Paul Williams -- Still Alive (Sunday, June 10, 2012) (54)

Paul Williams was one of the most active singer-songwriter-actor-personalities of the 1970s. He wrote or co-wrote some of the most romantic and well-loved songs of that era, from "The Rainbow Connection" and "Rainy Days and Mondays" to "We've Only Just Begun" and "An Old Fashioned Love Song." His high camp and thick sugar style probably peaked with his collaboration 1974 with Brian De Palma in Phantom of the Paradise, a film for which he wrote the music and starred in as a slightly sexier, more powerful version of himself.

But since the mid-1980s, Williams has been somewhat invisible and largely forgotten by the younger generation. He fought addictions to drugs and alcohol (natch) and has been touring on a much smaller basis for the past twenty years or so.

Stephen Kessler's film, Paul Williams -- Still Alive is a love song to the man who wrote so many love songs. That is, Kessler confesses early in the documentary that he was a weird, fat kid growing up in the '60s and '70s and that Williams' music spoke to him in a deep way. Now in the present day, as a self-concerned documentarian, Kessler goes out to connect with his idol and make a movie about how far he's fallen -- at least that's exactly what he tells us.

When the two meet, Williams seems a bit nervous and unsure about Kessler's motives. He hopes to tell his life story, beginning with his troubled relationship with his father in Nebraska as a kid... but Kessler doesn't let him do this, saying it will be boring. Already the two seem to approach this film project differently. We see them interact over the course of several months, growing closer as time moves along, as the filmmaker follows the singer on a tour of various smallish shows around the country (and into the Philippines). They build a friendship as they learn to accept one another for who they are. To Williams, Kessler is a nice guy who has an unrealistic, nostalgic idea stuck in his head; to Kessler, Williams is a fallen idol, who is making it in the music biz his own way.

The biggest problem with this film is Kessler himself. I appreciate that this film functions as a form of psychotherapy for him, coming to terms with his own childhood and his own failure (Stephen Kessler is not really a household name, after all), but I don't really care to watch a movie all about him and his feelings and his view of Paul Williams. On the other hand, Williams is a super charming performer who shows a deep and interesting insight into his life and career. I could watch him on state and onscreen for hours. He's funny and self-effacing, self-aware and unapologetic.

So many times, just as Williams is about to say or do something interesting, Kessler inserts himself (or his directoral/editing touch) to change the course of events. This is one of the most unnatural fly-on-the-wall documentaries I've ever seen. Kessler has no qualms about pushing and prodding Williams to get him to do what he wants. Thank god Williams mostly pushes back. Kessler is desperate for Williams to be a broken man, suffering in his fading glow of decades ago, but Williams, thankfully, won't have that. He's aware he's fallen a bit, but not unset about it (this seems to have something to do with his involvement in AA, or the like, although that's never totally investigated).

Williams only looks forward, and doesn't live in the past, the way Kessler does. This is the most interesting element of the film, although I'm not sure this isn't an example of a broken clock being right twice a day. Kessler seems to be totally unaware of the film he's making and the subject he's looking at and seems to trip into this interesting duality of "forward and backward". That he does hit it means this movie is not really a failure, but the way he gets there is really messy.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

First Position (Wednesday, May 9, 2012) (46)

Yet another documentary about amazing things cute kids do... Oy vey! Yes, First Position shows how teens (and pre-teens) from around the world compete in an annual New-York-based ballet competition to get scholarships to some of the premiere ballet theaters of the world. 

You have your high-strung girl from California who is pushed harder and further by her Japanese mother, your young American boy, the son of an American Naval officer based in Italy, who now trains in Milan, your affable teen adopted by Philadelphians from her home in war-torn West Africa who is fighting to disprove the industry concept that black women don't have the body shape to be ballerinas. It's all very sweet with tons of built-in drama based on the inevitable falls, injuries and egos. 

Most annoying about the film is that what director Bess Kargman shows us is mostly what she has access to. The fact that she focuses on these kids is because they are the best in their relative age groups and divisions, so their success is relatively guaranteed. That we only see one competition is simply a matter of it being the one that she was allowed to shoot. That the competition we see seems to jump around through the various rounds in an inconsistent and sometimes confusing way, is only a matter of the end (their ultimate success) being more important than their stories.

It's all a bit too banal for my taste. This really isn't an examination of kids who do ballet or the weird world of junior ballet (the crazy schedule, the weird diets, the psychological trips the kids must go through), but rather an small glimpse of these few, hand-selected dancers for this short period of time. 

This is a nice movie, but nothing really special. It's probably more worth it for dancers to watch and reminisce about their youth than it is for dancing novices like me.

Stars: 2 of 4

Gerhard Richter - Painting (Sunday, March 18, 2012) (30)

It's possible that Gerhard Richter's color-field abstract painting are the best example of the physical work that goes into the creation of art, the formalism of a canvas. In her new documentary, Gerhard Richter - Painting, Corinna Belz, shoots the German post-modernist in his studios and in museums and galleries where he fights with the paint and the canvases to create his work.

As a process documentary, this is absolutely amazing. We see how Richter takes a blank white canvas and adds big swaths of color, seemingly at random, then takes Plexiglas trowels of different lengths to smudge the paint. He then covers over one layer with another, then scrapes again to reveal the hidden and random color fields beneath. Finally he applies paint directly to the edges of these massive knives and goes over the surfaces another time, removing and adding color at the same time.

It is never clear to us when he is done with a work or at what state he is in. At one point an assistant jokes that it's better to not comment on anything because he'll take a positive remark as a sign that the picture is bad and will start over from the begging, thus wasting everyone's time.

We get small glimpses of his mindset and his approach to his pictures, but he remains particularly sphinx-like about what he does and how he knows when pictures are done (I guess he has to keep some secrets).

There is a wonderful small moment as he looks at old family snapshots and comments that he has no memory of the scenes or the people in them (his parents) and can't actually account for the surrounding areas, beyond the borders of the image. It's such a wonderful overintelectualized and particularly East German view of the world. A fetishization of the banal and bleak. Still, it offers an interesting prism through which to see his work. He makes pictures that we can see, concentrating on composition and relationships of shapes and color. Any other content for him is noise and irrelevant.

The best moments in the film come when the canvases he works on fill up the entire screen and we see him moving across it scraping with his Plexi-ledge. Frustratingly, Belz includes moments of his representational pictures that seem to confuse the story and become noise for us. Still, this is an excellent example of some of the best moments in the recent trend in artistic process docs (there have been dozens, including recent ones on Louise Bourgeois and Richard Serra).

Stars: 3 of 4

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (Tuesday, March 14, 2012) (27)

David Gelb's film Jiro Dreams of Sushi has one of the move evocative names in recent memory. The documentary opens with the eponymous sushi chef talking about his dreams and then we see some of his creations, in a dreamlike slow motion, in wide angle. This film is a dreamscape of rice and fish.

It's a documentary about an 85-year-old three-star Michelin sushi chef in Tokyo who practices his craft in a way that has largely disappeared in our contemporary world, particularly the celebrity chef culture, where fame pushes some to change menus, make concessions on quality or rarely work as one manages one's empire of restaurants, books and TV shows. Jiro is not that chef.

The film looks at lots of different aspects of his restaurant and his view of the world, inasmuch as it relates to his 10-seat sushi restaurant. His main deputy is is eldest son Yoshikazu, who has worked by his side for a few decades now. He is clearly another great sushi chef, but the bar his father has set is so high, he might never be properly respected for his talent. We see how the son goes to the fish market to buy the best product, how they have special relationships with all the vendors, how they have a special kind of rice they serve that has to be prepared a special way. We see how they have a long line of apprentices who work for 10 years under Jiro's (and, to a lesser degree, Yoshikazu's) tutelage, learning the perfect way to slice fish, or massage octopus (40-50 minutes rather than 30 minutes, you naifs!).

Gelb embraced the minimalist beauty of the sushi gestalt by using several Philip Glass works for the score. The only problem with this is that it then begs a lopsided comparison with Morris' The Thin Blue Line and Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, both of which used original Glass music. Gelb really can't hold a candle to those masters. And here is where the film stops being a revelation and starts being a regurgitation of styles that the director picked up in film class.

Yes, sushi-making is beautiful and Japan has this amazing culture that appreciates craft and slowness and beauty in the midst of urban chaos, but do we really need every shot to be some camera trick or gimmick? Every set-up is at a funny diagonal, there's a ton of slow motion, a lot of wide angles, a lot of double-exposed images bleeding from one thing to another. It's all a bit too complex for such a simple work.

I get that Jiro probably has more in common with a dancer than with a typical chef, but I wish things were just a bit simpler and less stylized.

One interesting moment, when Yoshikazu goes to the fish market and to an auction for tuna (which, by now, has been shown on American TV dozens of times already) we see that the auctioneers in this market have an amazing sing-songy, playful cadence to their calling, less rednecked than American-style livestock auctions and more ethnic music. Sadly, Gelb buries these songs in a pit of recycled symphonic music, so we can't even appreciate what we're seeing and hearing. It would be like he's cooking fatty tuna. Totally unnecessary and borderline reckless.

The film generally loses it's way by trying to turn what should be a tight little short (35 minutes would suffice) into a feature. At one point we follow Jiro to his home town where he visits with some elementary school classmates. This is totally off-topic, especially because Jiro has been, heretofore, very reticent about his family history. This is just a bit too much.

Gelb makes a nice movie, but I would recommend he take some advice from great sushi masters like Jiro and concentrate more on the taste and quality of his dish and less on the volume and quantity of it. Using mostly borrowed, complex style doesn't help the film, and a lot less here would have been much more.

Stars: 3 of 4

Blank City (2011) (Wednesday, March 8, 2012) (158)

There are few subjects I like more for documentaries than New York in earlier eras. In Blank City, French director Celine Danhier, looks at the downtown art scene, particularly the culture of filmmakers, in the East Village in the late 1970s and early 1980s -- one of the worst eras in the recent history of New York City.

Following on the heels of the experimental art filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Jonas Meekas, Jack Smith, Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow, a large group of drug- and alcohol-addled kids started shooting small movies with Super-8 cameras they borrowed, rented or stole. This is the same era and the same group of people who brought you bands like the Talking Heads, Blondie and the Ramones -- a very CBGB-based set who lived somewhere from Avenue C to Bowery and from Houston to 14th Street. The city was broke and dangerous and their films were weird and terrible and amazing.

Dozens of artists, actors and filmmakers from the era are interviewed with clips from many of their movies. Probably the most famous of those people are Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi and Deborah Harry. We see how the movement went from the so-called "No Wave" films, which were rather chaotic and improvised, frequently sexual and about the desolation that surrounded the filmmakers, to the "Cinema of Transgression" of Nick Zedd, Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch (don't worry - I don't know most of these people either), that was more hyper-political and in-your-face. We see how the movement died when the neighborhood started getting nicer again in the late '80s and some of the (better) directors (like Jarmusch and Susan Seidelman) moved on to bigger projects.

This is a really fun and interesting documentary about the very recent past that seems to have been buried as if it took place a century ago. There's a constant sense throughout that despite the fact that New York City was terrible in that era, it was also wonderful. As much as hipsters bitch about how nice and yuppified the city is now, even East Williamsburg is nicer than Alphabet City was then. We probably won't ever see another time when groups of artists could rent lofts to live in for $50 a month... and, sadly, we won't ever again see such an enormous and weird output of art

Stars: 3 of 4

Last Days Here (Tuesday, March 6, 2012) (24)

The documentary Last Days Here opens with an old man sitting on a shity couch lighting a crack pipe. "Did you see where that rock of crack fell?" he asks as he searches beneath the cushions for a bit more drugs. This is Bobby Liebling, the once and future lead man for the heavy metal band Pentagram -- the best hard rock band you've never heard of.

The film follows Liebling and his friend, manager and number-one fan Sean 'Pellet' Pelletier, who discovered the band several years ago and has been trying to get Bobby to make a new record or go on tour ever since. Bobby is a life-long drug addict (heroin, meth, crack ... you name it) and has some significant clinical paranoia (or something) that makes him think his skin is infected... which leads him to pick at it until he draws blood. He's also one of the great American heavy metal artists, bridging the space between Black Sabbath and the Sex Pistols, as one person in the film put it.

Not only do we see the history of Pentagram - a band from suburban Washington, D.C. who could have made it had Bobby been easier to deal with in the early '70s - but we also see how Bobby's life is today. In his mid-50s, he lives in the basement (or "sub-basement") of his parents' suburban row house and he basically does nothing with his time aside from sleep and do drugs. His parents seem aloof to his situation and his Jewish mother hopes he'll find a nice woman to help him out. Good luck with that.

But his life does appear to turn around for a moment, as he gets hospitalized and clean and then connects with a fan (a really hot young fan!) for whom he moves to Philadelphia to be near. But, as with most addicts and young girls who fall in love with sick old men, things fall apart and Bobby seems to be on the brink of death yet again.

There is always an element to a movie like this where you worry as a viewer that you are taking part in the exploitation of such a man. It's hard to avoid that fact that he is deeply sick and damaged and the "objective film crew" seems to do nothing to help him (though in this case, directors Don Argott and Demian Fenton do seem to help, inasmuch as Bobby does get help from Pellet and others). It's not easy to sit and watch a man slowly burn his wick almost to the end (several times).

Bobby is tremendously charismatic, even in his drugged haze -- a bit reminiscent of Lemmy from Motorhead (and his documentary from last year). He has a magnetic personality, and seems to be a master of performance, which is clearly part of the problem for him. One could blame his parents or his friends (Pellet, specifically) for letting him get so bad, but ultimately it's clearly a hard situation for them too (his parents seem to wash their hands of him, and of the movie at some point).

This is the most recent in a rash of heavy metal documentaries, including Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, Iron Maiden: Flight 666, Until the Light Takes Us and Lemmy, and this is a solid one. It's fun to learn about the detailed history of something that nobody knows and Bobby's contemporary drug story is interesting and sometimes tragic, without being too cutesy or precious. I'm pretty sure I'll never buy a Pentagram record in my life, but I'm glad I know more about them now.

Stars: 3 of 4

An Encounter with Simone Weil (Tuesday, March 6, 2012) (23)

Simone Weil was a less-than-totally-well-known French philosopher active mostly during the period between the two world wars. A consummate humanist, she struggled with the nature and scale of human suffering and wrote volumes and volumes of journals about it. She began as a Marxist, concerned with the rights of workers in French factories and moved on to other post-Communist concerns about people suffering under totalitarian organizations of any scale.

Raised as a secular Jew in an intellectual family, she became interested in the spiritual and mystical side of Christianity, as a way of understanding pain, suffering and exaltation. Ultimately Weil died in London in 1943, while working for the Free French Government, largely as a result of a near-starvation regime meant to symbolize a connection between herself and the people of France (Occupied and Vichy), who were not eating well.

In her film, An Encounter with Simone Weil, director Julia Haslett presents a fascinating biodoc about Weil, but from a very personal, almost avante-garde point of view. Haslett explains early on that her father suffered with mental illness through his life and committed suicide when she was 17; her brother, an academic also concerned with the history of suffering of blacks in America, deals with his own depression and thoughts of suicide.

The film is not a standard biodoc, however, but rather is more of a personal diary or collection of thoughts by Haslett, mostly about Weil, but also about suffering of people in her family and others. She is as much the subject of her doc as is Weil.

As the film moves along, we see the very typical still scans of photographs of Weil as well as copies of her hand-written journals and essays; Haslett interviews some of her family members who are still alive in France as well as contemporary philosophers, academics and researchers who are using her writings for their work.

The most daring element, though, is that Haslett has an actress playing Weil, has her study her writings and then interviews her. This is the very literal encounter with Simone Weil. As she is doing it, Haslett speaks about how she doesn't know exactly what she is going to get out of it. It's a very bold and interesting device -- to see if through the craft of acting, one might be able to unlock doors into a deeper meaning of the text. As a thought experiment this is a rather brilliant tool; I'm not sure it finds any specific success, although I appreciate the effort.

There is a real beauty to the way the film acts a bit like Haslett's journal, as she's researching Weil, who kept journals herself. I like the way Haslett tells Weil's full biography and gives a picture of her soul, and subtly shows her own emotional biography, as it relates to her father and brother. It's cut together really elegantly.

This is a very interesting, well made film that does more than just tell the story of a relatively unknown thinker. It is clear that this is a very personal film, which might lead to how good it is, but it also clear that Haslett is a daring filmmaker, interested in film form and structure as much as in narrative history. I always appreciate any film that breaks rules and pushes boundaries -- and this one does it very well.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Exporting Raymond (2011) (Sunday, March 4, 2012) (157)

I should begin this by saying that in its entire 9-season run, I never watched an entire episode of "Everybody Loves Raymond" because the moments I did see of it were much too broad and banal for my tastes. I know well that everyone in America loved the show and I recognize that I was wrong to not like it. This is something I'm willing to live with.

Exporting Raymond, written and directed by former ELR producer Phil Rosenthal, is a sweet documentary about the cultural differences that arise when Sony TV sells ELR to a Russian TV station for production there. Rosenthal goes to Moscow to work for several months with the producers and cast to reconceive the show and make it more appealing to Russian audiences.

Every silly cultural stereotype that you would expect comes up: The Russian actors are a bit too wooden and naturalist; there's a fancy Russian costume designer who wants to dress the cast in luxury brand stuff because that's what she wears; ex-Soviet systems seem to be in place despite two decades of "democracy". It's all a bit wrote and uninspiring.

My favorite part is a scene where Rosenthal goes to a Moscow modern art gallery where he is told that Russians are more concerned with aesthetics than they are with content. To illustrate this, the gallery director shows him an artwork relating to Brittany Spears and he makes a lost-in-translation comment about how great Brit Brit is. Of course, Rosenthal thinks Britney is the the worst thing ever. But I would say her act is to music what Ray Romano is to comedy -- about as low as you can go. Perhaps this is where the film loses me.

There was nothing particularly clever or original about Romano's show -- and that was precisely the point. It was stuff with mass appeal about the difficulty of living with parents, a wife and kids. "Seinfeld" with kids and less Jewish.

This is actually why this film should work for me: without any emotional connection to the base material, I should have no issues about the quality of the adaptation and just concentrate on the experience. But Rosenthal is such a nag and a boring guy that almost all the jokes fall flat or seem easy.

This is a nice film, but nothing special. Just about exactly how I would describe Everybody Loves Raymond.

Stars: 2 of 4

This is Not a Film (Friday, March 2, 2012) (21)

In December 2010, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, one of the leaders of the Iranian New Wave, was sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on making films, writing screenplays or doing interviews. He was accused of colluding with others to make propaganda detrimental to the Iranian regime after being arrested at the grave of Neda Agha-Soltan, the woman who became famous for being killed on camera during the 2009 Green Revolution.

In 2011, locked in his apartment awaiting a decision from the appeals court, Panahi, along with friend and documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, shot a near-documentary, near-diary piece about a day in his life. The clever title, This is Not a Film, refers to his court-ordered ban on making films, but also raises a semantic dilemma about what exactly this is that we are watching. It's not really a film in a traditional sense that there is a particular plot of story that is being worked through; it is not a documentary about anything in particular, because Panahi's actions on this day are rather banal and not particularly intersting (he could leave his house, he's not in jail yet; he is making a movie of some form).

At first Panahi reads the script that would have been his next film, were he allowed to make it. Much like the neorealist content of his other works, this one deals with a woman in college. He puts tape on the floor of his massive and seemingly rich apartment to delineate her bedroom and rearranges the furniture to suggest the setting. As he begins to read from the text (he jokes that there was no ban on reading a script, so he's not violating the ruling), he stops to talk about the art of directing and the small details of working with non-actors, as he does in most of his films. He pulls out DVDs of his past films to show what he means. He begins to break down, as he realizes he cannot do this again for the foreseeable future.

This non-film proceeds and gets into a meta-discussion between Panahi and Mirtahmasb about the nature of documentaries and representation. It leaves us wondering how much of this is scripted and how much is natural. It seems totally natural, though Panahi's wife and daughter are curiously absent for the 12 or so hours the cameras are rolling (apparently if they were home they would have to wear a chador to obey the law, however women in Iran do not wear chadors in their homes; as a way around this obvious violation of law or naturalness, Panahi sends his family out of the house for the day).

This is a very nice, very clever film that not only raises post-modern issues of representation and perceived reality, but also functions as a sly attack on the monstrosity of the Iranian regime. Smuggled out of the country on a USB drive, it's amazing to me that this wouldn't be a violation of Panahi's sentence -- although it might follow the letter of the ruling, it seems to violate it at every turn and stick a thumb in the eye of the authority.

As interesting as the film is, it does lose some steam by the end, with the last 15 minutes a return to every-day life. I'm sure this is just a view into the mundaneness of life, though it feels like it's unrelated to the rest of the film and doesn't totally have any point (we see Panahi talking to the brother of the super of his building as he takes out the garbage). As much as I like the philosophical discussions that proceed this, I find this curiously boring, waiting for some greater connection to something of significance.

This is definitely a good film and possibly an important one, but it feels more like collection of scattered thoughts more than an effective essay of any sort. It is a handful of video journal entries, almost all of which are fascinating, but don't totally hold together well, as stream of consciousness frequently is wont to do. I like how this fits into the sharp naturalness of Panahi's previous work, and I think in the long run it will act as an important milestone, it just feels a bit less cohesive than it should.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Woman with the Five Elephants (2011) (Thursday, February 23, 2012) (155)

The so-called "five elephants" in the title of the German documentary The Woman with the Five Elephants are the five major novels by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the eponymous woman is Svetlana Geier, one of the most important translators of Russian literature into German who has spent the past 25 years working on those paper pachyderms.

This documentary starts out as a profile of Geier showing her method for translation, involving two rounds, one where she dictates to a lady who types (on a typewriter) what she says, and a second where she rereads what she put down with another linguistic and literary scholar. We see that she is a grandmother in Freiburg with a big family, she works for several hours a day and also takes care of cooking family meals for celebrations.

At some point one of her sons gets injured in an accident and she stops her translation work to take care of him, cooking for him and visiting him in the hospital. In this period she is asked by her alma mater in Kiev, Ukraine to visit and speak to students about her methods and her work. She sets off on a train trip, with one of her granddaughters, back to her hometown that she left during the war.

We then see her back story. In the Ukraine, she was a star German student and when the Nazis took control of Kiev, she got a few lucky breaks thanks to some of the officers who lived with her mother and her. At some point she was offered a scholarship to study at the University of Freiburg, where she moved with her mother before the end of the war.

There is an interesting passage where Geier reflects on her own luck and on "freedom" as described and written about by Dostoyevsky. Although she doesn't say it, it is clear she is thinking about how her own personal success and life was a result of Nazis, the archetypal group who would deny other such freedom, being kind to her.

This is a nice movie, although I feel like it's various threads don't totally connect (outside of this one sequence). I feel like there are really two stories here, one about the world's greatest Russian-to-German translator and another one about a young Ukrainian woman who got lucky early in life thanks to the Nazis. Perhaps this is very contemporary and young of me to feel, but it all doesn't really matter that much to me.

She's a wonderful woman, a loving grandmother, and has an intricate past but not all that interesting as a human. This is another case where I feel a 40-minute short would have been more compelling, showing one part of her story or another.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Undefeated (Friday, February 17, 2012) (12)

Ever since Hoop Dreams, documentarians have been obsessed with movies about sports teams, particularly ones in inner cities. In the past few years there has been a rash of mediocre ones that have minor interest and bad scripts. Considering this background, Undefeated, directed by Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, is a real triumph as it tells a very compelling story of a football team, focuses on a few interesting and exciting kids and uses some wonderful moments to tell a heart-warming tale of success despite poor odds.

This is not a film about a high school team going undefeated over the course of a season, after all, they lose their first game only a few minutes into the film. The title refers more to the concept of not being beaten down and not giving up. It's the philosophy of the team's hero coach, Bill Courtney.

Courtney is a slightly out of shape middle aged white guy who owns a lumber supply company in Memphis. Following his life-long dream of coaching a football team, five years ago he became the volunteer head coach of the Manassas Tigers in North Memphis. Manassas High School was recently rebuilt, so their physical facilities look nice, but the student body comes from very poor families with very little support. The school has a history of being one of the worst football teams in Tennessee for most of the last 40 years, but through hard work and discipline, Courtney has turned them back into a contender.

We follow star linemen O.C. Brown and Montrail "Money" Brown (not related), who are two of the senior leaders of the team, either physically or in effort and drive. O.C. is a typical giant of a lineman who struggles with his grades as he gets interest from many division 1A college football programs. Meanwhile, Money is a great student, but is a bit undersized to play on the line, so he makes up for his physical deficiencies by working twice as hard on the field.

At some point another kid, Chavis Daniels, gets out of juvee, where he spent about two years for assault, and continues to have issues with controlling his anger and his mouth. He gets in fights with coaches and other players and Courtney has to figure out how to use him on the field and how to not give up on him, as that would be a veritable death sentence for the young man.

Formally documentaries are difficult to inject too much style into, as their primary purpose is to explain something. Non-fiction is simply not as expressive and malleable a medium to easily make beauty. There is one moment in this film, however, that is one of the loveliest moments from a documentary I can think of in a long time. It's subtle and was probably the result of a lucky camera man shooting the right thing at the right moment, rather than being scripted by a director, but it's powerful and perfect for a moment. A tip of my cap to the directors for connecting two disparate elements from two parts of a film into one lovely shot.

This film is one of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature and it would be very deserving of the prize were it to win. It's a very good film, unsentimental, efficient and well made. Considering it probably could have done well just being OK (like so many other recent sports team docs), I consider that a great achievement.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Interruptors (2011) (Tuesday, February 14, 2012) (154)

On paper, The Interrupters, a film by Steve James (co-director of Hoop Dreams), about a group of volunteers who go into urban communities to help people alleviate violence and revenge attacks, seems like a can't-fail film. A brilliant filmmaker and a wonderful subject! But, as they say in sports, that's why they make the movies. The Interrupters is one of the biggest cinematic disappointments of the year for me, as it's way too long, has no real story structure and generally bores rather than inspires.

The film follows a year with the CeaseFire Violence Interrupters, a Chicago-based non-profit group who work with former gang members to mentor young people, many of whom are current gang members, and try to get them to cease the ever-spiraling cycle of violence and retribution. We meet three mentors, Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams and Eddie Bocanegra as they each work with a handful of individual kids to turn their lives around. Aside from their work with individuals, they each attend local community meetings and bigger CeaseFire panels where strategies are discussed. We see Matthews several times on the street literally getting in the face of young men as they are about to get into fights yelling them down to stop the violence.

Starting with the summer, we see four seasons of their work, and follow a few individual kids they struggle to keep in line. Matthews works with a girl who is prone to violence, has been arrested for something drug-related, and has difficulty turning the other cheek (and not getting high) when the heat turns up. Williams works with a young man in a similar situation, desperately trying to show him that a violent reaction would not make life better for anyone.

The biggest problem with the film is that there is simply too much information and too many people shown on screen. It is clear that what the Violence Interrupters are doing is fabulous and difficult work, but this is a case where showing less would be more effective. If we could concentrate only on three stories (one for each mentor), the message would be clearer. As it is, we see three stories and then about a dozen smaller stories in the middle. Yes, this clearly shows that they have very hard jobs to do and a lot of way to go before their work is finished, but part of the point of the documentary format is to not show everything, but to curate the best parts. For much of the length of the film, it seems the only reason we are still watching anything is because it's winter, say, and we need to get back to the end of spring. That's silly.

I can't really say there are many moments that are very memorable from the film, as there is just too much information presented. There are some happy endings and some sad ones and some unclear ones. It's easy to see that the work of the Violence Interrupters is amazing, but it's a shame it is presented in such a way (and that so many other critics are so thrilled with the results). This really could be a good 40-minute short about the work just of Matthews with the one young woman.

Otherwise, it should have been expanded to a miniseries, along the lines of the TV miniseries Brick City, about politics and people in Newark, NJ (that's a great series that everyone should see). As far as I understand it, there were longer cuts of The Interrupters in earlier versions, so I imagine there is adequate footage. Such a set-up wold allow stories to be expanded and clarified.

Stars: 2 of 4

Patriocracy (Tuesday, February 14, 2012) (10)

Following in the wake of polemicist documentarian Robert Greenwald, Brian Malone's Patriocracy is a nice and safe story about how bad American government is in 2012 and what we have to do to get it back to normal. Malone suggests that the reason everything on Capital Hill stinks so much is because of the deep partisan rift that has opened up in recent years and how no business gets done anymore because both sides are just bickering back and forth.

Malone's biggest example of nothing getting done is the Simpson-Bowles fiscal readjustment committee (he spends a lot of time interviewing Sen. Alan Simpson, who likes to say words like "bullshit" a lot). Apparently because there were members of both political parties and that both parties are monolithic, the findings of that group had to be perfect, or something. That they didn't get passed in Congress and that the White House basically ignored them is a terrible thing.

This is where the film loses me. I agree that things don't get done enough in Washington and that the bickering is sickening, but I don't think both sides are equally to blame for the problem. I would say things got terrible when the GOP controlled congress in the mid-aughts and then got worse when the so-called Tea Party Republicans gave the GOP a majority in the House in 2010. That nothing gets done in the Senate has more to do with Republicans there not wanting to bend at all than with any sort of greater issue with partisan bickering or filibuster issues. (Yes, I realize I'm asking the GOP to bend more, but that's because the Senate Dems. already bend a ton for their centrist members.)

There are a bunch of smart suggestions made in the film, like having primary elections not be divided by party, but all-in-one affairs where many parties could run against one another, and taking money out of elections, but all of these things seem like long-shots that will never come together.

I mind that centrism is seen as some sort of perfect state of being, because centrism now is really center-rightism. The American political system is gerrymandered so much to the right that even "compromise" is just a way of giving Republicans almost everything they want. This feels like how people feel both sides of an issue should be explored to make something fair, but really, there's right and wrong and showing both sides gives "wrong" too much credit.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (Saturday, February 11, 2012) (8)

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth deals with the rise and fall (literally) of the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St. Louis in the late 1950s through the early 1970s. The film serves as a response to those who believe in the mythology that grew up around the development at the time of its failure, some of which still lasts today.

The Pruitt-Igoe development was designed and built in the mid-1950s to replace the dilapidated tenement houses of poor inner-city St. Louis. A modernist dreamscape, the concept was that the poor families who lived in the slums could all move to a bright and new housing project, pay modest rents and grow economically. The problem was that at the time the project was built, there were few jobs available to the working poor black community in St. Louis and with a baroque web of Welfare laws, families were torn apart just to stay above water.

Almost immediately the apartment blocks began to show signs of wear and tear. Security and maintenance teams had their budgets cut and within a few years, the Pruitt-Igoe buildings were in terrible shape. Of course this had everything to do with the situation of the tenants rather than their character or qualities. This specification was lost, however, by the time the buildings were condemned and raised in the early 1970s (the footage of that demolition was used prominently in Godfrey Reggio's brilliant Koyaanisqatsi). At that point, public housing, poor inner-city blacks and urban areas were seen as the problem, for which the might not be a solution.

The film is told very well and mostly chronologically and thematically, interviewing historians and former residents of the buildings. We see how the buildings represented the modernist ideal of a new city built out of whole cloth and populated instantly. We see how it was a wonderful and frightening place to live at different times and how tearing it down was probably the only possible thing to do.

This is a very effective movie about a very important topic. It's efficient, compelling and far-reaching. It's easy to see how some of the conclusions made by some of the interviewees are reflected in our world today. This is a nice small film that has a big impact.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Arbor (2011) (Thursday, February 8, 2012) (151)

I am always interested in films that make leaps in formal conventions and are daring about how they present their information. Such is the case with Clio Bernard's film The Arbor, a pseudo-documentary about English playwright Andrea Dunbar. Bernard presents Dunbar's story as a series of actual audio interviews of Dunbar and her family recorded in the 1980s that are dubbed over actors playing the parts of these people. Most of the time the syncing is so close that we lost track of the formal process, as if the actors were simply speaking the lines of these sad, poor Yorkshire characters.

Dunbar came to some prominence and notoriety in the late 1970s with a short play called "The Arbor", which autobiographically told of her life and background. At the time she was a poor girl living in counsel estates in West Yorkshire. She wrote the play for a school project at age 15, but it was entered into a national competition, which it won. It was produced by the Royal Court Theater, with whom she would develop a brief relationship with.

From there she wrote a screenplay for the Alan Clarke film Rita, Sue and Bob Too, which was also autobiographical and dealt with many of the same characters and situations. All this time, she was generally on drugs and drunk and had three babies out of wedlock (the first was to a Pakistani man, which became the subject of her first play). She would go on to write a third play along similar lines before dying of a brain hemorrhage in 1990.

We then see how Dunbar's drug and alcohol abuse and the grinding poverty they lived in changed the lives of her kids. Her eldest daughter got hooked on drugs as well, worked as a prostitute and was convicted of killing her own baby with Methadone.

This is a very interesting, bleak look at the modern world, and one that we don't see all that often. It has the feeling of something that Andrea Arnold might have made (or Alan Clarke), and certainly feels as desperate and depressing as the story is. There is a helplessness to the whole thing that I find appealing and yet alienating. It's hard to identify with any characters because they're all so broken... and because the formalism of the piece gets in the way.

I'm not totally sure what I'm supposed to make of the this process and how I'm supposed to feel about the separation between the characters and myself that I feel. Is the point that I am as separated from them because of the dubbing as they are from one another? This is an interesting concept, an interesting Marxist technique in the midst of this anti-neo-liberal tale. I appreciate what Bernard is trying to do here more than I like the final product. I feel like it's a bit underdeveloped. Still, it's a very interesting and good film.

Stars: 3 of 4

Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune (2011) (Thursday, January 26, 2012) (147)

There But for Fortune is a very good biodoc about the life and career of the great folk singer and Lefty activist Phil Ochs. It shows how he came up in the late-'50s Greenwich Village folk scene, how he was friendly and competitive with Dylan and how he got involved in the various civil rights and anti-war movements of the Left. The third act, about his fall into manic-depression and his ultimate suicide is a bit rocky as it features less music and, as a result of his doing fewer interviews, more speculation by his friends.

Still, the music throughout the film is, of course, fantastic, and this really shows Ochs as the musical and cultural genius and firebrand that he was. It's sad that he's not thought of by most in the same way Seeger, Dylan and Baez are, but his work clearly stands shoulder-to-shoulder with any of theirs.

Stars: 3 of 4

Bonsai People: The Vision of Muhammad Yunus (Tuesday, January 24, 2012) (3)

The title of this film, Bonsai People, comes from one of Muhammad Yunus' millions of aphorisms about how people are like bonsai trees and that they can grow but they need care and love and the right soil. Yunus is a really great guy. He saw a need for micro-lending in his native Bangladesh and began the Grameen Bank, a nimble bank that broke with international tradition by lending small amounts of money to the poorest people they could find. Grameen's clients are almost all women who are looking for small loans under $100 to buy a cow or a few small trees or some seeds to start a small business. This documentary looks at all that Grameen and Yunus do.

After Yunus got tons of attention in 2006 when he won the Nobel Peace Prize, international companies fell all over themselves to work with him in one of the zillions of Grameen off-shoots, in health, housing, farming, livestock, childhood and women's education, disaster relief, food and on and on. The film is punctuated with some of Yunus' more wholesome and banal chestnuts ("Credit is a human right;" "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime;" "Making an impact in people's lives is as important as making money.") and we see how his policies and ideas are helping to life poor women out of poverty throughout Bangladesh.

Strangely criticisms of Grameen's lending practices are mentioned and quickly dismissed. We never really see what happens to women who can't pay back their debts and why (there's a suggestion that health care emergencies sometimes get in the way of paying back the loans... but that seems like a much too specific reason). There's also a strange sense, in discussion with some of Grameen' more long-term borrowers, that the bank acts as a bit of a pusher forcing women to take loans they might not need or want. One women proudly shows off her beautiful house and farm paid for by work and Grameen loans. Wonderful - but it does feel a bit like she's a junkie showing all the wonderful different drugs her dealer has given to her. A bit strange. I wish there had been a bit more balance to this portrait and that it came off as less of a propaganda tool than it does.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Page One: Inside the New York Times (2011) (Monday, January 23, 2012) (144)

Page One: Inside the New York Times is a documentary that follows the Media desk of the New York Times during the end of 2009 and early 2010. One of the main characters of the film is Media columnist and reporter David Carr, and with his rough Upper Midwest voice, he takes on all attackers who claim that the paper is going under and that the days of broadsheet print are over.

Throughout the film stories pop up, get discussed, are printed and then forgotten. We see the first WikiLeaks video dump showing US armed forces killing Reuters journalists, we see the late-2009 withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, we see the Tribune Company fall apart. With each story it is clear that the editors and writers of the Times are serious thinking people who try to look at more than one side of the issue.

Meanwhile, from every angle, they are under attack from other journalists and news media players such as blogs and news aggregators who claim that the world wouldn't be so bad if there were no more Times. Each time this comes up, director Andrew Rossi shows that the claim is worthless without a full consideration of the ramifications of such a situation. The New York Times is the originator of many stories each day and a world without it might very well be a worse place.

This is clearly a glamor project that shows how wonderful and smart everything surrounding the New York Times is. There are brief mentions of the Carlos Slim loan to the Times, the new building and it's sale-leaseback deal, the new pay-wall on the website and the buyouts of old staffers. Mostly we see how a bunch of young (mostly) good looking (mostly) men make tough decisions all the time.

I generally don't like films like this that come off as much as an advertisement for the subject as a document about it, but this is generally not too offensive. It is interesting and clever how stories come and go through the film just as they do on the front page of the paper. Still, it sometimes seems like a movie with no plot and no beginning or end.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011) (Friday, January 13, 2012) (139)

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory is the third part of the documentary series about the so-called West Memphis 3, three teenagers who were convicted of murdering three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993. From the outside, the prosecution relied heavily on the boys appearance and fascination with the occult and heavy metal (which, of course, is not totally unusual for teenage boys). There was never any strong physical evidence, no motive and the convictions were largely based on the confession of Jessie Miskelly, the most damaged of the three, whose testimony was forced and hard to believe when heard. Of course, the convictions were really based on the fact that the community needed scapegoats and these kids were weird, had long hair, wore heavy metal t-shirts and didn't have lots of friends. Guilty.

The second film, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (from 2000), dealt mostly with the appeals process, where the three men brought new evidence and testimony to the court. Unfortunately for them, the judge hearing their appeal was the same one who presided over their original trials and his most important goal was to save face for himself and the police department, who had screwed up a handful of time.

Now, 11 years later the story goes on. The first 20 minutes of the film serve as catch-up to some of the more unusual details of the murders and the original trial. The body of one of the murdered boys had strange scratch marks on it and had its testicles and penis removed. Prosecutors used these facts to suggest it was a Satanic ritualistic murder, though an expert brought in by the appeal team says now that it's consistent with an animal clawing and eating parts of the body.

The step-father of one of the boys famously was accused by Damien Echols, the suggested leader of the killers and the only one on death row, to be the murderer and he, in turn, had acted out a manic ritual himself of burning and burying the "bodies" of the three murderers. That man is now on the side of the guilty men, saying he's been swayed by the lack of physical and DNA evidence in the States' case. The good news for the convicts is that the original judge was elected to the state supreme court (fail upwards!), so they would get a new judge who would hear their new evidence.

The second film dealt a lot with the cause celebre that the case had become and how celebrities like Eddie Vedder and Johnny Depp had taken the story and raised money for the appeal process. There was also a lot in the appeal case seen in that film about how the cameras of directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky that were in the court room in the original trial might have affected the outcome one way or another. In this third film there is a lot more of this reflexive analysis about how much of a thing this story of three teens became due to the popularity of the films. In the end, there would not have been a strong appeal possible without the financial and emotional support of the public for the three convicts. The documentary itself changes its own outcome (very un-Frederick Wiseman).

One very interesting element about this third film (and really the second one to a degree) is how this series emerges in a very similar if unintended way to the Up Series, the group of documentary films by Michael Apted that follows a group of 7-year-olds every seven years as they grow up. In those, as in this, you see how the characters grow and change and meet different experiences depending on how the deal with the reality they are each given. Similar to those films, Purgatory also shows how the experience of being in the films changes the men's lives. Damien Echols himself got married to a woman who watch the original documentary on TV in 1996, began a letter relationship with him and ultimately moved to Little Rock to marry him. Similar to the Up films, this is not an experiment sealed in a vacuum, rather they each have different opportunities because they are known from the film.

It says a lot that when I read in August that the West Memphis 3 were getting out of jail I knew exactly what the story was about and let a few friends know about it. It has become a cultural touchstone for this era that people around the world know about. Few documentaries have this reach and few can help to free wrongly convicted men the way this series has.

Stars: 3 of 4

Buck (2011) (Tuesday, January 10, 2012) (135)

Buck is a biodoc of Buck Brennaman, a famous horse trainer, whose kind approach to the animals has led him to become a minor celebrity in the horse world. Buck was raised by a physically abusive father and put onstage at an early age performing rope tricks. When his mother died and his father began beating him and his brother more, they were moved to a foster home. There he learned about love of people and of animals.

Nowadays Buck tours the country presenting horse clinics, teaching people with young horses how to interact with them better and safer. He doesn't believe in roughness at all with the animals and tries to explain "feel", the idea that one can lead a horse with one's mind better than with one's body and actions. He also manages to be on the road for nine months a year and stay married with a teenage daughter who loves him.

This is a nice little movie that has a very good message about love for people and for horses. It's not particularly intellectually stimulating and probably would have been stronger as a short rather than a feature, but it's a nice story about a very good man.

Stars: 2.5 of 4