Tag Archives: documentaries

New In Theaters

One Good Documentary, No Bullshit

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Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me

by Hope Madden

Having stolen scenes on stage and screen (large and small) for 60+ years, it’s only appropriate that Elaine Stritch would get the chance to hold your attention all on her own in the new documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me. And for 80 brief minutes, she commands attention and more in a film that attempts to match the old school, ballsy dame’s single most compelling quality: unflinching honesty.

For the uninitiated, Stritch may be best remembered as Jack Donaghy’s irascible mother on 30 Rock – a performance that won Stritch her third Emmy. (She was nominated 5 times for that role alone.) But Stritch is a legend of the stage, and a personality that’s too big to hold in any medium.

Lensed by first time director (longtime producer) Chieme Karasawa, Shoot Me serves the formidable octogenarian well by simply presenting her as she is: brassy, vulnerable and pantsless.

We spend some time with the headstrong entertainer leading up to her 87th birthday and her newest project, the cabaret act Singin’ Sondheim…One Song at a Time. It’s an opportunity to glimpse her whirlwind past as well as her struggles with alcohol and diabetes, not that she’d accept your pity.

As the seasoned pro says, “Everybody’s got a sack of rocks.”

It’s Stritch’s paradoxical qualities that make her so engaging. She’s a prima donna without an ounce of pretense. She’s humble and candid and absolutely addicted to attention. Says her longtime friend Julie Keyes, “She is a molotov cocktail of madness, sanity and genius.”

Karasawa and her film are appropriately in awe of this truly remarkable talent, but she’s also wisely clear-eyed in her efforts. The film lacks any hint of nostalgia or romanticism – the kind of gimmicks you might find in other biographical docs. It’s a bit more like the 2010 film Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work in that it marvels at the star’s seemingly boundless energy and phenomenal work ethic without clouding the image of a flawed but fascinating cultural icon.

One element that sets Stritch apart from other performers of her generation or any other is her immediate and amazing connection to the audience. Perhaps that’s why her story and personality prove such compelling fodder for a documentary.

 

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New In Theaters

Trading his Wings for Some Wheels

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12 O’clock Boys

by Hope Madden

A coming of age story set in poverty stricken, crime riddled West Baltimore sounds like an episode of the Wire gone sentimental. That’s not 12 O’clock Boys, though. 

We follow Pug, a savvy and funny preteen on the verge of adult decisions that will impact his life’s trajectory. And length.

What is absolutely fascinating about Lofty Nathan’s documentary, though, is that gangs and drugs and time spent on the corner are the furthest things from Pug’s consciousness. This is not to say that his goals are legal, exactly. And they certainly aren’t safe.

No, Pug wants desperately to join the dirt bikers who overrun West Baltimore streets each Sunday night, weaving in and out of traffic, through red lights, onto sidewalks – anywhere they like. Hundreds of zig-zagging, wheelie-popping maniacs have a blast while terrorizing and amazing onlookers, and Pug has no more passionate wish than to become one of them.

Filmed over three years, the doc chronicles Pug’s burgeoning adolescence as well as the societal, cultural and economic landmines between him and manhood. The fact that Pug is adorable – very small with a cherubic face and sly smile – only makes his struggle, his innocence that much more poignant.

But Nathan unveils more than just one boy’s journey. The footage of the Baltimore biking phenomenon is mind boggling, and the freedom and power the sport offers its riders does not skip by without mention. You might even applaud these young men of West Baltimore for avoiding, at least on Sunday evenings, much of the lawbreaking commonly found in their neighborhoods. But the 12 O’clock Boys – named for their ability to pull their bikes so far into a wheelie that they look like the hand of a clock striking 12 – can hardly be considered law-abiding.

And as thousands of traffic laws are beaten to submission each weekend, Baltimore police find themselves in a tough situation. The law forbids chasing the bikers because of the danger a chase poses to the riders and to bystanders, but they’re all in danger enough with or without a cop chase.

Wisely, Nathan’s position is not to judge the riders, the cops, the environment or Pug. Rather, he opens up an unseen world of skill, bravado and hellish traffic, and lets us watch it through the eyes of a budding young man still weighing his limited options.

 

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For Your Queue

For Your Queue: Best Documentary of 2013

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Available today on DVD and Blu-ray is the most breathtaking, mind boggling documentary of this or perhaps any year, The Act of Killing. Director Joshua Oppenheimer, along with dozens of filmmakers who remain anonymous for their own safety, work with the people who slaughtered more than a million Indonesians in 1965 to reenact their own crimes – or heroics, as they see it. The result is absolutely unlike anything you have ever seen. A jaw dropping act of discovery, the film is a masterpiece, a brave and confrontational effort, and essential viewing.

We usually pair new releases with backlist titles that match up well, but honestly, there is nothing on earth quite like The Act of Killing. The best we can do is to recommend Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991). The documentary looks at the making of Coppola’s extraordinary film, detailing the unsavory chaos on set and the madness of the shoot – another peek inside insanity.

For Your Queue

Filling Your Queue: Dirty Money

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Jeremy Scahill’s investigation into what the Joint Special Operations Command does while it isn’t taking down bin Laden lands in DVD queues this week. Dirty Wars offers a provocative look at the evolution of the American military from boots on the ground warriors to a management firm handling targeted assassinations. Hell, we even outsource the jobs, and the kill lists, to warlords in Somalia and elsewhere. The documentary wallows in cinematic clichés here and there, but that tweaking of tensions is needless given the bewilderingly fascinating content. It’s a scary look at the likelihood of endless war.

Another eye-opening documentary -that far too few people laid eyes on – is 2010’s Inside Job, director Charles Ferguson’s look at the deregulation, greed, and glorified pyramid schemes behind the most recent Wall Street meltdown.

Ferguson makes complicated issues clear enough to understand without a phD in economics. There are no dramatically staged confrontations, just tough questions to stammering subjects who suddenly decide the interview they’re doing wasn’t a good idea. While this is tough material with plenty of facts, figures, dates and data, Ferguson does his best to keep it from getting too dry. The only thing keeping the film from classic status is a strange decision to have narrator Matt Damon close the film with a preachy sermon by writers Chad Beck and Adam Bolt.

That stumble aside, Inside Job is essential viewing.

New In Theaters

I’m In Love With That Song

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Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me

by Hope Madden

There’s something both familiar and weirdly backwards about the film Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, a documentary that follows the path of a talented, promising rock band as it hurtles toward obscurity.

This is a film about a band so indie only the indiest of indie bands even know them; a band so underground that they inspired nearly every seminal act of the Eighties and Nineties alt rock movement; a band so obscure that they spun off into other bands that opened for punk acts you probably never heard of at CBGB’s. But, you totally know the That Seventies Show theme song, which is an obscure Cheap Trick cover of a Big Star song. So it’s not like they’re make believe.

The doc follows the career of Alex Chilton – you know, like from that Replacements song – and his Memphis band Big Star, who changed the foundation of rock music without ever really being heard by more than a few hundred people at a time.

Chilton charted a #1 song in his teens, singing “The Letter” with the Box Tops. By 1970, the Memphis youngster joined up with local musician/songwriter/budding producer Chris Bell and his buddies. They took advantage of a fruitful situation with local label Ardent Records, and the stage was set for what might have become the city’s next Sun Records-style phenomenon.

Over the next couple years, with a little band reshuffling, Big Star recorded two more albums with Ardent – all three of which landed in Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of the 500 best albums of all time.

Of all time.

I’m sorry – who are these people?

When you talk about the seminal Memphis acts, Big Star might not outshine Elvis, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, or even Jeff Buckley – so why spend two hours with their music? Well, that’s not always entirely clear. The doc plays only enough snippets of the band’s work to pique interest, while its focus meanders to the point of frustration.

Still, filmmakers Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori seek not only to clue you in on the greatest band you never heard of, but also to cast a glance at a little known revolution in Memphis music, one that came and went before its time, but impressed every music critic of the era and laid the groundwork for what we now know as alternative music.

So, you know, thanks.

 

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