Director:  Crystal Moselle, Watched in:  Theater Rating:  2.5/5.   The Wolfpack, a Sundance-award winning documentary, offers viewers the kind of beguiling story usually reserved for novels or memoirs. The six New York brothers featured in the film, who grow into their teen years and beyond during the course of the movie, have hardly ever ventured outside the walls of their cramped Lower East Side apartment. Virtually imprisoned by a domineering father and their beloved but passive mother, they engage with the world by reenacting scenes from their favorite movies. The fact that they’ve matured into relatively likeable, capable, intelligent young men is what keeps this film watchable throughout its 80 minutes. The director Crystal Moselle encountered the kids when they were finally being allowed out of the house. She convinced them to let her document their lifestyle and they gave her access to their home movies. She followed them on their ever more frequent excursions outside, and she even interviewed their evasive father, who kept the boys (and their developmentally disabled sister) indoors because he did not want them to be “contaminated” by the outside world. He cultivated a sense of tribal loyalty among the family, giving the kids ancient Hindu first names, keeping their hair long, and going out for food runs while his wife home-schooled them. There is lots of fascinating material in the movie, but much of it is dropped on viewers in a misshapen heap. Moselle leaves many questions unanswered. How did the parents end up in New York? Why didn’t mom [...]

Director:  Frank Pavich, Watched at:  True/False Film Festival, Rating:  3.5/5.     I missed Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo when it first showed up on midnight movie screens in the ‘70s. A decade ago during the Chicago Underground Film Festival, the director was in attendance to introduce a special screening of the film. It struck me while finally getting a chance to see El Topo that it could be viewed as either a surrealist masterpiece or a load of shit, depending on whatever drug you ingested that night. I happened to be straight, and also distracted by the botched screening of my own documentary at the festival earlier in the week. So perhaps I didn’t have the patience to appreciate “Jodo’s” trippy, outlandish intentions with the movie, nor was I aware of its blockbuster reputation among the bohemian esoterica. But right now, as I write this, I’m awaiting my Netflix delivery of the film, flush with an anticipation ignited by the experience of seeing the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which not only seeks to canonize the director and his offbeat oeuvre, but to also explain how the now 85-year old filmmaker came to direct the “greatest movie never made.” Jodorowsky, riding high in 1975 with European box-office cash and weirdo cred following the runaway success of both El Topo and its sequel, The Holy Mountain, secured the rights to Frank Herbert's science fiction novel “Dune.” Even though he’d never read the book, he began work on the screenplay and storyboards for a film that, at least on paper, had the [...]

Director:  Amir Bar-Lev, Watched at:  True/False Film Festival, Rating:  4.5/5.   Happy Valley is filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev’s dissection of the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky-Penn State scandal. Arriving on the scene after Sandusky, an assistant football coach to the legendary Joe Paterno, was sentenced to prison on more than forty counts of child sexual abuse, Bar-Lev turns his camera on the university, the surrounding neighborhood, the media and the culture of college football. What I assumed to be a title dreamed up by the director turns out to be the colloquial name of the area where the university resides. It’s an irony Bar-Lev confronts head-on, resulting in a multi-faceted and deeply troubling portrait of a quasi-tribal world of hero worship, secrets, cover-ups, and a peculiarly American form of idolatry. Happy Valley raises important questions about this country’s fawning reliance on symbols, myth, and so-called community values when forced to grapple with uncomfortable truths or challenges to the status quo. To his credit, Bar-Lev doesn’t set out to answer these questions, instead employing a consistently probing, wry approach that invites us to examine our own reverence for institutions and the heroes they produce. He interviews Joe Paterno’s widow and two of her sons. He talks to a disgruntled Penn State student who sees the university’s outcry over the scandal, and their subsequent dismantling of Paterno’s legend, as nothing more than a hypocritical feint. He also interviews Jerry Sandusky’s adopted son Matt, a disillusioned but searingly honest young father who offers a damning indictment of Sandusky and the ritualized [...]

Director: Rachel Boynton, Watched at: True/False Film Festival, Rating:  2/5.     Sometimes what a documentary needs is a good old-fashioned narrator. Rachel Boynton’s Big Men is so crowded with places, names, facts and faces you need a spreadsheet to sort it all out, especially since the director is reluctant to give in to the prosaic option of employing a simple voice-over to help guide us along. It’s become something of a non-fiction filmmaker’s badge of honor to make their films without the aid of an omniscient storyteller, but I’m not sure whether this is due to smugness or an inability to write a script. The result is a worthy but exhausting film like Big Men. With subject matter too sprawling to express through the voices of its characters, it resorts to using huge blocks of on-screen text to keep us oriented. You don’t so much watch this picture as read it. Big Men is a complex account of a start-up oil company’s virginal venture into the geopolitical minefield of petroleum excavation. Shuttling back and forth from New York to Texas to Ghana to Nigeria, Boynton’s film is notable for its insider access to the moneyed side of the oil game. Other films (Crude, Sweet Crude) have focused more on the criminal, exploitive toll of big oil, but Big Men takes a less judgmental, although sometimes awkward approach. Boynton manages to humanize the men–and they are all men–within Kosmos, the small oil company lucky enough to discover a mother lode of petroleum off Ghana’s coast. She thoroughly chronicles [...]

Directors:  Tracy Droz Tragos, Andrew Droz Palermo, Watched at:  True/False Film Festival, Rating:  2.5/5.     There is no doubt the filmmakers behind the documentary Rich Hill clearly intended their movie to be a sympathetic portrait of three young men living life in the margins. Andrew, Appachey and Harley are all teenagers from the titular Missouri town, a less-than-bucolic and all-too familiar zone of strip malls, vacant downtown streets, grinding poverty and vanishing opportunities. The movie’s directors (and cousins), Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo, have their own family roots in the area, which made it easier to engage with their subjects and move about the town’s streets, backyards and homes. The result is a lovingly made and emotionally honest picture, pretty to look at and easy to like. So why did the movie make me so uncomfortable? Why did I have the nagging feeling the filmmakers were exposing to the public the private miseries of people who perhaps didn’t understand their dysfunctions would be splashed across theater screens and streamed around the world? And I say that not because these people were ignorant, but because their burdens were simply too oppressive and too persistent, for them to give much thought to the artistic whims of a pair of filmmakers. The charge of exploitation is an easy one to lay on documentary directors. Their subjects rarely stand to benefit as much as the filmmakers do. But many professionals walk this line with care, and Tragos and Palermo are obviously sensitive to the issue. They adopt an impressionistic [...]

Director:  Margaret Brown, Watched on:  Netflix, Rating:  2.5/5.   The “invisible” in Margaret Brown’s documentary The Great Invisible, refers to both the damage done to the lives and landscape of the Gulf Coast following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (the largest in U.S. history), and the free pass awarded to BP in the years after the disaster. Sure, they paid billions of dollars in fines and fees to clean up the spill, but the amount will add up to a drop in their endless bucket of oil profits. The company continues to drill new offshore wells, hidden from view and unscathed by government regulations, while the devastation from the accident resulted in both a human and environmental post-traumatic stress that neither BP, the United States government, the media, nor the rest of us, care to think about. Out of sight, out of mind. The 2010 Deepwater explosion killed 11 workers and leaked 210 million gallons of crude into the Gulf. It ruined the coastline, killed countless birds, fish and other sea life, and put thousands of people out of work. Brown spends considerable time recounting the explosion and the leaking underwater well. She takes us inside the huge drilling rig, thanks to home movie footage shot by one of the surviving workers, and parallels the unfolding disaster with the story of oil rig survivors, relatives of the dead, and the fishermen and families directly affected by the spill. Roosevelt Harris, a volunteer at an Alabama church soup kitchen, is one central character. He comes across as a [...]

Director:  Frederick Wiseman, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  2/5.     The easy joke to make with National Gallery, Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary, which is set inside the venerable London art museum, is that it’s about as exciting as watching paint dry. The film will live up to that description for many viewers or, to be more exact, for many of the very few viewers who will actually see the film. Wiseman is not only famous for the demanding length of his documentaries, most running three hours or more, but also for the difficulty in finding them. They usually play for a week or two in a single art house in a few major cities and then must be purchased or rented via his own company, Zipporah Films. They don’t show up on PBS, HBO or on-demand; they rarely play in retrospective screenings; and, up until recently, you couldn’t find them online (a few of his 44 completed pictures are now available on Netflix, and Kanopy has licensed nearly all of his films for a limited time). Wiseman’s reputation is irrefutable among many critics and universities, but I’ve hardly met anyone, including many of my documentary filmmaking colleagues, who have actually seen much of his work. For whom, then, does this director make his movies? You won’t find an answer to that question in National Gallery. The documentary runs 181 minutes. It consists of endless scenes of talk: docents describe paintings to museum visitors; art experts explain the fine points of restoration; museum executives meet to discuss budgets and [...]

Directors:  Stephanie Spray, Pacho Velez, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  4.5/5.     Manakamana is the name of a sacred Hindu temple in central Nepal. It is perched atop a mountain reached by a modern cable car which whisks pilgrims and tourists a mile and a half up and down the hillside, cutting what used to be a three-day trek down to a 10-minute trip both ways. Manakamana is also the name of a documentary which captures this journey eleven times in eleven shots, each lasting the length of the ride, each viewed from the same locked down medium shot, the camera gazing objectively at each new set of passengers. There is no music, no narration, no wide shots or close-ups. We hear only the hum of the car, the rattle of the cable, the grinding of the gears as each ride reaches its destination, and the conversations among the riders. The film sounds like a total bore, except it is anything but. Manakamana might be the most invigorating film you’ll see all year, a work of both hypnotic calm and ecstatic imagination. The ten minute duration of each shot also happens to be the equivalent of a 400 foot magazine of 16mm film, which is the medium chosen by directors Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez to conduct this supremely formalist experiment. At the end of each run, the car rotates slowly into darkness, fading to black, before emerging again with a new set of riders. The film is split in half, with the first hour depicting rides up [...]

Director:  Michael Moore, Watched in: Theater, Rating:  4/5.     I’ve always believed that regardless of what you think of Michael Moore’s politics, skills or style as a filmmaker, he is beyond a doubt a man who loves his country. With Capitalism: A Love Story, he has made yet another one of his signature takedowns of the hypocrites, greedballs and scumbags who have turned America into an unrecognizable war zone where the Haves thrive on jack booting the Have Nots. It’s the perfect movie to watch at home, since you’ll need to pause several times to rant and retch and shake your head in disbelief at the cruelty of CEOs, the sycophancy of senators, and the lies of lobbyists who have been robbing us blind for the last 30 years. Moore may fudge on his chronologies and cherry pick his facts, and he strains at times to find metaphors for the looting of our treasury and the rape of our constitution, but his arguments seem to always make sense and his anger is palpable. Moore delivers the goods with Capitalism: A Love Story. The movie presents us with an easy-to-digest history lesson on deregulation and union-busting, courtesy of Ronald Reagan, and the slow erosion of taxes on the wealthy and safety nets for the poor. He uses an entertaining mix of newsreel footage, B-movie clips, and home movies to describe how America descended from a post-war pinnacle of can-do self-invention and prosperity to our current state of foreclosures, bankruptcies, unemployment and stagnant wages. He manages to include this [...]

Director: Greg “Freddy” Camalier, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  3/5.     Muscle Shoals tells the story of two legendary Alabama recording studios located near the banks of the Tennessee River, “a singing river,” as the locals like to say. Music is in the water and the blood of this deeply Southern region, and those elements no doubt helped lay the fertile groundwork for some of the most memorable songs in the American canon of rock, soul and funk.  Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge, the Rolling Stones, Wilson Pickett, Clarence Carter, the Allman Brothers and Jimmy Cliff made the pilgrimage to Muscle Shoals, drawn there by a rootsy vibe that is so ineffable even this documentary struggles to define it. A commendable effort by first-time director, Greg ‘Freddy’ Camalier, the film tells the story of FAME Studios’ founder, the mercurial Rick Hall, and his house band, The Swampers, who set out on their own to build the Muscle Shoals Sound studio, where they recorded Lynyrd Skynyrd’s classic southern rock anthem, “Free Bird.” It’s a fascinating story, one that begins with an irresistible bass and drum line, a beat so funky that black artists brought into the studio to record were astonished to learn their backing band was composed of all-white southern boys. But the music created in this Tennessee backwater jumped racial lines, and soon they produced a monster hit record for Percy Sledge, the seminal “When A Man Loves A Woman”, which kicked off a feverish rush by musicians to add that same gritty authenticity to their own [...]