FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead

John Lennon would have been 66 this year if he hadn’t been shot in 1980. As Yoko Ono points out in The US vs. John Lennon, a new feature documentary on Lennon’s years as a prominent anti-war activist, his memory lives on. (No release date was set at the time of writing, but it is expected to be out in Vancouver in mid-October.)
A slick composite of archived public appearances and interviews with Lennon and Ono, intermingled with current interviews with aging figures from the Vietnam era, this doc pretty much captures Lennon, (as well as any film could) as the iconic symbol of peace and love. That’s both its strength and its weakness, however. While iconoclasts will roll their eyes at its cozy, rose-tinted nostalgia, others will lap up the feel-good, idealistic vibe.
The film catches up with Lennon as he is drifting away from the Beatles and beginning to use his celebrityhood and that cocky Liverpudlian wit to raise awareness about the wrongness of the war in Vietnam. There are the Bed-ins for peace and the first recording of anti-war anthem Give Peace a Chance in Montreal. We also see half a million demonstrators singing Give Peace a Chance in Washington DC, as well as concerts and interviews.
As he became more involved, hanging with what the government considered dangerous political activists in New York, such as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, it becomes more sinister. We learn from apparently remorseful former CIA agents how they spied on Lennon and tapped his phones. (And they said he was being paranoid.) With Lennon’s own songs providing a constant soundtrack to his life, the story then details how the Nixon government, fearing Lennon’s influence during the 1972 election campaign, snarled both himself and Ono in a protracted deportation battle.
Would John have approved of the way his celebrityhood is used here? He’d probably be disappointed at the lack of bite. There’s something a bit too packaged about this film. Even though Gore Vidal draws a parallel between Nixon and the current US regime in blunt terms, The US vs. John Lennon has a safe, retrospective glow. It’s uplifting and occasionally funny, but it also feels mellowed by history.
The Vancouver International Film Festival runs until October 13 at various venues around town. One film that really shook me up was documentary feature Uganda Rising. Made by local directors Jesse James Miller and Pete McCormack, it is unrelentingly gory in its depiction of the horrors and brutality arising from the guerrilla conflict in North Uganda since 1986. Through interviews with victims, peace-brokers and former child abductees of the shadowy Lord’s Resistance Army, we learn how children were forced to butcher even their own family members as part of their “training.”
Narrated with a news-style voiceover, the doc leaves no doubt about the physical and psychological suffering the Acholi people have endured, yet, as the camera follows school children in one of the sprawling, muddy camps, it also shows that, in spite of everything, there is still hope. Although the film begins to connect the dots between Western exploitation in the region and the conflict, it does not provide enough details. It ends on an ambivalent note, suggesting that while reconciliation and the pardoning of former LRA members has helped heal wounds, recovery for the Acholi people is still desperately fragile. (October 10, 3:45pm, Vancity Theatre; October 11, 7pm, Ridge Theatre.)
On a brighter note, Buddha’s Lost Children shows how Khru Bah, a Thai kickboxing champion turned monk, has become an unorthodox father figure for many orphaned or impoverished children from villages in rural Thailand. Filmed over the course of a year, fly-on-the-wall style, it reveals that although some of Khru Bah’s physical childrearing methods may seem questionable, he clearly has won the affection and respect of the villagers and his children.
The mountainous setting for the monastery, with its stables of ponies and lush landscape, and a long trek made by the new boys, or
“novices,” is evocatively shot, but the film could have been more circumspect. For example, Khru Bah’s training as a monk is skimped over and there’s little sign of any drugs that we are repeatedly told are such a prevalent problem in the region. (October 8: Empire Granville 7, 10am; October 9: 6.40pm; October 13: 11:30am.)
Milarepa is the first of a two-part feature from The Cup’s Neten Chokling, a lama in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Milarepa was a 12th century saint, who, as the story goes, learned sorcery as a young man to avenge his wronged family. Unfortunately, this fable is poorly adapted for the screen as a two-dimensional plod with a confusing moral message. Spreading the story thin over two films – the next installment is due next year – doesn’t help either. That said, the Himalayan landscape is breathtakingly shot. You could watch it for that alone. (October 8: Empire Granville 7, 7pm; October 9, 1pm.)

Robert Alstead is making a documentary about Vancouver’s Critical Mass entitled You Never Bike Alone (www.youneverbikealone.com).