15 Nisan 2012 Pazar
I certainly got my fill of non-fiction films over the last several days. It was another fine Full Frame at the Carolina Theatre in Durham (in case you haven’t tuned in lately), and I saw as many documentaries as I could of the 102 being screened.
Here’s what I saw on Day 3: Saturday, April 14th (Oh, yeah – please visit my recaps of Day 1, and Day 2):
DIANA VREELAND: THE EYE HAS TO TRAVEL (Dirs. Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Bent Jorgen-Perlmutt, & Frédéric Tcheng, 2011)
“The first thing to do, my love, is to arrange to be born in Paris. After that, everything follows quite naturally.”
The late Diana Vreeland was an influential fashion editor at Harper's Bazaar (1937-1962), Editor-in-Chief of Vogue (1963-1971), and a consultant to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but its her blustery acerbic wit that makes her such a great subject for a doc. This one, which utilizes interviews that Vreeland did with esteemed author George Plimpton, exploits her hilarious quotes grandly, while colorfully flipping through the magazine pages of her life. As I tweeted, it's a “a savvy stylish film about a savvy stylish lady.”
JONESTOWN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PEOPLES TEMPLE (Dir. Stanley Nelson, 2007) Full Frame is paying tribute to Stanley Nelson this year with re-screenings of 4 of his films, including this stirring breakdown of the events that led to the largest mass murder-suicide in history (909 poeple), at Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. I remember hearing about the tragedy when I was a kid - Time Magazine images of the bodies on the ground around vats of Kool-aid are seared into my psyche forever - but I was unaware of how exactly it all went down.
The scene of the crime is laid bare by interviews with the survivors mixed with footage, and photos (thankfully no re-enactments). Nelson makes makes plain-spoken yet profound, deftly designed docs that pack a huge emotional punch. This is one of the best of them.
RADIO UNNAMEABLE (Dirs. Paul Lovelace & Jessica Wolfson, 2012) Another almost forgotten figure gets their well deserved bio-doc: Bob Fass, a free-form radio personality who broadcasted on WBAI, New York for half a century. Fass's show, also entitled “Radio Unnameable,” was a late night program in which Fass took calls, spun records, and interviewed a who's-who of '60s and '70s musicians (including Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Arlo Guthrie who premiered "Alice's Resturant" on the show).
Being an outspoken member of the counter-culture, Fass got involved in various controversies involving unions, free speech battles, and political rallying - all of which this doc defly covers with choice audio excerpts from Fass's archives.
BIG BOYS GONE BANANAS!* (Dir. Fredrik Gertten, 2012)
“When you go to a documentary screening at a film festival, it’s almost always about some kinda controversial story, who knows, war crimes or corporate abuse, family abuse - documentarians tend to traffic in misery and horror. And I’ve been to many films like that, but never to one that had this feeling that the room could kind of…blow up.” – Alex Rivera (Jury member of the LA Film Fest)
This is a film about a documentary filmmaker getting sued by a large corporation. You see, the Dole Food Company took issue with Fredrick Gertten's 2009 doc BANANAS!* and did everything they could to suppress its distribution. Gertten is amazed by Dole's scare tactics and how much money and effort they put into trying to stop his small film. Since Gertten's film was about Nicaraguan banana workers involved in a legal battle over Dole's use of a banned pesticide, one can see why they were nervous but it's ridiculous and self defeating that they would go to such lengths to discredit this man. A must-see for anyone who dreams of picking up a camera and sticking it to the man.
THE BUS (Dir. Damon Ristau, 2012) My last film of the day was thw World Premiere of this 63 minute tribute to the legacy of the VW Bus. Ristau draws together testimonies (mostly by hippy folks) to the German utility vehicle turned counter-culture icon with vintage advertisements and many clips of the camper's cameos in the movies including EASY RIDER, FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, CARS (firringly George Carlin voiced the vehicle) and LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (What? No Lost?).
There's also the Grateful Dead connection - the bus was so associated with the historic jam band's fans that the company took out a large ad depicting a VW bus with a tear in its left front headlight/eye in Rolling Stone when Jerry Garcia died. I didn't really learn anything new in THE BUS, but it was a fun trip, especially when he get a look at the world's largest VW Bus (13 feet high, weighing 19,500 pounds), that's named Walter incidentally.
Here’s what I saw on Day 4: Sunday, April 15th:
UNDER AFRICAN SKIES (Dir. Joe Berlinger, 2012) Paul Simon returns to Africa in this celebration and examination of his classic 1986 “Graceland” album. In the mid '80s, Simon recorded the bulk of the album in South Africa with South African musicians (including Ladysmith Black Mambazo) and courted controversy by breaking the cultural boycott against the apartheid regime. In an affecting one-on-one with Dali Tambo of Artists Against Apartheid, Simon makes his case for the collaboration, but Tambo states that the music, as much as he liked it, wasn't helpful at the time.
Berlinger (the PARADISE LOST films, SOME KIND OF MONSTER) keeps the very musical movie going with studio footage from the original sessions, film of live performances from then and now, and interviews with “Graceland” fans David Byrne, Paul McCartney, Oprah Winfrey, and Peter Gabriel.
THE IMPOSTER (Dir. Bart Layton, 2012) This was one of the 'To Be Announced' Sunday selections, which are usually made up of the films that won awards at the Awards Barbeque at the Durham Armory earlier in the day.
“The Imposter” didn't win any awards, but Full Frame Director of Programming Sadie Tillery said in her intro for it that it was one of the most popular docs at the fest with a much talked about sold-out screening Saturday afternoon. I myself had heard folks raving about it, so I got in the last minute line.
I'm glad I did - Layton's film is a both chilling and funny true-crime story about a 23 year-old Frenchman who is able to convince a Texas family that he's their missing teenage son, despite his different appearance and, ahem, strong accent. Frédéric Bourdin, the serial imposter who pulled it off, appears to give his side of the story, while the deceived family members and authorities give theirs. It's as compelling as many thrillers (especially these days), with even the dark re-enactments hitting the right notes.
A couple of films I saw on screeners in the Press Lounge:
BEAUTY IS EMBARRASSING (Dir. Neil Berkeley, 2012) I missed this when it screened on Friday afternoon, so I was glad to catch up with it via screener. It's a snazzy bio-doc of Wayne White, the guy who brought his awesome art skills to Pee Wee's Playhouse, Beakman's World, Shining Time Station, and the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight” video. White tells us: “I’ve worn many hats: painter, sculptor, cartoonist, puppeteer, set-designer, art-director, illustrator…” as we see tons of examples of his work, in particular his word paintings which feature vast landscapes with giant letters spelling out phrases like the title of this film.
White might want to add comedian to his list of occupations, because his anecdotes told from the stage while he's showing slides are hilarious. “Art is a lifestyle,” White says more than once in this doc, and, man, that’s an appealing ideal when you see this guy’s life’s work.
CATCAM (Dir. Seth Keal, 2012) This very amusing 16 minute doc short concerns a German engineer (Jürgen Perthold) living in South Carolina who outfits his cat, Mr. Lee, with a tiny camera (on a collar on the front of the cat's neck) so he can see what his pet does and where he goes. The pictures that come back are quite interesting - the cat encountering other cats, a street sign in an area Perthold doesn't recognize, and some almost artistic shots of nature. Bet anything none of my cats would take pictures anywhere as good.
Well, that's another Full Frame. Stay tuned for more extensive reviews of the best of the documentaries this year, as many of them may be making their way to a theater (or streaming service) near you soon.
More later...
12 Eylül 2011 Pazartesi
This documentary drops today on Blu ray and DVD:
CONAN O'BRIEN CAN'T STOP (Dir. Rodman Flender, 2011)
The title shot of this film has Conan O'Brien backstage strumming his guitar framed exactly like Bob Dylan was in the title shot of the 1965 documentary DON'T LOOK BACK. The font is even the same so it appears that director Rodman is attempting to do what D.A. Pennebaker did definitively for Dylan: capture an icon on tour during a pivotal period of transition.
Sadly, this is hardly a definitive or essential piece of work. It's a sloppily assembled, horribly uneven, and only fitfully funny film that jumps around spastically as much as its subject often does during his monologues - only it's less annoying when Conan does it.
I expected so much more from the director of LEPRECHAUN 2!
At the beginning Flender sums up the situation that I'm sure everybody reading this surely knows, so I'll try to keep it brief - after losing his Tonight Show gig on NBC in early 2010, Conan contractually could not appear on television, radio or the internet for 6 months, so he went out on a tour dubbed "The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour."
Okay, so that wasn't very brief.
There are a lot of clips of amusing stage antics, and some entertaining excerpts of the stable of songs (mostly rockabilly) played on the tour, but the choppiness of the presentation prevents immersion into the material.
The soundbite nature of the editing makes the interview bits unable to provide much insight. We hear Conan talk about the raw deal he was given (at point he says "sometimes I'm so mad I can't even breathe"), but you're better off with the 60 Minutes interview from last year if you want anything approaching revelations.
Still, Conan is an extremely funny guy so the film can't help have some hilarity - you gotta love a guy who says "it's in God's hands now" after sending a tweet. Sometimes Conan comes off mean with his constant comical verbal abuse of his assistant Sona Movsesian, the school boy punches to the shoulders of staff members, and the merciless ribbing of 30 Rock's Jack McBrayer - but hey, that's just the man's patented attention seeking persona. He acknowledges as much: "I might be a fuckin' genius and I might be the biggest dick ever, I don't know. Or maybe both - that's what Patton was."
It's obvious that Conan is always "on" when he's in front of a camera (I bet a lot of the time off camera too), so its a documentary that will be most enjoyed by hardcore fanatics i.e. Team Coco.
Although CONAN O'BRIEN CAN'T STOP isn't a great documentary, it's a worthwhile Blu ray/DVD because of its abundant special features.
The commentary with Conan, Flender, and the crew is much funnier than the movie (Conan says he wanted the tour's lengthy name to be even longer: "I wanted to call it 'The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour Because of Jay Leno Tour'"), there's a fairly insightful 11 minute interview, and a nice smattering of watchable outtakes which are listed below.
Special Features: Commentary with Director Rodman Flender, Conan O'Brien, Andy Richter, Mike Sweeney and Sona Movsesian, Interview with Conan O'Brien, Interview Outtakes, Additional Scenes.
More Later...
CONAN O'BRIEN CAN'T STOP (Dir. Rodman Flender, 2011)
The title shot of this film has Conan O'Brien backstage strumming his guitar framed exactly like Bob Dylan was in the title shot of the 1965 documentary DON'T LOOK BACK. The font is even the same so it appears that director Rodman is attempting to do what D.A. Pennebaker did definitively for Dylan: capture an icon on tour during a pivotal period of transition.
Sadly, this is hardly a definitive or essential piece of work. It's a sloppily assembled, horribly uneven, and only fitfully funny film that jumps around spastically as much as its subject often does during his monologues - only it's less annoying when Conan does it.
I expected so much more from the director of LEPRECHAUN 2!
At the beginning Flender sums up the situation that I'm sure everybody reading this surely knows, so I'll try to keep it brief - after losing his Tonight Show gig on NBC in early 2010, Conan contractually could not appear on television, radio or the internet for 6 months, so he went out on a tour dubbed "The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour."
Okay, so that wasn't very brief.
There are a lot of clips of amusing stage antics, and some entertaining excerpts of the stable of songs (mostly rockabilly) played on the tour, but the choppiness of the presentation prevents immersion into the material.
The soundbite nature of the editing makes the interview bits unable to provide much insight. We hear Conan talk about the raw deal he was given (at point he says "sometimes I'm so mad I can't even breathe"), but you're better off with the 60 Minutes interview from last year if you want anything approaching revelations.
Still, Conan is an extremely funny guy so the film can't help have some hilarity - you gotta love a guy who says "it's in God's hands now" after sending a tweet. Sometimes Conan comes off mean with his constant comical verbal abuse of his assistant Sona Movsesian, the school boy punches to the shoulders of staff members, and the merciless ribbing of 30 Rock's Jack McBrayer - but hey, that's just the man's patented attention seeking persona. He acknowledges as much: "I might be a fuckin' genius and I might be the biggest dick ever, I don't know. Or maybe both - that's what Patton was."
It's obvious that Conan is always "on" when he's in front of a camera (I bet a lot of the time off camera too), so its a documentary that will be most enjoyed by hardcore fanatics i.e. Team Coco.
Although CONAN O'BRIEN CAN'T STOP isn't a great documentary, it's a worthwhile Blu ray/DVD because of its abundant special features.
The commentary with Conan, Flender, and the crew is much funnier than the movie (Conan says he wanted the tour's lengthy name to be even longer: "I wanted to call it 'The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour Because of Jay Leno Tour'"), there's a fairly insightful 11 minute interview, and a nice smattering of watchable outtakes which are listed below.
Special Features: Commentary with Director Rodman Flender, Conan O'Brien, Andy Richter, Mike Sweeney and Sona Movsesian, Interview with Conan O'Brien, Interview Outtakes, Additional Scenes.
More Later...
11 Eylül 2011 Pazar
This British sci-fi comedy is playing exclusively in the Triangle at the Colony Theater in Raleigh:
ATTACK THE BLOCK (Dir. Joe Cornish, 2011)
A breath of fresh air after this superhero/sequel saturated summer, ATTACK THE BLOCK posits a teenaged South London street gang versus an alien invasion with thrillingly funny results.
There's a bit of a GOONIES filtered through the sensibility of SHAWN OF THE DEAD (Edgar Wright co-executive produced) thing going down as the kids race around a grimy low-income apartment building known as "the Block" (as in Block of flats), battling black furry monsters with green glowing teeth that they call "bear/wolf/gorilla motherfuckers."
The leader of the gang is the unsmiling John Boyega as Moses, who seems destined to the life of a go nowhere drug dealer until this unexpected attack puts him to the test. Boyega's crew is made up of Simon Howard, Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh, and Leeon Jones.
The underaged hoods first encounter the aliens in the middle of mugging a nurse (Jodie Whittaker) on her way home to the same complex they live in. Whittaker gets away as the gang go after the creature and kill it figuring that it's something they can maybe sell on Ebay.
Moses stashes the dead monster at the apartment of deadly drug kingpin Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter), who has a weed selling underling played by Nick Frost (there's some of that SHAWN OF THE DEAD vibe I was talking about).
Despite their prickly first meeting, Whittaker joins forces with Boyega and his boys (boyz?), while the spot-on Luke Treadaway, as a geeky stoner gang member wannabe, also gets wrapped up into the warfare.
The film builds into a chaotic action-packed blast as the kids pull their resources (mostly fireworks) to battle the bunch of bear/wolf/gorilla motherfuckers (just wanted to type that again), and there are tons of laugh-out loud lines (like "this is too much madness to fit into a text!"), every step of the way.
The movie is a bit too dark - not thematically, but lighting-wise - as some shots are hard to follow through the murky shadows, yet its small scale special effects work well enough to serve the story and tone.
ATTACK THE BLOCK looks destined to be a future cult movie, perfect for late night viewings, but don't wait until then - this is well worth seeking out now while it's still on the big screen.
More later...
ATTACK THE BLOCK (Dir. Joe Cornish, 2011)
A breath of fresh air after this superhero/sequel saturated summer, ATTACK THE BLOCK posits a teenaged South London street gang versus an alien invasion with thrillingly funny results.
There's a bit of a GOONIES filtered through the sensibility of SHAWN OF THE DEAD (Edgar Wright co-executive produced) thing going down as the kids race around a grimy low-income apartment building known as "the Block" (as in Block of flats), battling black furry monsters with green glowing teeth that they call "bear/wolf/gorilla motherfuckers."
The leader of the gang is the unsmiling John Boyega as Moses, who seems destined to the life of a go nowhere drug dealer until this unexpected attack puts him to the test. Boyega's crew is made up of Simon Howard, Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh, and Leeon Jones.
The underaged hoods first encounter the aliens in the middle of mugging a nurse (Jodie Whittaker) on her way home to the same complex they live in. Whittaker gets away as the gang go after the creature and kill it figuring that it's something they can maybe sell on Ebay.
Moses stashes the dead monster at the apartment of deadly drug kingpin Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter), who has a weed selling underling played by Nick Frost (there's some of that SHAWN OF THE DEAD vibe I was talking about).
Despite their prickly first meeting, Whittaker joins forces with Boyega and his boys (boyz?), while the spot-on Luke Treadaway, as a geeky stoner gang member wannabe, also gets wrapped up into the warfare.
The film builds into a chaotic action-packed blast as the kids pull their resources (mostly fireworks) to battle the bunch of bear/wolf/gorilla motherfuckers (just wanted to type that again), and there are tons of laugh-out loud lines (like "this is too much madness to fit into a text!"), every step of the way.
The movie is a bit too dark - not thematically, but lighting-wise - as some shots are hard to follow through the murky shadows, yet its small scale special effects work well enough to serve the story and tone.
ATTACK THE BLOCK looks destined to be a future cult movie, perfect for late night viewings, but don't wait until then - this is well worth seeking out now while it's still on the big screen.
More later...
8 Temmuz 2011 Cuma
HORRIBLE BOSSES (Dir. Seth Gordon, 2011)
As the most recent in a spate of crude R-Rated comedies, HORRIBLE BOSSES is just funny enough to recommend. Although maybe just as a matinee.
Anybody who clicked on this review surely knows the plot, but I'll state it anyway: 3 guys who want to murder their bosses concoct a plan to do so with comical results.
As the 3 guys we've got Saturday Night Live's Jason Sudekis, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia's Charlie Day, and Arrested Development's (as well as the everyman in every other comedy movie made these days) Jason Bateman.
The bosses are Colin Firth with a combover as a chemical company coke-head who takes over Sudekis's workplace after his father (Donald Sutherland) dies, Kevin Spacey as a corporate asshole (shades of his likewise character in SWIMMING WITH SHARKS) who denies Bateman a promotion, and Jennifer Anniston playing against her girl-next-door type as a dentist who sexually harrases Day as her dental assistant ("Yours doesn't sound so bad" Sudekis says about Day's predicament).
Think STRANGERS ON A TRAIN + THROW MOMMA OFF THE TRAIN (both of which are referenced in this movie), with a sprinkling of 9 TO 5 thrown in for good measure. It takes a bit to really get going, but when it does the frantic scheming of the 3 leads makes for some big laughs especially from Day doing his patented screaming, not-the-sharpest-knife-in-the-drawer, It's Always Sunny stuff.
Sudekis with his sex-snarkiness seems so much like his character in HALL PASS that I kept expecting him to call his wife back home, and Bateman is playing the same nice-guy notes he has in many a movie, but these guys' recognizable and relatable personas all anchor the movie nicely.
Spacey, Firth, and Aniston have fine funny moments, but none is funnier than Jamie Foxx who steals every scene he's in as a "murder consultant" the guys seek out in a seedy bar when they are looking for somebody to do their dirty work.
Scripted by John Francis Daley (who played protagonist Sam on Freaks and Geeks), and Jonathan M. Goldstein, the film feels oddly restrained at times - like it never quite goes over the top.
However when it busts out a car chase/phone sex climax it's gets mighty close.
More later...
25 Haziran 2011 Cumartesi
THE TRIP (Dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2010)
The best parts of this eccentric comedy featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, as fictionalized versions of themselves is when the pair try outperform each other's impressions of British celebrities, especially of Michael Caine.
There's some other stuff happening too, as they travel the North English countryside from one Bed and Breakfast Inn to another on a restaurant tour Coogan is writing about for The Observer. Coogan is on an unhappy break from his girlfriend (Margo Stilley), who was originally supposed to go on the trip, and Brydon, who is going in her place, has a new wife and child that he's leaving behind for this week-long excursion.
There's angst about aging, career paths, and flawed friendships, much of it poignant (though maybe a bit slight), but it's the hilarious dueling imitations that make the movie.
Coogan, who is a bigger star internationally than Brydon, carries a considerable amount of mental baggage around as he suffers the fool he thinks his aggravating partner in whining and dining is.
Brydon has a glibber, more laid-back demeanor than Coogan's crank, but he's obviously blanketing a bunch of insecurities under his charming ability to do an impeccable Hugh Grant impression, among many others.
THE TRIP was edited together from 6 episodes of a BBC program which explains its over-long length (107 min.) and it's disjointedness, yet it contains enough laughs and genuine emotion to carry you through.
Having previously worked together in a lot of projects (24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE, TRISTRAM SHANDY, lots of British television), Coogan and Brydon have a great naturalistic energy in their largely ad-libbed exchanges.
Aesthetically, the scenery is pretty, but very grey toned (it is England, of course), and there are a nice amount of delicious looking shots of fine food.
But, as I said before, it's those funny as Hell impression-offs that make me rate this movie so highly. For the record, although it's really close, I think Coogan does the better Michael Caine.
More later...
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