New Afghan War doco is a "tour de force"

I don't know if any Australian dustributor has picked this one up yet, but if not, I hope they do soon. If this New York Times report is to be believed, Hell and Back Again is a punch in the ribs of an Afghan war documentary:


"As the Afghan war neared a decade’s worth of combat, casualties and headlines, the photographer and filmmaker Danfung Dennis was looking to jolt people’s consciousness.
 'I was frustrated with photojournalism, and I was frustrated with society back in the U.S. being indifferent to the war,” said Mr. Dennis, who had covered Afghanistan as a still photographer in 2006. “I moved into video and new media to try to shake people up — to show the war’s brutal reality in an honest way.'


"Did he ever. Hell and Back Again, his new award-winning documentary film about the war, is a tour de force that breaks new ground in the documentary tradition, combining chilling reportage with sometimes dreamy or drugged-up sequences. The film – with clinical precision – peels away the daily headlines to expose the reality of the Afghan war and the devastating burden carried by American service members back home..."


Full report and trailer at NYT Lens section.

Wall Street trader blurts the truth: Goldman Sachs rules the world, not governments

Postscript, Sep 29, 11.15pm PST: Despite claims by the BBC that this interview was no hoax (see addendum below), apparently it was: the UK Daily Telegraph has found that Rastani is not a trader but a public speaker.


"In the interview Mr Rastani described himself as an independent trader. Elsewhere he claims he's an "investment speaker".


"Instead of operating from a plush office in Canary Wharf Mr Rastani works and lives with his partner Anita Eader in a £200,000 semi in Bexleyheath, south London. The house, complete with a mortgage from Royal Bank of Scotland, belongs to her not him. He is a business owner, a 99pc shareholder in public speaking venture Santoro Projects. Its most recent accounts show cash in the bank of £985. After four years trading net assets are £10,048 - in the red.


"How a man who has never been authorised by the Financial Services Authority and has no discernible history working for a City institution ended up being interviewed by the BBC remains a mystery."


(Not to say that what he had to say wasn't true, of course - but it does explain his apparent bluntness)


My original post:

This makes Gordon Gekko look like a left wing hippy - easy to see why it's going viral (love the bit where the BBC reporter comments that her floor staff were standing there with jaws dropped in amazement). Every stereotype about evil Wall Street traders confirmed - but with an honesty that is almost disarming. 


Or is it?  If this guy is salivating at the prospect of a major economic crash because he'll be making a lot of money out of it, then perhaps this  apocalyptic rant is merely a cynical ruse designed to heighten the market fears that might bring about that collapse.

Addendum: 

 Statement on BBC News channel interview with trader Alessio Rastani

Date: 27.09.2011

The BBC have today issued the following statement regarding an interview with trader Alessio Rastani on the BBC News channel yesterday (Monday 25 September):

"We've carried out detailed investigations and can't find any evidence to suggest that the interview with Alessio Rastani was a hoax. He is an independent market trader and one of a range of voices we've had on air to talk about the recession."
BBC Press Office

Documentary Discovers Print Media in Crisis Shock

The documentary PAGE ONE: INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES has opened in NSW, Queensland and ACT in limited release. I can't see it staying around for long, but I wouldn't recommend anyone - even journalists or media junkies - rushes out to see it before it disappears. You really won't miss anything seeing it at home on DVD or download, and in any case, it's not nearly as compelling as it should have been.

Here's an extract from my review in The Weekend Australian

 

Page One: Inside the New York Times is not the most inspiring of titles for a documentary. Why not call it “Mediacide”, or “Black Print”? How about “Paper on the Precipice”? None of these would exaggerate the contents of a film that tells of the deep crisis of old media through the lens of one of its most famous institutions.

Director Andrew Rossi sets the tone immediately with a roll call of recent US newspaper closures before going on to explore the economic crisis engulfing The New York Times – widely regarded, of course, as one of the most influential newspapers not only in the US but the world. The paper is but one of one of 100s of inky titles with no apparent long term future thanks to the crumbling of its business model amid the continuing revolution in digital communications.

There’s something else that’s odd about the film’s long-windedly prosaic title: while it purports to be accurately descriptive, it lacks precision. The film spends a year not so much inside the paper in general as just one of its sections, the media department. 

That’s a smart strategy for examining the broader story of the crisis facing newspapers in the western world, but in tackling it the film often disappoints. Surely one of the chief reasons many of us enjoy watching documentaries is that we gain new insights, have our curiosity piqued and learn something new. This film, while moderately engaging, tells me hardly anything I didn’t already know.

 

Over the past five or so years the topic of falling newspaper circulations, staffing levels and revenue and the rise of social media and aggregate news websites has been so thoroughly reported upon – on the internet, and to its shame, somewhat belatedly by the newspaper industry itself - that a film on this topic needed to come up with a particularly searching analysis. What we get here is more like a ticking of the boxes...