Posts Tagged ‘documentary’

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Page One: Inside the New York Times

July 19, 2011

Last month, when Andrew Rossi’s documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times opened in New York, Michael Kinsley reviewed it in the New York Times. A veteran journalist, Kinsley is not a movie critic, but more importantly for the sake of his assignment, nor is he a Times insider. So it was with particular authority, and without a conflict of interest, that he could sum Rossi’s movie up as “a mess.”

Particular authority is of the essence here. There’s something in the spirit of the Times, as it were, that has allowed this sequence of events to occur: Taking so very seriously the task of reviewing a documentary about it is part of what makes the paper seem documentary-worthy to begin with. Kinsley’s right; the movie is a mess, and it isn’t a matter of partisanship to think that on some basic level untidiness just doesn’t suit the subject.

“It’s hardly breaking news that the newspaper business is in deep trouble,” some broadcaster says early on in Rossi’s obligatory, expository cable-news montage. So why should Page One presume that news worth repeating? Why, of course to reveal how the mighty Times, still America’s “newspaper of record,” has been coping with the trouble. And it should be instructive to review what happens when particular authority is particularly challenged — mostly by the Internet, with its revenue-siphoning, allegiance-shattering cacophony.

Having shrewdly looked in on the Times’ still-young Media Desk, but only managed to characterize it as an in-house abettor of hand-wringing and chin-stroking, Rossi soon finds himself scrambling for substantiation, and he’s all over the place. Reasonably enough, he posits a generational conflict between ornery old-school columnist David Carr, an equal-opportunity condescender and an oft-imitated newsroom type, and blogger-cum-reporter Brian Stelter, whom Carr imagines as a robot sent to destroy him. But glimpses of these men’s inner lives seem not so much considered as search-engine optimized: Yes, Carr was a crack addict, and yes, Stelter tweeted his diet and lost 90 pounds. Meanwhile the film can’t muster enough critical distance to comprehend something essential to its theme of particular authority and challenges thereto: that each generation has its own manner of entitlement.

This peculiar provincialism is abrasively self-propagating. Kinsley, in his Times review, seemed miffed that Rossi didn’t explain what Vice magazine is. But Kinsley should know what Vice magazine is, or at least not pretend he doesn’t just to seem scolding. Of course, the only evident reason that the founders of Vice appear in the film at all is so Carr can be seen scolding them.

Page One has too few scenes of news judgment articulated, whether it concerns war coverage, battles between media conglomerates, or executive editor Bill Keller’s succinct appraisal of public trust as a function of leaked government documents: “Wikileaks doesn’t need us; Daniel Ellsberg did.” (It seems worth noting that Keller’s hair appears to have grayed a lot during the time Rossi spent with him.)

There are other tactical errors. Rossi makes an insufficiently nuanced equation between discredited reporters Jayson Blair and Judith Miller, two reputation-tarnishing disseminators of false information with importantly different motives and consequences. And it might seem like due diligence trotting out Gay Talese to read from The Kingdom and the Power, his extraordinary 1969 book about the inner workings and outer influence of the Times, but in context it comes off as a miscalculation, showing this movie up for the comparatively sloppy exercise it is.

Rossi pays homage to what we can understand as traditional newsroom values — curiosity, conscientiousness, critical thinking — but his own attention span seems tellingly ruined. His film had three editors, and it’s hard to know whether it should have had only one or three more. Page One feels like and gives off about as much useful insight as an unruly, time-killing panel discussion at some preening journalism conference.

Journalists eat this stuff up, of course. You may notice that Page One is not the only movie playing this week, but here it is being reviewed. Simultaneity with the weird public spectacle of contrition from Rupert Murdoch does at least go to show that nonfiction films about media culture still can be vital and useful — and that it’s too bad Errol Morris’s Tabloid isn’t yet available at a theater near you.

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Buck

June 29, 2011

Buck Brannaman is no ordinary horse trainer, and that’s unfortunate because thanks to Cindy Meehl’s film about him, ordinary horse trainers now have a lot to live up to.

They already did, of course: Brannaman was an essential influence on both Nicholas Evans’ book “The Horse Whisperer” and the Robert Redford movie it became. But now “Buck,” Meehl’s debut documentary, makes it very easy for very the rest of us to see why. If people ever still say they need to see a man about a horse, and the man is Brannaman, well then all involved tend to be the better for it.

Persuasion is essential to his technique (it can seem like communion), but so is his subjects’ innate majesty and intelligence. Meehl has recognized that a big part of what Brannaman does is allow animals to make up for human failings.

He has a wife and a teenaged daughter, both evidently beloved, but he doesn’t see them much. He’s on the road for most of each year, giving clinics all over the country for troubled horses and their troublers — as Brannaman puts it, “A lot of the time I’m not helping people with horse problems. I’m helping horses with people problems.”

Usually he’ll begin lightly, perhaps by pointing out that our urge to strap the hides of other dead animals on horses’ backs and then crawl up on them with our hands around their necks might require some prefatory diplomacy. Then he’ll continue into the nitty gritty, also lightly. Lightness of touch is the Buck Brannaman way.

Although straightforwardly a fond profile of this man and his obvious calling, Meehl’s movie is predicated on the notion that the humane treatment of an animal, when productive, can and does seem to us like some dazzling display of magic. It’s sort of a depressing testament, but that doesn’t make Brannaman’s accomplishments any less profound.

As kids, Buck and his brother enjoyed a spell of minor celebrity for their rope tricks on the rodeo circuit. They did not enjoy the constant and intense abuse from their alcoholic tyrant father. The brother’s absence from Meehl’s film is not accounted for; the father’s feels like a relief. Horsemanship, Brannaman tells his human clients more than once, is about controlling your emotions. That qualifies it as a spiritual discipline. “There’s a difference between firm and hard,” he also tells them, and, “You have to be a parent,” which might further qualify his own horsemanship as a way of working out his own issues.

Meehl for her part doesn’t much discern between horsemanship and a kind of lifestyle salesmanship, so “Buck” sometimes gives off a slightly hectoring vibe, like, “You know, Robert Redford, who is handsome and famous and outdoorsy, really likes this guy, and you should too.” Well, it seemed to work at Sundance, where Redford reigns and “Buck” won the Audience Award for documentary this year.

This film isn’t exactly long on story, and structurally it seems like little more than just an 88-minute trailer for itself. But Meehl has summoned a powerful formula: the disarming pleasure of taking in touchy-feely platitudes from such a no-nonsense fella. Brannaman’s rough upbringing and cowboy laconicism cuts nicely against the inherent cuddliness of his craft. Most importantly, perhaps, nobody needs to get broken for him to get results.

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Exit Through the Gift Shop

May 25, 2010

That it’s called “a Banksy film” could mean a directing credit for the adored, elusive British street artist, or just that it was made in the best spirit of his work: prankish, double-take-inducing, immediately appealing.

In any case, Exit Through the Gift Shop‘s ostensible subject is one Thierry Guetta, a French-born Los Angeles clothier and would-be documentarian — really, a footage hoarder; he is a fan of what he calls “the capturation” — who gets initiated into guerrilla-graffiti mysteries by the likes of Banksy, Space Invader and Obama iconographer Shepard Fairey, and then himself becomes “Mr. Brainwash,” a sort of self-made Warholian monster.

Wow, what a great idea for a movie. Of course, it only works if it’s true — or at least if it’s in that increasingly familiar but somehow not yet played out mindfuck mode of who-knows-what’s-really-real-anyway documentary. Yes, the result is so assiduously hip and so of its moment that in 10 years or less we’ll all be blushing to remember our enthusiasm for it. But meanwhile it doesn’t hurt for posterity’s sake to chronicle the dubiousness and gloriousness of urban DIY street art finally having its day.

The largely self-selecting audience for this merry venture will include anyone who might enjoy assembling stencil templates at Kinko’s by day and prowling artfully around big cities by night, all the while contemplating the vicissitudes of anonymity, ubiquity, cult of personality and of course gullibility. With rakish narration by Rhys Ifans, Exit Through the Gift Shop makes short work of the requisite conversation about art-scene commodification, authentication and blah blah blah. That title alone speaks volumes, although the movie itself is ultimately warmer and less snarky than might be implied. It’s a colorful cocktail of subversiveness, self-seriousness, wonder, horror and joy, and there is genius in its way of seeming at once calculated and quickly whipped up.

And there is also the reliable, rather old-fashioned pleasure to be had from simply watching artists make their art. Here, the art itself — at first unsanctioned by the establishment but aesthetically rarefied nonetheless, later something like the opposite of that — will not be to all tastes, but the thrill of its inventive vitality should be obvious to anyone.

Anything called a Banksy film will need serious curiosity, but also a durable sense of humor. Exit Through the Gift Shop allows that these ideals aren’t easy to reconcile. As one observer puts it, “I don’t know who the joke is on; I don’t even know if there is a joke.” What makes this movie great, though, is its willingness to find that sentiment exhilarating, not exhausting. Perhaps excepting the bit with the inflatable Guantanamo prisoner at Disneyland, which seems uncharacteristically less affirming than cruelly harrowing, it’s all in good, smart fun.

 

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The Art of the Steal

April 13, 2010

Have you heard about that protracted, politically porky legal battle over moving a dead millionaire’s priceless private early Modern art collection from a wealthy Philadelphia suburb into a downtown tourist mecca? Perhaps a better question: Have you cared?

No, not just any dead millionaire, but Albert C. Barnes, whose Last Will and Testament specified his axe should be ground against the presumed philistinism of Philadelphia’s power elite in perpetuity. That hasn’t happened, and Barnes’ acolytes are pissed, so one of them hired Don Argott to make lopsided leaflet of a documentary about it.

If only Argott had the courage of a little critical distance. What a field day he could have with such readymade characters as the aforementioned acolytes, the contentious lawyers, the priggish dewlapped art dealers, the slickly litigious political strivers, and the camera-wielding busybody NIMBYs who suddenly go mum when the thing actually might no longer be in their back yard.

Not to mention Barnes himself, a working-class Philly kid who paid his own way through UPenn, then made a fortune from inventing an antibiotic for gonorrhea and retired young to found an art school and fill it up with piles of great paintings. Reception to which from the local cognoscenti was so chilly — at least at first, before they figured out what modernism was worth — that Barnes would soon be decrying his native city as “a depressing intellectual slum.”

What’s really depressing is this movie — not merely because it gets so many layers deep into the grasping vulgarity of nonprofit culture-mongering, but because its own abhorrence of same comes off so crassly as to all but cancel out any remaining opportunity for actual art appreciation. One justification for “The Art of the Steal” being a film and not a long-form magazine article is the chance to really look at all those great works, but no such luck: Argott’s too busy with the awkward problem of making a case against more people having more access to a trove of masterpieces. He can’t seem to see how his attempt to curry anti-establishment favor actually endorses elitism, and so his film is vain, unbalanced, illogical, overstated and…yes, damn compelling.

It should be pointed out, and of course it is pointed out in the film, that no less an authority than Henri Matisse once described the Barnes Foundation as “the only sane place to see art in America.” A movie of this bent really couldn’t ask for a better sound bite than that, even if it is self-evident hyperbole, and a little la-di-da besides.

Of course, the same movie also puts forth an assertion that the dismantling of this aesthete-approved idyll could be “the greatest act of cultural vandalism since World War II” — a not-even-funny affectation that at least a few denizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Burma, China, and many nations in Africa, for starters, might consider culturally atrocious in and of itself.

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The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

March 30, 2010

Here’s an irony: It wasn’t until after he’d left the Marine Corps and forfeited his job as a 1960s Defense Department policy analyst, which is to say a professional maker of war, that Daniel Ellsberg ever struck anybody as dangerous. And not just anybody, but Henry Kissinger, who at the time was taking heat from Richard Nixon for not thinking big enough to consider a nuclear option in Vietnam. What a world.

Later Nixon would record his hope that Americans “quit making heroes out of those who steal secrets and publish them in the newspapers.” To which Berkeley filmmakers Judith Erlich and Rick Goldsmith now say: Tough luck, eh Dick? In the estimation of Erlich and Goldsmith’s Oscar-nominated documentary, “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” we’re actually way overdue to rev that particular hero-making engine up again.

Ellsberg, lest we forget, is among the most unambiguously influential whistleblowers in American history — a man whose public radicalization from dutiful hawk to dove of conscience seems inherently movie-worthy. James Spader played him on TV a few years ago, but really it ought to have been a big-screen part for Paul Newman, whom the young Ellsberg resembled and apparently admired, and who became unavailable by dying in 2008. Pragmatically, Erlich and Goldsmith have just gone ahead and let the real man tell his own story. It’s a story good enough to withstand the conventional documentary formula of archive footage and talking heads — and maybe even good enough to withstand a few ill-advised sprinkles of hokey music, animation and reenactments.

In addition to personally whipping up the specious pretext for LBJ’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and subsequent aggression in Vietnam, Ellsberg also had a demoralizing experience of his own on the ground there, whereupon he inquired of a fellow Marine, “You ever feel like the Redcoats?” On Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s Vietnam history task force, he ascended through stages of security clearance as if through stages of grief — sussing out “a pattern of presidential lying” that had metastasized across five administrations, and gradually coming to terms with the bitter truth left in its wake. “It wasn’t just that we were on the wrong side,” Ellsberg concluded. “We were the wrong side.” Soon enough, in 1971, 7,000 pages of top-secret CIA documents supporting this analysis found their way into the New York Times, setting a dramatic First Amendment precedent and steering a fiendishly paranoid president straight toward his destiny of self-ruination.

This should not imply a path of least resistance. Whether you call it treason or civil disobedience, what Ellsberg did sure as hell wasn’t easy. Enlisting his own children and last remaining Rand Corporation friend Anthony Russo to photocopy all those pages in the middle of the night was just the beginning. Ellsberg’s appeals for attention to outwardly antiwar lawmakers including William Fulbright and George McGovern went neglected; only Alaska senator Mike Gravel, alone and increasingly overcome by exhaustion and emotion, dared to read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record.

The Times, meanwhile, had taken its time vetting the material and considering the implications of making it public. One implication, manifested right away, was an injunction from Nixon’s Justice Department against further publication. Meanwhile, other dailies passed the story around and kept it burning, like an Olympic torch. But eventually, perhaps inevitably, the substance of the Pentagon Papers seemed less important than the sensation of their release. It’s important to remember that before resigning in disgrace, Nixon got reelected in a landslide, while the war Ellsberg helped launch raged lethally on. And never mind the disastrous déjà vu in Iraq a generation later. It’s the irony that keeps on giving!

Gloom enthusiasts may recall that McNamara’s own retrospective self-inventory made for compelling documentary fodder in Errol Morris’ “The Fog of War” — by contrast to which, Erlich and Goldsmith’s hagiographic portrait of a clever, handsome, righteous radical does seem less essential. Is it morbid and cruel to want more on the family tragedy that spurred Ellsberg’s sensitivity to fatally inattentive authority figures? Or to want at least some resistance to his privileged narration? Ellsberg’s still active as an activist; can’t we let him stay at least a little dangerous?

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Capitalism: A Love Story

October 2, 2009

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If Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” teaches us one thing about the global economic crisis, it is that the stunt-doc gold standard has become obsolete.

Maybe this was inevitable. No one of reasonable mind would deny that Moore’s formerly unique brand of cloddish precocity has expanded the horizons of nonfiction moviemaking. Once just a canny blue-collar fella who’d had enough of white-collar greed-mongers and their politician abettors, during the past 20 years, Moore has become a rabble-rousing multimedia industry unto himself. And in that time, the question of whether his antics clarify or corrupt his arguments has itself become moot–not for any refinement of the methods, but because the industry of Moore so deliberately made the actual man into a caricature. But at least he figured out a good way to make a buck.

“Capitalism,” like capitalism, will have its champions. As for the rest of us, well, now that we’re broke, exhausted, depressed, and not at all sufficiently bailed out, do we really need to be patronized too? Moore’s movie isn’t quite sure, as a matter of fact, but apparently it just doesn’t know what else to do. “This is capitalism, a system of taking and giving,” he narrates early on. “Mostly taking.” Near the end, he says, “Capitalism is an evil, and you can not regulate evil.” A lot happens in between. Too much, actually.

Ancient Rome. A cat flushing the toilet. A guy getting foreclosed out of his home. “Condo vultures” in Florida. Wallace Shawn explaining free enterprise. (Uh, OK.) Moore as a boy, enjoying post-war Michigan prosperity. Narration. Vietnam. Unhappy Jimmy Carter. Happy Ronald Reagan. Highlight’s from “Roger & Me,” Moore’s 1989 documentary feature debut. A for-profit Pennsylvania juvenile detention center, in cahoots with a corrupt judge. Airline pilots earning less than managers at Taco Bell. “Dead peasants” whose employers cashed in on their life insurance. Workers on a sit-in strike. Priests. Derivatives, whatever those are, and financial professionals unable to explain them. A funny, phony tourism promo for Cleveland. (”At least we’re not Detroit! We’re not Detroit!!”) A home video of a foreclosed family being evicted by the cops. A beaming, blond spokeswoman for Countrywide Financial, equated to “The Godfather.” Fiscal regulator William Black, a lead whip-cracker from the ’80s S&L scandal, having told us so. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, saying, among other stirring things, that “people who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” Bass notes in the soundtrack. “A financial coup d’etat.” Attempted citizens’ arrests of Wall Street CEOs. And so much Moore.

Does that description seem greasily abbreviated? Well, so does the movie.

The filmmaker-star also finds himself back at General Motors HQ, where security has standing orders not to let him in, and viewer amusement quickly sinks into a dispiriting sense that he’s just running through his same old shtick from 20 years ago. Compare this with a rather discreet and touching scene in which Moore and his father visit the AC Spark Plug plant where papa Moore used to work–or rather, the vacant lot where that plant once stood. This is the good stuff, but Moore buries it in the heap of his standard-issue throwaway jokes, stock-footage gimmicks and suggestive cuts.

Many of “Capitalism”’s points of attack seem at first like they’d be stronger if developed into individual pieces, as in Moore’s old shows “TV Nation” and “The Awful Truth.” (Hell, that “condo vulture” guy might even want to hold down his own series.) But development requires discipline and commitment (not to mention a viable, historically vetted alternative to capitalism), and it’s a lot easier just to cram all the scraps of artillery into one big cannon of a movie with one too-big target.

We can go ahead and tell our kids about the glory days when Moore’s routine seemed like a true way through the morass of under-reporting, untrustworthy agendas and bogus institutional voices that had come to define our “serious” media sources. But the fact remains that his most vital and refreshing (and too brief) moments now look just like something you’d (sometimes) see on “60 Minutes”: simple interviews with regular people, to whom he actually listens.

Moore may have grown accustomed to his big-screen proportions, but he should think harder about whether his medium and his audience already have grown out of them.

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Ballerina

March 26, 2009

Ballerina Lopatkina

A fond, glancing portrait of Russia’s erstwhile Kirov Ballet (now known as the Mariinsky Theatre), Ballerina roams freely among a select handful of dancers at various ages and stages of their careers, assembling a composite image of what narrator Diane Baker calls “constant metamorphosis.” On the heels of Ballets Russes but en pointe in its own right, director Bertrand Normand’s film half-consciously propagates the myth of the ballerina as delicate, ethereal creature, customarily observed from a distance in an isolating spotlight. So, what, no eating disorders, no nervous breakdowns, no sexual tensions? Maybe it’s enough that these impressive performers endure dissatisfied choreographers, effusive fans and their own physical limitations with rigorous grace.

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Chris & Don: A Love Story

February 24, 2009

Promotional materials for Tina Mascara and Guido Santi’s documentary Chris & Don say it belongs to the new canon of “Sophisticated Gay and Lesbian Cinema.” That’s putting it archly, but why not? In retrospect, the complex and mutually enlightening companionship that developed between aristocratic British novelist Christopher Isherwood and painter Don Bachardy, originally a So-Cal bumpkin thirty years the author’s junior, seems positively archetypal. As friend John Boorman, the English filmmaker, observes in what amounts to a tidy little FU to today’s Prop 8’ers: “Of all the people I came to know in Los Angeles, their marriage was the only one that endured.” The film treats them warmly without whitewashing. On DVD, it comes with a booklet containing seven arresting Bachardy portraits of his partner and one of himself.

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Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

February 23, 2009

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Filmmaker Kurt Kuenne began this home-movie scrapbook as a memorial tribute to his best friend Andrew Bagby, most likely murdered by an unstable ex-girlfriend. But Kuenne had to shift gears when the suspect fled to her native Canada and announced her pregnancy with Bagby’s son. Little Zachary was born with his grandparents battling the Canadian judiciary to bring his mother to justice and Kuenne just as zealously gathering material for a portrait of the father he’d never know. Then something even more horrible happened, and Dear Zachary had to change course again. The result is understandably jittery, and urgently provocative. With material so raw, the movie’s lack of craftsmanship sometimes works to its own advantage. It’s about as personal as a documentary can get. 

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Scott Walker: 30 Century Man

January 24, 2009

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If Scott Walker: 30 Century Man doesn’t quite know what to do with its subject, aside from revering him, well, who does?

Director Stephen Kijak, in this points-for-bravery, first-ever Scott Walker documentary, does at least shrewdly begin by invoking Orpheus, the famed poet-musician of Greek myth whose skills were serious enough to persuade Hades to give back his girlfriend. The idea is to make us think “wow” and “yikes” simultaneously.

And that is about what it’s like to witness Walker’s long strange trip from ’60s Britpop trio the Walker Brothers, who were not related or actually named Walker or even British in his case, to avant-garde recluse adored by fellow artistes as disparate as Sting and Radiohead and responsible for increasingly weird and infrequent recordings to which he won’t ever listen upon their completion, probably because even he doesn’t fully understand.

Yes, when Brian Eno says, “These are very, very spaced-out pop songs,” and David Bowie says, “I have no idea what he’s singing about,” the artist being discussed is nothing if not a serious one. Kijak may even figure he doesn’t need to work too hard; as an insidery profile of an ultimate outsider, this is music-doc manna.

Most of Scott Walker: 30 Century Man feels like having just been slipped an unknown LP from an earnestly intelligent fanboy friend who has locked the door and won’t let you leave without listening. For starters, just take the voice — that bewitching, reverb-abetted, somehow confidently tremulous baritone. Somebody in the movie says it’s beautiful and unpleasant at the same time, and that’s an understatement. One minute it’s as trivial sounding as some sci-fi ritual ditty sung by Spock in the original Star Trek; the next it’s, well, still kinda sci-fi, but with enough music-of-the-spheres seriousness to make you think the universe really is singing to you. Or just watch Walker go when he’s in his studio. How demanding life must be within his selective fraternity of random sessioners; how exactingly he gathers, say, the sounds of meat being punched for a piece inspired by the execution of Mussolini.

Just get over the idea that your leg’s being pulled, Spinal Tap-style, with that array of early solo albums: Scott, Scott 2, Scott 3 and, according to the prim narration, “what was regarded as his masterpiece of the period, Scott 4.” Upon this last, incidentally, is inscribed a useful quotation from Camus: “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

The engagement to be had here isn’t from parsing Walker’s mysteries, or making a case that he’s the peer of James Joyce or Francis Bacon or whomever. It’s about the pleasure of witnessing one man’s steady, uncompromising approach to his own unique artistic ideal.

Kijak also makes telling use of footage from archival performances, illustrating both Walker’s divergence from American popular music and his own individual consistency. Whether in a rudimentary TV spot from the ’60s or an actual music video from the ’80s, Walker wears the given era’s trappings awkwardly. Not because he’s unattractive; quite the contrary, as several people here attest. Not because he’s a poseur; even more people, including the man himself, will attest to the conviction with which he has shunned public attention. No, he doesn’t fit in because the trappings can’t trap him — or even seem to keep up. Quite clearly Scott Walker has always been ahead of his time.

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