-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: July 30, 2007 9:39:45 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: If Huck Finn Met Lucifer, and If Monty Python Told the
Tale ...
Eerie feeling when I first stumbled on it, deja-vu-ish -- been
there, done that ... Check it out!
"The American Ruling Class"
BBC/Cactus Three (indie film, hard to find), 2005
DVD $24.49 + Tax at:
http://www.playusa.com/DVD/Region_1/CART/2-/3256534/-/Product.html?
delete=3256534
Director: John Kirby, Writer: Lewis Lapham, Genre: Documentary
Plot Outline: Does contemporary America have a controlling class?
Is there an American ruling class? And if there is, how do I join?
That's what our two hapless Yale grads, Mike and Jack, want to know.
Lewis Lapham, the jaded socialite-cum-muckraker editor of Harper's,
is Mike and Jack's guide in this star-studded journey through
America's establishment. We get to meet Kurt Vonnegut, Walter
Cronkite, Mike Medavoy, Robert Altman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Vartan
Gregorian, Martin Garbus, Bill Bradley, Larry Summers, James Baker,
Pete Peterson, Hodding Carter, and even the small but insistent
opposition voice of Pete Seeger. Written by Lewis Lapham, and
under John Kirby's direction, the film is an over-the-top sketch,
with some good hard pokes at the complacency of this nation's elite
college graduates, and an occasionally surrealistic touch. The film
provides more evidence that there's plenty of energy in the melding
of documentary and fiction.
Will Mike give up his chance at the Great American Novel and take
that banking job? Should he?
Whatever your answer, you'll love to hear from these mentors in the
ruling class - which might or might not exist. Judge for yourself.
"The American Ruling Class is the most cinematically subversive
film to come along this decade. Led by the extremely lucid and
funny Lewis Lapham, the nation's number one intellectual treasure,
the film takes
us on a luminous quest... Director John Kirby has fashioned a sly
film; it plays with form, but is populist in outreach, transcending
documentary expectations with wit, style and political savvy."
-- Peter Wintonick, Director/Producer Manufacturing Consent: Noam
Chomsky and the Media
The American Ruling Class
(Docu)
By JOHN ANDERSON
A the Press & the Public Project production, in association with
BBC and Cactus Three. Produced by Libby Handros, John Kirby.
Executive producers, Stanley Buchthal, Caroline Camougis, Paula
Silver. Directed by John Kirby. Written by Lewis Lapham.
With: Lewis Lapham, Paul Cantagallo, Caton Burwell, Kurt Vonnegut,
Walter Cronkite, James Baker III, Bill Bradley, William T. Coleman
Jr., Mike Medavoy, Robert Altman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Martin
Garbus, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.
A film about empowerment that leaves you unsure whether or not to
slit your wrists, "The American Ruling Class" is that unusual
animal, the political documentary with high-wattage star power --
but only if your idea of stars is Hodding Carter, Vartan Gregorian
and William Howard Taft IV. Although public TV or cable airings of
the BBC co-venture would seem a natural, theatrical looks less than
a long shot.
Lewis Lapham, that eloquent apologist for progressive politics and
editor of Harper's magazine (which is never mentioned in the film),
wrote this movie with one chief goal in mind: To establish the
nature of America's ruling class.
That this country has a ruling class is never in doubt -- not only
does Lapham state its existence at the beginning of the film, but
his two fictional characters, Jack Bellamy (Caton Burwell) and Mike
Vanzetti (Paul Cantagallo) are Yale grads. Have they ever heard of
Skull and Bones? How about Carlisle Group?
Still, Lapham's characters ask the question of everyone from Robert
Altman to James Baker III, getting everything from frank disclosure
to shameless dissembling (particularly from Baker), as they pursue
Lapham's thesis.
Did we say characters? Yes. "The American Ruling Class" is less
documentary than hybrid, in which musical numbers (one sung by the
beleaguered waiters and waitresses at an International House of
Pancakes) enhance the proceedings delightfully. Too delightfully.
Not only do the numbers emphasize the stiff-bristled artifice of
the rest of the movie, they trivialize the very serious matters
Lapham and helmer John Kirby are trying to explore.
Artifice is the downfall of "The American Ruling Class." Everyone
is acting, and no one is an actor except, perhaps, Cantagallo.
Lapham, himself a beneficiary of venerable WASP privilege, has
written a literate, witty and provocative script, but his screen
persona is smug and patronizing; the various luminaries, many of
whose appearances obviously are rooted in the kinship of
entitlement, are reading their lines and sound it. The awkwardness
of each performance, so to speak, distracts so much from the
subject matter that the film become self-defeating.
The ideas are powerful, but "The American Ruling Class" is a movie
for people with choices, about a country in which people presumably
have fewer and fewer. Only the sequence featuring journalist
Barbara Ehrenreich (then working as a waitress for the Harper's
story that would become her book, "Nickled and Dimed") makes real
solid points about the effect of a class system on a supposed
democracy.
But even Ehrenreich gets to distance herself from the ruling class.
Everywhere in Lapham's story, people who benefit from being part of
the moneyed elite are allowed to explain away their part in the
process, with nary a question being asked.
Lapham does nail Baker, former secretary of State and Treasury for
the Bush I and Reagan administrations. Leaving Baker's home state,
Lapham intones, "In Texas, a man's worth is measured by the amount
of other people's happiness he can possess and destroy." It would
be a better movie if, like this, he showed his fangs more often.
Camera (color, Super 16mm), Mark Benjamin; editors, John Kirby,
Leah O'Donnell; music, Qasim Naqvi, Lucas Johnson-Yahraus. Reviewed
at Tribeca Film Festival (NY, NY Documentary Features), April 26,
2005. Running time: 100 MIN.
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