Sherry Chandler

Liberal Politics as Usual, says the NYTimes, of the Toronto Film Festival, which is showing a bunch of films that will be showing up in my Netflix queue (unless they come to the Kentucky Theater here). In addition to the BBC “Death of a President” and Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke,” there are a number of films that I have not really heard much about:

Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck’s documentary “Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing” is more of a bank shot, chronicling that popular country group as it copes with, and rallies from, the venomous reaction to the singer Natalie Maines’s March 2003 remark in London, after the start of the war in Iraq, that “we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” (That episode has hardly been forgotten: the film’s distributor, the Weinstein Company, noted with some surprise that workers hired to lure an audience to an Aug. 22 test screening outside Kansas City, Mo., were verbally assaulted on the street; only 100 seats out of 250 were filled.)

Easily one of the most damning new films, though, is “The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair,” by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, which had its origin in a haunting moment from the couple’s successful 2004 documentary about the Iraq conflict, “Gunner Palace.”

In that film, one handcuffed Iraqi man, pulled from his home in a nighttime raid, says to soldiers and to the camera, repeatedly, that he is a journalist, not a terrorist — and then is hauled off into the dark. The new movie tells the man’s story.

“Gunner Palace,” by the way, is a film you must see.

A much more oblique take on Iraq comes in the director Ken Loach’s insurgent’s-eye view of a rebellion against an occupying power, set in 1920’s Northern Ireland. In Mr. Loach’s new feature, “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” Padraic Delaney stars as a Republican fighter and Cillian Murphy as his brother, a doctor planning to take a job in a London hospital when the British government sends its Black and Tan soldiers to suppress the uprising.

On the home front, Emilio Estevez’s “Bobby,” set against the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, delivers its political message implicitly, invoking its subject without explicitly comparing him to Mr. Bush.

And for my liberal friend(s) in Cleveland, there is this one (though it’s still a question with me whether Democrats lost Ohio or Republicans stole it):

And James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo’s “… So Goes the Nation,” a documentary about the 2004 presidential campaign in Ohio, tries to show why Democrats can’t seem to elect presidents. It uses the Ohio battleground to contrast Democratic chaos and ineptitude with the Republican equivalent of a close-order drill. The film was picked up by IFC Films for release on Oct. 4 in 15 cities and simultaneously on its on-demand cable channels.

And who wants to march in lock step with Karl Rove anyway?

There are more. Read the article.

Just one thing I have to notice by way of the power of word choice. Says David Halbfinger, who gets the by-line:

However they make their points, the various critiques of American policy and its execution have been as impossible to miss here as Michael Moore, the ubiquitous documentary maker, who has been bad-mouthing the administration at every opportunity…

Is it just me or does the term badmouthing carry different implications than, say, criticizing? Us poets notice this kind of thing.

Ah well, Michael may be a wise man after all:

At Thursday night’s premiere of “Borat,” meanwhile, Mr. Moore was drafted into service after the theater’s projector broke down 15 minutes into the movie, which caused the closest thing to a riot by Canadians: a minute of howling from the packed house, then an hour of patient sitting, punctuated by a round of slow clapping and a performance by a self-proclaimed mentalist who got up and began bending spoons.

Mr. Moore, a Toronto favorite who is here to promote his upcoming health-care documentary, “Sicko,” helped kill time by taking audience questions alongside Larry Charles, the director of Mr. Baron Cohen’s movie. He allowed that he had contingency plans to flee to Toronto if things got much worse in the States, and worried aloud that the administration had “a whole list of places we still have to invade.” And when an audience member noted that it was well past 1 a.m., Mr. Moore said it didn’t matter.

“I never go to bed,” he said. “You can’t sleep these days if you’re an American.”

Says Mick Kennedy in the “Editor’s Notes” to the Summer 2006 issue of The Heartland Review:

Our fortunes increase — note that THR received over 550 submissions for the 2006 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize.

Mick also notes that ECTC’s ongoing Morrison Gallery Poetry Series continues to be a success. Last year brought readings by Rane Arroyo, w. loran smith, Lynnell Edwards, and yours truly. Other readers have included Leatha Kendrick, Frederick Smock, Kathleen Driskell, and Frank X. Walker. As a poet, I’m delighted with this opportunity to read to an enthusiastic audience and get paid to do it. Thanks to everybody involved in presenting that series, especially the delightful audience.

The summer issue of THR has poems by

• Rane Arroyo
• Sallie Bingham
• David Cazden
• Lynnell Edwards
• w. loran smith
• Frederick Smock
• Lisa Williams
• Allison Joseph
• Sherry Chandler

An all-star cast. I’m honored to be included.

To obtain a copy or for more information, contact:

The Heartland Review
c/oMick Kennedy, editor
Elizabethtown Community and Technical College
600 College Street Road
Elizabethtown, KY 42701

Mick.Kennedy@kctcs.edu