Death
"Delaware, they had a hanging problem that they were totally unable to deal with."--Fred Leuchter, Jr.
Tonight's double feature started with Uwe Boll's 2003 "film" House of the Dead. While he does seem to show some improvement from his earlier films, I am afraid I cannot recommend this film. There are very few films that I can think of that are based on a novel in which there are clips of actual pages from the novel in the film. I suppose this is the reason that Boll chose to insert clips from the video game that he was adapting into the film. Actual clips from the game of zombies being shot in the chest from the first person shooter. Perhaps this would mean something to me if I had actually played the game, but instead it just distracted me from the bullet-time battle roll call in the scene in which seven different "characters" get their time in front of the rapidly rotating camera, kicking, punching, slashing, shooting, and grenading the undead.
Then I followed with Errol Morris's superb 1999 documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. The timing of Netflix sending me this film was very interesting, concidering the arguments in the Supreme Court today concerning the method of executions. (Listen to Nina Totenberg read some of those arguments here.) In Morris's original cut of Mr. Death, the entire film was Fred Leuchter telling us the story of his life, how he grew up going to work with his father at the Massachusetts state prison and later developed a more systematic approach to first the electric chair, and then later gallowses, lethal injection machines, and gas chambers. He gives a fascinating account of how the states had just thrown together the chairs that they executed people without much study. When Delaware pulled out their gallows after not using for 30 years, it fell apart. If we as a society decide to use the death penalty, I think we do need to have someone like the person that Leuchter presents.
However, after showing his initial cut to a few friends, Morris returned to the editing bay and decided to add additional points of view. After Leuchter made a name for himself as an expert in creating execution machines, he was asked to use that knowledge in the defense of Ernst Zündel, who was being tried in Toronto for publishing false statements that would incite racial hatred with his Holocaust-denying book Did Six Million Really Die? The Zündel defense hired Leuchter to go to Auschwitz and look for evidence that there were no gas chambers there. Leuchter found no evidence and was therefore convinced that there could have been no Holocaust, and then afterwards his life fell apart. This is truly a fascinating film, especially University of Waterloo professor Robert Jan van Pelt's powerful yet simple critique of Leuchter's trip.
Errol Morris such a great filmmaker. The climax of his film The Thin Blue Line is nothing more than a shot of an audio tape recorder playing the confession that led to the release of an innocent man from prison in Texas. In Mr. Death, a simple rewinding the tape and asking us to remember the room that Fred Leuchter is in is so powerful. So maybe, just maybe, I will allow for the possibility that including a clip from the video game that inspired the film is a good choice. Maybe, but only if Errol Morris is adapting the game.
Tonight's double feature started with Uwe Boll's 2003 "film" House of the Dead. While he does seem to show some improvement from his earlier films, I am afraid I cannot recommend this film. There are very few films that I can think of that are based on a novel in which there are clips of actual pages from the novel in the film. I suppose this is the reason that Boll chose to insert clips from the video game that he was adapting into the film. Actual clips from the game of zombies being shot in the chest from the first person shooter. Perhaps this would mean something to me if I had actually played the game, but instead it just distracted me from the bullet-time battle roll call in the scene in which seven different "characters" get their time in front of the rapidly rotating camera, kicking, punching, slashing, shooting, and grenading the undead.
Then I followed with Errol Morris's superb 1999 documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. The timing of Netflix sending me this film was very interesting, concidering the arguments in the Supreme Court today concerning the method of executions. (Listen to Nina Totenberg read some of those arguments here.) In Morris's original cut of Mr. Death, the entire film was Fred Leuchter telling us the story of his life, how he grew up going to work with his father at the Massachusetts state prison and later developed a more systematic approach to first the electric chair, and then later gallowses, lethal injection machines, and gas chambers. He gives a fascinating account of how the states had just thrown together the chairs that they executed people without much study. When Delaware pulled out their gallows after not using for 30 years, it fell apart. If we as a society decide to use the death penalty, I think we do need to have someone like the person that Leuchter presents.
However, after showing his initial cut to a few friends, Morris returned to the editing bay and decided to add additional points of view. After Leuchter made a name for himself as an expert in creating execution machines, he was asked to use that knowledge in the defense of Ernst Zündel, who was being tried in Toronto for publishing false statements that would incite racial hatred with his Holocaust-denying book Did Six Million Really Die? The Zündel defense hired Leuchter to go to Auschwitz and look for evidence that there were no gas chambers there. Leuchter found no evidence and was therefore convinced that there could have been no Holocaust, and then afterwards his life fell apart. This is truly a fascinating film, especially University of Waterloo professor Robert Jan van Pelt's powerful yet simple critique of Leuchter's trip.
Errol Morris such a great filmmaker. The climax of his film The Thin Blue Line is nothing more than a shot of an audio tape recorder playing the confession that led to the release of an innocent man from prison in Texas. In Mr. Death, a simple rewinding the tape and asking us to remember the room that Fred Leuchter is in is so powerful. So maybe, just maybe, I will allow for the possibility that including a clip from the video game that inspired the film is a good choice. Maybe, but only if Errol Morris is adapting the game.
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