THE CARTEL A union-busting doc with an adamant if not quite apolitical — focus on the children slipping through the cracks, The Cartel uses New Jersey as Exhibit A in its case against this country's crooked education system.
Though it is first in education spending, New Jersey has an abysmal dropout rate and equally dire testing scores; director Bob Bowden cites what a former school superintendent calls "rampant, pervasive, institutionalized" budgetary corruption and a deeply entrenched, self-interested teachers union as the culprits. Bowden, a former local television reporter and anchorman, pulls together a familiar repertoire of talking heads, man-on.
The-street interviews, remedial graphics and stilted B-roll, and ultimately this information-packed indictment plays like a feature-length "in-depth" news segment. Moving loosely from angle to angle the tenure system, the plot against voucher programs, the stonewalling of charter schools The Cartel makes up for what it lacks in style and structure with selective but stone-cold facts. Although a school-district president rolling up to a budgetary hearing in a white limo and an administration parking lot clogged with luxury cars are undeniably good gets, Bowden's strength as a documentarian is more evident in the patience and logic with which he makes an argument for a state and a system in desperate need of reform. (Michelle Orange) (Sunset 5)
DANCING ACROSS BORDERS When 16-year-old Sokvannara Sar, a charismatic Cambodian with a gift for his native folk dances, arrived in New York City in 2001 as the protegé of the unbelievably rich Manhattan socialite (and generous dance patron) Anne Bass, he had never seen ballet — and wasn't that stoked about it. "This ballet thing is going to turn me into a duck," he remembers thinking. "I don't think I want to do this." It's a sentiment Sar repeats throughout Dancing Across Borders, and it is to first-time director Bass' credit that she marked his ambivalence in this otherwise blithely tone-deaf ode to her own generosity and that of dance instructor Olga Kostritzky.
Several uncomfortable factors are at play in the story of Sar's success the clear class and culture shock; the pressure to compress 10 years of ballet training into three lest he lose his patron's attention but Bass, enamored of his talent and determined to shape it to her liking ("I hope he's going to be what I want him to be," Kostritzky says), elides every one.
Instead, we get white folks ruminating lyrically on the peasant Asian's role as a kind of grand jeté bridge between East and West, and long performance sequences that are dazzling to behold but quite troubling to contemplate. (Michelle Orange) (Nuart)
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