DVD Review: RiP! A Remix Manifesto (2009)

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This is one of those movies I'm not even sure I should've been allowed to see let alone review...but it's available on Amazon and iTunes so I'll have good company in jail.

For, as I type this, I keep waiting for the door to bust open and the A-Team to file in complete with Mr. T and all his gold chains and--c'mon, let's face it-- as a polite, native midwesterner who trips and apologizes to the sidewalk, I will fold under questioning and confess to crimes I never committed like perhaps marooning all those islanders on Lost which I've never even seen.

Yet, I'm glad I was somehow deemed hip enough (and Erik, thank you, my man) to review this fascinating documentary from The Disinformation Company which has released some other high quality works that the Hollywood mainstream simply doesn't want you to see such as Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising (aka the first movie I saw on my Netflix Roku device), as well as Robert Greenwald's brilliant duo Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism which I discovered as an undergraduate film student.

Crafted by a likable and highly energetic yet cautious filmmaker who ensures he never steps on the toes of those he interviews or goes for cheap shots-- Brett Gaylor walks his talk by releasing the film in its entirety completely in open source and DRM free both on the DVD and online via his website.

Born and raised during the dawn and evolution of the internet on a tiny island off the enormous mainland of Canada-- originally he found the world wide web to be a tremendous outlet which allowed him the immediate and unlimited ability to connect with the planet at large.

Yet right around 1998, Gaylor began noticing amidst the era of Shawn Fanning's Napster debacle which kick-started peer-to-peer file sharing and the endless copyright lawsuits that followed-- that suddenly ideas and online creativity were becoming less free and more likely to get you fined, find you without a home, or forced into a squad car.

Further problems ensued, however as the entertainment industry realized that consumers then had the power over the content they'd created to do with what they wished. Of course, that was until they created new red tape in the form of greater rights and fine print for the ownership of content possessed by essentially six major corporations along with of course creating a new lock with "DRM" a.k.a. digital rights management or corporate software which prevented you from adding or ripping the files of a film or album onto your computer.  Yet, when there's a will, there's a way so cyber pirates provided their own key with "vault cracking DRM software" which can land someone five years in the slammer and/or $250,000 for every song they've downloaded.

Now in an era where there have been lawsuits levied against 24,000 Americans who've been forced to settle without guilty pleas even though not a penny of their fine goes to the artists, musicians or filmmakers whose work they've downloaded-- Gaylor has taken a keen interest.  And with this film, he's decided to look at all of it but in an upbeat, fast-paced, humorous way by taking a particular interest in those who have been fighting against the hypocrisy with creativity as their weapon of choice.

In doing so, he cites that remixing has always been practiced since Led Zeppelin took Muddy Waters' "You Need Love" (which actually had come from somewhere else) for "Whole Lotta Love" in the same manner that The Rolling Stones and others have done again and again although of course The Stones sewed Verve for full rights to "Bittersweet Symphony" and sold 'em to a Nike Commercial. Yep, that's just what The Verve meant in the lyrics when they wrote, "you're a slave to money then you die."

Yet, while musicians have always enjoyed "sampling" or remixing each other's notes, as we learn just moments into the movie-- taking even a single note and using it in your work is a copyright infringement issue, which is a major problem for Greg Gillis a.k.a. Girl Talk who works as a biomedical engineer from nine to five. Yet whether or not there's a full moon-- at night he's out on the prowl-- like Clark Kent changing into a booth, the nerdy scientist becomes music's hottest underground mash-up Superman mixing together old Motown classics with Elvis Costello with "Bittersweet Symphony" or whatever music is exploding on the Rolling Stone magazine charts that week.

By sampling 21 songs in 3 minutes, Gaylor argues that if Girl Talk were to make an album, he would owe roughly 4 million dollars in copyright fees for the music he samples and it's fun to watch Marybeth Peters-- an employee at the Office of Copyright who's held the position for 40 years (yet doesn't own a computer in her home) watch footage of Girl Talk sampling one note of a Costello song before her eyes to see the mathematical complexity involved.

Of course she's indeed correct when she notes that you can't argue that the copyright law is hindering someone's creativity if it's based on other people's stuff (and I do think Girl Talk is so gifted that he could probably create his own) but then when you realize the amount of greed involved as Warner Chappell Records makes millions every year on "Happy Birthday" and not a cent in royalties goes to the family of the deceased sisters who wrote it, you wonder if some stuff really should belong "to the people."

And this is especially the case considering that Warner Brothers-- incidentally, one of my very favorite studios!-- has made a mash-up of their own classic work Casablanca and turned it into an anti-piracy ad, thereby ruining one of the best American films of all time for future generations by presenting the next generation with the image of Ingrid Bergman as a DVD copier along with cheesy music instead of "As Time Goes By."

Essentially, the thesis for Girl Talk as an artist and indeed Gaylor's film is simple and it is that basically remixed content turns the consumers into creators; so Gaylor divides his film into those on both sides of his argument of the "copyRIGHT and the copyLEFT."

In tackling mash-ups which also involve video to often hilarious effect as you've seen on YouTube (typically before they're pulled down for copyright violation) or via the ninety extra minutes of footage on this DVD and within the disc that include such state-of-the-art techniques as rotoscoping), Gaylor's journey takes him from Girl Talk who will become legitimately appreciated by the film's end earning a fan in Paris Hilton and performing at Coachella to meeting up with Stanford professor, lawyer and expert Lawrence Lessig.

The man who tried to set all the Napster users free who now travels around the globe (for more than a decade to speak about our "extremist" policy concerning file sharing and copyright)-- Gaylor describes him as a lawyer with a guilty conscience but one who's done a lot about it by writing the Remixer's Manifesto that inspired the film. Namely*: 1) Culture Always Builds on the Past. 2) The Past Always Tries to Control the Future. 3) Out Future is Becoming Less Free. 4) To Build Free Societies, You Must Limit the Control of the Past. (*Source: Lawrence Lessig as quoted in the film)

In addressing the way that the past still has control, Gaylor becomes a member of a group called the Mouse Liberation Front who were sued by Walt Disney Corporation for their "Air Pirates" line of funnies or comics by turning Mickey into a counterculture, darker figure and during this interview wherein the man he speaks with jokes that the house of mouse will sue everybody just for looking at 'em.  Moreover, he discusses the origins of the Disney animation studios and Walt Disney's first efforts in particular by noting the way that Mickey Mouse was often drawn in shorts to tie in with pop-culture like Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr. or Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times all the way up through their renditions of the classic fairy tales remade again and again, noting that Disney himself was a mash-up artist.

Briefly addressing some of the new strategies to counter the copyright sledgehammer and the big house such as "fair use for free speech" or "creative commons" or "citing sources," there are two portions of Gaylor's documentary that are almost deserving of their own spin-off works in their own right, including the first when he discusses the amount of potential medical cures that could be found if drug companies worked together and why or how it is lawful for some to own plants or land with potential healing powers.

Secondly, in a great segment, we meet the former Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil when Gaylor travels to Brazil by investigating the way that medicine, music, art, culture, and more are all used without fear of "idea ownership" to better their society in a chain reaction of positivity where the country bravely "re-mixed" their own knock-off HIV drug when Brazil wasn't allowed to "break the patent" to help their citizens.

These last few portions of the film have an amazing impact on a larger social issue scale concerning health, safety and foreign policy and while they definitely go in tandem with the arts and culture angle-- I was so riveted by Gaylor's findings that I almost felt like he may have had enough for two films or even a few very hard-hitting short subjects works.

But nonetheless-- RiP! A Remix Manifestio is a film festival favorite, crowd-pleasing, and conversation provoking documentary that was so immediately gripping I had to share it with others of all generations since even at roughly thirty, although the term "remix" was definitely familiar; "mash-up" just made me think of "Monster Mash" or the mash games played by kids in the '80s on school buses. And in the end, Gaylor has made a stunning work that's not only the most entertaining presentation about the copyright issue that's come down the line so far but also one that's so filled with extras, pulsating with the music of Girl Talk that it's energy is infectious. Likewise, its impact is startlingly immediate like a jolt of caffeine or the instant gratification of downloading something awesome like Radiohead's "pay what you want" release of In Rainbows.

Text ©2009, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com
Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited.

Not By Chance

Produced by Constant Gardner director Fernando Meirelles, this impressively audacious and high quality debut feature film from Brazilian writer/director Philippe Barcinski follows in the thematic and cinematically stylistic footsteps of Altman’s Short Cuts, Iñárritu’s Amores Perros and 21 Grams, and Haggis’ Crash.

Centering on the alternately tragic and romantic yet always unpredictable fates of its seemingly unrelated characters, we first meet Enio, a middle-aged Sao Paulo traffic controller whose orderly existence, driven by mathematical logic and scientific precision is thrown into a tailspin after he discovers there are things beyond his control. After a startling event shakes Enio to his core, we encounter the younger talented billiard player Pedro, who, similar to Enio has a passion for structure in the geometric design of his pool table designs, and later discover that he is also linked to the film’s earlier climactic event.

Polished, breathtaking and expertly photographed with a memorable score woven throughout, Not By Chance is one of those films that will not only get audiences talking about the existential matters of free will vs. destiny but will also benefit from a second viewing.

The Year My Parents Went on Vacation

Director:
Cao Hamburger

With such masterworks as De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, Doillon’s Ponette, and Majidi’s Children of Heaven, it’s become a favorite practice for foreign filmmakers to tackle stories of tremendous depth and scope from the eyes of an innocent child struggling to make sense of a changing world, political climate, economic strife and/or a threatened family dynamic. And indeed these are the types of films that manage to engage audiences regardless of age and gender who all instinctively side with our precocious hero, wanting to protect them from harm, comfort them if they’re scared and love them when they’re lonely. Instead of tales of talking animals voiced by Eddie Murphy or sarcastic brats who always manage to hit annoying adults in the crotch, consistently we find solace in these stories of heartache and compassion from around the globe. However, the frequent success and release is a double-edged sword as the works have become not just highly marketable but so expected among foreign film fans that unless the filmmakers try desperately to set themselves outside the pack of the aforementioned works in the vein of movies such as Salles’s Central Station, Dupeyron’s Monsieur Ibrahim, or Malberti’s Viva Cuba, they’re nearly guaranteed to get overlooked, lost in the shuffle of too little advertisement for foreign titles, until they’re interchangeably shelved at a local library or video store, saved only when a film fan just happens by in the mood to take a chance on an unknown offering.

While unfortunately saddled with a forgettable title and misleading trailer that seems to set it up as though it were Monsieur Ibrahim 2 or Central Station: The Return (which makes me fear for its eventual life collecting dust at Blockbuster), director Cao Hamburger’s The Year My Parents Went on Vacation is anything but forgettable. Understated, brilliant, heartrending yet surprisingly filled with warmth and charm, Year, which was chosen as the official selection by Brazil for the Best Foreign Language Film category of the 2008 Academy Awards after earning accolades from around the globe, was co-produced by City of God director Fernando Meirelles. Despite the fact that Hamburger as well as some of the cast and crew including the talented cinematographer Adriano Goldman (City of Men) have collaborated with Meirelles either on God or Men’s television and film incarnations, Hamburger’s family friendly yet welcomingly deep coming-of-age story has none of the overwhelming violence nor sense of inescapable despair of Meirelles’s masterpiece God. Yet, as in God, we’re transfixed by the plight of a young man trying to navigate through the tumultuous 1970’s in Brazil.

Set in 1970 just after the legendary soccer (or “football”) player Pele scored his 1,000th goal positioning the country to claim the World Cup, Year finds preteen Mauro (Michel Joelsas) more concerned with collecting the likenesses of his favorite players to complete his card collection and mastering the art of table soccer, than paying much attention to the effects the cold war is having on the totalitarian regime running his native Brazil. Shortly after the film begins, we find ourselves as confused as Mauro when his devoted parents Bia (Simone Spoladore) and Daniel (Eduardo Moreira), hurriedly pack up their son in their old blue VW, flee the city of Belo Horizante to head for Sao Paulo in order to leave him with his estranged paternal grandfather who resides in the tight knit Jewish suburb of Bom Retiro. Informing young Mauro that they have no choice but to go on “vacation” as we deduce that his left-leaning parents are political activists trying to outrun governmental persecution, he’s promised that they will return before the first game of the World Cup. However, after a series of unfortunate events find Mauro unable to stay with his relative, he’s left mostly to fend for himself while becoming the unofficial mascot of the community, forming an awkward alliance with his grandfather’s neighbor, the predominately Yiddish speaking, devout Shlomo (Germano Haiut) and befriending young Hanna (a terrific Daniela Piepszyk) an adorable tomboy who lives in the same building. Preoccupying himself with table soccer and obsessing about the World Cup, the lonely Mauro who’s so devoted to his parents that he remains in arm’s length of the phone for extended periods until he’s lured outside by Hanna, begins to come out of his shell, although at the same time, realizes that in the wake of political turmoil, the term “vacation” may mean something much different than he’d imagined.

Although one can make the case that there’s nothing overly innovative about using sports as a metaphor to unite a community as Pele’s heroics manage to inspire everyone in Bom Retiro, Cao Hamburger never lets the film’s subtext get lost in what could have been a contrived loss-of-innocence paradigm. And not content to solely utilize Mauro's limited, naïve look at Brazil’s political situation, Hamburger expertly explores the boy's associations with a memorable cast of characters and takes a character vignette approach that’s echoed by numerous cinematographic touches with an emphasis on a “rack focus” as the camera racks to show the reaction of any number of individuals in a scene. It's by weaving a genuine tapestry of diverse perspectives that we’re painted a much more intricate portrait of the goings-on, feeling genuinely touched, heartbroken, and enlightened by the therefore well-earned conclusions Hamburger makes as the film rolls along towards its conclusion.

One of the best films released so far in 2008, Year is much richer than one would’ve assume given the bland tone of the trailer. Featuring a phenomenally deft portrayal by its young lead who was chosen in an exhaustive six month search from one thousand auditions (IMDb) and a strong supporting cast including the underused Liliana Castro and Caio Blat as two adults who befriend young Mauro, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, is one in a long line of quality foreign films depicting a country’s evolution from the eyes of a child. In addition it's hopefully one that--given enough positive word of mouth-- won’t land helplessly forgotten amidst a pile of “unknown” limited releases all pushed aside to make room for the latest celebrity driven blockbuster filled with gross-out gags and toilet humor pandering to the lowest common denominator for family entertainment. So pack a suitcase for the trip-- The Year My Parents Went on Vacation is a true gem and well worth the trouble of tracking down.

City of Men

Director: Paulo Morelli

It’s said that the sins of the father eventually go to his son but it’s a trickier proposition when a person either doesn’t know who his own father is or has vague memories of a father who was killed when he was young and now must face his own identity as a father to his baby boy. In director Paulo Morelli’s cinematic follow-up to Fernando Meirelles’s masterpiece City of God, the two main characters find themselves in exactly these situations as they turn eighteen. After losing his son at a young age, Ace (Douglas Silva) realizes he must try and make amends to ensure that his son Clayton doesn’t grow up to repeat his mistakes coming-of-age without male guidance but barely able to take care of himself or his equally young wife, Ace struggles with responsibility and priority when he’s enlisted by his best friend Wallace (Darlan Cunha) to track down the father he’s never met in order to secure his identity and get a needed signature on his eighteen year old identification card.

Like City of God, City of Men, which is based on the critically acclaimed Brazilian television series recently released in the states on both DVD and through the Sundance Channel, is set in the low class slums of Rio de Janeiro although while God was set in the past, Men’s action takes place today as the children of their community hill align themselves with a local gang leader and are willing to take up arms and risk their lives to fight local gangs over territory. Although one doesn’t necessarily have to see City of God in order to appreciate its far more linear follow-up with an emphasis on sentimentality and a cleaner narrative than its flashier, edgier, father God, it’s fascinating to view it with the first grand scale work fresh in one's mind.

Although Men feels like an ideal companion piece to the first film, however despite some similarities in style and crew behind and in front of the camera, Men is a more audience friendly picture that will be able to attract those who may have run for the exits from the brutality and horror of the first film. Although, Men comes with a few contrivances and one predictable twist near the end, which reminded me that it was missing the impact of the first picture which, in its much louder way offered up a truer sense of the beating heart of Rio and one less carefully and deliberately presented to filmgoers as this more accessible work. However, this being said, it’s a great, great film in its own right and one that feels, similar to God years earlier, like the perfect antidote to the mindless and numb Hollywood manufactured orgies of violence and gore by never letting us forget that we’re not looking at just bored teens who turn to violence to titillate or shock, but teens who grew up with absolutely nothing and must find a way to fight to survive, to make tough choices and more importantly, discover how to take the lessons or lack thereof they learned from their fathers and apply them to the next generation.