What’s up? Docs.

I watched two hip new documentaries, each with killer soundtracks, camerawork and cuts energizing the essentially talking-heads focus, flashy titles providing further information, and (in one) interwoven clips and photos which provide an Errol-Morrisian counterpoint to what a given talking-head is saying.

Yet the one I expected to relish went flat. Manda Bala, an examination of corruption and criminal culture in Sao Paulo and Brazil, goes down like empty calories. Its point or purpose at first seemingly incisive. It *must* have a political edge given its swooping helicopter shots, its fractured presentation of information, its (admittedly very fine) cinematography of absurdist details like frogs, feet, a plastic surgeon’s poolside barbecue. Right? But I quickly realized how little substantive information I was receiving. The film, even with its relentless rushing around, does observe the links between a political corruption, vicious economic disjunctions, cold hard criminal brutality, and an industry built up around “protection” from that criminality. But there’s no weaving or synthesis; unlike Errol Morris (whose work I think the film quite consciously apes), an expert at drawing out of narrative complexity and dissonance a strong critical through-line, this film just wanders around, ADD-led and ultimately ineffective. Some critics lambasted its sensationalizing, but I’d zero in less on the problem of form than the lack of substantive thought. For all its overdetermined sensory attack, I never got a sense of any there there. Disappointing. (And I suppose we could open up a debate about City of God again, which tackles a similar subject with similar stylistic brio which I found to be terribly effective while many of you would cut/paste the above doc’s critique to Meirelles’ film.)

Demme’s Man From Plains, which follows Jimmy Carter around on a promotional tour for his “controversial” book _Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid_, is far more sedate–yet still jumpy and stylish. Handheld cameras swoop around; Demme cuts constantly; the filming is sometimes oddly attention-getting (having a camera on Terry Gross at an NPR studio but also one with Carter while he responds to her questions from a different location? why film both?). Some of these details work to great effect — during one interview on Larry King, Demme instead films folks watching at a bar, and then interviews some of them. Mostly, however, the film is glued to its seemingly mushy central figure: Jimmy Carter, all soft-spoken smiles, quick to tear up (he does it twice that he mentions), the nicest old guy around. As if all that frenetic filming was an attempt to sidestep that unexciting protagonist, talking about the bible (again) …. but what you begin to realize is just how damn much this guy does, and how steely and incisive his thinking about and his commitment to social justice are. The film’s pace and energy are offset by the unflappable focus of Carter’s intent to have a conversation about things people don’t want to talk about.

My one caveat is that however intriguing his sense of policy and philosophy, this is still ultimately a book-tour, with mostly mainstream media talking-heads talking at him. So much sturm und kerfluffle, in many instances…. But I did come away with some revivified sense of Carter as a fighter, deceptively pleasant while driven and quite determined.

19 thoughts on “What’s up? Docs.”

  1. I’m too tired to say much now, but My Kid Could Paint That was pretty damn good.

    So is Frisky Dingo, a documentary about supervillain Killface’s efforts to destroy mankind.

  2. I too liked My Kid Could Paint That. It is smart and sly about notions of what contemporary art (at least art shaped by modernist experimentation) actually is and how it functions. It also engages issues of authenticity and authority and the function of narratives in the way meaning is distributed in social and cultural circles both large and small. It’s also a bit of a heartbreaker in terms of what constitutes celebrity, family, childhood. Finally, it narrows in on issues of identity and success, play and work. I don’t know; I saw it a few months ago, but it is about a lot more than one child prodigy (which, if indeed she is a child prodigy–can a four-year-old conceptualize her work as a triptych–the film keeps quite ambiguously open in its interpretation of the data).

  3. In the tradition of Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March) and reminiscent of Michael Apted’s 7Up series, Ralph Arlyck’s Following Sean is a quietly ruminative, melancholic study of the legacy of late-sixties counter-culture ideology filtered through the story of Sean Farrell. In 1969 Arlyck released a controversial short film which focused on four-year-old Sean’s feral childhood in the Height-Ashbury district of San Francisco (he smokes pot, he uses power tools, his parents’ marriage is transgressive, his family’s apartment is open to anyone and everyone). The film attracted a lot of attention (a sort of generational Rorschach test), played in film festivals across the globe, received the seal of approval from Francois Truffaut (the short played with Truffaut’s The Wild Child at Cannes), jump-starting Arlyck’s career as a freelance documentarian. Twenty-seven years later, Arlyck returned to California to locate Sean and his desire to understand the past leads him on a nearly decade long quest into the future as his discoveries lead him further back into the history Sean’s family and, of course, his own family narrative. The film is quite thoughtful not only about the children of the sixties but also their parents and their parent’s parents, many of whom were active in communist movements during the 1930s. It’s available to watch online over at Netflix and is worth the eighty minutes.

  4. ‘The American Ruling Class’ is worth watching, though it is also pretty frustrating. It is a documentary that purports to explore the existence and nature of the American ruling class through the experiences of two Yale graduates, one of whom opts for the job at Goldman Sachs, while the other tries to make it as a writer in New York. In fact, both are actors, playing those roles, so the documentary form is complicated from the start. Then add in the musical numbers that pop up every so often (including the song “Nickel and Dimed” from the book of the same title by Barbara Ehrenreich), and you get an unconventional documentary.

    In fact, this is a vanity project for Lewis Lapham, who wrote it, who gets to dispense aphorisms and pearls of wisdom to the two Yale graduates (“Nationalism? The last refuge of very poor nations without a tourist industry…”), and introduces the two actors to his entire Rolodex. Along the way we meet countless prominent bankers, politicians, film-makers, pundits, authors, etc. etc. all of whom try to answer the questions: is there an American ruling class? who is in it? how does one join?

    There are valuable nuggets here, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s segment about working America is certainly one of them. But the critique is scattershot, never really getting to grips with what it means to talk about a ruling class (except that Lapham knows every member personally), and occasionally falling into embarrassing scenes of twenty-somethings talking about what it means to sell out.

  5. Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten opens with some great, scratchy black-and-white footage of a headphoned Strummer bobbing (jerking, thrusting) his head at a mic, right before he starts wailing into it. We see him singing, and don’t hear the track he’s accompanying until after a couple minutes the soundtrack opens up with the great boogie-punk beat. But his voice doesn’t disappear into the wall of sound; it remains the central hook, running lead, pulling the rest of the anthem along with his seemingly-boundless enthusiasm.

    Julien Temple’s film is a swirl of voices, footage, fictional doodles, found historical clips, recordings, and music, music, music. It produces the kind of energy Strummer displays, and it’s among the best music documentaries (and unlike most of the others) I’ve seen. We get the man and his bio, the rise of punk and the rush of sounds he loved (brought in as soundtrack through clips from Strummer’s BBC radio show), odd bits of silly cartoon and lovely scribbled art, campfire interviews with family/friends and those he influenced, clips integrated slyly from the cartoon “Animal Farm” and the BBC’s “1984”, and so on. I was thoroughly entertained, I couldn’t stop tapping my foot or nodding my head, I was moved. Great, engaging film–even for those who are not necessarily fans of The Clash.

  6. I know Mike saw Surfwise but I wasn’t as satisfied with it as I had hoped (and you Mike?). Like Following Sean it is about fathers and sons, the post-WWII countercultural impulse, and an examination of American outsider ideology. Unlike Following Sean, the surfing family doc doesn’t scratch too far beneath the surface. It’s an impersonal, at times facile exploration, which, in the end, adds up to little more than a family reunion video. Ralph Arlyck’s film has a lot more meat on the bone.

  7. Yup, you nailed it. Too many people engaged, too diffuse–or too toothless–an examination. I liked it, but it didn’t push the way I’d hoped.

  8. I watched Billy the Kid tonight and it’s not at all what I was expecting. Shot over the course of eight days in a small town in Maine (with a brief coda), the filmmakers tell the story of a fifteen-year-old boy coping with mild emotional and developmental disabilities (he’s mainstreamed at school but also attends special eduction classes). It’s also possible he’s a high-functioning aspergers kid (the film doesn’t label him in any specific way). He’s got some anger issues (an abusive, drug-addled father abandoned Billy and his mother years ago) and is certainly an odd bird (physically and verbally), but he’s also empathic, highly introspective, nakedly honest, Romantically optimistic and unafraid to put himself out there whatever the potential risks. The narrative mostly focuses on Billy’s surprise courtship with a sixteen-year-old girl with who is visually disabled. It’s obvious she is drawn to him, but Billy is intense and pushes his case perhaps a bit more than six or seven days should merit. I’ll leave it at that. What’s interesting to me is the role of the camera (and crew) in Billy’s life. It’s obvious the townfolk are aware of the camera. It’s obvious to me that the camera serves as a kind of cinematic “butterfly effect” subtly and not-so-subtly altering the atmosphere in which Billy is received and treated by the locals. It’s hard not to imagine the aura of the camera’s gaze to be a good thing in the short and long term. Those marked as special often benefit from the rewards, but one also senses the kids and adults with whom Billy interacts would behave differently if there wasn’t a camera crew in sight. It’s hard to reconcile this tension as you watch and I found that fascinating. Another major figure is Billy’s mom. Living in a trailer on the edge of town (the home sitting on a large and well maintained yard), she is nothing short of a poster woman for what parenthood should be. Remove the cameras, and I still think Billy’s sense of self and his willingness to accept himself as, in his words, an individual who’s simply “different in the mind” comes from the nurture and love (some of it tough) provided by his mother. Finally, there are moments here that are painful to watch. Not necessarily because anything painful happens, but because Billy’s journey (his desire for love, happiness, friendship, a stable family life, acceptance) reminded me of so many awkward yet painfully unforgetable moments from my own adolescence. At 80 minutes its short and sweet and what Ryan Gosling is doing on the commentary track is a true mystery, but Billy the Kid deserves a look.

  9. This film was fantastic–avoiding the cliches of the cinema of mental difference/disability, fully investing in (and reinvigorating) those cliches of the cinema of painful teen yearning.

    Jeff raises some fascinating points about how the camera seems to inform (and maybe reform?) the people Billy runs into, a very smart point, and I’d add that there’s a different but complementary effect on Billy and his Mom… not like they were performing for this camera–in fact, their respective engagements were as honest and authentic and open as any I’ve seen in a doc in some time. Yet it also seemed, particularly for Billy (but for Mom, too), that they carried themselves with a sense of roles, a vision of how to behave on camera that comes from their engagements with the things they’ve seen on camera. I was struck by the opening with Billy, driving in a car, and he puckishly opens his mouth wide and moves to block the camera. Then, quite earnestly, he asked what they saw in there. Perhaps this is a leap, but it seemed like Billy was carefully shaping a sense of how he “ought” to behave–we see him at various points using references to film to talk with (or try to talk with) his peers or other people around, we see him watching a video of a rock band as he mimics the chords on his own guitar. This is not a critique of his inauthenticity, but I’m curious if the film doesn’t capture something quite true and lovely about how he struggles to find a socially-acceptable persona…

    Great little film. And compared to the shit I’ve been seeing….

  10. I listened to a bit of the commentary track and, supposedly, because Billy was such a movie fan, they were going to use the movies as a sort of trope to get us more in tune with Billy’s inner and outer lives (if that makes sense). but the director ended up dialing back that trajectory in the editing room (probably felt a bit too contrived). but yeah, a great little film.

  11. Dear Zachary is gut-punching, propulsively intense documentary about a filmmaker who decides to make a film about his best friend David, a doctor at the beginning of his career who was “allegedly” murdered by a former girlfriend, in order to provide the toddler this woman gave birth to eight months following the murder a portrait of his deceased father. In the days after the murder, and confronted with evidence that is damning at best, this woman flees to her home in Newfoundland where she and David had attended medical school. Fuck Canada man! Canadian law makes it possible for this woman to go free, give birth, pay no bail, and string out her son’s grandparents, who sold all of their belongings in California and moved to Canada, in order to be near their surviving grandson. The story gets uglier, but the portrait of David and his parents (who are the heroes of the film) and the friends David made growing up and growing older is compelling, moving, cathartic, even hopeful in a small way. This film is truly a testament to friendship and family. Man, it took the breath out of me. Though it is still in the theatres in NY and LA, MSNBC showed it this past Sunday (probably because it was not short-listed for the Academy Award). It’s a labor of love, and a tough film to sit through, but I couldn’t tear myself away.

  12. Werner Herzog’s ‘Encounters at the End of the World’ is worth watching. It is a fairly conventional documentary about Antarctica. Herzog went in the summer of 2006 and what we see is essentially a travelogue of his time there. He begins with a nice joke about refusing to film cute penguins, but of course he does have one segment on some very cute penguins. Herzog provides a running commentary, and I think that he saw the documentary as an opportunity to interview and investigate the kind of people who end up in these remote outposts of tents and prefabricated houses. Some of those interviews are interesting, and an assortment of bizarre human beings have somehow migrated (or “fallen to the bottom of the earth” in the words of one of them) to Antarctica. But the real reason to see this documentary is the stunning scenery. We see astonishing underwater (and under ice) life, vistas of snow and rock, an active volcano, and… penguins. It almost made me want to visit, but Ohio is cold enough for me.

  13. I tried to rent Encounters at the End of the World tonight, partly b/c M. Dargis suggested Herzog should get a best acting nomination for it. Someone else must have had the same idea, as it was out, so I got Herzog’s The Wild Blue Yonder instead.

    But I also got Louis Malle’s documentary God’s Country, and just finished it.

    Considering how many of you on the blog live (alas) in Minnesota, this might already be known to you, but if not, should be seen. Filmed mostly in 1979, with a brief return in 1985, it’s the portrait of a small farming town about 60 miles from Minneapolis. Though not as depressing as, say, the Frontline doc The Farmer’s Wife, you can still see the seeds of the end of the family farm giving way to agri-business, the helplessness of the farmers who see it coming, the effects of Reagonomics and the weird political mutations (like anti-semitism) that came along with it.

    Highly recommended.

  14. Was Dargis kidding? Herzog is offscreen for the entire movie. He narrates and occasionally throws questions at those he is interviewing. He meditates on solitude and has a wry sense of humor. But I’m no sure it qualifies as acting.

  15. As far from hip and frenetic as a doc can get, Sweetgrass comes out of the Wiseman school–set up the camera, get long long long takes, edit chronologically, never intrude, keep your voice entirely absent. And in this instance, very few of those onscreen talk. Most of ’em bleat.

    It chronicles–beautifully, almost beatifically, and a little soporifically–the final two years when ranchers could take their herds of sheep up into the Absaroka/Beartooth mountains of Montana. There are so many glorious panoramas–all these great shots of the wide sweep of peaks and then the camera zooms and zooms until we pick out a moving line of white specks on one, the herd rushing up or down. Not a lot happens. It’s rather lovely, a pastoral in the old sense–pining for the (lost) romance of the shepherd.* But an action film it isn’t.

    *and, no, I don’t mean that in a dirty way, Arnab.

  16. The Last Truck is a short (40 minute) documentary about the closing of the Moraine, Ohio GM truck plant in 2008. Nothing special, and no real background to the closing; there is no attempt to place blame or explain the decision to close the plant. It just interviews workers about how they feel about losing their jobs, what the job meant to them, and what they plan on doing next. There is a quote on the DVD box from the New York Times reviews that captures the documentary perfectly: “It’s heartbreaking in an unassuming way.”

  17. The Oscar winning Inside Job was ok, but you won’t learn anything you didn’t already know from reading any of the dozen or more good books about the financial crisis already out there. (Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail is my favorite, but the chapter in Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia about Alan Greenspan, “The biggest asshole in the universe,” covers all the same bases and is funnier.

    More captivating to me was Still Bill, a doc shot a couple years ago about the great Bill Withers. I’m not sure how engaging it would be to people who don’t think he is one of pop music’s great forgotten geniuses, but to me he is up there with Harry Nilsson. He could write em and sing em with equally staggering talent. Unlike Nilsson, Bill just stopped making music when his own odd blend of folk and soul gave way to disco and the horrible R&B we still have today.

    More than anything I was just glad to learn that Bill’s still around, healthy and wealthy if not always happy.

    Here’s a taste of what the man did in his prime. He’s got a dozen more just as good.

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