Our Daily Bread

2020-02-03T18:13:47+00:00Categories: Docs in Review|

Director:  Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Watched on:  DVD, Rating:  4.5/5.     I would time your viewing of Our Daily Bread thoughtfully. The film will most likely influence your upcoming trip to the grocery store. It may ruin your next meal. It will most certainly kill your appetite. A German-Austrian production directed and shot by Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Our Daily Bread contains no narration, talking heads, characters, music, special effects, or on-screen graphics, including location identifiers. The entire movie consists of magnificently composed, dynamically rendered scenes of food production. From farm fields to greenhouses to cattle cars to slaughterhouses, we watch–sometimes in disbelief, but most often in horror–at the utterly dehumanized, mechanized, highly technological systems man has created to get the very stuff that sustains our world from the plant and the animal it comes from into our mouths and stomachs. After the 90 disturbing, but breathtaking minutes of this movie, you will never look at the food you eat the same way again. With explicit irony, we watch scene after scene of vast fields of crops sprayed with pesticides; of cavernous greenhouses hosed down with chemicals; of stadium-sized barns stuffed to standing-room-only with hens; of baby chicks speeding down conveyor belts and shot off into bins; of salmon crammed into underwater pens, then harvested into tubes and finally sliced by mechanical saws. There’s more: pigs are prodded into a dumpster sized contraption, squeal for their lives, and then tumble out dead, before a gigantic electric slicer guts them, their intestines slide out, and their hooves are scissored off by [...]

Salt of the Earth

2018-08-09T23:46:22+00:00Categories: Docs in Review|

Directors: Wim Wenders, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, Watched in:  Theaters, Rating:  3/5.     The casualties of war, oppression, poverty and religious zealotry confront all of us in the photographs of Sebastião Salgado, whose remarkable career is the subject of the documentary The Salt of the Earth. Salgado has witnessed the horrific aftermaths of genocide, the terrible cruelty of famine, the awful exploitation of workers, and he has captured these distinctly human evils with a deep-focused, exquisite eye. His pictures are magnificent and monumental, and usually expensively printed in coffee table books or displayed in art museums. One can find compressed versions on the Internet, but to see them displayed on the big screen of a movie theater is a rare treat. Salgado’s transformation from a young man studying economics to a world-class photographer is a compelling early part of this film. He was drawn to remote pockets of the earth, not only by the indigenous people who lived there but also by their often miserable conditions and the choices they had to make to survive. Perhaps his most famous series was shot in a Brazilian gold mine, where men carried endless sacks of dirt up rickety ladders for hours on end. Salgado reveals that these men were not slaves, but freelancers; intellectuals and students scattered among the laborers, all hoping to strike it rich. But rather than letting capitalism off the hook, his photos of these mudcaked men, shot in luminous black-and-white and framed against a hellish landscape, tell us of the dangerous lengths humans will go [...]

Marley

2018-08-08T23:42:00+00:00Categories: Docs in Review|

Director: Kevin Macdonald, Watched on: Cable On-Demand, Rating:  1.5/5.     I knew going into Marley, the documentary about the life of the late reggae superstar,  that there was no way this or any film would be able to match the transformative allure and muscular power of the man’s music. So there was already a benefit-of-the-doubt halo around the project that almost demands an uncritical embrace of its approach to the subject matter. But I was not prepared for how conventional and bland Marley is.  Clocking in at 144 minutes, this overstuffed fatty of a documentary carries the heavy gloss of an American Masters hagiography on steroids. Director Kevin Macdonald, who made a memorable but stagey re-enactment doc a few years ago, Touching the Void, before turning to fictional films with The Last King of Scotland and State of Play, movies that carry the aura of serious engagement but are really only spiffy, quasi-topical entertainments, throws up his hands early in Marley, deciding on an academic cut-and-paste structure of talking heads, generic Jamaica b-roll, and all-too-brief snatches of Marley’s music.  It’s the man’s music, if nothing else, that should save a film like this, but Macdonald uses Marley’s vast discography as a background soundtrack to stitch together an unimaginative chronology of his life and times.  Each time we are treated to rare concert footage or an early studio track from Marley’s career, the music quickly recedes, papered over with more interviews or an onscreen text moving us dutifully along to the next phase of his life. It [...]

Man on Wire

2018-08-08T23:08:17+00:00Categories: Docs in Review|

Director:  James Marsh, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  4/5.     Man on Wire contains the suspense of a whodunit, the tension of a heist film, and the poetry of a ballet. It tells the story of Phillipe Petit, a Frenchman who could be the greatest high wire walker of all time.  But this is no biography, or hagiography, and there is no built-in competition to provide us with a formulaic climax. Petit’s only competition is with his own notion of failure. As a young man he followed the construction of the Twin Towers in Manhattan, and decided that yes, in 1974, walking a wire strung between them needed to be done, and he needed to do it. Man on Wire breaks this goal down into segments that form the film’s narrative structure: the dream, the preparation, the set-up, the accomplices, the night before, the morning of. One of the most enjoyable aspects of this entertaining film is its breezy asides and delightful detours, the minor character with nicknames and their lets-put-on-a-show approach. Petit and his team were the merry pranksters of vertigo. Director James Marsh has a great eye and a fine sense of how to apply cinematic techniques to documentary filmmaking.  First off, he’s lucky that many of those involved in Petit’s wire walk are still alive and willing to talk; and that there is archival film, still photos, local news clips, and stock footage to work with. But Marsh also uses recreations, shot in a noirish, grainy black-and-white, that helps to ratchet up the sense [...]

Life Itself

2018-08-08T23:06:24+00:00Categories: Docs in Review|

Director:  Steve James, Watched on: DVD, Rating:  2/5.     The late film critic Roger Ebert would have appreciated seeing the movie made from his memoir, Life Itself, available on both theater screens and television at the same time. He was enthusiastically democratic about movies. He loved exposing everybody to all kinds of films–the silly and the sublime, the blockbusters and the indies–and his enduring legacy was his ability to talk and write intelligently about movies without coming off as pompously intellectual. The popular movie review program he hosted with Gene Siskel, At The Movies, may have dumbed down the critical process for art house snobs, but it showed that smart talk about motion pictures could be exciting, funny, and even enlightening to the great unwashed masses. He helped make it okay to have an opinion about a picture. Life Itself is directed by Steve James, a fellow Chicagoan ever grateful to Ebert for championing his legendary documentary, Hoop Dreams. There is an endearing personal quality to the film that is hard to be churlish about, but the movie is a raging hagiography, with way too much detail about Ebert’s life outside the movies, and way too little of the stuff most people want to see. Excerpts from At the Movies (and its preceding incarnation, Sneak Previews) are so few you wonder if the movie’s producers had trouble getting usage rights. The same is true of actual film clips, which would seem to be the most alluring reason for watching a documentary about a famous movie critic. [...]

Inequality For All

2018-08-08T22:46:59+00:00Categories: Docs in Review|

Director:  Jason Kornbluth, Watched in: Theater, Rating:  3/5.     Working in the same mode as 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, director Jason Kornbluth’s Inequality For All expands a series of lectures by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich into a full-length documentary. The subject is not global warming. It’s the widening income gap in America. But like Al Gore’s eye-opening assessment of climate change, Reich’s pronouncements are just as alarming. Both movies could be catalogued within a growing sub-genre of the documentary field labeled “the enlightenment of approaching doom.” Reich is a likeable, self-effacing, humorous and intelligent guide through the brambles of economic misery choking the middle class in this country. He is filmed giving lectures at the University of California at Berkeley, speaking to union organizers, attending conferences, and talking directly to the camera. His personal history is revealed through family photographs and footage of his stint in the Clinton administration, before he was eased out because he couldn’t shut up about the dire prognosis for the American worker in the age of rapid globalization. He has never stopped fighting for the middle class throughout a long career in liberal politics and the private sector. His warmth and compassion helps in transforming the weedy, difficult subject matter of income inequality into a concise and moving assessment of our endangered democracy. He is aided by director Kornbluth’s intimate supporting material. Interviews with struggling parents working two or three jobs, union laborers facing extinction, a rich executive who admits that as a member of the top 1% of income [...]

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

2018-08-08T23:35:52+00:00Categories: Docs in Review|

Director: Werner Herzog, Watched in: Theater, Rating:  2.5/5.     In 1994, three explorers stumbled upon a series of caves in Southern France that contained an amazing array of 30,000 year old drawings: charcoal renderings of lions, bears, rhinos, and horses, expertly etched on smooth, curved walls of stone. The pictures reveal a reverence for nature and motion and the creative spirit in the artists who drew them, the same qualities shared by the 21st century filmmaker, Werner Herzog, who was granted limited but exclusive access to the caves for Cave of Forgotten Dreams, shot in 3D. Working in tight spaces with a small crew, minimal lighting, and restricted access along a single steel boardwalk threaded throughout the caves, Herzog crafts a documentary that is as entertaining as it is loopy and long-winded. One part science project, one part metaphysical inquiry, and several parts tongue-in-cheek ballyhoo, Cave of Forgotten Dreams succeeds in revealing the primitive artistry of our neanderthalic ancestors and inciting our own imaginations to wonder at the unique creative capacity of the human mind, but it also points up the diminishing returns in Herzog’s languorous, rambling approach to documentary filmmaking. Where his excellent film, 2005’s Grizzly Man, grew into an ever more transfixing, horrifying portrait of a man who succumbed to nature’s inherent savagery, his last two documentaries, Encounters At the End of the World and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, are content to wander through their subject matter, stopping now and again for conversations with eccentric characters, or to muse on vague, mystical ideas of our place [...]

Montage of Heck

2018-08-08T23:48:41+00:00Categories: Docs in Review|

Director:  Brett Morgen, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  2.5/5.     Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is named for a mix tape the musician made in his misfit years, when he was spending days on end in his apartment scrapbooking a vision of himself. He would draw, scribble in journals, paste cutouts from magazines, play guitar, listen to his favorite bands, and write lists of the things he loved, hated, needed to do, or looked forward to doing. These were private manifestos of rage and dreams and wishful thinking, cobbled together when he had no idea he would eventually become a rock star and the early years of his short life would be repeatedly scavenged for clues to his genius and his pain. Montage of Heck dredges up little new information despite the access granted to Cobain’s private life and the interview with his widow, Courtney Love. But for fans of Nirvana, it stands–for better or worse–as the only “authorized” documentary they’re likely to ever get. Executive produced by Cobain’s daughter, Frances, and featuring, in addition to Love, approved interviews with his mother, father, stepmother, sister, early girlfriend, and band member and good friend Krist Novoselic, the movie proceeds with a sense of clarity and a notable absence of speculation. The director, Brett Morgen, seems to have been granted undiluted permission to comb Cobain’s intimate journals, and then to animate them, bringing them vividly to life with explosions of color and movement, and an eye-catching technique in which Cobain’s handwriting materializes on-screen. It’s startling and distracting in equal measure. [...]

Circo

2019-04-10T15:50:25+00:00Categories: Docs in Review|

Director:  Aaron Schock, Watched on:  Netflix, Rating:  4.5/5.     The little seen film Circo is a picaresque tale of a traveling Mexican circus made by a first-time feature filmmaker. I happened to read about the movie in a magazine before I realized it had been been kicking around Netflix for almost a year. Beautifully shot, simply told, and wonderfully immersive, this is the rare documentary that has no activist agenda, topical issue or political ax to grind. Director Aaron Schock made 8 trips to Mexico over a period of 21 months to document the itinerant lifestyle of the Ponce family circus, a traveling family of performers featuring several kids, their parents and grandparents, and an aunt or uncle or two, working the backroads of a colorful but changing Mexico. The crowds may be small but the professional attention to detail and the passion for performing never waver for the family, which includes pre-teen trapeze artists, pubescent clowns, and a lion-taming father. This is no freak show however, it’s a business, and there is tension between the parents. Mom wants to retire from the road, settle down, and give her kids a stable home and a decent education. Dad is torn between love for his family and his love of the show, an inherited tradition stretching back seven generations. Circo has a lovely rhythm, criscrossing not only the exotic landscape of rural Mexico but also the emotional terrain of a family pulling together, working unimaginably difficult hours, dealing with recalcitrant animals and malfunctioning vehicles, continually practicing their craft, and [...]

Encounters at the End of the World

2018-08-08T22:15:36+00:00Categories: Docs in Review|

Director:  Werner Herzog, Watched in:  Theater, Rating:  2.5/5.   Encounters at the End of the World is middle of the road Werner Herzog. It’s a for-hire job that allows him to rant about us lesser humans who don’t live in extreme temperatures and risk death every day, who have regular jobs, families, kids, mortgages, etc. That’s usually okay with me.  I go to Herzog for his oblique portraits of absurd risk-takers, people who dwell in the last remaining hut on the nexus of civilization, obsession, and madness. My problem with Encounters at the End of the World is that Herzog’s gaze settles too easily on the people that just happen to be living in Antartica when he visited, rather than people he discovered or searched for by pushing himself to extremes. The microcell biologists, the drivers and divers, the computer programmers, the mechanics—they are getting paid to live and work at the end of the world, and Herzog, who is on assignment for Discovery Channel Films, sometimes gives away to the pressure to please his employers. There are few of the quirks I come to expect from Herzog’s vision. His narration, while retaining his special brand of dry, flat irony, offers only a tidbit or two of revelation. He dips in and out of stories, and makes an occasional observation that may not hold up under deeper scrutiny. For example, towards the end of the film he interviews a penguin expert about insanity among the birds, and then focuses on one of the penguins as it gets lost [...]

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