2010 Sundance Film Festival

Storyline pretty predictable, but very well acted and beautiful cinematography. Glad to see African American films about important topics. Enjoyed it. Cant believe they shot it in 18 days!

Who knew a documentary about public schools could be so moving and compelling? The style itself is nothing new and felt a little slick for my taste, but the devastating simplicity of the stories of a handful of kids and their parents who only want to go to a decent school had me in tears from start to finish. The fact that this basic desire is left to l the luck of a lottery (for admission to well-performing charter schools) is utterly heartbreaking. Although you are pulling for these kids and their parents, it almost doesnt matter in the end who is accepted -- you are all too aware that there are millions like them who aren't. The film makes the strong argument for the quality of teachers and the assumption that kids are up to the task regardless of their background as the keys to success, and it also wades into but doesnt fully resolve the difficult ethical questions of teacher unions and workplace protections. These arent easy debates but are worth having. I hope the combination of Davis Guggenheim's compelling film, Geoffrey Canada's vision and heroic determination and Bill Gates' stature and command of the issues (they were present afterwards for the most exciting Q&A I've seen) will bring critical mass of awareness and political will to this problem that Guggenheim and Al Gore brought to climate change in An Inconvenient Truth. Like climate change, this is also the quiet (at least for those of us with means) disaster that we have to wake up to!

I really wanted to like this film. It's a gutsy project about an important subject...but the execution just felt flat to me. The film dragged--people were yawning and checking their watches and many left immediately after a round of polite applause. I got the point that Abu Jandal (former bodyguard to Osama Bin laden and the films protaganist) is a complicated guy and trying to navigate complex sociological and political territory in his portrayal of himself (and in fact seems like a total liar most of the time) to different audiences. And I was interested in the different rifts and interpretations of the old and new guards in Al Qaeda...but somehow in the end it hardly added up to a "lush, gripping novel." I never quite got a sense of who Hamdan (bin Laden's driver, Jandal's brother in law, and on trial in Guantanamo) was and his motivations except through Jandal's filters for the camera, which I utterly distrusted. I deeply appreciate the project of trying to humanize the complexity of these subjects for an US audience, but I guess for me, it didnt work. I wanted to be convinced but still felt distrust for Jandal and his proclaimed "new jihad" and Yemen's Dialogue project for "reformed" jihadis. Are we (and the director) being played?