One-liners: Docs

Quick hits on a couple of documentaries:

KORDAVISION (2005) (C+) - A disappointingly amateurish production tracks the origins of the iconic image of Che Guevara snapped by Albert Diaz -- who labored under the nom de zoom "Korda" -- in the heady early days of the Cuban revolution and reproduced on T-shirts and posters to this day. This documentary apparently was shot with a Sony digital camera, but the quality is more along the lines of a family birthday party in the 1980s captured on videotape. And Korda himself proves to be a surprisingly dull subject for a film. He was essentially a propagandist for the first decade of Castro's Cuba who was lucky enough to be in the right spot for the Che shot and a few other memorable images. Most of the film has him, in his dotage, reminding everyone he sees that he's the one who created the Che visual or the one of a little girl clutching a piece of wood as her "doll." He and his fellow photogs come off as over-the-hill braggarts rather than respected artists. The only reason, though, to watch this film (as a rental, so you can fast-forward) is for the scenes of the men meeting with Castro a dozen years ago (most of the footage was shot around 2000). The Cuban leader, still spry four decades after the revolution, banters with the four men like kindly old Uncle Fidel; it all has a found-footage/home-movie feel to it and is a rare glimpse of the Cuban leader in casual mode rather than in his chest-puffing world-leader guise.

THE REVISIONARIES (incomplete) -I watched the one-hour version (on PBS' "Independent Lens"), which failed to sustain much drama in this recounting of the Texas school board's attempts to skew their textbook requirements away from hard sciences and toward a more fundamentalist view of history, social studies and science. (And, as goes Texas, so goes the rest of the nation, according to the dictates of the textbook industry.) We get a focus on the Bad Guy, a dentist who leads the conservative majority of the board, but the parallel story of his bid for re-election seems rushed. And the extensive footage of board meetings seems overdone. I'll reserve judgment on this one. The full version is coming to the Guild Cinema in March.


And our random one-liner comes from "Attenberg," where a Greek father who is dying tells his daughter:

"We built an industrial colony on top of sheep pens and thought we were making a revolution. I leave you in the hands of a new century without having taught you anything."