It's also about how this state of affairs was not incidentally foreshadowed by the information-managing principles espoused by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, as well as by the ruling- party ogres in George Orwell's prophetic novel "1984."

As NYU professor of media studies Mark Crispin notes in the doc, "[Goebbels] said once, and this is an example of how sly he was...that what you want in a media system -- he meant the Nazi media system -- is to present an ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity."

Shown last October at the Hampton's Film Festival (where it received a glowing review from VARIETY's Ronnie Scheib), ORWELL is a brilliantly assembled piece of anti-corporate, anti- Bush, fuck-you-Rupert-Murdoch populist propaganda.

The word "propaganda" means an agenda and a lack of balance, and in this respect Pappas's doc undoubtedly qualifies. And yet it seems awfully smart and perceptive and grounded in fact (or at least what seem to me like credible-sounding assertions). My judgement is that it's telling truths that the mainstream news media will never reveal or cop to. Besides, don't they spread their own brand of propaganda around the world, 24-7?

ORWELL was submitted to Sundance programmers within the required deadline period (Pappas mentioned Shari Frilot as one Sundance staffer he believes saw it), but it was turned down.

The doc begins early on by asking in a voice-over, "Can lies become truth? Could a media system controlled by a few global corporations with the ability to overwhelm all competing voices, be able to turn lies into truth? Is there a pattern in which the ways certain stories are covered and then dropped, or never even pursued?"

Noting that the mainstream media system is basically a subsidiary of corporate America, it asks if big-media companies have become an anti-Democratic force in this country.

It goes on to present the case that the news media companies aren't as interested in exposing facts or keeping an eye on political corruption as much as perpetuating their own power as the shapers of a kind of dozing, status-quo, no-rough-edges view of the way things work, while scrupulously avoiding hard truths about same.

ORWELL needs to be seen at the very least as an exceptional piece of political provocation. And it really ought to be distributed in theatres before it goes to cable and DVD. Pappas says he has faith that the film will be in theatres by next April or thereabouts. It would probably be wise to have it playing before Michael Moore's FARENHEIT 911 is released next August, so as to avoid competition from another lefty documentary.

Because it's my idea of an inspirational warning-cry movie, I have no trouble believing Pappas -- a 50ish, amiable filmmaker from Long Island who's directed two indie-level dramas (SOME FISH CAN FLY, NOW I KNOW) -- when he says several folks who attended a recent Salt Lake City screening of his film formed a long line in order to shake his hand and just say "thank you."

There isn't anyone out there who doesn't feel suspicious about what we're being fed these days. The appeal of ORWELL is that it seems to articulate precisely and succinctly what the hell is going on.

ORWELL explores the conflicts of interest that make the multi-national corporate owners of the media unwilling to really dig into stories that might have some kind of perceived negative effect on their incomes or political allegiances.

It gets into the lack of general reporting about the myths of deregulation, and how Bush lackeys like FCC head Michael Powell (son of Colin) have shilled and played dumb about it.

It looks at how the rich-favoring argument against the "death tax" issue has been sold by the Bush administration without the news media saying boo.

It observes how the news media completely ignored an insider-trading story about Bush, but wouldn't stop flogging the Monica Lewinsky thing to death.

It recalls how GE honcho Robert Welch, who owns NBC, walked into that network's news studio on election night 2000 and demanded that the anchors call it in favor of George Bush.

It examines the news media's ignoring a BBC-reported story about Florida Governor Jeb Bush's purging of a large block of mostly black voters with alleged criminal backgrounds a few months before the 2000 election.

And that's just a taste.

Pappas wasn't able to get any big-time print reporters from TIME or NEWSWEEK, or any TV news guys like Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw or Chris Matthews, to go on camera and trash the corporations who are paying their salaries -- big surprise. The doc would be stronger if he had, of course; maybe he'll be able to bag a name or two down the road. He told me during a chat yesterday at the Yarrow Hotel that someone from the Howard Dean campaign has asked to meet with him and talk about the film.

The "heads" he uses (and they seem more than sufficient for me) are Charles Lewis, former "60 Minutes" producer and founder of the Center for Public Integrity; Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders; the afore-mentioned Mark Crispin; author and media historian Robert McChesney; author Vincent Bugliosi; and former ABC and CNN producer Danny Schecter, among several others. Clips of Michael Moore giving one of his Bush-bashing speeches are also worked in.

The first clip is of Schecter giving a speech and saying, "We falsely think of our country as a democracy, when in fact it has evolved into a mediaocracy. The news media, which is supposed to check political abuse, is part of the political abuse."

Then Crispin comes on and says, "These commercial entities now vie with the government for authority over our lives. They are not a healthy counterweight to government. They are as big as, if not bigger than, government, and they work closely with government."

Lewis describes the media corporations as collectively "the most powerful special interest in Washington today...not only [because] they give money and lobby and do all the things that industries and companies do in Washington -- they of course control whether or not a politician gets his mug on the tube, and that's power...that's the ultimate power in a political realm...controlling perceptions."

ORWELL ROLLS IN HIS GRAVE is expected to be shown at the American Cinematheque "Best of Slamdance" festival in Los Angeles at the Egyptian theatre, which usually happens in Feburary.

After that it's up to Pappas and whichever distributors he sits down with to throw something together. It should really be seen, this thing. Somebody should step up.

Over and Done

The '04 Sundance Film Festival ran out of steam about two days ago. Sometime late Wednesday afternoon, I'd say. You could feel it everywhere. Familiar faces were missing. Main Street wasn't as crowded. Journalists and ticket-holders were still going to films yesterday (i.e., Thursday), but the spark was gone.

There's a reason that festival programmers always front-load this festival. People quit after five or six days. Seven days max. Even if you're 22 years old and in perfect health, your body rebels at a certain point.

I was totally into my schedule -- 7 am to 1 or 2 am for six or seven days straight...until I wasn't. I could feel the sand draining out of my system on Wednesday night. I was trudging down Main Street with a neutral fuck-me expression. I didn't care what parties were happening or who was there or anything.

I was going to fly home on Saturday, but now I've advanced it by a day, and I never even got to see Harry Thomason and Nick Perry's THE HUNTING OF THE PRESIDENT, which shows for the first time today at 5:30 pm.

The winners you'll be wanting to see when they hit your local theatres are Walter Salles' THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, Andrey Zvyagintsev's THE RETURN (which I still haven't written about, despite having seen it before Sundance), Chris Kentis' OPEN WATER (partly due to the presence of my hands-down favorite actress of the festival, Blanchard Ryan), Joshua Marston's MARIA FULL Of GRACE, Bernardo Bertolucci's THE DREAMERS, Ondi Timoner's DIG!, Christian Johnston's SEPTEMBER TAPES, and Stacy Peralta's RIDING GIANTS.

Bum Steer

I wasn't sensitive or feminist-minded enough to fall for Jessica Sharzer's SPEAK, which David Poland tipped me about Tuesday night. He said the film proves that Sharzer has chops as good as any studio-recognized helmer, and that "she may be the next big woman director."

I don't think so. I felt myself pulling away only minutes after it began. It's full of not-quite-right behavior. Some of the performances feel broad and over-amped, which tells you right away the director doesn't have it together. There's a racist history teacher who acts like F. Lee Ermey in FULL METAL JACKET without the profanity -- bullshit. There's a new-to-the-school female acquaintance who seems way too chatty and animated, like she's in a Shawn Levy comedy.

SPEAK is a drama about a high-school girl (Kristin Stewart) who's been labeled a squealer by classmates because she called 911 and brought the cops to a wild party everyone was attending because she'd just been raped and wanted help. As ghastly as any rape is, I don't think any kid outside of an attempted homicide victim would do that. A rape victim can go right to the police or her parents and press charges and whatever else, but you never bring cops to a parent-less house where your friends are drinking. Every high-school kid knows this.

And rapists (or date rapists) don't lean right over their victim who's sitting at a lunch table in a school cafeteria with three other girls, as a bizarre statement of some kind. Unless he's an out-and-out psychopath, a sexual violator would almost certainly avoid confronting his victim.

Even the usually excellent Elisabeth Perkins feels a bit off playing Stewart's slightly neurotic mom. When a movie isn't cutting it, it keeps telling you this over and over, like some obnoxious guy tapping you on the shoulder and going, "Hey...hey!" All right, okay...outta here.

Ask The Dust

Freed from the clutches of an ABC Afterschool Special, I walked out of the Yarrow Hotel and onto Kearns Blvd. and hitched a ride down to the Eccles, where a press screening of Christian Johnson's SEPTEMBER TAPES was about halfway finished. (It had begun showing the same time as SPEAK.) I saw the last 45 minutes or so.

This was more like it. Shot in a hand-held, scattershot style reminiscent at times of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, it's about a journalist and two friends who go to Afghanistan a few months after the 9.11 attacks in order to learn stuff about the search for Osama bin Laden that they think the media isn't reporting.

The part I saw showed them roughing it in the Afghanistan desert, with the camera using a green night-vision function to make out what's happening in the dark. The visitors get attacked by guys on horseback and then another group of cadres, and a couple of them get shot. It's very raw and intense and immediate-feeling. One line that stood out was an Afghani insider telling the visitors that the Americans don't really want to catch Bin Laden...not really. Or else they would have by now.

At the very end of the film a survivor of the adventure, speaking to the camera while waiting for a London Underground train, explains the reason he went to Afghanistan in the first place -- a lover named Sarah who was killed in the World Trade Center disaster.

First Look Media announced a pick-up deal a couple days ago. I'm very keen to see this again, only this time from the beginning.

Errata

OPEN WATER star Blanchard Ryan, who appreciates my words of praise about her being the new Angie Dickinson or Laura Antonelli (take your pick), wrote to say I paired her up with the wrong SUPER TROOPER boyfriend. She says she's going out with Steve Lemme of the comedy group Broken Lizard. Okay.

And the real-life big-wave surfing hero of Stacy Peralta's RIDING GIANTS is named Laird Hamilton already -- not Laird Armstrong, not Lance Hamilton, and not Lash LaRue. This guy should be tapped to be the next Jean Claude van Damme. He's confident, together, focused, powerful...he's got the right stuff.

Staggered

As a favor to Slamdance co-founder Dan Mirvish, and out of my own curiosity, I went to see Dan's "fantabulous" real-estate music comedy OPEN HOUSE on Wednesday evening, at Slamdance headquarters at the Treasure Mountain Inn. It was shown as a "special surprise screening," or words to that effect.

Do I love this movie? Do I love this movie? Do I really, really love this movie?

Well, "love" isn't the term I'd use, exactly....but if you're able to watch it in the midst of the same yea-team spirit of generosity and communal support that I was getting from everyone in the Slamdance screening room that night (a group that included the cast members, of course, and various friends-of-Dan), you'll have a fairly good time.

It'll also help if you're not bothered by a musical starring people who can't sing or deliver a song with any kind of professional panache. (The two exceptions are the great Sally Kellerman and her romantic costar Jerry Doyle, who acquit themselves admirably).

I'm not saying that a little indie musical like this needs to stand up to SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, but it ought to try and compare favorably, say, to Lars von Trier's DANCER IN THE DARK, which had a distinct indie flavor. If you're making a musical, that presumably means you love the genre...right? And you love the songs and dancing and whatnot? Shouldn't some kind of earnest tribute to the magic of good musicals be part of your mission?

I can sing James Taylor's YOUR SMILING FACE pretty well, but I sure as shit wouldn't want to perform it in front of paying customers. The crowd would throw spitballs and pieces of half-eaten bagels at me, and they wouldn't be wrong.

Let's put it to a vote. Does a musical need performers who are able to hit notes (a toughie, that one) and deliver a tune with a semblance of professional expertise? No? It's okay if the actors assassinate each and every song, as long as they do this in a laughing, light-hearted way? Fine. OPEN HOUSE is your oyster.

Should the director of said musical, faced with this deficiency, decide against taking everyone into a recording studio before the start of shooting and use the magic of 21st Century technology to pre-record the songs so as to make everyone sound better? No? You think it's better to have them struggle through the songs live on the set, accompanied by only a piano? OPEN HOUSE awaits your patronage.

The story's about a bunch of lying, money-grubbing adults trying to steal or scam their way into a semblance of happiness or contentment while pretending to be prospective buyers of homes being offered for inspection to any Tom, Dick or Harry walk-in. It's not worth describing any further, trust me.

The actors -- James Duval, Kellie Martin, Anthony Rapp, Ann Magnuson, Robert Peters, Joel Michaely and Eddie Daniels, along with the delightful Doyle and Kellerman -- give it hell. They all should be given a special "spirit" award for making OPEN HOUSE as occasionally amusing as it is.

On top of everything else, the songs (by Mirvish, Lawrence Maddox and Joe Kraemer) aren't very catchy, inventive or inspired -- they have a rote, hammered-out quality. And the video transfer shown at the Wednesday night screening looked cheap and flamey, with that slightly jittery, skip-frame movement that comes from sub-standard equipment.

Dan worked his butt off on this thing and I'm sorry, but aside from the general gameiness of the cast the whole thing is a bust, certainly from a perspective of a ticket-buying audience.

Liberal Smarty-Pants Sees The Passion!

A guy I know saw Mel Gibson's THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST recently, and sent me his reaction this morning (Friday, 1.23). We've been friendly for a few years, and I know him to be a bright and knowledgable film buff.

"My immediate reaction is actually quite strongly negative, but I need to think about it a little bit more before I compose a detailed reaction. My first thoughts are, though, that it's basically two hours of religious porn, as opposed to a film of any memorable worth or innovation.

"The devout, who number in the many millions, will probably think it's fabulous, and I think therefore it will make a lot of money. But did it show me anything I hadn't seen in 20 made-for-TV movies or Hallmark specials? Aside from incessant Adrian Lyne-ish slow-motion photography and a brutal and bloody extended whupping sequence, naah.

"I can sort of understand concerns about the film's alleged anti-Semitism. The only things missing from the depiction of the Jewish elders calling for Jesus' execution was some fey moustache twirling and some guttural hoo-hah-hahs. "Sorry, but I just can't help but be a bit cynical. I really went in buzzed, especially after reading those thumbs-up reactions."

Mix

"Jeffrey my boy, you've reported about crappy grub and crappy Diet Coke with Lime. Why not do a paragraph on that staple of the Utah diet known as 'mix?' Your favorite greasy spoon probably has some. I know that the Park City Hardee's outlet does.

"Mix is a sauce of sorts. It purportedly is a mixture of mayonnaise, ketchup with often a scintilla of pickle juice added for acidic brightness. For Utahns it is de rigeur with French fries, as well as other foodstuffs like onion rings and shrimp. Mix is what constitutes edginess in a state dominated by Mormons. No sex, drugs or nefarious rock 'n roll. In Utah, you get your kicks with mix.

Personally, I hate the stuff. A mayonnaise sauce is way too oleaginous for deep-fried fare or delicate seafood. I think it must have been invented originally as a marital novelty to be used when performing cunnilingus on Marie Osmond types." -- Arizona Joe