rolling documentary thread 2017

This is perhaps the best venue for discussing, say, my two favorite nonfic films of '16 which are getting more widely seen now, I Am Not Your Negro and Tower. (I don't count the scorching 'docufiction' The Other Side.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNUYdgIyaPM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTzNkfgM1vE

I Am Not Your Negro was very good. Not a perfect movie - I think the editing of the first 20-30 minutes was trying to hard, like he didn't trust the material - but the last hour was great. I hope people see it.

yeah, I liked it, but like Moonlight, WAYYY overhyped by many people I know... one of them was "at a loss for words," said this was the most important movie he'd seen in years. wtf? it was fine. i liked how it was mostly just Baldwin and Jackson reading Baldwin. I wish they explored more of our current moment - a lot of possible threads and paths were presented, but it felt very shallow in the end. or focused on Baldwin- which was great, reminded me of last year's overlooked Zappa doc Eat That Question, which was exclusively interviews with the guy, no bells and whistles...

Tower was terrific - so moving

I appreciated how it was pretty much 100% focused on the victims & surivors, they maybe say Whitman's name once I think?

I was apprehensive about the animation elemeblnt but it worked so well, helped the re-enactments feel less stagey than they tend to

I'm assuming this isn't the Tower Records doc.

no, it's about the University of Texas shooting

Terry Kath doc coming

http://www.terrykath.com/terrykathdocumentary-1/

That looks good. Thanks for the tip.

flappy, overhyped compared to what? It's not a great doc bcz Peck is probably not a great documentarian, but it conveyed the essence of Baldwin's POV in 90 minutes, and that's satisfying.

Netflix premiering the docu-series adap of Five Came Back, the Mark Harris book about Hollywood directors in WW2; also showing 13 of the films chronicled:

http://deadline.com/2017/02/five-came-back-netflix-trailer-spielberg-coppola-del-toro-greengrass-kasdan-1202026705/

oooh

Finally caught up with The Witness on DVD (missed the week it played here). Found the biographical stuff on Kitty Genovese and Winston Moseley really interesting, but Bill Genovese (Kitty's younger brother, whose project of tracking down the alleged 38 witnesses is the focus of the film) is so placid and stoical--bland, truthfully--he got in the way for me. Trump would love how the film basically calls out the then-thriving-not-failing New York Times for manufacturing fake news in 1964. David Edelstein had it in his Top 10.

http://www.vulture.com/2016/12/10-best-movies-of-2016-and-6-more.html

Any way to see Pressure, the 1976 British film that turns up in the James Baldwin documentary? Had never even heard of it until tonight. Nothing on Amazon.

Highly recommend the film that just opened in NY on the trumpeter Lee Morgan's life and death, I Called Him Morgan. It's not primarily a music doc and certainly not solely for jazz buffs; it's a haunting ghost story.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/a-documentary-about-the-life-and-tragic-death-of-the-great-jazz-trumpeter-lee-morgan

https://www.filmlinc.org/films/i-called-him-morgan/

(btw you should see it if you ARE a Blue Note completist, I suspect; it portrays that milieu vividly)

Oooh nice

btw, besides Netflix, Five Came Back is also running theatrically in NY; I smell OJ-style Oscar hunting.

http://www.ifccenter.com/films/five-came-back/

I'm cool with OJ-style Oscar hunting.

Saw Tower last night - well worth tracking down.

ex-ILXor on programming documentaries

I’m convinced most people watch fiction films to see themselves. Therefore, you are deciding who your audience is when you select what narratives to screen. If you follow the traditional arthouse booking model (i.e., programming each week’s highest PSAs), you will fail. Setting aside the overly competitive months of November, December and January, when there’s a surfeit of well-funded theatrical campaigns and, increasingly, a wider variety of stories, most big-name arthouse distributors have been putting their theatrical muscle into the white, liberal grey dollar. Support the small distributors who are bucking this trend....

Awareness-raising, “impact”-oriented documentaries try to stir audiences into action, but secretly, they make people feel as if they’ve done a good deed by simply bearing witness. Play documentaries that intelligently confront all viewers, documentaries that convey ideas and concepts, rather than films that hinge on cheap empathy....

http://filmmakermagazine.com/102137-projecting-outside-the-echo-chamber/#.WPeQ_PnyuUk

Gianfranco Rosi is filmmaker in residence here, they're showing all of his features in chronological order with Q&A after. So far they've only shown boatman and below sea level and I had to leave halfway through the boatman Q&A; the films are great tho and Rosi is really great value. I'll try to remember what he says throughout the run - after boatman he said that Michael Moore killed the documentary for a while, "showman replaced ethnographer" (these are not exact words) & talked about how revelatory the idea of the caméra-stylo was for him (again, didn't use this exact term but so nearly)

No Jayne Mansfield thread, no Anton Lavey thread, what the hell's wrong with this place?

I would have liked Mansfield 66/67 more (say, 7.5 instead of 6.5) if they'd ditched the choreographed filler stuff and replaced it with something involving smartly chosen period music. Fascinating anyway. The '60s sure were weird. (Going to see if I can find a Lavey Pez dispenser online.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93ccJc7Or-o

I highly recommend "Meru." It's from 2015.
One of the many things I came away with was that it is possible to give 100% under trying circumstances,
without making such a dramatic fuss over it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pZ1GzXPEO8

oh i have been meaning to watch that, i will check it out

in September, from Wiseman:

http://filmforum.org/film/ex-libris-the-new-york-public-library-film

Yay! Can't wait to see that in half a year or so.

You would think a documentary about rediscovered silent-film footage in the Yukon would be a Trump-free safe haven, but no, there's no escape.

I had seen the trailer for Dawson City: Frozen Time a couple of weeks ago, so I was looking forward to something dreamy and contemplative. It didn't disappoint on that count--I can imagine it playing Nuit Blanche at three in the morning. Not harboring any protective feelings about silent film in general, the ambient soundtrack helped make that happen, though it did get repetitive after a while.

What came as a surprise was how much history is packed into the film--everything from Grauman's Chinese Theatre to Kenesaw Mountain Landis to Fatty Arbuckle to Robert Service. And fires--there are so many of them in Dawson City it becomes a gruesome joke, like the drummers in Spinal Tap. Towards the end, where the couple who were instrumental in preserving all this film fill in the backstory, the husband says two innocuous words that provided the biggest laugh I've had at the movies this year.

early Ex Libris reviews

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4900-the-daily-venice-toronto-2017-wiseman-s-ex-libris

strong recommendation for Raising Bertie on PBS (via POV program) -- I love David Sutherland's work and it's very reminiscent of Country Boys. Centers around an alternative school and everything. The filmmaker is Margaret Byrne, never heard of her til now but I will remember her name. The boys are unforgettable. It's not verité as advertised (there is talking to the camera and music) but I still enjoyed the feel a lot too.
http://www.kartemquin.com/films/raising-bertie

Yay! Can't wait to see that in half a year or so.

Good title for the rolling 2018 doc thread.

xpost ooh that sounds good

looking forward to Spettacolo, which just opened in NYC

https://www.filmcomment.com/article/make-real-acting/

if anyone watches Raising Bertie, i am interested in talking about it
i feel like more people would watch it if they knew it existed

felt the same way about Country Boys tbh

Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World is an okay introduction to the money end of art--auctions, dealers, etc.--that covers a lot of the same ground as Anthony Haden-Guest's True Colors. A few film clips are mixed in, including two from Woody Allen: the great Jackson Pollock scene from Play It Again, Sam, and one from Midnight in Paris, which I haven't seen. But somehow they overlooked Daniel Stern and Max Von Sydow in Hannah and Her Sisters! Love that scene: "I'm looking for something big...I got a lot of wall space."

has anyone watched Raising Bertie yet?!
it is so good!!

I really want to see it after your previous post, but I don't know if it got an opening here--our 100% documentary theatre usually catches everything for at least one screening, but I can see where a non-descript title like that might have slipped by my notice.

you can watch it on the PBS streaming site, if you do that

i agree about the title -- it sounds like it's about taking care of a dolphin named Bertie or something but that's not what it's about at all!

anyone seen Strong Island? i mighta liked it even more than Sam did. Horribly sad.

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/strong-island

and high recommendation for The Work, though i'm a lifelong therapy skeptic...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8OVXG2GhpQ

Anyone seen Escapes, Michael Almereyda's Hampton Fancher doc from last year? I don't know anything about the release status of it; I just came across it on Letterboxd.