Oscar & I choose "Best Picture"

Most Oscar nominees arrive on Blu-Ray disk after the awards are announced, so I’m typically late to see them, but this is the rare year when I’m happy to second the Academy’s anointing of Best Picture.  Here I offer my belated commentary on the nominees. 

Spotlight (MC-93, FC #7, MC #2, NFX) definitely earned the award -- important in subject, well-judged and well-made across the board, combining truth and art to tell a real story, explaining while entertaining, documenting while fabulating.  Where to start?  I guess one has to start with director and co-writer Tom McCarthy, who must have set out to atone for his role as the bad Sun reporter in season five of The Wire, by showing exactly what a good reporter does.  He brings “truth of place” to the film; perhaps that’s the proper definition of a phrase I’ve never quite understood, mise-en-scène.  Next, the familiar and admirable cast – Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel MacAdams, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, and others – are all highly authentic in their roles.  As are the city of Boston, the newsroom of the Globe, the neighborhood juxtapositions and class distinctions.  Most authentic of all – the job of reporting, what it looks like, what it feels like, as an investigative team delves into the cover-up of pedophile priests by the Catholic Church.  The film portrays journalism as not glamorous, but driven by purpose.  And its purpose is the same as that of the characters of the film, to shine a spotlight on an abuse of power by a big institution preying on vulnerable individuals.

The Big Short (MC-81, FC #40, MC #18, NFX) is almost as good at revealing systemic institutional mendacity, but plays more as a revel than a cautionary drama.  Adam McKay’s film does a good job of explaining the financial crisis of 2007, but lays the glamour on thick, and humor as well, riffing freely on Michael Lewis’ nonfiction bestseller of the same name.  Need a definition of some arcane acronym? -- this film will stop and deliver it through a beautiful blond in a bubble bath sipping champagne, or a celebrity chef making a stew out of old fish, or a pop star at a roulette table.  Plenty of glamour and humor from the cast as well:  Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Steve Carell, and all the rest, with all but one of the leads a fictionalized composite of the originals in the book.  The movie is somehow anarchic and cogent at the same, eliciting laughs as well as righteous anger.  Reality is freely embellished, but never ignored.  Departures from fact are explicitly flagged by direct-to-the-camera commentary.  You get the feeling that this is how the housing and bank crash actually happened, just funnier.

Hmm, a story about a kidnapped teenager being kept in isolation for years, raped repeatedly and raising a child alone in small garden shed?  No wonder I did not gravitate to Emma Donoghue’s acclaimed novel,  Room (MC-86, FC #35, MC #11, NFX), but when her screenplay was directed by Lenny Abrahamson and embodied in the Oscar-winning performance of Brie Larson, whom I’ve admired since Short Term 12, I was drawn in, and mightily impressed by the result.  Excellent as Brie is, she is overshadowed by the central role of Jacob Tremblay as the five-year-old boy through whose eyes most of the film unfolds, and the love between them is the beating heart of this film.  I won’t say more about what happens, because if you don’t know the story already, I advise you to approach it with innocent eyes.  Moreover, I urge you to have confidence in the sincerity and sensitivity of all the people involved, and not avoid the story as unpleasant.  The last half-hour is a little too rushed to fully convince, as if trying to cram in too much of the book, but otherwise this is an exemplary adaptation of a difficult book, with dimensions far beyond its “woman and child in jeopardy” horror movie aspects.

Just as the first two films in this survey make a pair of sorts, so do the following two, about young women trying to find a place and an identity under trying circumstances.  Brie Larson has a harder passage through isolation than Saoirse Ronan does in Brooklyn (MC-87, FC #18, MC #5, NFX), but the latter is equally effective at making inner struggle visible.  She plays Eilis (whom I learned from the movie to pronounce Ale-ish, after reading Colm Toibin’s book in all ignorance), a girl who in 1952 reluctantly leaves her older sister and mother behind in Ireland to pursue an opportunity that opens up for her in America.  And she in turn gradually opens up to her titular new home, and to a devoted Italian boy who falls hard for her.  Then a family tragedy takes Eilis back to Ireland, where unexpected new possibilities arise for her, forcing her to choose between staying where she’s from or going back to Brooklyn.  Both the star and the film are lovely and emotionally expressive, and Nick Hornby’s screenplay also warms the novel up a bit.  Director John Crowley captures a fond but clear-eyed retrospect on the past, which pairs nicely with Carol, as stories about NYC department store shopgirls in the Fifties.  I was prepared to see through this film after reading a single dismissive review, but wound up watching it through tears and smiles.

I feel more ambivalence about Steven Spielberg than any other major director, but Bridge of Spies (MC-81, FC #20, MC #25, NFX) falls mostly on the positive side of the ledger.  Spielberg is unquestionably a consummate filmmaker, but to me seems to have a shallow, sentimental worldview, with more drive to entertain than to understand, less commitment to truth than to a good story.  He marshals vast talents to create a cinematic otherworld, then populates it with puppets, sometimes letting the strings show.  On the other hand, he frequently works with actors who have the stature to cut the strings and go their own way, notably in this case, Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance.  Spielberg effectively conjures the era when the Cold War was at its height, in telling the story behind the swap -- on a dark, frigid Berlin bridge in 1962 -- of convicted Russian spy Rudolf Abel for downed U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (plus an American student caught on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall as it was being erected).  Told mainly from the point of view of the Hanks character, the straight-arrow lawyer picked to represent Abel, who comes to appreciate the stoic integrity portrayed by Rylance; he’s later recruited by the CIA to arrange the swap.  Spielberg’s movie magic works in making us a root for a Russian spy, as well as the lawyer’s devotion to due process, in a plot strand with plenty of contemporary relevance.  Where he fails is in the plastic replica of his own birth family, which he inserts into so many of his films, with Amy Ryan wasted as the lawyer’s wife, and mother of their three utterly generic children.  Still, in mood and setting this is a masterful film, marked by two superlative performances.  Stevie’s bag of cinematic tricks reliably conjures life out of projected images, and when my sentiment is in tune with his, preeminently with Lincoln, I am happy to believe in his act.

The Martian (MC-80, FC #44, MC #13, NFX) represents a lot of effort and expense without a lot of effect, aside from special effects.  My god, the stars! – though aside from Matt Damon, they don’t get much to do.  And the SFX! -- the surface of Mars looks terrific, space ships have never looked glossier or sexier, and the same goes for NASA facilities on earth.  Director Ridley Scott certainly knows his way around a blockbuster.  But to me this film smacks of propaganda for a space program to which I’ve never lent credence or support.  It’s fun to see a lot of familiar faces in small roles, but not a lot of characterization is offered, though there are plenty of jokes and amusingly appropriate disco music.  The scientific problem-solving -- amplified from Apollo 13 -- is the most appealing part of the movie, but the political and international setting is thin to the point of transparent.  I can’t deny this sci-fi is engaging to watch, infinitely more entertaining than Interstellar, but I can’t help wondering about the waste of resources involved, and the unexamined calculations of this movie.

The down-and-dirty problem-solving of Leonardo DiCaprio - as a mountain man of the Rockies in the 1820s - is the best part of The Revenant (MC-76, MC #22, NFX), besides the always-magical cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki.  But director Alejandro G. Iñárritu has never engaged my interest, despite back-to-back Oscar wins.  In his films, there is spectacle aplenty, with bravura flourishes, but ultimately little substance, and shallow insight into character.  Despite the unfulfilled storytelling, the acting is good across the board.  DiCaprio might have deserved his Oscar, if only for what he had to suffer for his art, playing an indigenized guide to a fur-trapping company, who is mauled by a bear and left for dead.  Bad-ass Tom Hardy and carrot-topped Domhnall Gleeson seem to be everywhere recently, always delivering quality performances.  The special effects are wondrous, whether grizzly attack or bison stampede.  But the story is a simplistic revenge fantasy, less sophisticated than the similar but far-superior Jeremiah Johnson of 1972, or even the psychologically complex Hollywood Westerns of the 1950s.  The scenery is magnificent, but there’s a wised-up grubbiness to this tale of endurance, which keeps me on the outside, barely enduring the film.  Despite its basis in historical fact, the story seems made up, and the sense of period more fabricated than lived in.  Still, those vistas…

What can I say?  What causes some people to sit up and take notice -- makes me fall asleep.  And vice versa, no doubt.  I could barely keep from dozing off during the nonstop vehicular collisions and fireballs of Mad Max: Fury Road (MC-90, FC #3, MC #1, NFX).  I stayed awake long enough to take in some of the aspects that won this genre film an Oscar-nom as “Best Picture,” but remained quite immune to its charms.  I am happy to say that I have never seen anything at all of Mel Gibson as Mad Max, and wish I could say the same about this series re-boot, though I’ve come to expect interesting character work from Tom Hardy.  I derive some amusement from Charlize Theron’s perpetual and futile attempts to look ugly – here, cut off my arm (as well as my hair), bloody my face, drain my blood, beat the shit out of me!  I guess the trick is to make live action look like a comic book, and CGI effects look as real as real could be.  In the Metacritic compilation of Top 10 lists, more critics anointed this pile of something as best film of the year than the next three vote-getters combined.  Apparently, partisanship is as rife in film as in politics, and I’m clearly on the opposing side.

Germane to romance

German literature in general, and German Romanticism in particular, is terra incognita to me (might have something to do with coming of age in the immediate wake of two World Wars), but chance has led me that way lately.  First there was an essay in the New Yorker that asked the question, “What’s great about Goethe?”  Then Amour Fou (MC-68, FC #48, NFX) leapt from a library shelf into my hand, with writer-director Jessica Hausner looking at the life and death of Heinrich von Kleist, from the perspective of the woman who died with him in a notorious suicide pact.  This is at the opposite emotional pole from Mayerling, for example; portrayed with dry wit in the spare, formal style of Eric Rohmer’s Kleist adaptation, The Marquise of O.  The precision of the framing creates a cage around the characters, who recite their lines in a stiff manner that reflects the rectilinearity of the social milieu, and the pastness of the past.  Rather than rising to surges of romantic feeling, this film hews to historical facts, but examines them with a feminist sociological eye for the absurd.

From that film, I was directed by a review to Beloved Sisters (MC-66, NFX), and found it absorbing and quite lovely.  If I knew anything about Friedrich Schiller, I might object to the liberties this film takes with his life, turning the author’s relationship with his wife and her sister into a ménage a trois.  But in my ignorance of historical fact, I was much more taken with how writer-director Domink Graf went to school on Truffaut, repeatedly echoing two of my favorite films, Jules et Jim and Two English Girls.  Whatever the fabrications of the story, a slice of German literary life between 1788 and 1805 is rendered with impressive authenticity at nearly epic length.  And the sisters themselves – oh my!  Played by Hannah Herzsprung and Henriette Confurius, they command our attention with their blue eyes and emotional intensity.  (I’d say remember the names of these actresses, but that is hard to do; think of heart-leaping beauty and the wisdom of Confucius.)  Goethe (and Weimar Classicism) figures only on the fringes of this romance, appearing from behind or in long shot, as if he were Mohammed and no image allowed.  The previews on the DVD, however, led me to the next film.

For the German title, apparently untranslatable – Goethe! (beware of film titles with exclamation points!) – American distributors clearly chose Young Goethe in Love (2011, MC-55, NFX) to call up memories of Shakespeare in Love, for costumed hijinks with a literary veneer.  Lots of lusty embraces out in nature, galloping horses, bouts of drink and drugs, and of course the bonnie lass who inspired The Sorrows of Young Werther, which made Goethe a continental celebrity at the age of 25.  Actually I found Miriam Stein quite piquant as Lotte Buff, but the actor playing Goethe was too puppy-ish to represent the universal Germanic genius, even as a stripling.  That said, I rather enjoyed this film for its evocation of Germany in 1772, and for its Classics Illustrated comic book version of a literary classic that I will never get around to reading.  But if you want to see romantic poets cavorting like rock stars, I would refer you to Coleridge and Wordsworth in Pandaemonium (1999), if you can find it.

Still deeper into 2015 films

After the Oscars comes the season when last year’s prestige productions arrive on DVD in a rush.  I’m still holding off comment on the Best Picture nominees till I have seen them all (spoiler: Spotlight truly was the best of the bunch), but there are many other critical faves to cover.

In Carol (MC-95, FC#1, MC #3, NFX) the feel for place and period - New York in the early Fifties - is as sleek and soft, lush and thick, as Cate Blanchett’s mink coat.  In this adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel, directed by Todd Haynes, she is the title character, a well-to-do New Jersey housewife in town to get a Christmas present for her preschool daughter.  The young sales clerk who waits on her is played by Rooney Mara, admirably channeling Audrey Hepburn.  You could say that sparks fly, but on a slow-burning fuse.  Carol is divorcing her husband -- even though he’s Kyle Chandler -- and after a subtle mating dance, suddenly Carol and Therese are off on a cross-country road trip, where they might well cross paths with Humbert and Lolita.  Their love affair, scandalous for the time, threatens Carol’s custody arrangement, so hard choices are in order, exquisitely rendered by Cate and Rooney.  The associative force of this film is strong and classic, evoking Sirkian Fifties melodrama, and calling up for me the mood of one of my all-time favorites, The Apartment.  Every aspect of the production is carefully considered and mutedly beautiful.  I can’t think of a film from last year that I admired more, though I’m not quite ready to anoint it my best of 2015.

Sicario (MC-81, FC #47, MC #15, NFX) has many worthy elements, but in sum they do not deserve your attention, unless you have a thing for dark drug-smuggling thrillers (and if you do, I’d point you in the direction of the Oscar-nominated documentary Cartel Land).  This title is Mexican slang for “hitman” and there are several candidates for the eponymous role.  Our eyes and ears into this hellish cycle of border violence – criminal and governmental, with blurry lines between the gangs on either side – is Emily Blunt, a good-soldier FBI specialist in hostage situations, who is recruited as a blind for two nefarious operatives (CIA? DoD?) with obscure objectives, Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro.  Director Denis Villeneuve inflects Zero-Dark-Thirty-ish elements with moody and arty touches, as well as deep ethical ambiguity, and Roger Deakins’ cinematography makes the desert landscape a palpable force in the story.  This is a good-looking, well-acted, pulse-pounding action film that wants to be something more, but doesn’t really escape its genre.

Suffragette (MC-67, NFX) is a notch above Masterpiece Theater in the vein of British historical drama -- for production values, cast, and gritty realism.  The script seems somewhat manufactured, however, and Sarah Gavron’s direction, though competent, does not discover added dimension.  This film depicts a moment before WWI when the movement for woman’s suffrage - goaded by official resistance turning violent - switched from words to deeds, from peaceful petitions and marches to incendiary bombings and provocative actions.  Though the focus is on a fictional character, a gradually-radicalized laundress played by the reliably-appealing Carey Mulligan, other characters are more historical, such as the leader played by Helena Bonham Carter, with a cameo by Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst.  Suffragette dramatizes neatly enough a pivotal point in the still-ongoing stuggle for women’s rights, but hardly digs deep into its characters or the full implications of their actions.   

Trumbo (MC-60, NFX) seems cut from the same cloth – worthy historical drama, good cast, decent production values, but still missing some element of engagement with character or theme.  Bryan Cranston plays blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo from his appearance before HUAC in 1947, through his prison sentence for (well-deserved) contempt of Congress, and his pseudonymous Oscars (including script for Roman Holiday), to the reappearance of his name in the credits for Spartacus.  Cranston is first-rate, but Helen Mirren nearly steals the show as Hedda Hopper, his adversary and spokesperson for the “loyal anti-communist” community of Hollywood.  A lot of familiar faces do well by their roles, though some, like Diane Lane as Trumbo’s wife, are sadly underused.  Jay Roach’s film leans more to self-satisfied preaching than to honest soul-searching, but the backstage view of the movie business is quite entertaining.  

For Steve Jobs (MC-82, MC #27, NFX), Danny Boyle’s direction is too razzle-dazzle and Aaron Sorkin’s script too rat-a-tat, but Michael Fassbender in the title role carries the day (Cranston and Fassbender were both nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, but I’d give the nod to the latter).  He is supported adeptly by a nearly unrecognizable Kate Winslet, as the “work-wife” who keeps him sane and almost human, plus Jeff Daniels as the Apple CEO who was ally and then adversary of Jobs.  Also convincing are Seth Rogan as Woz, Apple co-founder, and Michael Stuhlbarg as a menschy Apple engineer (he played Edward G. Robinson in Trumbo). The three-act structure is too theatrical and too simplified (but the editing too complicated), as each part revolves around a product launch -- the Mac in 1984, NeXT in 1988, and iMac in 1998 – and requires each character to come back on stage in turn, along with Jobs’ ex-girlfriend and the daughter he first disowns, then embraces, then alienates.  Though this portrait of a tech-age titan falls well short of The Social Network, it’s still worth seeing.  As is the nearly simultaneous documentary by Alex Gibney, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (MC-72, NFX); I watched them back-to-back and now the films blur a bit in my memory, but together they give a more rounded portrait than either separately, though neither really solves the enigma of its subject, or the implications of his career.

I might be inclined to dismiss The Danish Girl (MC-66, NFX) as the performance of a performance of a performance, but then, there are the performers.  I don’t go as wild as some do for Eddie Redmayne, but he is certainly right for this role.  I am, however, totally on the Alicia Vikander bandwagon, and was happy to see her win an Oscar for what was her third best performance of 2015. His performance is all about external gestures, hers about internal emotions.  It’s the story of a painting couple in 1920s Copenhagen, living a mildly bohemian life, while the man gradually realizes his womanhood and seeks radical surgery to confirm it. Every aspect of the production is tastefully, even artfully done (I loved the interiors copied from Hammershoi paintings), but for me it failed to engage on any but a surface level.  Except of course for Ms. Vikander, whose gaze I find bottomless.

Better you should watch the first film of this young Swedish actress, readily availability on Netflix streaming.  Lisa Langseth’s film Pure (2010, NFX) tells the story of a troubled young woman, who stumbles upon classical music as way to bring order and beauty to her disordered life, to save her from the suicidal fate of her promiscuous mother.  She bluffs her way into a job at the Gothenburg concert hall, and into an aspirational affair with the conductor, which can only lead to disappointment and further consequences.  This film has merits beyond Alicia as Katarina, but doesn’t really need them.  There are faces that the camera loves, that reveal every blush of emotion, every flicker of thought – hers is such, self-evidently from her first film.  And with her dancing background, every movement is beautifully articulated (as in Ex Machina).  Sorry if I seem smitten, but you should see for yourself this emerging star from the constellation of Ingrid Bergman.

Similar in theme and in Netflix availability, also written and directed by a woman, Marya Cohn's The Girl in the Book (MC-68, NFX) tells another story of a young woman seduced and exploited by an older creative type.  Emily VanCamp plays a 29-year-old assistant at a Manhattan publishing house, her father an obnoxious high-powered agent, and her boss not much better.  They both involve her with an author, with whom she has a difficult history.  In flashbacks, Ana Mulvey-Ten plays her as a young teen, whom the author mentors with dubious motives, turning her into his most famous character, “a female Holden Caulfield.”  I liked both these actresses, and enjoyed the setting within the NY publishing world (much more plausibly portrayed than in Showtime series The Affair).  Meanwhile, the elder Alice meets a paragon of normality, who may or may not end her streak of bad luck with the men in her life.  This film is hardly unique, but still authentically its own thing, made with Kickstarter passion.

Speaking of girls in books (and in movies), who could be more of one than Cinderella (MC-67, NFX)?  It certainly sounds superfluous for Disney to do a live-action remake of its animated classic, and do so without revisionist irony, but rather literalist sincerity.  But then there’s direction by Kenneth Branagh, costumes by Sandy Powell, and set design by Dante Ferretti, so you can expect a ripe visual spectacle.  Excellent acting too, by Lily James and Richard Madden as Cinderella and the prince, but moreover Cate Blanchett as the stepmother, and Derek Jacobi as the king.  On one level, I didn’t need a straight retelling of this fairy tale, but on another, even with CGI embellishments, this film seems a vindication of traditional movie pageantry over the modern magic of animation.

Michael B. Jordan played memorable characters in two of my all-time favorite tv series, The Wire and Friday Night Lights, so I’m happy to see him become a leading man in the movies.  Creed (MC-82, FC #28, MC #17, NFX) is bound to be his career breakthrough, as he and his sculpted pecs convincingly embody a light heavyweight boxer, in this afterthought to the series of Rocky films.  I saw the first two or three of those, and it’s pleasant to see this film play off them, not least in Sylvester Stallone’s reprise of the Rocky role.  Boxing films make up a genre all their own, with stories as predictable as Greek tragedy or afternoon soap operas, so don’t expect any surprises out of Ryan Coogler’s film, but it’s competently made and well-performed, with a compellingly different angle on the traditional story, as you would expect from the director and star of Fruitvale Station.  I liked the urban feel for Philadelphia, with several scenes shot in my brother’s neighborhood.  But honestly, I hope Michael B. is not trapped into playing this character again and again.

Does Chi-Raq (MC-77, FC #41, MC #28, NFX) work?  Depends on the work you’re looking for.  Is Spike Lee’s latest film a shapely aesthetic object?  Well, no, it’s a mess, and has ambitions beyond its reach.  But is it amusing and impassioned?  Eclectic and daring?  Calculated to entertain and enrage in equal measure?  Yes, that it is.  Like Lee’s School Daze and Bamboozled, it’s a radical minstrel show that uses song and dance, jokes and jive to make a strong argument about racial politics, and sexual politics as well.  From hip-hop to slow jams, it celebrates black music and culture, while documenting the shocking truth that since 2001 there have been more gun murders in Chicago than American military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.  Based on Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, and told largely in verse, it tells of the revolt of women against the senseless carnage of gang warfare by the strategy and slogan, “No Peace, No Pussy.”  The cast is graced by Samuel L. Jackson as the rapping Greek chorus, John Cusack as a radical priest on a crusade, and Angela Bassett as the leader of the women’s protest.  But the focus is on Nick Cannon as one of the gang leaders (an unrecognizable Wesley Snipes is the other) and Teyonah Parris as his lady, the firebrand Lysistrata.  Call it one of Spike’s more effective provocations.

I’m more a “Love & Mercy” than a “Fuck tha Police” sort of guy, but I could appreciate the anger and aspiration embodied in Straight Outta Compton (MC-72, NFX), as well as the contemporary relevance of thirty-year-old music.  Never a fan of hip-hop, let alone “gangsta rap,” the story of N.W.A. (“Niggaz Wit Attitude”) was mostly news to me.  Almost as interesting as Brian Wilson, to follow these young men into the recording studio.  Less so, however, to follow them into their booty palaces, and the personal conflicts of success.  This is definitely the authorized version of the group’s history, following standard music business tropes (white businessmen ripping off black artists), but the young cast makes it all quite watchable, notably Ice Cube being played by his own son.

The Fellini-esque style of Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth (MC-64, NFX) is familiar from his Oscar winner, The Great Beauty, but while the earlier film overcame my class-based resistance to the lifestyles of the rich and famous, this one does not -- despite elements that won me over, including intermittently sharp writing and winning performances from long-familiar faces, such as Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel, Rachel Weisz, and Jane Fonda.  I appreciated the setting in the Swiss alps, but the denizens of a posh resort spa did not interest me much.  For every well-turned scene or dialogue, there was also some empty posturing, supercilious attitudinizing, or pictorial excess, not adding up to much in the end.  I watched the spectacle without pain, but without engagement either.

I happened to come upon a DVD of In the Heart of the Sea (MC-47, NFX) at a public library, and picked it up without consulting Metacritic, which could have warned me away.  I had heard good things about the book, and it’s set in the era I’m obsessed with, in a seafaring genre that usually appeals to me.  But you know what, it’s not very good.  It wastes talented actors, has a poor sense of period or locale, and devolves into formulaic and chaotic action/adventure.  The weak frame of the story has Ben Whishaw as Herman Melville interviewing Brendan Gleeson, as the last living survivor of the whaling ship Essex, which was sunk by an enraged leviathan.  For me the most entertaining moment in the movie comes when Melville sets off for home, “Pittsfield, Massachusetts,” to write Moby Dick.  Shipboard relations and the shipwreck itself are not well-directed by Ron Howard, but there are a few visual effects that work.

If you found the male stripper extravaganza Magic Mike more entertaining than you might have guessed, do not imagine that Magic Mike XXL (MC-60, FC #38 (!), NFX) is more of the same, only bigger.  It’s simply trashier in every respect.  Even if down and dirty is your thing, this is dirtier and a bigger downer than you expect.

My latest documendations

At 86, Frederick Wiseman is still going strong, turning out his lengthy documentaries at a regular pace, each one figuring among the best of the year (case in point, In Jackson Heights, which I am super-eager to see, ranks FC#13 of all 2015 features).  His latest on DVD, National Gallery (2014, MC-89, NFX), certainly appealed directly to my interests, bringing his usual panoptic viewpoint to every facet of the London museum.  He’s the most intelligent and all-seeing fly-on-the-wall in the history of film, who fashions his very personal storytelling about institutions without narration or other editorial intervention, aside from his own feel for pace, insight, and connection.  Recording sound in a two-man crew with brilliant cinematographer John Davey for almost thirty years, Wiseman gets close to his subjects and studies them from many angles, and delivers his reports with impressive objectivity, flavored by his own distinctive craft.  The more attention you bring, the more you will get out of his films. 

The behind-the-scenes operation of a world-class museum is bound to engage my interest, but for a test of Wiseman’s magic, take a look at Boxing Gym (2010, MC-83, NFX), which I was surprised to find quite riveting for its 91-minute running time, a mere short subject by Wiseman standards.  The time is spent just hanging around a gym in Austin TX, getting to know a range of characters and their reasons for embracing the “sweet science” of boxing.  Would make an intriguing double feature with Andrew Bujalski’s Results.

Two other European museums have recently received Wiseman-like (or Wiseman-lite) treatment, highlighting the differences in Dutch and Austrian national cultures.  The New Rijksmuseum (2013, MC-66, NFX) demonstrates the democratic culture of Amsterdam, construction being held up for years by public arguments over a bikepath, and hearings on every other issue imaginable.  The available DVD cuts almost two hours from the theatrical release, but still takes its time and gets into many corners of the museum, and portrays the many characters who must come together to allow the outstanding national museum to open again, after a decade of renovation and construction.  The Great Museum (2015, MC-66, NFX) refers to Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, also dealing with a major renovation, the installation of a gallery of Hapsburg family treasures.  It’s interesting to see how old imperial culture lingers in Austrian politics, especially in contrast to Amsterdam’s liberal democracy.  Other than that, this shorter film shares the style but does not have the dimensions of the other two.

Here are two more documentaries I vetted for possible showing at the Clark, once the auditorium reopens after renovation, probably next January.  Art and Craft (MC-68, NFX) would certainly get a discussion going.  It’s the true story of Mark Landis, a not-for-profit art forger who paints copies of second-tier artists and gives them to second-tier museums, impersonating a priest and saying the works were inherited from recently deceased relatives.  He’s a Southern Gothic sort of character – schizophrenic? autistic? – who has managed to get his work into sixty different museums.  One registrar he duped goes on a crusade to reveal the con.  Except Landis broke no laws, not even taking a tax deduction for his gifts.  There’s the mystery of his character and motivations, but also a wider inquiry into questions of authenticity and value within the art world.

No problems of provenance in Very Semi-Serious (MC-74, NFX, HBO), in which all the works are signed, sealed, and delivered to the New Yorker art department, where cartoon editor Robert Mankoff makes the weekly selection of trademark panels.  This is a sharp and funny look behind the scenes at the irregular characters behind our regular weekly comics, including Roz Chast and others, and what it takes to make a living by drawing.

Here’s one strong documentary recommendation that might be a tough sell.  Racing Dreams (2010, MC-78, NFX) is an examination of NASCAR culture, through the prism of its corresponding “little league,” where middle-schoolers travel around the country to race go-carts at speeds up to 70 MPH.  Following the template of Hoop Dreams and every kids’ competition film from Spellbound on, Marshall Curry deploys his curiosity and canny filmmaking skills to tell a tale of pre-adolescence that is both universal and tied to a very specific sociology, brilliantly edited to turn 500 hours of footage into a swift, compelling 90-minute narrative.  Following two young boys and a girl as they compete on the Karting circuit for a national title, we come to know them and their families well, and the unfamiliar milieu they inhabit, in a manner that makes me almost willing to think of auto racing as a genuine sport.  I’d put this in a category with Red Army, as a doc that uses a sport in which I have no interest as a window onto much more than a game.  It’s endearing, informative, and even stirring.  You should see it to believe it.

That documentary was so surprisingly accomplished that I felt impelled to look deeper into its director, Marshall Curry.  Turns out his first was Street Fight, an excellent film that first brought Cory Booker to my attention.  Since Curry seems like a documentarian who qualifies as an auteur, I made a point of catching up with his other films.  Unfortunately, in nonfiction the characters are chosen and not created, so unless you’re a genius like Fred Wiseman, real authorship is elusive.  I didn’t mind watching Curry’s other two films, but the subjects portrayed were not as engaging. 

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (2011, MC-65, NFX) follows a tree-hugging “ecoterrorist” years after he was arrested by the FBI and jailed for acts of arson against logging companies and other supposed environmental villains.  The question of violence in the service of a good cause is looked at from many angles, through news footage and interviews, but the central character is not interesting enough to carry the film.  Same deal with Point and Shoot (2014, MC-65, NFX), where a pipsqueak Lawrence of Arabia wannabe takes a motorcycle trek through the Middle East for a “crash course in manhood,” filming himself obsessively along the way, and winding up with anti-Qaddafi fighters in Libya.  Both the location footage and the subsequent interviews are queasy with the subject’s self-regard, which Curry views all too dispassionately. 

Before surveying the Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature, I want to offer three further personal recommendations:

How to Dance in Ohio (MRQE, NFX, HBO) is something I never learned growing up there, but something a group of autistic young adults undertake to do, in a program designed to prepare the high-functioning for independent living.  You may not feel the degree of identification I did with these unusual young people trying to find their way in the neurotypical world, but Alexandra Shiva’s film will make you empathize with the effort they put it, and the delight they take in such against-the-grain sociability.  The film follows three girls in particular as they prepare for a spring formal, and the problems they face in doing so, with a winning blend of insight and uplift.

I was rather surprised to wind up adding Little White Lie (MC-80, NFX) to my list of outstanding first-person documentaries.  I’d suspected a vanity project but discovered something much more profound.  Lacey Schwartz grew up in a Jewish family in Woodstock, where her unusual looks were ignored or explained away, in a conspiracy of silence about her actual parentage.  Only when she went away to college was the obvious observation made, as she was invited to join the Black Students Union.  She then confronts her family over long-buried secrets, and embraces a black identity.  Through family photos and interviews, she puts the story together in a brisk and moving 65 minutes, with implications well beyond the narrowly personal.

I also suspected Ethan Hawke of a vanity project in directing Seymour: An Introduction (MC-83, NFX), but found an honestly searching portrait of a mentor he’d met at a party, where they discussed the problem of stage fright.  Octogenarian Seymour Bernstein has plenty to say on that subject and many others.  He was an acclaimed concert pianist who gave up the stage suddenly at the age of fifty, and has since devoted himself to teaching and composing.  Despite my frightful ignorance of music, his passion and precision gave sense to everything he said, about the practice of music, and the vicissitudes of performance.  Talking with Hawke, and other interlocutors like ex-student Michael Kimmelman, he reveals understanding not just of his art and craft, but of life.  This film makes a nice match with Albert Maysles’ Iris, in introducing us to a deeply vital elder with a lot of life wisdom to pass along.

(Click through for reviews of the five Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature, and others.)