Tag Archives: documentaries

Gone Too Soon

I recently sat down to watch 2 biographical documentaries, Amy (about Amy Winehouse) and I Am Chris Farley (about Bob Marley. No, I’m kidding. It’s totally about Chris Farley), that were shot through with parallels.

Fame and addiction don’t have to co-exist necessarily, but when they do, the fame feeds the addiction. Literally: you and I might have to choose between cocaine and groceries, or cocaine and prostitution, but they have unlimited resources. Couple that with a need and want for approval, of being adored by everyone except maybe yourself, and it makes for a really bumpy road.

That said, I Am Chris Farley is not entirely the bummer you might think. This film asks: can you make small-dick jokes about your dead brother? And the answer is: yes. The Farleys can! Chris may have been the star, but the funny gene seems to have been a family trait. His brothers recount their idyllic childhood, and their brother’s quick rise to fame, leap-frogging others from Second City immediately toward the father-like figure of Lorne Michaels at SNL, where Mike Myers points out Chris was an instant favourite. Dan Aykroyd likens Farley to his own friend (who met a similar demise) John Belushi, and Lorne Michaels thinks of him as the love child that Belushi and Aykroyd never had.

I first found Saturday Night Live when Farley et al. were at their height. Babysitting late at night, their reruns kept me company.Farley, David Spade, and Adam Sandler were clearly friends who wrote for each other and worked together all the time, and it was magical to watch them (dubbed “the bad boys of SNL” along with Rob Schneider and Chris Rock). Then they got bigger than the show itself and started casting each other in their movies – Chris appeared with Spade in Tommy Boy, and with Sandler in Billy Madison. Shit blew up. They were all celebrities. I remember watching the 25th anniversary show in 1999, and Sandler and Spade came back to pay tribute to him just 2 years after his sudden death. Those casts are often very tight, and the remembrances are far too many (send-ups to Belushi and Hartman are equally touching).

Chris Farley had a huge heart and is clearly still missed today. Interviewees are choked up recalling his problems with drinking and drugs and it’s hard to watch the regret on their faces. Farley didn’t want to die. You don’t go to rehab 17 times because you want to be this way. But his addictive personality was strong and his self-confidence weak, and he died alone on his kitchen floor at the age of 33.

Amy Winehouse died when she was 27. She was messed up before she was famous, she made her fortune on a song that mocked rehab, and it was probably not much of a surprise, but no less a tragedy, when she passed the way she did. Newsweek called her “a perfect storm of sex kitten, raw talent and poor impulse control” while paparazzi documented her wasting away in front of us, in clear emotional and physical distress. It was hard to watch at the time, especially knowing that the people who should have been caring for her were instead treating her like a meal ticket.

In the documentary, all the people in her life come together to speak on her behalf, and theirs – and we’re talking about people who clashed over her in life and defend themselves and their actions since her death. You really get a sense of what a tangled mess her life was, but it also manages to be tender. It’s just a story that you wish didn’t exist. This woman with an enormous voice and huge talent poisoned herself to death with alcohol in the end, and everyone was too busy trying to make money off her to notice or care. That’s the tragedy. She was a lost little girl insulated by her money and success, and it killed her.

TIFF 2015: Ninth Floor

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When I first started at Concordia University in Montreal, news magazine Macleans had ranked the school as an embarrassing 11 nation-wide. The only Macleans measure on which we could chant “We’re number 1! We’re number 1!” was student activism. (Im)famous at the time (I have no idea if this has held true 15 years later) for its student protests, the Concordia Student Union refused to keep quiet on issues of social justice. During my undergraduate orientation, some sneaky CSU reps took some of us aside and told us their side of their conflict with the university’s administration. They told us one story (which, as I recall, they neglected to mention happened 32 years prior) about blatant racism on the part of one professor and the administration in general and how several students held their ground and seized the Sir George Williams campus’ computer room for two weeks until their demands were met.

This incident that I now know happened in early 1969 is the subject of Ninth Floor, which premiered Saturday night as part of the TIFF Docs program. Director Mina Shun makes her documentary debut and at times fails to ask the questions I would have liked to hear the answer to. Even onstage she seemed to still be adjusting to her new title of documentarian- accidentally referring to her participants as “cast members” more than once and even referring to one partipant’s tearful interview as his “Oscar moment”. Overall though, this is a POWERFUL film about an important two weeks in Canadian history and gets bonus points for searching for the roots of racism instead of taking the easier road of labelling some as the Bad Guys. Even professor Perry Anderson- who was the subject of the students’ original complaint- is treated with some compassion. The screening concluded with four of the film’s “cast members” – three participants in the occupation (one of whom later went on to become Canada’s first black Senator) as well as Professor Anderson’s son- taking the stage to a standing ovation in one of the most moving of my TIFF moments.

Both onstage and onscreen, the interviewees often speak of their actions in 1969 as those of young naive kids. I never speak up during question periods but what I wanted to tell them- but didn’t dare- was the ongoing tradition on campus of retelling against injustice and the pride with which my generation- all these years later- speak of their actions.

The Wolfpack

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This is a documentary featuring a crackpot couple of parents and the 7 children they’ve home school and raised in near-complete isolation. The family lives in a 4-bedroom apartment in Manhattan and have rarely left it. The kids are totally ignorant of the world outside their windows, but spend their time looking at another screen – their television. Enamoured with movies, they seem to have saved themselves from the nuthouse by finding a creative outlet in faithfully recreating their favourite movies.

They write scripts literally by taking long-hand dictation from the movie, one line at a time, and then typing it up with an ancient typewriter. They make astounding costumes and props using notebook paper and cardboard but end up with a product so realistic the police raided them on a gun charge.

It’s hard to watch this movie because this crazy way of life was imposed by a father who apparently hates the country that is feeding and housing him (he “shows his rebellion” by not working, although he would make an exception for a recording contract, (so obviously his beliefs are quite sincere) and has infected his family with such a pervasive feeling of paranoia that neither his wife nor children met with the outside world for 14 years.

When the 6 boys are finally old enough to venture out, everything is new and strange and bright; maybe too bright. Everything appears to be suddenly “3D” to them, and when they see trees up close and glorious, they can only compare them to a forest they’ve seen in Lord of the Rings.

The kids are well-spoken and capable – despite, not because of their upbringing. They are fiercely protective of their mother who has fostered their creativity and seems to have been abused and subjugated by her husband right alongside her children.

The father remains a blurry presence in the life of his family, and within the documentary. He appears occasionally but seems to know he’s this movie’s villain. Worse still, the 7th child, a sister, is nearly completely ignored.

The boys met film maker Crystal Moselle by chance on one of their first outings as a group. A film student, the 6-pack of brothers with waist-long hair, dark suits and Raybans caught her eye, and she’s followed them ever since. Their world is definitely fascinating, and at times frustrating (like it or not, they’ve caught their father’s paranoia) but unfortunately, this documentary doesn’t have much to say. Yes, this was a crazy upbringing, a crazy life – but so what? Moselle doesn’t seem to have a point to make. And while I found this to be an eminently interesting watch, it wasn’t an enlightening one.

Comedian

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Sean and I were very lucky to spend the weekend at the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal. We saw Dave Chappelle, Ellie Kemper’s Unbreakable, All-Star Comedy Show, where she hosted Michael Che, Chris Hardwick, and Margaret Cho (among others), and the Alan Cumming Gala, where he hosted the likes Joel Creasey, Todd Glass, Orny Adams, Jen Kirkman, and Dana Gould (Rob Schneider was announced, but a no-show). And then later that night we happened to upon a surprise show by Aziz Ansari, so we had ourselves a weekend.

Dave Chappelle was awesome. All-caps awesome. AWESOME. We’d seen him before at the Funny or Die Oddball Comedy Festival in Chicago (with Flight of the Conchords!) and found him even more hilarious in person than even his brilliant show of yore, Chappelle’s Show, suggested. The fact that there was a surprise appearance and performance by Mos Def made it, like, astronomically all-caps awesome.

We looked forward to each and every performance and I was wiggling away in my seat just pleased as all get-out to see Mr. Alan Cumming live and in person. My love for him is immeasurable, and in fact, upon reflection, I can’t even tell you where it comes from. It feels like it’s just always been there. And he’s so much more than his American film credits would have you believe (he was Nightcrawler in X-men 2). If you have Instagram, you can hear Sean and I singing along on his post – live from Montreal, it’s Saturday night on Broadway. And while all of the acts that he hosted were excellent (Todd Glass being a particular favourite, since Sean and I happened to sit beside him on our recent flight from Los Angeles to Montreal, and when he went into a bit about a crazy lady on an airplane who ate a KitKat with deliberate and infuriating slowness, we gave each other accusatory but conspiratorial looks). However, there was one act that I was much less enthusiastic about.

So there’s this excellent documentary you may have seen simply titled Comedian. And it’s basically about Jerry Seinfeld, post-Seinfeld, after he retired all his old material and is now on the comedy circuit, trying out new material. It’s an incredibly insightful look at the comic’s creative process, the writing and the honing and the practise. As I love stand-up, I adore this film. It doesn’t hurt that it includes bits from other comedians I really admire – Colin Quinn, Gary Shandling, Chris Rock. It also features a young comedian called Orny Adams, up and coming but already the ego on this kid.

It was painful for me to watch this kid beg for celebrity, a complete unknown talk about all the jealousy he’s encountered. And then stand him beside Jerry, who is bigger than big but doesn’t seem to have an ounce of ego to him, and is humbling himself night after night in front of audiences, and even he is kindly shaking his head at Orny’s hubris. In Comedian, Orny Adams is actually chasing his frist spot on the Just For Laughs Festival line-up in Montreal. And I hated every minute of his footage. Hated it. He was such an annoying douche, complaining about how he mysteriously wasn’t famous yet, though none of his material made me laugh in the least. Of course, when the audience fails to laugh, or only laughs politely, he blames them. They’re all wrong, he’s still right. When senior comedians offer him advice, they’re cocksuckers. There’s not a humble bone in his body, or, as far as I can tell, a funny one.

I took away a lot from this particular documentary: respect for the craft, and a better understand of the crippling insecurity behind most acts, but I also took away an astounding dislike of Orny Adams. Rewatching the documentary today, I see he’s even more annoying that I remembered him. But watching him on stage on Saturday, his set was near-perfect. Tight. We laughed. I don’t know if he’s grown as a person, but he’s definitely grown as an artist,

The Bridge

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A few weeks ago, Sean, Matt and I were at a screening of San Andreas, a movie that seemed to do its best to squash California tourism but actually only encouraged us to seek out some baseball tickets (that’s a very sturdy stadium they’ve got in San Francisco!) to a Giants game while we’re there.

By the time you’re reading (curse you, early morning flights!) we’ve probably already touched down in the Golden State and with any luck, we’ve had our first glimpse of the Golden Gate bridge. Now, if you thought San Andreas should have had us cancelling our plans to visit the shakiest of the united states, get a load of this movie:

The Bridge is a documentary about that beautiful bridge in San Francisco that just happened, at the time of its filming in 2004, to be the busiest site for suicides in the world (they don’t mention this fact on Trip Advisor) (has since been surpassed by a bridge in China). Director Eric Steel shot the bridge from across the bay for a full year, and captured 23 of the 24 known suicides during that time, bringing the bridge’s body count to somewhere in the vicinity of 1200. Steel was shocked that such a popular spot, well documented for its suicides (averaged 1 every 15 days during filming), was still not inclined toward any kind of prevention. Training his film crew in suicide prevention, the documentary is responsible for saving the lives of at least 6 would-be jumpers. The film, however, focuses mostly on those they didn’t save. Friends and family give voice to those no longer with us, casting the film with an eerie glow. It’s an honest look at suicide, but for some, it may blur the lines between morbidity and sensitivity.

The deck of the Golden Gate bridge is about 75m above water, which means a jump takes four full seconds before a person hits the water at 120km\hr. That sounds short but is an awfully long time to regret your decision. Most will die from impact; about 5% may survive the initial trauma only to drown or die of hypothermia. Very few live to tell the tale, but makers of The Bridge manage to track one down, and his story may be more haunting than any other.

So, a pretty bleak movie to celebrate the first day of our trip, but I always have love for a well-made documentary. And when I finally lay eyes on this amazing feat of engineering, I’ll be marvelling at its design and span, and mourning for the people who choose to end their lives there.

Stay tuned – we’ll be posting about movies inspired by our California trip as we go, and later today we’ll be checking out the Painted Ladies from the opening credits of Full House, as well as notable spots from Inside Out, Planet of the Apes, Big Hero 6, and Antman, and then Jay will complain that her feet hurt and Sean will wonder aloud why she didn’t wear more comfortable shoes, and Matt will try to placate them both with the lure of San Francisco treats (and by treats I mean martinis. Obviously).

Montage of Heck

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We all know how the story ends, and given that, I should have been more prepared for how fucking gloomy this shit is.

Of course it’s gloomy. If you can recall the lyrics of any one of Nirvana’s songs, literally pick any one at random, and I guarantee you, it ain’t happy. The inside of Kurt Cobain’s head was not all picnics and pantaloons. He was raw pain at times, and the brilliance of this documentary is sheer access to pretty rare footage – home videos, private diaries and notebooks, childhood photos. It doesn’t have the guts to stab at answers but it does ask a lot of questions and highlight a lot of recurrent themes – the search for meaning, wanting to belong, extreme sensitivity to rejection and humiliation. Not great character traits for someone who would achieve absurd stardom.

But there’s also the ease he seems to feel with is daughter, and even Courtney, and his transcendent love of playing music live. This last seems to have come at a great cost to him personally, and his suicide begins to feel inevitable.

Interviews with his family members, former band mate, and even Courtney, help to flesh out the story. Kurt himself addresses us through notebooks and old videos. Notably absent: Frances Bean, and Dave Grohl.

The documentary sort of blurs between his creative genius and his personal pain, which I suppose is a pretty accurate representation of what Nirvana was at the time. Director Brett Morgen uses some interesting techniques to bring Cobain back to life for a couple of hours. It made me think of who Kurt would be today if he was still here. Oh the melancholy.

Weekend Round-Up

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Project Almanac – I have mixed feelings about this one. I wasn’t bored by it, but the story is thin. I like the championing of the inventor, but I disliked the very trite time-travel routine, where the same costs and benefits are explored here as have been elsewhere a thousand times before. The kids are likeable enough but you know what? Enough with the “found footage” thing. It’s done. Let’s drop it.

Gambit – A movie with Colin Firth and Alan Rickman AND Stanley Tucci you want to like. But can you? It’s a remake, written by the Coen brothers, about an art thief who recruits ditzy Cameron Diaz to pull a fast one on his boss – and then dares to be surprised when it doesn’t quite get pulled off as planned. Firth is solid and has great comic timing but Diaz exists on a level so far beneath him it’s not fair to either. I have the feeling Firth was hoping for The Big Lebowski but ended up in The Ladykillers. Better luck next time, y’all.

San Andreas – The three Assholes who went to see this together are also the same three Assholes planning a trip to shitty, shaky San Francisco next month. Oh sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. Lots of wine, we heard, those weird, slopy streets, and just a beautiful coastal drive away from LA. San Andreas is not exactly a boon to tourism. Made it seem a little reckless to travel there (let alone live there), in fact. But we survived the movie and as of this time have not cancelled our plane tickets, mostly because Sean couldn’t find the number. I watched this movie totally stressed out, from start to finish. Is there a plot to this thing? I have no idea. WATCH OUT FOR THAT FIRE! Is there good acting in this thing? I don’t know, does dodging debris count? WATCH OUT FOR THAT FLYING CRUISE SHIP! It was a disaster movie so jam-packed with disaster that some leaked out the sides. It keeps you so busy racing from one near-death experience to another that you never have time to question the holes in the movie, because every hole is filled with exploding glass – in 3D!

Dear Zachary: A Letter to his Son About his Father – In 2001, Andrew Bagby was brutally murdered. Soon after, his girlfriend, the prime suspect, announces she’s pregnant and Bagby’s bereaved parents have to interact with their son’s killer in order to gain any visitation with the grandson who looks just like him. This is a documentary Kurt Kuenne who isn’t a particularly talented documentarian, but who was Bagby’s best friend. This is a tribute to his friend, and also to the parents who went to great lengths to make a life for a grandchild born out of tragedy. I was prepared for this one to hurt my heart, but I wasn’t quite as prepared as I needed to be. Check it out on Netflix.

Aloha – Cameron Crowe’s greatest offense is being too successful too early in his career. Does this stand up to Almost Famous? No, it doesn’t. And not many movies would. But would people be giving Aloha as hard a time if it were written and directed by anyone else? This film is imperfect. It drags in places (but has flashes of brilliance to prop things up) and it tries to involve too many, which takes away from the central story, which is the one we’ve put our butts in the seats to see. Emma Stone plays Jennifer Lawrence opposite Bradley Cooper (what is it about Bradley Cooper, by the way, that his characters are constantly romancing women he could have fathered?). Anyway, he plays this deeply flawed individual and she plays so pert and perfect you want to punch her right in the googly eyes. But you’re supposed to root for them I think, even though Rachel McAdams makes a tantalizing (and age appropriate, while still being younger) alternative. They exchange some witty banter, some banal banter, look at an atrocious toe, and induce Billy Murray into a dance scene. It’s not a cohesive movie by a long shot, but nor is it as bad as the critics will tell you. The story wants to be more than it is. The movie is beautiful but straight-forward. There’s very little art here. What we have in abundance is white people, puzzlingly, since it’s set in Hawaii, where the census tells us they’re relatively rare and Hollywood tells if you squint hard enough, George Clooney passes for Hawaiian.

Going Clear – The more I learn, the less I understand. I didn’t learn anything new (in fact, nothing that’s not on the Wikipedia page), and I think they went a little soft on the former members they interviewed. Has anyone else seen this?

Last Days in Vietnam

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This documentary was nominated for an Oscar this year – it lost to Citizenfour. Even though I hit the categories hard, I only managed to see 3 of the 5 before the Academy Awards were broadcast and I’m sadly only getting around to this one now.

This film offers a fresh perspective on the end of the war – the kinder, softer side of an action that’s been vilified and condemned, and for good reason, but this movie shows that no matter what the politicians were maneuvering, there were good hearts over there doing their best to help real people.

As American troops are removed from South Vietnam, the North is marching in, and cities are falling. The American embassy is cognizant of what their pull out will mean to the people, especially the Vietnamese who were known allies. Lots of American soldiers and Vietnamese heroes risked their lives and went against White House orders in order to help evacuate the panicked, innocent residents.

There’s nothing innovative here, it’s just diligent work. Rory Kennedy uses great archival footage, lots of in-depth, exhaustive first-person interviews, and paints a panoramic view of what could only have been a chaotic time, while being sensitive to the moral dilemma at its heart.

Quick & Dirty

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Short Term 12 – Brie Larson stars as a social worker in a group home for damaged kids – though she hasn’t quite shed her own damaged past. Raw, messy, and unmissable.

Proof – Gwyneth Paltrow’s recently deceased father (Anthony Hopkins) was both a genius mathematician and a victim of dementia. She’s afraid that she’s inherited both those tendencies. Good performances but unbalanced film.

Lucky – A man is inconvenienced when he wins 36 million dollars in a state lottery – it makes his secret killing spree more vulnerable to discovery! No chemistry between Colin Hanks and Ari Graynor and the movie just kind of pinballs between one bad idea and the next. Dud.

Love Me – Documentary about American men finding mail order brides. Gave me the willies. Scams outnumber love stories but it’s very hard to feel sorry for guys who gave me the creeps.

Monkey Kingdom

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There is so much luscious photography here, a real gluttony of beautiful images that intimately capture a tribe of macaque monkeys in Sri Lanka that I’d like to look the other way, I really would. But Disney Nature isn’t just making nature documentaries. It’s telling stories. Feel good stories. And if the monkeys don’t provide enough drama, or a convenient narrative arc, then one will be provided for them.

The monkeys live in an abandoned ancient city reclaimed by the jungles of Sri Lanka. It’s a striking if haunting place to film monkeys being their monkey selves. The movie focuses on one in particular – Maya, a “low-born” lady monkey with a bowl cut a la Jim Carrey in Dumb And Dumber. Poor Maya gets the last and worst of everything. Even though it’s Tina Fey doing the narrating, you can almost hear Rodney Dangerfield going into his “I get no respect, no respect at all” routine.

Then the soap opera unfolds. Maya gets a boyfriend, but then he gets exiled by the possessive head of household, who normally doesn’t give her the time of day but instead hangs out with the three ugly step sisters who taunt our poor Maya and don’t let her join in any reindeer games. So of course when the boyfriend is run off we find out Maya’s pregnant and she has to be a single Mom, scavenging children’s birthday parties to put frosting and cheesies on the table. And then an enemy tribe shows up to do battle because they want to live on Castle Rock and so far Maya’s tribe only shares reluctantly with an antisocial mongoose. It feels a little like an episode of The Walking Dead – two bands fighting for survival, wanting the best and safest territory for themselves. Maya’s tribe loses, and must leave. Her band of macaques ends up going into the city where they literally monkey around – stealing food from carts, shop lifting from stalls, gorging on people’s dinners while their backs are turned. AND THEIR BACKS ARE ALWAYS TURNED!

There’s a lot to commend and recommend, but let’s face it: Disney is staging its documentaries. These stories don’t just happen in the wild. If you watch, say, Planet Earth, David Attenborough will narrate what is happening so that you can fully appreciate what you see. Tina Fey, wonderful as she is, and I did love the jokey, conversational tone of her narration, is often telling us what the monkeys are thinking. And just how does Tina Fey know what the monkeys are thinking? Did the monkeys provide a script? Is Disney just filming an elaborate play put on by very clever monkeys? Since when does a nature documentary have plot?

I should have known. I should have known that a film studio who banks on sympathetic, singing lions, and little birds who braid hair, and apes who adopt humans, and sharks who won’t eat fish, and dogs who plan elaborate, romantic dates, well, they’re probably not going to be able to shake that tendency in a hurry, are they? So do they give in to their singing-animal desires and use The Monkees as a soundtrack? Sure they do. And throw in Salt N Pepa’s Whatta Man for good measure. I know it sounds like I’m knocking it and I guess I kind of am. I’m a bit of a purist. But the truth is, this is eminently watchable, and friendly, and does a good job of bridging the gap between cartoon and nature show. It will engage children, and it’s not a bad place to start for a young, curious mind – hopefully curious enough to look beyond the silliness and think about what life in the jungle really means.