THE BRAINWASHING OF MY DAD: some insight into our national madness

Filmmaker Jan Senko’s dad Frank in THE BRAINWASHING OF MY DAD

How the hell did we get here – a moment when millions of Americans believe stuff that demonstrably isn’t true – and have this misconceptions drive them into unrighteous rage? For insight, let’s look at the prescient 2016 documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, which saw some of this nightmare coming.

In 2016, I wrote, “Ever notice how people who watch a lot of Fox News or listen to talk radio become bitter, angry and, most telling, fact-resistant?” Then I couldn’t imagine an assault on a the US Capitol by propaganda-intoxicated hillbilly barbarians. In The Brainwashing of My Dad, filmmaker Jan Senko explores how right-wing media impacts the mood and personality of its consumers as well as their political outlook. Senko uses her own father Frank as a case study.

We see Frank Senko become continually mad and, well, mean. And we hear testimony about many, many others with the identical experience. Experts explain the existence of a biological addiction to anger.

Senko traces the history of right-wing media from the mid-1960s, with the contributions of Lewis Powell, Richard Nixon, Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. Senko even gets right-wing wordsmith Frank Luntz on camera to explain the power of buzz words. If you don’t know this story (Hillary was right about the “vast, right-wing conspiracy”) , Senko spins the tale very comprehensively. If you do know the material (and my day job is in politics), it is methodical.

This topic is usually explored for its impact on political opinion. Senko’s focus on mood and personality is original and The Brainwashing of My Dad contributes an important addition to the conversation. One last thing about the brainwashing of Senko’s dad – it may not be irreversible…

I first reviewed The Brainwashing of My Dad for its U.S. Premiere at Cinequest 2016. The Brainwashing of My Dad is available streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

THE BOYS IN RED HATS: Rorschach America

THE BOYS IN RED HATS. Photo courtesy of Shark Dog Films.

Remember the resulting frenzy when the Kentucky prep school boy at the Lincoln Memorial smirked at the indigenous tribal elder? Documentarian Jonathan Schroder is an alum of that very prep school – Covington Catholic or “CovCath”. In The Boys in Red Hats, his point of view shifts as he peels back the onion on what really happened. It comes down to insights into media, social media and, especially, White privilege.

Like most of us, Schroder was initially outraged at the boys; as more facts emerged, he became sympathetic to what seemed like mistreatment of the boys in social media. Don’t give up on this movie as a whitewash – as the story gets more complicated and Schroder becomes more reflective, his needle sways back and forth until the final payoff.

This was a Rorschach event at the Lincoln Memorial. One thing is for sure, these privileged kids and their chaperones, confronted by a crazy hate group (Black Hebrew Israelites), were unequipped to deal with a momentary convergence of disorder and diversity.

To put my own cards on the table, I am not disposed to sympathize with rich kids who were comfortable in being shipped to an anti-choice rally, wearing MAGA hats. In The Boys in Red Hats, the journalist Anne Branigan’s perspective most resonated with me.

Schroder gives plenty of rope to a professional conservative talking head, two CovCath dads and the school’s alumni director, none of whom display a modicum of sensitivity or empathy to those less rich, less white or less male than they.

Schroder sees the significance when one of his CovCath buddies says, “I like my bubble”. I screened The Boys in Red Hats for its world premiere at Cinequest, and it made my Best of Cinequest 2021.

MLK/FBI: about America then and about America today

MLK/FBI. Photo courtesy of IFC Films.

In MLK/FBI, Sam Pollard, the master of the civil rights documentary (Eyes on the Prize), takes on the FBI’s quest to discredit and even destroy Martin Luther King, Jr. Over many years, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI targeted King with wiretaps, bugs, surveillance and informers. The FBI built a trove of audio tapes of King having extramarital sex; these tapes are now in the National Archives and will be released publicly in 2027. The tapes themselves are not included in MLK/FBI, but the film reveals the many secret FBI memos that discuss them.

Pollard bookends MLK/FBI with historians considering the questions of how we should process the behavior on the tapes and how we should face the actual tapes when they are released six years from now.

MLK/FBI documents the moment that Hoover and his top lieutenant William Sullivan became obsessed with King – and the moment they tried to force him into suicide. From their perspective, if King’s movement wanted to upend the racial inequities that included legal segregation, then of COURSE he must be an anti-American subversives. They started by red-baiting King for associating with communists, and then moved to focus on sexual behavior.

MLK/FBI reminds us who we were back in the 1960s. King had not yet been martyred and many in the mainstream shared Hoover’s discomfort with racial progress and his driving fear of communism. When MLK and Hoover had a public spat, the polling documented 50% of the American public siding with Hoover and under 20% with King.

While today, a male public figure would likely not be ruined by consensual heterosexual sex outside of marriage, that was not the case in the 1960s. Then it was still controversial about whether a divorced person – or even someone married to a previously divorced person – should be elected to high office.

And MLK/FBI says a lot about our society today. Although this salacious material was leaked to many journalists in the 1960s, none actually made it public. I find this particularly sobering, because today there is no way that the temptation to generate clicks, likes retweets and ratings would have been resisted – it would have gone viral, as we now say, probably with history-changing consequences.

MLK/FBI can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7: an earlier bizarre moment in our political history

John Carrol Lynch, Jeremy Strong and Sacha Baron Cohen in THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

In The Trial of the Chicago Seven, writer Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, Oscar winner for The Social Network) brings history alive. The trial of anti-Vietnam war activists in 1969 was a bizarre moment in our political history (but not any more bizarre than the past four years).

Now in 2020, it’s time for this movie. Back in 1969, there were authoritative statements about criminality on both sides. But it’s more clear today – and indisputable – that the violence outside the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago was a series of police riots, pure and simple, and that the trial was Nixon’s nakedly illegitimate legal assault against all activism.

The overriding absurdity of this political trial was that it alleged a conspiracy – and some of the alleged conspirators barely knew each other and some despised the others. These were rivals within the anti-war movement and only together in Nixon’s mind.

The movie makes this most clear in the conflict between Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Abby Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen). Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society wanted to end the Vietnam politically. Hoffman of the Youth International Party (Yippies) was against the war, but sought a wider cultural revolution; the Yippies’ clownish political theater alienated the American Middle and made Hayden’s job harder. Hoffman was hilariously witty and Hayden was as funny as a heart attack. The two men couldn’t have conspired together to order lunch.

Hayden does not benefit from the Sorkin treatment. One is reminded that another activist said, “Tom Hayden gives opportunism a bad name.” THat almost tops Abby Hoffman’s own cutting appraisal of Hayden: “He’s our Nixon”.

The disparity between the defendants was emphasized by the prosecution of David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), the non-hippie, a pacifist leader from another generation. Dellinger was a suburban dad and boy scout leader, No one could see him as some punk kid, so when his outrage finally boils over, it’s one of the most powerful moments in the film.

John Carrol Lynch and Sacha Baron Cohen in THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

Cohen and Lynch are superb in The Trial of the Chicago 7, along with Kelvin Harrison, Jr., who plays Black Panther leader and martyr Fred Hampton, and Mark Rylance as defense lawyer William Kunstler. It’s a star-studded cast with Michael Keaton, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jeremy Strong (so good as Lee Harvey Oswald in Parkland).

Frank Langella is also brilliant as the villain, Judge Julius Hoffman. Langella’s Hoffman is imperious and intemperate, and utterly blind to his own racism and generational bias.

Frank Langella in THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

The facts are compressed and – for the most part – kept in context. The role of former Attorney General Ramsey Clark (Keaton) happened a little differently but is portrayed with basic truth. Fred Hampton didn’t actually attend the trial and sit behind Bobby Seale; but the facts and impact of his assassination are fundamentally correct.

The one thing that annoys me about The Trial of the Chicago 7 is the spunky character of the defendants’ office manager Bernardine – because it’s clearly inspired by radical Bernardine Dohrn. Dohrn, who was not part of the trial, was NOT some chick answering the phone, but had already graduated from law school and was about to co-found the Weather Underground terrorist cell. I’m guessing that Sorkin wrote her in the story in a well-intentioned attempt to make the story NOT all-male. But the truth is that even the counter culture was sexist, and even male hippies saw women as adornments in 1969. The 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique did not immediately wash away millennia of patriarchy.

This, however, is a sound retelling of a salient moment in our political and cultural history. Cohen, Lynch, Rylance, Langella, Harrison Jr, are all exceptional, and The Trial of the Chicago 7 is pretty entertaining.

COUP 53: uncovering what we suspected

COUP 53. Courtesy of Coup 53.

The Cold War espionage documentary Coup 53 brings astounding new source material to the history of the 1953 coup which replaced the democratically elected Premier of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, with the Shah.

The key to the success of Coup 53 is that filmmaker Taghi Amirani uncovered troves of never-before seen source material. Amirani brings us oral histories of Iranian witnesses to the coup, including a play-by-play from Mosaddegh’s head of security. He adds a video interview with the last surviving Iranian coup plotter, an especially cadaverous and repugnant individual. There are also boxes of more recently-declassified CIA documents.

COUP 53. Courtesy of Coup 53

But, most essential are the tapes and transcripts of interviews for a 1970s BBC documentary. The testimony of Norman Darbyshire, the British spy who masterminded the coup, was cut from the BBC doc, but Amirani found an uncensored transcript. Ingeniously, Coup 53 reconstructs Darbyshire’s interview in the same room in London’s Savoy Hotel, with the same camera operator present (!) and actor Ralph Fiennes reciting Darbyshire’s actual words.

Why did Darbyshire spill the beans? He may have resented that CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt (TR’s grandson) exaggerated his role as a last minute bag man, when Darbyshire had laid the groundwork for years and was the real instigator.

Although the UK’s involvement has never been officially acknowledged by the UK government, everyone has known about it for decades. There’s even a clip in Coup 53 of Richard Nixon explaining it on TV in the 1970s or 1980s. But this is very personal to Taghi Amirani, and he puts great import on the smoking gun – an interview with the British spy who designed and directed the coup.

Although I think that Amirani oversells the proof of British involvement, there is is lot of exciting new stuff for the moderately informed rest of us. For example, we get a deeper-than-usual dive into Mohammad Mosaddegh himself, a man many of us have only seen as a victim of Western over-reaction to communism. We also learn that:

  • Harry Truman opposed the regime change, but newbie President Ike was persuaded by Wall Street’s Dulles brothers to green light the coup.
  • The CIA was walking away after an initial coup failure.
  • After the UK did the dirty work, the US got the most influence with the Shah, and, with Israel’s help, set up the Shah’s brutal and hated secret police, the Savak.

From Mosaddegh’s nephew, we learn about Mosaddegh’s final years under house arrest, his last secret joyride through Tehran and his unusual dining room burial.

There’s one stunning What If moment – revolutionary Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr explains that after the first coup attempt failed, Mosaddegh had the list of all the coup plotters. Had he executed them all immediately, there would have been no coup in 1953, no revolution and Hostage Crisis in 1978 and today Iran would be a stable, 70-year-old Muslim democracy in the Middle East.

Coup 53 is directed by Taghi Amirani and its editor, Walter Murch. The Iran-born and UK-educated Amirani is the researcher and on-camera interviewer. Murch is probably our greatest living film editor and the person who invented the entire field of movie sound design in the 1970s.

Coup 53 is available to stream on Virtual Cinema; I watched it at the Roxie.

DATELINE-SAIGON: the truth will out

David Halberstam (left) and Malcolm Browne (center) in DATELINE-SAIGON

Dateline-Saigon documents the efforts of five journalists to cover the Vietnam War in the face of a US government which did not want the facts to be told. The five were Malcolm Browne, Neil Sheehan, Horst Faas, David Halberstam and Peter Arnett, who amassed a bucket of Pulitzers between them.

What they found in Vietnam was that American policy was not working, because (among many factors) the Diem regime was alienating most of its own population, the South Vietnamese Army was less motivated to fight than the Viet Cong, and that Americans were more directly involved in combat than had been acknowledged. And the US government didn’t want any of this reported.

As Dateline-Saigon says, “When these patriotic journalists arrive in Vietnam, they had no idea they would become the enemy“, meaning the truth-wielding enemy of the US government propaganda. The reporters describe the government efforts to obscure, mislead, spin, hide and controvert the facts as a “vast lying machine” and the “Truth Suppressors”.

Quang Lien and Malcolm Browne (center) in DATELINE-SAIGON (AP Photo)

All television news viewers (especially a ten-year-old The Movie Gourmet) were shocked by the 1963 Buddhist monk’s self-immolation to protest the Diem regime in 1963. No one was more shocked than Browne, who was covering the Buddhist march, and, to his surprise and horror, had this unfold a few steps in front of him.

Sheehan is famous for uncovering the Pentagon Papers. Beginning with The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam banged out bestseller after bestseller on 20th century American history. Arnett went to cover dozens of conflicts interview Osama Bin-Laden and was a major media face of the Iraq War.

This is a Must See for students of journalism and of the Vietnam War Era of American History. You can stream Dateline-Saigon on iTunes.

Remembering John Lewis

John Lewis (on far right) in JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

John Lewis, that most profoundly American of American heroes, has died at age 80. Released just nine days ago, the documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble traces the life of the civil rights icon.  I usually don’t buy reverential biodocs, but when the subject is a freaking saint, I guess you have to go with it.  The rest of the title comes from Lewis’ mantra – if you see injustice, make good trouble, necessary trouble

US Representative John Lewis, of course, was a real hero.  As a very young man in 1965, he had been leading efforts to register Blacks to vote in Selma, Alabama, including a peaceful march to the State Capitol in Montgomery.  On March 7, 1965, the march got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma when they were attached by local law enforcement and Ku Klux Klan members under the command of Sheriff Jim Clark.  Lewis was in the very first rank and was beaten, shedding his own blood on “Bloody Sunday”.  Two subsequent marches on the bridge and the LBJ speech that followed led directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1964, the most important civil rights legislation since 1867. 

In John Lewis: Good Trouble, we see footage from the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  We see a young John Lewis being beaten in 1965, and we see an elderly Lewis in an anniversary march with President Barack Obama and former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

John Lewis: Good Trouble is well-sourced by director Dawn Porter, even though only a few of Lewis’ contemporaries survive.  When the first Black president was elected, Lewis says he wept for JFK, RFK, Dr. King and the others who hadn’t lived to see it.  Fortunately, Lewis had sisters still alive who participated in the documentary.

We get an inside glimpse at Lewis’ childhood.  We get to see Lewis watching footage of himself at a pivotal Nashville sit-in that he had “never seen”.  And, this intimate portrait shows us some dry Lewis humor and some impressive octogenarian dance moves.

How did Lewis get to Congress?  John Lewis: Good Trouble shows us the race against his longtime friend and fellow Civil Rights icon Julian Bond. My day job is in politics, and I understand that, to win, you have to do what you have to do to win; others may find this episode bracing and unsettling. 

 John Lewis: Good Trouble is an insightful view of a man and of a critical point in American history.  You can stream it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE – an icon continues

John Lewis (on far right) in JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble traces the life of civil rights icon, US Representative John Lewis.  I usually don’t buy reverential biodocs, but when the subject is a freaking saint, I guess you have to go with it.  The rest of the title comes from Lewis’ mantra – if you see injustice, make good trouble, necessary trouble

John Lewis, of course, is a real American hero.  As a very young man in 1965, he had been leading efforts to register Blacks to vote in Selma, Alabama, including a peaceful march to the State Capitol in Montgomery.  On March 7, 1965, the march got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma when they were attached by local law enforcement and Ku Klux Klan members under the command of Sheriff Jim Clark.  Lewis was in the very first rank and was beaten, shedding his own blood on “Bloody Sunday”.  Two subsequent marches on the bridge and the LBJ speech that followed led directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1964, the most important civil rights legislation since 1867. 

In John Lewis: Good Trouble, we see footage from the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  We see a young John Lewis being beaten in 1965, and we see an elderly Lewis in an anniversary march with President Barack Obama and former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

John Lewis: Good Trouble is well-sourced by director Dawn Porter, even though only a few of Lewis’ contemporaries survive.  When the first Black president was elected, Lewis says he wept for JFK, RFK, Dr. King and the others who hadn’t lived to see it.  Fortunately, Lewis has sisters sill alive who participate in the documentary.

We get an inside glimpse at Lewis’ childhood.  We get to see Lewis watching footage of himself at a pivotal Nashville sit-in that he had “never seen”.  And, this intimate portrait shows us some dry Lewis humor and some impressive octogenarian dance moves.

How did Lewis get to Congress?  John Lewis: Good Trouble shows us the race against his longtime friend and fellow Civil Rights icon Julian Bond. My day job is in politics, and I understand that, to win, you have to do what you have to do to win; others may find this episode bracing and unsettling. 

 John Lewis: Good Trouble is an insightful view of a man and of a critical point in American history.  You can stream it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: behind the one percent

CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Documentarian Justin Pemberton brings alive Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a critique of the concentration of wealth. There’s no more fundamentally important political topic than inequality, and this theme has resonated through the best of recent cinema, including Parasite and Knives Out.

Pinketty traces the economics of wealth from feudal times to the present, and Pemberton keeps all the economic history lively with plenty of eye candy. Capital in the Twenty-First Century covers a lot of ground – globalization and movable capital, deregulation and privatization, defanging of organized labor, China state capital, and the impact on today’s youngest generations.

Piketty’s proffered solutions are simple and intellectually sound (stopping off-shore tax dodges, taxing inheritance, incentivizing wealth to be invested in productive risk instead of moving around a closed-loop of financial instruments). But, given the political power of great wealth, this is a very heavy political lift.

CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century pops along fairly briskly, but, as an entertaining popularizer, it’s no The Big Short or An Inconvenient Truth. Still, about an hour in, there’s a jaw-dropping psych experiment in which people benefiting from pure luck believe and act as though they are entitled.

During its Bay Area virtual run at the Roxie, you can stream Capital in the Twenty-First Century at Roxie Virtual Cinema, or at distributoe Kino Lorber’s new virtual platform Kino Marquee.

From SFFILM: ROJO – bobbing in a sea of moral relativism

Benjamin Naishtat’s ROJO. Courtesy of SFFILM.

The San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) was set to open tomorrow before it was cancelled for the COVID-19 emergency, so in tribute, here’s a film from SFFILM’s 2019 program.

Rojo is Argentine writer-director Benjamín Naishtat’s slow burn drama.  Rojo is set just before the 1970s coup that some characters expect – but no one is anticipating how long and bloody the coup will be.  Several vignettes are woven together into a tapestry of pre-coup moral malaise.

A prominent provincial lawyer Claudio (Darío Grandinetti) is invited to participate in a scam. There’s a scary encounter of lethal restaurant rage. It looks like Claudio, bobbing on a sea of moral relativism, may well remained unscathed, but the arrival of crack detective becomes a grave threat.

As Claudio weaves through his life, his society shows signs of crumbling. There’s a failed teen seduction, an emotional breakdown at a formal reception and a natural metaphor – a solar eclipse.

It’s funny when the audience finally connects the dots and understands who the character nicknamed “the Hippie” is. And Naishtat and Grandinetti get the most out of the scene where Claudio finally dons a toupee.

We know something that the characters don’t know – or at least fully grasp – how bloody the coup will be. Watch for the several references to desaparecido, a foreboding of the coup. Argentina’s coup was known for the desaparecidos – the disappeared – thousands of the regime’s political opponents went missing without a trace, having been executed by death squads. In Rojo, a very inconvenient madman dies and his body is hidden, there’s a disappearing act in a magic show, and a would-be boyfriend vanishes.

This is a moody, atmospheric film that works as a slow-burn thriller. I saw Rojo earlier a year agoat the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). Rojo made my list of 10 Overlooked Movies of 2019. Stream from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.