DVDebut for Tom Herman's look at a hugely important part of U.S. journalism and history: DATELINE--SAIGON

For those of you around my age who came into adulthood (and then beyond) protesting the Vietnam War, here comes a terrific, not-so-new (2016) documentary -- DATELINE--SAIGON -- that will bring back memories of a time, a rotten and unnecessary war, and a group of journalists/photographers whose necessary and difficult work helped bring the truth of that war to the public eye and mind.

Much of what is covered by this fine documentary -- written and directed by Thomas D. Herman (shown at left) --  will be familiar to those who followed U.S. involvement in Vietnam from its inception on through our country's sleazy abandonment of the stupidly created and wretchedly run South Vietnam, once this war had been lost. (Anyone who tells you the outcome was some sort of "tie" is either lying or impaired.)

Full of fabulous tales and anecdotes (including some of the early mistakes made by these fledgling reporters) and featuring both archival footage of and more current interviews with the four leading journalists who covered the war -- Malcolm Browne, Peter Arnett, Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam plus that ace photographer Horst Faas -- the documentary is so packed with history and intelligent information that is seems particularly appropriate all over again, now, in our time of Donald Trump and his "alternative facts."

These five fellows (that's, left to right, Halberstam, Browne and Sheehan, above, and photographer Faas, below) offered so much more than the typical parroting-the-administration "take" on how the war was going that they pretty much led the USA from oblivious complacency into the kind of increasing activism that would eventually derail -- thanks in good part to television's finally broadcasting the war into the living rooms of America -- the lying Kennedy/Johnson administration and its "best and brightest" mechanics.

The movie is particularly accomplished in the way it handles the story of South Vietnam, the Diem regime, the infamous Madame Nhu (below, right) and the Buddhist uprising that simultaneously helped derail the South politically, even as the North continued to win the war.

For the younger generation that does not know as much about Vietnam as we older folk, I can't imagine a better history lesson than this film. Nor a better example of the kind of journalism we need now, more than perhaps we ever have before.

From First Run Features and lasting 96 minutes, Dateline--Saigon has its home video debut this coming Tuesday, July 14, via DVD and VOD. Click here for more information.

Raúl de la Fuente and Damian Nenow's ANOTHER DAY OF LIFE offers some hot animation inspired by the cold war

Just the other day TrustMovies was wondering how many of us are all that familiar with British history, let alone with that of our own USA. And now here we are getting a good chunk of the history of the African country of Angola, which was, until winning its independence from Portugal in 1975, one of the many "colonized" African countries. That independence led to a decades-long struggle between the ruling party, the MPLA (supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba) and an insurgent group (UNITA) supported by the United States and South Africa. Yes, that ever-famous/infamous Cold War was full-swing in Angola, just as it was in so many other places around the globe.

The new combination-animated/live-action movie, ANOTHER DAY OF LIFE, is based upon the eponymously titled book by Ryszard Kapuściński, a noted Polish journalist/ photographer/poet/author.

If the story of a hugely difficult independence, mass killings and yet another nasty product of that seemingly endless (and maybe starting up all over again) cold war would seem to be an odd choice for animation, think again.

The film's directors (and co-writers), Raúl de la Fuente and Damian Nenow (pictured at left, with de la Fuente on the right), do full justice to Kapuściński's penchant for poetry and reportage.

The animation (above and below) is by turns beautiful, poetic, impressionistic and horrific -- as befits the story here told. Further, the animation and story are very well complemented by the use of live-action documentary footage in which a few of the true-life characters we meet are shown to us now, some forty years on, in old age.

The back and forth between animation and live-action is never jarring however; instead, it flows as easily as do the assorted moods, images and characters woven through the story. We meet everyone from our protagonist's fellow reporters and a gorgeous female rebel-in-chief (below)

to the famous hero-of-the-revolution, Farrusco (below), who oddly proves the film's most surprising and poignant creation, and some of the students Kapuściński teaches back home in Poland,

one of whom (below) poses a question to his instructor that lingers for good reason. The film is full of ideas, as well as visual appeal.

Given all we now know about our own country's involvement in the overthrow of numerous democratically elected foreign governments, as well as its happily propping up just about any bloody dictatorship, so long as that dictator says he's anti-Communist, what we see here will seem pretty much par for the course. (Except, of course, for the people of the foreign country in question.)

While the use of live-action in tandem with animation proves consistently compelling, Another Day of Life reaches its zenith at the end, as the credits roll and we learn more about Kapuściński, his life and work. The film is, deservedly, a paean meant to honor this man. It thoroughly does.

GKIDS will release the movie -- a Poland/Spain/Germany/Belgium/ Hungary/France co-production running 85 minutes, in English, Portuguese, Polish and Spanish (with English subtitles as needed) -- this Friday, September 13, in New York City (at the IFC Center) and Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Glendale).

With CHRISTINE, Campos, Shilowich and Hall offer a genuine, deeply-felt and honorable memorial to a talented, troubled young woman

Coming as it does on the heels of a documentary -- Kate Plays Christine -- that seemed to prove above all else how difficult and sometime pointless documentary film-making can be, the new narrative movie CHRISTINE succeeds beautifully in bringing to life a life that most of us (if we'd heard of Christine Chubbuck at all) knew only for the single act that "put her on the map."

In that regard, this movie is not unlike another excellent film that opened earlier this year, The Witness, that managed, at long last, to give us a look at Kitty Genovese in a manner that opened up her life into something much richer than the mere victim she'd seemed to have been down the decades since her murder. Rather than exploiting, both films honor their subject.

As directed by Antonio Campos (shown at left), written by Craig Shilowich (shown below) and

starring an actress who's currently as good as anyone performing in movies and TV -- Rebecca Hall (shown on poster, top, and further below) -- in what is, so far, the role of her career, Christine succeeds in creating a time (the mid-1970s), a place (a local TV station in Florida), and people (workers, friends, family, interviewees) that come together to form the kind of spot-on reality that narrative movies rarely get near.

This is the first attempt at screenwriting for Mr. Shilowich (shown at right), and as such it is not simply good, it's rather phenomenal.

The writer has packed in so much, and all of it germane, fascinating, and very warts-and-all in terms of not only Christine herself but of those around her. This allows us to see the positives and negatives clearly and to come surprisingly close to understanding who Christine was and how her surroundings worked with her personality to determine what happened.

Over the course of the film we learn so much about Christine -- everything from her virginity status to her relationships with her mother, boss, co-workers and especially the co-worker for whom she feels more than the normal attachment (played with his usual skill and subtlety by that fine actor, Michael C. Hall, below).

Via all of this, we come to understand Chubbuck as a terribly troubled yet talented young woman with rather heavily under-developed social skills. And so very good is Ms Hall is delineating all this that we quickly and hugely feel the embarrassment and naivete of this woman as she tries to work her way around and through various situations. Hall handles all of this so skillfully than not a moment registers as false or overdone. She keep us in her corner, even as she allows us to understand how that corner is so thoroughly fencing her in.

Hall has a large and often glowing face, but here she keeps the muscles in that face tightly coiled. Only when she is putting on the charming social-service puppet shows for the children she works with does she relax into those "puppet" roles to leave her constrained self behind. What a joy it is to see her suddenly liven and embrace! (Christine is not the kind of movie our "Oscar" Academy usually embraces, but I dearly hope its members gird up their loins and take a look, because quite a number of people involved with it deserve nominations.)

Around halfway along this two-hour film, my spouse noted aloud, "This does not seem like a movie." (More and more often these days, Spousie uses the word movie to double for the word fake. After we've watched something or other, he'll shrug and exclaim, "Yeah -- it's a movie.") Regarding Christine, he is so right. This is about as real as it gets. Mr. Campos, a director whose past work (AfterSchool and Simon Killer) I've enjoyed, does wonders here, using a documentary style abetted by what seems like a near-perfect production design, including period costumes, hair styles and sets.

The manner in which Campos and Shilowich and their actors capture the little TV station and its workings (above) may but you oddly in mind of its polar opposite, that glossily entertaining cable series, The Newsroom. (Or even better, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which is used quite cannily and sadly here.) Campos' entire cast -- which include Tracy Letts (below, right) as Christine's adversarial boss, J. Smith-Cameron as her alternately helpful and trying mom, Maria Dizzia as her best friend who has her own necessary ambitions, and John Cullum, as the TV station's money man -- is first rate. There are no villains here, and no heroes, either. Just people living and working as best they can -- and doing a pretty good job of it, considering the circumstances.

In yesterday's New York Times there a fine article about Rebecca Hall and the making of the film, in which it comes out that Christine's brother refuses to see it because he feels that it is exploiting his sister. I wish he would reconsider, for this film is anything but exploitative. Christine is a movie that, during and after viewing, makes you look at things differently and understand them better. That's a tall order and it is served up here with intelligence, kindness and caring -- as expertly as you could wish.

The movie, from The Orchard and running 119 minutes, opens this Friday, October 14, in New York City exclusively at Film Forum. Elsewhere? Sure hope so, and as soon as further playdates becomes available, I'll post them here.

Tom McCarthy's SPOTLIGHT is as good as you've heard. Which is saying a whole lot.

Earlier this year New York magazine ran an article in which it noted that writer/director Tom McCarthy had managed to have both one of the year's best reviewed movies (SPOTLIGHT) and one of its worst-reviewed (The Cobbler*). That's some kind of weird record, to say the least. Having finally caught up with Spotlight this week, TrustMovies can vouch for how fine a film it is: one of the very few I've seen that delves into a particular workplace -- investigative reporting for a big-city daily newspaper (in this case The Boston Globe) -- and, according all the notices I've so far seen, together with what I myself know about investigative reporting, shows this workplace in a truthful and realistic manner.

The story it tells, based pretty closely on the facts, is of the pedophile-priests scandal that rocked the Boston area and The Catholic Church a decade or more ago, and that ought to have rocked both two decades earlier, when reports of the abuse were also coming in. Mr McCarthy, shown at left, has long been a wonderful filmmaker, talented, modest and reliably low-key. From The Station Agent, through The Visitor and Win Win, his talent has resulted in movies in which "reach" and "grasp" become one and the same. (The fellow is also a fine actor, with 38 acting credits to his name but only seven writing and five directing credits, according to the IMDB.)

Spotlight is the first time McCarthy has worked on anywhere this large a scale. Yet, along with his co-screenwriter, Josh Singer, he's been able to capture both the big picture (the network of power that had kept the scandal in tow for so long) and the small one (the step-by-step investigation procedures that finally result in the whole story). As per usual, the filmmaker manages this in such a modest, unshowy fashion that it might seem easy to overlook his excellent work come awards time.
I hope not.

One hallmark of McCarthy's films is their fine ensemble acting. Not only is Spotlight no exception, it features as good an ensemble performance as the filmmaker has managed so far. My spouse pointed out immediately after viewing the film that it seemed like these actors were real people rather than performers or characters. There is indeed a documentary feel which contributes mightily to the unusual sense of reality the film achieves.

"Spotlight" is the name of the small group of reporters who work on special projects for the Globe, often taking a very long time to bring their stories to fruition. Leading the group is Robbie (Michael Keaton, shown above, left, and three photos above, here as low-key and under-the-radar as he was over-the-top in last year's overblown Birdman). Robbie has a bevy of good reporters under his wing, including Matt (Brian d'Arcy James, at left, two photos above), Sacha (Rachel McAdams (above, right) and Mike (Mark Ruffalo, below, right, with Stanley Tucci, who plays the lawyer for many of the victims).

All of these characters (shown below) report to Ben Bradlee, Jr. (John Slattery, seen below, right), who in turn reports to the paper's new editor-in-chief (played by an extremely bright but buttoned-down Liev Schreiber, shown at bottom, second from left).

So cleverly and intelligently is laid out the investigation -- alternating between victims (with only an occasional look at a predator) and reporters, between those in the power structure, whether it be the Church or its minions who run the city and culture, who want to keep the story underwraps -- that the film allows us to fully understand what is going on without ever being banged atop the head with "meaning" or heavy-handed ironies. (The movie also never seems too slick; rather, it appears focused and pro-active -- adjectives that I'll bet describe the moviemaker, too.)

The film moves fast, too. Timing out at just over two hours, there's not a tired or treacly moment to be seen. Distributed by Open Road -- a company that, after releasing a number of very good but not all that big-at-the-boxoffice movies (from Hit and Run to End of Watch) has finally broken into the big-time with this excellent film -- Spotlight is playing across the country now. Click here to find the theater near you.

*After viewing Spotlight and taking into consideration 

McCarthy's entire oeuvre, we're planning to stream 

The Cobbler off Netflix tonight -- to see if maybe 

that critical drubbing was undeserved. 

We'll weigh in with our opinion a little later....

James Franco and Jonah Hill shine in Rupert Goold's deceptive and disturbing TRUE STORY

James Franco and Jonah Hill are hardly neophytes where the question of celebrity, notoriety and identity are concerned. Both these actors (along with several others) handled these subjects with fine comic flair in This Is The End (Mr. Franco explores this slate in almost every movie he acts in or directs), and now they're back at it in a deadly serious, deeply disturbing film called TRUE STORY -- based on, yes, exactly that. As written and directed by relative newcomer Rupert Goold, the result is one of the most quiet and creepily effective tales of murder, identity, sanity, celebrity and justice that you will have seen. What is most disturbing here is that the filmmaker and his cast, together with the story itself, offer us no easy out regarding what happened and why. We know, but what we know only makes everything all the more obscure and somehow frightening.

Mr. Goold, shown at right, comes from the British stage and television, where he directed and adapted (for the latter's Hollow Crown series) Shakespeare's Richard II, in which Ben Whishaw gave perhaps the definitive performance so far of that shallow, sad, confused and finally radiant monarch. From there, Goold seems to have gone directly to this filmed project, on which his work is exemplary.

As is that of Misters Franco and Hill. These two actors jive so well together that it seems their ability to play comedy is equalled, even bettered, by their skill at realistic, moment-to-moment drama in which we hang on every subtle expres-sion, every murmured word.

The story is that of yet another journalist, in this case a fellow named Michael Finkel (played by Hill, below), who was caught falsifying one of his stories written for The New York Times and then summarily fired from the newspaper. Around the same time, Christian Longo (Franco, shown at left), a fellow on the run and suspected of killing his wife and children, used Finkel's name as an alias and for a short time posed as the journalist.

How these two meet, agree to work with/use each other, and eventually become, well, "close," makes up the meat of the movie, and a stranger, more disturbing meal you're not likely to have digested. This is one hell of an unsettling tale.

Much of the reason for the film's ability to disconcert us is that, as it moves quietly along, so much of the facts -- about the cases of both men -- remain in question. Finkel's guilt can somewhat be attributed to his trying so hard to cover an important story, while in Longo's case -- his guilt, as well as what really happened -- seems very possibly to be up for grabs.

Can we believe what we see and hear? Is identity as slippery as it appears here? In the instance of Mr. Franco and his supremely subtle and unnerving performance, this is all important.

Mr. Goold does a superb job of keeping us off balance and even rooting, at times, for both men. And the actors themselves do a masterful job, particularly Mr. Franco, of making us question what initially passes for an open-and-shut case. The more we learn, the odder things become. Franco uses his easy ability to charm, while remaining inscrutable, to keep us ever off-balance

This is mostly a "men" movie: The women's roles -- though acted by excellent performers like Felicity Jones (above) as Finkel's wife and Gretchen Mol as his boss at The New York Times -- are but cursory. It's that relationship between the two men, and theirs to the world outside, that counts for all.

True Story also brings to the fore ideas about character, the meaning of insanity, and the question of if and how a man -- who has lead a fairly standard and relatively decent life up until the "event" -- can simply go full-throttle crazy. Was the seed of insanity always present? Is it in each of us? If so, what might it take to call it into being?

The ironies present here are huge and plenty, but the movie never stops to underscore them. They simply keep popping out from the events and characters. By the finale -- and right through into the end credits that explain what followed -- you will question everything from journalism to friendship, truth and what it means to be criminally insane. In fact, the most ironic thing about True Story is probably its title.

From Fox Searchlight and running 100 riveting minutes, the movie opens this Friday in New York City (in half a dozen theaters), and probably elsewhere, too. As I post this, however, the Fox Searchlight web site for the film is not particularly helpful in indicating where else across the country it will be playing.