Fog of War

2003 documentary

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Some old guy talks about war.

Cory recommended this about 3 1/2 years ago, but I'm not sure why I didn't watch it long before anyway. It's Errol Morris, and Philip Glass scored the thing. Errol Morris has never made a bad documentary, and there has never been a bad documentary scored by Philip Glass. That's a winning combination. I did like the music here, and Morris's style--which always seems not-quite-professional to me--gives this an interesting pace. It really is an hour and forty minutes of an old guy talking with a mix of archival footage, archival conversations, typewriter simulation, war footage, skull dropping experiments, and close-ups of nasty teeth. There are little touches--a freezing on McNamara's face while he still talks--that give this some flash, but this isn't something that should be mandatory viewing for Americans because of the documentary style. It's the message of these 11 lessons where McNamara talks about things that are scary because they really could happen, things that are scary because they almost happened, and things that are scary because they actually did happen. There's real tension in a chilling story about how we were "this close" to nuclear war, and that's despite me having a rudimentary knowledge of 60's history and knowing how it all turned out. I also found his discussion of Kennedy's death very touching. This one guy lived so much history, and it was amazing to watch him tell about what he's learned from it all. You know, because those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it, and all.

Vernon, Florida

1981 documentary

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Errol Morris visits the eccentric inhabitants of the titular rural community. They wax poetic about turkey hunting, worms, the human brains, gophers/turtles, God, crime, and sand.

I popped this delicious slice of life in because it was at the tail end of a list of somebody's favorite movies. I'd seen and loved everything else on the list, and I've enjoyed all the other Errol Morris documentaries I've seen. This one is just under and hour, but it's an hour jam-packed with comedy gold. Like a folklorist, Morris just turns the camera on these folks and lets 'em have the floor. There's no polish, no explanation, no real organization that I could see, just interwoven snippets of these (almost all) men sharing their odd obsessions with the camera. Interestingly, Morris actually was drawn to Vernon because in the late 50s/early 60s, two-thirds of self-amputation accident insurance claims came from there. The documentary doesn't address amputation at all though. You get a wild turkey hunter sharing stories of his greatest triumphs; an old man who seems to be an expert on the brain ("You ever see a man's brains? I've seen them. I've picked them up, scooped them out, put them in, do them up like brains."); a "wiggler" farmer who at one point is just showing off when he says the words "regular wiggler;" the Steve Irwin of Vernon who shows the camera a turtle and says, "Now this here is a gopher" and later claims that he could get 1,200 or 1,500 dollars for a possum in an auction; a cop whose biggest concern might be people stealing clothes pins; a guy with a jewel; and a woman with a jar full of "growing sand." Yeah, sand that grows. In a couple years, that sand will fill the jar. The style and pace and pointless subject matter will try the patience of some of my readers (looking at you here, Barry), but I thought it was fascinating and very very funny. The most bewildering moment for me: a guy tells a story about a 65-year-old mule with a hole in his throat. I had trouble understanding the guy, but I think he was describing pulling the mule out of the river and finding that a whole bunch of fish were swimming around the inside of it. Or something. Other things to look out for: At the 32 minute mark, a guy picks his nose with his thumb. And at the 36 minute mark, you get to see Michael Cera singing in the back row of a choir. I don't know exactly what Errol Morris's real intentions were, but if it had something to do with filling Shane with joy, it's a success.