Buck

Buck Brannaman has been branded a horse whisperer, based on his ability to work with horses without resorting to the traditional means of “breaking” the animals. He calls his technique “starting.” For lack of a better, more marketable term, that indeed sums up what he teaches. Brannaman helps owners “start” to develop a mutually beneficial working relationship with their horses that is rooted in trust and respect and the awareness of the largely unspoken bond between the two living beings that must exist.

Brannaman travels 40 weeks a year across the United States. He is more of a counselor or psychologist rather than a “whisperer,” and his real subjects are the people paying for these sessions, not the horses. The film captures Brannaman in a series of sessions, preaching and embodying his mannered Southern philosophy. He is a modern-day cowboy, complete with the 10-gallon hat, the boots and the chaps, and again this almost New Age take on training humans and animals to work together.

The film hints at Brannaman’s dark past, the inspiration for his code, and when it is revealed that Brannaman and his brother were abused by their father after their mother’s death, everything comes full circle.

Everyone who works with Buck knows his story and appreciates how it makes him the perfect trainer, but, more importantly, they understand that it has started him on the path to being a better human being. He doesn’t see the horses as pets or beasts of burden; they are living creatures worthy of certain inalienable rights and respect. It should be noted, though, that there are moments, real moments, which will call into question his approach as part of more complex dynamic. How do you stand before ethical and personal challenges where the well-being and fate of another living creature are at stake?

“Buck” is about overcoming fear and pain, breaking free of a cycle of suffering. It offers an example of a man who figured out how to start over and helps others to do the same.

-Michael Tancredi

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

The innocent son of a high-ranking Nazi commandant, Bruno has been largely shielded from the harsh realities of the war. When Bruno discovers that his father has been promoted and that their family will be moving from Berlin into the countryside, he doesn't take the news well. Increasingly bored in his sprawling yet dreary country abode and forbidden by his mother from exploring the backyard, young Bruno searches for something to do. One day, bored and gazing out his bedroom window, Bruno spies what first appears to be a nearby farm; his parents refuse to discuss it, and all of the inhabitants there are curiously clad in striped pajamas. But while Bruno's mother naively believes the "farm" to be an internment camp, her husband has sworn under oath never to reveal that it is in fact an extermination camp specifically designed to help the Nazis achieve their horrific "Final Solution." Eventually defying his mother's rules and venturing out beyond the backyard, Bruno arrives at a barbed wire fence to find a young boy just his age emptying rubble from a wheel barrel. His name is Shmuel, and before long the two young boys become fast friends. But the closer these two boys grow, the more Bruno becomes awakened to the horrors unfolding all around them. His mother is catching on quickly as well, a fact that causes great tension in her marriage to Bruno's father. When Bruno's father announces that the young boy and his mother will be going to live with their aunt in Heidelberg, Bruno grabs a shovel and makes his way to the camp, setting into motion a tragic and devastating sequence of events

Other than what "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is about, it almost seems to be an orderly story of those British who always know how to speak and behave. Yes, the actors speak with crisp British accents, which I think is actually more effective than having them speaking with German accents, or in subtitles. It dramatizes the way the German professional class internalized Hitler's rule and treated it as business as usual.


How can ordinary professional people proceed in this orderly routine when their business is evil? Easier than we think, I believe. Relating it to the Enron executives who knew the entire company was a Ponzi scheme. The laughter of Enron soldiers who joked about killing grandmothers with their phony California "energy crisis." Whenever loyalty to the enterprise becomes more important than simple morality, you will find evil functioning smoothly.



-Michael Tancredi

Prisoner of Paradise

Kurt Gerron was an actor, filmmaker, and musician who rose to acclaim and stardom in Germany in the late '20s and early '30s. Gerron appeared in The Blue Angel alongside Marlene Dietrich, starred in the inaugural production of the groundbreaking The Three penny Opera, and directed a string of successful movie musicals. Gerron, however, was also a Jew, and while he had the good sense to flee to Amsterdam after the early Nazi programs when Holland fell under Axis occupation, he was later deported back to Germany. Unable to join such colleagues as Peter Lorre and Billy Wilder in the United States, Gerron found himself using his talents acting in vile Nazi propaganda films such asDer Ewige Jude (aka The Eternal Jew), and was finally forced to direct Theresienstadt (1944, aka The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews), a remarkable bit of fabrication which portrayed one of the Third Reich's death camps as a safe haven for Jewish refugees. Gerron's reward for his hard work on the film was a one-way trip in a railroad car to a gas chamber. Prisoner of Paradise is a documentary that chronicles Gerron's remarkable and tragic life story, in which his desire to create and his need to work in the limelight led him to both betrayal and his doom.

-Michael Tancredi

Triumph Of the Will

The original intention of this film was to document the early days of the NSDAP, so future generations could look back and see how the Third Reich began. In reality, Triumph of the Will shows historians how the Nazi state drew in the masses through propaganda and also how Adolf Hitler had a unique and terrifying ability to entice crowds to his beliefs by the very power of his words .The film starts with a prolonged orchestral overture using a score by Herbert Windt. Riefenstahl edited the sound into the film later, carefully synchronizing the music, the roars of the crowd, and the cadence of the speeches to the motion. The title, 'TRIUMPH DES WILLENS, slowly fades in with the caption: "Made by order of the Fuhrer 20 years since the outbreak of the World War, 16 years after the beginning of the German misery, 19 months after the beginning of the German Renaissance: 1934, the Party Congress." From white billowing clouds, Hitler's airplane, a symbol of the modernity of the new Reich, breaks through over the gothic city of Nürnberg. The plane casts a cross-like shadow over the city whose streets are filed with long lines of marching men. Like a god, Hitler descends to earth where the noise of the crowds replaces the silence of the heaven.

Germany had not seen images of military power and strength since the end of World War I, and the huge formations of men would remind the audience that Germany was becoming a great power once again. Though the Labor Service men carried spades, they handled them as if they were rifles. The large mass of well drilled party members could be seen in a more ominous light, as a warning to dissidents thinking of challenging the regime.

-Michael Tancredi

Enron:The Smartest Guys in the Room

This is not a political documentary. It is a crime story. No matter what your politics, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" will make you mad. It tells the story of how Enron rose to become the seventh largest corporation in America with what was essentially a Ponzi scheme, and in its last days looted the retirement funds of its employees to buy a little more time.

There is a general impression that Enron was a good corporation that went bad. The movie argues that it was a con game almost from the start. It was "the best energy company in the world," according to its top executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. At the time they made that claim, they must have known that the company was bankrupt, had been worthless for years, had inflated its profits and concealed its losses through bookkeeping practices so corrupt that the venerable Arthur Anderson accounting firm was destroyed in the aftermath.

The film shows how it happened. To keep its stock price climbing, Enron created good quarterly returns out of thin air. One accounting tactic was called "mark to market," which meant if Enron began a venture that might make $50 million 10 years from now, it could claim the $50 million as current income. In an astonishing in-house video made for employees, Skilling stars in a skit that satirizes "HFV" accounting, which he explains stands for "Hypothetical Future Value." Little did employees suspect that was more or less what the company was counting on. During a Q&A session with employees, Lay actually reads this question from the floor: "Are you on crack? If you are that might explain a lot of things. If you aren't, maybe you should be."

-Michael Tancredi

The Pipe

The discovery of a huge and untapped cache of natural gas off the coast of County Mayo seemed a gold mine to Shell Oil, which acquired rights to extract the resource and planned to move it under high pressure by pipe to an inland refinery. The energy behemoth failed to realize, however, that local folk, particularly residents of coastal Rossport, would deem the plan unacceptable because it would disrupt their way of life, endanger the environment and prevent them from supporting themselves by fishing and farming, as their forebears had for generations. Rossport said no and geared up to halt installation of the pipe.

The Pipe is an observational documentary that periodically uses explanatory intertitles. The filmmaker doesn't appear as a character, nor does he editorialize. Yet, it's easy to tell that he supports local folk. Guided by cinematography that captures the wildly majestic beauty of the landscape and sea, you, too, will support the characters that love their unspoiled environment and way of life. Your sentiments will flow for the Rossport citizens.

-Michael Tancredi