Pink Ribbon, Inc. - What you need to know about Cause Marketing

      This week Hannah chose to watch Pink Ribbon, Inc. A 2011 film put out with support from Breast Cancer Action, a group that has stood up in vocal protest of the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure (SGKRftC) charity.
      This film was actually pretty interesting although Breast Cancer Action seem to have lost sight of their goal. A pure assumption of mine is that Breast Cancer Action, also known as BCAction would be most concerned with finding a cure for breast cancer or at least a reliable way of preventing it. However, as you can see from their wikipedia page their actions are more to put down SGKRftC and their Pink Ribbon campaign than anything else.

     This documentary makes some excellent points about cause marketing, which more people should be aware of in my opinion. Cause marketing is where companies or corporations will join forces with a charitable organization. The company will generally give a portion of profits to the charity and will be able to use trademarks and logos on products. This does two things for the companies; First it effectively markets their product in that people will be more likely to choose a product that supports a charity that they also support. Second, it also associates a positive idea with the company and what they might stand for. On the other hand, many people often forget that the charity is also benefiting handsomely in such an exchange. The charities often receive millions of dollars that they might not otherwise. They also piggyback on corporations' advertising, essentially receiving free publicity that would otherwise be extremely expensive.

     This brings us to the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. Arguably, this is one of the most successful charities in history. They have raised awareness of Breast Cancer in an extremely effective way and have encouraged millions of women to get screened for Breast Cancer. Since it's founding in 1982 they have given over 1.5 billion dollars to research, advocacy, education and other things. It is continually rated as one of the best breast cancer charities. This is especially interesting considering how many breast cancer organizations are on the list of worst charities as rated by the Center for Investigative Reporting. In my opinion, SGKRftC has done more for breast cancer than any charity I can name. I certainly had not heard of any of these other charities.
    BCAction and this documentary would have us stop supporting SGKRftC because some of the companies they ally themselves with also sell products that contain carcinogens. In addition, this film also suggests that we stop buying products from companies regardless of whether they contain carcinogens. Yoplait, for example, is dragged through the mud for their campaign "Save Lids to Save Lives" where they would donate 10 cents for every yogurt lid sent in. BCAction wants us to stop buying Yoplait products because their dairy products at times included milk from cows that had been given rBGH. This is despite numerous studies that have failed to show a link between rBGH and any kind of cancer. These studies are even done by groups such as the American Cancer Society, lest anyone believe, based upon what the documentary propagated, that corporations fund the research in such a way as to prevent their products from being besmirched.

    I think this is an important documentary for people to see so that they can understand what cause marketing is and how it has an effect on their behavior. Other than that, this documentary is one you can skip.


If you like you can view the full documentary on Netflix or on YouTube here:

Cutie and the Boxer

   I was not sure what to expect when I chose this documentary for this week, but I certainly did not expect what we saw. Cutie and the Boxer was our latest choice for documentary and again it is nominated for Best Documentary at the 2014 Academy Awards. It is also my current pick to win though we have yet to see The Art of Killing or 20 Feet from Stardom.

    This film was about two married Japanese artists, Ushio and Noriko Shinohara and specifically about their marriage of 41 years. It is a beautifully filmed story of a seemingly troubled marriage. Throughout the film it seems as if Noriko harbors strong dislike if not hatred for her husband and their life of poverty in SoHo. Through her artistic narration we see the story of how he took advantage of her needs as a young immigrant and then how she felt trapped when they had a child very quickly. Ushio fell into alcoholism soon after and was very abandoning of his family.

     Interspersed through Noriko's comic book like story telling is video both from the past and present of Ushio and his views of himself and his wife. On the one hand Ushio seems to need constant reassurance that his artwork is any good, and his wife constantly gives this to him. Noriko, on the other hand, knows her artwork is good and insists upon promoting and showing it despite constant criticism from Ushio who seems to be jealous of her confidence and ability.

    This was a very beautiful film that captured the story of a lifetime remarkably well. By far the best scene of the entire piece was played during the credits and I will not spoil it. Go log on to Netflix and watch it.

Sons of Perdition or How to Surivive a Cult

       I have always been fascinated with cults and am very curious as to what makes someone believe so strongly that they will hold their belief to the very literal death, even against overwhelming evidence that their religion is a fraud. As frightening and sad as a cult can be, someone who has no beliefs is even more frightening. This idea is dealt with in a very interesting way in our documentary for this week, Sons of Perdition.

    Sons of Perdition is a film about the children who are excommunicated from an offshoot of the Mormon church called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints or FLDS. This group is led by a man named Warren Jeffs who is infamous for promoting polygamy and underage marriage/rape.

 Even though Jeffs was sent to prison in Texas in 2008, the FLDS is still alive and well in many states including Colorado, Utah, South Dakotah and Arizona. In addition, according to a documentary put out by CNN in 2012, Jeffs is still leading the FLDS from prison. Jeffs and other leaders of FLDS hold the community to a very strict standard. They hold their power through property and especially by using women as property. If they feel that a particular male in the community is doing what they believe he should they will reward him with a wife. If he continues to do well they will give him another wife, but if he fights any of the teachings of the leaders, they will remove that wife and any children she may have and give them to another man. Further, most of the property that these families live on is owned by Jeffs and the FLDS. It is leased/given to them, but can be taken back at any time if the men of the household do not toe the line. The children are given no privileges whatsoever. Many of them do not receive a good education and cannot read or do basic math. They are prevented from dating or even being in the same room as a member of the opposite sex that is not a family member. Similarly they are not allowed any form of entertainment. No music. No movies. No books. If you are caught repeatedly doing any of these things you will be excommunicated at a very young age (usually 13 - 17) and are banned from seeing your family. If your family (Often 20+ people in your immediate family) does not force you to leave they can lose their livelihoods and their homes. Over 100 children are excommunicated every year.

     This documentary follows the lives and tribulations of these children as they attempt to navigate the outside world. The sad thing is that they really want to try and live a responsible life, but they're so confused about what to believe. They have had every one of their beliefs destroyed and now they have no sense of moral guidance. They want to work or go to school but they have no place to live. Many of them believe they are going to hell and since there is no longer any redemption for them they become very hedonistic.   They often end up on drugs and on the street. Many of them die of overdose.
     I would definitely suggest this documentary to anyone who is interested in cults and to those who are looking to help these unfortunate kids.
 
    For those who are interested I am adding a few links on further information about FLDS.

Warren Jeffs says that FLDS couples are no longer to have sex. 15 "chosen" men will father all the children in the community.

Reddit AMA: FLDS 'Lost Boy'

YouTube: Some of Jeff's Teachings

War is Hell

     

     Continuing our apparent habit of watching depressing documentaries, Hannah and I chose to watch Dirty Wars this week. This is another film nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Documentary and yet again I could not tell you why.
     I strongly disliked this documentary from the beginning. It used heuristic statements intended to play on emotions and an extremely melodramatic style to create a reaction from the audience rather than to convey any sort of fact.

It follows the story of Jeremy Scahill (writer, producer, narrator and apparent star of the film) as he travels over the Middle East looking at the effects of a so called "secretive" branch of the military known as JSOC. He further documents his attempts at educating the public about JSOC's military endeavors. In the end, the film is more about Jeremy Scahill and how much he thinks he suffered learning the things he did.
     Throughout the entire piece Scahill  places an extreme emphasis on how hard things were for him. He talks about having to travel into the dangerous areas of Afghanistan, how he was pursued by federal agents (little to no evidence of this) how his computer was hacked (zero evidence of this). He seemed to want us to believe that he literally feared for his life on several occasions.
     Scahill makes several claims in this documentary and I will leave it up to the reader to decide how much of it to believe. There were only a few well established points of the documentary and these are the only ones which I will address.
1. The War on Terror has left us with unintended casualties
      This seems to be Scahill's main point. The military actions of the United States have caused the deaths of many civilians and even allies. I do not want to gloss over this point because it is important. None of us want to see any innocents killed, and especially children. The loss of civilian life is unacceptable and the United States Military goes to great lengths to avoid it. Scahill goes so far as to imply, if not say outright, that our actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and other parts of the Middle East are simply creating more martyrs for the Jihad against America. The problem is that he does not pose any solution to this problem. What does he think the US should do? Just allow the terrorists to continue their recruitment and training of jihadist?  Of course the United States wants no civilian casualties, but if it prevents the deaths of American civilians, their method seems to be working pretty well.
2. The President Ordered the Killing of an American Citizen without a Trial
    This was the only other well established point. That President Obama personally ordered the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki.many others  These are things that are not brought up by Scahill. Hundreds of Al-Awlaki videos, that called for Muslims to kill any possible Americans were still up on YouTube until members of Congress asked Google to take them down in 2010. This unfortunately is not the end of the story. About two weeks later, after al-Awlaki was killed, a second drone strike killed his son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. This killing was highlighted and emphasized in the documentary. As a 16 year old American citizen I think we can all agree that this is a very sad killing. What Scahill fails to mention, and what the media largely ignores, is that the son was in the company of 7 known Yemeni Al Qaeda leaders. Sixteen years old or not, American citizen or not, he definitely would have known that he was in dangerous company. He would have known that by simply being in the company of these men he could not return to the United States without the risk of arrest and trial for treason.

This is naturally concerning to any American Citizen, after all he was only using his right to Free Speech. Except of course that he was inciting the killing of American Civilians, supporting Al Qaeda and actively recruiting Muslims for a Jihad against America. He had connections to the Fort Hood Shooter and inspired the Boston Marathon bombings as well as
     All this to say, Dirty Wars should not be considered a valid entry for Best Documentary of the year as it does not portray any fact. It is simply a melodramatic film about a journalist experience attempting to muckrake.
   

The Square

    So this week we watched The Square which is a very new documentary (A Netflix Original in fact) that has been nominated for the Best Documentary of 2014. For those of you who don't know, it is the story of the Egyptian Revolution, which largely takes place around the Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt and follows the story of people who call themselves revolutionaries while at the same time differentiating themselves from the Islamic Brotherhood.

     By pure coincidence, Hannah and I watched this on the 3 year anniversary of the start of the revolution on January 25th, 2011. After seeing this film, I was left with two thoughts.  First, it was sad to see the disharmony of the Egyptian people. At the start of the documentary, Egypt had been under what was essentially a totalitarian rule for 30 years and the youth of Egypt started to hold protests. As the protests grew in power and numbers the Islamic Brotherhood (according to the people featured in the documentary) began to latch on to this movement as a way to gain political power of their own. Eventually an election was held and Dr. Mohammed Morsy (reportedly a Muslim Brotherhood lapdog) was elected president by a margin of 52%.  The Revolutionaries (who, again, were very careful to differentiate themselves from the Muslim Brotherhood) were displeased but said they would give him a year to make changes. Almost exactly a year later those revolutionaries again began protesting, saying that since they could not defeat him in elections, this was the only way to remove him from power. The military, after two days of protesting by reportedly "Millions" of people, then ousted Morsy and put him under house arrest. This angered the Islamic Brotherhood who then organized their own protests. After these protests continued for a month, the military controlled government moved in and killed hundreds of protesters as they broke up the "sit ins".

There is a very emotional scene in the documentary where a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the original revolutionaries, is speaking with a non brotherhood revolutionary over the phone saying that this is never what they had intended for their revolution. In my opinion, this is the only redeeming scene of the film. It was very sad to me to see the the disunity of the Egyptian people, how one group could care less about the needs, beliefs and feelings of another group. It is sad to me that the people of Egypt felt that a coup was the only way to get rid of an elected official. Is there no way of recalling the President or otherwise removing him from office?

     My second thought about this documentary was that it was very one sided and therefore it was extremely difficult to determine some balance of what the truth might be. As you watch, it is extremely hard to follow along with what is occurring because there is no narration other than the revolutionaries explaining their actions. At one point, the protagonist was either shot or hit with a rock. We see his head bleeding and several doctors gathered around him and frantic and confused Arabic being translated, "Is he dying!? Was he shot? Was it a rock?" This is never again mentioned in the film. The film is full of anecdotes like this where it is impossible to determine what is actual truth because it is all essentially hearsay.  This troubles me mainly because this documentary was nominated for an Academy Award and I would hope that our standards for documentaries would be high enough that we might actually might learn something factual when we see them. Now, what I will say for this film is that it was very beautifully filmed. We see excellent footage of the raw scenes of fighting which is interspersed with film that clearly shows the devotion that the revolutionaries feel for their country and their compatriots.  In this sense, the film is quite moving.
    Over all, I would recommend this documentary only if you already are familiar with the turmoil in Egypt and would like to see the man on the ground perspective or if you are interested in the films nominated for the Academy Awards, just don't expect to learn very much actual fact.

The Black Blizzards

     So for this week's documentary I chose The Dust Bowl made by Ken Burns. If you haven't seen it, this documentary is absolutely a must see. It tells the story of the people who lived in the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas during the 1930s and is both harrowing and moving. 
    Rather than attempt to poorly summarize this amazing documentary I will simply share what I learned. There were two main ideas that I took away from seeing this film; First history seems to be repeating itself.
    In 1929, the Stock Market crashed beginning one of the greatest periods of economic hardship in modern time. Among other things, crop prices, particularly wheat fell over 60% which proved disastrous for the millions of people who had moved west to farm. As a result of the drop in prices the farmers chose to attempt to sell more by plowing up tens of millions of acres in the middle west. Then came a ten year drought and and along with it high winds that blew up dust storms. These dust storms were so extreme that they actually choked people and livestock if they were left outside. 

    We have just gone through what is now being called The Great Recession when among other things unemployment reached a high of 10% in 2009 (although this is not even half of the rate reached in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression). Many people, particularly farmers in the midwest and California are struggling financially. This problem is being further compounded by what is now a three year drought. Just this last Friday, California Governor Jerry Brown declared a a state of emergency because of the lack of rainfall saying, "perhaps the worst drought California has ever seen since records began being kept about 100 years ago". Meanwhile drought conditions in the midwest are equally troubling with almost half of the country being classified as a D2 Severe Drought. 

    The second thing I took away from this film was a thought about how tough the people of that generation (my grandparents) must have been. Imagine being born in 1920 in Boise City, Oklahoma. By the time you were 14 years old you were in the heart of the Dust Bowl and suffering through the Great Depression. There would be months at a time when the dust storms did not stop. When you could not go outside for fear of never being able to find your way back to shelter and literally choking to death on the dust.

 Not just you and your family but your entire community would be starving to death. This went on for YEARS, during which all you could do was pray for rain. In 1936, your family could not take it anymore and received a loan from the government and moved to California. In California, you and your family experienced tremendous hardships including homelessness, unemployment, and severe poverty. When everything finally settles down and your family has finally been able to make a living for themselves, World War 2 breaks out in 1941. 
    So, obviously this has been an extreme (and made up) anecdote that no doubt happened to many people. I wonder if the same things were able to happen today how our society would react. That generation went through so much more than I think I ever could. 
    Unfortunately, I do not have enough time to talk about everything that I would like to about this documentary. Please go and see it for yourself (it is on Netflix) and leave any comments or thoughts you have. 

So my girlfriend and I made a joint New Years resolution this year to watch one documentary a week for the entire year. This decision was motivated by the realization that unless I actively educate myself I will be contributing to the apathy of collective knowledge. An apathy which was highlighted by my recent reading of The Fountainhead. I’m sure if you follow this blog you will hear more about this. Think of this as a modern non-fiction version of Jay Gatsby’s resolution to “Read one improving book or magazine per week”.

Anyway, she and I agreed that we would take turns each week selecting the documentary. As of right now there are no further restrictions though we reserve the right to change it later. This blog will document our year doing this, although I will also post on other things.

So this week’s selection (her choice) was Jiro Dreams of Sushi. This film completely surpassed my expectations. It was a very interesting and beautiful story of an 85 year old Japanese native of Tokyo who started a sushi restaurant called Sukiyabashi Jiro. My favorite thing about this documentary is that it is much more than a film about sushi; it documents Japanese work culture, family, and what it takes to (to quote Suits) become a Gladiator of one’s profession. I also learned that I have no idea what makes good sushi.

What I’d really like to talk about though is the idea of what it takes to become a Gladiator of One’s profession. Jiro’s life is completely consumed by everything about Sushi. The opening lines of the documentary talk about how he regularly dreams about Sushi and then gets up in the middle of the night to create a new dish that he literally just dreamt up.

At the age of 9 he began as an apprentice at a Sushi stand and has worked the same job for 76 years! I want to emphasize that when I say work, I mean that he actually only takes a day off when he is forced to by a Japanese National Holiday or a funeral. He expects the same dedication from his staff which is made up of his eldest son and some other apprentices. His youngest son also apprenticed with him but later went to found another Sushi restaurant in Tokyo (though it is not as highly rated).
By all accounts Jiro is the preeminent Sushi Master in the world. His restaurant holds a three star Michelin rating. Which according to the French company which publishes the rating, the food is so superb that it is worth traveling to that country for. Jiro is also in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the oldest working chef with such a rating.

What is beautiful to me about Jiro is that he does not do all this work for money or fame or even success; he does it for his own satisfaction. He is one of those people who is willing to work harder than is maybe good for him to attain a perfection only he believes is possible. While this work ethic is admirable, I would really like to know; Do you think that he is satisfied? Do you think that he is happy with his accomplishments? One of the most interesting moments to me in the documentary is when his sons are talking about what it was like growing up. It was clear that they barely knew who their father was because he was never around. They relate a story where they ran and told their mother that a strange man was sleeping in the house because they did not know who he was. While the anecdote was humorous it was also a hollow laugh. Other than this story there was zero mention of Jiro’s wife and I am left wondering if she left him because he was never around. Is this what being a Gladiator of one’s profession means?

So these are my thoughts on our first documentary of the year. Please leave comments or thoughts concerning these questions or if you have any suggestions on documentaries worth viewing.

One follow up question; What do y’all think? Is it possible for a good chef to smoke? After all one needs such a good sense of smell and taste.