Finding Fela (Alex Gibney)

A greater sin still is how the film saps Fela’s music of its energy. It’s not entirely Gibney’s fault: no documentary about an artist has ever captured the thrill of personal discovery of that artist’s work. Being flatly informed of the military raid on Fela’s Kalakuta Republic compound after hearing a snippet of “Zombie” pales in comparison to hearing all of “Zombie” first, being galvanized by it universal anti-military lyrics, then gradually filling in the context around that composition. When it is served to a viewer already wrapped in significance, the whole progression of immersion is thrown out, teaching detached admiration instead of passionate discovery.

Read my full review at Spectrum Culture.

TIFF Review: The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld (Errol Morris, 2013)

First up from TIFF, the new Errol Morris documentary, a worthy (if inferior) companion to The Fog of War that finds another defense secretary who presided over a military disaster. To see Rumsfeld, so close to the wars that have yet to fully cease, smiling and justifying himself provokes a special kind of rage, yet what really stuck out watching his benign support for war on the thinnest grounds was how much the unlearned lessons of Rumsfeld's tenure seemed prime to take us into yet another conflict. Since this review was filed and published, America's seemingly inevitable move into Syria has been thankfully stalled (at least for the moment), but The Unknown Known still seeps into the skin as a glimpse not only into the self-delusion that made the first stage of the War on Terror possible but into the lingering insanity that may lead us into the next era of it.

My full review is up at Film.com.

Dirty Wars (Rick Rowley, 2013)

Slightly too focused on Jeremy Scahill himself as the journalist uncovers a massive, unsettling method of covert operations, Dirty Wars nevertheless condenses years of Scahill's arduous reporting legwork into a concise, dramatic thriller that blanches at military overreach as much as it respects the fading art of honest journalism. It provides food for thought for supporters and detractors of the Obama administration, clarifying their response to the War on Terror not as a push toward peace (or a retreat) but an advance of warfare in clandestine terms that should make everyone take pause. Scahill's empathetic facial reactions to horrific stories from interview subjects may be overused, but it's hard not to cheer a journalist so steadfastly doing his job, and as instructive as the film is for uncovering a terrifying military expansion, it is equally instructive in showing the process by which such a thing is credibly pieced together by a diligent reporter.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Wattstax (Mel Stuart, 1973)

Mel Stuart's Wattstax, a document of the concert that gives the film its name, is not strictly a concert movie. Instead, it often moves from the concert to the neighborhood around it, touching on racial pride and tension the place that exploded these issues outside the Deep South. The music becomes simultaneous escape from and voice of the pain and anger on display, culminating in a performance from Isaac Hayes that focuses everything into one delightfully tacky gold chain vest.

Check out my full thoughts at Movie Mezzanine.

The Revisionaries (Scott Thurman, 2012)

A bit unfocused, The Revisionaries nevertheless offers an insightful look into the issue of textbook revisionism in Texas (and beyond, as Texas is, with California, the nation's leading distributor of schoolbooks). Its villains are comical in their commitment to ignorance, yet Thurman spends enough time with them to show their normalcy outside boardrooms, or at least the banality of their evil. He even spares some sympathy for the leader of this creationist movement, former State Board of Education chair Don McLeroy, showing how cordial and friendly he and one of his most passionate critics, Professor Ron Wetherington, can be around each other when not locked in battle. It's a strangely instructive model for political discourse in a broader film about the ills of politics in matters of objective study, and the climax makes for an effective "get out the vote" message regardless of how one feels about the outcome.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Head Games (Steve James, 2012)

Steve James' weakest feature almost doesn't even feel like a James film at first, presenting a straightforward call to increased safety in sports to reduce the rising number of concussions. But as James and his subjects uncover a sickening level of self-justification and obfuscation on the part of sports organizations looking to maximize the playing time (and, therefore, profit margin) of their players, Head Games emerges as something more classically "Jamesian." In peeling back the layers, the director starts to live up to his usual quality, and if nothing else, Head Games is proof that when James acquiesces to play by convention, he can still make a fine, probing work.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

Samsara (Ron Fricke, 2012)

Ron Fricke's latest tone poem, Samsara, takes its name from a concept shared among Indian religions pertaining to life, death and rebirth. Its root in the constant change of the world fits the film's structure, which trades the focus of Fricke's own Baraka or Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy for a more free-associative collage of world imagery. Opening on jarring close-ups of a ritualistic dance performed by three little people, Samsara only gets more bewildering when it moves from this show to the eruption of a volcano and the cooling of lava.

Yet the titular idea also connotes a cyclical movement of life and rebirth, giving order to its vastness, and Samsara soon reveals its unifying theme to be that of various ordering properties. That opening dance, so bewildering as an introduction, soon becomes part of a larger tapestry of ritual, organization and routine of humanity in nature and urban development alike, and even those of the Earth. This explain the footage of the exploding magma and solidifying lava flows, a miniature cycle of destruction and reformation the planet has seen across hundreds of millions of years. Fricke even includes a near-bookend of Tibetan monks playing horns to wake their village, a sort of invocation and benediction that reflects the cycle of the film's loose subject matter and the organizing properties at work on all cultures.

Beauty Is Embarrassing (Neil Berkeley, 2012)

Wayne White is too fascinating a character for the staid documentary techniques of Beauty Is Embarrassing. In fact, I found myself wishing I could have just seen the one-man show sprinkled throughout the film as a framing device than the movie itself. Nevertheless, if the point of these kinds of movies is to spark interest in their neglected subjects, then Beauty Is Embarrassing is certainly a success.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Spike Lee, 2006)

I have not seen Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke in five years, and in that time I had not only forgotten what a superb documentary it is, but also how profoundly I was affected by Hurricane Katrina. Rage and sorrow run through Lee's film, their purest outlet in his filmography since Do the Right Thing. But Lee also focuses his emotional response to the gargantuan blunder by interviewing such a wide variety of people that blame is cross-examined, shifted around, and finally rendered both unclear and sharply honed. One of Lee's finest works, if not his best.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Side By Side (Christopher Kenneally, 2012)

Side By Side is, thankfully, not merely a mere account of aesthetic differences between film and digital. Instead, it asks serious questions about what technological change will mean for not only the process of filmmaking but a new rulebook for movies. Engagingly led along by Keanu Reeves, Side By Side lets directors and cinematographers draw battle lines and, occasionally, wade among the No Man's Land between them. Though there are some surprising omissions—it is almost silly to document the way digital is changing movies without talking to Michael Mann, who has done more than anyone in the American mainstream to stake a new digital style—but Side By Side is nevertheless a solid introduction into an issue that should concern, but also excite, cinephiles everywhere.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

Free Radicals: A Story of Experimental Film (Pip Chodorov, 2012)

The article of Free Radicals' title gives away its main strength and weakness: this is a story of experimental film, not the story. Filtered through the personal remembrances of a man who grew up around some of the greatest innovators of the cinematic avant-garde, Free Radicals often feels like the home movie that opens the documentary. Yet it also tries to be the story of experimental cinema, offering introductions of most major icons of the underground but leaving out numerous linchpins of the movement such as Hollis Frampton and Kenneth Anger. In fact, the whole sexual side of avant-garde film is elided entirely, omitting a significant motivation for the early underground and some of its most scandalous taboo-breaking. Still, I have a soft spot for the enthusiasm Chodorov has for the filmmakers he knows and loves, and helps demystify experimental film a bit by highlighting the curiosity rather than the heady intellectualism behind the underground. It's not a great introduction to its subject matter, but it'll do until a great one gets here, I suppose.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Runaway Slave (Pritchett Cotten, 2012)

I tried my best to actually address Runaway Slave, a loathsome new piece of sub-Michael Moore agitprop, rather than simply foam at the mouth. I cannot say to what degree I succeeded. To even list the logical fallacies present in this oversimplification of disproportionate poverty, crime, etc. among black Americans as a failure of the Democratic Party and welfare would stretch well beyond my 1,000-word limit. And for a movie that goes so far out of its way to assure conservatives that they are not racist, its techniques sure are offensive, from the way it sinisterly frames any leftists black speaker to the repeated refrain of black teenagers with their pants sagging (because that has what to do with anything?). Easily the most reprehensible film I've seen this year.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Paul Williams Still Alive (Stephen Kessler, 2012)

I love Paul Williams. I love his songwriting, and I adore him as a record producer/Antichrist in Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise. But I loathed Paul Williams Still Alive, a documentary about the musician climbing his way back after years spent in the druggy wilderness and subsequently push for sobriety. This can be attributed to one Stephen Kessler, a never-quite-was director who openly seeks to make this film his own comeback and therefore makes himself the true subject of the documentary. His narcissistic rudeness is overpowering, and his "I'm the real story!" antics make those of Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore look like Steve James' professionalism. One of the worst movies I've seen this year.

My full review is at Spectrum Culture.

Pink Ribbons, Inc. (Léa Pool, 2012)

Forgot to link to this last week as I was caught up in my Top 100. Pink Ribbons Inc., a repetitive Big Issue documentary, nevertheless does a service in challenging lazy, self-satisfied attitudes toward the disturbingly commercialized breast cancer movement and how moneyed interests have steadily taken over a good cause. Pool's interviews cover her bases in not criticizing the pink-clad people on the street who think they're making a difference even as analysts not so subtly suggest these people are deluded. What elevates the film is that, unlike most social issue documentaries, it doesn't preach to the choir, instead taking issue with a universally assumed good and reveals just how bad it can really be.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Re:Generation Music Project (Amir Ben-Lev, 2012)

I never know where to stand on DJs, so I was glad to watch Re:Generation Music Project, an effort to prove the artistic validity of this sort of music. I loved watching each DJ pore through his assigned genre, some of them coming to appreciate that which they had previously ignored (I'm especially thinking of Pretty Lights initially disdaining country then growing to truly admire it). There are some irritations, chiefly in the form of that insufferable know-it-all Mark Ronson, but overall I came away with a new respect for what these people do. DJ Premier's work with classical music in particular is one of the most entertaining, inspiring things I've seen this year.

My full review of Re:Generation Music Project is up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Filth and the Fury (Julien Temple, 2000)

The Filth and the Fury opens with an old BBC weather report announcing incoming rain. The metaphor works two-fold, as a literal announcement of the coming storm that is the Sex Pistols, and as a brief look into the starched public face of Britain that is about to have a safety pin shoved through its nose. Indeed, Julien Temple devotes only a few minutes to establishing the adolescences of the Sex Pistols, instead focusing on the social context of the mid-'70s that allowed the band to rise. A few photographs of young Steve Jones and John Lydon are swiftly drowned out by images of trash piling into mountains in the streets during a years-long garbage strike, of punters standing unaffected by a lump of dead rats large enough to be capybaras.

Temple attempts to capture some of the slapdash energy of the band's actual formation, shoved together by impresario Malcolm McLaren and molded into the perfect embodiment of Thatcherian fury and inchoate aggression. Much of the film's first act, in fact, deals with the group's attempt to bash their way into any semblance of musical competence, archival footage and audio of early performances showing off four individuals with no business standing on a stage slowly building a following off their insane look and crazier live act. As the refuse of Britain's youth slowly trickled into whatever shit hole the Pistols played, a movement starts to form, simultaneously proving the shrewdness of McLaren's fashion marketing and turning into something inadvertently genuine.

The Beat Hotel (Alan Govenar, 2012)

I know so little about the Beat Generation. All I was taught in school were excerpts of On the Road and a shambles of a class reading of "Howl" in college. So in the dark am I regarding the nuances of the movement that The Beat Hotel, Alan Govenar's slight but engaging documentary, was more educational than all my English-department forays into the Beats put together. Offering a fondly recalled overview of the dingy Parisian roach motel for ex-pats, The Beat Hotel helped clarify the links between the Beat and Lost generations and how the former is the more harrowed, paranoid iteration of the latter. Anecdotes are touching, amusing, even a bit frightening (usually the ones involving William S. Burroughs), while the remembrances of the surviving witnesses of this time period are all universally the best kind of old person, the type who have just aged into great storytellers. It's overlong (despite only being 80 minutes long), but the movie does do a service to a still-underappreciated moment in our literary history. Besides, it made me run out and go buy Naked Lunch after finishing.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Last Days Here (Don Argott & Demian Fenton, 2012)

The same pitch that drew me to Last Days Here, that it was a rawer version of 2009's excellent documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil, is ultimately what made its weaknesses all the more apparent. Anvil! had a clear sympathy for its subjects that didn't override its ability to treat the forgotten band honestly. Last Days Here simply languishes in the Pentagram frontman's stupor, so lacking in context that it just feels as if we're watching a failure die. It grows uncomfortable quickly, and the vague strands of hope that come into play at the end weren't enough to make me like I hadn't just spied on someone's breakdown for 90 minutes. It's one thing to illuminate pain with cameras; it's another to just record it.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Undefeated (Daniel Lindsay & T.J. Martin, 2012)

Undefeated doesn't reinvent the sports documentary, but it does add depth to the genre with an unyielding focus on the people over the game. I've never seen a sports doc care so little about the actual sport. Like Hoop Dreams (a film it uses as a clear template), Undefeated makes its subjects so dramatic that even this hater of all things sports wants so desperately to see them succeed. It's not a great movie, but Undefeated is nevertheless a fine documentary about the struggle to find some new hope in the wake of the death of the American Dream.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

El Sicario, Room 164 (Gianfranco Rosi, 2011)

In an age where "FAKE!" greets even the most honest video, the almost-too-consistent dramatic ups and downs of this extended talking head about a reformed assassin for the Mexican drug cartel will certainly strain the credulity of some. And this is wholly leaving out the conclusion of the man's life story, which is so conveniently moralizing that it could play at schools and church groups (especially church groups). Nevertheless, the sicario's monologue is so enthralling as to make something compelling of 80 minutes of a masked man mostly sitting in a chair explaining himself. I know of at least one person who compared the man's confessional to Spalding Gray's ability to hook a crowd with just his speechifying, and that strikes me as more than apt.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.