The best way to convince people that caring for the planet is badass is to have a badass tell them so. This is what I was hoping to get from Liam Neeson’s narration of Love Thy Nature. This is not what I got.
Neeson’s involvement is featured heavily in the documentary’s promotions, but his real role is much smaller than that of “narrator.” Neeson voices “sapiens, homo sapiens” – essentially speaking for the human race. The choice to involve the human race as a whole and to engage it, quite literally, in a dialogue is interesting but ultimately not effective. Neeson’s script is heavy handed, ending musing thoughts with sudden reversals like “Or is it?” or “Could I be wrong?”
The film itself proceeds like any shown in a high school science classroom. Picturesque landscape shots cover the basics; rocks, beach, underwater, trees, the savannah. These shots are accompanied by a litany of new age talking heads, cartoonish and often unnecessary animations, and an excessive amount of footage featuring people gazing into the distance.
What’s most perplexing is that the talking heads never seem to say much of merit. The film has good heart, urging that we reconnect with the planet, but when it comes to facts or statistics, an entire cast of scientific professionals has little to offer. One talking head claims that “slathering ourselves with sunblock or covering up actually increases the risk of skin cancer.” There’s no follow up.
Love Thy Nature is segmented by profound quotes about man and nature, displayed on the screen in white lettering on the same hazy forest backdrop each time. The quotes seem to have little purpose other than to be inspirational.
While the film eventually suggests that we can use technology to further our relationship with nature, a bizarre cut early on seems to suggest that children playing video games leads to forest fires.
Eventually, director Sylvie Rokab settles on the idea of biomimicry, an engineering field that focuses on using designs that are naturally occurring. It seems like this is what Love Thy Nature has been building toward, the ultimate reconnection of man and nature. The segment lasts about a minute or two, with few hard facts, and then is over.
Rokab is obviously dedicated to this cause, also co-writing the script and story and leading the Kickstarter that funded the project. It is a noble cause. Sapiens, Homo Sapiens, will find it hard to deny a cry to take better care of both our planet and ourselves. But this Earth Day is better served by skipping the film and going outside.
Sometimes the truth is scarier than fiction, which is why we decided to look at documentaries this week. From true crime to weird tales, from psychological nightmares to war crimes, we look at the best documentaries the genre has to offer.
5. Room 237 (2012)
Stanley Kubrick’s magnificent film The Shining inspires close examination. Director Rodney Ascher assembled some of the most inspired – obsessed, even – for his documentary on the Kubrick ghost story, Room 237.
It would be too simplistic to take Room 237 as a deconstruction of The Shining, and those hoping to uncover Kubrick’s deeper meaning may be disappointed. But what the film does, it does well. It explores one of cinema’s most exquisite films, using it to encourage the spectator’s active participation in viewing. In doing so, it positions film as an art equal to literature or painting in terms of thematic dissection.
It also opens our eyes to the abject nuttiness of Kubrickian “scholars” – and a documentary always gets extra points if it introduces an audience to an entirely new concept, like that of the Kubrickian scholar.
More than anything, though, Room 237 is a documentation of obsession, and a fascinating one at that. It bares more insight into the act of obsessing than it does on Kubrick’s work itself, but it helps that these people spend all their time analyzing such a great movie. If they were this excited about tessellations or ringworm, well, the movie would have lacked that certain panache.
4. My Amityville Horror (2012)
The film begins as yet another tale spun ‘round the Long Island home called High Hopes, where Ronald DeFeo Jr. killed his parents and siblings before the Lutz family took up residence, remaining only 28 days. The Lutzes’ tale informed a fantastically popular book and no fewer than 12 films, as well as plenty of hoax accusations. What sets My Amityville Horror apart is that it quickly becomes a character study of the eldest of the Lutz children, Daniel.
He’s a troubled, heartbreaking, mesmerizing central figure for the film. His stories are so wild and yet he believes them so earnestly that, whether phantasms traumatized his family or whether these tales are the coping mechanism of a young boy subjected to a different kind of abuse becomes hazy and deeply sad.
Director and Amityville fanatic Eric Walter uses a compassionate but unerring focus to illuminate something honestly troubling: the struggle of one of the Amityville horror victims, regardless of the actual horror that went on inside the house.
3. Cropsey (2009)
Cropsey was the Hudson River area summer camp name for a boogeyman. In Staten Island’s Boy Scout camp tales, Cropsey lived in a tunnel system beneath the borough’s abandoned mental hospital. He nabbed children while their parents weren’t looking and killed them out in the woods.
But in Staten Island, the story of Cropsey was true, only his name is Andre Rand.
As filmmakers Barbara Brancaccio and Justin Zemen dig into this story of a convicted sexual predator/mental hospital orderly suspected in the disappearances of as many as seven children, they pull us through fact and myth, expertly choosing news footage to anchor modern interviews.
Their clever approach combines the best of any serial killer drama with the haunting reality of Capturing the Friedmans. They explore the investigation of a serial child killer, all the while exposing the human foibles, mob mentality, and lurid fascination that makes you wonder, even though they clearly have a very bad man, do they have the right one?
2. The Act of Killing (2012)
Surreal, perverse, curious and horrifying, The Act of Killing demands to be seen.
It is anchored in the atrocities committed during the overthrow of the Indonesian government in 1965. Paramilitary death squads and ruthless gangsters captured, tortured and killed at will, all under the guise of exterminating “communists.” Over one million Indonesians lost their lives, and those responsible continue to gloat about their actions from a seat of power they still enjoy today.
Co-director Joshua Oppenheimer met with some of the most famous death squad leaders and made them a distasteful yet ultimately brilliant offer: would they re-enact their savagery on camera?
The result is mesmerizing, can’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing-stuff.
Recalling the finest of their work, The Act of Killing is unforgettable. It calls to mind past cruelty, an Orwellian present and an uncertain future, emerging as essential, soul-shaking viewing.
1. The Nightmare (2015)
An effective scary movie is one that haunts your dreams long after the credits roll. It’s that kind of impact most horror buffs are seeking, but even the most ardent genre fan will hope out loud that Rodney Ascher’s documentary The Nightmare doesn’t follow them to sleep.
His film explores sleep paralysis. It’s the phenomenon that inspired Wes Craven to write A Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s a clear creative root for Insidious, Borgman and scores of other horror movies. But it isn’t fiction. It’s a sometimes nightly horror show real people have to live with. And dig this – it sounds like it might be contagious.
Ascher’s a fascinating, idiosyncratic filmmaker. His documentaries approach some dark, often morbid topics with a sense of wonder. His films never seem to be pushing an agenda, he doesn’t seem to have made up his mind on his subject matter. Rather, he is open which, in turn, invites the audience to be open.
We spend a great deal of time watching horror movies, and I cannot remember an instance in my life that I considered turning off a film for fear that I would dream about it later. Until now.
Listen to the whole conversation on our FRIGHT CLUB podcast.
It takes a real gift for storytelling to take a Behind the Music tale – rags to riches to tragedy – and turn it into a riveting, relevant, surprising film. Documentarian Asif Kapadis (Senna) has done just that with the vital and heartbreaking film Amy.
For his picture of Amy Winehouse he collects hundreds of interviews and sifts through countless bits of personal footage to craft more than just a powerful look at a self-destructive talent. The footage is so personal, the interviews so honest, we become voyeurs as a bawdy, vivacious young talent finds her own voice, indulges her dangerous appetites, spirals out of control, and finally succumbs to her demons.
That lens – the voyeur’s eye view – is a pivotal component to the success of Kapadis’s film. While Winehouse’s story is eerily similar to so many others, it may have been the utterly public self-destruction that sets her story apart. We watched it happen, and to a great degree, we participated. Kapadis is asking us to do it again.
Winehouse’s story certainly echoes too many others. Dead at 27, she joins a prestigious if tragic club: Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin. Like those musical supernovas, Winehouse struggled with depression, drug abuse, family issues, and a string of bad decisions.
Too few people knew her before she was a Jay Leno punchline, but the doc takes us back to her throaty pre-teen singalongs with buddies, her earliest club dates, to scenes with the same group of friends from grade school onward. We see the raw, shocking potential in this voice, something that echoed both jazz divas of days gone by as well as the most contemporary hip hop, and are reminded of the breathtaking intimacy of her lyrics.
A crafty filmmaker, Kapadis knows what to do with the collection of material. He understands the complexity of the Winehouse story. Though he implicates those whose influence helped determine the chanteuse’s fateful trajectory – a dirt bag junky husband, an emotionally disinterested mother, a manipulative, self-serving father, a short sighted tour manager, and a public thirsty for controversy – he never paints Winehouse as a true victim.
Like many hard living performers of remarkable talent before her, Amy Winehouse was a train wreck. Asif Kapadis respects that. You should, too.
As you take shelter from yet another downpour and check in on the interwebs, have you seen that thing Pope Francis said about humanity ruining the planet? Or Jeb Bush’s command for him to shut his pointy-hat wearing trap? Or the latest on California drying up like a raisin?
Well, there’s a documentary out on that theme, The Yes Men Are Revolting.
The Yes Men, activists Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno (not their real names) have been together since the 90s egging each other on to ever escalating heights of ridiculousness in an attempt to prank corporations and climate change deniers.
In order to draw public attention to issues, they stage phony press events and impersonate lobbyists, employees of corporations, and/or governmental agencies and announce dramatic shifts in policy, like Canada agreeing to pay 1% of its GDP to help poor countries adapt to climate change. (Imagine the guys from Jackass, but with a political agenda.)
Often, the stunts get picked up as legitimate stories by mainstream media, before the folks they’ve been impersonating scramble to set the record straight and do damage control.
This, the Yes Men’s third film, covers their attempts to draw the public’s attention to climate change while simultaneously dealing with transformation in the duo’s own lives. They’ve been doing this gig for a while. Now, Bonanno’s married with two kids and one on the way. Bichlbaum finally finds a man he wants to settle down with. Both men have other jobs that put demands on them. They’re asking questions: How much time can they devote to their stunts and each other anymore? Is activism even worth it? What difference are they actually making? Isn’t the world in worse shape now than when they started?
Despite these questions and the gloom generated by any discussion of climate change, The Yes Men Are Revolting will not result in you wanting to slit your wrists.
Bichlbaum and Bonanno’s enjoyment of each other and their vocation, the silliness of their fake names and awful disguises, the quality of the ideas at the heart of their pranks, and a final act that involves getting defense contractors to awkwardly dance, make this film fun and even potentially inspirational.
An effective scary movie is one that haunts your dreams long after the credits roll. It’s that kind of impact most horror buffs are seeking, but even the most ardent genre fan will hope out loud that Rodney Ascher’s new documentary The Nightmare doesn’t follow them to sleep.
His film explores sleep paralysis. It’s a sleep disorder – or a label hung on the world’s most unfortunate night terrors – that’s haunted humanity for eons. Most sufferers never realize that others share their misery.
Sleep paralysis is the phenomenon that inspired Wes Craven to write A Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s a clear creative root for Insidious, Borgman and scores of other horror movies. But it isn’t fiction. It’s a sometimes nightly horror show real people have to live with. And dig this – it sounds like it might be contagious.
Ascher’s a fascinating, idiosyncratic filmmaker. His documentaries approach some dark, often morbid topics with a sense of wonder. His films never seem to be pushing an agenda, he doesn’t seem to have made up his mind on his subject matter. Rather, he is open which, in turn, invites the audience to be open.
It’s not all earnest sleuthing, though, because Ascher is a real showman. What’s intriguing is the way he draws your attention to his craftsmanship – like framing a shot so you see the speaker not head on, but in a large mirror’s reflection, then leaving the reflection of the cameraman’s arm in the same shot. Touches like this never feel amateurish, but they don’t really feel like a cinematic wink, either. Instead they seem intentional, as if he may just be playing.
Coyness suited his Shining documentary Room 237 pretty brilliantly. Here it feels almost like a way to release the tension, remind you that you are, indeed, watching a movie… a heartbreaking, terrifying movie.
I spend a great deal of time watching horror movies, and I cannot remember an instance in my life that I considered turning off a film for fear that I would dream about it later. Until now.
Earth Day rears its smiling, nervously optimistic head once again with Disneynature’s latest eco-doc Monkey Kingdom.
Directors Mark Linfield and Alastair Fothergill have carved an impressive career of environmental documentaries, for both the large and small screen. Monkey Kingdom boasts the same skillful mixture of environmental grandeur and character-driven intimacy, and the film is as visually glorious as any in this series. Still, you have to wonder how many hours of wildlife footage is accrued before the filmmakers can impose a storyline on the proceedings.
That is not to suggest the tale is entirely make believe. Monkey Kingdom rolls cameras in the jungles of South Asia, capturing the complex social structure of a macaque monkey troop. What unfolds is a kind of Cinderella story of the low-born Maya and her efforts to fend for herself and her newborn.
As we’ve come to expect from Disney’s doc series, Monkey Kingdom sheds light on the intricate social workings of the subject, and macaques turn out to be fascinating creatures with the kind of structured social order that begs for exactly this treatment. At first we watch as lowly Maya sleeps in the cold and eats from the ground while the alpha and other high born monkeys nap in sunlight and feast on the ripe fruit at the top of the tree. Can she ever hope for more? (At least we can rest assured that there’s no make-over coming.)
The intricate pecking order sets the perfect stage for an underdog film full of scrap, perseverance and triumph.
Narrator Tina Fey’s smiling, workaday feminism gives the film personality and relates it to humanity without having to even try.
While the film keeps your attention throughout, Monkey Kingdom lacks some of the punch of other Disney Earth Day flicks. Linfield and Fothergill’s 2012 film Chimpanzee had the 5-year-olds at my screening sobbing breathlessly, whereas Monkey Kingdom might elicit a compassionate frown.
Between the built-in drama of the “overcoming adversity” storyline and the occasional giddy monkey hijinks (the bit where the troop crashes a birthday party is particularly enjoyable), the film compels attention as it shares eco-savvy information kids may even remember.
Documentary purists will balk at the anthropomorphized story, but families will enjoy this thoroughly entertaining film.
Hollywood is captivated by bank robbers: John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Patty Hearst, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid…
And John Wojtowicz, aka the Dog.
Not familiar? He’s the inspiration for the 1975 Al Pacino movie Dog Day Afternoon.
The Gateway Film Center is showing the latest of three documentaries on Wojtowicz, The Dog, starting Friday, August 22nd—the 42nd anniversary of the day Wojtowicz robbed a Chase Manhattan bank in order to finance his partner’s sex change operation.
The documentary offers the perspective of the progressively ailing Wojtowicz as well as those of his “wives” (both female and male), mother, eye witnesses, hostages, reporters, and gay rights activists. Directors Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren position Wojtowicz in the context of the burgeoning gay liberation movement, reminding the viewer how eye-opening this event was to many of the television viewers and local bystanders who watched the robbery and subsequent hostage negotiation unfold live. The Stonewall Riots had only happened three years previously.
Wojtowicz gave a good performance during the robbery—threating to beat up police for calling him a faggot, visiting with his adoring mother, having pizza delivered to the bank, throwing thousands of dollars out of the door, and French kissing a man at the bank threshold while still holding hostages. Wojtowicz was primed for theatricality; he went to a screening of The Godfather to psych himself up for the robbery.
And Wojtowicz, gives a good performance here. He describes himself both as a “romantic” and a “pervert” and narrates events leading up to the robbery and his life in its aftermath with a jovial demeanor that often jars with his subject matter. Several times I had to blink and process what just happened. (Is he narrating a butcher knife suicide attempt while smiling and wearing a puffer coat? Did he just offer a blowjob to a walrus?)
Berg and Keraudren leave it up to the audience to form their own conclusions about Wojtowicz. Romantic, willing to face prison to make his partner’s dream come true, as he maintains? Controlling, chauvinistic, sex addict, as interviews with his partners make it seem? A man clinging to his 15 minutes of fame? An ex-con with limited options, making a buck off the crime that prevents him from following his preferred career path in finance?
His story is indeed captivating and probably worth giving him another 15 minutes of fame.
Whether you loved him or hated him, Roger Ebert was a massive cultural influence – particularly if you happen to be a film critic.
Arguably the most influential movie reviewer of all time, Ebert was also a far more unique and fascinating character than casual readers/viewers might realize. Life Itself, Steve James’s revelatory new documentary, unveils the highly complicated personality behind all those opinions.
Life Itself nearly bursts with intimacy and detail, embracing Ebert’s bawdy youth and epic ego as openly as his medical treatments and serene end. The minutia of Ebert’s life is a surprising thrill to take in, though James feels no compulsion to pretty it up. He asks an old friend at one point whether, deep down, Ebert was really a nice guy.
Yes, he says. But not that nice.
The sparring with his reluctant TV partner Gene Siskel, often taken directly from TV outtakes, is utterly hilarious, but James mines it for more than laughs. We are reminded that Ebert was a populist film critic before there was such a thing, and while we relive some of the highlights of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s eloquence, we also revisit some of his more questionable assessments, (as when he gave Full Metal Jacket a thumbs down, but pointed that digit skyward for Benji the Hunted).
James notes, sometimes hilariously and with absolutely no sugar coat, that Siskel & Ebert’s program was often derided by fellow reviewers as not being film criticism at all – at which time Ebert routinely pointed to his Pulitzer. By taking film criticism to the public, the show had more influence on ticket buying, film production, and the changing paradigm of the medium of film criticism than anyone could have predicted.
James spends a great deal of time with Ebert and his wife Chaz in the hospital during the last couple stays before Ebert’s death, detailing the medical treatments and witnessing more of the drive that motivated this prolific writer his whole life. More importantly, through these visits, as well as emails and excerpts from Ebert’s autobiography, James makes clear that he is not laying his subject naked before us, but that Ebert himself is the willing object of our scrutiny through this film – an act that takes on much power when you consider what the man did for a living.
With James, we wind and careen through Ebert’s personal and professional life and legacy, but the film never loses focus. It touches all the bases, and in the end not only offers a moving image of a life abundantly and uncommonly lived, but honors Ebert’s most enduring, most identifiable, and most tenacious attribute: his voice.
Wondering how best to celebrate the 20th anniversary of that bat-shit white Bronco freeway chase? (That’s right- it’s been twenty years!) Jeff Rosenberg has you covered with his new film, OJ: The Musical.
This little slice of theatrical genius shadows aspiring thespian and/or nutjob Eugene Olivier via mocumentary as he follows his muse. Eugene leaves the Big Apple behind to take on that theatrical hotbed, Hollywood, recruiting old friends and attempting to put on the “next great American musical” – an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello, reworked to mirror the OJ Simpson case.
Writer/director/producer Rosenberg has a degree in playwriting from Ohio University, and his insider knowledge of the theatrical process is put to good use here. His script is sharp witted but soft hearted, his attitude generous but entirely comical.
Eugene, played with manic good nature by Rosenberg’s longtime collaborator Jordan Kenneth Kamp, is a doughy ball of denial, vulnerability, goofiness and arrested development. His is a unique but entirely recognizable character, and Kamp nails it.
Rosenberg’s piece does not trod entirely new ground, despite the unusual stageplay at its center. You can’t help but measure it against other drolly comedic mocumentaries by the master of the genre, Christopher Guest. And with a musical at its heart, it bears a resemblance to much of the work of Trey Parker and Matt Stone – heady company, but OJ holds its own.
OJ is not as dry as Guest’s work, nor as confrontational as the South Park output. Instead, it finds an understated, amiable place between.
Though the film is too slow in spots, it overcomes pacing lags with rampant unpredictability. And though Kemp is clearly the star of this show, the whole ensemble sparkles as it lovingly skewers the earnestness of that “show must go on” attitude.
The way the Bard’s tragedy, OJ’s case and Eugene’s journey come together is subdued brilliance. The play itself, in the final act, is hysterical, but nothing in the film draws as many laughs as the new idea brainstorming over the credits.
Brimming with insider insight, compassion, wisdom and humor, OJ: The Musical articulates the lovable absurdity of drama.
It’s Doc Week here in Columbus, that bi-annual festival that caters to the documentary lover in us all. But what of those who don’t care for docs? They’re missing so much! Well, in the interest of sharing the doc love, we’ve put together a list of documentaries bound to entertain even those folks with zero interest in the genre.
5. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007)
Seth Gordon’s doc on old school video game competitions managed to be the best underdog sports comedy of the year. Wisely, the film doesn’t mock its subjects, which would have created a distance between the participants and the audience. The competition is so fierce and yet disarmingly funny. Full of geekdom, mystery, humanity and the quest to maintain one’s own legend, King of Kong is a miraculous little slice of competitive life.
4. Stories We Tell (2012)
Sarah Polley uses an absolutely fascinating and intensely personal investigation to make some universal points about how we frame our own stories when sharing them with others, whether it’s the way we recount a personal tale or the way a filmmaker manipulates the audience to create the desired tone. Her points are all the more powerful because she chooses to open up such a private story to make them.
3. Man On Wire (2008)
Philippe Petit tight rope walked from one World Trade Center to the other. It became known as the artistic crime of the century, and James Marsh’s Oscar-winning documentary offers endlessly fascinating tidbits about how he pulled it off. The doc is maddeningly suspenseful, and the sight of this exquisite, joyous lunacy literally attached to the site of such profound tragedy somehow makes it all that much more magical.
2. Murderball (2005)
It’s full contact wheelchair rugby for quadriplegics, and you would get your ass kicked. Murderball is a film that shows no mercy because mercy wouldn’t be accepted anyway, as it follows athletes vying for a spot in Paralympic Games. The competition is intense, the action breathtaking, the story sometimes wickedly funny, and the human experience of it all serves as the doc’s escalated heartbeat. Murderball may very well be the best sports documentary ever made.
1. The Imposter (2012)
Not the best doc on the list, but without question the one that will leave you astounded. A young French drifter claims to be the missing son of a grieving Texas family. Director Bart Layton keeps his film exactly one step ahead of you, and the twists are absolutely impossible to see coming. It’s a jaw dropping true crime story that will leave you amazed.
