Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover Archives - Page 17 of 22

Spellbound (2003)

May 23, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Theatrical

**½/****
directed by Jeffrey Blitz

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It doesn’t surprise me that Spellbound has been garnering more acclaim and attention than most documentaries: it’s a gentle and untaxing film whose drama is not so far removed from the flashy arena of “American Idol”. Despite collecting a disparate group of people in the same event (the 1999 National Spelling Bee held in Washington, DC), Spellbound doesn’t give enough detail to draw any conclusions about the participants’ involvement, nor does it place the whole notion of the competition in a historical context so that we might understand it better. In the end, the film is just a record of American striving that exists in a vacuum, offering the thrill of competition and the agony of defeat with only cursory glances towards things beyond the moment.

The Ampersand Man: FFC Interviews Nick Broomfield

May 11, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Interviews, UK

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Say what you will about Nick Broomfield: that he's shallow, that he's an ambulance-chaser, that he is, as one reviewer put it, "the unobservant voyeur." But whatever else they are, his films are compulsive viewing. His modus operandi–collecting a group of arresting individuals surrounding other, more central and elusive (or dead) ones–sucks the viewer into their vortex as testimonial after testimonial reveals both the film's subject and, as Broomfield would put it, the "soul" of the interviewer. The tapestry he weaves out of these apparently disparate interviewees is often overwhelming, even when you're not sure about the director's motives, and it keeps you watching to the final frames.

Hot Docs ’03: The Last Round

May 3, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

The Last Round: Chuvalo vs Ali***/****directed by Joseph Blasioli by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A look at the crazy, labyrinthine ways of boxing as seen through the eyes of Canadian heavyweight George Chuvalo. Ostensibly about the day in 1966 when he went head-to-head with Muhammad Ali and managed to last the full 15 rounds, it follows the contours of his career as he strives for the world championship belt. A precocious, driven athlete, he becomes Canadian champion at an early age and sets his sights on the world--but the world has other ideas for him, and his yearning for a title…

Hot Docs ’03: Driving Me Crazy (1988)

May 2, 20031980s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK, West Germany

**½/****directed by Nick Broomfield by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Of interest to pupils of documentary--and no one else--is Driving Me Crazy, a film in which Nick Broomfield, for better and for worse, reveals his own machinations on camera and upstages his ostensible subject. Hired by producer friend Andrew Braunsberg to document an Austrian stage production on African-American music, the director shamelessly inserts himself into the scene, recording the financial and political transactions that allow him to continue with his work. In so doing, he antagonizes many who work on the production and doesn't seem to care, concerned only with continuing the…

Hot Docs ’03: Baader-Meinhof: In Love with Terror

May 1, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK

**/****directed by Ben Lewis by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Or rather, Ben Lewis: In Love with Obviousness. This brief history of the ultra-left Red Army Faction, whose terrorism swept West Germany during the '70s, doesn't really deal with the issues that created it; the film is far more interested in the sensational aspects of their rampage than in any of the questions that it raised. Admittedly, some of the details depicted are fascinating: I didn't realize that Andreas Baader's squeeze Gudrun Ensselin was a sex-movie queen, or that the BMW, RAF getaway car of choice, became known as the "Baader-Meinhof Wagon."…

Hot Docs ’03: Hush!

May 1, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Russia

***/****directed by Victor Kossakovsky by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By far the most original of this year's crop is Hush!, in which director Victor Kossakovsky turns his gaze through his apartment window and collects the goings-on outside. Lovers meet in the street, dogs are walked, street cleaners sweep up the curb, and public workers tear up the street to do... something. Seasons change, rain and snow fall, a police van has a close call at an intersection and the hole in the street gets bigger and bigger as the workers continue to do God-knows-what. Sometimes the action unfurls in real time,…

The Dancer Upstairs (2002)

April 30, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Javier Bardem, Laura Morante, Juan Diego Botto, Elvira Mínguez
screenplay by Nicholas Shakespeare, based on his novel
directed by John Malkovich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Why do people insist on making movies as though all Latin-American countries are the same? How is it that they can get away with ignoring cultural differences and national identities as though they were nothing? The same first-world writers who set their scripts “somewhere in Latin America” would surely find an Ecuadorian or a Peruvian presumptuous for setting his or her own tale “somewhere in Western Europe.” But these jokers have no guilt about herding millions and millions of people into the same leaky boat, and defining the stretch from Mexico to Argentina as one big, ugly banana republic. The results are usually not pretty, and The Dancer Upstairs is no exception to the rule.

Hot Docs ’03: The Day I Will Never Forget

April 30, 2003Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, UK

***½/****directed by Kim Longinotto by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The co-director of Divorce Iranian Style is back with this intelligent and powerful documentary on female genital mutilation in Kenya. Not only does it show, in a chilling centrepiece sequence, the immediate and excruciating pain it causes the young girls subjected to the practice (as well as the health consequences of dirty instruments and heavy stitching), but it also explores the cultural mechanisms that ensure that people, even women, will continue it. The ears burn at hearing tribal leaders offer their explanations of the logic in its implementation, as well as at…

Hot Docs ’03: Rockets Redglare!

April 30, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***½/****directed by Luis Fernandez de la Reguera by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The lively but tragic saga of Michael Morra, a.k.a. Rockets Redglare, is explored in this somewhat crude but extremely moving documentary. Morra/Redglare lived a life that would be ennobled by the word "marginal": he was born a heroin-addicted baby, raised in grinding poverty, all but witnessed the murder of his mother, and bounced from needle to rehab to needle again in a titanic losing battle with addiction. But he was also an extremely creative individual, and rose in the '80s to become a character actor, comedian, and performance artist…

Hot Docs ’03: And Along Came a Spider

April 29, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Iran

Va ankaboot amad***/****directed by Maziar Bahari by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You'd think it would be clear-cut: a serial killer who murders 16 prostitutes should be treated with a maximum of scorn. But that's not how it happened in Iran, where the notorious Saeed Hanei dispatched members of society who were already believed to have been the scum of the earth. The sadistic "spider-killer," already high on killing from the Iran-Iraq war, believed that he was doing God's work, and interviews with his family reveal that they are proud that their son/husband/father was taking a stand on those who would corrupt…

Hot Docs ’03: Stupidity

April 29, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

½*/**** directed by Albert Nerenberg by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Words fail me in describing this travesty, a hypocritical assault on the senses which traffics in the very imagery it pretends to deplore and leaves you drained, battered, and completely demoralized. Ostensibly, it's about the media events and herd behaviours that conspire to keep the stupid oppressed and the even dumber in power, but despite the presence of Noam Chomsky and scattered other intellectuals, Stupidity is an exercise in smug superiority that does nothing to fight the powers that be. It's more interested in looking smarter than the crowd instead of…

Hot Docs ’03: Kim’s Story (1997)

April 29, 20031990s, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

**½/****directed by Shelley Saywell by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This is the story of Kim Phuc, who was napalmed during the Vietnam War and became the subject of an infamous photo that shocked the world. Her life is full enough of incident: Having become a symbol of America's brutality during the war, she was turned into a propaganda instrument by the Vietnamese government and subsequently defected to the west. She remains, however, a committed pacifist and continues to build bridges between herself and veterans--including, in the film's biggest surprise, the pilot who dropped the napalm on her. Alas, the crew that…

Hot Docs ’03: How High is the Mountain + How Deep is the Ocean

April 28, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Taiwan

HOW HIGH IS THE MOUNTAIN
***/****
directed by Shiang-Chu Tang

HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN
***½/****
directed by Shiang-Chu Tang

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover These are two tangentially related films by the Taiwanese director Shiang-Chu Tang, and they're like nothing else in the Hot Docs festival. They're neither as overly schematic as so many socially-minded documentaries nor overly aestheticized like the school of Errol Morris. In fact, those poles don't really apply to these films, which record social processes through the examples of individuals and which have a formal beauty to them that is totally non-coercive. Watching them, you don't feel forced into taking a stance–you are provided with the stuff of peoples' lives to draw your own conclusions as to how they ended up the way they did.

Hot Docs ’03: Generation of Hate

April 27, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

**/****directed by Shelley Saywell by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In Generation of Hate, Shelley Saywell goes to Iraq and doesn't come back with much you didn't already know. Apparently, the Iraqi people hate America for constantly attacking them and aren't allowed to speak about Saddam's oppression--shocker! Sure, it can't hurt to hear that one more time, but Saywell's primitive technique doesn't give the subject much urgency beyond the common liberal "tsk." Lacking in structure and confused in focus, the video ricochets from subject to subject, taking sound bites here and there and imposing frightfully obvious voice-overs that often repeat themselves. The…

Hot Docs ’03: The Lost Boys (2002)

April 27, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, UK

**/****directed by Clive Gordon by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Can a film have a wealth of new information and still be a failure? If the film is Clive Gordon's The Lost Boys, the answer is an unfortunate "yes." Dealing with the ultimate fate of some of the "lost boys" of the Sudan, who fled to northern Kenya when they were attacked by the Arab army, it shows a handful of the 3,500 who were selected for resettling in America. On the plus side, it shows a process that rarely is seen on film, that of people struggling to adjust to a…

Hot Docs ’03: Algeria: The Nameless War

April 26, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Sweden

***½/****directed by Agneiska Lukasiak by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Director Agneiska Lukasiak got more than she bargained for when she went to shoot in Algeria and fell in love with one of its countrymen, Habib. Not only was she in a country racked by civil conflict, she also had to face up to her culture shock at the country's radically different approaches to love. Despite her amour fou for Habib, his familial obligations make it impossible for her to marry without destroying his family's means of support. As she ponders her unhappy love, she wanders around Algiers illegally taping war zones,…

Hot Docs ’03: Juchitan, Queer Paradise

April 26, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Chile, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

Juchitán de las locas**½/****directed by Patricio Henriquez by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This documentary has a honey of a subject: a Mexican Zapotec town with a high tolerance for homosexuality. Unfortunately, it blows it when it takes a personal angle that obscures the town's inner workings. At first, the film gets your hopes up by showing Juchitan's relaxed nature--gays and the transgendered are treated with respect, women are given a high rank in society, and the Zapotec language is still spoken in a country where native languages are quickly disappearing. But Juchitan quickly shifts gears to follow several residents of the town,…

Hot Docs ’03: Strip Club DJs

April 26, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Television

***/****directed by Derrick Beckles by Travis Mackenzie Hoover One approaches a film on this topic with a sense of humour: surely it couldn't have anything other than good ribald laughs. But as Strip Club DJs inches ever closer to its conclusion, it becomes more and more disturbing, until you are choked-up with a combination of contempt and pity for those who would play the tunes at your local peeler bar. It turns out that the DJ is the nerve centre for the whole operation: not only must he spin the discs, he must also arrange who has the rights to…

Hot Docs ’03: My Flesh and Blood

April 25, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***½/****directed by Jonathan Karsh by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Susan Tom more or less adopts special-needs children; this is her story, and it's both gripping and moving. A woman described by her mother as trying to fill her own "loneliness," Tom has taken on the children who are too much for other people--there are kids missing limbs, who have been horribly burned, who have cancer and cystic fibrosis, and one hyperactive boy with a terrible mean streak. The film takes stock of a year with Tom and her family, and considers what it takes to care for children who demand so…

Hot Docs ’03: Bruno S. – Estrangement is Death

April 25, 20032000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs

Bruno S. - Die Fremde ist der Tod***/****directed by Miron Zownir by Travis Mackenzie Hoover At the Cannes premiere of one of his films, Werner Herzog discovery Bruno S. decided to play his accordion outside the theatre; unfortunately, no one knew how to take this, and the police were called in to arrest him. That pretty much sums up the life of Bruno S., who, after two films with Herzog, faded into obscurity, never to catch the public eye again. But that wasn't the only rejection in his life: Not only was he the victim of neglectful parents, but his…