Gateway Cinephiles

Shooting Loaves and Fishes in a Barrel

October 9, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Libby, Documentaries 2 Comments

Religulous
2008 (USA)
Director: Larry Charles
Viewed: October 8, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Odds are, you already know whether you will appreciate Larry Charles’s Religulous. If you find Bill Maher funny, then Religulous will tickle you. If the notion of Maher confronting the essential horseshit of religious belief via a series of globetrotting interviews sounds engaging to you, then Religulous will spin your dreidel, so to speak. More accessible and yet possessing a narrower, humdrum aim than Charles’ sublimely crackpot social critique-slash-Jackass stunt, Borat, Religulous doesn’t break any new ground theologically or cinematically. Maher, who has evolved from a Christmas-Easter Catholic to a doubter to a forthright critic of faith, clearly yearns to play the part of the acerbic foil, eager to “go there” and call religious leaders frauds and fabulists to their faces. If you’ve ever wandered into a watercooler–or Internet forum–discussion about religion, you know the arguments, just as you know that neither Maher nor his hapless subjects will walk away swayed by the other. While the enterprise is a little creaky–”Hey, did you know that there are fundamentalist nutjobs in America?!”–Maher and Charles surprise with an approach both more personal and more forceful than one might expect.

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You and Me, We Sweat and Strain

September 30, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Libby, Documentaries No Comments

Trouble the Water
2008 (USA)
Directors: Tia Lessin and Carl Deal
Viewed: September 28, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal have achieved a triumph in documentary film-making with Trouble the Water, a phenomenal, searing portrait of American survival and spirit. The directors deserve a bow for offering veterans such as Errol Morris and Werner Herzog stiff competition for the best documentary feature of 2008. However, the soul and vision of Trouble the Water’s protagonist, one Kimberly Rivers Roberts, so suffuses–one might say possesses–the film, that any fair assessment must regard it as her film, at least in part. Indeed, Trouble the Water recalls Herzog’s own Grizzly Man in its near-surrender of its form and content to the sizzling force of its fascinating subject. Admittedly, Lessin and Deal’s stance towards Roberts is far warmer, more admiring, and more credulous than that of the German master towards Timothy Treadwell. There is a temptation to regard Trouble the Waters at least partly as “found art,” given that Roberts’ own amateur footage of the Lower Ninth Ward under Katrina’s lash serves as the film’s foundation. However, from this small seed springs a work so undeniably powerful that one can only praise the directors for revealing Trouble the Water’s glittering treasures for all the world to see.

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Review: Man on Wire

August 6, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Documentaries No Comments

2008 (UK / USA)
Director: James Marsh
Viewed: August 5, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

James Marsh’s Man on Wire succeeds gratifyingly in one crucial respect, despite its questionable structural choices: It ascends to become more than a mere cinematic description of an event. That counts for a lot in documentary film-making. Marsh strives mightily to convey (and largely accomplishes) a sense of the transcendent in this story of French acrobat Philippe Petit and the outrageous artistic stunt he improbably pulled off. In 1974, Petit and several accomplices entered the World Trade Center and strung a high-wire between the Two Towers, setting the stage for a 45-minute tightrope performance at 1,400 feet with no net.

That’s pretty much the story, but as with most effective documentaries, Man on Wire–which takes its title from the Port Authority’s description of Petit’s “disorderly conduct”–is compelling because of the unexpected themes it discovers. If the film falters a bit in its presentation, it’s due to to the clumsy, scrambled structure it employs, and the way it hedges its bets by dwelling for far too long on the drama of its story’s heist aspects. Still, Man on Wire pinpoints the same sublime wonder that Petit evoked when he created such a baffling, beautiful work of performance art.

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Review: Chris & Don: A Love Story

August 5, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Documentaries No Comments

2007 (USA)
Directors: Tina Mascara and Guido Santi
Viewed: August 3, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

A feature documentary about a romantic relationship seems to present particular challenges. In attempting to convey such a profoundly personal subject, a filmmaker risks emotional voyeurism, not to mention its ugly cousin, audience resentment. Who are these people, and what makes their love so damn special that they deserve a movie? Directors Tina Mascara and Guido Santi appreciate that a viewer must first be lured before they will weep. Their new feature, Chris & Don: A Love Story introduces a couple as star-crossed as they come: The Berlin Stories author Christopher Isherwood and portrait painter Don Bachardy, thirty years Isherwood’s junior. What could be more compelling than a May-December gay couple that defied the world and discovered an enduring love? However, despite its veneer of against-all-odds romance, Chris & Don quietly discovers an emotional space that is deeply affecting precisely due to its universal nature.

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Review: Up the Yangtze

July 31, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Documentaries, Foreign 3 Comments

2007 (Canada)
Director: Yung Chang
Viewed: July 30, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze dangles delicately in the documentary space between an unvarnished portrait of life and a nimble examination of social issues. Deceptively modest in its approach and laced with swift, unexpected stabs of pathos, Yangtze is most essentially a glimpse of a land in flux. Chang is plainly fascinated with the ways that epic changes to landscapes and societies sweep some people along, raise others to heady heights, and drown still others without a glimmer of pity. Yangtze is primarily the tale of “Cindy” Shui Yu, a sixteen-year-old Chinese peasant (though she looks younger) who takes a job on a kitschy river cruise in order to help her family claw its way out of poverty. Chang, however, frequently wanders away to gaze at the brown expanse of the Yangtze River, to peek in on the struggles of Cindy’s parents, or to listen placidly to others only tangentially related to the story. In this way, Yangtze moves with plodding resolve from the personal to the universal and back again, its intentions naked but always accented with remarkable insight and empathy.

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Review: Encounters at the End of the World

July 30, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Documentaries No Comments

2007 (USA)
Director: Werner Herzog
Viewed: July 30, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

The Discovery Channel and its lesser edutainment progeny are a bit like eccentric Victorian naturalists, disseminating wonders and grotesqueries for an ecological spectacle that would made Barnum proud. This, perhaps more than the Bowdlerization or Disneyfication of Nature, is one of the more unfortunate legacies of the nature documentary. Art has receded in favor of the accumulation of curious factoids and gruesome oddities for their own collectible sake. Thank God, then, for Werner Herzog. The German director has spent decades carefully building his cynical credibility. As a result, he can approach the natural world with the same awestruck notes as any Discovery feature, even as he pushes beyond the banal limits of such fare in the pursuit of something more probing and, well, visionary.

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Quick Review: Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

July 25, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Libby, Documentaries 1 Comment

2008
Director: Alex Gibney
Viewed: July 24, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

My only previous experience with director Alex Gibney was Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a slick, illuminating feature with an unfortunately tittering tone. Enron slimmed down Bethany McLean and Peter Elkin’s dense chronicle of capitalism amok until it was undetectable. With Gonzo, Gibney seems to find material that works much better with his momentous and yet slightly mocking angle of attack. In this biographic sketch of “freak of letters” Hunter S. Thomspon, Gibney seems uncannily attuned to the grunting poetics of Thompson’s typewriter, if a bit superficially dazzled by the man’s insights. Johnny Depp assists with ripe narration of the journalist’s words, which spatter into the film accompanied by crude, quirky visuals (occasionally far too literalist). Gibney mostly shies from anything mournful; even Thompson’s suicide is addressed with a minimum of schmaltz. The portrait that emerges depicts a cowboy of social consciousness, the second coming of Mark Twain soured by aimlessness and self-doubt. Gonzo offers no trenchant revelations, and the relentless “It’s Happening Again” political flourishes undercut its subtler intentions. Still, the films serves as a sort of flamboyant, seductive crash course that will inspire newcomers—including myself—to seek out Thompson’s work.

Quick Review: Bigger, Stronger, Faster*

July 4, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Libby, Documentaries No Comments

2008
Director: Chris Bell
Viewed: July 3, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Perhaps I wouldn’t be so impressed with Chris Bell’s documentary about steroid use in America if I hadn’t been mistaken about what I was getting into. I expected something akin to a television magazine exposé (“Americans use steroids! Oh noes!”), albeit served up in a wry, punchy package. Instead, Bigger, Stronger, Faster* is a genuinely stunning feature documentary debut. Bell doesn’t demonstrate a particularly cinematic sensibility, but he boasts an amazing ability to find the right tone and deftly juggle a deceptively complex controversy. Admittedly, his style owes something to the Moore-Spurlock school of gee-whiz credulity. He asks the occasional sharp question, but mostly nods along while athletes, doctors, advocates, and family members offer their expertise and pour their hearts out. However, his narration absolutely nails a young American male’s strange blend of confusion and cynicism about steroids. Bell takes an empathic and deeply personal approach to the material, looking at it from every angle, never satisfied with conventional wisdom or easy answers. For this reason, BSF* is profoundly satisfying. If Bell can maintain his balance of pithy insight and authentic middle class hope, he might someday unseat Michael Moore as America’s marquee Big Issues documentarian.

Quick Review: Surfwise

July 1, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Libby, Documentaries No Comments

2007
Director: Doug Pray
Viewed: June 30, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

The story of the nomadic, surfing Pascowitz clan—“Doc” Dorian, Juliette, and their nine children traversing the continent in a cramped RV—is essentially the tale of the Pascowitz patriarch’s fierce philosophy of Right Living, and how he imposes his worldview on the family with an tanned fist. It’s fortunate, then, that Doug Pray’s new documentary about the Pascowitzes, Surfwise, employs an evenhanded approach. The film features both wondering admiration for Doc’s uncompromising moral vision and a keen skepticism for its effects on his own family. Pray gleans much of latter from interviews with the adult children, who are at once nostalgic, bemused, and deeply pained about their years in the camper. Using rapid, sure-footed editing, the filmmakers demonstrate good instincts for the material, and a sharp awareness for the late twentieth-century surfing vibe. On occasion, Pray breaks with this style to daring effect, such as when he holds his gaze on son David singing the bitter metal ballad he composed for his father; the scene evolves from touching to embarrassing and back to touching. Although it toys with contrived sentimentalism in its final scenes, Surfwise sketches a compelling portrait of an abnormal-yet-normal American family with poise and passion.

Review: Standard Operating Procedure

May 30, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Documentaries No Comments

2008
Director: Errol Morris
Viewed: May 29, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Most Americans who follow current events have seen the pictures. We think we know what they represent. We think we have a handle on the story that they tell. During 2003, prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were sexually humiliated and molested, terrorized with dogs, brutalized, tortured, and murdered. By Americans. The abusers were military police, military intelligence, private contractors, and CIA interrogators. Errol Morris’ new film, Standard Operating Procedure, opens the photo album on Abu Ghraib and initiates an inquiry both indebted to and a world apart from the fleeting sensationalism of the mainstream media’s coverage. The film’s taste for the dramatic might provoke accusations that Morris is aiming for cheap agitprop. Nothing could be further from the truth. SOP is a spellbinding film about a grave and inflammatory topic, a vital rumination that upends one stone after another and then holds up a microphone to the emerging grubs. Morris’ refusal to utilize the Abu Ghraib scandal as a political cudgel might be noble or disgraceful, depending on your outlook, but with SOP, he has unquestionably crafted a haunting work that digs deep and cuts deeper.

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Shooting Loaves and Fishes in a Barrel

You and Me, We Sweat and Strain

Review: Man on Wire

Review: Chris & Don: A Love Story

Review: Up the Yangtze

Review: Encounters at the End of the World

Quick Review: Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Quick Review: Bigger, Stronger, Faster*

Quick Review: Surfwise

Review: Standard Operating Procedure

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