Documentary round-up

Inside Job (2010, MC-88) suffered for me from the high expectations I brought to it, having found Charles Ferguson’s first film, No End in Sight, the most enlightening documentary I’d seen about the Iraq War.  So I figured he’d really unpack the banking meltdown of 2008, and very likely I’d join the critics of the Film Comment poll and rank Inside Job among the top handful of films from last year.  Not quite.  The film offers a clear enough picture of the financial skullduggery behind the crisis, and I agree that some people should have gone to jail for it, but I didn’t find its argument as informative and convincing as I expected.  So I can’t quite agree with its Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Another nominee that I found more surprising and satisfying was Waste Land (2010, MC-78), which I will certainly schedule for the Clark at first opportunity.  Vik Muniz is an artist well-known for his re-photographed portraits in chocolate, sugar, or dust, and a pair of matching Madonnas, one in peanut butter and one in jelly.  Lucy Walker’s film follows Muniz when he returns to Brazil, having achieved success in the global art world, in an effort to give something back to the community from which he arose.  He chooses as his focus the largest landfill in the world, where most of the waste in the Rio area goes, and as subject for his portraits the catadores, or pickers, who recycle a modest living out of the piles of garbage.  He takes photos of them, and then enlists their aid in recreating the portraits by arranging refuse on the floor of a warehouse and then re-photographing the construction from above.  He then takes the portrait subjects to a London gallery show and auction of the finished works, returning the money raised to the pickers’ association for mutual aid.  There are many ways this film could have turned icky, but it maintains its humor and intelligence throughout, and winds up quite moving as well.

At first I assumed the HBO documentary Reagan (2011) would be an anodyne celebration of the Gipper’s hundredth birthday, another amnesiac hagiography of the patron saint of all Republicans.  But then I saw that it was directed by Eugene Jarecki, who in Why We Fight went back to Eisenhower’s farewell speech and lucidly showed just how the “military-industrial complex” has taken over in the fifty years since the old soldier’s warning.  This film manages to debunk without anger, and still to celebrate what there was to celebrate in Reagan’s leadership.  It works as a reality check both ways, more a serious work of history than a partisan argument.

Another documentary I approached dubiously on PBS "Independent Lens" series, For Once in My Life (2010), turned out to be well worth seeing.  I suspected this story of a band of variously-disabled performers from a Goodwill facility in Miami getting ready for a big public performance would be a source of saccharine uplift, but the film by James Bigham and Mark Moormann included as much eye-opening insight as special pleading, on the path to its rousing and heartening conclusion.

I also didn’t expect a competition among pastry chefs for the French honor of  “master craftsman” to make for a riveting film either, but I certainly had enough respect for giant of direct cinema D.A. Pennebaker and his partner Chris Hegedus, to give a look to Kings of Pastry (2010, MC-69).  The film baked up more amazement and emotion, not to mention humor and suspense, out of sculptures in sugar than one could have easily imagined going in, with a small subject that revealed unsuspected depths of implication. 

A much weightier subject is addressed in Pray the Devil Back to Hell (2010, MC-78).  Gini Reticker’s film follows a peace movement among Christian and Muslim mothers, led by Leymah Gbowee, which managed to bring an end to Liberia’s civil war with the overthrow and exile of corrupt strongman Charles Taylor.  This film makes an excellent prequel to The Iron Ladies of Liberia, another good documentary which covers the subsequent election of Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson as the first woman president in Africa, and the initial efforts at reconstruction by her largely female administration. 

Also worthy of note is the second season of the Sundance Channel series, Brick City (2011), a high-toned reality show that follows Newark mayor Cory Booker as he deals with budget apocalypse and a re-election campaign.  Booker is an admirable and engaging character, a Rhodes scholar who takes on the mission of saving New Jersey’s beleaguered largest city against formidable obstacles, while maintaining some sense of mystery about his private life, if any, and his deepest motivations.  His story is intertwined with that of the police chief and various reforming gang members, as well as the entrenched opposition of native Newark or would-be radical forces.  In the current days of municipal meltdown and threatened default, these stories are important to see, and the comparison to The Wire as a portrait of a city in multiple crises is well-deserved.  Booker’s story is fascinating to follow, from the excellent stand-alone documentary Street Fight, which detailed his first, unsuccessful run for mayor, through the first season of Brick City, in which he wins and takes office for the first time.  I’m eager to see whatever’s next.

As an addendum to the Cinema Salon film club’s first series on “The Art of Documentary,” let me re-recommend F for Fake, Orson Welles’ elegantly braided exploration of art and lying; The Gleaners & I, Agnes Varda’s amusing and thoughtful exploration of the margins of economic system, and an obvious inspiration for Waste Land; and most especially, Heddy Honigmann’s  Forever, which seemed even better to me on second viewing, in its exploration of death and immortality, art and memory, through the window of Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Displaced persons

The central character of Amreeka  (2009, MC-73) is as much placeless as displaced.  As she has to inform airport security, she has no country, she is Palestinian and comes from occupied territory.  Her 15-minute commute to work takes two hours because she has to go around the Wall and through checkpoints where she and her son are routinely hassled.  Her husband has left her for a younger, slimmer woman, and her son urges that since the old man’s done what he wanted, they ought to do what they want, which is move to America when their papers come through.  They go to stay with her sister in suburban Illinois, her husband a doctor whose successful practice is suddenly shunned after 9/11.  Despite two degrees and ten years experience in banking, our heroine has to take a job at White Castle, while pretending to her family that she is working in the bank next door.  Cherien Dabis knows whereof she makes her film, and while it may run through a checklist of predictable plot points, it does so with grace, charm, and wit.

Nearly witless yet sharply satiric, Four Lions  (2010, MC-68) portrays a group of Muslim young men living in England but not at home there, longing for jihad, with pratfalls at every step.  This film can only be categorized as terrorist slapstick, so be prepared to laugh as one dunderhead after another blows himself up, and if you can’t imagine laughing at such things, then pass this film by.  In one respect, Chris Morris’s film is very much like The Hangover (which I just happened to catch in passing on HBO, but did not find special in any way), in which a group of wild and crazy guys find nothing but misadventure on their path to paradise, whether it be Las Vegas or scented gardens with 77 virgins.  Given the exploits of the underwear bomber and the clown who left a carful of fertilizer in Times Square, this film may give a truer than expected portrait of the losers who turn to terrorism, but it still winds up a mixed bag, which may or may not be yours.

In Alamar  (2010, MC-77), a young boy is transported to something like paradise, above the coral reefs of Mexico.  He is the product of a brief union between an Italian mother and a Mexican guide, and is going to spend time with his father, living in a house on stilts above the water and spending his days baking in the sun on fishing boats, falling into the rhythms of an extremely elemental life, while tacitly absorbing paternal lessons in communion with nature.  Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s film is half documentary, half rhapsody, slow and stately, intimate and sensual, quiet but ultimately powerful.

I guess I was the person displaced from Around a Small Mountain (2010, MC-63) – I just didn’t get it.  Jacques Rivette’s latest falls under my category of “The New Wave gets old,” and as with Resnais’ Wild Grass, I am disinclined to follow.  Only my man Rohmer was strong till the very end.  Rivette as usual looks at the lives of performers, in this case a traveling circus in the south of France, but unusually and mercifully this film is quite short.  I’m interested enough in Jane Birkin to watch for 80 minutes to try to figure out why she left the circus 15 years ago and why she’s back now, and whether she will fall for the Italian charmer stalking her.  But I didn’t figure it out, and I didn’t really care.

I’ll squeeze one more recent film under this heading:  It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2010, MC-63).  This unmemorable title suits this kind of okay movie, about a teenager who is displaced by checking himself into a mental hospital, when suicidal feelings get the better of him.  It’s a plush place where he learns some not-very-hard life lessons and meets a cute girl with just a few cosmetic scars on her wrists and face.  The whole thing is less “Boy, Interrupted” than “Boy Goes to Overnight Camp.”  Still, I watched it because I’d been impressed with the earlier films of the directorial team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Half Nelson and Sugar. They should forget catering to a wider audience, and go back to making their own stories, instead of adapting popular young adult novels.  Keir Gilchrist is ingratiating enough as the central character, Zach Galifianakis is good as the fellow crazy from whom he learns the ropes, and the rest of the cast is inoffensive in this “cuckoo’s nest lite.”  So the film won’t bore you silly or altogether betray your sense of plausibility, but you won’t remember it or its title for very long.

Never Let Me Go

Don’t let this one go by.  Mark Romanek’s adaptation of a Kazuo Ishiguro novel received some lukewarm reviews, but I’m with those who see its virtues.  Foremost among them is Carey Mulligan -- I believe I could watch the subtle movements of her kewpie-doll face for the duration and be content.  The suddenly ubiquitous Andrew Garfield also seems to be inherently interesting.  And here Keira Knightley has something within her range.  They are residents of a not quite right British boarding school some decades ago, in this strangely-retro speculative fiction of cloning to harvest organs.  There, I’ve given it away.  And will do so more by comparing this film to Gattaca in its thoughtful addressing of questions of genetic ethics.  The three characters are earlier played by a younger trio who mirror them nicely.  The film is prettily shot by and I found Rachel Portman’s music to be appropriately lugubrious and meditative.  Aside from the set-up, I leave the mystery and romance to unfold for you step by quiet step – it won’t make you happy but it will hold your attention, and give you plenty to think over afterward.  (2010, MC-69) 

Lovers discourse

Showing Eric Rohmer’s La Collectioneuse (1967) to the Cinema Salon film club was one of the most agonized viewing experiences I've ever had, with its provocative aggravations hardly giving most of my audience an inviting introduction to one of my favorite directors.  Yet I could have as easily made a case for it as apologized for it, and I was glad when some of the audience spoke up in favor.  Later the same day, I watched two other of Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” and confirmed that he is indeed engaging as well as persistently interesting, and now I’ve been on a binge of watching or re-watching every Rohmer film I could get my hands on.

The most excruciating scene of La Collectioneuse was certainly when the annoyingly pretentious artist Daniel persisted in mindlessly stamping his feet on the living room floor.  The character was played by a real artist named Daniel and he no doubt considered his rudeness a conceptual performance piece, as painfully prolonged as many such are.  While the discomfort of the scene might have seemed too mimetic, still one could see Rohmer doing interesting things within it, in the reactions of the other two characters, the man who smirks admiringly at this friend’s effrontery even while his own leg falls into the other’s rhythm, and the girl who determinedly moves to her own rhythm and gives a sensible if exasperated response.  The whole film is there in miniature, if you can bear to watch.

But the thing is, Rohmer is usually easy on the eyes -- like Haydée in this film -- and if you pick up his rhythm, get on his wavelength, he is endlessly and seamlessly entertaining, yet continually thought-provoking.  Like Ozu, he is a master who basically made one lifelong film, comprised of interlocking (and almost interchangeable) chapters.  So here’s my brief take on a number of those chapters.

  

The “Moral Tales” I watched to get the taste of La Collectioneuse out of my mouth were Ma Nuit Chez Maud  (1969) and Love in the Afternoon (1972).  Both were every bit as good as I remembered them to be, well establishing the Rohmer formula – a few attractive people in an attractive place, ruminating endlessly on the ambiguities of attraction.  One person is pursuing another, but is distracted from pursuit by a third.  Much rationalization -- and comic delusion of self and other – follows.  The characters are specimens we observe with sympathetic amusement. 

In My Night at Maud’s, the black & white setting is Clermont-Ferrand at Christmastime.  That’s Pascal’s hometown, and the film revolves around the question of Pascal’s Wager, as Jean-Louis Trintignant pursues his “innocent” blond dreamgirl Marie-Christine Barrault, despite his attraction to dark-haired, worldly-wise divorcee Francoise Fabian.  In Chloe in the Afternoon (as it was first released in the U.S. to avoid confusion with the Audrey Hepburn film), a stuffy Parisian businessman threatens his comfortably bourgeois marriage by taking up with an old bohemian flame.  In Claire’s Knee (1970), which I’ve seen often enough not to need my memory refreshed, the setting is summer at a Swiss lake, where an engaged diplomat forms a fixation on a blond teenager’s lovely gam.

Beatrice Romand plays another teenager, a dark frizzy-haired foil to Claire, but grows up to return as the main character in Le Beau Marriage (1981), in Rohmer’s next series, “Comedies and Proverbs” (and will return again, as is Rohmer’s habit with actresses, as the delightfully difficult middle-aged seeker for love in An Autumn Tale in 1998).  Here she’s a young woman who’s never had trouble attracting men, commuting between art studies in Paris and family home and job in the old section of Le Mans, when she decides arbitrarily to get married and suddenly encounters disappointment in her pursuit of a mate.

We return to a seaside summer in Pauline at the Beach (1983), with our first glimpse of the delightful Amanda Langlet as the 15-year-old title character, who follows the erotic escapades of her va-va-voom older cousin and begins to form her own attachments.  As usual, Rohmer manages to find humor, pathos, and complication in his bikini-clad characters.  Summer (Le Rayon Vert) (1986) features another difficult babe and Rohmer favorite, Marie Riviere, as she restlessly seeks a place to vacation and some sort of romantic companionship.  Boyfriends and Girlfriends (L’Ami de mon amie) (1988) concludes the “Comedies and Proverbs” cycle, back in a fancy new suburb of Paris, where young professional women try to find a mate and sort out their love lives, as usual charmingly complicated and fondly satirical.

Then Rohmer turned to his “Tales of Four Seasons,” beginning with A Tale of Springtime (Conte de printemps) (1989), which follows a young Parisian philosophy teacher as she falls in with a younger girl and eventually her father, in another rondelay of hidden motive and sexual scheming.  Amanda Langlet returns in A Summer’s Tale (Conte d’été)  (1996), again wise beyond her years as she waits for a young man to make up his mind, while he vacations on the Brittany seacoast waiting for his tardy girlfriend and encountering a hot chick, emulating the choice of Paris in selecting the fairest of the three.  Scandalously unavailable in any video format, I remember An Autumn Tale (1998) most fondly of the tetralogy, for its winning reunion of Beatrice Romand and Marie Riviere, the former as a winemaker ripe for love amongst her beautiful vineyards.  I don’t remember much about A Winter’s Tale (1991), except that it delivered the reliable, though ineffable, pleasures of any Rohmer film.

I recently reviewed Rohmer’s last film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2006), and then at last, I caught up with his penultimate film, Triple Agent (2004), which as a World War II spy saga seemed like an outlier in his oeuvre, but turned out to be quintessential Rohmer in its depiction of intimate deception of one’s self and the other.  Based on a real case, the film examines a White Russian general living in France, who may be collaborating with the Nazis or the Russians, but is certainly deceiving his stay-at-home Greek painter wife, in Rohmer’s usual round of conversations filled with themes of loyalty and betrayal, trust and suspicion.  Amanda Langlet reappears as the upstairs neighbor in this very interior drama.

These last two films complete another implicit cycle of Rohmer's work, which might be categorized to as historical stylizations.  However different in setting and style, each essentially recapitulates all his obsessions, of romantic complications among attractive people, usually young.  The Marquise of O (1976) adapts a Kleist novel into a beautifully chaste though passionate vision of domestic life during the Napoleonic wars.  Perceval (1978) emulates a medieval pageant, on minimally unreal sets, to retell a tale of chivalry and knighthood amongst a group of lovely modern young people, especially notable for introducing Fabrice Luchini as the title character, humorously balanced between naiveté and nobility.   The Lady and the Duke (2001) plays out an affecting story of the French Revolution from the perspective of the nobility, against green-screened period paintings of interiors and exteriors, an effective innovation in historical recreation that surprisingly has not been much emulated.

So there in capsule form is the career of one of the greatest of all filmmakers.  Dip in at any point, and enjoy!

Recent viewing

Reviews are mixed, by myself or the critics, on these assorted films from 2010 that I combine here simply because I’ve watched them in the past few weeks. 

The biggest surprise to me was Animal Kingdom (2010, MC-83), which I put in the category of Red Riding Trilogy as films that ought to be loathsome in their violence and corruption, but actually approach the pity and terror that is the point of such drama.  David Michôd’s debut crime thriller follows the disintegration of a Melbourne family of not-so-goodfellas, with their pride -- preying and preyed upon -- led by a dowdy old lioness, a seductive and deceptively sweet grandma named Smurf (believably embodied by Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver with a bleach-blond mane).  She takes in her 17-year-old grandson when her estranged daughter ODs on heroin.  He comes under the wing of his uncles, for whom armed robbery (as in The Town) is the family trade, though threatened by cops more eager for the kill than the collar.  This grimy, unglamorous revenge tragedy plays out in a sunny suburban landscape of gas stations and supermarkets, yet remains hypnotically absorbing through its twists and turns, feints and blows.  Character, even when creepy, is more important than action.  The acting is good across the board, though only Guy Pearce, as an unusually honest cop, is a familiar face.

Also worthy of note is Lebanon (2010, MC-85).  Written and directed by Samuel Maoz, this film -- like Waltz With Bashir – is a personal reminiscence of being a very raw Israeli conscript in the 1982 war in Lebanon.  The particular novelty here is that the entire film is shot from a viewpoint inside an armored vehicle, so it does for tanks what Das Boot did for submarines, evoking a claustrophobic atmosphere so dense you can smell and taste it.  In some ways the film is as formulaic as a play, as one character after another drops through the porthole for a scene or two with the four typically assorted crew members, but the gunner’s-scope view of chaotic battles and civilian devastation seems particularly potent and powerfully evokes the director’s personal experience.  Not a must-see, but worth a look if the subject interests you.

Creation (2010, MC-51) is one film I endorse more warmly than the Metacritic average.  I found Paul Bettany quite convincing as Darwin and Jon Amiel’s direction good at evoking wonderment in the face of nature and portraying a plausible struggle to write.  Bettany’s wife, Jennifer Connolly, serves as Darwin’s pious and severe wife, who dreads publication of his ideas.  Marsha West (daughter of “McNutty” on The Wire) is engaging as the deceased child whose ghost haunts and inspires Darwin.  I wouldn’t say this rises far above a good BBC television production, but it certainly held my interest and more, intellectually convincing despite some sentimental contrivance.

I part company with the critical consensus in the opposite direction on Dogtooth (2010, MC-73), a prizewinner at Cannes and nominee from Greece for Best Foreign Film.  I confess I was slow to get the point of this fable of horrific parenting by Giorgos Lanthimos, but by the time I got over its sheer weirdness, I was put off by several scenes of shocking violence, gratuitous or not (less so by the graphic sex).  So be forewarned about this story of three post-adolescent children who are kept sequestered in a gated compound, and whose isolation is enforced down to being taught nonsense meanings to words that might suggest a world outside.  You could take this as a very bleak black comedy, or you could just leave it.

For You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010, MC-51), my “meh” response pretty much matched the critical average.  I’m not sure why I keep watching Woody Allen, as he obsessively recycles his material year after year.  There’s always an intriguing cast, and a smoothly delivered veneer, but never anything new being said.  Naomi Watts made this one tolerable to watch, though Anthony Hopkins could do nothing with the hackneyed role of the old guy besotted with a young hottie, and several other familiar faces are wasted.  We follow a group of loosely-related characters for an hour and a half, and then the narrator throws up his hands and closes the proceedings abruptly.  I couldn’t believe that was it, that these desultory sketches were supposed to add up to a feature film.   

Oscar contenders

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been catching up with all the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, and while none would be my pick over The Social Network or Winter’s Bone, most were worthy in their own right (and better than The Kids Are All Right in my book). 

My friend suffers from a family affliction, a half-ironic obsession with the Royal Family, so she was eager to see The King’s Speech  (2010, MC-88) as soon as it came out, even before its large haul of Oscar nominations.  And why not?  With Colin Firth as Bertie, destined to be George VI, and Helena Bonham Carter as the future Queen Mother, and Geoffrey Rush as the idiosyncratic speech therapist who helped the king-to-be to assume his duties as head of state, all directed by Tom Hooper, whom I’d noted for last year’s Damn United – what could go wrong?   Not much did, and I liked the film more and more as it went on, as it got past the jokey byplay featured in previews, and really deepened into a study of an unlikely friendship.  I wasn’t blown away, but was thoroughly entertained, and as moved as an anarchist can be by the personal travails of royalty.  I liked the little girl who played Elizabeth too, and thought about her growing up to become Helen Mirren in The Queen.

I’m not sure what surprised me more about True Grit (2010, MC-80) – how purely entertaining this old-fashioned Western proved to be, or how little of the Coen brothers’ quirky personalities came through?  Nonetheless it was immaculately made, with superb performances from Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, Matt Damon as “LeBeef”, and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie, the stalwart young girl who recruits the other two to track down her father’s killer.  But the true star of the film was the dialogue lifted directly from the Charles Portis novel, in an archaic diction that achieved the same unlikely self-contained believability that the harsher dialect of Deadwood did.  (I caught up with the John Wayne version on AMC, and while the Duke had his iconic portrait readymade, plastic smoothie Glenn Campbell and the Disneyesque Kim Darby are not a patch on the remake’s other pair.  How did the Coens follow the original so closely and yet make it so much hipper?) 

An even bigger surprise was Toy Story 3 (2010, MC-92), which more than overcomes the stigma of a sequel.  Like Up, this Pixar animation is fit to play with the big boys, and definitely deserves consideration as one of the best films of the year.  Andy is going away to college, and has to decide what to do with Woody, Buzz, and the rest of his long-disused toys.  The film is both hilarious and effectively tearjerking, as the toys experience a variety of possible fates -- including a garbage truck and a preschool that is not the utopia it seems at first glance -- before finding a safe haven.  The standout among the new characters is a Ken doll, who has as much surprising personality as the dog in Up, though a sinister huggy bear and a discarded baby doll also make a deep impression.  Despite being a cartoon and a sequel, this is certainly among the most powerful cinematic experiences of the year.  It made me go back and check out Toy Story 2, which I had skipped in a prejudice against films with a number at the end of the title, and found it almost equally charming and eye-popping.

Last and certainly least of Best Picture nominees (aside from Inception) is Black Swan (2010, MC-79).  Darren Aronofsky’s intense direction kept me involved till the Grand Guignol turned silly, and Natalie Portman’s performance, both as ballet dancer and crazy person, was better than I expected, but in the end I found this an empty-headed horror film, relying on shrieking chords and shock cuts instead of meaningful characterizations.  A puppet show rather than a genuine backstage drama, this film’s pretension to follow in the steps of The Red Shoes or All About Eve is totally overblown, a traducing of cinema history.

And the final nominees are...

I dutifully took in two final multiple-Oscar nominees in a self-made double feature at Beacon Cinema, both highly competent translations to the big screen of interesting real-life stories, both including in the final credits footage of the real characters behind the stories, but neither of which is likely to make my Best of 2010 list. 

You have give credit to an exuberant director like Danny Boyle for taking on the challenge of such a constricted subject as 127 Hours (MC-82).  The title refers to the time Aron Ralston spent alone in a canyon crevice with his arm caught under a huge boulder, until he did what he had to do to escape with his life.  The first major hurdle is to find an actor with whom we would want to spend extended time up-close and very personal, and one could hardly do better than James Franco.  As it happened, I went to this film immediately after catching a few minutes of him as dropout Daniel in the short-lived but immortal tv-series Freaks & Geeks – that crooked smile charming even in 1999 as a high school student (and now a graduate student at Yale and RISD, not to mention co-host of this year’s Oscar ceremony).  Boyle gets things going with a burst of kinetic exhilaration, multiple images to a pounding beat, as Aron escapes the big city on a Friday night and heads for the canyon wilderness of Utah, for a weekend of biking and hiking, and penetrating the landscape.  Until he falls down the rabbit hole.  Boyle has the opportunity to interject hallucinatory imagery, but from then on, it’s just us and Mr. Franco in very close quarters.  There’s some gore, of course, more horrific than a horror picture, but the essence of this film is still its intimacy and its ratiocination, as Aron confronts his dilemma with the limited tools at hand.

Then I watched a few minutes of the Super Bowl on the big screen -- the Beacon showing it for free -- and went back to another screening room to watch The Fighter (MC-79).  The boxing film is firmly delineated as a genre, a tight box all its own, and it’s surprising to see a director as wacked out as David O. Russell work within the small lighted ring, so indelibly inscribed by a whole range of films, out of which Raging Bull stands as the peak.  Of course, he’s got Christian Bale to go all crackhead crazy for him, as the coulda-been-a-contender, who punched his one-way ticket to palookaville with drugs, but now fitfully tries to guide his younger half-brother to the success he never reached.  Mark Wahlberg effectively plays Micky Ward, and this project is his homage to a hometown hero, the Pride of Lowell.  Unfamiliar with boxing, I wouldn’t know that for three straight years after 2000, Ward’s bouts were hailed as the fight of the year, but this film deals with the decade before, when the craziness of his family – not just his brother, but his manager mother, the formidable Melissa Leo, and a Greek chorus of seven furious sisters – drove him out of the game.  It takes the equally tough and adorably foul-mouthed barmaid Amy Adams to return him to his dream.  All involved acquit themselves well, but in the end cannot escape the boxing movie formula, however true to life it may be.  While I wouldn’t say that The Town was a better film, Affleck’s Charlestown exceeded my expectations by about as much as Wahlberg’s Lowell fell short of what I expect from director Russell, a personal favorite.

Two new documentaries

The Tillman Story.  (2010, MC-86)  The title of Amir Bar-Lev’s accomplished documentary (following My Kid Could Paint That) refers to at least three different stories:  Pat Tillman’s personal story, the story the military made up for propaganda purposes, and the story of the Tillman family’s attempt to get at the truth, and restore the integrity of their son’s life and purpose.  One strength of this film is that it doesn’t force an argument at you, but offers a many-sided portrait that holds together more and more as you think about it.  It would be easy to solicit rage around this subject, and maybe rage is an appropriate object, but even-handed contemplation offers more manifold truth.  Pat Tillman became, unwillingly, a patriotic icon when he turned his back on a multimillion-dollar NFL contract to enlist in the Army Rangers after 9/11.  When the army literally killed him in Afghanistan, they had to make up a story of an All-American hero’s death -- as always in war, “truth is the first casualty.”  His family – mother, father, two brothers, wife – insist upon the real story of his death, as forthright and thoughtful as he had been in life.  We follow as these strands spool out and interweave, free to take sides but not forced to do so.  The final story takes shape in our minds after viewing.  Call it “fratricide” or “friendly fire,” this is a tale with powerful overtones of tragic irony. 

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.  (2010, MC-68)  Alex Gibney is among the best of polemical documentarians working today, but his latest does not come up to the standard of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; Taxi to the Dark Side; or even Casino Jack and the United States of Money, which he must have been working on at the same time as this film, which shares themes of big money and the corruption of politics.  Not that Spitzer isn’t a character of some interest, but this film is too long and diffuse, goes off in too many directions, suggesting but not proving a number of conspiratorial connections.  No doubt Spitzer made some powerful enemies, and Hank Greenburg of AIG and others parade their satisfaction at his downfall on screen.  The politicization of the Justice Department in the Bush years is well known, but if the whole case amounted to a sting, and a hit job, well then, Spitzer himself was no innocent party.  He manfully if not candidly admits to as much in interview, while also elevating himself with talk of Greek myth – hubris, Icarus, all that.  One might also suggest that there was some ironic, if not causal, connection between Spitzer’s takedown and the financial meltdown of 2008.  But then you add an inside look at the world of high-end escort services, introducing an intriguing array of characters, including one who didn’t want to appear in person so her words are replicated by an actress, and you’ve got a serious distraction.  Overall, Gibney has developed a jazzed-up, argumentative documentary style as identifiable and influential as Ken Burns in his sedate PBS manner, but this film does not get deep enough into the character of Spitzer to invest him with the weight assigned to him. 

Catfish and other fry

Your reaction to a documentary has a lot to do with the expectation of truth that you bring to it.  For me that yielded a response to Catfish (2010, MC-65) that was just the opposite of my reaction to The Cove, each documentary arriving with some question in the air about its relation between fact and artifice.  With The Cove, that skepticism was amply confirmed by the “mission impossible” vibe, so I wound up thinking the whole thing was a hoax, which maybe it wasn’t.  With Catfish, however, the approach was so modest and D-I-Y, that I granted some trust to its reality, and I did not find myself disappointed.  Perhaps some reviewers were put off by the way the film was being pitched, as a real-life thriller, and refused to be had.  But I found the whole operation sincere, if conscious of effect and aimed to a purpose.  But that purpose was not to unmask a Web imposter, but to get to the real person under the mask, and in the process make multiple points about social media, NYC vs. the Heartland, as well as art in the construction of identity and personality.  Ariel Schulman, with Henry Joost, set out to make a film about his brother Nev’s internet romance with not just a young woman but her whole family out in Upper Michigan, and his eventual quest to meet them in person.  To my mind, the DVD extra with the three of them sitting together and answering questions about the film more than confirms their genuine geniality, and the essential honesty and good will of the project.  See for yourself, but for me this is the real deal.

Not so real but fun just the same was I Love You, Man (2009, MC-70), which one reviewer accurately described as the best Judd Apatow film that Judd Apatow had nothing to do with.  Apatow regulars Paul Rudd and Jason Segel are, however, at the heart of this bromance, and writer-director John Hamburg does mix in a good measure of psychological truth along with the gross-out humor, so this tickles the funny bone without insulting the brain.

In an odd coupling, even odder than Paul and Jason, I have to mention another film about the bond between men.  Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (Novocento) (1976) follows the lives of two boys born on the same day in 1900, who grow up to be Robert DeNiro as the padrone, and Gerard Depardieu as the peasant communist, whose lifelong friendship and antagonism comes to a head on Liberation Day in 1945, with the overthrow of evil Fascist Donald Sutherland, whose leering performance typifies this film’s cartoonish approach to the politics of the first half of the 20^th century.  Even after I decided against showing this film in a peasant-themed series I am doing at the Clark next summer, as tie-in to a Pissarro exhibition, I persisted through its original 5 ½ hour length, for the operatic elements that overcame a lot of awkwardness.  I watched it dubbed in English to get the real voice of DeNiro and the other American actors, but perhaps the Italian would have seemed less stilted.  Burt Lancaster wanders in from Visconti’s Leopard, along with many other borrowings from that master, but this film’s ambition of depicting brotherhood with historical sweep would eventually be achieved much more fully in a later Italian epic, The Best of Youth.

Mother and Child

This is another comparable film that I preferred to widely-acclaimed The Kids Are All Right.  The main point of comparison is in superlative performances by Annette Bening, but while in the other she retains her glamour in a lifestyle magazine setting, here in Rodrigo Garcia’s film, she strips away vanity in a truly lived-in LA environment.  As with Nine Lives, the son of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and buddy of the three amigos (Cuarón, Del Toro, Inárritu) recruits exceptional actresses and actors to live out his interlocked stories of something like real life.  (Garcia is also responsible for the HBO series In Treatment, which I will have to find my way into at some point.) There is an element of contrivance in the way different story lines finally connect, but the coincidences are more grounded than in Babel and its many modish epigones.  The narrative leaps over major developments to focus on crucial moments of truth and feeling.  Bening plays a difficult, disappointed woman, a physical therapist who yearns for the child she gave up when she got pregnant as a 14-year-old, while she cares for the aging mother who has instructed her in the disenchantments of life.  In parallel, Naomi Watts (in a highly plausible pairing) plays her unknown daughter, who has sealed off the anger of her abandonment in determined independence and devotion to getting ahead as a high-powered lawyer.  They pair off with Jimmy Smits and Samuel L. Jackson respectively, as a kindly fellow therapist and the head of a fancy legal firm.  A third strand of the film is anchored by Kerry Washington, as an infertile bakery shop proprietor who is trying to adopt a child while ignoring the ambivalence of her husband.  There are several other representations of the relationship highlighted in the title, which add up to a convincing group portrait, despite some gaps in plausibility.  If you are a mother or were formerly a child, this adoption drama is worth seeing. (2010, MC-64) 

Other side of town

By happenstance, I watched in succession a group of recent films whose Metacritic ratings all fell in the mid- to high-70s, but of which I had decidedly different opinions, here listed from most favorable to least.

From The Town (2010, MC-74), I get the feeling that Ben Affleck looked at the efforts of elders Eastwood, Scorsese, Lumet, and others -- to penetrate the seamy side of his native Boston -- and said, “Hey, I’ll show you what we’re all about.”  Of course he’d already done that in his first directorial effort, Gone Baby Gone, but I was surprised to find myself won over by this expression of the Beantown crime formula.  I don’t usually go for car chases, but I found one such through the narrow streets of the North End to be hilarious.  Likewise with extended shootouts between cops and robbers, but it’s kind of cute to see one such set in Fenway Park.  The town of the title is Charlestown, a square mile that has in fact produced an amazing number of bank and armored car robbers, and while my knowledge of Boston’s ethnic enclaves is not comprehensive, I found the flavor of this relatively authentic, within its genre limits.  Affleck himself is the leader of one gang, with childhood friend Jeremy Renner as his triggerman.  In the course of one bank heist, they take manager Rebecca Hall hostage, but then release her blindfolded, only to find out she’s a “toonie” – as opposed to “townie” – in their own neighborhood.  Ben tries to check out whether she could have recognized the masked robbers, and soon is falling for her (not a stretch of the imagination with the lovely Ms. Hall).  Don Draper, aka Jon Hamm, leads the FBI investigation, while other welcome faces turn up, such as Chris Cooper for a scene or two as Affleck’s imprisoned father.  Not a cinematic gem, this proved to be an entertaining genre exercise with strong local flavor.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010, MC-79) was reviewed as a documentary to see even if you have no appreciation of the subject.  I don’t, and I did -- but I don’t necessarily advice you to do the same, even if Anne Sundberg and Ricki Stern do look beyond showbiz cliché in their portrait of a driven performer’s drive to perform, even well past her sell-by date.  Though I was never able to see behind Rivers’ absurdly nipped-tucked-&-botoxed face to a more sympathetic character behind the mask, one does derive some sense of a will, a way, and a world.  But if you want to spend time in the company of a tough New York Jewish comedienne and provocateur, you’d be better off with Fran Lebovits and Public Speaking.

Soul Kitchen (2010, MC-76) offers just what you expect from Germany – frothy romantic comedy and food porn.  Now I do indeed have great expectations of director Fatih Akin, but this would-be jeu d’esprit is a far cry from Head-On and Edge of Heaven.  I’m inclined to let him have his fun, but I certainly did not join in, and wound up fast-forwarding through the second half.  This film takes his usual inside look at his hometown of Hamburg but does not balance it off with trips to his ancestral Turkey, as his other films do so memorably.  This caper follows a hapless restaurateur trying to appeal to a hip young crowd in a converted factory, while dealing with his journalist girlfriend going off to Shanghai and his ne’er-do-well brother getting out of jail and depending on him for work, along with a madman chef and a yuppie old classmate scheming to buy him out.  This film certainly expresses youthful energy, but for me the romance was vacant and the comedy landed with a dull thud.

On the other hand, I knew I was not going to have much use for Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010, MC-74), but dutifully took a look at what some consider among the best films of the past year.  Very much like another of the same -- Scorsese’s Shutter Island -- I just did not care that much about what is going on inside Leonardo DiCaprio’s head, and wound up fast-forwarding after the first hour of oh-wow dreamscapes.  It’s not so much that I couldn’t figure out what was going on, as I didn’t give a damn about any of it, despite a lot of appealing performers, from Ellen Page to Michael Caine, and some spectacular -- if not special -- effects.

Classic or not?

In the past month or so, I have watched (or re-watched) a lot of films that someone or other has called a classic, and while I don’t have it in me to review each in much detail, I will take the opportunity to pop off on my opinion of whether each film is indeed classic.

We’ll start with an easy one, a film that practically defines the meaning of the word “classic,” and lives up to its billing every time.  Casablanca (1942) is the fruit of the Hollywood studio system at the end of its golden age, plucked at its peak of ripeness.  It seems almost too familiar, without having been seen in ages, and hovered deep in my Netflix queue for a decade.  But one night I happened to flip on TCM just as the opening credits began to roll -- I couldn’t resist, and was transported all over again.  It was indeed an amazing moment of movie perfection, with every element conspiring as Michael Curtiz rushed the film to completion to take advantage of the marketing bonanza of FDR’s Casablanca conference.  As a star of magnetic magnitude, Ingrid Bergman in gauzy close-up is all that, but what startled me was the subtlety and range of Humphrey Bogart’s role-playing, and of course Claude Rains gives one of the great supporting performances, amid a string of pleasingly evocative faces.  It’s a little magic box of a movie.

White Heat (1949) explosively completes the cycle of gangster films at just the point where it blends with film noir.  Cagney returns to complete his classic trilogy of energetically crazy bad guys with family issues, here an Oedipal relationship gone wild, with Ma the only real person in his life.  Raoul Walsh returns with his hurtling direction.  The story mingles the old and the new, the high and the low, characters from Greek tragedy and a big robbery based on the Trojan horse, newfangled police technology like tracking by radio transmitter, and a big ending that is totally metaphoric in a realistic modern setting.  And yet the film is like the last big blow-up of a genre, baroque to the point of unbelievability.  Well done in every particular, it still seems essentially divorced from reality into artifice.  It would take The Godfather to revive the form and infuse it with a convincing new reality.

The Big Clock (1947) is not a classic in my book, but an interesting variant on film noir.  Ray Milland is editor of a true crime magazine in the publishing empire of Charles Laughton, obviously premised on Henry Luce and Time-Life.  Laughton offers an amusingly mannered portrait of a business tyrant, who drives Milland out of his job and into association with the tycoon’s disenchanted mistress.  Skullduggery ensues.  The title references the signature element of the company’s highly stylized building, and indeed set design is one of the strengths of the film.  So is the acting in its own overwrought way, but John Farrow’s direction is nothing special and the story is full of holes.  Perhaps toddler Mia was on the set with her father and her mother Maureen O’Sullivan, who plays Milland’s wife.  Anyway, this film is child’s play, however dark.

Susan Slept Here (1954) is child’s play of a different candy-colored sort, with director Frank Tashlin on his way from cartoons to Jerry Lewis.  This would not have caught my attention if not for a recent boxed feature in the New Yorker film listings, but when it turned up on TCM I recorded it.  I rather enjoyed revisiting the Technicolor world of Fifties romantic comedy, but classic this is not, though it is a stylish take on the “bachelor and bobbysoxer” theme, which has a lot of fun with sexual innuendo between a middle-aged man and a teenage girl, in this case Dick Powell closing out his career and Debbie Reynolds near the start of hers.

For two slots in a film series that I’ll offer at the Clark next summer, called “PraiseSong: African-American Music in the Movies,” I watched and decided between two pairs of would-be classics.  Cabin in the Sky (1943) was the first all-black musical on screen, brought from the stage by Vincente Minnelli in his first film directing job.  Stereotypes abound, starting with “Rochester” as the male lead, but some authentic spirit is maintained, with Ethel Waters as the devoted wife for whom “Happiness is a Thing Called Joe,” and Lena Horne as the sultry songstress who leads Joe astray with “Honey in the Honeycomb,” while emissaries from heaven and hell strive for his soul.  There are also walk-ons by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, so the film certainly represents its period.  Carmen Jones (1954) I ruled out, despite its widescreen Technicolor direction by Otto Preminger, and a magnetic performance by Dorothy Dandridge, because it was too much an operatic construct by Oscar Hammerstein.  The transposition of Bizet’s opera to the African-American South works well enough, but why star Dandridge and Harry Belafonte and not let them sing in their own voices, as Pearl Bailey does get to do?

It was a much closer call between Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight (1986) and Clint Eastwood’s Bird (1988), each of which does justice to the bebop jazz saxophonist at its center, centered on exceptional performances by Dexter Gordon as a fictional amalgam of Lester Young and Bud Powell, and Forest Whittaker as Charlie Parker.  Both films totally respect the music and deserve to be considered classic, if not without flaw.  Bird was darker, both psychologically and visually, and very long, but more homegrown, without the Parisian setting that is a bit of a distraction from my theme.

After watching Five Easy Pieces with the film club, I had the inclination to watch another bit of vintage Jack Nicholson, in The Last Detail (1973), which proved less satisfying.  Hal Ashby’s direction is slipshod in my estimation, but Jack as petty officer “Bad Ass” Buddusky, and Randy Quaid as the young railroaded sailor being escorted from Newport to prison in New Hampshire, carry the film through its stops along the road, in Washington, New York and Boston, whether in Aquarian enclave or whorehouse.  There’s some sense of the period, but little of timeless significance.

Getting down to the bottom of the barrel, I’ve always confused Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) with Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant – which really is a classic -- as Aussie war films, but it turns out I’d never seen this one, which left me rather cold, though it was startling to see Mel Gibson so young.  This seemed too obvious an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Chariots of Fire, and wandered to its preordained battlefield conclusion, which ought to have been horrific but seemed aestheticized.

Another early Jack Nicholson, Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) was, however, the absolute pits.  I might have thought that it was merely my inattentiveness that made it seem so bad, but my two viewing companions shared my befuddled exasperation with this portentous nonsense.  So later, for laughs, I had to read them the proclamation by David Thomson (whom I generally find illuminating) that this is “one of the greatest films ever made.”  Not by me, it isn’t.  I’ve never been an Antonioni acolyte, and even less as the years go by, so this one was completely lost on me.

The Kids Are All Right

It would be easy to imagine Lisa Chodolenko’s latest film as intolerable with another cast, but with Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, and Mia Waskowska, it’s a pleasure to watch.  Compared to another recent film with a number of similarities -- Nicole Holocener’s Please Give -- I buck the critical consensus and much prefer NYC over LA in the skewering of liberal pretension and self-delusion.  Nor did I find this as surprisingly good as Chodolenko’s previous SoCal effort, Laurel Canyon.  Still, Annette is astounding and Julianne game as a lesbian couple, whose teenage children seek out their sperm donor father, in the hunky, easy-going person of Ruffalo.  While the actors take the family sitcom beyond its normal limits into realms of truth, the film remains unrealistically insular, too much a design spread in a lifestyle magazine.  If you damp down your expectations, though, this film delivers a fair measure of satisfaction.  (2010, MC-86)  

Restrepo and other docs

Among the hardest to watch but most essential films of the past year was the you-are-there Afghan war documentary Restrepo (2010, MC-85).  Sebastian Junger (who also wrote the companion book, War) and Tim Hetherington accompany a small band of soldiers on a 14-month deployment on a remote mountain top in Afghanistan, the furthest tip of the spear of American power.  The troops build Outpost Restrepo, named for the devil-may-care medic who was among the first casualties of their unit, and then go out into the surrounding valleys, ancient and alien, to win hearts and minds, while being continuously shot at by rarely-seen attackers.  The viewer shares the hard duty intimately, and puts a human face on the abstraction of boots on the ground.  You participate in the boredom of prolonged isolation, mixed with the insane adrenaline rush of being under fire and letting loose with 900 rounds from your M-50.  The small cameras go into battle alongside the soldiers, and also show the daily life of young men together, in a way that verges on the homoerotic and recalls Claire Denis’ Beau Travail.  The film doesn’t tell you how to think about the American presence in Afghanistan, but gives you plenty of grist for the mill of your own thinking.  And the deleted scenes and extended interviews on the DVD supply plenty more, and should not be missed.

I expected more than I got from Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010, MC-85), the “prankumentary” by and/or about the famous British street artist Banksy.  Frankly I didn’t get the joke.  The collateral presence of Shepard Fairey makes for an obvious comparison with Beautiful Losers, another film about the graffiti aesthetic, which I found more satisfying.  Controversy still rages over whether this Banksy film is a doc or a con, a setup or a brilliantly witty reversal, in which the filmmaker becomes the subject and vice versa.  To me it’s all much ado about nothing.

On the other hand, I had no expectations for Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (2010, MC-73) and did not bother to record its “American Masters” presentation on PBS, but I happened to turn on the TV in the middle of its broadcast and was soon engrossed, so I recorded a rerun and watched it from the beginning.  Peter Raymond and Michele Hozer’s documentary takes a more traditional approach to the piano prodigy than 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (which I will now have to watch again), but with plenty of archival footage and subsequent interviews, it offers a compelling portrait of a strange but engaging genius.

So pleased with Every Little Step, I was moved to watch other terpsichorean documentaries.  The Last Dance (2002, MC-66) is about a collaboration between Pilobolus Dance Theater and Maurice Sendak, an unlikely combination that follows a fascinating joint process of creation.  Sendak is of course a compelling character in his own right (see Tell Them Anything You Want – no, I mean it, you really should see the documentary portrait made by Spike Jonze at the same time he directed the feature adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are), and Pilobolus is an eye-opening improvisational dance group that lasted for more than thirty years as the original dancers became directors and recruited a new troupe of exceptionally lithe and inventive dancers.  Sometime tense, sometimes ecstatic, the collaboration is enthralling to watch, though the concluding passages from the finished piece seemed draggy by comparison.  Sendak is determined to make a piece about the experience of children in the Holocaust, while at least one of the Pilobolus directors wants to make the dance simply about movement.  But through the raw material of the astounding flexibility of the dancers’ bodies, they reach some sort of accord in Mirra Bank’s effective film.

Afterthoughts

Neil Jordan’s Ondine (2010, MC-65) was an afterthought with critics and audiences, but I found it among the better, if not the best, films of the year.  The selkie-based story is reminiscent of John Sayles’ Secret of Roan Inish, though it takes off in a different direction.  The beauty of the Irish seacoast as filmed by Christopher Doyle is almost a sufficient recommendation, but Colin Farrell is excellent in his own right as the fisherman who happens to pull up in his nets a mysterious young woman.  She’s played by Alicja Bachleda, Farrell’s squeeze at the time, and the chemistry between them is palpable.  He’s trying to cope with a history of alcoholism and a young daughter in a motorized wheelchair; she’s on the run from – what?  A nice edge of mystery is maintained, but the thriller denouement seems somewhat misplaced in what is actually an effective character study of a few people and a place.

After referencing it in a review of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, I decided to take another look at Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) and confirmed the delights of its passage through downtown in the dead of night.  It was really Griffin Dunne’s project, and he is charming as the horny uptown computer specialist, who is lured downtown by the enticements of Rosanna Arquette, only to run through a nightmarish maze of crazy women, on a long night’s journey back to day.  As Marty relates in an interview on the DVD, his beloved long-term project, The Last Temptation of Christ, had fallen through, and out of that disappointment this quick and dirty production reawakened his appetite for making films.  Its edgy off-kilter humor recalls but does not quite come up to The King of Comedy.

After being so impressed with Winter’s Bone, I looked into Debra Granik’s first feature, Down to the Bone (2005, MC-76), and it proved promising but less than fully satisfying.  Vera Farmiga performs well in the central role, of a recovering junkie trying to normalize her life as single mom supermarket checkout clerk in upstate New York.  Apparently the film grew out of a longtime documentary project, and the milieu is well described (how many films are set in a Price Chopper?), but the story seems familiar and unsurprising, with a whiff of nostalgia for the mud.  You get a sense of slumming that you don’t in Winter’s Bone, or for another example, Wendy and Lucy.

Cedric Klapisch strikes me as a middling sort of director, hardly an auteur, but when I saw his Paris (2009, MC-68) showing on Sundance and noticed Juliette Binoche and Fabrice Luchini starring, I decided to record it, and eventually got around to watching in bits and pieces over several nights, not the ideal way to take in a film but not inappropriate for the fragmented style of this Altmanesque ensemble of intersecting types.  Juliette and Fabrice were indeed the best things in the film, she a single mother of three caring for a sick brother, and he a distinguished history professor turned tv-documentary host, who falls for one of his students.  A swirl of characters surrounds them in ways that did not really connect for me, though I never minded watching.

Early line on best of 2010

Several critics’ polls have already declared rankings for the year.  I won’t be finalizing my choices till I see a number of more recent releases, but I’ve already seen 8 out of the top 10 in the Film Comment poll, and certainly find areas of agreement [click on film title to access my review].  They have Carlos at #1 and The Social Network at #2, and I could go with that, or in reverse order as they appeared in the indieWire poll, which conforms to the Metacritic averages of 95 for the Fincher and 93 for the Assayas.  So far I’ll go with indieWire’s choice at #3, Winter’s Bone (FC #6, MC-90.)  Polanski’s The Ghost Writer gets just a bit more love than I give it at FC #4 and iW #7 (MC-77).  I think FC has A Prophet right at #5 (MC-90).  And I join the acclaim for Everyone Else with FC at #9 and iW at #5. On the indieWire list, I Am Love comes in at #9 (FC #22), and I am inclined to agree with that.   

For the rest of Film Comment’s top ten, I look forward to seeing Claire Denis’ White Material (#3), and was disappointed to miss Charles Ferguson’s acclaimed documentary Inside Job (#7) when it showed at Images last month but eagerly anticipate the dvd.  Wild Grass (#8) I wish I hadn’t seen, and Greenberg (#10) I barely remember seeing.  Look for me to be filling in the rest of the top films of 2010 from various lists over the next few months, before making final pronouncement on my own choices.

More documendations

Here’s another batch of documentaries that are worth a look, one that I found satisfying in every respect, and a handful of others for which the strength of my recommendation is dependent on your interest in the subject, rather than any advance in the art of documentary. 

Every Little Step (2009, MC-76) works on so many levels: as presentation and enactment of a 2005 Broadway revival of the hit musical, A Chorus Line, and memorial of the original production; as real-life recapitulation of every backstage drama from 42^nd Street on; as putting the viewer in the position of an American Idol-like judge to appraise just what makes for singing and dancing talent; as swift and engaging storytelling with all the winnowing-down excitement of competitive contests like Spellbound.  Trust me, really -- make a point of seeing Adam Del Dio’s documentary, even if like me you are not familiar with the original show beyond a vague awareness of its long-running popularity – available from Netflix on dvd or for instant play.

The Oath (2010, MC-72), an intimate film made by Laura Poitras, probably has the broadest and most urgent interest among the rest of this list.  The oath in question is of allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and the subjects are two brothers-in-law who were his former bodyguard and driver.  The former is Abu Jandal, who is now a voluble cab driver in Yemen, renouncing the 9/11 attacks but still proselytizing for his own brand of jihad.  The latter is Salim Hamdan -- of Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld – and Abu Jandal feels guilty for getting his unpolitical relative into Guantanamo.  So Hamdan remains an absence in the film, even when the Supreme Court releases him, but Jandal’s nonstop self-contradiction, much of it as he drives his taxi around Sanaa, offers a fascinating window into the jihadi mindset.  Two heroes that emerge are Hamdan’s U.S. military lawyers, who certainly put the system in the best light, despite the abuse dictated from Cheney and Bush.  I saw this as part of the generally-excellent “P.O.V.” series on PBS, but it is available from Netflix both as dvd and streaming video, as is the next film, which might have been on the other good documentary series on PBS, “Independent Lens.”

In this era of WikiLeaks, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2008, MC-75) assumes more than historical interest.  I started watching without particular commitment to the subject, but was never tempted to tune out.  Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith take a very sympathetic look at Ellsberg, who earned the title epithet directly from Henry Kissinger, but they do a good job of recalling the Nixonian era and what seemed to be at stake at the time, and what still seems at stake today, in the continual contest between government secrecy and the public’s right to know.  I don’t think Assange is anywhere near as well-motivated as Ellsberg, so I was a bit surprised to see the elder whistleblower endorse the younger on the Colbert Report.  Nonetheless he’s an old-time counterculture hero who still commands respect.

Though The Promise (2010) is mainly an HBO promo for the dvd/cd release of outtakes from Bruce Springsteen’s classic album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, the documentary does offer an intriguing glimpse of the Boss in session during the mid-70s.  Fans like me will not want to miss it, but if you are not into the Bard of New Jersey, you will find little here to linger over.

One of the better entries in ESPN’s intermittently excellent “30 for 30” anniversary series is The Best That Never Was (2010, no dvd yet).   Jonathan Hock’s documentary about Marcus Dupree is a real-life Friday Night Lights story about the fate of perhaps the greatest high school football running back ever.  The highlight is the jaw-dropping footage of him regularly ripping off 80-yard touchdown runs, with a grace and fleetness of foot that seems truly heroic.  No wonder he generated such a recruiting war among major colleges, and no wonder the Philadelphia, Mississippi hero had such trouble making the transition to Oklahoma and then the NFL.  From his position as a middle-aged truck driver in his old hometown, he looks back philosophically on the phenom that he was, and the stardom he was destined for and derailed from.

Public Speaking  (2010, HBO, no dvd yet, MC-75) is basically Martin Scorsese’s My Dinner with Fran, and your response with be predicated on how you feel about Fran Lebowitz’s animated gestural tabletalk.  Her acerbic, self-assured New Yawker commentary on any subject that comes to mind, and her cultivated Oscar Wilde in drag persona, will determine whether you are drawn into this portrait or put off, delightedly amused or definitely not amused.  Count me among the amused.