, to see them not as just arrogant jocks, to make us root for both Soares, Team USA, and Team Canada. For them to do this in less than one and a half hours adds to the scale of their task.

Do Rubin and Shapiro succeed? I believe they manage to humanise the cast eventually, while avoiding almost all of the Hallmark weepy moves. There is a lot of sharp humour and honesty in the filmmakers’ rehabilitation of the cast, and by the time the curtains rise for the final showdown between the two teams, all nasty memories of the first half might be well forgotten.

Murderball may be a documentary, but it rivals the best sports dramas (Friday Night Lights, for example) in terms of sheer intensity, emotional scope, storytelling, and sports camerawork. This is a must-watch for all sports fans!

First published at incinemas on 6 July 2006

Road to Guantanamo (2006)

Road trip to hell exposes moral failings of War on Terror

The Road to Guantanamo has a very limited release in the United States, apparently because it dwells on topics too hot for movie distributors to handle. Maybe it’s the image of prisoners decked in orange straitjackets and shackled in leg irons and goggles 24 hours a day. Maybe it’s their torture and beatings by the US Army. Maybe it’s their indefinite detention and denial to any judicial proceedings, or the insistence by GW Bush that these prisoners are all evil and guilty anyway, Maybe it’s their detention in prison camps that incidentally aren’t liable to international law anyway. Maybe the American public would rather remember the War on Terror through the rash of 9/11 propaganda films United 93 and World Trade Centre – where they are always victims and never perpetuators of evil.

The rest of the world, though, is more than ready for this documentary.

The Tipton Three, as they have been dubbed by the media, were originally four English lads of Pakistani descent. Boisterous, goofy, and close-knit friends, they keep dropping into street slang like the Bhangra Muffins duo from TV comedy show Goodness Gracious Me. When one of the boys returns to his hometown in Pakistan after 15 years in the UK for an arranged marriage, he invites his 3 close friends over, and they decide to make a side trip to Afghanistan – it’ll be good, clean fun. Never mind that American and UK forces began bombing the Taliban in Afghanistan a few days before our lads cross the border; the huge naans are worth the trouble.

What ensues can be described as a comedy of errors in their road trip to hell. The extreme budget travellers lodge in free rooms in mosques, get downed by food poisoning, are stranded by the round-the-clock bombings in the capital, then get spirited to a Taliban stronghold city when they request safe passage back to the Pakistan border, get captured by the Northern Alliance army when the Taliban surrenders, and are delivered to the American Army, sent to various detention camps and winding up in Guantanamo Bay, where their captors, exhibiting true American hospitality, welcome the prisoners by telling them “From now on, you’re the property of the US Army!” and insist they confess their crimes as terrorists, Al Qaeda soldiers, and provide the location of Osama Bin Laden.

As a documentary, The Road to Guantanamo is a dispassionate film that never descends into angry denouncements or disrespectful jibing of the architects of the war. The experience of the Tipton Three (the fourth is missing and presumed dead after an airstrike blows up one of the convoy vehicles in Afghanistan) is very simply re-enacted by actors, interspersed with interviews with the 3 real-life survivors and news reports from the Afghan war and Guantanamo Bay. There is simply no need for polemics, since the depiction of life in the detention camps, as accounted by the trio and corroborated by reports from the Red Cross and Amnesty International, are enough to send any sane person into anger and despair. Shot in a mixture of grainy film stock and handheld video cameras, there is an authenticity that prepare the audience for how the young men’s lives change once their road trip ends in the detention camps.

I’m not going to spoil your enjoyment of the movie by giving away the horrifying details, but they do highlight the malevolence, incompetence, disconnection from reality, and sheer mendacity of George W. Bush and his administration in their prosecution of the War on Terror, and how this behaviour has lost them the respect of people around the world. It’s a wonder that the 3 men – victims of injustice and a Kafkaesque system – managed to survive their 2-year imprisonment intact and emotionally stable.

First published at incinemas on 22 June 2006