Tag Archives: documentary

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In Search of a Purpose

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In Search of Darkness

by Hope Madden

The first thing you know about Shudder’s new original doc In Search of Darkness is that it’s an encyclopedic look at horror movies from the Eighties.

The second thing you need to know is that it’s 4 hours and 20 minutes long.

Right?!!

Why filmmaker David A. Weiner decided this had to be a standalone doc rather than a short series is beyond me. Certainly you can (and no doubt will) pause the film and come back to it, which is simple enough to do with Shudder. Still, having devoted about 1/3 of my waking day to a single documentary, I feel as if I should have learned more about Eighties horror than I did.

The bright spots: Tom Atkins is as delightful as you hope he is, as, of course, is Barbara Crampton. John Carpenter and Larry Cohen are as curmudgeonly; Keith David’s saucy baritone makes every anecdote extra fun; Alex Winter makes some interesting connections between films and society at large; and some of the industry insider talking heads seem knowledgeable.

There’s no real rhyme or reason to the specific titles discussed, but more problematic is the superficial treatment of the genre. In four and a half hours, I should have learned something, should have heard of a movie I’d never known about. In Search of Darkness refuses to connect any dots.

Some of the asides about VHS cover art, for instance, are briefly interesting, but other such tangents only emphasize the film’s overall weaknesses. The discussion of the final girl or of gratuitous nudity in 80s horror lacks any kind of insight, but when the piece on horror soundtracks did not mention Goblin, it dawned on me that in early 4 ½ hours, not a single foreign title is discussed.

No Argento, no Fulci, no Deodado – niente.

A ninety minute doc that contents itself with a nostalgic traipse down VHS store aisles would be fun. A doc series that contextualizes the phenomenal explosion in the popularity of horror in the Eighties, digging into sexism, feminism, foreign titles, changing music, the Reagan influence, the impact of VHS and MTV – that would be amazing. In Search of Darkness is neither.

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Legacy

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John Lewis: Good Trouble

by Rachel Willis

With a man as active as John Lewis, finding a focal point from which to craft a story could prove challenging. Should a documentarian focus on his early years as a civil and voting rights activist? His first years as a politician? His contemporary battle to overturn voter suppression laws?

Director Dawn Porter decides to highlight a little bit of everything in John Lewis: Good Trouble. The result is a fascinating, if messy, portrait of one of America’s greatest fighters for equality and justice.

Porter’s efforts have previously featured John Lewis as an interviewee (the magnificent docu-series Bobby Kennedy for President), but this time, she mines the wealth of material surrounding the man himself.

Congressman Lewis is a more than worthy subject. His early years on the front lines of the fight for racial equality alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to his current stumps along the campaign trail offer endless archival footage, colleagues and siblings to interview, and opportunities to follow the Congressman during his day-to-day life on the Hill. 

Some of the most noteworthy parts of the documentary showcase conversations with those who have been inspired by Lewis. Representative James Clyburn says Lewis is “the most courageous person [he] has ever met.” Representative Ilhan Omar quotes John Lewis saying she took to heart his message to “love your country like you love yourself.”

The bulk of the film addresses Mr. Lewis’s continuing struggle to ensure voting is accessible to everyone. In the 50’s and 60’s, it involved (among other things) walking door to door in black neighborhoods to encourage the residents to vote. Today, he wages the war in Congress, trying to strengthen the Voting Rights Act after it was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013. On the campaign trail, he encourages those who are most affected by restrictive voting laws to turn out in waves.

Some moments drag, as Porter tries to cram as much information about Lewis as she can into her 96-minute documentary. Certain stories seem added as an afterthought that would perhaps have been better left on the cutting room floor.

Mr. Lewis says he is deeply concerned about the future of democracy in America, but that he still believes “we shall overcome.” Anyone who needs inspiration or hope in these chaotic times can always look to John Lewis for guidance.

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Survival Island

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Madagasikara

by Hope Madden

As little Anna tells viewers and her elementary school classmates, Madagascar is the 4th largest island on earth, and likely the single poorest country. Ninety three percent of Madagascar lives on less than $2 a day and half the population is children.

Madagascar is also devastatingly beautiful, not unlike Cam Cowan’s documentary Madagasikara.

Beautifully photographed and expertly edited, Madagasikara introduces you to a world you just didn’t know existed—one that’s never been site to war and yet grows more ravaged by poverty daily. It’s a world where breaking quarry rocks with hand tools offers the most stable occupation, for as long as your body holds out. The world of this film is one so impoverished it may as well be medieval—part of a long forgotten period where a family’s best hope for the survival of their children is the convent.  

For all the destitution, Cowan’s film is surprisingly joyous at times, primarily because of the beautiful little faces surrounding the three mothers—Deborah, Tina and Lin—that are the documentary’s main focus. It’s hard to watch so many sweet, cute children and not feel joy.

Their pain is also more punishing.

A decade of botched elections put the island nation at the center of a tug of war between a millionaire looking to exploit what he can for his own gain (sounds familiar) and a pro-military dictator even less interested in the wellbeing of his citizens. It also put Madagascar in the crosshairs of a global community more focused on sanctioning its leaders than in feeding its population.

Wisely, Cowan humanizes the tale of strife by dropping us into the day-to-day of three different women. Their struggles, joys and heartaches breathe life into statistics that could otherwise overwhelm, their resilience and their frailty speak powerfully to the human condition.

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Only One Star

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Queen of Lapa

by Rachel Willis

In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the neighborhood of Lapa is home to Luana Muniz, the focus of directors Theodore Collatos and Carolina Monnerat’s documentary, Queen of Lapa.  

A photoshoot of Muniz opens the film. She is elegant in black lingerie, holding a cigarette; the audience learns that she has been a sex worker since the age of eleven and is now one of the most recognized transgender (Luana prefers the term transvestite) activists in Brazil.

A hostel run by Muniz for over two decades provides a safe haven for transgender sex workers. It is this world that Collatos and Monnerat are privy to. They are given a level of access that allows the audience to experience these women’s lives as they live them.

Muniz is a bit of a mother hen to the women, many of them even call her Mother Luana. She scolds them for not cleaning up after themselves, expresses concern over injuries, and fights to ensure the house remains a place where transgender men and women can live and work safely.

It’s an important concern. Transgender men and women, and sex workers, experience violence at alarming rates. One of the women speaks of having gasoline poured on her before she escapes her attacker. The same woman is beaten and robbed one night, showing her injuries to her Facebook Live audience. Another woman is nearly raped but manages to flee.

However, the film focuses on more than one aspect of these women’s lives. It allows us a chance to spend time with the housemates and get to know them. There is a familial atmosphere as the roommates watch TV, do each other’s nails, eat meals together, and argue.

Some of the conversations are more interesting than others, but the filmmakers play a critical role with their lack of presence. They allow the group to share their own stories, to let their voices be heard at a time when it is essential that those who have been silenced in the past are allowed to speak. 

Muniz says of herself, “the only star here is me,” and in some ways, she is the sun to a community of people who need an advocate like her. One of the women recalls seeing Muniz on TV as a child, never expecting to know her as an adult, but it’s an example of the impact she has had on the community. She teaches the women how to be safe, how to not be ashamed of who they are, and that they are loved.

The world could use more people like Luana Muniz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfBAz26dZnY

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Unto Others

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For They Know Not What They Do

by Hope Madden

“If a lot of people have just a little bit of courage, then nobody has to be a hero.”

If we can’t see the truth in that statement right now, we are truly lost. It’s a call to action, and an argument that For They Know Not What They Do patiently articulates.

A sequel of sorts to director Daniel G. Karslake’s 2007 doc For the Bible Tells Me So, For They Know Not What They Do revisits the Christian church after more than a decade to gauge its movement on LGBTQ rights.

The film drops you into the lives of four families navigating the complex world of faith and sexual identity.

Elliott is about to leave for his freshman year at Vassar, and he and his parents walk us through what it’s like to trust your adolescent enough to begin the irreversible. Ryan, with the help of his genuinely loving if deeply misdirected parents, commits to praying the gay away. Sarah is as committed to the political career she started as a middle school class president as she is in fully transitioning. Victor survived a tragedy thanks in part to the unflinching support of his Catholic parents.

In and around all of these stories, Karslake examines the political backlash to marriage equality, particularly the way the religious right has targeted the especially vulnerable transgender population and what that has meant in terms of violence.

All of the parents involved display their courageous human frailty, owning their immediate and long-term responses to knowledge of their children’s sexuality or gender identification.

Their continued reliance on faith to help them see where religious dogma had become poisonous is among the loveliest elements of the film. These parents lean on their scripture’s concept of forgiveness (mainly to forgive themselves for having harmed their children), love, and acceptance to help them see beyond their own fear.

It’s a path Karslake takes as well. This is a forgiving documentary. It never turns a blind eye toward the way the religious right uses organized religion as a tool to oppress. But FTKNWTD is more interested in how faith does not have to be tainted by this noxious hate. It’s a bold vision for a documentary on Christianity and LGBTQ suffering.

It is also perhaps the film’s strongest selling point. Karslake doesn’t preach at, condescend to or even vilify the audience most in need of the film’s message.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cke9VNzAqNY

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Man of Your Dreams

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Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street

by Hope Madden

“It was intended to play as homophobic rather than homoerotic.”

So says David Chaskin, writer of 1985’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge—a film many consider to be the gayest horror movie ever made. Chaskin has long shared the belief that it was the casting of Mark Patton in the lead role, the “final boy,” that pushed the envelope from homophobic to homoerotic.

Chaskin is right.

Thank God for casting.

The mid-Eighties hardly needed another homophobic movie, or another AIDS-terrified horror flick. Did it need the story of an adolescent boy whose homosexual nature emerges as some monstrous id, only to be cured by the love of a good woman? No, but if you just don’t watch the last ten minutes of the film, Nightmare 2 is a bizarre and glorious B-movie coming out party.

Again, thanks to Mark Patton.

Patton is the center of the Shudder documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street. He also produces, which means he gives the footage his OK, leading to a film that comes off as self-congratulatory and self-indulgent more often than it should. But there is no denying Patton’s life has been fascinating.

Patton’s a charming, charismatic vehicle for the doc and the insight he offers into burgeoning stardom, closeted Hollywood and the Eighties is riveting. He’d lived quite a life before his first feature lead likely ended his career—but what he survived outside Elm Street was certainly tougher.

So much so that Patton’s particular anxiety about how this film affected him and his career sometimes feels misplaced. But watching how his perception of the “gay controversy” has evolved and what that evolution has allowed him to do within the gay community is delightful.

Of course, equally fascinating for horror fans is the debate as to who did and did not realize how profoundly gay Nightmare 2 was. Patton’s co-stars—Robert Englund (Freddy himself) comes off especially well—each add to the conversation in entertaining ways, though director Jack Sholder should maybe stop talking.

First time filmmakers Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen seem unsure of their real aim: to tell Mark’s story, to help Mark find closure, to deconstruct the film’s subtext, to explore its lasting meaning for the LGBTQ community. Because of their meandering focus, Scream, Queen feels longer than it needs to be.

Lucky for the filmmakers, every one of those topics makes for an intriguing investigation, and watching Patton triumphantly recreate his iconic (and likely career-ending) dance scene is sheer joy.  

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Seeking Truth

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The Dalai Lama: Scientist

by Rachel Willis

People around the world generally know something about the 14th Dalai Lama. Whether you know him as a religious figure, political refugee, or something else entirely, director Dawn Gifford Engle wants to highlight another aspect of the Dalai Lama – scientist.

For over thirty years, the Dalai Lama has hosted talks with some of the world’s leading scientists. From George Greenstein (cosmologist) to Francisco Varela (biologist and neuroscientist) to Steven Chu (physicist), the Dalai Lama has opened discussions, facilitated new ways of thinking, and highlighted similarities between western science and Buddhist science.

From interviews with the Dalai Lama, we learn that had he not become the 14th Dalai Lama, he may have pursued a career in engineering. Many of those who speak with the Dalai Lama emphasize the fact that he has a “curious mind.”

Most, if not all, of these meetings with scientists were recorded, so Engle has a wealth of footage to use to tell this story.

Unfortunately, this is largely where the documentary falters. With all this footage, the film spends too much time trying to help the audience understand the basics of fields like cosmology, quantum physics and biology. Unless one is particularly keen to learn about these topics, the documentary becomes tedious. It fails in its primary purpose of underlining the ways in which the Dalai Lama has contributed his understanding to these subjects. Most of these scenes focus on the scientist of the moment, animating his words with simple graphics, while the Dalai Lama listens intently. Most of what is learned through these scenes is that His Holiness is a good listener (admittedly a good trait to possess).

The film is also guilty of meandering as it digs through thirty years of footage. Early on, there is a brief section explaining the war between Tibet and China that led to the Dalai Lama’s exile in India. Some beautiful animations appear in the first ten minutes of the film, showing some of the moments in the Dalai Lama’s young life that made him interested in the universe. Those animations are discarded too early – an unfortunate decision, as they are some of the most effective moments.

The film does remind us why the Dalai Lama is admired around the world. He is a champion of using science to improve the world for all conscious beings, he advocates scientific understanding for all (it is a requirement of monks in their monastic training), and he stands as a reminder that religion and science can go hand in hand.

These are a few of the lessons worth learning within this disjointed documentary.

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For Art’s Sake

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Beyond the Visible – Hilma af Klint

by Hope Madden

Film pioneer Alice Guy Blache and contemporary art ground-breaker Yayoi Kusama were copied, hidden and disregarded by the predominantly male industry that determined not only financial success but historical acknowledgment.

In 1906 – five years before Kandinsky painted Composition VII, long considered the genesis of abstract art—Sweden’s Hilma af Klimpt had already created a breathtaking series of abstracts. Not that you’ve heard of her.

How could you? As Halina Dyrschka’s documentary Beyond the Visible – Hilma af Klint points out, she wasn’t accepted in her time.

Not uncommon for a great artist. What Dyrschka and those she speaks with in the documentary find far more frustrating is that today, even when her genius is acknowledged (more than a million visitors have taken in the current exhibition of her work), art history shuns her.

Leaving behind hundreds of paintings and thousands of pages of journal entries and sketches, af Klint offers an unusual story of a singular life. Inspired by science, nature and spirituality in ways that would seem wildly uncommon today and must have been outright bizarre in her time, she devoted herself to a vibrant artistic exploration.

The filmmaker lingers lovingly on the work, devoting every inch of screen to the vivid color and fascinating images. She surrounds footage of the paintings with landscapes, architecture and even talking head footage framed for elegance. The material balances the energy of af Klint’s work with a calm that’s sometimes even quietly spiritual.

Still, the underlying outrage at history’s reluctance to accept the truth gives the film an energy matched by the excitement of discovery, which is never lost on the filmmaker. As impatient as the film is with the unhurried acknowledgment of genius, it’s equally thrilled to be able to share this genius with an eager if unknowing audience.  

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Partial

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Santiago, Italia

by Hope Madden

History repeats itself.  This often frustrating, even tragic theme has powered many films and documentaries over the years, including Nanni Moretti’s Santiago, Italia.  

An account of Chile’s 1973 military coup, Santiago, Italia approaches its history with a fascinating, character-driven approach. An opening news footage montage sets the stage—no timeline or voiceover narration detail events for you.

The people of Chile democratically elect a socialist president. Chileans are excited and hopeful. Big business and the military is not. Planes fly low over the city. Bombs drop. Hope turns to terror.

Moretti, 6-time nominee and 2001 winner of the Palme d’Or, isn’t exactly known as a documentarian. His instincts as a storyteller supersede, even complement, his disregard for the standard practice of documentary. The result is a slice of global, political, human life that bristles with passion and indignation.

Moretti’s main characters are a handful of Chilean exiles, persecuted and, in several cases, tortured for their political views and later exiled to Italy. As moving as it is to see emotion sneak up on someone remembering a moment now nearly fifty years old, witnessing someone recount their own torture with such a clear eye and lack of emotion is even more unsettling.

The filmmaker spends time with former military as well. Among others, he interviews imprisoned war criminal Raul Iturriaga, who believes the two sides should just forgive and forget. Irked at the direction the interview takes, Iturriaga challenges Moretti’s impartiality.

Moretti corrects him.

“Yo no soy imparcial.”  

And why should he be? With Santiago, Italy, Moretti recounts a story of two countries bound by a common desire for freedom from tyranny. As he sees that history replay itself once again, he believes that this is a story that bears repeating.

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Hot in the City

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The Hottest August

by Hope Madden

It’s August, 2016 – the hottest August in history – and Brett Story (The Prison in Twelve Landscapes) is taking the temperature of New York City. Armed with open-ended questions, she travels borough to borough gauging different New Yorkers’ sensibilities concerning climate, race, capitalism, robotics, gentrification, unions.

As the world sweats and readies itself for a total solar eclipse, Story gets people talking.

Her subjects are not tongue tied, and their soliloquies are loosely linked one to the other by their in-the-moment nature. You can’t talk about this moment, it seems, without waxing nostalgic about the past and worrying about the future.

How do they feel about the future?

Some are compelled to take action, to exert some control over their present to claim their own future. Others prepare. Some take note of what’s going on around them and that’s enough. Some don’t even do that.

The film is equally fascinating whether it’s digging into grand ideas or sitting in a sidewalk lawn chair chit chatting about the nastier, day-to-day consequences of gentrification.

It’s best, though, when it walks alongside Afronaut – New York artist or man from the future who’s come back to make notes on the present and offer sage advice?

Multiply the probability of a harm by the magnitude of the harm.

All directors manipulate the message, especially documentarians, and Story is no different. Story’s unshowy curiosity proves an amicable though not passive guide. She doesn’t judge, neither does she excuse.

Story talks with big thinkers in their spacious, impressive apartments. She follows activists to the streets as they practice to effect change. She sits on a barstool with Yankee fans who’d like to reframe racism as “resentment.“

Is the future controllable, inevitable, or both? Are we preparing for it, or will it eat us whole like the moon ate the sun that August? The answer is ultimately surreal – just ask Afronaut.