Gateway Cinephiles

Quick Review: Food, Inc.

2008 (USA)
Director: Robert Kenner
Viewed: June 24, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

If you’ve already devoured Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation or Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you won’t learn much in Robert Kenner’s provocative documentary, Food, Inc., that you didn’t already know.  That might have something to do with Schlosser’s producer credit, or the fact that both authors appear in and provide narration for the film.  Kenner, in his theatrical feature debut, works within the comfortable confines of Alex Gibney’s style, presenting Big Issues in a breezy, ever-so-caustic package that preaches to the choir and looks damn slick while doing so. Fortunately, Food, Inc. refrains from indulgent stunts and cheap shots, preferring to lay out its case against industrial agriculture firmly, relentlessly, and with a warm, affirmative tone. Like any polemicist worth his salt, Kenner knows that a film like Food, Inc. won’t convert his natural antagonists, but it may shift the perspective of viewers who weren’t aware of the costs of modern agribusiness.  Accordingly, the film’s most enduring aspect is its human element: the mother who lost a son to E. coli poisoning, the seed cleaner financially ruined by Monsanto, and the ebullient organic farmer who emerges as a captivating advocate for a better way of eating.

Quick Review: Tyson

2008 (USA)
Director: James Toback
Viewed: June 13, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

It’s tempting to dismiss James Toback’s absorbing documentary Tyson as an unapologetic hagiography of former heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson.  The film is narrated and produced by the champ himself, and it doesn’t merely gloss over Tyson’s rape conviction, but permits him to hurl insults at his alleged victim.  Yet Toback’s canny approach does much more than solidify a sympathetic characterization of the man.  The director interviews Tyson from an indulgent distance, using the footage as the key component of an ambitious and unexpectedly personalized tale.  Tyson recounts his life and expounds on his views in sprawling monologues replete with malapropisms, upwellings of rage, and moments of poetic clarity.  Toback’s camera swallows Tyson’s version of events whole, but also devours his eccentricities and slumbering-lion features with a blend of awe and puzzlement.  Refreshingly, the director is less concerned with hewing to a Fallen Sports Hero narrative arc than capturing the specifics of his subject matter with passion.  The film reinforces the enduring wonder of Tyson’s athleticism with a triumphal style, but offers its revelations in a reserved manner, allowing the viewer the freedom to mull over, discount, or titter at them.

Long-Lived Rock

Anvil!: The Story of Anvil
2008 (USA)
Director: Sacha Gervasi
Viewed: May 13, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Much of the charm that vibrates in the bones of Sacha Gervasi’s amused, melancholy documentary, Anvil!: The Story of Anvil, is premised on the oddly ambiguous definition of success in the rock world.  Sure, the eponymous Canadian metal group, now twenty-odd years past its peak in popularity, might be a failure by any yardstick one might select.  Financially, they are a broke.  Artistically, they’re stuck on the cutting edge of 1982.  Culturally, their name evokes the response, “Who?”  (Though not from metal luminaries such as Slash and Lars Ulrich, who in the film’s introduction hold forth on Anvil’s key role during the early days of the genre.)  Listen carefully, however, to lead guitarist and vocalist Steve “Lips” Kudlow’s rambling, armchair philosophical assessment of the setbacks that have bedeviled the band.  Simultaneously painfully self-aware and laughably oblivious, Kudlow is relentlessly optimistic about Anvil’s success, even though he lacks a coherent conception of what that success might look like.  Depending on the moment and his mood, “success” might mean cultural relevance, uncompromised integrity, a packed house, or an honest living.  Regardless, one gets the sense that he will know it when he sees it.  Despite first-time director Gervasi’s gawking at the band’s fundamentally kitschy character and its sad predicament, the thematic heart of Anvil! is humane stuff: success is a slippery thing, and the dogged pursuit of such an ineffable goal is rife with dizzying highs and miserable lows.

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Ode to a Landscape Lost

Of Time and the City
2008 (UK)
Director: Terence Davies
Viewed: March 14, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

[Of Time and the City premiered in St. Louis at the 2008 St. Louis International Film Festival. The film was also recently featured in a limited engagement on March 13-15, 2009 at the Webster University Film Series.]

Even the most supple and contemplative documentary features usually make gestures towards a narrative, sculpting their visual and aural components into hand-holds where viewers might find purchase. The only noteworthy exception to this principle in recent memory is Philip Gröning’s magnificent Into Great Silence, a film that broke every rule of the medium and achieved something singularly beautiful. While Gröning’s triumph strove for a quiet, observational character, Terence Davies’ equally superb Of Time and City takes an entirely different track, embracing the director’s own memories and emotions with soaring enthusiasm. The ultimate effect is daring and exquisite, resulting in a film that functions as a tone poem to a vanished environment, and yet also as a tuning fork keyed to the viewer’s own nostalgic impulses. Via a collage of images, music, and narration, Davies explores the most cherished crevasses of his heart, where the lost Liverpool of his youth still resides, and in doing so he tunnels into our own hidden stores of bittersweet remembrance.

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Once Again, I Don’t Recall

Waltz with Bashir (Vals Im Bashir)
2008 (Israel)
Director: Ari Folman
Viewed: November 23, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

[This is one of several full reviews I am posting on some of the films that were featured at this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival and which have now opened in wide or limited release.]

Waltz with Bashir’s curious species–an animated documentary–serves to lure the viewer by means of sheer novelty, but it also emerges as a brilliant mating of form and function. Director Ari Folman adeptly employs the elements of a bold, compelling visual style to delve the rank sinkholes of memory and culpability, surfacing with artifacts that run from bizarre to disturbing to appalling. Via color, contrast, and motion, Waltz with Bashir tackles the sheer uncanniness of warfare, the slippery character of recollection, and the sway that remorse holds over our personal narratives. Never mind that such matters have been taken up by numerous film-makers before. Folman brings both a bruised and jittery aura of the personal–the film is, after all, partly the tale of his own experiences from the 1982 Israeli-Lebanon war–and a stunning instinct for the pairing of image and mood. The veterans Folman interviews are haunted by their wartime memories, which are blazing in their intensity but usually bereft of soaring wisdom. In the same way, the film burns vivid moments into the viewer’s mind, all while striking a slightly bemused, off-handed tone of hollow-eyed cynicism. Folman rejects the notion of war as a noble construct, plunging with grim familiarity into its surreal, monstrous facility for tangling morality and crystallizing animal instincts.

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Shooting Loaves and Fishes in a Barrel

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

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

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

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

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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