Liberalsarecool Loc: Texas

The civil-rights film inspired Michael Moore to make his latest documentary.




BY AMY KAUFMAN AND STEVEN ZEITCHIK


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JAY L. CLENDENIN Los Angeles Times

MICHAEL MOORE arrives for a screening of his “Where to Invade Next,” which offers “all solutions.”


Let’s be real: Michael Moore documentaries are usually kind of a bummer.

The filmmaker has examined some of America’s more troubling issues: our healthcare system, the war on terror, school shootings. And it started to depress him.

“I’ve made these documentaries for 25 years, showing everything that’s wrong. I got tired,” said Moore, 61. “Why would you give up a Friday night to go to the theater to discuss again why we had 45 school shootings this year alone?”

So he decided to make “Where to Invade Next,” which played the AFI Fest on Saturday night. Moore described it as his “no problems, all solutions” doc — but that doesn’t mean it goes easy on the U.S. The film sees Moore travel to a few countries, exploring what he thinks makes each place great and how Americans can learn from it.

The point isn’t to get down on America, said Moore, who sat in front of a packed house at the Egyptian in Hollywood after the screening.

“We wanted to show things that other countries have been doing for a long time,” he said. “Why not go to some of these places that have done the trial and error... and they now know how it works? We just go and take it.” Which may sound a little naive. But Moore places faith in the power of films to create change. He said it was Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” that inspired him to make “Where to Invade Next.”

“I was so moved and so shaken by the film,” he recalled. “Weeks after seeing ‘Selma,’ we were like, ‘Let’s do something.’ It was very powerful that just us seeing a movie and getting inspired to go make this movie. We weren’t going to make anything like ‘Selma’ — this was gonna be a documentary that dealt with something else — but we weren’t gonna be afraid to say the things that needed to be said.”

DuVernay, as it turned out, was in the audience, later tweeting: “Anger. Awe. Frustration. P***e. Indignation. Hope. WHERE TO INVADE NEXT made me feel all of the above + made me laugh too. Bravo.”

A VR merger of old, new schools

As virtual reality continues to gain traction in mainstream Hollywood, one of the big questions is: How much will it feel like mainstream Hollywood?

Not much, said one of the people involved in the push.

“We are all doing something we don’t know how to do in order to learn how to do it,” Glen Keane said Saturday, citing a Pablo Picasso line about taking on new challenges. “That’s what’s happening in VR.”

Keane should know. The 61-year-old spent more than three decades working as a Disney animator. But he left and branched out to VR years ago, seeing in it new challenges for himself and new possibilities for an industry. He now works at a Google-backed group creating a variety of VR projects, scripted and nonfiction.

Most notably, he’s created the short “Duet,” a touching look at a baby boy and a girl who drift apart and then come back together. The animation is hand-drawn, and it shows how VR can be used for — and might be better at — empathy and emotion than slick storytelling. (At the AFI event, Keane demonstrated the movie by having a colleague capture the action on a smartphone as she moved her eyes around the film’s world, projecting in real-time her experience on a screen in front of the room. It’s still not quite the same as donning the headset oneself, but it’s a better approximation than most such displays.)

What’s notable about Keane, whose videos showing him draw in VR have gone v***l, is that he’s an old-school artist who prefers handmade over computer-enhanced. Keane doesn’t especially like conventional CG animation. He wants to continue producing the kind of rough-around-the-edges human animation that Disney once traded in regularly. Yet even this form, he believes, lends itself to VR.

AFI Fest has been one of a number of Hollywood institutions to embrace “cinematic VR,” the catch-all term for VR storytelling that veers away from the hardcore interactivity of games. The medium is important to the festival and to director Jacqueline Lyanga, who said that amid the display of classic auteur and awards pieces, room should be left to explore the future as well. (In this regard, AFI is in line with Sundance’s embrace of VR, which continued last week with the announcement of a new program.)

Of course, all these efforts won’t preclude challenges in the creation and adoption of VR. The t***sition from flat, director-dictated storytelling to an all-encompassing, viewer-driven one, Keane noted, means moving from thinking “in a linear way [to a] circular way. And not just one circle but two” or more.

The biggest snag in is how filmmakers can ensure that the viewer retains the possibility of looking anywhere without sacrificing a propulsive story.

Keane offered perhaps the best analogy yet in explaining how it could work. He compared it to the experience of a theme-park ride, which offers the chance to actively explore as well as be passively entertained. “No one tells you what you have to look at, but the car is moving down the path,” Keane said. You feel the freedom of movement, he said — “and the joy you’re in a great storyteller’s hands.” amy.kaufman@latimes.com steven.zeitchik

@latimes.com