Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War (premieres Mon., Sept. 6, 9 p.m., Sundance Channel) Overreaching its subtitle may be — the "whole truth?" Really, now — but Robert Greenwald's hourlong documentary builds what ought to be an irrefutable case that the Bush administration warped, misstated and otherwise finessed the case for war. Among Greenwald's flotilla of anti-Bush docs, which also includes Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism and Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election, Uncovered stands out for its imposing cast of interviewees and its preference for fact over innuendo, though you have to turn to the theatrical cut or the DVD's deleted scenes to find more than a token acknowledgement that Saddam Hussein was, y'know, not such a nice guy.

Skirting the blood-for-oil route, Uncovered focuses on the ideological underpinnings of the Iraq War. Says Graham Fuller, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the war represented the fulfillment of the "geopolitical and philosophical vision" of neocons like Paul Wolfowitz, who'd been itching to unseat Saddam and open the Middle East's first franchise democracy ever since W's daddy hung up his spurs. The evidence was made, or selectively interpreted, to aid that goal.

In Uncovered's strongest sections, Greenwald goes point by point through George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address and Colin Powell's remarks to the United Nations, rebutting each claim as it's made. Powell tells the U.N. that, by a "conservative estimate," Iraq has 100 to 500 tons of chemical weapons. "My suspicion is that this is not our conservative estimate," says Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 26 years. "This sounds very much to me like our neoconservative estimate."

In the long run, the Bush administration's once-rigid rhetoric has proved surprisingly flexible, not to say opportunistic, so it's worth going back to the scene of the crime and remembering just how overstated the case for war was. Bush touts our "good sound intelligence," Iraq's "long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations," not to mention those infamous 16 words. Are Iraqis better off now than they were four years ago? Some undoubtedly are, though in the documentary About Baghdad, shown by Small Change last week, several say they preferred the stability of Saddam's regime to the current chaos. But by the Bushies' own logic, the real question shouldn't be if they're better off, but if we are.

Greenwald's new Unconstitutional will screen Tue., Sept. 14 at the Bridge. Ticket info is available from theatre-tickets@grassrootsforamerica.us.

Carl Theodor Dreyer Tribute (starts Sun., Sept. 5, 10 p.m., Turner Classic Movies) Your desk calendar may not mention it, but it's Carl Theodor Dreyer month, which calls for celebration on the most intimate scale. There's next week's screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc (Sun., Sept. 12, 1 p.m., International House) and a DVD of The Parson's Widow on the way. But for a more complete tribute, turn to Turner Classic Movies' month of Sundays, four late evenings devoted to the Scandinavian master's work. For those who've already succumbed to Dreyer's exacting charms, the choice nuggets are three early and otherwise unavailable silents: Michael (Sept. 13, 1:30 a.m.), Leaves from Satan's Book (Sept. 20, 12:15 a.m.) and Master of the House (Sept. 27, midnight). But the best introduction is this evening's slate: the documentary My Métier followed by 1928's The Passion and 1932's Vampyr. The Passion is one of cinema's singular achievements, a depiction of martyrdom and transcendent humiliation so intense the actress who played Joan never made another film. Vampyr, Dreyer's followup, was so poorly received that he didn't make another film for a decade, but it's one of a small handful of truly great vampire movies, despite, or rather because of, its departure from genre. There's a vampire in Dreyer's version, but you wouldn't know it if you didn't watch closely. There are no black capes, no fangs, no virgins bleeding from the neck, just a soft, overwhelming light that threatens to burn the characters out of existence. Dreyer shot at dawn to achieve a dreamlike diffusion, and the film's best sequences have the unshakable quality of an insistent nightmare, especially the coffin's-eye view of the main character's burial.

In the Mirror of Maya Deren/Brakhage ($29.99 each DVD) Martina Kudlácek and Jim Shedden's portraits of experimental film legends Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage share a reverence for their subjects, but the results are markedly different. Kudlácek successfully mixes biography with appreciation and concocts a compelling overview of Deren's life and work, even if it's more comprehensive on the former than the latter; Deren's two divorces are barely mentioned, her friendships with literary and art world figures not at all. Mirror is particularly good at connecting Deren's dance background with her interest in body and camera movement, seen most purely in late films like Meditation on Violence, a remixed version of a Wu-Tang boxer's workout.

Shedden's tribute, by contrast, largely maintains the air of mystery around the canonical Brakhage, whose films are at once more autobiographical and more abstract than Deren's. Filming the birth of his first child, his grandchildren at play, Brakhage transformed life into art in the most literal fashion. (His late-period trend towards hand-painted films was motivated, in part, by his second wife Marilyn's dislike of being filmed.) Shedden collects plenty of appreciations, but the dots never connect: Brakhage's greatness is asserted more than it's explained, and the excerpts from his films are too brief to make a substantial impression. The hand-painted films especially suffer from an uninspiring transfer, nowhere near the quality of Criterion's essential two-disc set. (Brakhage's short Water for Maya, though, is well-presented on the Mirror disc, along with two uncompleted Deren fragments.) Deren died young, but her brief body of work is collected on a nicely assembled DVD from Mystic Fire (www.mysticfire.com). Brakhage fans should note next week's I-House screenings of Ellipses and Star Garden.

Millennium Mambo ($24.98 DVD) As the films of much-acclaimed but little-seen Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien go, Millennium Mambo's two Philadelphia screenings counts as a veritable festival, but there's something about the film's insular aesthetics that make it particularly suited to home viewing. I put in my advance DVD intending to check the quality of the transfer and ended up watching all the way through; days later, I got the retail version, and almost fell into the same trap. Set at the dawn of the millennium, Mambo stars the mesmerizing Shu Qi as an aimless beauty who drifts between men in what feels like one long, unending night, although it may span anywhere from a few months to several years. Hou's celebrated single shots are framed as carefully as ever, and ravishingly lit by frequent collaborator Mark Lee Ping-bin (In the Mood for Love), but Lim Giong and Yoshihiro Hanno's looping techno score gives the movie a toe-tapping forward momentum, even if its heroine is mainly going in circles. The most affecting moment comes right at the end, when the occasional narrator returns to tell us that everything we've just seen happened 10 years ago. The characters we've been watching are already dead, at least as we know them, and the story's end was set before it started.