Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

CRISIS

Acting Presidential (through Sat., Aug. 21, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6575) Young Mr. Lincoln was Wednesday night, but that doesn't mean International House's election-year series has run out of presidential fictions. It's just that the rest don't announce themselves as such. The seven remaining movies are all documentaries of one sort or another, but from Emile de Antonio's scathing Millhouse: A White Comedy to the soft-focus portrait of Ronald Reagan in A New Beginning, they're not shy about rearranging reality to create the president they see, or the one they'd like to.

Inevitably, the nonfiction films in "Acting Presidential" are more silhouettes than portraits, each with a president-shaped hole at its center. For Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (Sat., 7 p.m.), Robert Drew got the kind of White House access no filmmaker has had before or since, and yet John F. Kennedy remains a peripheral figure, overshadowed by brother Bobby and his deputy Nicholas Katzenbach. Bill Clinton ducks into The War Room (which screens following Crisis) now and then, but it's his image that staffers George Stephanopoulos and James Carville are really concerned with protecting. D.A. Pennebaker, who midwifed the campaign documentary as a crew member on Drew's Primary (1960), co-directed this seminal look at modern spin control. Eye-opening as some scenes are, you need only watch campaign staffers scrambling for land lines to contemplate how much more aggressive the process has become in the last 12 years.

The same weakness afflicts Spin (Sat., 1 p.m.), Brian Springer's 1995 documentary, culled from unaired excerpts of TV satellite feeds. (The concept is similar to James Ridgeway and Kevin Rafferty's 1992 doc Feed.) There's a mild voyeuristic thrill in watching an off-air Larry King recommend his favorite prescription painkillers to then-President George H.W. Bush, or Pat Robertson brushing off a caller's charges of insensitivity, then half-whispering "That guy's a homo" once they've gone to commercial. But a lot of Springer's footage is no more than glorified bloopers, unguarded moments that reveal that public figures occasionally pick their noses. Far creepier, and more revealing, is A New Beginning, a 20-minute propaganda short straight from the Reagan Library. Hailing the Great Obfuscator's first term and paving the way for his second, the film, which preceded Reagan's acceptance speech, conjures an America of dappled sunlight and new pickup trucks, a nation united on the couch. "If anybody has any questions about where he's coming from, it's their fault," burbles one affable Reaganite. "Maybe they don't have a television."

After the Reagan and Clinton presidencies, it's easy to forget how adept even their less charismatic predecessors were at using the idiot box to move a nation. (If Bush II has proved anything, it's that you can stage a successful play even if your lead actor can't remember his lines.) Emile de Antonio, whose landmark Point of Order underscored the role of television in ending Joseph McCarthy's reign of terror, devotes several sparingly-edited minutes of Millhouse (Fri., 8 p.m.) to Richard Nixon's 1952 "Checkers speech," in which Nixon fended off accusations of financial improprieties by divulging his entire financial history on live television. It's a masterpiece of insincere honesty: Nixon underlines his modest upbringing, adding his wife's "respectable Republican cloth coat" and the family's cocker spaniel to his list of assets. Though Nixon jokes about removing television sets from the White House after he's elected president (LBJ famously watched several sets at once), staffers recount Nixon's acute camera-consciousness, making sure, for example, that his head was fully raised before the camera cut in, so he'd appear to be facing the lens (and thus the public) head-on.

De Antonio's contempt for Nixon is obvious, right down to the intentional misspelling of his middle name, but not all his exhibits are as damning as he seems to think. (It's Fahrenheit 9/11 all over again.) The opposite flaw afflicts America Is Hard to See (Thu., 8 p.m.), De Antonio's record of Eugene McCarthy's unsuccessful run for the Democratic nomination in 1968. The movie ultimately paints McCarthy's exclusion from the embattled Chicago convention of 1968 as a failure of democracy, but you're left with the impression that the feeding frenzy McCarthy stirred up ultimately put Nixon in the White House. McCarthy succeeded in toppling the sitting president of his party, but the public scuffling over the nomination, not to mention the violent confrontations that spun off from it, ultimately sent the country scurrying into Nixon's arms. Then as now, a Democratic candidate was hard-put to be antiwar without seeming like a softie. Let's hope a few Kerry volunteers are on hand to take notes.

Lost Film Fest 9.0 (through Sun., Aug. 22, www.lostfilmfest.com/lff9) Take your pick of anti-globalization documentaries at the Lost Film Fest's ninth edition, which founder Scott Beibin says might be the last weeklong affair, though the LFF will continue as a more compact touring program. One of the few docs to push past problems toward solutions (unless you count hurling flaming projectiles at riot cops, charmingly depicted in The Fourth World War) is The Take (Thu., 10 p.m., C.O.D.E. Space, 48th St. and Woodland Ave.), written by No Logo's Naomi Klein, which follows a group of Argentinean workers as they attempt to reopen their shuttered factory under collective control. As with all the LFF films we've seen, healthy skepticism is a must, as their unapologetic agitprop leaves gaping questions unanswered. Exhibit A: the self-aggrandizing muckraking of Greg Palast, whose Bush Family Fortunes (Sun., 7:30 p.m., The Rotunda, 40th and Walnut sts. ) closes the fest. Palast's reporting on the Bush family's foreign connections figures heavily in Fahrenheit 9/11, but his faux film noir persona (complete with fedora and khaki overcoat) is merely risible, the sneering tone of his voiceover instantly off-putting. (He's like the investigative reporting version of A.J. Benza.) Twice, Family Fortunes shows a Florida's head of elections storming out of an interview, Palast shouting hypothetical accusations after him, without ever showing the question that prompted the walkout. Bush Family Fortunes has its revelations, but you'd need an investigation of your own to sort out fact from innuendo.

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