Tag Archives: documentary reviews

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Wanna Take You Higher

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Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

by George Wolf

According to Amir “Questlove” Thompson, the first time he saw some of the digitized footage from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival concerts, he nearly wept.

How could this event have been ignored to the extent that even a musical aficionado such as himself had never heard of it? And why had all these hours of stunning performances gone unseen for decades?

The free concerts ran for six consecutive weekends at Harlem’s Mt. Morris Park in the summer of 1969, attracting over 300,000 fans. That same summer, the Woodstock festival was held about 100 miles away, but even when producer Hal Tulchin tried to market his reels of video as “the Black Woodstock,” there were no takers.

And so the boxes sat in a basement for 50 years.

Once Thompson committed to directing his first film, he immersed himself in the footage nearly 24/7, and Summer of Soul emerges as a triumphant testament to the music that drove a “Black consciousness revolution.”

From the gospel of Mahalia Jackson to the blues of B.B. King, from the 5th Dimension’s smooth pop to Sly Stone’s psychedelic funk, the musical styles blend gloriously in the summer sun and the goosebump moments mount.

A young Mavis Staples and an aging Jackson share one microphone; Stevie Wonder unleashes a furious drum solo; Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis. Jr. tear up recalling how important it was that the 5th Dimension’s perceived “white” sound be accepted as “black enough;” Nina Simone strikes a commanding presence as she challenges the crowd’s commitment to social change; and on and on and on.

But even more impressive than Thompson’s musical direction is the way he frames the entire festival through the context of time, place, and population.

Embraced by New York’s Republican mayor and sponsored by corporate giant Maxwell House, the festival was seen as a way to keep the Black community calm after the rising tensions of 1968.

But ’69 was – in the words of Rev. Al Sharpton – “the year Negro died and Black was born,” and Thompson layers the archival footage with new interviews that are equal parts poignant and timely.

We see festival attendees telling stories of what lengths they went to for a chance to be in the crowd, and how being there changed their lives. Starkly contrasting footage of white and black crowds being interviewed for reactions to the 1969 moon landing put a fine point on how sadly relevant yesterday’s civil rights struggles remain today.

And while the defiant cries of revolution and equality pulsate through Summer of Soul, they never eclipse the festival’s unbridled joy.

One man who was just a young boy in 1969 and had come to doubt his own memory over the years, cries with joy at seeing proof positive on film.

“I’m not crazy! And it was beautiful.”

It still is.

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A Question of Innocence

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The Phantom

by Brandon Thomas

In February 1983, Corpus Christi, Texas, gas station employee Wanda Lopez was murdered by a knife-wielding assailant during a robbery. Witnesses saw a man flee the scene, and police eventually caught Carlos DeLuna – shirtless and holding a wad of cash – hiding under a car. After a whirlwind trial, DeLuna, who always claimed his innocence, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The execution itself was carried out on December 7, 1989.

During his trial and subsequent incarceration, Deluna maintained that a Carlos Hernandez was the man responsible for Wanda Lopez’s murder. Local police and prosecutors looked into DeLuna’s allegations but claimed to have never found any existence of the Carlos Hernandez described. Nearly a decade later, a private investigator was able to prove that Carlos Hernandez did exist and that he bore a striking resemblance to Carlos DeLuna. What happened next convinced many in the Corpus Christi region that a severe miscarriage of justice had taken place.

With The Phantom, director Patrick Forbes (The Widowmaker) doesn’t waste any time digging into the particulars of Wanda Lopez’s murder, and its seemingly neat resolution. Like any good true crime doc worth its weight in gold, The Phantom is chock full of interviews with the investigators involved, and the family members impacted most. The approach is clinical in nature, with nearly everyone involved getting a chance to speak their piece about what happened. 

The second half of the film is where things get really interesting, and the focus of the movie shifts. Miscarriages of justice aren’t new topics in crime docs – and especially crime docs set in Texas (The Thin Blue Line anyone?). More questions are presented than are answered, but answers don’t seem to be Forbes’s objective anyhow. There are more than enough questions surrounding DeLuna’s guilt, but The Phantom’s ultimate goal seems to be to comment on the morality surrounding capital punishment. 

As the end credits start to roll, the lasting feeling from The Phantom is that of freshness. So many modern-day crime docs editorialize to the point of denying the audience a chance to think for themselves. Sometimes it’s nice to spend 80 minutes with a fascinating story and walk away with a lingering “What if…?”

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A Whole Aesthetic World

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Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide

by Christie Robb

With the cancellation of 2021’s Columbus Arts Festival and ComFest happening only virtually, this summer you might be feeling the sweet ache of longing for community-building kooky pop art. Never fear—a Kenny Scharf documentary is here!

Scharf, an LA valley native and young baby boomer, was drawn to New York by Andy Warhol and the Factory—folks having an extravagantly good time making art fun. He became part of a group of young artists who merged the club and art scenes. Along with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, Scharf was also part of the 1980s NYC graffiti subculture and became renowned for blurring the lines between the rarified walls of the art gallery and the gritty surfaces of public spaces.

Scharf’s style is maximalist, bright, chaotic, with amoebic-like organic forms. Heavily influenced by mascot-like pop-cultural memes from advertising, cartoons, and B-movies, there’s often something sinister lurking behind a smile. He calls attention to the nuclear in nuclear family.

The documentary, by Scharf’s daughter Malia Scharf and Max Basch, is a mix of interviews with Kenny, archival footage, and commentary from collaborators, critics, artists, and collectors. It situates Kenny in art history by tracing the evolution of art style from post-WWII abstract expressionism through to pop art/appropriation art, to graffiti art and cartoon realism.

Although some personal and historical background is presented, the focus is on the art itself and the evolution of the artist’s style, motivation, and use of media over the course of his decades-long career. While Basquiat and Haring died young (taken by overdose and AIDS, respectively), Scharf was privileged to witness his embrace by the art establishment, his fall into obscurity, and his perseverance as a creator. He’s an inspiration.

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Justice v Tradition

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A Crime on the Bayou

by Cat McAlpine

The nation was one month into federally enforced integration in 1966 when Gary Duncan pulled his car over to intervene between a group of boys spoiling for a fight. That afternoon, Duncan became a marked man.

Targeted with a litany of false charges, he was arrested again and again. He could have accepted battery charges for a crime he did not commit and paid a fine. But he refused to be painted as a criminal for simply being Black. So he and his Jewish attorney, Richard Sobol, took the case to court, stepping to the corrupt titans of 1960s Louisiana, like white supremacist judge Leander Perez.

Remembering one of his final arrests with tears in his eyes, Duncan recalls “I said ‘I’m not going to jail. I’m tired.’…I was ready to die.”

Another clip shows young Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to attend desegregated William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Weeping, she tells the interviewer, “I’m not afraid. They’ll have to kill me to keep me from getting my education.” She was six years old at the time.

The most striking juxtaposition in A Crime on the Bayou is the use of black and white footage paired with full color, high-quality interviews. Director Nancy Buirski utilizes a unique handheld technique for the talking heads portions of the film, staying extremely tight on her main subjects’ faces. It reminds us that 1966, and the Civil Rights Movement, was not as long ago as we’d like to believe. Many of the young people immortalized in black and white photos, screaming their protest of the integration of schools, are still alive and well today. They are a part of our society. They are your neighbors. They vote and run for office or lead companies.

Little Ruby Bridges is still alive too. She’s only 66 years old.

Buirski embraces the setting of the desegregation crisis and resulting Civil Rights movement. She employs drone footage of Louisiana, archived footage of New Orleans, and jazz music interludes. Buirski reminds us that culture cannot be separated from its struggles and ugly parts.

The documentary also explores the struggle of Jewish Americans during the Civil Rights Movement, particularly Jewish attorneys and civil rights lawyers. The holocaust had only occurred 20 years prior, and many Jewish families were relatively newly immigrated and fighting for a new life. With them, they carried their own memories of genocide and totalitarian rule. And while the trauma of the two cultures cannot be compared— you can never compare trauma and come up with a winning outcome—Black Americans and Jewish Americans often found themselves fighting against the same forces.

This moving film is a reminder that the world does change, but slowly. We cannot brush off the sins of the past so easily, as many of us are still living them.

At an hour and a half, this documentary moves quickly and doesn’t languish in the trauma of Black men the way many other films do. Instead, it is honest about the inherited traumas we carry. It methodically exposes how entire systems have been built to suppress minorities. Most importantly, it reminds us that the fight continues, and that whenever possible, we must rise to the challenge of upholding justice.

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This Is My Town

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Our Towns

by George Wolf

If all politics is local, then Our Towns is the most political film you’ll see this year.

Because authors James and Deborah Fallows had one rule as they traveled the country looking for towns with interesting stories. Never, ever talk about the national political climate.

The Fallowses, both longtime writers, reporters and academics, have lived and traveled all over the world. Their 2018 bestseller Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey Into the Heart of America was based on their extensive reporting for The Atlantic on the civic and economic renewal of America’s towns.

Oscar-nominated directors Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan (Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern) put the gentle, reassuring authors front and center for an easygoing documentary from HBO that touts possibilities over partisanship.

From the influx of refugees in Sioux Falls, South Dakota to the twenty percent unemployment of Columbus, Mississippi; from the end of logging in Bend, Oregon to the climate change fears in Eastport, Maine, we see how these towns have adapted and thrived.

And, by the way, what we see is gorgeous, thanks to the drone footage from Bryan Harvey and the cinematography from him and Ascher.

The solutions – diversity, investment, innovation, local engagement – may not be revelations, but the surprise comes in seeing how some communities have actually been able to move these ideas from buzzwords to policy.

The film skirts specifics, as well as the deep ideological divisions that stand in the way of such progress, but even that seems true to the stated goal of locality. It never wavers, even in the face of celebrity. Because even though you clearly see actor Jeff Daniels playing guitar and singing with a band in Charleston, West Virginia, his national fame is completely ignored, as it should be.

It is not lost on The Fallowses that their book research coincided with a national recession and their film project debuts during a global pandemic. But even with such large-scale challenges, they say the building blocks for recovery are the same, and they start in our own neighborhoods.

For 97 minutes, Our Towns shows you that underneath all of our ugliness, there are success stories we can look to for examples of hope and possibility.

And now feels like a pretty good time to see them.

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What’s In a Name?

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Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker

by Hope Madden

Maybe you don’t know who David Wojnarowicz is. Maybe you have no idea how to pronounce his name. It might be safer to butcher the provocative late artist’s last name (voy-nah-ROYH-vitch) than to read the title of director Chris McKim’s documentary aloud—Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker.

It doesn’t really matter what you call it as long as you see it.

The film primarily uses Wojnarowicz’s own recordings, photos and paintings to let him tell his story. A profound influence on New York’s art scene in the 1980s and into the ‘90s, the multimedia artist’s work delivered among the earliest and most startling images of queer art in the city.

McKim had a lot to work with. Wojnarowicz made hundreds of audio cassettes, recording his thoughts in a sometimes wounded monotone. The stream of conscious monologues often dip into the outright poetic and create a poignant soundtrack for the life and work on display.

The documentarian does enlist some additional voices, including friend Fran Lebowitz and frequent collaborator Marion Schemama, but relies mainly on Wojnarowicz’s own visuals to create the sense of isolation, alienation and anger that fueled much of his work.

Wojnarowicz and his work, as well as his death, became a focal point of the mishandled AIDS epidemic that scars the politics and history of the 1980s.

In much the way Wojnarowicz’s work reflected his hellish upbringing and time on the streets, McKim’s film contextualizes the artist among that which he influenced: a city, a movement, a scene, politics, and other artists.

As is crucial in a doc about a visual artist, the screen is routinely filled to brimming with Wojnarowicz’s creations. Powerful, inflammatory, sexually explicit and unmistakably challenging, the work itself looms large in the documentary as if to ensure that it reaches out to as many as possible who forgot, never knew, or may have been kept from it.

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I’d Vote for Him

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My Name is Pedro

by Rachel Willis

Pedro Santana is the bright, innovative, caring teacher/school administrator that every child deserves and some desperately need.

It’s not surprising that in her first documentary feature, director Lillian LaSalle chose such a larger-than-life personality to concentrate on.

Most of LaSalle’s doc focuses on one-on-one time with Santana, but there are plenty of interviews with those who have been touched by him: students, parents, and co-workers. All have glowing praise for Santana’s inventiveness and compassion.

The film’s extraordinary subject helps hide the more mediocre elements. Apart from from Santana himself, there isn’t much that stands out. Some of the shots are distractingly blurry, and harried animation sequences detract from the spoken words. With someone as animated as Santana, why would you ever take the camera off him in favor of line-drawn cartoons?

But the audience gets to see inside struggling school systems – sadly, something already too familiar to many parents and students – and how someone like Pedro Santana can make a world of difference in a short time. The children who have been impacted by Mr. Santana over the course of his career brim with self-confidence in their interviews.

We’re also shown the dynamics of school politics at one suburban school district in upstate New York. A school board at odds with members of the community makes for heated scenes in which parents confront the board over decisions made for their children. The bulk of the board is comprised of men whose own children don’t attend the local public schools, yet in whose hands rests hiring decisions and money matters for those schools.  

These scenes make for some of the most interesting, and infuriating, moments.

But at its heart, this is a movie about the impact caring educators have on children. Santana recalls his own experience with such a teacher and how she drove him forward in life. From a stint in the Peace Corps to the Teacher’s College at Columbia University and beyond, we see how a good teacher does make a difference.

Santana’s approach to education is a good lesson for anyone who works with children. He pushes them to be their best, and the results speak to his skills in the field of education. And that’s probably because Mr. Santana is interested in more than test scores and homework. He is fundamentally invested in seeing children succeed – at school and in life.

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A History of Non Violence

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MLK/FBI

by George Wolf

This year’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. day arrives during a time in history that has worn out the word “unprecedented.” And it is the gravity of these times that only serves to make veteran documentarian Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI ring with more timely urgency.

Mixing some impressive historical footage, newly declassified files and more recent interview perspectives, Pollard dives into the FBI’s harassment of Dr. King with a steady, tactical approach.

For those unfamiliar, it becomes a chilling reminder of a courageous and charismatic civil rights leader, and the powerful white men who felt the best way to weaken Dr. King was through revelations of his sexual indiscretions.

And as you hear racists from decades past recite the same, tired excuses for their fear and bigotry that we’re hearing now, the folly of our confident righteousness is exposed with a sad irony.

Looking back, former FBI director James Comey describes the assault on Dr. King as the saddest days in the history of the bureau. Those times were daunting, too, and they called for accountability that never came.

Are we condemned to repeat that history? We’ll see very soon, which makes the lessons of MLK/FBI as vital as ever.

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Nights Are Warm and the Days Are Young

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Some Kind of Heaven

by Hope Madden

There is something absurd and mesmerizing about Lance Oppenheim’s documentary Some Kind of Heaven. The greens of the golf courses are insanely green, the aquas of the pools are blindingly blue/green, the synchrony of limbs or golf carts in the choreographed dances is hypnotic.

They have synchronized golf cart dances.

The Villages is nuts!

Sort of the Disneyland of retirement communities, Florida’s The Villages is a 100,000 strong city, gated and catering exclusively to elderly residents. Their town square is painted and constructed to look like a real town square – it even has a fake history that city tour guides will spin with a smile and a deep, savage tan.

This is a community of affluence ripe for satire in an era of catastrophic generational income inequality. Instead, Oppenheim finds a more melancholy and poignant inspiration. Rather than lampoon the wretched excess, the filmmaker develops character studies, unveiling something more bitter than sweet in this dessert topping of a town.

Anne and Reggie, married 47 years, began falling apart before they moved to The Villages, but his recreational drug use and attempts at spiritual awakening are taking a toll. A poignant look at loneliness inside the happiest place in old age, the recently widowed Barbara works all day and finds herself an outsider in a world full of vacant, smiling eyes.

But the true outsider is the seediest and most fascinating character of the bunch. Eighty-one-year-old Dennis cannot afford The Villages, but he’s not ashamed to scam his way in. Living in his van and preying on lonely women with money, he reminded me of the sublime Senior Love Triangle from 2020.

That comparison, though, only draws attention to the fairly superficial treatment Oppenheim gives the subjects. Dennis seemed to be an opportunity to comment on an unseemly reality seeping into this community, itself a perversion of reality.

Oppenheim’s framing and David Bolen’s cinematography create an unforgettable visual experience, preparing you for a Wes Anderson meets John Waters documentary about rich old people synchronized swimming.

Well, that’s just too high a bar. Who could live up to that? Instead, Oppenheim settles for a little razzle dazzle, a little character intrigue, and enough footage to make you wonder what the hell goes on in The Villages.