Intense sports action and accidents, reference to serious injuries
Diversity Issues:
None
Date Released to Theaters:
August 21, 2009
Kids, don’t try this at home.
3D is X-treme film-making and thus well suited to the X Games, hyper-intense, hyper-dangerous, hyper-what are they thinking? sports that are closer to stunts. Young men compete on skateboard, snowboard, and on dirt bikes and motocross to defy the laws of physics. One of them says he feels about gravity the way some people feel about evolution: “It’s just a theory.”
Adolescent testosterone-friendly sponsors like Play Station, Taco Bell, Red Bull, and the Navy have helped make the X Games into an enormous and high-stakes event. Some of its most stunning images are of the homes these young men have purchased with the money they make breaking their bones to do these tricks.
And X can also stand for something else. At one point, a selection of one competitor’s past x-rays of injuries flash on the screen.
The stunts are astonishing and the 3D effects are so intense that you will feel like wiping the dirt kicked up by the motocross bike off your face. But there is more to the film. It has some important lessons about passion, commitment, being willing to ask “what if it is possible?” and being willing to fail in order to achieve ultimate success. The climax of the film comes in a three-way competition that includes one man coming back from a wipe-out the year before and one who is badly injured early on and insists on continuing to compete. The respect and affection between the competitors is genuinely touching and the way they ride their boards back and forth to the medical facility to check on the injured athlete is affecting. They are barely aware of how organic their attachment to the boards has become.
Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamera, the architect of the Viet Nam war, died today, still a figure of controversy after nearly half a century. Every family should watch the Oscar-winning documentary The Fog of War for a thought-provoking (and often just provoking) look at the way people of the greatest possible intelligence, experience, and good intentions, can make decisions with terrible consequences. The parallels to contemporary challenges are undeniable.
A forthcoming book and documentary about Gertrude Berg tell the story of this pioneering broadcaster, producer, and actress. According to a story in Flow Magazine,
Gertrude Berg was the founder of the family situation comedy on radio and television. She was Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz rolled into one, a business genius and negotiator as well as performer, writer, director and auteur of her own show — and this during an era when women in up-front power positions were rare. She was known as “Molly Goldberg” on her show The Goldbergs, which ran from 1929-49 on radio and from 1949-56 on television. Kempner’s film gives a fascinating multi-sided portrait of Gertrude Berg, the demons that drove her and the undeniable imagination and talent that made her such a prolific writer-producer and star of early television. Gertrude Berg had extraordinary powers of observation, love for her grandparents’ generation, and an innate drive to write and perform evident from her teenage years when she entertained the children of guests at her father’s Catskills hotel.
Berg came from the vaudeville-era tradition of ethnic comedy, but she avoided caricature and created a warm and affectionate portrait of a three-generation Jewish family living in the Bronx.
On one side of Molly Goldberg and her husband Jake was the first-generation “Uncle David,” with the characteristic shrug of the shoulders and Yiddish theater inflection that made him endearing. On the other side were the third-generation “kids” who were becoming fully American. But it was Molly Goldberg herself, placed squarely in the middle, still speaking the Yiddish-inflected language of the Bronx when she moved to the suburbs years later, who created the central vitality of the show as she opened it each week from her window in the Bronx.
In an era when women and Jews were seldom given opportunities in business of any kind and almost never in television, Berg was so successful that her radio program was broadcast simultaneously on all three networks. Kempner’s new documentary bills itself as the story of “The most famous woman in America that you never heard of.” Kempner, the creator of the award-winning 1998 documentary about Hank Greenberg, is the ideal film-maker to tell this story and I look forward to seeing it when it opens later this month.
As they have for hundreds of years, a Buddhist monk goes on a journey in search of the “unmistaken child” who is the reincarnation of his master. The quest is unchanged in its goal and its procedures. But this time the monk is sporting a very modern backpack, traveling in part by helicopter, and the journey is being filmed by an Israeli documentary film-maker.
I spoke to that film-maker, Nati Baratz, as he was traveling through the United States to talk about the film, “Unmistaken Child.”
Tell me how this project came about.
Back in 93 I fell in love with Tibetans, especially the people, and I felt a moral responsibility about the suppression by the Chinese. I went home to study cinema and I wanted for a long time to make a film abut Tibet, to bring to the audience the experience of the culture and the qualities. The Tibetans have this happy nature, they are calm and non-violent and they have developed a lot of wisdom over thousands of years. Most of all, they have this endless commitment to benefit others. You can read about it but to experience it is different. The Buddhist culture is the best thing I have found in my life until today. It is not formal but I am connected to it, more Buddhist than anything else, more than my Jewish background.
And how did you decide on this particular story?
I wanted to make a film about a hidden Tibetan tribe. In the course of this I went to Nepal and joined the meditation to deepen my understanding of Tibetan Buddhism. There I heard this talk about the life of the master who had just died. The lama Tenzin Zopa touched me with his huge heart when he asked us all to pray for the swift and unmistaken return of his master. I knew this is the movie I have to make.
Do you believe in reincarnation? Specific, individual reincarnation of the master’s spirit in one unmistaken child? Do you want the audience to believe in it?
That is a tricky question. I want people to contemplate and think, not just experience the film but engage with it. I tried to challenge the viewer. You see one part of the film and the child looks holy, in another he looks like a normal child. I want to make the audience decide for themselves. That idea is connected to Buddhist teaching. They should not believe anything you say but should examine by themselves.
How long did if take?
It was a 5 ½ year film-making. I moved with my wife and two year old daughter to India, just to give you an example of my commitment. It was great for her to live in the monastery and to play with the reincarnated child. It was tough on my wife but she had a great experience. We were really fortunate that they agreed to allow us to enter into the most private and hidden part of their life and tradition.
How did you get their cooperation?
I told him I am not a formal Buddhist but I have a strong commitment to the Tibetans amd really want to make this movie. It was a chance to show the world the qualities of the master. The Dalai Lama is famous and so many people are benefiting from it. It is not a problem to be famous, it is what you make out of it.
I had to ask permission from a very senior lama. It was a three month journey that really tested my patience and insistence. I passed an astrology check. And it took Tenzin quite a while to really trust me. They are monks so they are not used to the camera, they are modest. He is an amazing example. For me, all the reincarnation is just a narrative motor to have enough suspense and interest in the film to experience Tenzin’s journey of maturity, from a servant to a leader, bringing the treasure back home to the Tibetan people.
As the father of a two-year-old while you were filming, how did that affect the way you portrayed the family asked to give up their two-year-old?
I tried to give an intimate and close look at the story to give people the option to experience a different way of thinking. When the parents give up the child, this is the most touching part of the film for me, because they do it for the benefit of others. It is very inspiring that people give up their most precious thing for the benefit of others. That is what makes the film a feature-like experience. It is a documentary with an amazing character on an amazing journey that is very spiritual, a transformation.
