Hot Docs ’17: Hobbyhorse Revolution

Posted in2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Finland, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2017
***/****directed by Selma Vilhunen Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 27-May 7, 2017 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers Hobbyhorsists. They are predominantly young women, tweens and teens alike, who pretend to ride broomstick horses. The horses have names, idiosyncrasies, even lifespans (in a poetic externalization of personal growth, one girl's closet seems to double as a mausoleum for hobbyhorses), and they're billed alongside their riders in dressage tournaments that are surreal spectacles of girls bunny-hopping over fences while the crowd watches on tenterhooks, the way you dread…

Hot Docs ’17: Living the Game

Posted in2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2017, Japan
**½/****directed by Takao Gotsu Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 27-May 7, 2017 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers In surveying a complementary milieu with the same elegant reserve, Living the Game could be a blood relative of the streaming favourite Indie Game: The Movie. Although its chill vibe doesn't feel entirely forthcoming in the age of Gamergate, the pro gamers it profiles may exhibit fewer chips on their shoulders because they all hail from the East (Japan, mostly) rather than the West. These folks are damn near…

Fantastic Fest ’16: S is for Stanley

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Documentary, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '16, Film Festivals

Ff16stanley

***½/****
directed by Alex Infascelli

by Walter Chaw Emilio D'Alessandro was the only delivery driver courageous enough to brave a rare London blizzard to deliver a giant phallus to the set of A Clockwork Orange sometime in the last half of 1970. An aspiring Formula 1 racer and jack of all trades, Emilio caught the eye that day of one Stanley Kubrick, American expat and obsessive-compulsive who happens to be one of the handful of undisputed geniuses in the auteur conversation. Moved to London at this point and destined to die there in 1999 after the first industry screening of his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick hired Emilio essentially by writing him notes on index cards and Post-Its and steadily, some would say monstrously, dominating his life to the extent that it strained Emilio's marriage and caused him to miss the moment of his father's death. It would be easy to make a documentary like Alex Infascelli's S is for Stanley from that perspective: the madman in his laboratory, unwitting Igor fettered to his noisome wake. Harder is what Infascelli actually does, which is understand that the story here isn't about one odd duck, but two…and of a feather to boot. I love the moment where Emilio remembers his wife (they're still together) complaining that Stanley calls day and night: When he told Kubrick about it, Stanley proposed that the solution was to install a separate line in Emilio's house so that they could leave Emilio's wife out of it altogether. Emilio went for it.

Fantastic Fest ’16: Fraud + Belief: The Possession of Janet Moses

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Documentary, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '16, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, New Zealand, Short Films

Ff16possesion

FRAUD
***½/****
directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp

BELIEF: THE POSSESSION OF JANET MOSES
**½/****
directed by David Stubbs

by Walter Chaw The line between documentary and fiction filmmaking is blurry. Better–more accurate–to say there’s no difference at all: that documentary is just a genre in and of itself. Documentaries are products of points of view, of editing, of premise. You could film someone reading a phone book, but even that’s a choice. Where to put the camera; why do it in the first place? Consider the Heisenberg Principle as well, this notion that the nature of anything changes once it’s observed. Documentary as “truth” is an interesting philosophical question. It’s sold as such, used politically, manipulated to serve purposes contrary to the idea of objective reality, but documentaries are never objective. Indeed, they challenge the very idea that the product of any endeavour could be truly objective. It’s an interesting phenomenon in our technological wasteland that video “evidence” of malfeasance has proven inconclusive in courts of law. Replays in professional sports have only muddied the playing field. Everything is subject to interpretation and the product of someone’s decision made somewhere along the way.

TIFF ’16: Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Italy, TIFF

Tiff16waterandsugar

Acqua e Zucchero: Carlo Di Palma, i colori della vita
***/****
diretced by Fariborz Kamkari

by Bill Chambers This is an illuminating if less than revolutionary documentary about a cinematographer who’s more of a DP’s DP than a consensus Great among film buffs. (Google “greatest cinematographers” and Carlo Di Palma doesn’t even number among the sixty thumbnails in the banner at the top.) Perhaps the reason is because he spent so long in the weeds with Woody Allen (from 1986 until his retirement from fiction features in 1997), whose movies are statistically ephemeral; perhaps it’s because Di Palma is a key figure specifically in Italian cinema, which seemed to exhaust its cultural cachet as art films became outmoded there. Inspired by an exhibit devoted to Di Palma curated by his widow, Adriana Chiesa Di Palma, Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life–a title derived from a late-film anecdote about Carlo as a young boy that packs an emotional punch I wasn’t quite expecting–sees Adriana poring over his papers and videos, interviewing her husband’s colleagues and admirers, and wistfully recalling their marriage. Surprised herself by the vitality of his contribution to the cinematic arts (it sounds like he didn’t talk shop much at home), she makes for an ideal entrée into the filmmaker’s oeuvre: she knows the titles and the people involved (sometimes personally), but not well enough to be disenchanted with them.

Telluride ’16: The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2016

Tell16bside

**½/****
directed by Errol Morris

by Walter Chaw Towards the end of Errol Morris's fitfully-fascinating portrait of legendary large-format Polaroid photographer Elsa Dorfman, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography, Dorfman, looking at one of the dozens of snapshots she's taken of the late Alan Ginsberg, says that maybe the true life of a photo isn't revealed until the subject has died. It's the emotional fulcrum of this brief piece, as the now-79-year-old Dorfman looks back on a lifetime of pictures taken while she went from being a single "New York Jew" without direction to a hob-nobber among the Greenwich Village crowd. Ensconced at Morris's bequest in her studio's backroom, she's dwarfed by a cluttered drafting table on the one side and rows and stacks of archived portraits on the other. As she opens each cabinet, Morris captures the delight and surprise of her rediscovering the "discards" of her customers (they pick one to keep; the other she dubs "the B-side" and ferrets away), reading the detailed captions she's left on them.

Telluride ’16: Into the Inferno

Posted in2016, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2016, UK

Tell16inferno

**/****
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw About 20 minutes of Werner Herzog’s 104-minute Into the Inferno is recycled footage from his own Encounters at the End of the World. Another 20 is a strange diversion into the discovery of a hominid skeleton in Africa featuring a particularly excitable paleoanthropologist. This leaves roughly an hour for the cultural/anthropological examination of cults sprung up around active volcanoes the movie promises, and at least a portion of that is devoted to the amazing footage captured by the late Katia and Maurice Krafft, who, like Kilgore on the beach, never thought they could be killed by the fire. They were. It’s the kind of gallows revelation that is the purview of Herzog’s mordant documentaries. He is at least as good at this as he is at his more traditional fictions. But Into the Inferno seems tossed-off and unfocused, and not even a partnership with affable British vulcanologist Clive Oppenheimer can help Herzog ground this material. A previous incarnation of the filmmaker would find him stealthily building a profile of a man who spends his life staring into magma pools, perched at the edge of pyroclastic calamity. This Herzog interviews a few chiefs of island cultures, the most fascinating of whom has decided that an American airman lives in the lava and will one day emerge to shower the villagers with a bounty of consumer goods.

Just Desserts: The Making of “Creepshow” (2007) [Special Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2000s, 2007, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: George A. Romero, Documentary

Justdesserts1

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
directed by Michael Felsher

by Bryant Frazer The market for 1980s horror nostalgia on Blu-ray reaches some kind of saturation mark with the release of Just Desserts, a feature-length documentary on the making of Creepshow, the George A. Romero-helmed, Stephen King-scripted anthology-film homage to EC horror comics. Producer-director-editor Michael Felsher, well-known to home-theatre horror buffs as perhaps the most prodigious creator of the featurettes that show up on genre releases from independent video labels, originally made Just Desserts for a 2007 UK DVD release of Creepshow. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get Warner Home Video interested in picking it up for the North American version. One $4,400 crowdfunding campaign later, Felsher himself engineered the BD release of Just Desserts via Synapse Films in the U.S. That’s a great story in its own way–who doesn’t like to see an independent filmmaker bypass the studio gatekeepers and give his work a chance in the market? Divorced from its context as a studio-sponsored bonus feature, however, Just Desserts doesn’t stand out in any way except its earnestness. It’s an excellent example of the cozy, clips-and-interviews format that dominates Blu-ray supplements, and that means it’s essentially rote in both form and content. Felsher isn’t mounting a critical argument about Creepshow, nor is he placing it in a revealing new context. He’s simply flattering the film and its audience.

Hot Docs ’16: No Man is an Island

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2016
**/**** directed by Tim De Keersmaecker Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers The white sands and turquoise waters of Lampedusa, Italy's southernmost island, have attracted tourists like iron filings in the age of TripAdvisor. It's paradise found, an oasis in the Mediterranean. And it's "the door to Africa," a European outpost at which migrants dock en masse. No Man is an Island alternates between two young refugees who've established themselves there in some capacity. Omar, who fled Tunisia during…

Hot Docs ’16: Sonita

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2016, Iran, Switzerland
***½/****directed by Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers By coincidence or zeitgeist design, Sonita is my third consecutive Hot Doc about the disenfranchised's quest for "personhood." Here it's the titular Sonita Alizadeh, an Afghan teenager who fled the Taliban and, as the film begins, is living in a fleapit in Tehran with her sister and young niece; an unseen brother apparently resides nearby, close enough to duck in and trash her belongings while she's out. Sonita's…

Hot Docs ’16: Unlocking the Cage

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2016
**½/****directed by Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers As an idealistic young lawyer, Harvard law professor Steven Wise went looking for the biggest "underdog" he could possibly represent and realized that animals were it. He founded the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) to aid any and all "autonomous" wildlife in cases of abuse, but Unlocking the Cage, the latest from the prolific team of Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker, zeroes in on his…

Hot Docs ’16: The Pearl of Africa

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2016, Sweden
***/****directed by Jonny von Wallström Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers Cleopatra Kambugu and her husband Nelson Kasaija board a train. Although the seats in their sleeping car are discouragingly narrow, Nelson consults the passenger guidelines and sure enough sex is not explicitly forbidden. It's sitcom-cute that he checks, but his impulse to do so also creates a palpable unease; the accumulation of ominous imagery at the start--a barbed-wire fence; a front door, open though not beckoning; the word…

Fantastic Fest ’15: Man vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler

Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Film Festivals, Italy, Japan
**½/****directed by Andrew Seklir & Tim Kinzy by Walter Chaw This is a well-mounted documentary about videogame geek Tim McVey (no, not that Tim McVeigh), who, as a carbuncular teen, once scored a billion points on little-known stand-up game Nibbler--a symbolic victory for its marathon nature (typically a 40-hour run is required for such a feat) and for the rarity of having a machine that would actually tally a ten-digit score. Man vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler is ultimately best when it diagrams the essential decency of Tim and especially his impossibly kind and supportive wife, Tina. The film…

TIFF ’15: Where to Invade Next + Ninth Floor

Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

Tiff15wheretoinvadenext

Where to Invade Next. (pictured)
**½/****
written and directed by Michael Moore

NINTH FLOOR
**/****
written and directed by Mina Shum

by Bill Chambers The narrative pretext for Michael Moore’s globetrotting that lends Where to Invade Next its title is so low-concept, jokey, and finally immaterial as to be the documentary equivalent of the cable repairman arriving at the beginning of a porno. After a solid five minutes of trolling the Right with an inventory of recent conflicts that makes the United States look at once war-happy and, despite its exorbitant military spending, not very good at the whole war thing, Moore satirically sets off on a mission–shabby haircut, gummy smile, and Tigers cap (sometimes in camo green) intact–to find a good place for America’s next big skirmish. What he’s really doing is touring the world in search of proven ideologies his own tailspinning country would do well to adopt. In Italy and Germany, he discovers a happy, fruitful middle class in factories, of all places. In France, he encounters a gradeschool cafeteria where the chef opts for fruit-and-cheese platters over burgers and fries and the children regard Moore’s can of Coke dubiously. In Slovenia, he can’t find a single university student in debt until he happens on an American transplant who owes money back home. In Iceland, he becomes enamoured of an emergent matriarchy, which might be why he recedes as an on-camera presence: to curb the irony of his film mansplaining women in leadership to us.

Gates of Heaven/Vernon, Florida [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Documentary, The Criterion Collection
Vernonfl

VERNON, FLORIDA (1981)
****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Errol Morris

GATES OF HEAVEN (1978)
****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Errol Morris

by Walter Chaw Trying to decode what it is about Errol Morris’s best work is a thorny proposition. There are times his work feels mocking, but it’s always uncertain whether that’s extant in the piece or intrinsic in the audience. Certainly, it’s tempting for me to compare Morris–especially early Morris–to Diane Arbus or Shelby Lee Adams, but even the marriage of those two artists in opposition or sympathy to Morris opens cans of syllogistic worms. At the least, it’s not much of a stretch to predict, just based on his first two films, Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida (both sharing space on a new Criterion Blu-ray), that he would one day partner with Werner Herzog–another brilliant documentarian who lives right there on the edge of disdain for subject/spectator, surrealism/documentary, Brechtian absurdity/Maysles vérité–and that the two of them would, together, support someone like Joshua Oppenheimer. I interviewed Errol Morris back upon the release of his Robert McNamara documentary The Fog of War and was existentially worried to do so. All this by way of saying that I don’t have the facility to judge the quality of Morris’s work. A mountain is a mountain. But I can appreciate its truth, beauty, and implacable impenetrability.

Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets (2014)

Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Concert Doc, Documentary, Music, UK

Pulp

**½/****
directed by Florian Habicht

by Bill Chambers There's an episode of "The Larry Sanders Show" where tragic sidekick Hank Kingsley asks producer Artie what he thinks of him opening his solo act with Blood, Sweat & Tears' "Spinning Wheel." "It's a showstopper, Hank," Artie says, briefly raising Hank's hopes before delivering the kicker: "Never open with a showstopper." I was reminded of this at the outset of Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets, which opens with the title band giving a rousing performance of their "Common People" that is, for those of us watching after the fact, vicariously thrilling. "[1996] won't produce a more indispensable song," wrote rock authority Robert Christgau, and indeed, "Common People" went on to crystallize the Britpop movement and be covered by the disparate likes of Tori Amos and William Shatner. If you're a dilettante like myself, you go into this first sanctioned documentary about Pulp (lead singer Jarvis Cocker receives a "concept" credit alongside director Florian Habicht) wishing to hear "Common People," and what follows pales for the instant gratification–at least until it becomes clear that "Common People" had to be up front: for purposes of this film, it's nothing less than the national anthem.

F for Fake (1973) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Orson Welles, Documentary, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

Fforfake1

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Orson Welles, Oja Kodar, Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving
written and directed by Orson Welles

by Bryant Frazer In 1971, Pauline Kael did her best to kill Orson Welles. In “Raising Kane,” an essay originally published in THE NEW YORKER and later used as a lengthy introduction to the published screenplay, she argued that Welles had unfairly taken authorial credit for a film whose real creative force was Welles’s credited co-screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz. Kael’s piece was persuasive but hardly comprehensive, cherry-picking evidence in an effort to make a liar of Welles. (In his definitive 1978 book The Making of Citizen Kane, Robert Carringer described Kael’s charge that Welles did not contribute to the script as “a flagrant misrepresentation,” although he did allow that Welles may have hoped not to credit Mankiewicz.) Making the case against Kane was an opportunity for Kael to escalate her ongoing crusade against the auteur theory; it doesn’t seem that she held any personal grudge against Welles, especially given her loving notice for his Chimes at Midnight, made just a few years earlier. But for the aging Welles, by that time a subject of mockery in Hollywood who struggled to finance even the most bargain-basement film projects, the apparently unprovoked attack must have stung. F for Fake is his elegant response: a good-natured but deeply-felt riposte, executed with his considerable showmanship and meant to humble artist and critic alike.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Dwarves Kingdom

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Documentary, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals

Dwarveskingdom

***/****
directed by Matthew Salton

by Walter Chaw Here’s the thing, and I say this after years of being tortured by Chinese people: Chinese people are pretty awful. At least culturally, it should be said, there’s an extreme disconnect in terms of social mores. There’s a certain directness that’s difficult to assimilate as an American, along with a certain disapproval that maybe I’m just more sensitive to because of my privileged status as neither fish nor fowl. I used to say the Chinese perfected racism because they had to learn how to be racist towards people who didn’t look substantially different from themselves. I became a case study in a graduate anthropology course once concerning the evolution of human sexuality. Asked about my object-choice apparatus (was I triggered more by distinct facial features than by hair colour, for instance, or body type?), I wasn’t offended. It’s a good question.

TIFF ’14 Wrap-Up: The Gift of MAGI and some quick takes

Posted in****/****, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Sweden, TIFF

by Bill Chambers I try my best to stay away from the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto’s state-of-the-art cinematheque, during the Festival, because for a goodly portion of those ten days it becomes Pandaemonium with a red carpet. But I made what I hope is a self-explanatory exception for the Industry conference “Ad Infinitum: Bigger, Faster, Brighter Movies – The Changing Creative Landscape of Digital Entertainment,” where Douglas Trumbull–who designed the lightshows for, among others, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner; directed the cultish SF movies Silent Running and Brainstorm; and engineered Back to the Future: The Ride–debuted/previewed his new MAGI process, a digital replacement for his late, lamented Showscan. Trumbull took the podium to introduce a featurette on his work that set the context for UFOTOG, a short subject shot in 4K resolution and 3-D at 120 frames per second (fps). Although the piece dovetails with Trumbull’s geeky interest in space invaders (the title is a portmanteau of “UFO” and “photography,” just as MAGI is a weird anagram-cum-abbreviation for “moving image”), its raison d’être is to serve as MAGI’s proof of concept. Good thing, too: as a narrative, it’s pretty incoherent.

TIFF ’14: Seymour: An Introduction; Love & Mercy; Whiplash

Posted in2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF

Music3fertiff

SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION
***½/****
directed by Ethan Hawke

LOVE & MERCY
**½/****
directed by Bill Pohlad

WHIPLASH
**/****
written and directed by Damien Chazelle

by Bill Chambers Ethan Hawke’s first documentary isn’t the affected thing its Googler-confusing, appropriated-from-Salinger title would suggest. (And perhaps we should be grateful he didn’t go with Suddenly Seymour, Seymour Butts, or I Know What You Did Last Seymour.) Intimate but not prying, Seymour: An Introduction profiles the homuncular Seymour Bernstein, a former pianist of some renown who withdrew from the concert circuit in his prime to focus on teaching piano, hoping to stave off the neuroses of fame. Hawke decided to make the film after receiving some life-altering advice from Bernstein at a gathering, as if compelled to share his good fortune with the world, and that generosity of spirit courses through a piece that looks for wisdom, not pathology, in its subject’s hermetic existence (57 years alone in the same New York apartment) and monk-like devotion to music. A forgotten genius, Bernstein also proves an unsung raconteur in enthralling stories that place him at the centre of a real-life Sunset Boulevard or on the front lines of Korea; he commands the screen in lingering close-ups and holds court with equally-captive audiences of confrères and disciples, despite his professed stage fright. The picture builds to Bernstein’s first live performance in decades, a recital Hawke has arranged in a gesture that seems like a betrayal yet has the not-undesirable effect of making Bernstein look oddly heroic. If possible, he’s an even more expressive individual when filtered through the keys of a Steinway.