Director: Sarah Polley, Watched in:  Theater Rating:  3.5/5.     In the documentary Stories We Tell, director Sarah Polley invites us into her cinematic scrapbook of home movies and family interviews with a playful, warm embrace. The film is both a memoir about her mother and a meta-commentary on the process of making a movie about memory. Beginning with a disarming montage of relatives settling down on chairs and couches for interviews, admitting their shyness and asking Polley if anyone really should care about their family history, the movie immediately establishes a non-threatening atmosphere of trust and familiarity. The story being told here may be unremarkable, but Polley’s deft command of structure, film formats and dramatic layering is polished enough to invite our intimacy. Her honesty is so genuine that when a third act revelation comes along, a revelation not in the story being told but in the method used to tell the story, it has the potential to destroy nearly all the goodwill the film has accumulated up to that point. Polley grew up the youngest child of a family of five. Her father dabbled in acting and writing but decided to sell insurance to support his family. Her mom was a housewife who also acted and sang, was beautiful and beloved, and who died of cancer when Polley was only 11 years old. Family lore had it there was always something fishy about Sarah’s birth. So, armed with curiosity and a camera crew, she set out to establish, once and for all, whether or not [...]

Director:  Davis Guggenheim, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  4/5.     There are actually two inconvenient truths in An Inconvenient Truth. The first truth is stark and unavoidable: the devastating effects of global warming are accelerating even faster than we want to believe, so fast that in 50 years floods may kill millions of people around the world and create millions more refugees, while corrupt politicians are more concerned with starting wars based on lies, securing the profits of General Motors and Haliburton, and making the United States safe from gay weddings. The second truth is more subtle, and to the easily distracted mainstream media, still debatable:  if the 2000 election was not stolen from Al Gore, and the voters who picked him, then he would have probably paid attention to the memo that said Osama bin Laden was determined to attack inside the US and Sept.11th, the war in Iraq, illegal wiretapping, secret torture, and the anti-gay marraige amendent would be nothing but fictions in a Scooter Libby bodice-ripper.  That’s a lot of truth for a documentary that is essentially an artfully filmed power point presentation.  But it shows you how powerful, and deeply depressing, the truth can be.  That’s why America’s gated community of politicians finds it easier to make stuff up. No matter what you think of Al Gore—his drone, his dry as dust wit, his stiff, serious, senior thesis approach to his material—you know he’s not making any of it up, and that’s why An Inconvenient Truth should be required viewing for every middle and [...]

Director: Haskell Wexler, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  5/5.     In Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, set during Chicago’s 1968 Democratic convention, vibrates with the intensity of watching history happen before our eye. Wexler, already an established veteran director of photography for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, In The Heat of the Night, and The Thomas Crown Affair, grafted the fictitious story of a news cameraman’s tentative love affair into his real-time street footage of the convention and ensuing protests, creating a one-of-a-kind film that is both politically astute and cinematically playful. Wexler was a master with the long lens. He was a student of montage. His scenes have a tactile momentum. A foot chase through a parking lot, a boy’s long wander through the city, and the aftermath of a fatal car accident are all staged with an attention to the process of cutting on rhythm, of building coherent sequences. His scenes crackle with a visual intelligence, even when they dawdle on the storytelling. Medium Cool is a commentary on many things: Vietnam (of course), political upheaval, the emerging self-importance of TV news, the dialectic of McLuhan’s hot and cool media, and the casual racism of white liberals (reflected in a scene where the cameraman and his sound guy find themselves uncomfortably challenged by a room full of black radical intellectuals). The cameraman, played with the right touch of arrogance by a young, intense Robert Forster, falls in love with a woman (Verna Bloom) from Appalachia, whose pre-teen son has begun to forget his own father, who [...]

Director:  David France, Watched on: Cable On-demand, Rating:  4.5/5.     How To Survive A Plague sounds like the title of a post-apocalyptic adventure picture.  For the gay and bisexual men who lived through the AIDS epidemic, a private apocalypse is exactly what faced each and every one of them throughout the long, frightening days that made up much of the ‘80s and early ‘90s. This film, a ragged and startling account of what amounted to a collective cry for help and recognition by a population ignored, abandoned and left to die, is indeed a must-see for any group or subculture who realizes their lives depend on their ability to summon the courage to fight back. Director David France focuses on the primary AIDS activist group ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and an offshoot, called TAG (the Treatment Action Group) that splintered acrimoniously from ACT UP in order to pursue what some in the movement felt was a misguided, even conciliatory side mission: a concerted push for drug testing to combat AIDS, which meant working with drug companies, the CDC, even politicians, akin in some activist’s eyes to sleeping with the enemy. Using a trove of rough home video, news clips, and later interviews, the events of the film charge off the screen, grab you by the collar, and force you to imagine what you would do if your life and the lives of nearly everyone you loved was at stake, and the people with the power to help wrote you off. How To [...]

Director:  Gonzalo Arijon, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  4.5/5.     Documentary gatekeepers—the distributors and film festival programmers who get to decide what docs are worthy of their audiences—will tell you that the most important quality they look for in a film is access, meaning the access the filmmakers have to elements of their story no one else has. This all too often leads to a sacrifice of craft and artistry for the sake of the more sensational aspects of subject matter, but in the case of the excellent documentary, Stranded:  I Have Come From A Plane That Crashed on the Mountains, the opposite is true.  Yes, the director had an envious amount of access to the characters and the archival footage used in the film, but out of that familiarity he constructed a stirring, spellbinding meditation on the soul’s unquenchable thirst for life, especially when it competes with the serene temptations of a quiet, painless death. Stranded recounts a story we’ve heard before: the tragic 1972 plane crash in the Andes that marooned a Uruguayan rugby team for 72 days. 16 young men survived only by resorting to cannibalism, eating the flesh of their dead teammates and friends. Their tale at first horrified the world, but when it quickly became clear that their survival depended on the sacrifice of the dead, and that they treated the act as almost a sacred ritual, their story evolved into a unique kind of heroism. The film was directed by Gonzalo Arijon, a childhood friend of the survivors, who treks back into [...]

Director: Malik Bendjelloul, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  4/5.     Where-are-they-now tales of celebrities making it big before a fast slide to oblivion are always hard to resist, but the makers of the new documentary Searching For Sugarman had a bigger problem. Their subject, a singer-songwriter from the early ‘70s going by the name Rodriguez, never even had a sustained music career, let alone a hit, and he was all but unknown in the United States. Somewhere it is written everyone’s musical cachet must begin or end in America, but Cape Town, South Africa never read that memo. Thanks to a bootleg tape, Rodriguez’s honest, biting, inner-city tales of alienation slipped into that then isolated country. His music, ignored here, became an overnight sensation during the apartheid era, expressing the pent-up frustrations of a young, educated white population yearning for a way to protest the strict racial and structural codes of their society. The fact that Rodriguez was completely unaware of his new found celebrity, and that he may have burned himself alive on stage, makes for a terrific mystery story, one in which the details the filmmakers decided to leave unexplored only adds to the shaded myth of the man and his music. His music provides the atmospheric soundtrack for the documentary, underscoring moody ‘70s era footage of Detroit and Cape Town, as the film shuffles back and forth through the years.  Music journalists and a record store owner in South Africa talk about the singer’s impact and fame, his galvanizing influence on the white youth, and [...]

Director:  Barbara Kopple, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  5/5.   Harlan County USA, director Barbara Kopple’s account of a miner’s strikes in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1973, won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1976. It remains a classic example of third person, observational, immersive documentary filmmaking. Kopple and her crew spent more than a year covering the coal miners’ strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company when the company refused to negotiate a new contract with the recently unionized miners.  What ensued wass an elemental stand-off between the hard-scrabble working men and women of the hollers of Appalachia and the gun-toting thugs of capitalist corporate America. Harlan County USA is shot in grainy, 16mm color film, the textural equivalent here of raw earth and coal dust; the music is deep, backwoods bluegrass and miners’ laments; and the point-of-view is obviously one sympathetic to the miners’ cause. This was a time when documentary filmmaking was a tool of the rebels, the social historians, and the political anthropologists (while many of today’s docs look like hack work for well-funded non-profit causes). Kopple includes brief but pungent historical perspectives on coal mining and the film is patient enough to let the atmosphere seep into her frames. The woodsmoke, the laundry on the line, the dented pick-ups and the plaid shirts, the music and the talk, echo back through generations. The progress of the strike is clearly followed and the film finds its characters in the conversations and conflicts between the strikers, the scabs, the cops, and the [...]

Director:  Alex Gibney, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  2.5/5.     Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson, gets the “life” part of its title down on film. The other half, the work part, you’ll have to find out yourself.  Read Hells Angels or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or The Great Shark Hunt to discover what made Thompson a maverick journalist. You you won’t get much of a sense of it from the movie. Gonzo is a lively, fast-paced, mostly enjoyable tour of the signposts that marked the manic myth of Thompson’s life:  the early days riding with the Angels; his work for Rolling Stone; his fear and loathing on the campaign trail of the 1972 McGovern/Nixon election; his love of booze, drugs, guns, and women; his audacious tweaking of the rules of journalism; and his descent into caricature as a cartoon figure in Doonesbury. There are plenty of interviews with the likes of Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, Pat Buchanan, Jimmy Buffet, his two wives, Jan Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, and Timothy Crouse, author of the classic The Boys On the Bus. There are fascinating clips from Thompson’s appearance on the game show To Tell The Truth, from a little seen documentary called Breakfast with Hunter, from the Bill Murray movie Where the Buffalo Roam, and from the Terry Gilliam directed version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, staring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro.  Yes, it’s all there: the wild and crazy life of Hunter S. Thompson, revolutionary writer, drunk, and self-fulfilling [...]

Director:  Jeff Feuerzieg, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:   4.5/5.   The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a riveting documentary about a man who descends into mental illness at the same time he acquires a cult following for his primitive artistic achievements.  His fans embrace his childlike songs sung and strummed on a guitar and recorded to audio cassettes, and trendy Soho art galleries sell his colorful comic book drawings to collectors. While at the same time, his parents and friends have him committed, again and again, for violent assaults and dangerous flights from responsibility. Daniel Johnston, while still very much alive, but very seriously mentally ill, started his artistic pursuits early in childhood.  He was driven to create, making Super8mm films in which he played all the characters and pieced together soundtracks featuring secret audio tapes he made of his mother.  He drew, he acted, he wrote songs, he was by all accounts an imaginative and talented kid.  When he hit adolescence, he retreated, like many teenage boys, to his bedroom.  He grew sullen and a bit angry, but he kept creating art, mainly music, plinked out on a cheap electric piano, with ironic, absurd lyrics, sounding like a primitive cross between Bob Dylan and the Butthole Surfers.  He was weird but blessed with self-confidence, and his quirky art endeared him to the alternative music scene in Austin, Texas.  He got his own manager, who worked hard at maintaining Johnston’s self-image as an edgy savant.  But then Johnston dropped acid, and things took a serious turn down the slippery [...]

Director:  Eugene Jarecki, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  3/5.     My hope for Why We Fight is that it will reach all of the homes and especially the high schools that house the future cannon fodder for George Bush’s imperialist army. Perhaps this film and the others like it—An Inconvenient Truth, The Road to Guantanamo, Robert Greenwald’s Moveon.org marketed drive-by documentaries—will end up making a difference after all.  I hope so, because the feeling one gets watching Why We Fight is a great and desperate anger, followed by depression, and then hopelessness. A fun time at the movies it’s not.  But the lessons contained within are essential. Why We Fight is not great documentary filmmaking. It is snipped and cliff-noted, sound-bited and sanded down into an unemotional and clearly left-leaning treatise. There are way too many talking heads and the supporting footage is scattershot, without real focus or even clear attribution. You’re never quite sure which scenes are new, old, or recreated. But the information is clear-headed and sobering. And the jumping off point for the film is intriguing. The movie takes its title from the series of World War II propoganda films made by the likes of Frank Capra and John Huston; but its premise comes from a 1961 speech by outgoing president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower was a former general, who oversaw the troops in World War II but disagreed with Truman over the dropping of the bomb on Japan.  He saw a scary thing happening. The emergence of the military-industrial complex essentially as the tail [...]