Last week, indieWIRE ran a provocative piece by Anthony Kaufman about the financial woes of THINKfilm, one of my favorite indie distributors. Kaufman detailed the cash flow problems at THINKfilm, which were causing acrimony between the distrib and many of its filmmakers, who were alleging that the distributor hadn't paid what it owed to them, as well as to advertising companies charged with marketing films under THINKfilm's banner.

Now indieWIRE has a follow-up piece up by Eugene Hernandez, which says that director/producer Alex Gibney, whose film Taxi to the Darkside won the best documentary Oscar this year and was supposed to receive a major theatrical push by THINKfilm following its win, is seeking more than $1 million in damages from the ailing distributor.

While THINKfilm did pay the film's producers the minimums guaranteed by their contract on May 5, Gibney's complaint alleges that THINKfilm failed to disclose that it did not have the financial resources to support the film's theatrical push following its Oscar win, and "jeopardized the success of the film by failing to abide by the terms of contracts it entered into with public relations firms and advisers and failed to pay such firms for work done and expenses incurred."

We told you a couple ago about the Cinema Eye Awards for documentary filmmaking, the brainchild of director/blogger (and all-around great guy) AJ Schnack and IndiePix. The awards were held last night at the IFC Center, and thanks to former Cinematical editor/current Spout queen Karina Longworth and her impressive Twittering skills, I was able to feel almost like I was there at the awards, instead of sitting here at home continuing to nurse this seemingly endless SXSW cough-from-hell I've been fighting all week.

Here (well, after the jump) are the award winners, per Karina. For the far more entertaining version, you can read the text of her live-posting over on her Twitter site as well. I expect the Cinema Eye folks will add a list of the winners to their site once the open bar closes at the after party, or at least sometime today, so here's a link to the official site as well. We at Cinematical appreciate both Karina's tenacity and her ability to provide entertaining awards coverage in 140-character Twitterings while, presumably, also enjoying the open bar at the party. That's dedication.

http://twitter.com/KarinaLongworth?page=2

Back in January, we wrote about director AJ Schnack's (Kurt Cobain: About a Son) efforts to create awards for non-fiction filmmaking that would be ... somewhat more relevant than the Academy Awards. Back when the Oscar shortlist for docs came out, Schnack wrote an angry diatribe about the process and the films selected (and, more importantly, those that were not selected) that echoed the sentiments of many of us who write about, or make, documentary films.

Although I'm not at all displeased that Alex Gibney ultimately won the Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and would have been equally happy if No End in Sight had won, there were some glaring omissions in the Oscar shortlist that were truly appalling, most notably In the Shadow of the Moon and King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

Here's a dirty little secret: sometimes film critics don't want to see movies. It's true. When we start out, ambitious and full of energy, we'll sit through any old thing, but after a while, when the formulas begin to wear on you, you can smell a turkey from watching the trailer. Sometimes you can smell a stinkbomb just from the title alone. I thought, for fun, I'd go over some titles I haven't seen and give you an idea of what might go through a critic's head. Of course, some of this is self-justification for not being able to see every single movie that comes through town. Frankly, it's impossible for one person to do, and so we resort to a porcupine-like defense, just in case anyone asks us about a movie we haven't seen: "It looked terrible."

Here's one: How to Cook Your Life (1 screen). What is that? Without even looking, it sounds like a bunch of actresses on a single set with too much dialogue, probably a lot of violin music and tears. And what could it mean? Why would I want to cook my life? It sounds painful, doesn't it? (It's really a film by the German director Dorris Dorrie about trying to equate cooking with Zen philosophy.) Then we have Hitman (9 screens), which irritated critics to no end, but seems to have pleased a fair number of moviegoers. Question: how many hitman movies have you seen in the past five or ten years? Is there an actor working today who hasn't played a hitman? What kind of brass cojones must it have taken to actually use the title "Hitman" on a middling, forgettable piece of work like this one?

As my wife said, it's just not the Oscars if there's nothing to complain about. However, I was impressed that two of the year's toughest films, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (389 screens) and Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men took the most nominations. Typically, the Academy is attracted to much less challenging and easy-to-categorize films (like Atonement). Both films are fairly bleak in their vision, but I suspect There Will Be Blood will sneak out ahead for two reasons: it's an epic, and epics almost always win. And, to quote a character from Sunset Boulevard, it "says a little something" about the current sociopolitical climate.

One of the biggest controversies cropped up over the foreign film category, which came up with five nominations that no one has ever heard of. (The Counterfeiters opens sometime next month and Mongol opens in June.) Not to mention that they ignored top contenders like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (opening this week) and Persepolis (30 screens). Thankfully the outrage has begun discussions on changing the stupid, ancient rules for the category. Currently these rules require each country to submit one film, and multi-national films, such as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (107 screens), to be disqualified. A small group of "specialists," rather than the Academy as a whole, votes on the small list of films. The documentary category was less obscure, and although I saw 19 documentaries in 2007, I only managed to see two of the five nominees, No End in Sight and Sicko. I have an Academy screener for Operation Homecoming that I hope to catch soon, and Taxi to the Dark Side (1 screen) is screening for Bay Area press next week.

You're probably thinking you don't need another documentary about the Iraq War. But you're wrong, because Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side is finally being released, and the film is one of three necessary docs dealing with Iraq. The triad, which would make a great box set if only the same company distributed all three films, also includes Charles Ferguson's very highly acclaimed Sundance jury-award-winner No End in Sight (on which Gibney was a producer) and Patricia Foulkrod's under-appreciated 2006 work The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends.

What do they have in common? Well, if you put them together and watch them all, you'll feel like an expert on three important aspects of the war and its most significant repercussions. They may not tell you everything there is to know about the Iraq War, but they're more thorough and informative than most. No End in Sight is the most directly involved with the actual conflict, from its causes to its effects (read Kim's review here). The Ground Truth more specifically deals with the American soldiers, but in an all-encompassing, training-to-homecoming portrait of modern combat and its consequences (see my review here). Taxi to the Dark Side is sort of like a flip side to that film, though it doesn't necessarily focus on the enemy combatants. Instead it deals with suspected enemies, soldiers or otherwise, who are held and oftentimes tortured in prisons such as Iraq's Abu Ghraib.

Taxi to the Dark Side somewhat falls outside the box (set), though, in that it really isn't about Iraq. In fact, Gibney insists that his documentary is not an 'Iraq film.' Yes, it does feature a lot of details about, and footage of, Iraq's Abu Ghraib, which is probably the best-known prison of its kind, but it also prominently features Bagram, in Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, the two other facilities used in the detention and interrogation of individuals presumed to be involved with Al-Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgency or any other enemy of the U.S. in its "War on Terror."

Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room won acclaim for its inventive, expressive but journalistic and rigorous expose of the facts and finances behind a story that came to represent turn-of-the-millennium capitalism gone mad. Now, with Taxi to the Dark Side, which opens today in New York and expands nationwide in the coming weeks, Gibney's looking at a very different kind of power, and a very different level of abuse. Winner of Best Documentary honors at both the Tribeca and Chicago International film festivals, Taxi's uncompromising look at the death of an Afghan cab driver named Dilawar at the hands of U.S. military interrogators at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan in 2002 has made it one of the films selected for the 'shortlist' of films eligible for this year's best Documentary Oscar. Gibney's interest in the material isn't just academic or moral; his late father served as an interrogator for the U.S. Navy during World War II. At the same time, Gibney's film is fiercely principled: " ... if you study Osama Bin Laden's words, if you study other terrorist groups throughout history, the goal is to get liberal democratic societies to publicly undermine their own principles. Well, in this case? Mission accomplished." Gibney spoke with Cinematical in San Francisco. Also, you can listen to the interview by clicking below:





Cinematical: Your previous film, (about) the last days of Enron, was similarly about the excesses of power, but a lot lighter. Were you looking for something that didn't quite have the kind of comedic potential for your next project, or did you stumble across Taxi to the Dark Side in a moment of fortune?

Alex Gibney: I guess I stumbled across it -- the way someone would stumble across a corpse in a dark room. It was brought to me, in fact I was on a panel talking about Enron, and a very angry attorney who was on that panel said "if I helped get together some of the money, would you do (Taxi to the Dark Side)?" And I said I would. And my father also encouraged me to do it, because he was a Naval Interrogator during World War II; I felt honor-bound to do the film, but it was a tough one to do, it was a very dark topic. But I will tell you that in earlier cuts, I tried to render this subject in a tone that was more similar to Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, that had dark humor in it. Because there was dark humor to be found in this story. But I found that viewers, as we showed this story to them, once they saw and heard the details as to how Dilawar was murdered, they weren't in any mood for jokes. This tended to be a much more serious subject that took us to a much darker place.

Cinematical: Say what you will about the excesses of Enron, but at least they didn't kill anyone; automatically, you're dealing with that (in Taxi to the Dark Side). Someone brought you the kernel of this story; was it your decision to focus on Dilawar, to follow that one narrative thread through the process?

AG: Yes, it was my decision to focus on Dilawar. Because you can't make films about things and sort of abstract ideas; you have to make films about characters, about people. And the story of Dilawar, to me, seemed very powerful. Because he was a pure innocent. And there was something that haunted me in Tim Golden's original article; he had said, I think in the very last page of the article, a very long, front-page piece in the New York Times, that they discovered on day three of a five-day interrogation that Dilawar was almost certainly innocent. And yet over the next two days, they tortured him mercilessly anyway. And it told me something about the kind of momentum of torture has that was haunting to me. So, for those two reasons, it felt right. And the other key reason for the Dilawar story, I think, was that what was interesting about the Dilawar story is that as you follow it, it's kind of a murder mystery; it takes you to different parts of the torture system; the people who interrogated him are sent to Abu Ghraib; the people in his taxi are sent to Guantanamo -- in effect to cover up the fact that they had arrested an innocent man. And all those roads ultimately lead to the White House. So for all those reasons, the Dilawar story seemed a great one, the most right.

UPDATE: The Daily Variety story was incorrect; the MPAA actually rejected a trailer for Taxi to the Darkside, and not the poster. Here's the Variety clarification: "The MPAA did not approve a theatrical trailer for Alex Gibney's documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side" that contained scenes with nudity and images that the org deemed inappropriate for all audiences. ThinkFilm has not yet officially submitted the one-sheet art referenced in a Dec. 19 story, but Daily Variety failed to indicate that it was the trailer that was rejected and not the one-sheet artwork."

ThinkFilm is prepping an appeal to the MPAA, but this one doesn't concern a film's rating. It's about a poster. The poster art for Taxi to the Dark Side -- a documentary about the pattern of torture practice that is on the short list for Academy Award consideration -- is causing a stir due to its depiction of a hooded man being led by American soldiers. The original news photo was taken by photographer Shaun Schwarz, and had been censored before -- when the military erased it from Schwarz' camera. (He later retrieved it from his hard drive.) Variety is reporting that the MPAA has officially rejected the poster, and if ThinkFilm goes forward with the marketing, they could have their "R" rating revoked. Taxi to the Dark Side is due for release on January 11th.

An MPAA spokesman says "We treat all films the same. Ads will be seen by all audiences, including children. If the advertising is not suitable for all audiences it will not be approved by the advertising administration." Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), the film's writer, producer, and director says, "Not permitting us to use an image of a hooded man that comes from a documentary photograph is censorship, pure and simple. Intentional or not, the MPAA's disapproval of the poster is a political act, undermining legitimate criticism of the Bush administration. I agree that the image is offensive; it's also real." I've got to side with Gibney on this one. This isn't horror movie imagery cooked up to sell tickets, this is really happening in the world today. And considering the explosive subject matter, I feel the poster is tastefully done. What do you guys think?

Documentary filmmakers deserve much more love and attention than they receive. One way to get more attention is to make the list of 15 documentaries short-listed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Variety has this year's list and cites three Iraq War-themed films as being "center stage": Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro's Body of War, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight (which Cinematical's Kim Voynar gave high marks when it played at Sundance) and Richard Robbins' Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.

Kim is a self-styled "documentary dork" -- her words, not mine -- and wrote a column two months ago about films she thought "have (or ought to have) a shot at Oscar gold." She included No End in Sight, as well as the following docs that all made the short list: Sean Fine and Andrea Nix-Fine's War/Dance, Michael Moore's Sicko, Daniel Karslake's For the Bible Tells Me So, and Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's Nanking. Kim was pulling for Logan Smalley's Darius Goes West, which sadly did not make the list. Other notable exclusions included David Singleton's In the Shadow of the Moon and Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

Here are the remaining eight that did make the list. First, the ones we've covered so far: Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire, Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen's The Rape of Europa, Weijun Chen's Please Vote for Me and Peter Raymont's A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman. Next, the ones we haven't seen yet: Steven Okazaki's White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which has played on HBO), Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side (due for release in January), Bill Haney's The Price of Sugar and Tricia Regan's Autism: The Musical.

Now the Academy's Documentary Branch will review the 15 films and narrow the list still further to the final five nominees, which will be announced on January 22.