Journalist and short-film producer Cara Jones chose as her first feature-length film to explore intensely personal subject matter in the documentary Blessed Child. Jones serves as the director, co-writer, and central subject in a film that documents her long process of walking away from her religion – what she now regards as a cult – while struggling to not do the same thing to her family. The film is a good first effort and is told in such a personal way that it couldn’t have been made by anyone else. The director’s unique perspective on the life she abandoned is the movie’s greatest strength.
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There’s a section of the new(ish, I’ll get to that soon) Netflix documentary, Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics, that discusses the all-important set and setting concept. It has to do with the state of mind a person is in before they embark on an experience with hallucinogenic drugs. Focusing on a positive mindset (set) and putting oneself in a comfortable setting with people one trusts makes it much more likely that one will have a good experience on the drug. The same basic idea is true of watching the documentary, too. To use the parlance of someone you might score psychedelic mushrooms from at a Grateful Dead tribute band concert: Don’t let any negative vibes near your aura while you watch it, man, or you’ll, like, be in for a real bad time.
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Just about every person who participated in the Biosphere 2 experiment -- and subsequently the new documentary about it, called Spaceship Earth -- talks about the scientific goals of their undertaking. As noble as these scientific aspirations were for the project, it’s pretty clear that they were secondary to more emotional and psychological interests. One of the eight members who volunteered to live inside an airlock-sealed facility for two years -- they called themselves biospherians -- recalls her first thoughts just after the door to the outside world was shut and locked on day one. She describes turning on the rain in the vegetation section of the biosphere and gaining a sense of peacefulness. She wanted to wash the air, to wash out the impurities of the world she left behind and "begin anew." She soon discovers, as do we, that it's not easy to begin anew when messy interpersonal human dynamics are involved.
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The main issue I have with Rob Garver’s documentary about Pauline Kael, arguably the most influential film critic ever to write about movies, is that it’s too reverential of its subject. In Garver’s film, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, we do get the warts, but they’ve been airbrushed, even if only slightly. The film also tries to pack an entire lifetime into its 100 minutes, which often gives the feeling of rushing through the major events of Kael’s life.
Those few reservations aside, What She Said is a consistently entertaining and enlightening look at Kael. Every person – this writer most certainly included – wrestling with their movie obsession, as well as the movies themselves, owes her a great debt.
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“The problem is concentration of ownership…” The entirety of French economist Thomas Piketty’s argument about what’s wrong with our society and how to fix it can be boiled down to those six words. Obviously, that’s an oversimplification, and Piketty’s nearly 700-page examination of wealth and income inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, goes into exhaustive detail on the subject. It was published in the original French in 2013, and the English translation released in 2014 reached number one on The New York Times Best Seller list a month after publication. New Zealander filmmaker Justin Pemberton has turned the tome into an eye-opening, and at times a rather eye-popping, new documentary.
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“Flash! AH-AH!” Like millions of other movie fans my age, I grew up watching (and watching, and watching, courtesy of my parents’ HBO subscription) the 1980 cheese-fest Flash Gordon. The movie was a cash-grab attempt by producer Dino De Laurentiis to capitalize on the success of a little movie called Star Wars. Ironically, George Lucas’s original idea was to make a Flash Gordon film, but when De Laurentiis wouldn’t sell him the rights, Lucas went off and created the Star Wars universe instead.
The star of the De Laurentiis produced and Mike Hodges directed Flash Gordon was Sam J. Jones, a relative unknown in Hollywood. The sci-fi spectacle about a New York Jets quarterback who travels to another planet in order to save Earth from a sadistic despot was only the actor’s second credit after the Blake Edwards comedy 10. The documentary Life After Flash covers the production, release, and legacy of Flash Gordan as well as Jones’s ups and downs in life following his big break portraying the comic strip hero.
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You can take the title of the documentary Human Nature as a reference to a few different ideas the film raises. Probably the most apparent – especially after you’ve seen the movie – is the way a recent and revolutionary scientific discovery brings with it the ability for the human species to alter our very nature, what makes us human. I took it as a nod to our one unique trait, the thing that has caused all of our triumphs and pain. Our human nature is defined by our complex brains and our endless quest for discovery and knowledge about how the universe works. That knowledge, as one man puts it in archival footage of a scientific conference that opens the film, can be used either “for deliverance, or equally for disaster.”
Human Nature is a thought-provoking film that is by turns wondrous and terrifying.
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The documentary Citizen K filters the last thirty years of revolutionary upheaval and the march toward dictatorial rule in Russia through one man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In the form of Khodorkovsky – the Citizen K of the title – director Alex Gibney reveals a complicated figure and gives us the unlikeliest of heroes. The thread of personal metamorphosis that Gibney tracks in Citizen K is what makes it such a dynamic and thought-provoking film.
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Much of the negative criticism for documentary filmmaker Errol Morris’s American Dharma is aimed at Morris not challenging his subject enough on his beliefs. Steve Bannon, the right-wing luminary and short-lived White House Chief Strategist to Donald Trump – just a few of Bannon’s many roles on the world stage – is allowed to present himself as a towering figure of great foresight and heroism, the critics claim. What these critics have forgotten (or possibly don’t know), is that direct confrontation isn’t Morris’s preferred mode of operation. He’s said as much in a recent interview about American Dharma:
“I don’t really believe in adversarial interviews. I don’t think you learn very much. You create a theater, a gladiatorial theater, which may be satisfying to an audience, but if the goal is to learn something that you don’t know, that’s not the way to go about doing it. In fact, it’s the way to destroy the possibility of ever hearing anything interesting or new. I guess I don’t believe in them.”
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Late in the documentary Mike Wallace Is Here, there is a clip of the legendary reporter interviewing playwright Arthur Miller. Wallace asks Miller what the ultimate goal has been of Miller’s decades of work; what he’s been trying to achieve. “Oh, some little moment of truth,” Miller responds. Director Avi Belkin’s documentary about the life and career of Wallace has uncovered much more than that. His film explores not only the driving force of one man’s life, but how he in turn affected the entire profession of journalism, for better and for worse. Mike Wallace Is Here is a perceptive, unflinching look at what made Wallace tick.
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I’ll be the first to admit I’m no expert on the subtleties of film distribution. I just watch the movies and react to them. But it’s telling and more than a little ironic that a documentary about sexism and misogyny in the entertainment business isn’t getting a traditional theatrical roll out. This Changes Everything, directed by Tom Donahue and executive produced by Geena Davis, will be seen in theaters for one night only on July 22nd, 2019 as part of a Fathom Events special screening on 800 screens across the U.S.
Those screenings, in conjunction with the documentary’s availability on streaming platforms, has the potential to create a lot of buzz for a movie with a vitally important message. But it also has the potential to fizzle in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scenario. Let’s hope the latter doesn’t happen.
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The Satanic Temple is doing the Lord’s work. That statement is meant to be both provocative and ironic, just like the organization that Penny Lane’s documentary, Hail Satan?, examines. The film manages to be both hilarious and enraging. While it gets close to delving under the surface of The Satanic Temple’s leading members – most notably the tension between co-founder Lucien Greaves and TST Detroit chapter head Jex Blackmore – it never quite gets there. Hail Satan? stays at arm’s length from the people it’s documenting. That’s not the case with the ideas that Greaves, Blackmore, and other TST members are championing. The documentary does a fabulous job of explicating The Satanic Temple’s ideals and goals.
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Peter Jackson’s stunning World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old made me understand what it must have been like to see The Wizard of Oz in 1939. The director, most famous for special effects wizardry in films like The Lord of the Rings trilogy and his King Kong remake, has employed jaw-dropping digital restoration work to century-old footage to bring the Great War to life. His film is a chill inducing experience.
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If you want an intriguing mystery buried inside a documentary that pontificates on the act of moviemaking itself, look no further than Shirkers. One of the things I prized most about my number one film of 2018 – the documentary Free Solo – was how layered that film is. Shirkers is the same. Director Sandi Tan’s film never stops blossoming from beginning to end. It continually digs deeper into questions of creativity, friendship, obsession, and betrayal.
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They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is as fascinating as it is frustrating. This is the second documentary from director Morgan Neville, whose other 2018 film, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, was one of the best documentaries of the year.
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I’m not a big fan of poker (and as a rule, I dislike gambling in general), but every once in a while, I’ll play penny ante games with friends. The very few occasions when I’ve been involved in impromptu games “just for fun,” because none of us happened to have the cash on hand to give real value to the chips we were using, I lost interest almost immediately. Without the consequences of winning or losing real money, it’s not any fun. You’re just throwing around chips without any thought behind it.
Alex Honnold, arguably the greatest rock climber of all time, seems to hold the same view about his vocation and obsession, but the stakes in this game are his life. Honnold is most famous for his free-solo climbs. These are climbs made with no safety equipment. No ropes. No harness. There are only two possible outcomes to each of Honnold’s stunning free-solo ascents: perfection or death.
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Three Identical Strangers is a documentary that’s ideas get bigger and bolder with every passing minute. For the most part, it works. By the end, the film is pontificating on the very question of what makes us who we are. What shapes our personality: inherited traits or our surroundings? The “nature vs. nurture” question has been around for centuries. The men at the center of the movie, a set of triplets, offer a tantalizing view into that question. The who and how at the root of their unique situation is also an important, disturbing part of the story. Documentarian Tim Wardle delves into it with a humanistic approach, and what he uncovers is shocking. The questions his film poses about the banality of evil, and the ease with which people use the cover of “scientific discovery” to excuse their actions, is equal parts fascinating and revolting.
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Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired for 30 years on PBS. Because of this extraordinary long run, we see many different versions of the show in the new documentary examining the life of its creator and star, Fred Rogers. The sets change, the video quality changes, we see versions in both color and black and white. Mr. Rogers also changes. We see him as a young man, an old man, and somewhere in between.
While watching the documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, I had an exuberant emotional response when I saw my version of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood appear on the screen for the first time. I’m guessing most other audience members will have the same response, but at a different point in the show’s evolution, depending on when you watched it. For me, it was the early to mid-1980s. Mr. Rogers had a healthy dose of gray mixed with his dark hair; he was middle-aged on the cusp of becoming an old man. The quality of the show was the soft, warm analog fuzziness that comes with shooting things on video tape instead of film.
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Kids these days, am I right? If they aren’t playing video games for countless hours or taking endless selfies, they’re making an 85-year-old Supreme Court justice the center of a wildly popular meme. That last one might not quite fit the stereotype, but it’s nevertheless true. Back in 2013, an NYU law student named Shana Knizhnik created a Tumblr page that celebrated Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the Notorious R.B.G. It’s a play on the name of classic hip-hop artist The Notorious B.I.G., and the meme transformed Ginsburg into a gangsta-style bad-ass on a tireless quest for justice and social equality.
Filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West used the meme as an entry point for RBG, their documentary that covers the life of the towering – at least in terms of her professional achievements, if not her physical stature – Ginsburg.
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One of the front runners in the Best Picture Oscar race this year was La La Land. It’s a movie some people condemned due to a racially charged element: white appropriation of jazz music, a historically black art form. The white central figure sees himself as a savior of jazz music, while the film simultaneously sidelines any black characters, and sanitizes jazz of its deeply African-American origins and past. Defenders of the movie belittle this critique as making the film about racism when it’s simply a sweet love story. The backlash against the argument that La La Land is racially troubling speaks to a central theme in the magnificent documentary I Am Not Your Negro. When a society is structured around one race’s superiority to all others, everything is about race. To suggest otherwise is to be naïve or willfully ignorant. The way the film illustrates this and many other points is elegant, eloquent, and unflinching.
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