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 [...]

Director:  Lauren Greenfield, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  3/5.     The rich are different than you and me.  For one thing, they have more money.  For another, they don’t seem to know what to do with it. In the new documentary, The Queen of Versailles, we get to watch a filthy rich couple prance then stumble through the wreckage of the economic recession without ever really coming to terms with the grotesque side effects of greed.   Their false compassion for the less fortunate, their switch from shopping sprees at Saks to shopping sprees at Wal-Mart, their firing of a few expendables from their platoon of nannies, these are their ideas of sacrifice. What makes The Queen of Versailles fascinating is the attempt by the filmmakers to tease out our sympathies for people we find appalling. David and Jackie Siegel live in Orlando in a vast McMansion that is bursting at the seams with 8 kids, several poodles, an army of helpers, rooms full of disposable possessions and walls plastered with gawdy vanity portraits. When the film’s director, Lauren Greenfield, got wind of the Siegel’s plans to build a new crib, a 90,000 square-foot replica of the palace at Versailles, which would make it the largest house in the country, she convinced the couple to let her make a movie about wealth and consumerism in America. Jackie Siegel, with her huge manufactured breasts and skin-tight designer shorts, siezes the role of star and tour guide. She unapologetically leads Greenfield and her crew on an entertaining cruise through her daily [...]

Director:  Charles Ferguson, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  4.5/5.     No End in Sight may seem like any other big-screen documentary, one of the rare few that is allowed to play in theaters before it is launched into the infinite online universe. The movie is polished to a professional sheen, narrated with a somber but commanding presence by Campbell Scott, with interviews lighted in deep, rich colors that suggest a hefty budget. But unlike the assembly-lined facile professionalism of an Alex Gibney film, there is a heightened and intensely sober intelligence at work. The movie presents little new general information. It is now common knowledge, unless you live under a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker, that the Bush administration committed a series of grevious errors in the first few months of the Iraq war that virtually guaranteed the mess we are now in. The power of No End in Sight lies not necessarily in its recitation of these errors—although they are mind-boggling—but in the way the director of the film has managed to bring together, in one place, a veritable battering ram of expert opinion vilifying nearly every decision this administration made in the early days of the war. The men and women interviewed here were hired by Bush’s team because they knew what they were doing—people with years of foreign policy training, people who knew how to establish communication and chains of command in countries we were occupying, military strategists with decades of experience in other wars—and yet, and yet...nearly every important decision they were paid to make was [...]

Director:  Sarah Burns and David McMahon, Ken Burns, Watched in: Theater Rating:  4.5/5.     The Central Park Five, directed by Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon, is many things: an historical record of New York in the late ‘80s when it was gripped by fear and racism; a true crime thriller, recounted with incisive journalistic scrutiny; and an emotionally wrenching personal story of five boys whose lives were shattered by a heinous miscarriage of justice.  It is both extremely well-crafted and intimately moving, a testimony to the power of patient, attentive storytelling. How many of us remember the story of the Central Park jogger?  A young, white, Wall Street working woman who went out for an evening run in the park, and was brutally raped and beaten and left for dead in the brush. How many of us remember the five black and mixed-race teenagers arrested, convicted and jailed for the crime? The story claimed front-page space in newspapers nationwide. The party line was this: the teens were members of a so-called “wolf pack” of thugs, roaming the parks and streets of the world’s most famous city, engaging in something called “wilding”, savage and random attacks on defenseless, innocent people. The awful story of their rampage confirmed the image of New York as a crime-ridden metropolis, overrun by menacing black gangs high on crack. In the ensuing weeks, the police, the press and even mayor Ed Koch signed, sealed and delivered the fate of the Central Park Five before their trial began. [...]