Director: Jason Reid, Watched:  Online, Rating:  4/5.     The most popular documentary in Seattle right now tells the story of greedy capitalists lying to the American public while pocketing millions of dollars with corporate help and then cowardly retreating behind the walls of their empires to leave in their wake a hurt, wounded, and ignored citizenry. No I’m not talking about Capitalism: A Love Story, I’m talking about a locally made labor of love called Sonicsgate, the sad story of the hijacking of the Seattle Sonics by a lying bunch of faux cowboys from Oklahoma. Director Jason Reid and his filmmaking partners made this film for less than $10,000 and yet he is giving it away online, free, to anyone who wants to go to their website, sonicsgate.org, and watch the film immediately with a click of a mouse. So far, in a little more than a week, 30,000 people have viewed the film. If you were either a casual or hardcore Sonic fan, you were no doubt just as bewildered as I was by the tragic demise of the longest existing professional sports team in Seattle, and, along with the Seattle Storm, the only one to ever win a world championship. The Storm was saved at the last minute, but the Sonics were lost and are gone forever. Sonicsgate is a thorough, well-organized, and professional piece of work, even though the filmmakers had little game footage to work with. But they have plenty of clips from local newscasts, press conferences, rallies, home movie footage and interviews [...]

Director: Michael Moore, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  4/5.     Have you wondered why you hardly ever run into people who’ve moved to the United States from Canada or Europe, especially France and England?  Americans are always moving there, but why don’t they move here to take advantage of our low taxes, our rugged individualism, our health insurance?  Michael Moore tells us why in his latest documentary, Sicko, an utterly depressing piece of agit prop that not only condemns the privatized health care business in the US but also finds something rotten at the very core of the country. How is it possible, Moore asks, that in the wealthiest country in the world we are at our most poor in how we take care of each other. Thanks to lobbyists, anti-socialist rhetoric and back-door political deals, the US has a health care system that actually rewards CEOs and administrators for denying people medical care. The fewer mammograms, cholesterol exams, diabetes tests, etc. that a hospital performs means a fatter bottom line for insurance companies and HMOs and, this being America, where greed trumps every other motivation, that is a good thing. By the end of Sicko, you’ll either revoke your citizenship and move to Paris, or you’ll do exactly what the powers that be want us to do, retreat even more into a fetal cocoon of paralysis. The most alarming theory that Moore offers is the idea that a populace locked into a cycle of debt, work, and fear has neither the time nor the will to change [...]

Director:  Errol Morris, Watched in:   Theater Rating:  2/5.   With Standard Operating Procedure, investigative stylist Errol Morris dissects the Abu Ghraib prison scandal by forcing us to look, over and over and over again, at the photographs that brought the scandal to the world’s attention. He also digs out several other snapshots, much more graphic, revealing, and repellent than the ones we saw in the mainstream press. He intersperses these photos with several talking head interviews of soldiers and investigators involved in the mess and with highly cinematic recreations or imaginings of the events. These exotically lit and elaborately art directed sequences are standard operating procedure for Morris as a filmmaker but, like the guards at Abu Ghraib, he has gone too far. Morris seems to be relishing too much the opportunity to visualize the sordid events that occurred at Abu Ghraib. He fetishizes the extreme close-ups of blood, bits of hair, and steel bars.  Some scenes are lit with an eye for erotic sleaze, as if they were excerpts from a Nazi stag film.  Other moments are rendered in shadows and silhouette, with pools of–one assumes–urine or blood shimmering in the foreground. The onslaught of these scenes, cut together with photographs showing Iraqi men stripped naked and forced into humiliating positions, and other photographs of the guards laughing or taking crude pictures of each other, combined with the endless interviews of soldiers (some of whom seem, I hate to say it, not very bright), adds up to an excruciating and often repulsive 2 hours of movie [...]

Director:  Robinson Devor, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  1.5/5.     Zoo is based on the infamous Enumclaw horse sex case of July, 2005, where a man died in the hospital from a perforated colon after he was, um, penetrated by a stallion. The movie combines voice-over interviews with actors and staged scenes. I admire films that push the boundaries between documentary and fiction; especially docs that can tell a story or enhance the reality of it subject matter by avoiding the usual menu of talking heads, news footage, and blandly shot and edited digital video. Too many documentaries these days are simply not worth the time it takes to watch them. It is much more efficient, and usually more enlightening, to simply read the newspaper articles they are based on. Zoo is also ripped from the headlines, but director Robinson Devor and co-writer Charles Mudede, Northwest filmmakers, avoid direct storytelling and even journalism in this film, which amounts to a highly atmospheric but narratively inert attempt at explaining the world of zoophiles, or zoos, men who like to have sex with horses. I have nothing but praise for director of photography Sean Kirby, editor Joel Shapiro, and composer Paul Mathew Moore. They create a pastoral Eden by day and a slightly menacing world of shadowy men by night, with the ghostly presence of Mt. Rainier hovering in the background. Their work is beautiful and often mesmerizing. But Devor and Mudede have used these elements to craft a picture that is artistically and emotionally remote. They’ve avoided, thankfully, showing [...]

Approaching the Elephant Director/ Amanda Rose Wilder Watched at True/False Film Festival Rating 4.5/5 Approaching the Elephant, a striking, DIY documentary by director Amanda Rose Wilder, chronicles the inaugural year of an experimental elementary school in New Jersey, Wilder, working alone, adopts the style of direct cinema filmmakers such as Albert Maysles (Salesman) and D.A Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back). Wilder avoids narration, talking heads, soundtrack music, or any manipulative point-of-view, planting herself in the classroom as the virtual personification of a fly-on-the-wall. The classic technique, which can more often than not tumble slowly down the hallways of tedium, requires–when done well–not only a firm and patient commitment on the part of the filmmaker, but also subject matter that lives up to the investment of a viewer’s time. In the case of this film, what begins as a sometimes shambling, unfocused experiment gathers an absorbing, even visceral power. Several years ago I worked as a freelance cameraman on a CBS news series called “Before Your Eyes,” which attempted to mimic the direct cinema experience by allowing the characters, combatants in a child custody case, to go about their day making phone calls, driving to meetings and walking in and out of rooms, observed up close and from afar by a camera crew always listening in via wireless microphones. The idea, the audience was told, was to watch a story develop before your eyes. The program was brazenly anti-commercial for such a profit-driven corporation, and the enormous cost of paying production crews quickly sunk the series after a [...]

About A Son Director/AJ Schnack Watched on iTunes Rating 4.5/5   This is the other Kurt Cobain documentary, the one released in 2007 and now being ignored in the wake of the so-called “authorized” doc, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. For my money, About a Son is the far superior film. Directed by AJ Schnack, the entire movie rests on audio interviews with Cobain recorded by journalist Michael Azerrad for his book “Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana,” and supported by a vivid tapestry of iconic, Northwest imagery. From Aberdeen to Olympia to Seattle, Schnack and his cinematographer Wyatt Troll weave together gorgeous visuals and Cobain’s intensely intimate recollections of his childhood and rise to unexpected fame to craft a poetic, cinematic essay, an impressionistic version of Cobain’s too-short life that is both exhilarating and heartbreaking. Schnack was operating without access to Cobain’s journals, home movies or music. The songs on the soundtrack are by the bands that influenced Kurt, and they provide more insight than the repeated spins of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in Montage of Heck. The director also avoided interviews, press clippings or photographs. A brief series of Cobain pics at the very end is the only time we see him. Schnack turns these limitations into a powerful expression of place: the fecund isolation at the perpetually damp bottom end of the Olympic Peninsula which fueled Cobain’s outsider philosophies; the tantalizing promise of a future he saw in the bustling college town of Olympia; and the starry-eyed dreams of true rock-n-roll success he hoped to attain in [...]

Watermark Director/ Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky Watched in Theater Rating 3.5/5  The report known as the National Climate Assessment predicts a near future of massive drought, raging wildfires, torrential rains and heavy flooding. In other words, we’re fucked. But rather than taking a desperate approach to our impending doom, the ruminative new documentary Watermark details our implicit connection to water, the lifeblood of the planet, in a series of dreamy, contemplative vignettes. Directed by Canadians Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky, an environmental photographer who collaborated with Baichwal on the stunning 2006 picture, Manufactured Landscapes, the film meanders across the globe, dropping in on Arctic scientists studying ice cores to determine ancient patterns of global warming, observing millions of Indian pilgrims bathing in the Ganges and depicting the grotesque polluting of an urban bay in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I hope you didn’t see the film when it recently played at Seattle’s Varsity Theater. Thanks to an outdated projector screening an inferior video version, it looked scuzzy and washed-out. (Shame on you, Landmark Theaters, for charging full price!!) Too bad, since the film was shot in gorgeous high-def by Nicholas de Pencier, and imagery is everything in this movie. Majestic scenes of waterfalls and dam flows accentuating the enormous power of water are contrasted with other scenes of humans contorting mother nature to fit our needs, for both pleasure and business. The movie is murky and beside the point in some scenes, especially those in which we see Burtynsky looking at contact sheets or setting up his expensive camera equipment. [...]

Finding Vivian Maier Director/ John Maloof Watched on Netflix Rating 3/5   Finding Vivian Maier is an often fascinating film of anthropology, an investigative peek down the rabbit hole of one eccentric and very private woman’s life. Vivian Maier worked as a nanny for several wealthy Chicago families. She was, by most accounts, responsible, dutiful, imperious, harsh and intrepid. She took her young charges on outings throughout the rougher corners of the city, bringing along the usual accouterments of the nanny trade: strollers, diapers, baby bottles and snacks. She also carried a Rolleiflex camera, a boxy big cousin to the old Brownie cameras of 50’s and 60’s era childhoods.  With it she snapped thousands upon thousands of pictures, most of them black-and-white, many of them left undeveloped in their canisters. Nearly all of them are astonishing. Maier was not famous. She never received a penny for her photographs. She shared very few of them. Hardly anyone was aware of the staggering quality of her work. She died a hoarder’s death in a cramped apartment, surrounded by towering stacks of newspapers. When John Maloof, who co-directed this film along with Charlie Siskel, bought several boxes that belonged to Maier at an estate auction, he also had no idea who she was or what the boxes contained. He was just a guy who grew up going to swap meets and enjoyed sifting through the artifacts of other people’s lives. When he discovered the massive trove of pictures, he quickly turned to the Internet to help piece together Maier’s background in an attempt [...]

Anita Director/ Frieda Lee Mock Watched in Theater Rating 3.5/5 Where were you in October 1991? I know where my daughter was. She was asleep in her car seat while my wife and I sat in our SUV during a weekend vacation, ears glued to NPR’s live coverage of Anita Hill’s testimony during the confirmation hearing of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. “Anita-who?,” my daughter asked me, 23 years later. “Clarence Thomas? Him?” she said, when recalling a few articles she may have researched about the Hill-Thomas episode while in college. If nothing else, the documentary, Anita, will thrust this now celebrated author, law professor and women’s rights advocate back into the spotlight, and illuminate for an entire generation of young women the antediluvian attitudes toward sexual harassment that persisted a mere 20-some years ago. Anita is not groundbreaking as a documentary, but Anita Hill the person was, even though the idea of becoming a cause célèbre was the farthest thing from her mind. Anita opens with a recorded message that was left on Anita Hill’s home phone in 2010. Alert viewers will remember the minor kerfuffle surrounding this call; others will be taken by surprise. Either way it’s a jaw-dropping way to start a story that still has the power to provoke shock, anger and disbelief. While Hill, now an Oklahoma law professor, toiled as an assistant to Clarence Thomas at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, she endured unwanted flirtations and outright sexual misconduct from the man who, a short time later, was [...]