Saturday, November 28, 2009
Ballast
This Sundance favorite involved me in its indirect approach, allowing a situation to make itself clear gradually, through inarticulate gestures rather than explanatory dialogue. What emerges from the desolate landscape of a wintry Mississippi Delta is the story of a teenage boy, whose estranged father has committed suicide. The father’s twin brother tries to kill himself as well, but survives, to take a slow and grudging interest in his nephew, even though he blames the mother for the father’s death. In a sidelong way, forgiveness and family feeling begin to emerge from emotional devastation. Understated yet eloquent, Lance Hammer’s film may look to some like nothing happening, but to me was invested with meaning and feeling, true to the marginal lives it depicts. (2008, dvd) *7* (MC-84)
Funny People
Judd Apatow should have a little less fun making movies, and give us a little more by serving up less. This film would have been better shorter -- less diffuse, less all things to all people (and therefore little to any). That said, there’s a lot of good stuff in the movie. Adam Sandler has proved himself to be an intriguingly off-putting actor, and Seth Rogen has not worn out his welcome yet. The world of stand-up comedy is intimately familiar to all involved, so there is some personal truth in the playing out of the movie, though muffled some by shtick and sentiment, however ambiguous. Sandler is -- quite a stretch -- a ridiculously successful movie comedian, who gets a death sentence from his doctor, and hires fledgling stand-up Rogen to be his flunky and fake friend. About when the story should be wrapping up, it takes a twist and goes on and on. Not that it’s all bad – we’re happy to see Mrs. Apatow (Leslie Mann) and their two kids – but the opportunity for focus and resolution is past. Maybe Judd is nostalgic for the run-on pleasures of a series -- such as the immortal Freaks and Geeks -- where he can let all his friends strut their stuff. This baby has an amusing face, and a good heart despite a potty mouth, but needs to lose a few pounds before it’s really attractive. (2009, dvd.) *6+ * (MC-60)
Random viewing
As it approaches its fifth anniversary, this blog will be undergoing a number of changes. First off is to leave behind its original impetus. With the turn of the millennium, I began a filmlog to help keep track of all the movies I was watching, with a number grade to remind me how much I liked each, and a one-line summary to jog my memory. Gradually the summations became longer, almost mini-reviews, and when I began to post them online at the start of 2005, became more like a searchable film guide, geared toward recommendations for the reader’s Netflix queue, straight from my own.
What I will be abandoning is a complete record of my viewing. Some films require only a cursory notation as watched in passing. Films of particular current or retrospective interest will continue to get their 200 words or so, sometimes accompanied by short subjects -- documentary, animation, what-have-you. Films viewed in pursuit of a theme will be addressed together in longer essays. As for the rest, they will be lumped in a potpourri such as this.
On the domestic side, what assortment could be more random than Cash McCall (1959 – somehow lodged in my 12-year-old mind, led to revisit by relation to Executive Suite and Mad Men, features charming rascal James Garner as a corporate raider who slows down enough to woo Natalie Wood (yum!), daughter of a takeover target -- not quite as humorous or pointed as I remembered), Diner (1982 – heavily copied and no longer the novelty it seemed at the time, but not a classic in retrospect, this tale of a group of superannuated juveniles in Barry Levinson’s Baltimore introduced a lot of now familiar performers, and I watched largely to compare Mickey Rourke to his latest incarnation as The Wrestler), and Tropic Thunder (2008 – Ben Stiller’s funny-enough parody of making an Apocalypse Now-like movie is a self-referential comedy in the tradition of Airplane! and all its spawn, notable for the hilarious fake trailers at the beginning, lots of celebrity cameos, and Robert Downey in blackface).
As for imports, I would single out The Return (2003, MC-82), Andrey Zvyagintsev’s subdued but intense psychological thriller, about the mysterious return of the father of two teenage boys, who were happy living with their mother, but now have to adjust to an incomprehensible authority figure they hadn’t seen in ten years. With no explanation, the father takes the boys on a fishing trip to the ends of the earth, a remote spot near the Arctic Circle. Tensions build as the elder boy is only too glad to have a dad, but the younger distrusts this demanding stranger. It all plays out with the economy of a fable, to the accompaniment of breathtaking widescreen landscapes.
I watched Nenette & Boni (1996) to fill in Claire Denis’s filmography, but you don’t have to – for a taste of this intriguingly elusive director, go straight to Beau Travail (1998) or her newly-released 35 Shots of Rum, which I notice has a Metacritic rating of 96, just about the highest ever.
As I was researching Vittorio De Sica’s career for my film club introduction, I noticed that even though Shoeshine is still unavailable on DVD, The Criterion Collection has issued an earlier film of his that I had never seen. The Children Are Watching Us (1943) is anything but neorealist, a child’s eye view of a wandering mother somewhere between Anna Karenina and a desperate housewife. The story transpires in an upper middle class milieu that gives no hint that a war is going on, but offers a well-done soap opera made something more by the brilliant “acting” of the five-year-old boy.
Speaking of the film club, I found Il Posto to be up to my exalted memory of it, The Flowers of Saint Francis to be slight but indicative of Rossellini’s genius, Umberto D to be impressive but not transcendent, La Terra Trema to be interesting but an hour too long, and La Strada to be less sentimental and more coherent than I remembered. In my other series, The White Sheik confirmed my view of Fellini’s first as one of his best, and one of the most deeply delightful comedies ever. What a comedown to the next film in the series -- I had never seen the whole of La Dolce Vita, and now I know why. Same for Fellini's Roma -- hard to see how an accomplished director can fall so far from grace.
What I will be abandoning is a complete record of my viewing. Some films require only a cursory notation as watched in passing. Films of particular current or retrospective interest will continue to get their 200 words or so, sometimes accompanied by short subjects -- documentary, animation, what-have-you. Films viewed in pursuit of a theme will be addressed together in longer essays. As for the rest, they will be lumped in a potpourri such as this.
On the domestic side, what assortment could be more random than Cash McCall (1959 – somehow lodged in my 12-year-old mind, led to revisit by relation to Executive Suite and Mad Men, features charming rascal James Garner as a corporate raider who slows down enough to woo Natalie Wood (yum!), daughter of a takeover target -- not quite as humorous or pointed as I remembered), Diner (1982 – heavily copied and no longer the novelty it seemed at the time, but not a classic in retrospect, this tale of a group of superannuated juveniles in Barry Levinson’s Baltimore introduced a lot of now familiar performers, and I watched largely to compare Mickey Rourke to his latest incarnation as The Wrestler), and Tropic Thunder (2008 – Ben Stiller’s funny-enough parody of making an Apocalypse Now-like movie is a self-referential comedy in the tradition of Airplane! and all its spawn, notable for the hilarious fake trailers at the beginning, lots of celebrity cameos, and Robert Downey in blackface).
As for imports, I would single out The Return (2003, MC-82), Andrey Zvyagintsev’s subdued but intense psychological thriller, about the mysterious return of the father of two teenage boys, who were happy living with their mother, but now have to adjust to an incomprehensible authority figure they hadn’t seen in ten years. With no explanation, the father takes the boys on a fishing trip to the ends of the earth, a remote spot near the Arctic Circle. Tensions build as the elder boy is only too glad to have a dad, but the younger distrusts this demanding stranger. It all plays out with the economy of a fable, to the accompaniment of breathtaking widescreen landscapes.
I watched Nenette & Boni (1996) to fill in Claire Denis’s filmography, but you don’t have to – for a taste of this intriguingly elusive director, go straight to Beau Travail (1998) or her newly-released 35 Shots of Rum, which I notice has a Metacritic rating of 96, just about the highest ever.
As I was researching Vittorio De Sica’s career for my film club introduction, I noticed that even though Shoeshine is still unavailable on DVD, The Criterion Collection has issued an earlier film of his that I had never seen. The Children Are Watching Us (1943) is anything but neorealist, a child’s eye view of a wandering mother somewhere between Anna Karenina and a desperate housewife. The story transpires in an upper middle class milieu that gives no hint that a war is going on, but offers a well-done soap opera made something more by the brilliant “acting” of the five-year-old boy.
Speaking of the film club, I found Il Posto to be up to my exalted memory of it, The Flowers of Saint Francis to be slight but indicative of Rossellini’s genius, Umberto D to be impressive but not transcendent, La Terra Trema to be interesting but an hour too long, and La Strada to be less sentimental and more coherent than I remembered. In my other series, The White Sheik confirmed my view of Fellini’s first as one of his best, and one of the most deeply delightful comedies ever. What a comedown to the next film in the series -- I had never seen the whole of La Dolce Vita, and now I know why. Same for Fellini's Roma -- hard to see how an accomplished director can fall so far from grace.
Still plugging
I have two more new documentaries to cite. From “Independent Lens” on PBS, I tuned in tentatively to No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos (2008), and found myself more and more engaged. I certainly knew Kovacs and Zsigmond as names to conjure with, cinematographers for many of the most memorable American films from the Sixties on, but nothing more. In this film, they emerge from behind the camera as interesting characters in their own right. Though it’s impossible to keep track of who did what, if you remember the look of any movie from Easy Rider on, chances are it was shot by one of them, so this documentary works as a clips reel if nothing else. But there was a brotherhood between these two film students who escaped Hungary together in 1956, smuggling out amazing on-the-scene footage of the Uprising stomped out by the heavy foot of Russian tanks. Together they made their way to Hollywood and wormed their way into filmmaking, by working fast, cheap, and beautiful, virtually sharing a 50-year career. Based on their blithe spirits, this documentary has some of the expected platitudinous Hollywood back-patting, but something more comes through.
Another film I gave a chance and found myself watching through with a grudging fascination was Audience of One (2007) on the Sundance Channel (also on Netflix). In the tradition of films about filmmaking gone bad, Mark Jacobs has found himself a doozy of a subject in a Pentecostal preacher in whom God (that “Audience of One”) has inspired Cecil B. Demille dreams. He embarks on what he, aflame with faith, believes will be the biggest movie ever, Star Wars meets The Ten Commandments. Bringing his own special brand of craziness to the crazy business of filmmaking, he displays a flabbergasting confidence, as the project just keeps getting bigger, the more his complete incompetence is being revealed. Maybe it’s just me, but I came to see him as indicative of Bush in Iraq. Once you replace fact with faith, you believe you can do anything you want. It’s hilarious until it’s chilling. The beauty of this documentary is that the preacher could be happy with it as an honest portrait, not regret the access he gave the documentarists, while the audience is free to take it as total satire and a cautionary tale on many levels.
Another film I gave a chance and found myself watching through with a grudging fascination was Audience of One (2007) on the Sundance Channel (also on Netflix). In the tradition of films about filmmaking gone bad, Mark Jacobs has found himself a doozy of a subject in a Pentecostal preacher in whom God (that “Audience of One”) has inspired Cecil B. Demille dreams. He embarks on what he, aflame with faith, believes will be the biggest movie ever, Star Wars meets The Ten Commandments. Bringing his own special brand of craziness to the crazy business of filmmaking, he displays a flabbergasting confidence, as the project just keeps getting bigger, the more his complete incompetence is being revealed. Maybe it’s just me, but I came to see him as indicative of Bush in Iraq. Once you replace fact with faith, you believe you can do anything you want. It’s hilarious until it’s chilling. The beauty of this documentary is that the preacher could be happy with it as an honest portrait, not regret the access he gave the documentarists, while the audience is free to take it as total satire and a cautionary tale on many levels.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Docs are still rockin'
I’m still pushing documentaries and have some more to recommend, first off several from PBS, which are available on Netflix, not just on DVD but as a free download for subscribers, and also on PBS.org. Botany of Desire recapitulates Michael Pollan’s great book of the same name, in a coherent and visually impressive manner, devoting a half-hour each to the apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato, as each plant appeals to human desires – for sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control – to insure its co-evolutionary survival. Pollan’s case for diversity is judicious and entertaining, filled with “gee, I didn’t know that” facts and striking images.
I caught up with two rebroadcasts from series I just recommended, each of which seemed particularly relevant – and revelatory -- to the news of the day. An “American Experience” segment on the Civilian Conservation Corps revisited one of FDR’s great stimulus plans for recovery from the Depression, from back in the day when government was still seen as part of the solution and not the problem, a rather amazing mobilization of collective will, much more extensive than I imagined, truly the “moral equivalent of war,” until it was superceded by war itself.
Then “Frontline” repeated its survey, Sick Around the World, which gives a global survey of what works and what doesn’t in providing universal healthcare at lower cost and with better results than the American non-system achieves. This sort of comparative analysis is precisely what is missing in the current debate over healthcare reform, as Congress reinvents the wheel by committee in the dark, relying on knee-jerk positions rather than facts. So see how they do it in Britain, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and Switzerland, and conceive what is possible when healthcare is treated as a right, and not a privilege reserved to those who can afford it.
HBO is still in the game as well. By the People:The Election of Barack Obama offers behind-the-scenes access as a freshman senator embarks on an improbable journey to the White House. It’s a story that I for one was happy to relive, from the perspective of the people behind the campaign, from the candidate down to passionately committed field workers. You know whether you’d be happy to share that thrill once again.
But I have an out-of-the-blue but strong recommendation for Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak. I figured Spike Jonze’s documentary would just be a promo for his current adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, but it turned out to be an extremely well-done and intimate portrait of a prickly but fascinating character, a picture book artist who connected to children not because he knew them, but because of his connection to his own inner child, with all its passions and fears.
Another good HBO doc, which I can recommend only if you have the stomach for it, is Terror in Mumbai. Narrated by Fareed Zacharia, the film has the expected combination of news footage and eyewitness accounts by survivors, but is made riveting by the actual voices of the terrorist kids and their controllers in Pakistan through intercepted cellphone transmissions, plus video of the hospital-bed confession of the one surviving terrorist, and surveillance footage of the juvenile jihadists in deadly action. Chilling and premonitory.
I caught up with two rebroadcasts from series I just recommended, each of which seemed particularly relevant – and revelatory -- to the news of the day. An “American Experience” segment on the Civilian Conservation Corps revisited one of FDR’s great stimulus plans for recovery from the Depression, from back in the day when government was still seen as part of the solution and not the problem, a rather amazing mobilization of collective will, much more extensive than I imagined, truly the “moral equivalent of war,” until it was superceded by war itself.
Then “Frontline” repeated its survey, Sick Around the World, which gives a global survey of what works and what doesn’t in providing universal healthcare at lower cost and with better results than the American non-system achieves. This sort of comparative analysis is precisely what is missing in the current debate over healthcare reform, as Congress reinvents the wheel by committee in the dark, relying on knee-jerk positions rather than facts. So see how they do it in Britain, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and Switzerland, and conceive what is possible when healthcare is treated as a right, and not a privilege reserved to those who can afford it.
HBO is still in the game as well. By the People:The Election of Barack Obama offers behind-the-scenes access as a freshman senator embarks on an improbable journey to the White House. It’s a story that I for one was happy to relive, from the perspective of the people behind the campaign, from the candidate down to passionately committed field workers. You know whether you’d be happy to share that thrill once again.
But I have an out-of-the-blue but strong recommendation for Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak. I figured Spike Jonze’s documentary would just be a promo for his current adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, but it turned out to be an extremely well-done and intimate portrait of a prickly but fascinating character, a picture book artist who connected to children not because he knew them, but because of his connection to his own inner child, with all its passions and fears.
Another good HBO doc, which I can recommend only if you have the stomach for it, is Terror in Mumbai. Narrated by Fareed Zacharia, the film has the expected combination of news footage and eyewitness accounts by survivors, but is made riveting by the actual voices of the terrorist kids and their controllers in Pakistan through intercepted cellphone transmissions, plus video of the hospital-bed confession of the one surviving terrorist, and surveillance footage of the juvenile jihadists in deadly action. Chilling and premonitory.
Scrambled call letters
AMC has gone from a station I never looked at to the red-hot center of my television viewing pleasure. Its Sunday night has replaced HBO’s as the must-see line-up. Mad Men (MC-86) did not disappointed in its third season, nor did Breaking Bad (MC-85)in its second (with which I caught up in rerun). Both finished their seasons with a bang, and with a promise of more in 2010. If you haven’t made your way into either of these series, I strongly advise you to start at the beginning with the first season on DVD. As is the way with the televised megamovies that have become a preeminent form of popular culture, it doesn’t matter so much what they are about, as the way they have leisure to make characters and settings and communities engaging in a global and ongoing way. Were you really so interested in the business of the street corner crack trade, or of a family funeral home, going in? No, depth of engagement is the road into any of the worlds created by these high-quality series.
Mad Men has a lot going for it in the glamour of its setting and era, but all the design in the world wouldn’t attract a passionate audience without a full cast of rounded characters to live with and get to know. Highbrows can enjoy the pleasures of soap opera without guilt. On the other hand, a guilty complicity is at the heart of Breaking Bad’s appeal. Walter White is a guy just like us, a high school chemistry teacher with a perfectly ordinary middle American home and family -- in the marvelous Bryan Cranston literally a sitcom dad -- whose life is derailed by a diagnosis of cancer into unimagined depths of depravity as he schemes to turn all his technical knowledge into fast money by cooking up the best crystal meth in the world. We feel with him every step of the way, as he descends the ladder of despicability. Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we gasp in horror, sometimes both at the same time. BB’s second season certainly ended with a bang, and has us on the hook for another, but MM’s finale was the best I could imagine, not only rounding off this season but setting up the next in a way that has us panting with anticipation. How good was it? It had me comparing it to one of my top ten films of all time: The Seven Samurai.
Meanwhile, from the BBC I’ve been watching Cranford, a series that was previewed on the Little Dorrit dvds, and while it does not have the scope of the Dickens, this adaptation of several works by Elizabeth Gaskell does have an appealing cast (led by Judy Dench) and a savory Jane-Austen-ish flavor. It follows one year, from 1842 to 1843, in the life of a small village, a spinster gynocracy led by Eileen Atkins, as elder sister of Dame Judy and arbiter of all matters and manners in the neighborhood. Imelda Staunton is a good-hearted but inveterate busybody next door. A handsome young doctor comes to town and sets hearts aflutter; an estate manager crosses the lady of the manor by trying to educate and advance a poor but promising local lad; and the train threatens to reach Cranford and change its hidden-away charm forever. Of these threads and more the five-hour series is woven, increasing in complexity and significance as it goes. I’m happy to see a second series is due to be broadcast on PBS early next year.
Britain’s ITV gets in the game with Lost in Austen, which takes the premise of a modern London girl, obsessed with Pride and Prejudice, who swaps places with Elizabeth Bennett. Some amusing situations are spun out of the premise, but it does go on and on. I didn’t check the length when I popped in the Netflix-recommended DVD, and thought I was watching a film (which apparently is now in pre-production). When I started to ask myself when this thing was going to end, I checked the envelope and saw it was a series totaling almost three hours. I watched to the end with increasing disenchantment, as it strung out to a series of audience-catering, self-canceling conclusions. But the movie might be worth looking at when it comes out, once they’ve trimmed the story to reasonable feature length.
With the next seasons of the AMC duo now breathlessly awaited, the one show I look forward to every week is Friday Night Lights (MC-81), whose fourth season I am lucky to be able to preview as a DirecTV subscriber, months before it will debut on NBC. I won’t gloat by telling you how good it remains, but will simply note that in a neat passing of the baton between favorite shows, one of the corner hoppers from The Wire turns up as the replacement for ace running back Smash Williams in the new season of FNL.
Mad Men has a lot going for it in the glamour of its setting and era, but all the design in the world wouldn’t attract a passionate audience without a full cast of rounded characters to live with and get to know. Highbrows can enjoy the pleasures of soap opera without guilt. On the other hand, a guilty complicity is at the heart of Breaking Bad’s appeal. Walter White is a guy just like us, a high school chemistry teacher with a perfectly ordinary middle American home and family -- in the marvelous Bryan Cranston literally a sitcom dad -- whose life is derailed by a diagnosis of cancer into unimagined depths of depravity as he schemes to turn all his technical knowledge into fast money by cooking up the best crystal meth in the world. We feel with him every step of the way, as he descends the ladder of despicability. Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we gasp in horror, sometimes both at the same time. BB’s second season certainly ended with a bang, and has us on the hook for another, but MM’s finale was the best I could imagine, not only rounding off this season but setting up the next in a way that has us panting with anticipation. How good was it? It had me comparing it to one of my top ten films of all time: The Seven Samurai.
Meanwhile, from the BBC I’ve been watching Cranford, a series that was previewed on the Little Dorrit dvds, and while it does not have the scope of the Dickens, this adaptation of several works by Elizabeth Gaskell does have an appealing cast (led by Judy Dench) and a savory Jane-Austen-ish flavor. It follows one year, from 1842 to 1843, in the life of a small village, a spinster gynocracy led by Eileen Atkins, as elder sister of Dame Judy and arbiter of all matters and manners in the neighborhood. Imelda Staunton is a good-hearted but inveterate busybody next door. A handsome young doctor comes to town and sets hearts aflutter; an estate manager crosses the lady of the manor by trying to educate and advance a poor but promising local lad; and the train threatens to reach Cranford and change its hidden-away charm forever. Of these threads and more the five-hour series is woven, increasing in complexity and significance as it goes. I’m happy to see a second series is due to be broadcast on PBS early next year.
Britain’s ITV gets in the game with Lost in Austen, which takes the premise of a modern London girl, obsessed with Pride and Prejudice, who swaps places with Elizabeth Bennett. Some amusing situations are spun out of the premise, but it does go on and on. I didn’t check the length when I popped in the Netflix-recommended DVD, and thought I was watching a film (which apparently is now in pre-production). When I started to ask myself when this thing was going to end, I checked the envelope and saw it was a series totaling almost three hours. I watched to the end with increasing disenchantment, as it strung out to a series of audience-catering, self-canceling conclusions. But the movie might be worth looking at when it comes out, once they’ve trimmed the story to reasonable feature length.
With the next seasons of the AMC duo now breathlessly awaited, the one show I look forward to every week is Friday Night Lights (MC-81), whose fourth season I am lucky to be able to preview as a DirecTV subscriber, months before it will debut on NBC. I won’t gloat by telling you how good it remains, but will simply note that in a neat passing of the baton between favorite shows, one of the corner hoppers from The Wire turns up as the replacement for ace running back Smash Williams in the new season of FNL.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Film Club update
The final two films in the first series of screenings for the Cinema Salon Film Club at the Clark will be:
Friday, 11/6, 4:00 pm: La Terra Trema. (1947, 160 min.) Luchino Visconti’s neorealist examination of life in a Sicilian fishing village is explicitly Marxist but also lyrical, long and slow but thoroughly involving.
Friday, 11/20, 4:00 pm: La Strada. (1954, 104 min.) Federico Fellini emerges from his neorealist roots into his own personal style of sentimental fantasy, on “the road” with a waif played by his wife Giulietta Massina, who is indentured to itinerant strongman Anthony Quinn..
Thereafter, the Film Club will break for the holidays and return in February with a new series of screenings, under the heading of “What in the World is Going On?” Check back to this website for updated information.
I happened to notice this week that coincidentally Lincoln Center is just now offering a much more extensive series on Italian neorealism, and their program notes offer a concise summary of the points I've been making over the past weeks. For more detailed info, check out their program guide.
Friday, 11/6, 4:00 pm: La Terra Trema. (1947, 160 min.) Luchino Visconti’s neorealist examination of life in a Sicilian fishing village is explicitly Marxist but also lyrical, long and slow but thoroughly involving.
Friday, 11/20, 4:00 pm: La Strada. (1954, 104 min.) Federico Fellini emerges from his neorealist roots into his own personal style of sentimental fantasy, on “the road” with a waif played by his wife Giulietta Massina, who is indentured to itinerant strongman Anthony Quinn..
Thereafter, the Film Club will break for the holidays and return in February with a new series of screenings, under the heading of “What in the World is Going On?” Check back to this website for updated information.
I happened to notice this week that coincidentally Lincoln Center is just now offering a much more extensive series on Italian neorealism, and their program notes offer a concise summary of the points I've been making over the past weeks. For more detailed info, check out their program guide.
Docs around the clock
One reason I’ve been reviewing fewer fiction films lately is that I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries, and here I’m going to sort through a range of recommendations. Titles in bold are available on DVD from Netflix (or soon will be) and recommended by me. The others are worth looking for if you have a particular interest -- they may be found on the linked-to network schedules, or possibly On Demand..
First off is the recent documentary outing by feature director James Toback: Tyson (2009, MC-83). Like you, probably, I did not think I was all that interested in Mike Tyson, but I found this film almost hypnotizing in its formally inventive approach to film portraiture. Much of the film is Tyson himself speaking to the camera, in that incongruously high-pitched lisp, as if in self-reflection before an unseen therapist, but broken up into overlapping pictures and sound, which suggest the multiple facets of a divided self. He seems utterly believable in all his contradictions. There is enough footage recapitulating his career to establish that he might have been one of most powerful, if not the greatest, boxers of all time, and also to delineate his public disgrace in a rape conviction and prison term, plus the ignominious career-ending bout in which he bit the ear of his opponent. Tyson never goes quite so far as to plead, “I am not the animal you think I am,” but the film makes that case eloquently, and perhaps convincingly.
There are several stations worth monitoring for outstanding documentaries. Sundance Channel features Monday as Doc Day. I have been engrossed recently in the five-part (and perhaps continuing) series, Brick City, which portrays the city of Newark in much the same way that The Wire does Baltimore, though with more uplift and less crushing despair. In one of its aspects, this series from Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin picks up where the excellent documentary Street Fight leaves off, with the story of mayor Cory Booker, the media-savvy Obama avatar who is bringing hope to a city that is a byword for bleakness. Other threads include the story of a police commissioner brought in to lower the murder rate, and a gang girl gone good who is developing a mentoring program for other gang girls. If 90% of success is showing up, then the filmmakers are pretty much there, finding themselves in the middle of one amazing scene after another. One of the joys of documentary is deep-felt access into other people's lives, and this series has that in ... um, I want to say spades, but there are some honkies too.
“Real Sex” and “Taxicab Confessions” aside, HBO demonstrates a real commitment to quality documentaries, frequently featured on Mondays as well. From this link, you can get more information on these films, listed in order of the urgency of my recommendation. In Boy Interrupted, a filmmaking couple try to come to terms with the suicide of their teenage son, in a wrenching but not exploitive manner that is edifying to the viewer as well as cathartic for them. The Yes Men Save the World with media stunts like going on tv masquerading as a corporate spokesman to apologize and offer reparation for the health disaster of Bhopal -- they are inventive and funny and jaw-droppingly revealing of the ethos of big business. The Last Truck: The Closing of a GM Plant watches the last vehicle come off a massive assembly line in Ohio, and reveals the mixed feelings of the laid-off workers who have devoted most of their lives to the disappearing workplace. Prom Night in Mississippi is a bit of a stunt but turns out to be revealing, as Morgan Freeman offers to pay for the first integrated prom in his small hometown, which catalyzes debate over the lingering legacy of racism but also suggests the hope of a new generation free of the hatreds of the past. The Nine Lives of Marion Barry is like Tyson in going some way toward rehabilitating a black man who has become notorious for bad behavior. The Recruiter is just as much about the recruited, as we follow a variety of Texas youth into the military and through basic training, in a film that could be taken as a prequel to Stop-Loss. (Not a documentary but a spinoff from a great one, HBO's Grey Gardens, with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange as the Bouvier daughter and mother, was not as superfluous as I imagined -- while some scenes were duplicated from the Maysles brothers' classic, the backstory is filled in and the actresses illuminate their characters -- and deserved the slew of Emmy nominations it picked up.)
PBS has long been a mainstay for documentaries, and they are a number of series I check regularly, foremost among them Independent Lens. Among the recent highlights are Herb & Dorothy, an absolutely delightful and fascinating look at the Vogels, a postal worker and librarian, who amassed an astounding collection of art from the Sixties on in their tiny Manhattan apartment, before three moving vans carted it away to the National Gallery -- I will look for the first opportunity to show this at the Clark. Butte, America mines fascinating archival footage and retrospective interviews to tell of the highly emblematic rise and fall of the "richest hill on earth," whose deposits of copper made the city boom, but whose mining companies went bust and left a legacy of environmental devastation.
Frontline is frequently worth checking out for extended treatment of important issues of the day, and Wide Angle is the same with an international perspective. Particularly notable from the latter is Time for School 3, which like the 7 Up series tracks a diverse group of children through time, ranging from an Afghan girl to a Brazilian boy, from a Romanian girl to a Kenyan boy. Initiated when an international accord promised a free education to every child in the world by 2015, this very well-done and affecting series periodically checks in on how that promise is being met or not in a variety of countries.
Two other venerable PBS series worth tuning into are American Experience and American Masters. Two episodes I've enjoyed lately are an old one of the former, A Midwife’s Tale, which uses an old diary and effectively minimal historical reenactments to offer a window on everyday life in colonial New England, and a recent broadcast on the latter, Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, which I didn't expect to watch, but caught while channelsurfing and remained caught by through its length -- I tend to think of Baez as a pretty voice covering other people's songs, but this film makes a case for her as a social activist who used singing as her most effective tool.
I've recently watched two other documentary dvds from Netflix that I commend to your attention. Kestrel’s Eye is a delight for birdbrains, offering a genuine bird's eye view of the lives of a family of hawks living in a cranny of an old Swedish church -- a spare but astonishing nature film, without narration or music, but with incredible camera angles and uncanny intimacy with the subject.
Many years ago I saw a memorable short film called Organism, a film about New York City which uses time-lapse photography to portray the city as a huge living organism. When I started to think about doing a film series of "city symphonies" at the Clark, I went looking for it and found it on a dvd called The Films of Hilary Harris -- it was every bit as good as I remembered, and as a bonus included 9 Variations, which is as good a dance documentary as I have ever seen, utterly simple but visually stunning and extremely sensual.
There's a world of great documentaries out there, and if you're not looking for them, you're missing a great part of the art of film.
First off is the recent documentary outing by feature director James Toback: Tyson (2009, MC-83). Like you, probably, I did not think I was all that interested in Mike Tyson, but I found this film almost hypnotizing in its formally inventive approach to film portraiture. Much of the film is Tyson himself speaking to the camera, in that incongruously high-pitched lisp, as if in self-reflection before an unseen therapist, but broken up into overlapping pictures and sound, which suggest the multiple facets of a divided self. He seems utterly believable in all his contradictions. There is enough footage recapitulating his career to establish that he might have been one of most powerful, if not the greatest, boxers of all time, and also to delineate his public disgrace in a rape conviction and prison term, plus the ignominious career-ending bout in which he bit the ear of his opponent. Tyson never goes quite so far as to plead, “I am not the animal you think I am,” but the film makes that case eloquently, and perhaps convincingly.
There are several stations worth monitoring for outstanding documentaries. Sundance Channel features Monday as Doc Day. I have been engrossed recently in the five-part (and perhaps continuing) series, Brick City, which portrays the city of Newark in much the same way that The Wire does Baltimore, though with more uplift and less crushing despair. In one of its aspects, this series from Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin picks up where the excellent documentary Street Fight leaves off, with the story of mayor Cory Booker, the media-savvy Obama avatar who is bringing hope to a city that is a byword for bleakness. Other threads include the story of a police commissioner brought in to lower the murder rate, and a gang girl gone good who is developing a mentoring program for other gang girls. If 90% of success is showing up, then the filmmakers are pretty much there, finding themselves in the middle of one amazing scene after another. One of the joys of documentary is deep-felt access into other people's lives, and this series has that in ... um, I want to say spades, but there are some honkies too.
“Real Sex” and “Taxicab Confessions” aside, HBO demonstrates a real commitment to quality documentaries, frequently featured on Mondays as well. From this link, you can get more information on these films, listed in order of the urgency of my recommendation. In Boy Interrupted, a filmmaking couple try to come to terms with the suicide of their teenage son, in a wrenching but not exploitive manner that is edifying to the viewer as well as cathartic for them. The Yes Men Save the World with media stunts like going on tv masquerading as a corporate spokesman to apologize and offer reparation for the health disaster of Bhopal -- they are inventive and funny and jaw-droppingly revealing of the ethos of big business. The Last Truck: The Closing of a GM Plant watches the last vehicle come off a massive assembly line in Ohio, and reveals the mixed feelings of the laid-off workers who have devoted most of their lives to the disappearing workplace. Prom Night in Mississippi is a bit of a stunt but turns out to be revealing, as Morgan Freeman offers to pay for the first integrated prom in his small hometown, which catalyzes debate over the lingering legacy of racism but also suggests the hope of a new generation free of the hatreds of the past. The Nine Lives of Marion Barry is like Tyson in going some way toward rehabilitating a black man who has become notorious for bad behavior. The Recruiter is just as much about the recruited, as we follow a variety of Texas youth into the military and through basic training, in a film that could be taken as a prequel to Stop-Loss. (Not a documentary but a spinoff from a great one, HBO's Grey Gardens, with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange as the Bouvier daughter and mother, was not as superfluous as I imagined -- while some scenes were duplicated from the Maysles brothers' classic, the backstory is filled in and the actresses illuminate their characters -- and deserved the slew of Emmy nominations it picked up.)
PBS has long been a mainstay for documentaries, and they are a number of series I check regularly, foremost among them Independent Lens. Among the recent highlights are Herb & Dorothy, an absolutely delightful and fascinating look at the Vogels, a postal worker and librarian, who amassed an astounding collection of art from the Sixties on in their tiny Manhattan apartment, before three moving vans carted it away to the National Gallery -- I will look for the first opportunity to show this at the Clark. Butte, America mines fascinating archival footage and retrospective interviews to tell of the highly emblematic rise and fall of the "richest hill on earth," whose deposits of copper made the city boom, but whose mining companies went bust and left a legacy of environmental devastation.
Frontline is frequently worth checking out for extended treatment of important issues of the day, and Wide Angle is the same with an international perspective. Particularly notable from the latter is Time for School 3, which like the 7 Up series tracks a diverse group of children through time, ranging from an Afghan girl to a Brazilian boy, from a Romanian girl to a Kenyan boy. Initiated when an international accord promised a free education to every child in the world by 2015, this very well-done and affecting series periodically checks in on how that promise is being met or not in a variety of countries.
Two other venerable PBS series worth tuning into are American Experience and American Masters. Two episodes I've enjoyed lately are an old one of the former, A Midwife’s Tale, which uses an old diary and effectively minimal historical reenactments to offer a window on everyday life in colonial New England, and a recent broadcast on the latter, Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, which I didn't expect to watch, but caught while channelsurfing and remained caught by through its length -- I tend to think of Baez as a pretty voice covering other people's songs, but this film makes a case for her as a social activist who used singing as her most effective tool.
I've recently watched two other documentary dvds from Netflix that I commend to your attention. Kestrel’s Eye is a delight for birdbrains, offering a genuine bird's eye view of the lives of a family of hawks living in a cranny of an old Swedish church -- a spare but astonishing nature film, without narration or music, but with incredible camera angles and uncanny intimacy with the subject.
Many years ago I saw a memorable short film called Organism, a film about New York City which uses time-lapse photography to portray the city as a huge living organism. When I started to think about doing a film series of "city symphonies" at the Clark, I went looking for it and found it on a dvd called The Films of Hilary Harris -- it was every bit as good as I remembered, and as a bonus included 9 Variations, which is as good a dance documentary as I have ever seen, utterly simple but visually stunning and extremely sensual.
There's a world of great documentaries out there, and if you're not looking for them, you're missing a great part of the art of film.
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