Tag Archives: documentary

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Discontent

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The Last First: Winter K2

by George Wolf

“Whoever climbs K2 in the winter will claim the last great prize in mountaineering.”

In 2021, that mission became a deadly competition. Businesses were reeling from COVID restrictions, social media likes became a new form of currency, and an unexpected crowd gathered to earn that last first: summiting the world’s second-highest peak amid the worst conditions imaginable.

K2 — aka “The Savage Mountain” — had proved too much for all previous winter attempts. But veteran climber John Snorri Sigurjónsson and local Pakistani hero Ali Sadparas thought they could be the first, only to be met with an unexpected crowd thinking the same thing.

There was filmmaker Elia Saikaly, Nepalese legend Nims Purja and his team, extreme athlete Colin O’Brady, Italian climber Tamara Lunger and a commercial group of climbers from Seven Summit Treks. The party atmosphere at base camp deteriorated into a brutal fight for survival, and director Amir Bar-Lev deconstructs the bad decisions with reverence and determination.

The visuals are often breath taking and the quest gets jaw-droppingly tense, which is not uncommon for this type of extreme documentary that we’ve seen over the last several years. What sets Bar-Lev’s approach apart is how he balances the multiple factors lurking behind the tragic deaths of five climbers.

When the over-commercialization of summitting meets an industry struggling to survive the pandemic, social media dopamine addiction and foolish hubris, common sense caution struggles for attention. The contrasts between tourist climbers and seasoned vets, layered into the already tense caste system of the region, creates an added atmosphere of suspicion and finger-pointing once the situation turns dire.

If the time of pioneers is truly gone, The Last First: Winter K2 bids them a stark, unforgettable farewell. At times thrilling, tragic, and exasperating, it is ultimately a sad reminder of how high human folly can climb.

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Yes They Canada

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You Had to Be There

by George Wolf

Don’t pretend you don’t want to hear a homemade recording of a 15 year-old Martin Short singing Frank Sinatra tunes in his bedroom.

You Had to Be There gives you that gem early on, and then rolls out a succession of beautifully human moments that live inside the story of one ridiculously talented 1972 Toronto production of Godspell. More than one thousand people auditioned, and an ever-growing tree of success began to take root.

Not just Short, but Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Dave Thomas, Paul Shaffer and more. Household names, plus other veteran performers who have carved out long careers and influenced generations of popular culture. They were all here together for a magical time that “felt like Paris in the ’20s,” and director Nick Davis (with executive producer Judd Apatow) tells their tale with absolute joy and reverence.

There are no videos of the actual shows, but thanks to the always resourceful Short, there is audio from a small cassette recorder stashed on the stage. And some from that same recorder pulled out at cast parties. It’s great stuff, and Davis presents it with some fitting, SNL-style animation that makes sure you can identify each player. So fun, even without the archival footage.

Current interviews with living cast members are presented in front of colorful blank screens, illuminating each personality in a different glow before cutting away to animation or due praise from admirers such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Janeane Garofalo, Mike Myers and more.

And as the film moves into the closing stages, it becomes undeniably touching. We feel the love these people have for other, and for the wonderful experience they shared. We also see the highs and lows of their respective lives, including Radner’s tragic passing and one cast member admitting — for the first time — about sexual assault she endured on the set of a network TV show.

Then we, and this cast, see something else. And it results in such a warm surprise I’m not going to spoil it. But it’s special. So is the film.

You Had to Be There not only supports the claim that this Godspell production was the ’27 Yankees of comedy, it reminds us to cherish the good friends, good times, and yes, good art that we are blessed enough to experience in our lives.

Curtain call!

Outtakes

Denied Pregnancy and Delayed Justice

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Baby Doe

by Matt Weiner

There’s no true crime mystery at the heart of director Jessica Earnshaw’s riveting documentary Baby Doe. Gail Ritchey gave birth in 1993 and left the newborn in the woods in Geauga County, a conservative rural suburb outside of Cleveland, Ohio. The case was a local sensation that went unsolved until 2019, when DNA evidence led investigators to arrest Ritchey for murder.

What follows from that arrest is a challenging examination of the criminal justice system, its treatment of women and their mental health and how we view those accused of what popular culture (and pulpier true crime fare) dub acts that are “especially heinous,” told through a blend of contemporary footage and intimate access to the Ritchey family and their legal team.

Earnshaw’s camera becomes an ever-present member of the extended Ritchey family as they grapple with an unthinkable crime. Ritchey’s high school sweetheart and now husband Mark was unaware that Gail was even pregnant with their child at the time, and Earnshaw doesn’t shy away during interviews as Mark and Gail both reckon with their deeply conservative Christian upbringing that may have contributed to Gail’s state of mind at the time.

As Ritchey’s defense team confers with experts on how to get a jury to sympathize with Ritchey, Earnshaw touches on other high-profile cases on the subject of “denied pregnancy.” This is where the documentary takes yet another surprising—and enraging—turn, with medical experts on one side offering up compelling and deeply moving testimony on the under-discussed condition. On the other side, there is Ohio law, which in this case bars Ritchey and her team from using any of this as part of her defense. Instead, her lawyers must focus on the argument that the baby was stillborn.

Earnshaw’s raw interviews ultimately weave a sad, winding narrative that starts with Ritchey’s overbearing father and ends up in a suburban Cleveland jury room filled with male jury members and a reproving judge. It’s difficult to shake the sense that whatever is happening in that courtroom, it’s not about justice.

We do at least find more tender moments and even grace outside of the trial. Some of this comes from likely sources (a welcoming church, spearheaded by a caring pastor’s wife). But one of these moments comes from a surprising figure near the end of the film, one of the few men outside of the Ritchey family who sees Gail as someone who is more than the acts she has committed.

These moments, rare as they are, hardly make up for a criminal justice system that seems both unequipped and uninterested in understanding the mental health of why some people do what they do. Thankfully, Earnshaw is, and she tells the story beautifully in a way that suggests if sympathy is impossible, we can still find room for empathy.

Outtakes

What the Hell?

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Boorman and the Devil

by George Wolf

There was a new list floating around social media this week, and it ranked the 25 all-time worst movie sequels. 1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic was nowhere to be found. That will probably surprise a bunch of people, including some that are part of Boorman and the Devil, a fascinating look behind one of the most infamous productions in film history.

John Boorman was fresh off of an Oscar nomination for Deliverance when he accepted the gig to follow up the phenomenon that was The Exorcist. Looking back, the now 92 year-old Boorman realizes Stanley Kubrick was correct when he warned the only way to follow Friedkin’s classic was to bring even more shock value.

Boorman chose an approach that focused on light over dark. Plus “the Synchronizer,” a tap-dancing Linda Blair and James Earl Jones in a locust getup.

It was a complete disaster. But director David Kittredge’s look back is so captivating, the urge to give The Heretic another look will be strong.

Boorman’s candor about the pain of failure is refreshingly honest, and the way that Kittredge surrounds it with insightful commentary from filmmakers such as Karyn Kusama, Mike Flanagan and Joe Dante creates an engaging filmmaking conversation.

Kittredge also shows some sharp editing skills, weaving in specific moments from the film to create wry commentary on the battles going on behind the scenes. Linda Blair would show up late, Richard Burton would leave early and Oscar-winner Louise Fletcher wound up exasperated.

Plus, there was the battle over the script re-writes, some ballooning budget and production schedules and Boorman’s case of Valley Fever that shut the whole thing down for five weeks.

Was there a Devilish curse at work?

Kittredge makes sure you appreciate all the things Boorman did right, and hear from a few critics who insist The Heretic is more triumph than tragedy. Either way, Boorman and The Devil is an essential and entertaining breakdown of one infamous film, and the devil-in-the-details of the filmmaking process itself.

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Always Be Cookie-ing

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Cookie Queens

by George Wolf

Did you ever look at the girl selling you Thin Mints and think, “she’s going to be a Supreme Court justice some day?”

You might start, once you meet the youngsters of Cookie Queens, a triumphant look at goal setting, upselling and the fleeting years of girlhood.

Writer/director Alysha Nahmias travels to North Carolina, Texas and California to immerse us in the frenzied weeks of cookie season with four budding entrepreneurs. There’s Ara in San Diego, an impossibly cute and precocious 5-year-old who hopes to be strong enough to pull her own wagon of treats. 8-year-old Shannon Elizabeth is in El Paso, practicing karate and trying to make sure her parents don’t have to skip a mortgage payment to pay for unsold cookies. Nikki is a 9-year-old in Chino, who has a family tradition to uphold while she’s chasing enough sales to earn a trip to Europe. And then there’s 12-year-old Olive, the future Supreme who sets sales records, schools her troop on upselling, and already frets about disparities in the relationship between management and labor.

With a week-by-week countdown and some helpful onscreen stats, Nahmias builds a subtle layer of sales tension while letting us glimpse how these girls, their families and friends are navigating life. It’s all endlessly engaging, full of inspiration, frustration and some way-too-early hints about the ways of the world.

We see older teenage sisters pine wistfully for the carefree days of youth, while those younger ones are already wondering about their purpose in life and learning that success can hinge on their appearance.

Yes, some parents can Cookie vicariously, but Cookie Queens never lets the focus stray from these wonderful young ladies. Even with all they are juggling during the height of selling season, their sparks of joy and enthusiasm can’t be denied.

And for us grown-ups, the film might make you sorry about the world we’re leaving these kids. But would I bet against them growing up and changing it?

Not a chance.

Outtakes

The Speed of Joy

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Marty, Life Is Short

by George Wolf

Remember when someone on social media tried to come at Martin Short, and it seemed like the entire internet rose up in protest?

That was awesome, because even if you don’t think Short is funny for some odd reason, he just seems like a peach of a human being.

The Netflix doc Marty, Life Is Short confirms that peachiness, for just about every one of its 99 minutes. Full of home movies, TV and movie clips, interviews with family, famous friends, and a few new thoughts from Short himself, the film reveals him as a kind soul committed to fighting pain by spreading laughter.

And while Short insists that, as opposed to the well worn comic stereotype, his humor was not born from pain, he has endured plenty of it.

“It came from my whole life,” he says.

Short lost his brother at age 12, his mother at 18, his father at 20, his beloved wife of thirty years, Nancy Dolman, in 2010, and his daughter Katherine just three months ago. And still, as Steve Martin tell us, if Marty says he’ll be at your dinner party and then he can’t come, “you cancel the party.”

Martin is just one of the many longtime friends and colleagues that director Lawrence Kasdan assembles to sing Short’s praises. From Speilberg to Hanks, from former SCTV co-stars Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, and the late Catherine O’Hara to Short’s own siblings and beyond, all of the love feels warm and one hundred percent authentic. It’s often touching.

Clearly, Kasdan is also a longtime friend, which brings both pluses and minuses. He’s an Oscar-nominated director with no shortage of inside access to his subject, yes, but his closeness to Short also fuels the feeling that all the film’s edges have been safely dulled. Kasdan also asks some onscreen questions without being mic-ed up, which can be frustrating to follow.

Recent docs such as Steve! (Martin) and Pee-wee as Himself have shown how these types of biographies can transcend the standard playbook for a deeper, more resonant type of engagement. Marty, Life Is Short keeps the ranks more closed, leaning into a greatest hits presentation, a box set with extended liner notes.

It’s an entertaining, funny, and star-studded salute to a guy who’s pretty easy to like and who, in the words of Tom Hanks, “moves at the speed of joy.”

And, man wait ’til you see the footage of his A-list Christmas parties from back in the day. Epic!

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Always Been in Meat

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Chain Reactions

by Hope Madden

Not everyone believes Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a masterpiece of American filmmaking. I find those people suspicious. Luckily, those are not the people filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe (Memory: The Origins of Alien, 78/52) talks to for his latest documentary, Chain Reactions.

The film is a celebration of 50 years of TCM. The celebrants are five of the film’s biggest fans: Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King, and Karyn Kusama. It’s a good group. Each share intimate and individual reminiscences and theories about the film, its impact on them as artists, and its relevance as a piece of American cinema. What their ruminations have in common is just as fascinating as the ways in which their thoughts differ.

Heller-Nicholas, an Australian film critic and writer, creates a fascinating connection between Hooper’s sunbaked tale of a cannibal family with desert-set Aussie horrors like Wake in Fright and Wolf Creek. Meanwhile, Kusama sees the story as profoundly, almost poignantly American.

And Miike, genre master responsible for some of the most magnificent and difficult films horror has to offer, including Ichi the Killer and Audition, credits The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with inspiring him to become a filmmaker. And all because a Charlie Chaplin retrospective was sold out!

Philippe’s approach is that of a fan and an investigator. When Oswalt compares Hooper scenes to those from silent horror classics, Philippe split screens the images for our consideration. When Kusama digs into the importance of the color red, Chain Reactions shows us. We feel the macabre comedy, the verité horror, the beauty and the grotesque.

It’s fascinating what the different speakers have in common. So many talk about Leatherface, worry about him, pointing out that from Leatherface’s perspective, TCM is a home invasion movie.

What you can’t escape is the film’s influence and its craft. The set design should be studied. Hooper’s use of color, his preoccupation with the sun and the moon, the way he juxtaposes images of genuine beauty with the grimmest sights imaginable.

Each of these artists came to the film from a different perspective—some having seen it early enough in their youth to have been left scarred, others having taken it in as adults and still being left scarred. But each one sees layers and importance—poetry, even—in Hooper’s slice of savage cinema.

Chain Reactions is an absolute treasure of a film for fans of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

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Poison Pen

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A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant

by George Wolf

“If Pat Oliphant couldn’t draw, he’d be an assassin.”

That quote gets your attention, even if you don’t know the name Pat Oliphant. Either way, you’ve probably seen some of his work, and A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant is a broadly effective intro to a legend of political cartooning.

Oliphant wielded a revolutionary artistic style and the kind of cynical mind that had him rebelling against the very committee that awarded him the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. Aided by his alter ego “Punk” the Penguin, Oliphant skewered the political landscape through five decades and ten U.S. Presidents.

In his feature debut, director Bill Banowsky keeps things pretty standard, rolling out a succession of Oliphant’s best cartoons, and chatting with family members and colleagues to provide some personal details that Oliphant himself seems averse to.

And though today’s political and social climate carries some issues that are very relevant to Oliphant’s legacy, Banowsky doesn’t dig in. We do get mentions of the increased threats to a free press, and to the rise of internet memes as a shallow imitation of cartoon commentary, but those seem to be conversations for another day.

Banowsky’s aim is to give a legend his due and maybe spur some interest in learning more. A Savage Art hits that target square.

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My Mind on Mega and Mega on My Mind

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Megadoc

by George Wolf

I saw Megalopolis when it debuted last year. I liked it, didn’t love it. It was a big, messy cinematic swing from Francis Ford Coppola, and even those who hated it – there were plenty – had to admire FFC’s commitment to a project that he started over thirty years prior.

Coppola put up his own fortune to get the film done, including selling a stake in his winery. And that meant Coppola answered only to Coppola, which adds a captivating element to Megadoc, Mike Figgis’s behind-the-scenes documentary on the chaotic production.

Coppola invited the veteran Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) on set, which gave him nearly unlimited access to cast and crew. FFC’s head butts with the difficult Shia LeBeouf are frequently captured, while the more calculated Adam Driver needs some time to feel comfortable with Figgis’s presence.

The first run at filming Megalopolis came in the early 2000s, and footage from those early table reads and green screen shoots with some different cast members are juxtaposed with current footage to hypnotic effect.

But the real attraction of Megadoc lies well beyond any movie star posturing or agent demands. We get an up-close look at Coppola’s broad creative process, and the conflicts that come from the famed director thinking of his passion project as “play, while they want to work at it.”

Half the crew walks out, actors question the director’s choices, while FFC often retreats to the isolation of a trailer where he can call the shots remotely. And Figgis is always there, sometimes abusing his privileges and becoming more of a proud participant than impartial observer.

And ironically, that ends up making Megadoc even more of a necessary bookend to Hearts of Darkness, Eleanor Coppola’s 1991 doc on the making of Apocalypse Now. Decades later, the frenzied director on the verge of losing it all has become a legend more than at peace with risking it all. That’s a fascinating transformation to observe, and any fan of filmmaking should embrace the chance to do it.

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Last Goodbye

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It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley

by Rachel Willis

Director Amy Berg (Janis: Little Girl Blue) paints an intimate portrait of songwriter Jeff Buckley in her documentary, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.

Berg understands her subject and skillfully weaves the story of Buckley’s life, which is bookended by tragedy.

Buckley’s mom (Mary Guibert) opens up about the tumultuous early years of Jeff’s life. With a father who abandoned his six-month pregnant wife, Buckley had no relationship with a man to whom he would draw comparison in later life.

Buckley’s biological father was singer/songwriter Tim Buckley, and as Jeff started to make a name for himself, those constant comparisons would wear on him. Berg artfully navigates these early years of Jeff’s career while he struggled to distance himself from his absentee father.

Berg weaves archival footage into the film, often using recordings of Buckley to invigorate interviews with Jeff’s friends and family. The footage helps the audience to know the person to whom everyone has such touching words.

Unfortunately, there are times when the film drags a bit as it becomes repetitive. A lot of similar ground is trod over the course of the film’s runtime, and Berg doesn’t bring anything new to the genre of music documentary.

It can also be hard to watch people talk about events in hindsight, particularly when the subject of such conversation is unable to weigh in on those opinions. There is speculation of Buckley’s mental state, perhaps that he suffered from bipolar disorder and psychosis. While this may be true, it’s difficult to judge the truth of someone’s memories 20 years on. It’s Buckley’s haunting cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah that plays over the words of those who speak of Jeff after his death. It is undeniably an exquisite cover and a fitting tribute to a life cut tragically short.