As a member of the choir, I ran screaming from the church because of Michael Moore’s preaching in Sicko.
I’m in the minority here — the movie got good reviews and an Oscar nomination in the documentary category — but this was among the least effective films I saw all year.
Plus: the equally inept Infamous.
The guy who dominates Stefan Nadelman’s documentary short Terminal Bar could be related to Robert Crumb, both in his physical features and his matter-of-fact way. He talks about everything from death by alcohol to bathroom blowjobs to the “destituted” people who frequented the titular establishment where he tended bar for a decade. And like the famous cartoonist Crumb, he seems perpetually amused, and it looks suspiciously like a defense mechanism.
He tells of putting cheap liquor in the bottles of more expensive brands, and brags that not one person ever noticed.
In talking about the clientele, he says that the white, working-class patrons died off — often because of booze — and were replaced by gay black men. With a shrug, without bitterness or judgment, he says something along the lines of: If you become a gay bar, you become a gay bar. Whatcha gonna do?
His name is Sheldon Nadelman. He is not the subject of the 23-minute movie, but its character is drawn from him: lively, detailed, aloof, unfocused, and scattershot.
Near the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, spiritual-documentary filmmaker Martin Doblmeier conducted a survey on his Web site. He asked whether people supported constructing a “garden of forgiveness” at Ground Zero in New York City.
Thousands of votes later, the results were overwhelming: Roughly 95 percent of respondents said “no.”
Although he wrote and directed The Power of Forgiveness, Doblmeier offered this anecdote in a recent phone interview without judgment. His point was that forgiveness is something that spiritual people tend to embrace as an abstract concept, but putting it into practice is shockingly difficult. For many, he said, forgiveness is the equivalent of a spare tire, something you “keep ... in the back of the trunk and hope to God you never need it.”
The grief in Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke is heartbreaking. Unfortunately, the anger in it is misinformed, facile, naïve, misplaced, unfair, inconsistent, unsupported, or some combination of the seven.
To be clear, I do not begrudge the people of New Orleans for being pissed off at their municipal, state, and federal governments for their preparations for and responses to Hurricane Katrina, levee breaches, and flooding. When you’ve been through what they’ve been through, you’re entitled to your ire.
I do begrudge Lee, who had an opportunity to create either a poetic expression of loss, sadness, and fury or the definitive popular political document on the hurricane and its aftermath. Instead, he made something in between, a scattershot, muddled, formless four-hour documentary that is rarely illuminating and too infrequently poignant. It’s not just disappointing; it’s maddening.
In Davis Guggenheim’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a high-angle shot of George W. Bush is followed by a shot of Al Gore looking down out of an airplane window. The juxtaposition delivers a subtle but forceful message: Al Gore is God, gazing in harsh judgment on this Republican president.
You might quibble with my decision to focus on these two, seemingly throwaway images when the movie itself is dominated by Gore’s lecture on global warming. But this shot pairing is symptomatic; An Inconvenient Truth pretends to be about global warming, but it’s mostly a vanity project, a propaganda film supporting the future candidacy (or canonization) of Al Gore. This is a political document masquerading as altruism, an attempt to position the former vice president at the forefront of the environmental issue in spite of the Clinton-Gore administration’s mixed record. And it’s working.
Because I do have a memory — not a very good one, but a memory nonetheless — I can save myself some work by providing filmmaker Rupert Murray with a few lessons I’ve learned from other movies and simply link to previous essays.
Lesson number one: Let the story tell itself.
Lesson number two: When you’re dealing with people who have lived in front of cameras, you have an additional burden of proof to establish their credibility.
Murray’s Unknown White Male is a fascinating but headstrong and immature documentary about amnesia. The film’s subject found himself on a New York City subway one morning in 2003, not having any memories of his previous life.
Imagine a mystery story in which the detective started to explain the killer’s method and motive, paused 30 seconds in, and said, “It’s pretty convoluted. Let’s skip that part.” That’s how the Oscar-nominated documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room works.
Murderball is the perfect movie to show to people who think they don’t like documentaries, because it transcends the genre; above all else, it’s a very good sports movie — compelling, fun, smart, and accessible.
March of the Penguins, the surprise summer hit, is often awe-inspiring in its content and stunningly beautiful in its visuals, but it’s also a big fucking cheat.
Near the end of Nathaniel Kahn’s engaging and illuminating documentary My Architect: A Son’s Journey, one of his interview subjects suggests that some people with greatness in them must be excused for being boorish, emotionally absent, or simply insufferable as human beings. They should be forgiven because they have a higher calling: God’s work.
In toto, Errol Morris’ First Person doesn’t feel scattershot; it comes together at the end in mysterious, alchemic, and near-miraculous ways. The television series is a composition of disparate moods, tones, and colors, touching on myriad extremities of the human condition and containing multitudes, but it also has an elusive quality of oneness.
Forget about the shit, piss, vomit, semen, vaginal mucus, blood, burst boils, incest, abortions, anal sex, oral sex, fisting, bestiality, sex with wounds, anal musical talent, and other pleasantries in The Aristocrats. I wanna talk about editing!
Errol Morris’ Vernon, Florida has no apparent reason for existing, no message, no discernible structure, and only the faintest of pulses. It’s lazy, mean-spirited, hateful, and tedious. Why, then, is it so valuable?
Shaun of the Dead, Super Size Me, and Trembling Before G-d
The premise of The Five Obstructions is simple, elegant, and gloriously artificial. A pupil gives his teacher under-any-circumstances-difficult assignments with absurd conditions, and the mentor complies — with no agreed-upon goal beyond the completion of the tasks. Through the assignments, the movie emerges as a portrait of a submissive relationship that’s not at all one-sided.
The best part of Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is its reputed backstory. Commissioned by Metallica’s record label as a promotional film about the making of the metal band’s new album, it instead documented the group’s near-implosion. Yet as engaging as the film is, it’s still strangely amiss. It’s lean but feels too long; it’s probing through the camera’s omnipresence but too gentle and polite; and it’s revealing without ever getting to the heart of the band or its leaders.
As a screed against George W. Bush to justify the feelings, suspicions, and thoughts of people who already dislike the president and plan on voting against him in November, Fahrenheit 9/11 is strikingly effective. But as propaganda — as a compelling case to convince undecided voters and GOP loyalists that Bush needs to be voted out of office — Michael Moore’s movie is an utter failure.
The highest compliment I can pay to Kevin Macdonald’s Touching the Void is that few people will notice how radical it is. It’s a completely gripping, horrifying movie, and it’s so good that it’s easy to overlook what Macdonald has done: seriously undercut the idea that plot “spoilers” damage the experience one has with a movie.
I agree with Roger Ebert’s assessment of Errol Morris’ Gates of Heaven as “bottomless,” with the disclaimer that it’s as much a function of the movie’s open-ended nature as its depth. The filmmaker’s debut has no clearly articulated subject or thesis, and it’s so wide-ranging, with so little guidance from Morris, that its effect and meaning will depend a lot on who watches it and where they are in life.
What, exactly, is one supposed to get from Errol Morris’ latest movie, The Fog of War, winner of this year’s Oscar for best documentary? This feature-length interview with Robert McNamara — secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations — is more mirror than painting, allowing many critics to read into it exactly what they bring in. It’s a curious effect, but not entirely surprising.
Box Office Power Rankings: September 26-28