Documentary Archives - Page 7 of 18

Hot Docs 2012: Tchoupitoulas (ds. Bill and Turner Ross)

April 30, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda Tchoupitoulas is a rare thing, an aesthetic antidote to the info-dump documentary tradition of talking head interviews and old snapshots. Described in the press notes as a night-time “piggyback ride” through the French Quarter, it’s more like a sweet re-imagining of James Joyce’s “Araby.” That short story culminates in a child’s dispiriting revelation that all that glitters in a bazaar is not gold, but Tchoupitoulasstrikes at something more ambivalent and certainly more beguiling, the bleary-eyed altered state of a 3AM comedown after a night of revels.

Hot Docs 2012: Legend of a Warrior (d. Corey Lee)

April 29, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Martial Arts, Sports

by Angelo Muredda Director Corey Lee stages a moving reunion with his infamous but distant father in Legend of a Warrior. As a martial arts grandmaster and lauded trainer famed for ushering former pupil Billy Chau to a kickboxing world championship, Frank Lee spent his son’s formative years in gyms, training surrogate children while Corey went largely unattended. Now his son is trying to reconnect, relocating to the elder Lee’s Edmonton gym for a rigorous five-month training program that will submerge him in his charismatic father’s world while taking him away from his own young children. What follows is both an observational record of that process and a subtle father-son melodrama, punctuated by animated interludes that turn Frank’s early days in Canada and youth in Hong Kong into a comic-strip biography.

Hot Docs 2012: She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column (d. Kevin Hegge)

April 28, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda A few minutes into Kevin Hegge’s long-gestating She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column, a critic calls the titular feminist post-punk act an art band that wasn’t necessarily arty. That sounds like an interesting distinction, but it’s also as far as the idea goes in a doc that almost makes up in enthusiasm what it lacks in depth. Hegge sets a fast pace, and the early history of intellectual centre and drummer GB Jones and lead singer Caroline Azar’s collaboration nicely establishes their dynamic of cryptic rock deity and big-sweatered frontwoman, with plenty of footage of…

Hot Docs 2012: The Boxing Girls of Kabul (d. Ariel Nasr)

April 28, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

by Angelo Muredda Ariel Nasr’s The Boxing Girls of Kabulopens with clandestine footage of an execution in Kabul’s Olympic Stadium, where members of the Taliban force a woman to crawl before shooting her at close-range. That image haunts the alternately uplifting and sobering narrative that follows, which shadows the faltering Olympic hopes of a trio of young female boxers in a country where patriarchal attitudes toward women, particularly athletes, range from mild acceptance to violent hostility. This is a vibrant film, coloured by the verve of its protagonists, Shahla and siblings Sadaf and Shabnam, who speak candidly about their progressive values and their anxieties about the precariousness of their position amidst threats of assault and kidnapping. They’re presented as jocks, so it’s especially jarring when their future turns out to depend less on their athleticism than on the volatile political conditions of their country and its stance on the rights of women.

Hot Docs 2012: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (d. Alison Klayman)

April 27, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda Like Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s vital This is Not a Film, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorrydelights in capturing its dissident subject lounging in the company of animals. Panahi has his iguana, which roams the Tehran high-rise to which he’s been confined by Iranian authorities, and Ai, a target of systematic harassment by the Chinese government, has his cats, one of whose ability to open doors mystifies him. By framing Ai in this domestic scene, director Alison Klayman finds warmth in an artist recognized for his compulsive refusal to comply with draconian authority – see, for instance, the series of photos where he smashes ancient pots and strategically places his middle finger in front of cultural landmarks. Situating Ai as a cat man might seem precious, but Klayman is also doing sly political work here. She’s demystifying an avowed radical, and showing (without telling) how his oppositional stance to the government in projects like a multi-year effort to catalogue the students who died in 2008’s Sichuan earthquake due to shoddily constructed buildings are born not of snark but out of a real respect for individuals, be they undocumented students or pets.

Hot Docs 2012: Wildness (d. Wu Tsang)

April 26, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda “They call me Silver Platter.” That's the opening salvo of Wu Tsang’s Wildness, which hands its narrating duties off to the so-named bar in the East end of Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park, a safe space for undocumented Latina trans women that turns into a largely cissexual queer hipster party called Wildness on Tuesday nights. It’s a bumpy ride from there. Tsang, the performance artist who started Wildness, smartly establishes MacArthur Park as a palimpsest, constantly transformed by waves of gentrification, economic collapse, and immigration. (That none of these terms are spelled out is also nice.) He brings the same consideration to the complex history of the Silver Platter, attending even-handedly at first to the owners and to the bar’s shifting clientele.

Hot Docs 2012: The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche (d. Maya Gallus)

April 26, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda Newmarket-born author Mazo de la Roche hit the big leagues in 1927 when her third novel Jalna, the first entry in a lucrative sixteen-part series, won a $10 000 award from the ATLANTIC MONTHLY. In terms of prestige – particularly Canadians’ favourite sort, the kind that’s granted from elsewhere – you could think of her boon alongside Yann Martel’s Booker win in 2002, which similarly propelled a relatively unappreciated home-grown talent to international literary celebrity. But few people make the connection these days, or read de la Roche at all. Maya Gallus’s playful docudrama The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche does a good job of redressing this lacuna. Through a mixture of dramatic re-enactments with actress Severn Thompson, bitterly funny interviews with de la Roche’s adopted daughter, and talking head testimony from Canadian authors Susan Swan and Marie-Claire Blais, the film situates de la Roche both within her early celebrity in Canada and within the larger cosmopolitan movements of first wave feminism and modernism, with which she was loosely allied.

Hot Docs 2012: Ballroom Dancer (ds. Christian Bonke and Andreas Koefoed)

April 25, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda Early in Christian Bonke and Andreas Koefoed’s Ballroom Dancer, we see 33-year-old Russian ballroom dancing champion Slavik tell his students that a dance between two people is an everyday story, not a big drama. The goal, he tells them, is to get on the other person’s wavelength. Slavik’s lesson is taken by Bonke and Koefoed’s film, which strives to get on the physical and emotional wavelengths of an aging artist who can’t get back to his salad days with former partner and reigning champion Joanna. His training sequences with new (younger) partner and lover Anna are rendered in dynamic camera movements that position the spectator as a surrogate partner in their tense mating dance, which yields disappointing results in competition. The filmmakers find a way to capture less obviously visually charged moments as well, framing Slavik and Anna in two-shots that emphasize their distance from one another even as they share the same space: Anna seems always to be hovering in the background on her Blackberry, eager for a window out. Slavik’s journey is a tricky one, then – a quest for self-mastery negotiated with another person who has her own set of goals.

Hot Docs 2012: Bones Brigade: An Autobiography (d. Stacy Peralta)

April 25, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

Stacy Peralta returns to skateboarding culture with mixed results in Bones Brigade: An Autobiography. A sort of sequel to Dogtown and Z-Boys, which focused on his mates in early 1970s crew Zephyr, Peralta’s new film turns to the titular group of talented young misfits that he and business partner George Powell recruited in 1978, who went on to dominate the sport for the next decade. Like Dogtown, this is a likeable memory box of a movie, which briskly mixes up talking head interviews with scratchy archival footage and snapshots visibly manipulated by the director’s own hand. Peralta has a knack for converting alternative social history into this strangely effective hybrid of MTV and family album aesthetics. His firsthand experience and easy conversance with his subjects – who sometimes boyishly narrate his past actions to him with the kind of reverence guys usually reserve for dads and deities – makes for a good hook, and certainly there are worse tour guides through skater culture than a scrappy Jeff Daniels doppelgänger. Still, for an autobiography, this enthusiastic campfire reunion can feel cursory, especially at a bloated two-hour running time.

Fightville (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

***/****
directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein

A few minutes into Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's Fightville, we see a couple of young MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) trainees wrestling in the stark confines of a shithole tucked away in a Louisiana strip-mall. The gym's popping red-on-white colour scheme resembles nothing so much as the Space Station V lounge, but the weirdest thing might be the (unseen) stereo blasting Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus" to set the mood. Tucker and Epperlein have a good eye and ear for this strange minutiae, and it's this low-key humanity that makes their follow-up to more sombre, Iraq-centered docs like How to Fold a Flag and Gunner Palace as compelling as it is. While an early backstage glimpse of bandaged wrists and wastebaskets overflowing with bloodied paper towels suggests a high-minded melodrama about the corporeal cost of fighting for a living (think The Wrestler), the filmmakers thankfully turn out to be much more interested in the daily grind that a commitment to the sport entails.

Payback (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Theatrical

***½/****
written and directed by Jennifer Baichwal, based on Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood

by Angelo Muredda Midway through Payback, Jennifer Baichwal's fifth feature documentary, we're given an alarming overhead view of the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill. At first, all we see is a dark pool of water, but before long a sickly orange substance starts tracking left through it, nearly filling the frame. The orange stuff, we're told, is chemical dispersant, and its job is to both break up the oil slick and push it below the surface, whatever the cost to the animal and plant life that happens to already be there. Not least for the way it suggests a scale that's been thrown out of balance, it's a striking visual metaphor for Baichwal's subject, which is the impossible work of translation we undertake whenever we try to square intangible debts with material payouts–in this case, dispersing oil with toxic chemicals. As one commentator points out, it'll be decades before we know just how large the ecological debt we've amassed as a result of the Gulf spill is–and even then, to think of it in terms of dues paid is to forget that dead fish can't cash cheques.

Being Elmo (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

**½/****
directed by Constance Marks

My 2-year-old nephew's favourite YouTube video is a "Sesame Street" clip where Elmo's birthday card to fellow monster Rosita is swept away by the wind. It's a bizarre little skit, devoid of anything like closure or uplift, but the nephew gets caught up in it every time. He narrates, tearing up and saying, "Oh no!" as Elmo does, and asking where the card went, though he already knows. Then it ends, and he promptly demands, "Again." I didn't know what to make of this at first, but my sense, watching Constance Marks's Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, is that the titular red guy is a sort of Everykid for preschoolers, feeling what they feel. The film charts Kevin Clash's impressive rise from inner-city Baltimore puppeteer to one of Jim Henson's trusted collaborators. It's a straightforward and strictly chronological account, beginning with his preteen years of making puppets out of his dad's trench coats and following him through to his work on "Captain Kangaroo," Labyrinth, and most importantly "Sesame Street." Long-time Muppet ally Whoopi Goldberg is our throughline, narrating in her sweetest story time voice and telling us things like, "One of Kevin's first characters was Hoots the Owl!" as we see, well, Hoots the Owl.

O Lucky Man! (1973) [Two-Disc Special Edition] + Never Apologize: A Personal Visit with Lindsay Anderson (2008) – DVDs

October 17, 20111970s, 2000s, 2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Comedy, Concert Doc, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Music, UK

O LUCKY MAN!
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Malcolm McDowell, Ralph Richardson, Rachel Roberts, Arthur Lowe
screenplay by David Sherwin
directed by Lindsay Anderson

NEVER APOLOGIZE: A PERSONAL VISIT WITH LINDSAY ANDERSON
**½/**** Image C Sound B-
directed by Mike Kaplan

by Jefferson Robbins As magnetic an actor as he is, Malcolm McDowell is often the acted-upon. Alex DeLarge of A Clockwork Orange seeks to master his chosen domains by force, but once he finds himself in the larger circuitry of the world, he's really just an implement of others' power. Is Caligula the prime mover of his vulgar Roman Empire, or merely its best expression? And so on. It was only in his later career that lazy filmmakers and casting agents made McDowell a shorthand for sinister worldliness; today, he arrives onscreen and you know who he is. Time was, he was a squirrelly, intense audience surrogate, Everymannish but beautiful in a way that was at once fragile and sharp. Asked to identify McDowell's essential quality as an actor, director Lindsay Anderson told him, "You're rather dangerous." For good or ill, the movie industry has looked no farther than that in the way it's handled McDowell for the last thirty years.

The Interrupters (2011)

October 7, 20112011, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Documentary, Theatrical

***/****
directed by Steve James

by Angelo Muredda There’s a bracing moment late in Steve James’s new documentary The Interrupters when a host of Chicago neighbourhood teens pay their respects to Derrion Albert, a 16-year-old beaten to death in a gang skirmish outside his school. Fidgeting in their pews and adjusting their hats (for the camera?) at his memorial service, they take in their surroundings as if, as one commentator opines, they’re at a dress rehearsal for their own funerals. The Interrupters is full of such alarming insights. A fly-on-the-wall chronicle of a year in the life of three so-called violence interrupters, it puts us on the frontlines of a number of intense encounters on Chicago streets without losing sight of the generational crisis that undergirds each of these potentially shattering exchanges between kids who don’t expect to live past 30. Both James and producer Alex Kotlowitz, whose NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE article on the violence-prevention efforts of an organization called CeaseFire inspired the film, ensure that the stakes are high; the camera frequently catches ephemeral stuffed-animal memorials, charting a haunted path through marked playgrounds and bus stops. If the filmmakers’ subdued reverence for their protagonists sometimes keeps them from fully exploring their complex subject, the result is nevertheless a devastating polemic about retraining fatalistic teens to think of themselves as having a future.

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (ds. Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky) + Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life (d. Werner Herzog)

September 24, 20112011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF, TIFF 11

On August 19 of this year, the West Memphis Three–the no-longer-young men railroaded in a triple homicide that left a humble Arkansas town mobbishly seeking justice–were finally released from prison, making Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which premiered at the TIFF on September 11, instantly obsolete. (The film reveals their parole in a postscript that feels laughably abrupt after 100 minutes of handwringing.) Where 1996's Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills dealt with the role of religious paranoia in the scapegoating of the West Memphis Three (who were accused of killing a trio of boys as part of a Satanic ritual) and its 1999 sequel, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, was profoundly if not explicitly about the ineffectuality of the original as an agent of change, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory is mostly a lot of housekeeping, a refresher course for viewers of the first two films and a lint trap for details about the case that have emerged in the media over the past decade. More a glorified DVD supplement than a documentary, the picture's at its best when it shows how easy it is to work up a head of righteous anger for dead kids by framing one of the fathers of the victims, Mark Byers, as the killer with "evidence" no less flimsily circumstantial than that which was used to condemn the West Memphis Three. (He had priors, his son's death didn't curb his criminal lifestyle–he must have done it!) In fact, Byers is compelled by his moment on the other side of the torch-wielding villagers to write a letter of apology to Damien Echols, the only one of the West Memphis Three on Death Row, whose head he called for back in '93. But by the end of the piece, another of the fathers, Terry Hobbs, has implicated himself in the killings by virtue of suing the Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines for slander, and Byers hastily commits to this new version of events, drafting a giant pros-and-cons list that seals Hobbs's guilt in his eyes. Hobbs may well be the culprit (the DNA does not work in his favour), but the point is, eighteen years later, nobody has learned to let nature take its course–except the Zen-patient West Memphis Three.

Paul Williams: Still Alive (d. Stephen Kessler)

September 21, 20112011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF, TIFF 11

Stephen Kessler's fun, funny Paul Williams: Still Alive proves that you can revere and challenge a documentary subject at the same time, and in that sense, the film was a tonic after watching two-plus hours of Pearl Jam blow their loads into Cameron Crowe's waiting mouth. Paul Williams is of course the diminutive singer-songwriter who was a veritable Zelig in the '70s, his facile wit making him a favourite guest of Johnny Carson, his unique look making him a viable character actor, his whorish need for attention making him powerless to turn down any offer to appear on television. (The…

Pearl Jam Twenty (d. Cameron Crowe) + Sarah Palin: You Betcha! (ds. Nick Broomfield & Joan Churchill)

September 11, 20112011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF, TIFF 11

When Cameron Crowe's Pearl Jam Twenty was over, I lined up to use the bathroom between two other people, a woman and a man, who were at the same screening. The woman, who looked perhaps like she might've been in kindergarten when Pearl Jam's "Ten" came out, asked me, "That Chris Connell [sic], the guy with the–" she crooked her finger over her lip to indicate a pencil moustache, "–was he in the band?" "No," I said, "he's the lead singer of Soundgarden." "Oh," she replied, and I could tell this answer didn't satisfy her in the least, but the bathroom became vacant and she excused herself. Then the man behind me, who was closer to my age (36) and patchouli-scented, wanted to know what I thought of the film. I told him that as someone who lost track of the band–lost interest in it is the truth, but something told me not to say that, for he'd take it personally–after "Ten," I had trouble keeping up with it. He nodded sagely and said, "The thing about the drummers?"

A Very Civil Dialogue: FFC Interviews Tom Shadyac

April 30, 20112011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Documentary, Interviews

May 1, 2011|"Ian, my brother." A casual greeting turned into an awkward embrace, and I realized then that all the time I had spent researching director Tom Shadyac's career wasn't going to play much of a role in the ensuing conversation. Shadyac was in town to discuss I Am, his self-conscious, documentary break from light family fare–which, he hopes, will change a few minds about the essential nature of humanity. (If he doesn't consider the days of Ace Ventura, The Nutty Professor, and Bruce Almighty to be behind him, this was not, I correctly surmised, the publicity tour on which to discuss it.) When we sat down to talk, I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about I Am. The director sensed my skepticism from the very beginning, and he didn't try to convert me in any traditional sense of the word. He just wanted to hash out our respective feelings on the film and have a decent conversation about them. I sort of wish that his vibrant personality shone through in I Am as well as it did in person; his statements here were delivered like an interesting university lecture, whereas the movie feels a bit more hectoring in its approach. And, yes, he followed through with a second hug at the end of the interview.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) + I Am (2011)

April 29, 2011****/****, 2011, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, France, Germany, Theatrical, UK

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS
****/****
directed by Werner Herzog

I AM
**/****
directed by Tom Shadyac

by Ian Pugh The introduction to Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams is unforgettably right. Ever the inquisitive narrator, Herzog tells us that, upon its rediscovery in the mid-'90s, France's Chauvet Cave did not appear to be of unique significance, "other than being particularly beautiful." But, say they hadn't found the prehistoric cave paintings within (the oldest on record, with some dating back 32,000 years)–would that 'particular beauty' have been enough to inspire Herzog? What is it about this specific cave that made it, and makes it, such a hotbed for creativity? So begins anew our search for mankind's place in the universe and, moreover, a human imprint on nature, even where one isn't readily apparent. The skeletons contained in the cave (all animal bones, none human) beg further questions to that end. Was this an altar, perhaps? A refuge for ritual sacrifices?

Hereafter (2010) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

March 13, 20112000s, 2010, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Romance, Spielberg

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Matt Damon, Cécile De France, Jay Mohr, Bryce Dallas Howard
screenplay by Peter Morgan
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Ian Pugh It's an age-old problem: how do you make a movie (or write a book, or stage a play) about the broad and ultimately philosophical subject of death? Not like this, that's for sure. Looking and feeling like it was shot from inside an aquarium, Clint Eastwood's Hereafter is a failure of staggering proportions. Three stories intertwine to form a bland whole: George (Matt Damon) is an honest-to-gosh psychic who's trying and failing to stay out of the racket; Marie (Cécile De France) is a French TV presenter who recalls visions of the afterlife after being caught in the Indian Ocean tsunami; and Marcus (Frankie McLaren) is a young lad who seeks answers when his twin brother dies in a traffic accident. Rest assured their paths will cross in profoundly obvious ways as they wrap their heads around the very concept of death and what comes next. I'm certainly not the first person to compare Hereafter to Babel, but Eastwood offers little alternative. Hereafter approaches the various perceptions of death in the same way that Alejandro González Iñárritu approached "life," and the end result is equally bloated and condescending.