To be released tomorrow on DVD

Watching the riveting documentary Burma VJ today, what with everything going on in places like Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea, is a giddy, distressing deja vu experience. Here’s a film about the late-summer 2007 uprisings in Myanmar, one of the most brutally controlled countries on the planet, cobbled together from video and cellphone camera footage, tape recordings, and phone calls. The movie presents reportage as de facto resistance, bearing witness as an act of insurrection. The generals who rule the country share this view: If you are seen videotaping on the streets of Rangoon, you will disappear.

Burma VJ comes from the Dutch filmmaker Anders Ostergaard, but its subjects are the journalists of the Democratic Voice of Burma, anonymous local heroes whose faces we never see for obvious fear of reprisals. “Joshua” is their leader, narrating the film in accented English and patiently re-creating the days and weeks during which he and his colleagues surreptitiously filmed the unrest. Their footage — a virus of dissent — replicated throughout the Internet, eventually popping out into the light of global media outlets like CNN and the BBC.

The events began with the Myanmar government doubling the price of gasoline overnight in August 2007, which led to sporadic protests that coalesced when the nation’s Buddhist monks decided to march en masse. Burma may be run by the military but culturally it’s a theocracy, and you do not mess with the monks. In their wake, emboldened, came the students, then the moderates, then everyone. Within days the streets of Rangoon were filled and the generals were faced with their fiercest popular resistance since 1988. Their worst fear seemed close to being realized: that the protesters would connect with activist Aung San Suu Kyi, an unseen and hugely potent figure after her 1990 election and subsequent years of house arrest.

In 1988, the tanks eventually came out and as many as 3,000 people were killed. The 2007 footage is astounding and inspiring but also unbearably suspenseful, because everyone’s waiting for the other boot to drop. At the same time the sheer numbers of the protesters is cause for elation, proof that the people’s will hasn’t been snuffed out in 40 years of dictatorship. “So many, so many. . .,” we hear a nearby voice murmur at one of the rallies, and it’s as if the national secret is out: We despise this life.

The DVB journalists poke their cameras out of backpacks and hide them under their arms, plunging into the thick of things. At first the monks worry they’re being filmed by government thugs, but when the real government thugs attack, the monks surround and protect the journalists. It’s a heady, surreal moment, church and free press welded together in defiance, and it energizes both the protests and the movie. Even as the news-gathering apparatus in the United States and elsewhere falters under the weight of new technology and outdated business models, Burma VJ is a fresh reminder that reporters can and must serve as a necessary Paine in the rear.

The flashpoint was reached on Sept. 25, when the protesters marched past Aung San Suu Kyi’s house and the cameras captured the distant, pixelated figure of a woman waving to the crowds in solidarity. The next day, the reprisals began in earnest with beatings, shootings, and tear gas. The DVB reporters filmed what they could, including the point-blank shooting death of a Japanese journalist brave or foolish enough to stand in the streets taking pictures. Monks and students were arrested and never returned, and many of Joshua’s reporters were rounded up as well. The military junta understood: What the world cannot see or hear no longer exists.

Burma VJ retorts that eyes and ears are everywhere in our ever-tightening global communications mesh. Voices, too, and they get heard. The generals and the ayatollahs have every right to be scared. Grade: A-minus


Other recent films to be released tomorrow on DVD:

Collapse (2009) A documentary in which investigative journalist Michael Ruppert details his unnerving theories about the inexorable link between energy depletion and the collapse of the economic system that supports the entire industrial world. Factor in variables like personal ideology, current-affairs savvy and where you land on the temperamental continuum between optimism and pessimism, and you will finish watching this DVD either fortified with told-you-so smugness or slightly wobbly on your pins. A chilling monologue of imminent catastrophe, Collapse is not just sobering; it’s a full-on assault. Ruppert’s well-rehearsed rhetoric is shockingly persuasive, and since the majority of his premises are verifiable, any weakness in his argument lies in inferences so terrifying that reasonable listeners may find themselves taking his advice and stocking up on organic seeds. Delusional thinker or tragic prophet (he predicted the current financial crisis almost five years ago), Ruppert emerges finally as an authentic human being, sympathetic even when the film that embraces him is not. Grade: A-minus

Youth in Revolt (2010) Nick Twisp (Michael Cera), a cynical, sex-deprived teenager living a less-than-satisfactory existence, is pushed by the manifestation of his debonair, rebellious id to bed his dream girl, Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday). Miguel Arteta’s film, based on the novel by C.D. Payne, is funny. And it does give Cera a chance to play at being a bad boy. But it’s just that — playing at it. Grade: B

Sex Positive (2010) Explores the life and works of Richard Berkowitz, the provocative S&M hustler turned AIDS activist credited with spearheading the safe sex movement in the 1980s. It is only at the end of Daryl Wein’s documentary portrait of Berkowitz that its agenda as a polemic against societal amnesia becomes apparent. Noting that in recent years H.I.V. infection rates among gay men have begun to climb, this sad, useful film sounds an alarm about the return of unprotected sex among young gay men who believe that contracting the virus is unlikely. Grade: B-minus

The Book of Eli (2010) Determined to salvage a sacred text in order to protect humanity, Eli (Denzel Washington) goes on a quest across the country. Washington kicks butt as a mysterious road warrior toting the world’s last copy of the Bible across a post-apocalyptic North America in this never-boring film. It’s also better than you would suspect from a movie that was dumped into theaters in January, the traditional studio deep freeze for problematic projects. The film’s cool-looking desaturated look (not unlike The Road), plentiful action and Washington’s charismatic gravitas as the taciturn hero make it relatively easy to overlook the pretensions and implausibilities in the script by video-game creator Gary Whitta, which may contain more film references than Inglourious Basterds. Grade: B-minus

Happy Tears (2010) Jayne (Parker Posey) and Laura (Demi Moore) return to their childhood home in Pittsburgh to look after their father, Joe (Rip Torn), a lively widower who may be slipping into dementia. Posey is a resourceful and lively actress who doesn’t get nearly so much work in Hollywood as she deserves. But in this film, she lands a juicy starring role designed to showcase her eccentric energy, and she’s so delighted by the opportunity that her happiness infuses the movie: She keeps the first half of Happy Tears aloft on a cloud of endearing tics and mannerisms. The rapport between Posey and Moore is pleasurable and convincing — there is an unspoken complexity in the way they communicate with each other, as real siblings do — and Happy Tears initially seems to be a study of a disjointed but reunited family. But writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein (Teeth) has a different plan in mind, throwing in extraneous supporting characters such as Joe’s girlfriend Shelly (a deglamorized Ellen Barkin), who claims to be a nurse but whose dirty teeth, restless manner and perpetually dirt-caked fingernails clearly mark her as a junkie. The character isn’t just unbelievable: Her presence also distracts Lichtenstein from the film’s true center. On its way to a climax that ends every plot strand on an unrealistically upbeat and pat note, the film loses sight of what made it so engrossing in the first place. And by film’s end, Jayne remains as self-obsessed and neurotic as ever. She’s just a lot happier now, having learned to accept she’s just a teeny bit crazy. Grade: C

When in Rome (2010) After fishing out coins from a water fountain in Italy, cynical New Yorker Beth Harper (Kristen Bell) finds herself being wooed by several ardent suitors. Ever hear of a little movie called Three Coins in the Fountain? It was a 1954 Academy Award nominee for best picture, not because it was a great film (it wasn’t), but because it charmed and transported American viewers eager to take in Italy via CinemaScope, and because it had a very catchy title song penned by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn. When in Rome has coins and an Italian fountain, too. But it winds up being predictably charmless and forgettable, even as a travelogue or iPod download. Do as the Romans do. Drive around it. Grade: D