TV docs

No, not that kind. I’m not talking about the long line running from Dr. Kildare to Dr. McDreamy, but rather nonfiction films on television. I’ve been watching a lot of them lately, and along with the new baseball season and basketball playoffs (both hopeful this year for a long-suffering Cleveland sport fan), they’ve been cutting into my film-watching. Here’s a brief report.

I’ve plugged it a few times already, but I have to insist: Planet Earth is must viewing, either as broadcast on the Discovery Channel with narration by Sigourney Weaver, or on DVD with BBC narration by David Attenborough. I prefer her to him, less plummy, more straightforward, but the nature photography is stunning either way, a real argument for High Definition TV. The dozen or so hour-long programs are highly miscellaneous, without much scientific coherence, but cumulatively a vivid picture emerges of the diversity and hunger of life, and how that diversity of hungers is fed by the diversity of our one planet -- the ingenuity of evolution, the marvelous, manifold ways living things have found to survive and reproduce.

Another documentary series with a far less exhilarating theme, and much wider variation in quality was the PBS series, “America at the Crossroads.” I couldn’t bear to watch more than a minute of Richard Perle’s feeble re-assertion of righteousness, and several other films sinned against the art of documentary in my view, but there were two worth looking for and at. The Men Behind Jihad was basically a visual recapitulation of the argument of Lawrence Wright’s essential book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, and he appears prominently as a talking head, but the film puts together a lot of archival footage that illustrates the story well. And Operation Homecoming was a moving and informative view of the Iraq experience from the perspective of American soldiers.

A Crude Awakening, airing on Sundance channel, was an entertaining and eye-opening summary of America’s addiction to oil.

Putting together a continuing series at the Clark on “Documenting Artists,” I had occasion to look at two films that appeared on the PBS series, “American Masters.” From Ric Burns, in the familiar vein that he has worked with his brother Ken and independently, comes Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (2006), which at four hours is inflated both in rhetoric and running time, but still makes the case for Warhol’s importance as an artist, while showing how the shy, strange boy from Pittsburgh came to define fame and celebrity in late 20th century America. Norman Rockwell: Painting America (1999) is more modest in every respect, but also fills in the life story of another sort of American artistic icon, even while favoring us with the “expert” testimony of Steven Spielberg and the like.

Just to justify my dearth of film reviews lately, let me note that I also watched the new DVD release of the recent BBC miniseries of George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda, which was good of its kind, but if you want to immerse yourself in an adaptation of a Victorian novel, then I strongly reaffirm my suggestion of last year’s Bleak House, recently rebroadcast and now on DVD.

While enumerating my visual distractions, let me note that I am keeping up with the new HBO seasons of The Sopranos and Entourage, but will save comment till they conclude.