PUTIN | Big Apple Reviews

WELCOME TO CHECHNYA – movie review

Posted on June 25, 2020 by harveycritic

WELCOME TO CHECHNYA

HBO Documentary FilmsReviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: David France
Writers: David France, Tyler H. Walk,inspired by the New Yorker article “Forbidden Lives: The Gay Men Who Fled Chechnya’s Purge” by Masha Gessen
Cast: Olga Baranova, David Isteev, Maxim Lapunov
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 6/15/20
Opens: June 30, 2020

On June 15, 2020 the U.S. Supreme issued a decision that gays people are protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law prohibited discrimination on account of gender. It should be obvious that gays and lesbians are covered. Yet three justices disagreed and look what Trump said: “This is a landmark decision that should be praised throughout the land.” Oops. He did not say that. He said that he would live with the decision. Awfully sporting of him, but of course he has to cater to his base, many of whom might be happier living in Tehran or Kabul or Sanaa. Now we learn that it’s not only in the heart of the Muslim world that gays are not tolerated by their governments but also in Valdimir Putin’s Russia. Putin is no friend of the LGBTQ community but folks who are closeted in Moscow and St. Petersburg have a fighting chance of experiencing love without state interference. Still, in the “Republic” of Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim entity whose officials have made peace with Moscow after attempts to secede, the big enemy is…people who are sexually involved with members of their own gender.

To learn more about this, we need only watch HBO’s bold, fly-on-the-wall coverage of the way homosexuals are intimidated in Grozny and outskirts. No, not intimidated. Killed in some cases. By whom? Maybe by police, but also by their own mothers, fathers, brothers and cousins. It’s a free-for-all where stone-cold bigots claim that their “honor” has been shamed by their kin who are not altogether like them, to such an extent that family members can kill them and authorities will do nothing to punish the killers or torturers.

Director David France, whose “How to Survive a Plague” deals with ACT UP’s successful battle to get needed drugs to people afflicted with AIDS, takes on the political battle of gays in Chechnya to avoid such treatment in police stations as having their fingers entwined with cords to deliver electric shocks should the hapless victims not come up with names of others in the gay community. One person gives up ten, the ten give up another ten, and soon the folks with authority in Chechnya will create a republic whose residents have, “pure blood.”

Obviously this will remind you of the treatment of Jews in Germany, of Rohingyas in Myanmar, of Indians in America, of Tutsis in Rwanda, or Aborigines in Australia, Maoris in New Zealand, to cite a few cases, you’re ready to understand the abnormal psychology of people who cannot tolerate those who are not quite like them. Never mind that all of these people are minding their own business, not rebelling against their governments.

The inspiration for this powerful doc is Masha Gessen’s article in the New Yorker magazine on July 3, 2017 which features prose like “They pushed my head down so I wouldn’t see where we were going,” Ali, who is around thirty years old, told me. “Soon, the car pulled up to an unmarked building. Ali saw two men he knew standing in front, their faces swollen from beatings.” The article names Ramzan Kadyrov who runs Chechnya as though it were his own country (he’s backed by Putin), and who claims that his aim is to cleans the country of gay men. At the same time he makes the absurd comment that “We don’t have any gays.”

The heroes of France’s documentary, which is mostly in Russian with easy-to-read English subtitles, are David Isteev and Olga Baranova. They run a shelter in Moscow that might make you think of Harriet Tubman’s havens for runaway slaves, transporting them to Canada which, by the way, is the country to which many of Chechnya’s gays want to go given that Canada is fairly liberal in granting asylum. One such person is Grisha who went to Chechnya to conduct business there as an event planner when he was picked up and tortured, ultimately heading to Moscow. His troubles were not over since his entire family became the target of threats. All had to be transported out.

Lesbians are not exempt from the reactionary rules of the Chechnya’s government. Anya, just twenty-one years old, has her sexual orientation discovered by her uncle. He threatens to tell her high-ranking father, but wait! He is good enough to allow her to go free if she would have sex with him. Isn’t it great to have pure morals? She complains to her rescue people of claustrophobia, staying in her room for three months and told not to go out even to dump her trash. She bolts, and nobody knows her whereabouts today.

As with his previous films including “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson” about that gay rights activist’s mysterious death, David France highlights the heroism of radicals who risk life and limb to move victimized people to locations where they can carry on with their lives without the abhorrent notions of government and family. The heroic guys and gals in this emotionally raw picture have special praise for Canada, which has granted scores of humanitarian visas to people hounded despite minding their own business.

Bulletin: Trump has not authorized a single visa for these victims. Surprise!
106 minutes. © 2020 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online

Story – B+
Acting – A-
Technical – A-
Overall – A-

CITIZEN K – movie review

Posted on January 12, 2020 by harveycritic

CITIZEN K
Greenwich Entertainment/Amazon Studios
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: Alex Gibney
Screenwriter: Alex Gibney
Cast: Mikkhail Khodorkovsky, NYMikhail Gorvachev, Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Petukhov, Leonid Nevzlin,
Screened at: Critics’ link, 12/17/19
Opens: January 15, 2020

Citizen K (2019) picture s_id875062.jpg

I would like to have been in Moscow to observe the well-preserved body of Vladimir Lenin on the day that “Citizen K” was released. You can be assured that he would be turning over in whatever receptacle is holding his bearded frame, because somehow the gods might have allowed Lenin to watch this movie and weep for what happened to his country, to his fondest dream. Instead of a paradise for workers and peasants, the former Soviet Union, having lost its satellite empire and given up communism, did not replace it with the kind of capitalism that Milton Friedman or Michael Bloomberg or New York Times economist columnist Paul Krugman would cherish. Russia is now under the influence of a wild-west kind of capitalism that some of us here in the U.S. can understand, given that in our country one percent of the citizens owns some twenty-five percent of the wealth. Inequality is even worse over there: at one point the oligarchs, the seven richest men in Russian, controlled fifty percent of the economy. Maybe Putin’s interest in gobbling up parts of Ukraine and feasting his eyes as well on the former satellite countries is his desire to distract the Russian people for what is being done to them.

“Citizen K” Alex Gibney, whose 2005 doc “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” lays out the case for a corruption that led to the company’s demise, now concentrates on two factors in the Russian economic and political goings-on. One subject is Putin, now the head of his country for eighteen years. The other is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the oligarchs and perhaps the richest man in Russian, whose fall for criticizing Putin led to the state’s seizure of his asserts and his imprisonment in Siberia for ten years. Gibney’s camera switches from president to oligarch, the former winning a series of fake elections while the latter, exiled in London and still holding on to hundreds of millions of dollars stashed safely in countries like Ireland, directs his venom toward the current Russian system.

Gibney has a way of making documentaries into thrillers as he did with Enron, though in this case he relies too much on a hugely intrusively score to give the impression that he is filming not a doc to enlighten us so much as a thriller to capture our emotions. Zipping through a series of historical events that pave the way to the present Russia, Gibney, ignoring Lenin and completely and showing a quick, archived film with Stalin’s picture, points us past Gorbachev’s glasnost era (Gorby is still considered by many in Russia to have single-handedly caused the Soviet Union’s end), through Boris Yeltsin’s turn at bat. With the government about to collapse once again leading perhaps to a return to Communism, Yeltsin bargained with the oligarchs. The state would borrow money from them knowing that they could not be paid back. And the oligarchs would own Russia’s leading assets, including oil.

During that time Khodorkovsky—whom we see as a young man and then as a figure aged largely by his stay in Siberia—by himself created the country’s first commercial bank while at the same time picking up Yukos, a number of Siberian oil fields, at pennies on the dollar. Khodorkovsky is later blamed for the murder of a Siberian oil town mayor who had claimed that Khodorkovsky evaded taxes, and guess who would be the leading suspect, given that it even happened on the oligarch’s birthday! Putin, moving rapidly up the political ladder, determined to go against Khodorkovsky at a time that the rich man exposed state corruption. K was arrested on fake charges and sent on a seven day’s journey to a Siberian prison. One must wonder why Putin did not simply have the man poisoned or shot, as he has been charged of doing for several other opponents.

Behind the lenses, Mark Garrett and Denis Sinyakov give us the long view of Russia’s seat of government while switching to a one-on-one series of interviews with a seated Khodorkovsky. This may not be a Michael Moore type of doc, loaded with wit and humor, but with its quick pacing and a script that allows us in the audience to understand at least a little of what our adversaries in Moscow are doing, it serves as entertainment and enlightenment equally.

Story – B+
Acting – B+
Technical – A-
Overall – B+

ACTIVE MEASURES – movie review

Posted on August 26, 2018 by harveycritic

ACTIVE MEASURES

Super Ltd
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten
Director: Jack Bryan
Screenwriter: Jack Bryan, Marley Clements
Cast: John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Michael McFaul, Sheldon Whitehouse, Steven Hall, Michael Isikoff, John Podesta, Jeremy Bash, James Woolsey, Evan McMullin
Screened at: Dolby24, NYC, 8/9/18
Opens: August 31, 2018

In the concluding scene of Spike Lee’s terrific new movie “BLACKkKLANSMAN,” the director shows an extended close-up of the American flag, upside down, the sign of distress. Anyone who doesn’t get all the news from Sean Hannity must realize, just as Spike Lee does, that the U.S. is underdoing serious problems: forget about the temporary successes like full employment (largely with crap wages) and a booming stock market (why not tax corporations 0%, and then watch a real boom)! Jack Bryan, whose previous ventures includes “Life After Dark: The Story of Siberia Bar,” about the demise of New York’s most dangerous bar and not about Siberia at all, this time targets both our own President and the man who rules Siberia, among other areas of that country, Vladimir Putin. Bryan, whose final scene is a large, simple sign stating “Resist,” is not calling upon moviegoers to resist the tactics of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and former Russian ambassador Michael McFaul, but rather to push back against the corruption in our present administration, which has already seen a record of number of high level government employees fired or turning in their resignations. If the head of Human Resources in any major corporation hired people who left their jobs by the hundreds, that department leader would be gone soon enough.

Still, despite the plethora of talking heads to afford us layer after layer or information about our current dangerous administration, Bryan focuses on one issue to avoid diluting his screed against President Trump. And that is his belief (and that of any thinking person) that Trump is Putin’s poodle. People who go to this film will already have a good idea of what “Active Measures” covers from watching the un-Fox news channels, especially CNN and MSNBC (with a special gold star for the Rachel Maddow Show), but here we have archival films showing Putin to be a dangerous man and, by extension, any person in thrall to the former Soviet KGB officer must be a threat to our country a well.

Putin is a fellow who, like many of his countrymen, is furious about the break-up of the Soviet Empire, the surrounding of his country by former satellite nations like Ukraine who are NATO members. He desires to restore the bad old days of Soviet imperialism. Letting nothing get in his way of the dream of empire, he has already invaded Georgia, Ukraine, and annexed Crimea to his land. He is suspected of ordering assassinations of his chief critics whether in Russia or outside. And here is the key point: he has been manipulating American elections not only since the Trump campaign of 2016 but of our internal matters for decades earlier, with hundreds of spies still living in our great republic, some right in Manhattan’s Trump Tower. This brazen attempt to influence our politics is what the Russians call “active measures.”

With a script that Bryan wrote along with Marley Clements (in the latter’s freshman entry into the script-writing pool), we get the impression that outside of Trump himself, the baddest guy is Paul Manafort, now on trial for tax evasion and money laundering, while giving air time to a number of Russian oligarchs, principally the people who took advantage of the restoration of public business to the private sector and who came out millionaires from bargain prices. Putin used social media, Facebook in particular and, like Trump. also Twitter, to spread false stories to politically naïve and less informed Americans, with such fake news as the absurdity that Hillary was connected to a child pornography ring out of a pizzeria. We don’t know whether the Russian interference put Trump over the top, although not in popular votes, but it didn’t hurt. Nor should a sovereign nation like ours tolerate interference in what should be a sacred annual rite of going to the polls. And we certainly should not have to put with a president who disrespects Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau while glorifying Vladimir Putin.

Bryan’s most powerful point is this: what is our chief executive doing sucking up to an adversarial country’s leader, suggesting, as many of us have heard, that Putin has something big against Trump which he is using for blackmail? The film is well researched, the most comprehensive look to date at Putin-gate compressed into just 112 minutes, with an impressive array of not only major political figures but also the scenic backgrounds of important meetings like the G20. If Trump is really committing high crimes and misdemeanors worthy of impeachment and removal, why is he still in office when Nixon was chased out, even by fellow Republicans, for doing not even one-quarter of these activities?

Story – B+
Acting – B+
Technical – B+
Overall – B+