Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., March 14

Any moldy notions of moldy baby boomer nostalgia in Brett Morgen's doc explode the first time you hear a riff from Rage Against the Machine. Morgen's prankish, exhilarating documentary about the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots and the farcical trial that followed eschews traditional doc voiceovers or talking techniques, taking a pass on long-view perspectives to become a fully immersive present-tense experience.

Four days of street tussles, billy clubs and tear gas brought the Summer of Love crashing to a halt, and Morgen has combed countless hours of archival footage--everything from TV reports, home movies and even some legendary shots from Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool. It's all been brilliantly assembled by editor Stuart Levy into a jittery, pulsating you-are-there experience that calls to mind Paul Greengrass' Bloody Sunday, except the soundtrack's blasting Black Sabbath and Eminem songs.

The drama alternates with actual stranger-than-fiction court transcripts of the counterculture's most ludicrous trial, as eight months later attorney John Mitchell brought conspiracy charges against the country's most vocal antiwar activists. These sequences are animated with the same quivering rotoscope techniques Richard Linklater used for Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, and an only occasionally distracting celebrity cast gives voice to the participants, most of them hell-bent on turning these somber proceedings into a circus.

Abbie Hoffman (Hank Azaria) and Jerry Rubin (Mark Ruffalo) show up wearing judges' robes and blowing kisses to the jury. The sputtering, enraged prosecutor might be voiced by Nick Nolte, but the animation design is clearly intended to resemble Dubya. The late Roy Scheider gives a hilarious farewell performance as doddering Judge Julius Hoffman, clearly confounded by these loudmouth young whippersnappers, completely clueless of the standard he's setting as he rhapsodizes about the Constitution while simultaneously ordering his bailiffs to physically gag Black Panther Bobby Seale (Jeffrey Wright).

Since its Sundance premiere last year, Chicago 10 has been criticized for providing insufficient historical context (Eugene McCarthy is barely mentioned, Hubert Humphrey not at all), a charge that strikes me as more than a little misguided. Morgen isn't teaching a class here--he's aiming to electrify and excite, to snap us all out of our stupor. The anachronistic music cues and refreshing lack of hippie-dippie reminiscence make it a movie for right now--a funny, fiendishly entertaining salute to dissent in all its forms.

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The Counterfeiters
Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky
B-
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., March 14

Stefan Ruzowitzky's tale of Nazi collaboration walked off with the Foreign-Language Oscar, but the honor does it no favors. The Counterfeiters is anything but a rotten film, but its myriad deficiencies are only made clearer when bathed in the golden light reflected off an Oscar trophy.

A cynic would say The Counterfeiters won over the other four nominees (including the latest from Polish legend Andrzej Wajda) because it's the one about the Holocaust. In fact, Ruzowitzky's film falls happily on the Black Book side of the continuum, asking tough questions about morality under fascism and avoiding forced uplift--all, miraculously, without resorting to what's been dubbed "Holocaust porn."

The remarkable Karl Markovics plays a first-class Jewish counterfeiter nicked just as he's about to forge his way out of 1939 Berlin. His skills spare him the worst of the concentration camps, and he eventually finds himself overlooking what will become the largest counterfeiting scheme in history. Seems the Nazis wish to flood the British and American market with fake dollars and pounds sterling. Is surviving worth it when it entails giving the baddies what they want?

Ruzowitzky has no answers, but sadly, only that one question. He allows us to brush up against a protagonist quietly following through on a decision he knows is abhorrent--but once you get that, all that's left to do is wait for the war to end and his guilt to become self-destructive. At just over 90 minutes, The Counterfeiters is a model of economy; alas, it ends well before it has a chance to truly dig into your brain.

Not Reviewed

Lucy Walker's documentary follows six students from Tibet's only school for the blind as they attempt to climb a Himalayan mountain. (Opens Fri., March 14.)

Doomsday

A group of people fight to save the human race from a deadly virus. Again. (Opens Fri., March 14.)

Horton Hears a Who

An animated adaptation of Dr. Seuss' popular children's book. (Opens Fri., March 14.)