Helen Highly Recommends Once Were Brothers, a documentary that was the opening-night film for DOC NYC 2019 and opens in theaters February 21st, based on the story of The Band (Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson). For those who don’t know: the Band originally formed as The Hawk, a backing band for rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins but came to prominence during its time backing Bob Dylan on tour and later grew into a legend in its own right, widely credited with being on the forefront of three different musical revolutions. Impressively, the Band was one of the first rock groups to appear on the cover of Time.
“Once Were Brothers” poster
I remember leaving the theater after viewing this film and feeling unusually buoyant. I felt uplifted. I was happy — smiling. Those are trite descriptions to use in would-be well-considered film commentary, but they are worth my mentioning for two reasons. First, sitting through screenings at a documentary film festival is rarely a joyous experience. One must usually dig deep for an optimistic perspective on so many subjects that are relentlessly somber and ominous and often downright despairing. The music-themed biopics are usually the only films that escape the heavy weight of social or political gravity, and the best of those tend to interweave a disturbingly consequential thread from history, while the others are easily dismissed as frivolous fan films. So, it’s rare to find a meaningful, musical doc that feels triumphant without being trivial. Once Were Brothers is that film.
My other justification for offering a platitudinous reaction up front is to give the reader fair warning that I am neither a music historian nor expert. I will bet there are in-the-know others who will offer a more shrewd and critical assessment of this film. So, this is a Helen Highly Impressionable review. I am not a source of music intelligence, although I do know movies and this film easily won me over. But don’t take it from me; take it from Martin Scorsese.
“legitimately optimistic”
Executive producers Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer give this film a pedigree that sets it apart from the average music-history documentary and elevates it on every level – including a well-paced and smartly arranged narrative structure, some amazing archival footage and a cast of music legends to provide commentary. Plus, Robertson’s own intelligence and reflection make this seem like a truly valuable document about the history of American music. (The film is based somewhat on Robertson’s 2016 memoir, Testimony, which covered the first three decades of his life, but this documentary goes both deeper and wider.) First-time feature-length film director Daniel Roher may have had something to do with the film’s success, but he surely gets a ride on some long coattails.
“Testimony” by Robbie Robertson
Once Were Brothers was an ideal film to open the DOC NYC festival due to its multi-dimensional timeliness, most notably its connection to Martin’s Scorsese’s new mob epic, The Irishman, which was playing in theaters at the time and is now playing on Netflix and remains one of the hottest films in distribution (and an Oscar contender for Best Film). (Click here to read IndieNYC’s Irishman review.) In addition to Scorsese executive producing this film (and filming The Band’s spectacular 1976 farewell concert and turning that into a documentary – The Last Waltz), Robbie Robertson created the score for Scorsese’s latest film (in addition to four others since 1980). The tight Scorsese / Robertson relationship seems unlikely and is fascinating to me. Scorsese also participates in this film as a commentator and gives a detailed description of how he shot The Band’s famous, swan-song concert – what camera angles he used, why he chose not to show the audience, etc. This film feels very much like a collaboration of two great artists and thinkers and surely that’s what helps to make it so good. Plus, there’s the music.
Robbie Robertson and Martin Scorsese
There is even more to the timeliness of this film: At about the same time as this documentary first premiered at Toronto International Film Festival, Robertson also released his sixth solo album, Sinematic, and some of its tracks, including the Van Morrison collaboration “I Hear You Paint Houses,” are part of his score for The Irishman. Plus, coinciding with the documentary’s premiere, it was announced that The Band’s seminal sophomore album – declared “better than the Beatle’s Abbey Road” when it was first released – was getting a deluxe reissue (out now, remixed and expanded for its 50th anniversary). That album includes two of the important songs from this documentary, “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” both rich with cinematic stories and eccentric Americana characters that are explored in the film. “The Weight” –perhaps The Band’s most significant song and number 41 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time – also figures prominently in the film, with tales about its inspiration and influences.
“The film excels in its humanity. It is about the great possibilities and painful frailties of human nature.”
All this is to say that this documentary is about the music of The Band as much as it is about the people in and around The Band. It manages to be a thoughtful, candid and compelling biopic of Robbie Robertson, The Band’s lead songwriter and guitarist (more on this later), in addition to exploring the uniquely close and crucial relationships – for better and worse – between The Band’s members, while balancing all that with broader historical perspective and commentary from other major musicians, including Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel and Bob Dylan, which may be worth the price of admission in itself. (And music. Did I mention lots of great music?)
So… for you Bob Dylan fans, yes indeed you will get your Dylan fix in this film. A hefty and heartfelt amount of time is spent recounting The Band’s infamously troubled tour with Bob Dylan (in which they were booed across America and throughout Europe) as well as their move to Woodstock, NY due to Dylan’s invitation and the vitally important time they all spent huddled together up there changing the very nature of popular music while creating “the basement tapes” in their little pink house. Yes, car crashes, heroin and romance too.
Bob Dylan and The Band
You don’t have to be a music history buff or even a particular fan of The Band’s music to appreciate this movie. It may also be true that being a serious music history buff can diminish your appreciation of this film. I get the impression that not every tale in this film is being told for the first time, so super fans may see some of it as old news. Perhaps more importantly, three of the five Band members are now dead, and one living in relative obscurity, so this film sometimes has the tone of a last-man-standing version of history. It is part biography but also part personal memoir of one man – Robbie Robertson, although he is one super-talented and articulate fellow. To my eyes, the film seems to bend over backward to be fair, but if you’re looking for an earth-shaking confession of some sort, you won’t find it here. We learn that members of The Band had some dispute about the equitable distribution of income and some other unresolved tensions, and while the film does not reveal any long-hidden secrets, it thoughtfully addresses the issues and moves on to what Robertson thinks is more important, and I believe the average film-goer will agree.
The film excels in its humanity. It is about the great possibilities and painful frailties of human nature. And it’s about the process of creativity – what it is, how it works, how it falls apart. It’s full of music. It’s full of wisdom. It’s full of inspiration (despite the profound sadness).
Once Were Brothers is pretty much the direct opposite of The Quiet One, if anyone remembers that documentary from last year, about bassist Bill Wyman, founding member the Rolling Stones. (Click here for myQuiet One review.) That film also featured its lead character speaking extensively about his past – a sort of end-of-career self-assessment, an attempt to break through the veil of myth and mystery that had long shadowed him. But The Quiet One failed in every way this film succeeds; that film was shallow where this one goes deep and that film evaded controversy where this one explores it.
For example, The Quiet One didn’t even mention any tension between Wyman and the rest of the Stones, but this film discusses the late-in-the-game internal problems at some length. (It never does mention that before the final, official break-up, the group toured briefly without Robbie, to mixed reviews, but at that point he was technically “on a break” and waiting for the others to clean up their acts, which they never did. One might credit Robertson for taking the high road and not dwelling on their failures or contributing to gossip. This is more a movie that attempts to understand success.) Both films have Eric Clapton doling out praise, but this one includes an amusing and telling moment where Robertson and Clapton were out of sync and Clapton passes some small judgement. Robertson is a good sport about it. Both Robertson and Wyman poignantly tell us their childhood tale of how they each acquired their first guitar. Both men’s careers share significant milestones and tragedies. But their memoir films couldn’t be more different.
Robbie Robertson goes deep
I compared The Quiet One to Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, feeling as if I were watching Wyman fade into a confused, disappointed silence and this would be the last we heard from him. In this case, we learn that Robertson is still very much alive and well and working productively, and he has managed to transform his past pain and success into new artistry. He’s mentally inquisitive and emotionally connected and speaks with a surprising humility that seems genuine to me. It might be worth noting that Robertson’s wife – the same one he originally married in the early days of The Band – is said to now be an addiction therapist, which I would guess helped him to be as self-aware and honest as he is in this film. Wyman, however, is on wife #3. Just saying.
So, at this time of global tragedy, American presidential impeachment and vitriolic partisanship, withering Twitter and Facebook drama, and even #AwardsOutrage about the nominations and/or winners of the Golden Globes, BAFTA, SAG and Oscar, I suggest you take a break from the hate and go see this legitimately optimistic film. (And there’s music. Did I mention the music?)
America is the country that invented the concept of Baby Boomers, and now that they’re aging and so often becoming a problem for their adult children faced with the challenges of elder care or even elder understanding, it should be surprising but is not that other countries are the ones best at addressing the issue in their artistic expression. As with most films regarding emotions and intimate looks at characters, foreign films do it best. Hollywood just has big clumsy hands when it comes to tender subjects like death. I recall writing something along these lines years ago when I reviewed Mia Madreby Nanni Moretti (also about the impending death of a parent), but I state it again now based largely on two films that separately grabbed my attention and my emotionally-exhausted heart – two foreign films that managed to squeak past my aversion to sentimentality and shed new light on my personal experience and a subject that is growing more socially relevant and painful with every aging day.
“Deceptively simple.”
“The Disappearance of My Mother” by Beniamino Barrese
The first filmI already reviewedand was perhaps my favorite at Tribeca Film Festival 2019 (but is still cycling through film festivals and does not yet have a distributor, alas) – Our Time Machine, by S. Leo Chiang, a Chinese documentary about a young-adult artist and his ailing artist father, with an astoundingly savvy story structure and creative style for a documentary. It’s the very definition of “achingly beautiful.” The second is in theaters now and Helen Highly Recommends you see it, whatever gen-letter happens to define you – The Disappearance of My Mother, an Italian documentary by Beniamino Barrese, a young-adult photographer, about his relationship with his aging, ex-supermodel mother, Benedetta Barzini. This film is as full of contradictions as real life – incongruities rarely acknowledged much less captured with the candor of this cinematic memoir that is both shocking and soft. I think it’s interesting that both films are about two generations of artists who in some way collaborate to make their movie, and also that both are not American, but both being truly excellent, they speak with universal appeal.
“Our Time Machine” movie poster
When I was caring for my elderly uncle, the hospital and social workers kept wanting him to sign a legal document declaring his desire for emergency resuscitation or intubation or not. As his health care proxy, it was my responsibility to explain to him exactly what DNR and DNI meant and get him to make an official decision for himself. He was mentally competent, but this was information he did not want to know and a decision he did not want to make. He did not want to die – was not ready to let go, but choosing the exact conditions under which he was willing to survive was too much for him. Discussing any details related to his future passing was simply off limits. We spent enough time in hospitals for me to witness other families in similar crisis, and it seemed a commonly tormenting consideration. So, it may seem odd that I felt such an affinity to Beniamino Barrese and his mother when watching this film. Through the telling of a jarringly different scenario, the relatable sentiments rise to the top. What resonates in this strange story is the truth of Benedetta’s insistence that toward the end of life the things that matter most cannot be seen or spoken.
Benedetta wants to disappear. She is exceptionally clear on what she wants. An iconic fashion model in the 1960s, she became a muse to Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. As a radical feminist in the 1970s, she fought for the rights and emancipation of women. But at the age of 75, she becomes fed up with all the roles that life has imposed upon her and decides to leave everything and everybody and never come back – to disappear to a place as far as possible from the world she knows and escape the gaze of the culture of images. She wants to go to an island “so far away that no one could ever get there.” She details her plan to her worried son; she will “just go,” with no credit card, bank account, phone or computer – with nothing.
It is her son who is not ready to let go. He persuades her to let him film a movie of her before she leaves – partially to record a memory of her and partially to delay her departure. She agrees with great reluctance (and frequent outbursts of anger). She tells him that she sees the lens as her enemy and it hurts her to be filmed but she agrees because “I tried in every way to tell you no, but no was a wound to you,” so she will bear the pain of the lens in order to spare him, at least for a while. Thus, this documentary unfolds as a sort of battle between mother and son, his determination to capture her image and her stubborn fight for liberation.
“It’s not about young love and heartbreak; it’s about grown-up love and loss.”
Benedetta rues that today everything is relegated to photography and nothing is left to one’s own memory. She declares that now she’s only interested in things that can’t be seen. She claims that despite all the photographs taken of her throughout her celebrated career as a model, none of them captured her true self. “The real me isn’t photographable.” In contrast, her son sees film as a way of preserving the people and experiences he fears losing. Starting at age seven when his father gave him a camera, he spent much of his youth photographing his mother, even before he knew she had been a famous model (a fact she hid from him) or before he became a professional photographer. Through photography, he was always trying to get closer to his mother, see her more clearly, connect to her more deeply.
Mother and son in “The Disappearance of My Mother”
In this film, there is much discussion (and passionate debate) about the nature of photography, and it leads me to recall Susan Sontag and her book On Photography, which was recently brought back to mind by a new biography of her in addition to the 50-year anniversary restoration and re-release of her movie, Duet for Cannibals– a film that feels crucial to me (and which you should see — my article here). Susan would be about ten years older than Benedetta if she were still alive, but it seems their paths would have crossed – both coming to cultural relevance in New York in the 60s. And while Barzini’s career as a fashion model may have seemed trivial to Sontag and her intellectualism back then, they certainly ended up with similar perspectives.
We see Barzini lecturing to young fashion students, warning them of the difference between fashion as free expression and fashion as a system of oppression by those who produce it. She rails against society’s obsession with beauty – similar to Sontag’s philosophies, explaining that imperfection upsets people because it suggests death, and there is tyranny in people’s fear of mortality.
Benedetta is not afraid and vehemently rejects fashion, despite her son’s pleading that she dress in something “elegante” to accept a lifetime achievement award. To that she says no. When he persists, she becomes irate and accuses him of being “petty bourgeois.” Perhaps the lady doth protest too much when she even refuses a bath in a modestly posh hotel room, after revealing it’s been weeks since she’s showered, saying she “distrusts luxury.” (It’s also been months since she changed her bedding, but “it’s perfectly clean.”)
Bernedetta Barzini in “”The Disappearance of My Mother”
She shows up at the awards event looking like some random homeless woman full of contempt, but it’s a chance for us learn more about her past and to see photos of her in her heyday. The film is not a biopic; there is no history lesson about her life. (I was left wondering even about who Beniamino’s father might be and read later that he has three other siblings – none mentioned in the film.) But the awards event tells us she was the first Italian model to appear on the cover of Vogue – discovered by the great fashion maven Diana Vreeland. And yet she “destroyed the stereotype of the brainless cover-girl.”
Benedetta Barzini once was beautiful.
The most charming scene in this cinematic portrait is when Benedetta finally puts on a dress – a simple blue shift dress that is too large for her tiny frame, but she says she likes the color because it looks like the bottom of the sea. The two are leaving her Milan apartment together and as she crosses the cement courtyard outside, her son casually asks her to pose like she did when she was a model, and she cheerily (surprisingly) agrees, posturing by the trash bins and having fun despite herself. She is twirling and then he is circling around her with his camera. She is laughing. It’s the first time we see her joyful. And we also see that even at the old age of 75, dirty and without a drop of makeup, she is mesmerizing. It is magical to watch her move and make herself and her dress into daring shapes. We see that she is truly magnetic in that specialness clings to her, will not fade away, and she’s very much alive. It felt reassuring to me; this is not a woman who is capable of vanishing.
“The Disappearance of My Mother” is full of contradictions.
This is one of the film’s many contradictions; Barzini has argued persuasively that photography is static and flat, that it freezes and kills a live moment. But the moment in which she is most alive in the film is the moment in which she is posing for her son’s camera. She also spends a lot of time explaining her need to go away and disappear, and then at the end of one of these discussions, she glances up coyly at her son and asks, “Do you mind?” She says it like a teenage girl flirting with her beau. It seemed almost perverse, but it was unusually revealing. Her asking if he cares doesn’t invalidate all she said before about wanting to leave despite his pleading, but it shows that she needs him to want her to stay; his devotion to her may even be the thing that will empower her to go.
I won’t tell you how the film ends. Not that it’s a big mystery to solve. But these two spend a good amount of time arguing about how the final moment will be staged, each wanting their own resolution, and it’s worth watching how it plays out. This is not a masterful movie (as Our Time Machine is, btw). Its worthiness is not in creativity or brilliant narrative or great cinematography or urgent activism. It’s the relationship. It’s the way this film manages to feel more real and true than any memoir film I can recall seeing.
It’s not in a hurry and doesn’t have big ambitions; it is what it is. (Ever been to Italy? You know how Italians can take just three ingredients, all super-fresh and locally sourced, and toss them together and make them into an impossibly perfect culinary experience? That’s what this movie is. Deceptively simple.) It’s completely unpretentious. It’s intimate without being invasive, even as Benedetta pushes away the camera and Beniamino steals secret shots. It’s furious and it’s funny and it’s even dull and sluggish at times. It’s not about young love and heartbreak; it’s about grown-up love and loss, as only a foreign film will show you. Those Italians, it’s like they can tap into some ancient source of emotion in ways Americans just cannot.
More: American Adult-Child-of-Famous-Aging-Parent Documentaries
The more I think about it, the more I realize that this film also follows in an excellent line of documentaries about adult children and their famous, aging parents. The two that come to top of my mind are indeed American films, but I will let stand my stated affection for the special, foreign-film touch of the three docs I mention in this article. (To make the distinction though, the films I discuss above are all stand-alone art films and not at all biopics or tribute films.) Still, in terms of terrific, American aging-parent films, I point you to two HBO Documentary flicks — Nothing Left Unsaid about Anderson Cooper and his mother Gloria Vanderbilt, and Bright Lights, about Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. I did write about Bright Lights, which is a wonderful and overlooked film, and due to its tragic timing — its release just before the unexpected deaths of both great women, it becomes not just a documentary but a kind of cinematic obituary, which makes it all the more touching. Both these films are tributes to extraordinary “women of a certain age” and also powerful memoirs of the relationship between the adult children and aging parents — something many of us can personally relate to, even if our parents were never famous.
Both films above are available online for streaming. In particular, Helen Highly Recommends Bright Lights as a celebratory and fun flick about real family to watch in your free time during the holiday season. (If these two women can overcome their differences and troubles, then so can we!)
How to Have Christmas Just Like in the Movies: Where to get the goods to make your classic Christmas-movie memories come alive.
“The stuff that dreams are made of.”
The unforgettable hat, the shining toy train, the pair of ice skates, as depicted by cinematic magic – these items have come to represent Christmas Joy itself. Don’t just watch them on television, bring them home for the holidays (or get them online and have them delivered while you stay home and watch the old movies that made them iconic). This guide points you to the websites that sell the items that our cherished old movies made symbolic of Peace on Earth and Goodwill to Men.
This film has been a perennial holiday favorite since its debut in 1947. No one has ever played Santa Claus more convincingly than Edmund Gwenn. I’s a movie filled with the exciting clamor of Christmas shopping and our yearning for just the right gifts.
Kris Kringle: “What do you want for Christmas, Peter?”
Peter: “A fire engine, just like the big ones only smaller, that has a real hose that squirts real water. I won’t do it in the house, only in the backyard, I promise.”
Harried Mother: “Psst! Psst! Macy’s ain’t got any. Nobody’s got any.”
Kris Kringle: “Well, Peter, I can tell you’re a good boy. You’ll get your fire engine.”
Peter: “Oh, thank you very much! You see? I told you he’d get me one.”
Harried Mother: “That’s fine. That’s just dandy. Listen, what’s the matter with you? Don’t you understand English? I tell you nobody’s got any. I’ve been all over. My feet are killing me. A fine thing, promising the kid.”
Kris: “You don’t think I would’ve said that unless I’m sure? You can get those fire engines at…”
Peter’s dream fire truck.
To get a fire engine with a working pump, as Peter specified, find the Bruder brand, which is sold at Target, Walmart and on Amazon. The Bruder water-spraying truck comes in a range of sizes, starting at $60. If you want the biggest and best – with an integrated water tank that can be easily filled, fully functioning nozzle, a removable light and sound module, telescoping ladder with rescue basket that swivels 360⁰, realistic driver’s cabin with doors that open, an opening hood to reveal the engine block, plus four extendable support legs to ensure vehicle stability in any situation, you’ll find it online at Amazon when you search for “Bruder Mack Granite Fire Engine Truck w/ Working Water Pump, Lights & Engine Sounds.” Also:
The NYFireAndPolice website store sells a big line of fire-and-police-related gifts, including T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats and toy police cars and fire trucks. They even have a section dedicated to children’s gifts with clothing in children’s sizes (and an NYPD teddy bear). It’s good to buy local and authentic, so this website is worth a visit, but they don’t sell the exact fire truck that Peter wanted.
If you want a true, detailed replica of a fire truck from your city – from New York to Philly to Chicago to L.A., plus many more, go to the Code3FireTrucks These metal, die-cast trucks are more than just toys; they are limited-edition, historic collectibles – for the little boy in our hero-loving grown men.
The other item that a child requested from Santa in Miracle on 34th St. was a pair of ice skates. These skates are what set the story of the movie into action, as Kris, the store-Santa working for Macy’s, dares to tell the mother of this little girl that she’ll find a better pair of skates at the competition, Gimbel’s. That puts Santa in trouble with his bosses, but it ultimately proves ingenious, because it makes customers like this one love Macy’s all the more.
Shopping Mother: “Imagine a big outfit like Macy’s putting the spirit of Christmas ahead of the commercial. It’s wonderful. I never done much shopping here before, but from now on, I’m going to be a regular Macy customer.”
Get your daughter high-quality skates, because as Kris says, “their little ankles want protecting.”
For a traditional figure skate with a classic look (rather than the latest styles that look more like ski boots), look for DBX Traditional Figure Skates, which are sold at Dick’s Sporting Goods.
For a full selection of traditional skates made from real leather, such as the top-notch Riedell brand, along with detailed information on choosing just the right skate, go to the website for FigureSkatingStore.
Just for fun, it’s also worth mentioning one of my favorite quotes from Miracle on 34th Street: “There’s a lotta bad ‘isms floatin’ around in this world, but one of the woyst is commercialism. Make a buck, make a buck…” says one of the greatest shopping movies of all time. (wink)
Maybe you can’t have Cary Grant and his angelic charm, but you can get a charming hat like the one he bought for Loretta Young in the 1948 film, The Bishop’s Wife. In this timeless Christmas tale, a bishop, played by David Niven, is trying to get a new cathedral built, which depends on the financial support of a domineering and selfish old woman. The bishop prays for divine guidance. An angel (Cary Grant) arrives, but his guidance isn’t about fundraising. It’s more about paying attention to the bishop’s lonely wife and tending to her happiness, which includes the purchase of a hat that she admired in a store window but was too meek to buy for herself. The hat is purchased and the strained marriage re-ignited. We are all mere mortals after all, and mortal flesh likes a pretty hat. To get a life-changing hat for your loved one, visit:
America’s oldest hat maker, Bollman Hat Company, offers an exclusive vintage collection of women’s headwear. They have chosen one hat for each decade since their inception in 1868 in Adamstown, PA, USA, beginning with an 1860’s bonnet, and including a 1920’s flapper hat, a 1930s aviator hat, and even a 1960’s Jackie hat. Their 1940’s hat, however, is based on “Rosie the Riveter” and not exactly the type to make a woman’s heart melt.
To find a dress hatthat might have been worn by a beautiful woman like Loretta Young in 1948, go toVillage Hat Shop. The site also includes a History of Hats section that is fascinating and fun.
This 1949 romantic comedy stars Janet Leigh and Robert Mitchum. Leigh plays a war-widow with a wistful devotion to her child, an adorable tousled tot who covets an expensive, electric train. Set during the Christmas shopping season, both main characters are working in department store jobs and struggling financially while they fall into a love triangle that involves the buying and returning of the train set – twice. Finally, it is little Timmy who takes his train back to Crowley’s department store and tearfully asks for a refund so that Steve (Mitchum) will not be left penniless. The story ends with the child not getting the gift he originally wanted, but instead getting a new father who he loves. If your child already has a father he loves, maybe he could use an electric train set:
The Lionel brand (the one in the movie) has a Winter Wonderland Train Set(now w/Bluetooth!) that is guaranteed to get you in the Christmas spirit with its smoke-puffing steam locomotive pulling festive, green and red train cars around white tracks. The set includes a Sleigh Bells & Co. boxcar, Whimsical Winter Mix tank car, Winter Wonderland caboose and a sound system with steam chuffing, whistle, bell and user-activated announcements. It’s everything a train-loving child could want on Christmas morning, except for the three AAA alkaline batteries (not included).
For a more year-round and high-end electric train set, go with the Bachmann brand. The Rail Chief Ready To Run Electric Train Sethas 130 pieces that include a diesel locomotive with operating headlight, open quad hopper car, gondola car, plug-door box car, and off-center caboose. It features an oval of snap-fit E-Z Track, signal bridge, 36 miniature figures, 24 telephone poles, 48 railroad and street signs, power pack and speed controller.
What is better than a train running on its track around a Christmas tree?
This 1957 film, starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, is universally considered to be one of the most romantic movies of all time. In the final, tear-jerking scene on Christmas Eve, Cary Grant brings his dead grandmother’s shawl as a gift to Deborah Kerr, who has been hiding herself (and her paralysis) from Grant for six months. Grant plays a painter, and he has painted a portrait of Kerr wearing the shawl his grandmother wanted her to have. The entire impossible love story turns on this beloved shawl; due to the gift, the painting is revealed, the wheelchair is revealed, and the couple’s true love is confirmed. To wrap the woman you love in a magical shawl this year:
Go to Etsy, search for “lace shawl” and then refine your search by selecting “Handmade” on the left sidebar. (Click the links above to see the results for the search I already did, but the results will change over time.) There are lots of people selling handmade shawls on Etsy that you’d never find in a mainstream retail store. Some will even make custom shawls to order. On Etsy, you also get to see who makes the item, so you can select a sweet old lady like Cary Grant’s grandmother, if you want.
This fantasy Christmas drama, written and directed by Frank Capra in 1946 and starring Jimmy Stewart, is often declared the best Christmas movie of all time. Readers of this article will no doubt know the story and remember the key, most-endearing moment in its resolution when George Bailey finally returns home to his loving family after his frightening odyssey. The silver-bell ornament on the Christmas tree magically rings, and little Zuzu Bailey exclaims, “Look, Daddy. Teacher says, ‘every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.’” Then we know that Clarence has become an angel and all is well.
Traditionally, bells are rung during Christmas to announce the arrival of the season and proclaim the birth of Christ. Ringing of bells can be traced back to pagan winter celebrations. During those times, noisemakers were used to scare away evil spirits in the night. Among those early noisemakers were bells. But it wasn’t until It’s a Wonderful Life that a ringing bell signaled an angel getting its wings, and Christmas bells and angels have been connected in the American consciousness ever since Clarence was redeemed.
Capture the joy of the movie and own a piece of history with a keepsake ornament fashioned after the exact bell in the movie – an authentic silver-plated Bevin Bellinscribed with “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It comes with red satin cording for hanging on the tree.
This classic holiday tale from 1940 has been so loved that it was remade into a musical in 1949 (starring Judy Garland) and even Tom Hanks took a chance at a re-make in 1998, updating the role that Jimmy Stewart originated. But the initial version took place in a Budapest gift shop, where Stewart worked as the head salesman, Alfred Kralik. The shop owner and Kralik get into an argument over the owner’s idea to sell a cigarette box that plays music when opened. Kralik thinks it’s a bad idea. Then, Klara Novak (Margaret Sullivan) enters the gift shop looking for a job. Kralik tells her there are no openings, but when she tells the owner that she likes the idea of the box because to her it seems “romantic” and makes her think of “moonlight and… um, music and cigarettes,” he takes a liking to her. When she is able to sell one of the musical cigarette boxes on the spot, the owner hires her. (She is able to sell the box by telling a shopper it’s a box for candy. Kralik responds, dryly, “people who like to smoke candy and eat cigarettes will love it.”) The disagreement over the box sets the two romantic leads at odds and begins the adversarial love affair that ends, of course, with Christmas joy and unity. To get a musical cigarette and/or candy box for your strong-willed love:
Go to MusicBoxAttic, where they sell all sorts of music-playing boxes, even those with twirling ballerinas, like so many of us adored as children.
Or search onEtsyor eBayto find a vintage music box that was actually designed for cigarettes, some with nifty, carousel dispensers. I bet you can even find one made in Hungary or Austria, similar to the one in the movie. (Links above show the results of my search, but remember that every day will give a different search result.) Here’s one I just found on Etsythat looks quite a bit like the one in the movie.
It’s Christmas eve in New York City and a fabulously well-dressed woman is trying on a bracelet in a 5th Avenue jewelry store. “Glorious, madam, isn’t it?” says the clerk as he snaps the expensive bracelet on her wrist. It’s beautiful and shiny, mesmerizing to the eye, but she’d like to see another one, she tells the clerk, and as soon as his back is turned, she’s gone, and so is the bracelet.
Barbara Stanwyck steals a bracelet for Christmas
Out on the street the focus remains on the bracelet until the shot widens and Barbara Stanwyck is finally revealed. She enters a pawn shop, where the clerk quickly passes around her to bolt the door shut and phone the police. Fred MacMurray plays John Sargent, a hard-charging DA who is assigned to prosecute Lee Leander (Stanwyck). The trial begins just before Christmas, and rather than face a jury filled with the holiday spirit who might be overly lenient, John has the trial postponed on a technicality.
Despite his rock-hard ethics, comical circumstances conspire to put Stanwyck and MacMurray together on a long road trip to Indiana (complete with cows invading the car). Sargent ends up taking this feisty shoplifter home with him to spend the holiday season with his small-town family, still wary of what terrible things she might do. She joins the family as they bake cookies, string popcorn on the Christmas tree, sing songs around the piano and proclaim their delight at whatever presents they receive, even if it’s the same gift they were given the year before.
Barbara Stanwyck wearing a Ruser necklace
In a classic holiday-spirit turn, John comes to realize the advantages his loving family have bestowed upon him once he sees how appreciative Lee is after they share with her the first, warm Christmas morning of her life. On the way back to New York, John tells Lee he loves her and tries to persuade her to jump bail and marry him on the spot, but she refuses, insisting she wants to prove her worth before she marries him, by doing the right thing and serving her time in jail.
Acclaimed screenwriter Preston Sturges summarized the film by saying, “Love reformed her and corrupted him.” You may not be able to give the gift of corrupting or reforming love this year, but that glittering bracelet is as appealing as ever.
William Ruser was a jeweler-to-the-stars whose clients included Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich and Lana Turner; they wore Ruser creations both on and off screen. He famously crafted the jewelry Stanwyck wore in Sorry, Wrong Number. You can still occasionally find vintage Ruser jewelry collected from estate sales, at fine purveyors such as Hancocks of London. Click here for their detailed biography of Ruser and his work.
Celebrity Collectionsis selling an actual sapphire ring that Stanwyck wore when accepting her Oscar.
“Christmas Carol” made turkey the meat for Christmas
Bitter and miserly Ebenezer Scrooge hates Christmas, calling it “humbug.” He refuses his nephew Fred’s dinner invitation and rudely turns away two gentlemen who seek a donation from him to provide a Christmas dinner for the poor. Scrooge is magically reformed in his sleep by three spooky spirits and awakens on Christmas morning with joy and love in his heart. He immediately purchases the largest turkey in town and sends it as a gift to the home of his overworked, underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchit, enabling a spectacular and joyous holiday feast. The gift proves Scrooge’s transformation, and turkeys ever after have come to represent generosity and compassion. Give the metaphorically and practically nourishing gift of turkey:
Turkey Christmas feast
Harry and David offers a complete Christmas dinner you can send to a needy family or even your own. They’ve included everything one needs for a marvelous meal, from a ready-to-heat, all-natural turkey to delectable side dishes such as apple sausage stuffing, parmesan creamed spinach, brown sugar sweet potatoes and a creamy pumpkin cheesecake. You’ll also find classic turkey gravy and spiced cranberry chutney to add the perfect finishing touches. Arrives frozen and will need to thaw 2 to 3 days before re-heating and serving.
Send a Meal offers a fresh, ready-to-cook turkey with sides and dessert you can select for a custom meal shipped wherever you choose.
Or get the turkey already cooked for you by Whole Foods, as part of their complete, prepared Christmas dinner. But you’ll need to find a store near you and schedule to pick it up in person after you order it online.
Scrooge: (yelling out his window) “Hey, what day is it today?”
Boy: “Today is Christmas!”
Scrooge: “Thank heavens I haven’t missed it. Do you know if they’ve sold the prize turkey hanging in the poulter’s window? Not the little prize turkey, the BIG prize turkey.”
Boy: “The one as big as me? It’s hanging there now.”
Scrooge: “Go and buy it then!”
It’s Christmas, y’all. Go and get that prize turkey!
There is a way that only cinema can engrave on our hearts and make magic of mere objects. It’s more than just another gift; “It’s the stuff that dreams are made of.”
You have two choices. You’re very unlikely to watch two documentaries about elephants in the next few months, even if they are very different in tone and message. There is the widely-advertised The Elephant Queen, which features “magnificent images of majestic animals” (as stated by the New York Times) and follows a herd of elephants across the Kenyan savanna, led by the herd’s surprisingly intelligent and charismatic mother elephant. It opened in limited release Nov.1st and will be part of the launch for Apple TV Plus. By all accounts, that film is gorgeously shot, poignantly narrated and is an inspiring tribute to the power of motherhood. OR, if you want more from your movie than pretty shots of elephants at sunset as they run in slow motion across the plains – a film that begins with the cheesy line, “Oh wise and gentle spirits…”, you could watch When Lambs Become Lionsby Jon Kasbe, a documentary centered around African elephant poaching and which Helen Highly Recommended back when I saw its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, and I recommend even more urgently now. (Maybe if you have kids, they would enjoy Elephant Queen instead of a Disney movie.)
“One of the most impressively crafted documentaries I have ever seen. This is what every documentary aspires to be.”
“When Lambs Becomes Lions” documentary
Despite its African-savanna setting, When Lambs Becomes Lions is not a nature film or an animal film or a conservation advocate; it’s a film about human family, conflict and survival. It’s a true documentary rarity in that it presents a strong storyline –in the present tense – and feels like a thriller. You will forget you are watching a documentary. It does not play to your sentimentality; it challenges your expectations and makes you think while it touches your heart with profundity not innocence.
Ivory poaching has unexpected complexity in “When Lambs Become Lions”
I know ivory poaching sounds tedious. But When Lambs Become Lions uses ivory poaching (and its unexpected complexity) as the setting for a discerning and dramatic story about the tension between honor and survival, loyalty and desperation, tightly knotted with complicated family relationships, in an environment both magnificent and deadly. When Lambs Become Lions is one of the most impressively crafted documentaries I have ever seen. This is what every documentary aspires to be; it’s constructed from authentic and vivid real-life footage, with no talking heads or voice-over explanations, and it manages to tell a compelling narrative tale that performs as a suspenseful action-packed drama. It’s no surprise that it won the award for Best Documentary Editing at TFF.
“Out here, we all are hunters” (poachers and rangers alike) — When Lambs Become Lions
“Lambs Become Lions” plays like a thriller
As I have often mentioned, the wonder of film festivals is that you get an opportunity to see small films that may not find a distributor and will be never seen again. That seemed to be the sad fate of this TFF2018 documentary. I flat-out loved this film, and I was amazed it got so little attention and seemed to go nowhere. Well, as film-festival-miracles would have it, When Lambs Become Lions is suddenly BACK and getting a limited release in LA (starting 11/22) and NYC (starting 12/6) and hopefully a national rollout to follow. It’s opening weekend numbers will impact its chances for wider distribution, so go see it if you possibly can.
Vérité cinema in “When Lambs Become Lions”
This work of vérité cinema takes us to the front lines of the poaching crisis through the intertwined stories of an ivory dealer and a wildlife ranger. In a Kenyan town bordering wildlife conservation land, “X”, a small-time ivory dealer, fights to stay on top while forces mobilize to destroy his trade. When he turns to his younger cousin, Asan, a conflicted poacher-fighting ranger who hasn’t been paid in months, we see the ways that these two men have been working both for and against each other. With each on the edge of catastrophe, they both see a possible lifeline in the other.
“Rise and rise again, until lambs become lions” — No, not from the Bible, maybe from an old poem, but yes, uttered by heroic Russell Crowe in the movie Robin Hood
Loyalties conflict in “When Lambs Become Lions”
The story itself is exciting, but equally exciting is the appearance of a new filmmaking talent – first-time feature director Jon Kasbe. Brooklyn-based Kasbe followed the film’s subjects with his camera in Kenya over a three-year period, gaining an extraordinary level of access and trust as he became part of their everyday lives. The result is a rare and visually arresting look through the perspectives and motives of the people at the epicenter of the conservation divide.
Director Jon Kasbe
Even in fictional dramas, it is seldom that we get such rich characters in such relatable conflict (despite the foreign setting and situation). With this film, Kasbe makes a virtuoso debut; beyond his top-notch skills as a documentarian, he has a gift for understanding and depicting the nuances of the human struggle. As timely and politically relevant as this story is, When Lambs Becomes Lions is also a timeless tale of the complexity of courage in everyday life.
In the world of this film there are no easy choices, but you do have an easy choice between two “elephant films.” Helen Highly Recommends When Lambs Become Lions. This is cinema at its best.
At a time when archives are becoming a meaningful theme in documentary filmmaking – investigated and presented onscreen, almost as characters, rather than merely behind the scenes as research material, Shooting the Mafia is another excellent and compelling addition to the group. This Italian-language film by Kim Longinottoconsiders the nature of Letizia Battaglia’s photographic archive – as historical documentation as well as a captivating collection of photojournalism that has risen to the level of art. Plus, Shooting the Mafia falls into another increasingly popular doc category – the combo memoir/biopic. But this one provides an unusually candid and fearless look at the life of a truly exceptional woman.
Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia began a lifelong battle with the Mafia when she first dared to point her camera at a brutally slain victim. A woman whose passions led her to abandon traditional family life and become a photojournalist in the 1970s—the first female photographer to be employed by an Italian daily newspaper, Battaglia found herself on the front lines during one of the bloodiest chapters in Italy’s recent history. She bravely and artfully captured everyday Sicilian life—from weddings and funerals to the grisly murders of ordinary citizens, to tell the narrative of how the community she loved in her native Palermo was forced into silence and poverty by the Cosa Nostra. Weaving together Battaglia’s striking black-and-white photographs, rare archival footage, vintage Italian films (film lovers take note!), classic Italian music, original interviews and the now 84-year-old’s own memories, Shooting the Mafia paints a portrait of a remarkable woman whose determination and defiance helped expose the Mafia’s brutal crimes.
Mafia crime scene, photo by Letizia Battaglia
Helen Highly Brief
Mob Movie Meets Art Flick Meets Gruesome Travelogue – has a lot to attract and engage you, is worth seeing, but runs a little long and gets bogged down in the nitty gritty of Mafia names and trials.
Who Should See It?
— If you recently saw Scorsese’s The Irishman (or plan to see it soon on Netflix), or if you are generally a lover of mob movies, this film will provide some important factual perspective (that will burn the pop-culture romance-flavored butter right off your popcorn). Battaglia produced many of the iconic images that have come to represent Sicily and the Mafia throughout the world, and this is a rare and valuable look at the story behind the camera that took those photos.
“Fear is a luxury we cannot afford.” — Battaglia
— If you like films about the life of artists, this is about as good as they come, in that it is unusually honest and revealing. Letizia could have become a nun. She could have been a wealthy wife to an older man. She could have been a devoted and nurturing mother. She could have been a battered spouse. She could have been a mistress. She could have been cloistered in a psychiatric ward and labeled insane. She could have been a crime victim. (She could easily have been murdered.) She was most of those things and failed at or rejected others, but she refused to let any of them define her. Instead, she turned her life into art. And she went all in.
Photo by Letizia Battaglia,”Shooting the Mafia”
— If you enjoy movies about photographers or like to look at photos, this film is for you. While you’re at it, you can also put Letter to the Editoron your to-watch list (coming to HBO this December), a documentary that displays the results of 40 years of one man compulsively clipping photos from the New York Times. Maria Garcia has called that archive “a quiet collection of screams,” which might be an even more apt description of Shooting the Mafia, and while the two films are in many ways entirely different, they do both share a lot of achingly beautiful pictures that come from the world of journalism. Interested in television journalism? Try Recorder: The Marion Stokes Story, which is reviewed here and in theaters now.
“More shocking than the gruesome reality in these pictures is the intimacy in them – the closeness.”
— And if, like me, there is a moth in your heart that is drawn to the flame of Sicily or Southern Italy and you start to feel flutters as soon as you see a few photos that capture the essence, you will want to watch this movie. The film points out that symptoms of embittered love will be familiar to anyone who has lived in Sicily for an extended period of time. Battaglia’s friend Sciascia says, “I hate and detest Sicily insofar as I love it, and insofar as it does not respond to the kind of love I would like to have for it.” He is speaking in reference to the Cosa Nostra’s dominance in Sicily, but I suggest that feeling of a knife in your heart (as they say) will resonate more broadly with anyone who has been captured by the diabolically rhapsodic spell cast by that part of the world – Sicily, Napoli and its environs, back then and even recently (where the culture that grew up around the Mafia will take more than a mere 30 years to fade). Whether Sicily or Napoli, there is a powerful sense of place, as devastating as it is alluring, inherently tragic and desperate in its ill-fated hopefulness, and even after you leave, you’ll never quite be free from it. (When the sun goes down, you remain at its window, as expressed in “O Sole Mio.”) If this makes sense to you, go see this movie.
To help validate that melancholic paragraph above, before proceeding with this article, I suggest you click below to hear Enrico Caruso sing “O Sole Mio,” the traditional Neapolitan song that is background for the beginning of Shooting the Mafia. There is no better way to set the mood. (Ironically, the title translates roughly to “You Are My Sunshine,” which one would guess would be a cheerful song, but not as sung by Caruso – a child of Napoli.)
Helen Highly Impressed
My first thought about Shooting the Mafia is that it was not what I expected. It’s a gorgeous movie; Longinotto creates a visually exciting narrative mixing these great old Italian films, archival news footage from the period, Letizia’s home videos and still photos. She distinctly portrays the look and feel of that time and place, which in itself is interesting to see. There is intrinsic beauty in those landscapes and streetscapes and the portraits of everyday people. Along with the music, it’s intensely evocative. And despite the subject matter, the film is not quite as grim as it may seem. There is plenty of life and color, and Battaglia’s interviews bring a sense of personal accomplishment and idealistic resolve.
But the strongest component is seeing so many of Battaglia’s photos, which yes are often gory and depict violence, but they express an exquisite anguish. We absolutely feel the pain of the photographer; the photos are genuinely caring – not exploitive. Battaglia opens herself up in an extraordinary way when capturing these images; they are personal to her, and the only comparison I can think of is Diane Arbus, when she was capturing “grotesque” images of people, but with a pronounced empathy that was startling in itself. More shocking than the gruesome reality in these pictures is the intimacy in them – the closeness.
Festa del giorno dei morti, Palermo 1986, by Battaglia
Arbus was working to normalize marginalized people and Battaglia was doing the opposite – showing the horror of what had unfortunately become normalized, but they were using a similar approach. Both were getting as close as possible and looking straight at the subject; there is no flinching, no demurring and in contrast to the notion of cool objectivity, they employ what I will call a warm objectivity. Arbus shot mostly posed portraits and Battaglia shot candids but both look squarely at their subjects, and there is a sense of a deep searching. Arbus seemed to be asking “who?” and Battaglia is asking “why?”
Letizia Battaglia’s Mafia crime scene photo from “Shooting the Mafia”
These are photos from within a war, but Battaglia does not see them as frightening. She says in the film, “fear is a luxury we cannot afford.” She was cast into the middle of this bloody conflict and she chose not to run from it but to fight it by exposing it – showing what these so-called “men of honor” truly did and what the Corleonesi Mafia truly means. What one might initially see as horrifying depictions of death, Battaglia understands as history – her history and that of her people, tragic though it may be. Her work became much more than a job; it was her duty as a citizen, she believed.
“For those who couldn’t pay, there was no resting place.” — Battaglia
In fact, when prosecutors in Palermo indicted Giulio Andreotti (who had been prime minister of Italy seven times) for colluding with the Cosa Nostra and ordering the murder of a journalist, Battaglia allowed the police to search her archives, and they discovered two 1979 photographs of Andreotti with an important Mafioso, Nino Salvo, who he had denied knowing. These pictures were the only physical evidence of this powerful politician’s connections to the Sicilian Mafia. Her archive wasn’t just recording history, it was becoming part of it. (Andreotti was acquitted, nonetheless, but I would guess that at least cut down on the death threats to Battaglia.)
Letizia Battaglia and the Mafia
Letizia Battaglia was born in Palermo, Sicily in 1935. To escape her restrictive parents, she ran off at age 16 and eloped with an older man. It was an unhappy and physically abusive marriage, but she had three daughters; she felt trapped. She had an affair, and when her husband caught her with her lover, “he shot the man but didn’t kill him” (we are told, as if that makes it okay). Battaglia was afraid and depressed, “spiraled out of control,” ended up institutionalized in a psych ward and afterward was alone and lost. She took up journalism after her divorce in 1971, while raising her daughters. She picked up a camera when she found that she could better sell her articles if they were accompanied by images and slowly discovered a passion for photography. Then she saw her first murder.
Letizia Battaglia’s photo: Mafia killing crime scene
Letizia Battaglia wants us to understand: “I was saved by photography. I was a young, intelligent, desperate woman. My encounter with photography allowed me to express my thoughts, my rebellion, my social and political commitment.”
In fact, we later learn that Letizia was 40 years old when she started taking pictures, so that’s not exactly “young,” as she says above (but speaking now from the age of 84, I guess 40 seems young, although honestly the timeline in this film seems a tad shaky). Any way you slice it, this woman has led a long, full life, and it is inspiring in that she re-invented herself and launched into this ambitious, dangerous career as a not-so-young woman. “Before finding the camera, I was not a person,” she says. Well, I kinda know what she means. Coincidentally, the time I spent in Southern Italy, I spent largely behind a camera, taking candid portraits of locals, and I found it gave me a strong identity; I liked being the unofficial “reporter” who was invited to all events and occasions in order to document with my camera. It gave me a purpose and a place in the community. Of course, I didn’t get as deeply involved as Letizia did, and the only violence I witnessed was emotional.
Letizia Battaglia, photojournalist
Battaglia took close to 600,000 images as a photojournalist, sometimes shooting at the scene of four or five murders in a single day, pushing through the crowds of onlookers (and the male reporters to whom the police gave priority access), hastening to get the photo before the blood of the dead began to dry. It was unrelenting. Sometimes there would be as many as seven bodies at one hit. It seemed the Mafia was killing everyone and being held to no account. “It was good to be a little crazy,” Letizia says. “It gave me courage.” She pushed through the pain same as she did the crowds, and she continued to document the ferocious internal war of the Mafia and its assault on civil society. She refers to that time as “an apocalypse.”
Letizia Battaglia’s photo: Mafia killing crime scene
Letizia says that the effect on everyday life is what pained her the most. “I looked around and saw how the Mafia was causing so much poverty.” The Corleonesi controlled everything – not just the black market but the slaughterhouses, the meat market, the fish markets; there was no avoiding their reach. They even controlled funeral concessions; you had to go through the Mafia to get buried. “For those who couldn’t pay, there was no resting place.”
A still from “Shooting the Mafia” by Kim Longinotto
Battaglia photographed the dead so often she felt like a roving morgue. “Suddenly,” she realized “I had an archive of blood.” She spent 18 years documenting the Corleonesi clan as they claimed the lives of thousands, including governors, policemen, entire mafia families and ultimately, two of Battaglia’s dearest friends – the anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falconeand Paolo Borsellino. She says she could not bring herself to photograph those crime scenes, and after that she quit photojournalism.
Letizia Battaglia was not invincible; even she had her limit. She reveals to us in this film that she is full of human frailty and has led a troubled life, albeit a meaningful one. She makes no effort to glamorize or inflate it. Battaglia also readily confesses that “I did damage to my daughters. I couldn’t give enough.” Just as in her photos, there is no attempt to sugarcoat the truth, although she again admits her limits. During that section of her sit-down interview, as she chain-smokes, she says, “I could talk about it, but I don’t want to.”
Letizia Battaglia, photojournalist: “I could talk about it, but I don’t want to.”
This is a woman who has defied male authority, her society’s culture and the all-pervasive Mafia, her entire life, and she was outspoken at a time and in a place where that was unheard of, but it did come at a cost, and she knows it. Her vocation – her place behind the camera – brought her purpose and personal strength. It even led her into a career in politics where she served 12 years on the Palermo City Council. But Battaglia does have regrets and dismisses any portrayal of herself as heroic. “I realize now I’ve never been at peace,” she says. But in case you want to pass judgement on her (and her new, much-younger boyfriend), she declares, “People who disapprove of me can fuck off.”
How I spent Yom Kippur with A.O. Scott and Susan Sontag and Delighted in Seeing Her Memory Inscribed in the Book of Life for Another Year
“Duet for Cannibals” poster
Susan Sontag is having a moment 15 years after her death. Or at least in my personal life there has been a moment of Sontag convergence that has led me to write this article. Mostly my intent is to write a film review of the newly remastered re-release of Duet for Cannibals, written and directed by Sontag, released in 1969, screened at the New York Film Festival, and brought back to gorgeous, lush black-and-white life on its 50th anniversary as a Metrograph Pictures Release, starting 11/22, but I also have a personal story to tell. Duet for Cannibals is one of the restored classics that is part of New York Metrograph theater’s new film distribution program. The new buyer/distributor role at Metrograph – started within the past year – was exciting news to me, so I mention it here, being a recent transplant from Chicago, where I long prayed at the altar of the Music Box theater, which has a similar business model. What brought me down to the Metrograph to see this movie was the recent release of a new and much-discussed biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work, by Benjamin Moser; two dueling reviews of that book are what started this Sontag moment for me. But before I launch into my personal tale, let me get this much out of the way: Helen Highly Recommends Duet for Cannibals, a refreshingly original film, even after 50 years. Go see it instead of Marriage Story, I beg you.
Susan Sontag’s “Duet for Cannibals”
Sontag: Her Life and Work, the New Biography
It was Wednesday, October 9th 2019 – Yom Kippur – the Jewish Day of Atonement, which is the close of the “High Holidays” that begin a week earlier with Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish New Year. I am mostly a non-practicing Jew, so I had no plans to go to synagogue, but I did think that I would try to spend the day in quiet contemplation of one kind or another. I was on Twitter (quietly by myself at home, so that kinda counts, I thought) and happened to see a tweet by A.O. Scott, film critic for The New York Times, in which he linked to an article he wrote discussing the new Susan Sontag biography. She was Jewish and an intellectual known for her deep thought, so I figured reading that article would come at least close to contemplation worthy of the High Holidays. (Any analytical consideration of your relationship to the world at large is good, right?)
“Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.” – Goethe
Susan Sontag Taught A.O. Scott How to Think
I read Scott’s article, which is titled “How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think,” with the tagline, “The critic A.O. Scott reflects on the outsize influence Sontag has had on his life as a critic.” It is a very personal article about how her writing essentially shaped his cultural and intellectual life from a young age, and how Sontag fueled his already urgent desire to “read all the books, see all the movies, listen to all the music, look at everything in all the museums.” He expresses more than deep respect; it is as if he loves her as the embodiment of intelligence itself. If she were alive to read his article, I can only imagine that, despite her reputation for arrogance and aversion to emotion, she would be flattered. I certainly felt touched.
On that day dedicated to quiet introspection, when one considers the merit of one’s life, his article made a few tears well up in my eyes. I was thinking how both Sontag and Scott had led consecrated lives – dedicated themselves to an intellectual mission they revered. They had both contributed serious, thoughtful works to the canon of critical writing. I felt admiration and even gratitude.
“With this masterful restoration, Metrograph Pictures has ensured that film lovers will not forget what radiance Sontag brought to this world.”
Wikipedia describes Susan Sontag as “an American writer, philosopher, filmmaker, teacher and political activist.” It writes, “Although her essays and speeches sometimes drew controversy, she has been described as ‘one of the most influential critics of her generation.’” As a pseudo-critic who calls herself HelenHighly, with the disclaimer tagline “I’m a little bit high,” followed by a list of self-descriptions that includes “highly suspect,” I stand in awe of such high-minded efforts (pun intended); I felt Highly Humbled as I read A.O. Scott’s Sontag article.
And when an email showed up in my inbox, inviting me to a press screening of Sontag’s movie (blasted from 50 years the past!) it seemed like some sort of divine intervention; I was meant to go see it. I knew about Sontag, vaguely. I had read at least some of her book Against Interpretation in an aesthetic theory class in graduate school (where I was studying theater directing). In that book, she declared, “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world.” She wanted people to stop looking for subtext and allegory in everything; just take the work as it is, without over-analysis and underlying meaning. Susan’s signature perception was objective coolness. I could relate to that. I saw myself in her corner, philosophically. (And I never saw my hot-headed personality and passionate personal life as any sort of contradiction to my stark artistic leanings.)
Susan Sontag Was Against Interpretation
Portrait of Me as an Artist as a Young Woman (channeling Sontag)
(You can skip all this and scroll down if you only want the film review.)
In my twenties, I felt akin to Sontag’s oppositional approach to all things; my theater career was built on challenging the status quo. Robert Brustein’s Theater of Revoltwas my bible. If I had thought of myself as more of an academic and less of an artist (in a PhD program instead of an MFA program), I might have studied Sontag in more depth. As it was, I took her writing as a general mandate for me to carry on with my avant-garde explorations. She was anti-sentimentality and so was I. I loathed psychological realism. I liked my theater disturbing and mentally challenging – physical more than emotional. And especially when I was young, I was nothing if not arrogant – full of myself and my theories.
Mel Shapiro’s tender staging of “House of Blue Leaves” by John Guare
I remember one of my first grad-school productions – Michi’s Blood, by esoteric playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz. Kroetz intended Michi’s Blood to be alienating, but I had doubled and tripled down on that. The head of the Directing Department was a kvetchy middle-aged man named Mel Shapiro, whose claim to fame was his tender stagings of some new John Guare plays in New York in the 70s, which won him a New York Drama Critics Circle Award (but not a Tony) and had eventually landed him at Carnegie Mellon University as prestigious Director of the Directing Department and also as a chronic drunk and sourpuss.
After suffering through Michi’s Blood, Mel had whined at me, “What am I supposed to feeeel about this play? I don’t caaaare about the characters.” Part of me delighted in making Mel miserable, but part of me genuinely wanted to challenge him to just look and just listen and give up his sentimental expectations and small-minded interpretations and surrender to abstraction in the service of carnality.
Susan mistrusted beauty.
That never happened. ha. In retrospect, I was maybe channeling Sontag before I knew who she was (or, I would realize later, she and I were both influenced by some of the same historic greats.) In those days, I lived in the world of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. I developed an antipathy for Tennessee Williams. (I had no inkling that Sontag would publish her own book about Artaud one year later, or knowledge that she ever did, until recently.) The Dean of the Drama Program thought I was a girl-wonder genius, but to Mel I was always the bane of his existence. The Dean enthusiastically made one of my bizarro productions required viewing for his aesthetics class on the same day that Mel refused to give it a formal review in his class because he declared it to be entirely worthless. Mel did his best to pretend I didn’t exist, and I did my best to upset him.
“It’s romantic and it’s perverse.”
In one rare moment of exasperation (the moment being rare, not the exasperation), Mel revealed that he had not been completely ignoring me and offered an insight I wouldn’t appreciate until years later. He yelled, “Why are you always wanting to do the darkest, ugliest thing? You’re funny! Don’t you see that you’re funny? You should be doing comedy!” I scoffed. However, Mel was not a pleasant man, but he was also not a stupid man. (And a New York Drama Critics Circle Award is not chopped liver.)
Time marched on and I grew bored irritating old men, didn’t feel the lifelong commitment to my career that Sontag did, and found myself in Seattle in the boom years, using my “genius” to help make Bill Gates richer and to fly myself around the world, scuba diving in the most exotic locales. I cooked insanely complicated Martha Stewart cookies, bought a sports car and become part of the thriving bourgeoisie, letting any interest in the Marxist theories of Brecht slip away. (I never did forget, however, that Brecht made a career of condemning fascism and fled Nazi Germany before the onset of World War II, living in exile in Scandinavia and then the United States. Sontag evidently respected his life as well, making both overt and subtle reference to it in Duet for Cannibals.)
“Was I going to have my heady head handed back to me on a platter?”
Now I am old and whiny myself, with a bad knee and living in New York City entirely accidentally in what feels like another lifetime. I still have a proclivity for occasional adversarial intellectualism (which is still occasionally undercut by my unintentional sense of humor), but I have also developed some heart and a bit of humility. I have become a gardener; I care about little living things. In the middle of Manhattan, I grow strawberries and marvel at Monarch butterflies on my balcony. And Susan Sontag is a dusty memory on a bookshelf. I think of her as most people do – as a philosopher, forgetting that she made a few films too. I had never seen one of her films, but given her renowned, cynical thoughts about photography… well, I think of her as a critic and don’t (didn’t) expect much from her as an artist.
“Susan Sontag’s Lifelong Literary Prose” in the National Review
Scorsese vs Marvel and Helen vs Baumbach
(Starting to get back to the movie here.)
It was not until a few days after my initial invitation to see her film, on the bus ride down to the Lower East Side, that I Googled the Susan Sontag biography, to remind myself what was so great about her. That’s when I found the National Review article. It was pretty much a scathing rebuke of Sontag. This critic, Peter Tonguette, seemed to think the book itself was just fine but felt mostly contempt for Susan. Using grandiose language, he essentially suggested that Sontag was a pretentious hypocrite. Here is his last line: “Readers will walk away from this admirable biography with a measure of pity for a woman who put such effort into molding her life a certain way — but, in the absence of the literary greatness she sought, the question must be asked: Was it worth it?” Ouch.
So, I walked into the theater with a little less bounce in my step. My High Holidays zeal had left me. What was I in for? Did I schlepp downtown to see some arrogant esoterica? Was this going to be some cerebral abstrusity? Was I going to have my own heady head handed back to me on a platter? I arrived at the theater in time to have a coffee and a brief chat with Michael Lieberman, Head of Publicity. I shared my doubts and the fact that I had read two such conflicting reviews of the biography. He first suggested that it was a master stroke of lucky timing that the film and the biography were being released in the same month. He was as excited as I originally had been. And his take on the conflicting reviews was, “Isn’t it cool that Sontag can still generate such passionate intellectual debate?!” Yes, it is. Michael is right.
The Metrograph Theater in NYC
Cut to Helen leaving the theater. I feel my head has transformed into a lightbulb and is beaming. I am all lit up. I am abuzz. What is this feeling? I have forgotten what it is to be so deeply stimulated. I am literally turned on. I am vibrating. God bless you Susan Sontag! May God write your memory into the Book of Life for another year (as we Jews say on Yom Kippur). And with this masterful restoration, Metrograph Pictures has ensured that film lovers will not forget what radiance Sontag brought to this world.
Here’s the thing: Duet for Cannibals is dark and twisted and also sexy and hilarious. Who would have imagined that Susan Sontag had a sense of humor? Certainly not me, who couldn’t even recognize my own sense of humor. This is just … they don’t make movies like this anymore. Martin Scorsese very recently pissed off half the country by saying that the Marvel movies are not “real cinema” and he yearns for the days when filmmakers were visionaries and risk-takers. Well Martin, I am with you, and here ya go. This is it — visionary and risky. You show me a Marvel movie that can compete with this. This is what we old folks call cinema. (Click here to read IndieNYC’s review of Scorsese’s latest “masterpiece,” The Irishman, in theaters now and coming soon to Netflix.)
“Duet for Cannibals” in Bed
Scorsese has an issue with Marvel, and I have an issue with Baumbach. I have been what everyone else insists is unfairly and incorrectly harping on how bad I think Noah Baumbach’s new film, Marriage Story, is. (Click here for my review, but essentially I think it is painfully cliched, banal and drowning in white privilege.) Seeing Duet for Cannibals only strengthens my resolve. This is a truly great movie about the breakup of a marriage – a story that feels personal and is touching at the same time as it is intelligent and broad-minded. And by broad-minded, I mean it does not exist in a vacuum and is not self-absorbed; it recognizes that everything is political, whether we like it that way or not. These characters are artists and intellectuals, but they exist in an authentic, multi-dimensional world with class-struggle and external political forces (unlike Marriage Story). It is a world depicted with an absurdist, warped lens, which paradoxically makes it all the more relatable, and having the world “paradox” anywhere near any commentary of his film is exactly what Noah Baumbach is woefully missing.*
“Marriage Story” in Bed
How do I love this movie? Let me count the ways:
(Finally, the film review!)
One: The lead character brags about an exceedingly large cigarette lighter given to him by Bertolt Brecht. Sontag includes Bertolt Brecht as just a passing reference and with regard to a trivial object – an ornamental lighter! (As I mentioned earlier, Sontag apparently shared my fondness for Brecht and beyond the lighter, she seems to have modeled the film’s lead character loosely on the outline of Brecht’s life, presenting him as a radical German political philosopher living in exile in Sweden.)
Two: The film’s title and theme connect to Sontag’s personal life through her diaries, where in 1967 she wrote, “I feel I’m a vampire, a cannibal. I feed on people’s wisdom, erudition, talents, graces. I have a genius for spotting them + for apprenticing myself to them + for making them mine … And – this is the key point – I always leave them when I’ve ‘learned’ all I can, when I’ve had my fill. I ‘use them up’ for myself and then want to pass on to new sources.” It’s terrific insight that I discovered after seeing the film, and it felt like a juicy secret. Although, don’t view this quote as a spoiler or let it define your experience of the film. Susan herself would tell you: Trust the art, not the artist.
Power Dynamic in “Duet for Cannibals”
Three: Sontag is clearly a woman who knows photography. Yes, after this film she would go on to write one of her most famous books, On Photography, but philosophizing and doing are two very different things. It is amazing that Sontag could do both so well. This film is a tour de force of composition, light and shadow. It’s clean and elegant at the same time as it’s tonally rich. It is a thing of beauty (although Sontag mistrusted beauty). Giving this film a restoration is a saintly deed. (Don’t be dissuaded by the poor quality photos in this article. The film restoration is truly gorgeous.)
Love and Sex in “Duet for Cannibals”
Four: It’s one of the sexiest movies I can remember seeing. I am usually with John Watersin regard to sex scenes: He says that watching other people have sex is like watching open heart surgery. But Sontag makes nudity work. If there was ever a movie more an advocate of love, I’ve never seen it. (I don’t care how much everyone will disagree with me; this is a love story.) On the other hand, it also advocates for all sorts of barbaric anti-social behavior. It’s romantic and it’s perverse. It is open heart surgery, but of a different sort; Sontag works like a surgeon in exposing internal organs, watching them throb, and them slicing them out. She lures you into believing and relating and then yanks away the thing that made you feel connected. (Is there a correlation to tantric sex? Maybe. It’s a topic perhaps someone else could explore.) Plus, one of the strangest, most startling and funniest sex scenes I’ve ever seen takes place in Duet for Cannibals inside a car with whipped cream (without any nudity). There are several moments of surprising eroticism in the film, sometimes sexual and other times just oddly arousing.
“Misunderstanding Sontag” in The Atlantic
Five: There is extraordinary intellectual integrity in this film. When Sontag moved from philosopher to artist, she astonishingly managed to stay true to her ideas. It’s almost as if this movie is the proof of her book Against Interpretation. There is not one drop of pretension in this film. It is bald and bold and joyously ravenous as it slowly breaks your heart. Baumbach’s notion of “universality” of experience (and all those people who are being emotionally validated by his story) are being laughed at by Susan Sontag. But she also is teasing herself. It’s an honest and disciplined depiction; there is more genuine humanity in this movie than in ten of Baumbach’s (says me).
And on the subject of Sontag’s philosophies and emotional perspective, I recommend a third review of her recent biography, from Merve Emre at The Atlantic – “Misunderstanding Susan Sontag.” That article admires Sontag and is critical of the book – the opposite of National Review, and it gives a fascinating overview of her life that seems to speak from a place of true comprehension of this complicated cultural icon. Janet Malcolm at the New Yorker also has an excellent article that discusses the “unauthorized” nature of the book, the nature of biographies in general, and offers its own perspective on the life of Sontag: “Susan Sontag and the Unholy Practice of Biography.”
Faceoff in “Duet for Cannibals”
Six: Sontag strips away sentimentality and leaves behind something more pure, more real and more urgent. Actually, the way the film focuses so tightly on studied interiors and then toward the end suddenly moves to a blazing fire outside… that sort of says it all (if I were to break the rules and “interpret”); that makes the story both personal and societal – by potentially impacting the community at large, with smoke and flames rising upward and outward into the sky. I can imagine David Byrne’s “Burning Down the House” playing as part of the film score: “Watch out, you might get what you’re after… strange but not a stranger… an ordinary guy, burning down the house.” I don’t know. I am surely off on a tangent now. But the film is complex and enigmatic and a thrill to contemplate; it is the antithesis of the common and obvious Marriage Story.
Intellectual Graffiti in “Duet for Cannibals”
Seven: And yet it is also fundamentally a conventional story about two couples – one older and one younger, both with struggling relationships. The older couple sort of preys on the younger and… now I truly understand Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962) for the first time. (Good artists copy; great artists steal.) Oh, and how wonderfully random and non-coincidental it is that in one of the few exterior scenes, there is graffiti scrawled on a city wall, in the passing background, that names Virginia Woolf –modernist author and famous subject of feminist criticism, and also, for kicks,Simone de Beauvoir– French feminist existentialist. It’s one of the subtly camouflaged treasure-hunt treats for Sontag’s intellectual friends — relevant to nothing in the story but reflective of Sontag’s perspective. Sontag has used well-known experiences of marriage and break-ups, infatuation turned to boredom, admiration turned to resentment, but explored those experiences rather than made them mawkish, which puts a cheap, thin film like Marriage Story to shame. Okay, I’ll stop going on about that.
I could watch “Duet for Cannibals” every day for the rest of the year and not get enough of it.
Eight: I’ll pick on Peter Tonguette at the National Review instead: Mr. Tonguette, I do not see how you can possibly “pity the woman” who made this movie. I believe that if this were the only thing Susan Sontag ever accomplished in her life, she would already be more successful than you (or I) will ever be. I don’t know anything about you, but it’s a true statement with regard to nearly everyone. All these years after her death, I feel confident I can speak objectively — without the sway of her towering cultural presence. This is just plain brilliant. Sontag was not a major influence in my life, so I approached this film relatively neutrally. I could watch Duet for Cannibals every day for the rest of the year and not get enough of it. I recommend that you, my readers, go see it soon. It’s playing beginning 11/22 in NYC with a national rollout to follow.
(Yes, the list ends at eight. What, did you think I was gonna give you the expected Top Ten List, or five, or seven? Why do you want a list to have a certain number of items? Time to shake up those assumptions.)
Go. Look. Watch. And leave your conventional expectations and desire for emotional validation at home. I’ll leave you with the wise words of Goethein one of my favorite quotations, which this films embodies: “Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.”
///
* As evidence of just how wrong I might be about Baumbach and Marriage Story, it is only fair to tell you that Metrograph theater, which I think is the hippest and smartest, happens to be running a nearly two-month-long Baumbach retrospective at the same time as it is playing Sontag’s Duet for Cannibals. So, they obviously don’t see them as artists in conflict (or at least they think they both merit attention). But Helen is still Highly Opinionated on this matter.
“Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer”
At the forefront of tabloid journalism for more than 60 years, the National Enquirer has left an indelible mark on American culture. Its brand of attention-grabbing headlines and sensationalistic coverage captivates curious readers even as it stretches the limits of truth. With his new documentary,Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer, director Mark Landsmandelves into the incredible yet accurate story of the most infamous newspaper in US history, detailing its wild history and its surprising, continuing role in shaping what the news has become and what the enquiring public wants to know. Helen Highly Recommends this film as the timely cure for what ails us all right now as a nation – just the right, ironic cocktail of sexy, smart and shocking, with a cancerous red-dye-number-2 maraschino-cherry garnish.
The film opens with direct commentary from the realest of the real journalists –Carl Bernstein, half of the famous, Pulitzer-Prize-winning duo who broke the Watergate scandal for the Washington Post – the monster of all real-news scandals (including the drama of Deep Throat – remember?), which resulted in the country’s astonishing presidential impeachment of Richard Nixon. Bernstein’s career continued to focus on daring, ground-breaking, investigative journalism, so it’s strangely, paradoxically appropriate that this ultra-respectable journalist appears to be the film’s designated spokesman/reporter for the country’s best-known, disreputable scandal-rag, the National Enquirer. The fact that Scandalous producers got him to be in this movie is part of the meta joke that makes this movie shine.
Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalists Woodward and Bernstein as they cover the Watergate scandal
The fact that the film’s opening weekend happens to come at the end of the opening week of the country’s latest impeachment hearings – centering on President Donald Trump, long associated with the National Enquirer, and the fact that both Nixon and Trump once had the notorious Roy Cohn as their legal advisor, is some barely conceivable triple-down reality that seems to warrant a conspiracy theory of its own.
The opening credits of the film appear over a soundtrack singing, “I don’t want to set the world on fire; I just want to start a flame in your heart,” and the famed vintage sound sets the mood. Who better to understand that the opening moments of a film are the most important than the people making a film about the most successful tabloid of all time?
“I don’t want to set the world on fire; I just want to start a flame in your heart,”
Is it a coincidence that the original National Enquirer owner, Generoso Pope Jr., is a former New Yorker who moved to Palm Beach, FL – just like our National-Enquirer-friendly President Donald Trump recently did? Hell no, I don’t think so – not in this movie, where all conspiracy theories are true. Is it surprising that National Enquirer creator Generoso Pope Jr. and his father were linked to the Italian Mafia in NYC (perhaps also like Donald Trump and his dad)? It was news to me but makes perfect sense.
Donald Trump and David Pecker
“He was like family,” is the explanation we hear for Generoso’s literal godfather, Mafia-boss Frank Costello, giving him a “no-repayment loan” in 1952 in order to purchase a small, local, failing newspaper with a circulation of 17,000, called the New YorkEnquirer, so that he could revamp it into something better. But also it seems that Costello (who later became head of the Genovese crime family), provided Pope the money for the purchase in exchange for the Enquirer‘s promise to list (Mafia-run) lottery numbers and to refrain from any mention of Mafia activities. Pope would later add National to the name of the Enquirer, because he believed it sounded more patriotic and also opened it up for his broader aspirations.
Actually, the origin story is more interesting than just that shady tale. Generoso’s father, an Italian immigrant, was founder of Il Progresso, New York’s Italian language daily newspaper, which ultimately brought him political connections and made him a power player in Gotham. So, the National Enquirer was essentially the offspring of a real newspaper man and a real mobster – perfect. Pope changed both the name and the scope of the paper. He worked tirelessly in the 1950s and 60s to increase the circulation and broaden the paper’s appeal.
“…and it all circles back to a Mafia-mentality with terms like “character assassination” and “hit pieces” and “catch n kill,” until the metaphorical and real-world references crash into themselves, and history and current events collide.”
Generoso Pope Jr. and Elvis in the National Enquirer
The National Enquirer became known for its gory and unsettling stories, such as “I Cut Out Her Heart and Stomped on It” (September 8, 1963). At this time the paper was sold on newsstands and in drugstores only. Pope stated he got the idea for the format and these gory stories from seeing people rubberneck on the highway to see auto accidents. He made a business of buying gory police photos, scooping “real” reporters. Pope didn’t care about journalism – only about “eyeballs” – more and more eyeballs, and selling papers. By 1966, circulation had risen to one million. Later, Pope would develop the ingenious idea of selling the tabloid in the suburbs at supermarket checkout counters. And, in order to entice this new market, he saw the necessity of switching from gore to sex, celebrity and scandal.
The National Enquirer celebrity scandal
As the movie moves along, we are now hearing much of this historical narration from another highly reputable reporter. Wait, what? Is that Mike Wallace?! They got Bernstein but how did they get Wallace? He’s dead. (“Mike Wallace Brought Back to Life by National Enquirer!”) Aaaah… that’s Mike Wallace in some old footage from 60 Minutes when they did a story investigating the National Enquirer. And the filmmakers have spliced in bits and pieces so gracefully that it really seems like Mike Wallace is narrating this film. It’s Wallace talking about the National Enquirer talking about the National Enquirer. And that is just one more example of the entire meta affair that is this movie.
Mike Wallace Back From the Dead!Full-Color Celebrity Horror
The filmmakers tell their story with all the color and excitement and sensation and temptation that the National Enquirer would use if they were making the movie. It’s exceedingly seductive. No matter how much you have learned to turn your nose up at the literal, physical, tabloid sheet at the checkout counter in today’s day, being far too sophisticated to fall for their cheap, sleazy tricks, this film transforms its audience into the tabloid’s enthralled reader during its heyday; you are a part of this movie.
The story of the development and evolution of the paper plays like a list of salacious headlines:
Highway Car Crash Transports Eyeballs: Gore Sells!
Enquirer Grabs Gruesome Police Picts
Gore Clashes with Green Grass: The Suburbs Change Everything!
Medical Oddities Appear at Every Single Checkout Counter in the Country!
The National Enquirer is Seduced by Celebrity Sex!
LSD Made Me a Prostitute! (That’s a real one.)
Celebrities Suffer Too, in the National Enquirer
But then some parts of the story are so extraordinary, you have to go beyond the headline because it’s all so thrilling and amazing: Pope created an “idealized reader” and named her “Missy Smith from Kansas City.” She set the standard of the all-American woman who had family and values. And she earnestly “wanted to know that celebrities suffer too.” (ha) That was the audience. “I guess I’m a little bit nosey,” says Missy Smith. And Missy’s family was conservative; they were into Country and Flag and believed in the US government – fine people. Pope couldn’t have been more right in understanding the importance of having the word “National” in the title; it wasn’t just a definition of scope; it was a trigger for trust. “Pope understood the prototypical Enquirer reader in a way that was almost freakish,” director Landsman explained in an interview. “He knew what she talked about with her girlfriends at the beauty parlor and what she yelled across the living room to her husband as they sat leafing through their periodicals, and he designed content that fed right into that.”
ELVIS!!!
Close Encounters with Elvis
At some point in the movie, grotesque, almost frightening photos of Elvis are splashed up on the screen, and really nothing else needs to be said. We are naturally drawn to the idea of Elvis’ demise – how the mighty have fallen. (Although more is said; the tale about getting the photo of Elvis in his coffin is downright depraved.) Then later it’s O.J. Simpson or Princess Diana who is splashed up on the screen, and each time you feel a visceral response. You get a rush of gestalt. It is somewhere in that rush that facts became less important. An ex-Enquirer reporter explains they actually called it “fake-ish.” The rule was, “You don’t change the facts, you just make them more interesting – make them better, more sensational.”
Part of the allure of the movie is hearing reporters and editors and photographers speak about all the adrenaline running around at the Enquirer offices; it was “a great vibe, so exciting that you wanted to be part of it.” Some people describe it as the best job they ever had. But there is really no need explaining at this point, because the film’s audience has already caught the spirit; we are all in for the great vibe and we’re loving it. It’s flashy and electric and irresistibly naughty.
Barbara Sternig talks “facts” in “Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer”
My favorite part of the movie is not all the awesome archival footage and photos they use (to tremendous effect); the best part is the present-day interview scenes, with their extraordinary set-up locations. Each person is perfectly posed exactly center in a symmetrical setting, be it on a couch, behind a desk, at a bar, by the pool, whatever. And each location is deep – literally like a ten-foot-foot deep shot in a real location – not some talking head against a flat screen, and each set is carefully painted in shadow and light and lurid color. It’s almost surreal. I don’t know if it’s a trick of aperture or lens length of what, but the depth of field is unbelievable; the shots are wide and deep and detailed and sharp and saturated in color and awash in texture.
Larry Haley in “Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer”
It’s captivating. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen when these people were talking. I will say that these are probably the best, most intense interview shots I’ve ever seen. Director Landsman and cinematographer Michael Pessah have transformed the vibe of the paper into a cinematic extravaganza. (We didn’t get the best of the images for press; you will need to go see the movie to appreciate what I’m talking about.) But as they look bizarrely gorgeous, these people are telling you terrible things – revealing the most awful stories about the history of the paper and the people involved.
Judith Regan in “Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer”
We hear about Gary Hart and how “you cannot understate his significance” in blurring the distinction between tabloid and real news. It was the National Enquirer who broke that sleazy and life-changing story, which got George Bush elected and changed the course of American history. And it didn’t just legitimize their ruthless and unsavory tactics; more important to them, they turned politicians into celebrities and opened up an entirely new market and revenue stream for tabloid press. For the country, however, the significance was that tabloid had beat out the legit news; they got the big story and it mattered (and how they got it didn’t matter). Now, the point is made; all news is tabloid news and we are all implicated in being scandalous.
Sex and Politicians Sell Newspapers
And that’s all part of the paradox; this is the art of trash, or is it trashy art? We are both repulsed and engrossed. But even though the movie is explaining it all to you – the dynamics and the psychology and the process, you don’t really need to hear it because you are experiencing it. And it’s tantalizing; it’s addictive. You want to stay in this world. You want every scene to take you to the next and the next. You can’t look away. You surrender your eyeballs. Well, I surrendered mine.
Trump on the Cover
The story goes on, and I won’t detail it all here. There is much more to be told, and it never gets boring. They talk about the evolution toward competitiveness and aggressiveness and back-stabbing and brutality and then coercion and corruption, and it all circles back to a Mafia-mentality with terms like “character assassination” and “hit pieces” and “catch n kill,” until the metaphorical and real-world references crash into themselves, and history and current events collide, and there is Donald Trump and David Pecker taking each other down. Absolutely wild.
It’s the great American story. Donald Trump didn’t need to know who Andrew Jackson was, or all those old historical figures; he knew who was going to be next on the cover of the National Enquirer (and who wasn’t) and that was much more powerful information.
The film played at DOC NYC 2019 and opens in theaters this weekend. Go see it!
Now that I’ve seen a few more films, I am updating and expanding my original DOC NYC 2019 Pick List. I am also explaining my bias and process in selecting which films to include in my list. Note that even after the festival ends, it’s still worth coming back to this overview list and to the DOC NYC 2019 website to find suggestions of which films to see; they will be debuting in theaters and online throughout the coming year.
It was not until I finished compiling my original Pick List that it occurred to me how many music and art films I had included and how few political and social justice films. In the past, I’ve been especially attracted by relevant-right-now films that illuminate important and serious topics. Now my list is oddly weighted with music history films, artist portraits and films from the literary world. I can only say that the change is due to urgency fatigue – exhaustion from hearing about all the national and global problems that are bearing down on us right now and feeling powerless to do anything about them other than pass along the bad news. Yes, there is an inherent hopefulness in the making of movies even when they are about depressing topics, and sometimes even solutions offered, but still. I guess I am looking for a break. And maybe my readers are too.
DOC NYC 10th Anniversary
But I will also say that films about art and fashion and music are often powerful metaphors for larger ideas, and they can offer a way into contemplating difficult realities that is not so overtly painful. So, I encourage my readers to consider my Pick List less as escapist and more as an alternative way to look at the world. Shifting to a different window can give you a closer view, or a broader view, or just a different angle, and change is good.
That being said, I did include a few serious films and am going to add a few more in this article. (When I finally got around to seeing them, I saw how worthy they are, and the best ones are inspiring, not just depressing.) Remember that most indie films that come out of film festivals don’t get a theatrical run or even TV exposure until many months later, so it’s worth checking out my previous pick lists, as they often become more relevant over time as the films become more widely accessible. I have two articles highlighting recommended films from Tribeca Film Festival this year: Archival Moviesand More Movies. And my article about last year’s TFFalso has a documentary section full of still-relevant, really-good movies than can mostly be found available for streaming.
DOC NYC 19
DOC NYC 2019 Sections
As I mentioned in my previous article, there are 21 different sections in this festival (more, depending on how you count), which is a bit overwhelming in itself. I did not evenly choose my suggested films, so I will at least include all the sections here and offer a few more titles for you to consider. Remember, even if you don’t catch these at the festival, they are worth checking out and looking for as they come to your local theater or to streaming platforms in the coming months. There are four sections that are new to this year:
Note: The section links are a bit tricky; my link will take you to the designated section page of the DOC NYC website, but you will need to change the date to “All” in order to see all the films in that section.
Mastersoffers a “spotlight on today’s nonfiction auteurs.” It features: the newest film from two-time Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple, Desert One, about the Iran hostage crisis (Helen Highly Recommends in this article); Alan Berliner’s Letter to the Editor, a profound visual essay on photojournalism (Helen Highly Recommended in the previous article); a special presentation of Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s Town Bloody Hall(1979), on the infamous 1971 debate between a panel of feminists and Norman Mailer, screened in memory of D.A. Pennebaker; and three more, one of which I include in my list below.
Investigations features “thought-provoking investigative nonfiction,” which includes: the world premiere of The Queen’s Man, following the efforts of the former bodyguard of the wife of the Shah of Iran to recover her stolen art collection (lots of good buzz around this film); the international premiere of Coastal Road Killer, a new true-crime series from the creators of the hit Netflix series Shadow of Truth; the US premiere of The Pickup Game, an exposé on the billion-dollar industry that teaches men how to manipulate women into bed, and five more (including In Bright Axiom, from my previous article.)
Green Screens features environmentally focused films, which include the NYC premieres of The Great Green Wall, about efforts to plant trees across Africa; The Story of Plastic, an investigation into the unceasing production of plastic (which I suggested in the previous article and Helen Highly Recommends again here), plus four more.
Food for Thoughtare films that tell “culinary stories,” including: the world premiere of Laura Naylor’s Vas-y Coupe!, an observational portrait of the harvest of a family-owned vineyard in France’s Champagne region; Nothing Fancy: Diana Kennedy, where this celebrated British-born chef, now in her 90s, shares her love of Mexican food, documents its regional varieties and advocates for environmental sustainability; plus one more. I have not picked any of these films for my list in either article, so you’re on your own here.
In addition to these four new sections, DOC NYC 2019 includes: Special Events, which I covered thoroughly in my previous article, with a special recommendation for The Apollo(not to be confused with Apollo 11, also good); Viewfinders — seven “distinct directorial visions from around the world,” one of which I included in my previous article; Metropolis — seven “New York stories,” two of which I included in my previous article; American Perspectives and International Perspectives, eight films in each, only one of which I included in my previous list (Scandalous, which Helen Highly Recommends), so you have a lot to explore on your own in these categories; Portraits, eight films that “profile singular individuals,” only one of which I included in my list; Modern Family, six films “about unconventional families,” one of which Helen Highly Recommends in this article; New World Order, four films on “today’s most urgent issues,” two of which I will include in this article; In The System, seven films that provide “inside looks at institutions and systems,” which I have completely ignored so you’re on you’re own there too; Fight the Power, eight “stories of activism,” none of which made my list but that is, as I explained, due to my politically-exhausted bias right now; Behind the Scenes, three films about film, none of which I included but seems like an interesting category; Winners Circle, five award-winning films, two of which I included in my previous article; Short List: Features, 15 films “representing the best of the year” and “distinguished by honors,” (most likely to show up in the running for an Academy Award), two of which I mentioned in my previous list; Short List: Shorts (and also regular Shorts), a terrific list for folks who enjoy short films, but none of which I have even considered (I have to stop somewhere); and then the two sections which I have most heavily recommended — Sonic Cinema and Art + Design.
Helen Highly Recommends
That’s my fair and balanced list of all the DOC NYC categories, so now I will list a few more of my personal favorites:
This intimate film revisits director Cara Jones’ upbringing within the Unification Church of Reverend Sun Myung Moon—commonly known as the Moonies—where her parents are high-ranking members. Home videos reveal never-before-seen footage of the inner workings of the controversial movement, considered a cult by some. After Jones separates from the church, she must come to terms with the shift in her relationship with her parents and with the impact of this unusual background on her family. I personally found this film to be deeply unsettling, but I recommend it as fascinating and insightful (perhaps more insightful than it intends to be).
When I was a child, there was a Moonie house in my suburban neighborhood — a large, old house that was home to a group of people, and my father treated that house as if it were the Manson family home; it was a place of disdain to be avoided at all costs. My father was conservative and self-possessed and mostly imperturbable, so seeing his out-sized reaction to these people was surprising — a fear and loathing he usually reserved for Communist propagandists. This, of course, peeked my interest, although I never did venture near that house. And the people inside kept to themselves; we never saw them out in the neighborhood proselytizing. I did, however, see Moonies out and about in a variety of public spaces, especially at shopping malls and airports, and they always seemed eerily cheerful. Yet, something about their sense of unity and overt expression of what they called “love” was appealing to me. In later years I would hear the harrowing tales of parents “kidnapping” their children back from the Moonies and needing to “de-program” them. And of course, there was the requisite discovery of fraud and corruption in the Church, and lies and “sins” by the Reverend.
“Blessed Child” documentary
My father was a strong advocate of thinking for oneself, so the idea of a cult was anathema to him. My brother and I grew up around a dinner table that regularly involved formal debates on a wide variety of social and political topics; we were taught the processes of logic and how to construct a solid argument. We were no fools — not if my father could help it. In the film, we see home movies of Cara and her brothers being taught to respect the principles of the Unification Church, and it seems somewhat similar in structure to the training my parents gave me. In college, one of my apartment mates came home one day suggesting that we all go to the nearby Moonie house for dinner. They were offering a free vegetarian meal and “discussion,” and I was quite intrigued — wanting to test my mental resolve against what I imagined would be their mind-control efforts, but we never made it over there, which was probably all for the best.
“It’s difficult to explain to people who have never experienced how bad a ‘perfect childhood’ can be, how insidious and lasting the ill-effects are.”
I felt a strong affinity to the woman who tells her story in this film. I was not raised in a cult, but I was raised in what — it took me until adulthood to see — was an unhealthy and distorted reality (despite my father’s best efforts at building a life around logic). I feel the impact of my relatively subtle childhood traumas to this day and continue to struggle with healing those internal wounds and breaking the invisible cord that connects me to my anxiety-ridden childhood and my parents’ privately unhappy world. So I can imagine what it’s like to grow up in an even more twisted home.
Cara’s parents loved her and she was never physically abused. In fact, she received loads of attention and what seemed like positive parental involvement in her development. Same with me; my parents loved me and were more involved with my life than most parents — made sure I got into a good college and that my shoes matched my handbag and all that. I surely have their dedicated training to thank for any of my life’s accomplishments. And yet, it’s difficult to explain to people who have never experienced how bad a “perfect childhood” can be, how insidious and lasting the ill-effects are.
Mass wedding in “Blessed Child” documentary
And this is why I felt the film to be so heart-breaking. Cara is making the film 20 years or more after finally “breaking free” of the Moonie Church. Her parents remain in the Church and appear in the film telling her that they love her unconditionally (with strained believability), although she stated several times throughout the film that one of her greatest fears in her many years of wanting to leave the Church was losing the bond she had with her family. She grew up intensely dependent on that bond; independence was something she learned was wicked, and dangerous.
Now we see that while her parents have not disowned her, they have not actually understood or acknowledged the harm they caused her. Her mother’s main concern is that she will be made to look bad in the film, and her father shrugs off the ruin of his gay son’s life, saying that he hopes one day the Church will become more accepting. They apparently love Cara enough to accept her disloyalty but not enough to give a heartfelt apology or any real support for her quest for recovery. I offer my respect and best wishes to Cara in her ongoing journey toward her own identity. It’s a story worth sharing.
But the film breaks down at the very end. We have watched Cara fight against the powerful forces of childhood indoctrination. (It’s not really the religion itself that is so destructive; it is being taught as a child that the only way to reach your parents’ love or your own self worth is through the Church.) And this movie seems to be Cara’s official declaration of independence; she has finally become her own woman and succeeded at her separation from the Unification Church. She was once miserably married in one of Sung Myong Moon’s mass weddings — thousands of couples matched by the Reverend, thousands of women standing together in the same wedding dress as they are married in bulk, but now she is about to be married in a traditional ceremony to a man she truly loves, in a dress of her own choosing.
And then the final frame of the movie is a screen graphic thanking her parents for their support and saying that none of this would have been possible without them. Ouch. It comes like a blow to the side of my head. As an audience member, it’s like my ears are ringing, and it hurts; here is Cara in her final moment, still trying to please her parents, all but pleading for their mercy for her betrayal. It is a painful thing to see — the way we are forever tied to our parents’ mistakes and how self-denial is so terribly difficult to quit.
Based on economist Thomas Piketty’s groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, this accessible and enlightening adaptation explores the history of wealth, power and inequality from the French Revolution to the present day. Is today’s ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor an aberration, or just the way capitalism is meant to work? Drawing on experts, historians and even The Simpsons, Capital in the Twenty-First Century offers a thought-provoking reframing of global economics and a caution for the future. The French/New-Zealand co-production blends talking heads — including Piketty and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz — and pop culture imagery of the rich and famous.
Yes indeed. This is a super-compelling and informative film. It couldn’t be more timely as we work our way up to the 2020 presidential election and all ought to be weighing the different economic and social policies of the candidates. I compare this film somewhat to The Big Short in how it entertains you into listening and amuses you into understanding what might otherwise seem bookish and boring. The use of pop music is especially effective, especially “Royals” by Lorde. And there are some excellent old movie clips too, including one that says, “Oh, you’re a humanist aren’t you? You believe one person is as good as another — an absurd notion, contradicted by the facts.”
The film is fill of old movie references, including a critical assessment of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, where it explains that Austin created the fantasy that you could get your hands on the inherited old-money of landowning families if you were just a bit witty and cute. In reality, we are told, there is No Way Mr. Darcy would have ever married Elizabeth. We learn how the cult of fashion saved the industrial revolution. We hear about the unique way the advent of television combined capital interest and public service. There is a “Greed is good” scene, based on the movie Wall Street, of course, but with smarter commentary than it typically gets.
Banking lessons in “It’s a Wonderful Life”
But my favorite part of this this film might be the criticism it gives to the economic basis for everyone’s favorite Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. I have long resisted the notion that this is a great Christmas movie, and now I have economic evidence to support my opinion. Capital in the 21st Century discusses this revered holiday film in terms of how it depicts the nature of banking, the philosophical calculus behind issuing loans, and the way American families’ financial fates are intertwined. It considers the movie in terms of the question “What are banks meant to do and who are they meant to serve?” I will let Piketty ‘splain the details, but my takeaway is that It’s a Wonderful Life perpetuates faulty economic beliefs.
So, whether as a film-lover, an economic hobbyist or a would-be qualified citizen capable of making smart choices in upcoming elections, Helen Highly Recommends Capital In the Twenty-First Century. Kino Lorber is the distributor so look for it coming to a theater near you.
Note: As long as I’m on this topic, I want to recommend a book by the new winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics, Abhijit V Banerjee and Esther Duflo — Good Economics for Hard Times, which The Guardian calls “a methodical deconstruction of fake facts” and is also very accessible and relevant to the way real people make choices about everyday economic issues. Along with the Capital in the 21st Century book, this book deserves to be at the center of our presidential debate.
“Desert One” documentary about the Iran hostage crisis
Two-time Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple (Harlan County USA, American Dream) re-examines the story of Americans taken hostage by Iranian revolutionaries in 1979. Focusing on a rescue mission, the film plays like a thriller. Kopple draws upon never-before-heard audiotapes from inside the White House, as well as new interviews with hostages, rescuers, Iranians and even President Carter, whose 1980 election loss to Ronald Reagan was greatly influenced by this decisive chapter of history.
Wow. The movie opens with someone saying that most people today don’t even remember the Iran hostage crisis, and they are correct. When they made that statement, I thought that it certainly did not apply to me. I was a senior in high school in 1979 and I remember all the yellow ribbons tied around all the trees in the neighborhood. But I forgot how it all actually ended, how catastrophically. Or, in truth, I learned in this film, I was never remotely aware of all that was involved and all that was going on behind the scenes — all the drama and tortured heroism.
Yellow ribbons around oak trees, for the Iran hostages
This film sure does play like a thriller, and it’s revelatory. It easily could be in the Investigations category due to all its journalistic detail and thorough coverage of every angle. It doesn’t play the least bit like a stuffy history film and I wish it were going to get a theatrical release, although I think it’s already set to air on The History Channel. But go search it out and find it. It’s a stunner.
And, similar to Capital in the 21st Century, this film becomes politically significant due to its timing — so close to the 2020 presidential election. The film keeps a relatively tight focus on the nuts and bolts of the story, which are immensely absorbing in themselves, but it’s hard not to consider how this story, re-told now, reflects on the current situation in America and the world at large. These days, we say how 9/11 2001 changed the world forever. But really it was April 4, 1980 that changed the world and was very much responsible for bringing us to where we are today, in terms of global power dynamics and how American citizens view presidential leadership, our beliefs about patriotism and about political strength vs weakness.
(I also want to mention that two recent documentaries are about people who were inspired on their own strange journey by the events surrounding the Iran hostage crisis and the news coverage it received — Recorder: The Marion Stokes Story, and Letter to the Editor, both of which I include in my Part One DOC NYC Pick List. Neither of these films is about this story, but their initial connection to the Iran hostage crisis is evidence of how significant that situation was to so many Americans, and how it changed the course of their lives.)
“Command and Control” documentary on PBS
Helen Highly Recommends Desert One as a film that will make you re-examine your ideas about patriotism, military action, and who America is in the world. Plus, it’s worth mentioning that this film is not the least bit didactic; it has no political agenda other than to reveal the truth of an extremely complicated situation. The interviews with Jimmy Carter add great value, but the most intensive moments come from the present-day interviews with hostages and rescuers themselves. To hear these elder giants of stoicism and strength struggle to tell their story while holding back tears… that packs a wallop. It reminds me in that way of another military-disaster documentary, Command and Control (available on PBS). That film definitely has a message, but its power comes from the first-hand accounts of the key figures in the devastating tale, told now from the vantage point of old age. Perspective, people! (Click here for my review of Command and Control.)
Robby Naish is seen in “The Longest Wave” documentary
World champion windsurfer Robby Naish has solidified his legacy through his dominance in nearly every kind of watersport. After a major hip injury and with the specter of age looming over him, Robby takes on a new challenge: surfing the world’s longest wave. Robby’s passion for the ocean is challenged as health, family and professional struggles arise during a three-year journey around the globe in pursuit of the perfect surf.
I’m not into sports films. I watched this because it came up as I sat in my seat during press screenings. I was planning to leave, but the color and beautiful cinematography caught my eye — was a refreshing change from all the dark and depressing fare at the festival. And then the film stayed with me as I walked home. There was something to it. It was more than just a portrait of a great athlete. The story starts when Robby is 10 years old, and he’s now in his 50s — still muscular and deeply tanned and full of spirit, and we are all set up for a portrayal of life-long exceptionalism and adventure. But unexpected events interfere with all the greatness.
I was impressed that the filmmaker was resourceful enough to save his film from flopping due to events beyond his control. In fact, I thought, it was that apparently sophisticated talent for storytelling that made this film worthwhile. I am sure he started out planning to make a different movie — a straight. heroic tale of the long life of a never-stop-competing surfer, but it ended up being something more nuanced and thoughtful. The long wave that Robby pursues becomes both literal and metaphorical.
Water sportsman Robby Naish dazzles
A decent film. Respectable, I thought. Almost interesting (I say cynically). If I were interested in sports, I would certainly have enjoyed this more and it might have felt genuinely inspirational. I did notice that there seemed to be a Red Bull logo in virtually every frame of the film. I thought that, well, athletes always have sponsors who plaster their logos everywhere — on shoes and shirts and hats, so I guess that’s normal. But there was an awful lot of Red Bull; it was almost its own character in the film. Robby is especially loyal to his sponsor, I assumed.
I went home and looked up the details of the film, and light started to dawn: In the “producer” spot where I expected to see “Netflix” or “HBO,” it said “Red Bull.” And right on cue, the phone rang and it was the film’s publicist calling to ask if I would tell her what I thought of the film. “Well, I have a question,” I said. “What is the deal with all the Red Bull? I get that they’re a sponsor, but it’s a typo that they are listed as the producer, right?”
“No,” she says, “Red Bull is the producer.”
“They made the film? They own the film?”
“Yes, they made the film. But they would like to sell the film, too.”
“So they’re looking for a distributor?”
“Yes. Red Bull is the sales company for the film and is looking for a distributor outside Red Bull channels,” she said.
“Red Bull has its own channel? How many films does Red Bull make?”
“I’ll have to get back to you with those details,” she said.
At this point, I’d been Googling as we talked and had arrived at the Red Bull film platform, full of dozens upon dozens of sports movies. I hurried off the phone with the publicity chick and started scrolling. It was astounding how many films. All extreme sports films like skateboarding and car racing — not “regular” sports like baseball or basketball. hmm. So, okay, Red Bull sure is clever and they know their market and make movies to entertain… or to persuade. I mean, these are commercials for Red Bull, right? I guess you could call them advocacy films — advocating for their product.* Bottom line: these are expensive infomercials.
“Brother’s Keeper” documentary by Joe Berlinger — not exactly Red Bull material
Color me mind blown. Not that I am clueless to product placement in movies but this is something altogether different. This is a paid advertisement, and I was kinda shocked that they made it into DOC NYC film festival, which is among the most discriminating of documentary festivals. AH! Here is the answer: This feature-length commercial is actually listed in the “Masters” section. That’s because Red Bull was savvy enough to hire an award-winning, very up-and-coming documentary film director, Joe Berlinger, who is known for making serious, social justice docs, such as Brother’s Keeper. Berlinger apprenticed with iconic documentarians Albert and David Maysles and went on to make acclaimed films and docu-series, so he’s a credible director. (Master? I don’t know. But I guess he is by DOC NYC standards; he’s won awards.) A 2017 HuffPost article said “Brother’s Keeper (1992) and the Paradise Lost trilogy (1996–2011) helped pioneer the style of documentary filmmaking in Netflix’s recent true crime sensation, Making a Murderer—a combination of artful cinematography, a stirring musical soundtrack, and a dramatic narrative structure as compelling as any scripted film.”
Red Bull Gives You Wings (and movies too)
So there you have it. Hire a real director to make your commercial and get it into a prestigious film festival. Not that I’m complaining. I am still processing. (I will let Scorsese be the judgmental one. And it’s not like this is taking up space in a movie theater. It has its own online channel. Although, if Red Bull gets its wish, this film will find a distributor and end up in movie theaters.) The lines between art and commerce and news and entertainment were blurred long ago, and I guess this is just the latest twist. And that HuffPost critic is right about dramatic narrative structure; The Longest Wave is, as I said, a would-be lame flick that is saved by its smart narrative and seemingly-inquisitive style. It does tell a worthy(ish) story. And it’s fun to watch. Plus, aspiring documentarians still gotta eat.
But here is my one remaining question for Red Bull: Upon further scrolling at your site, I see that you make more than just sports films. You also make adventure films (where one needs ones energy to climb that mountain) and dance and music films (especially featuring “rave” music — where Red Bull makes a nice combo with ecstasy, I have heard), but what about other applications that require energy, such as thinking or studying or working? I mean, I stay up many a late night at my computer, writing, and I drink coffee to stay alert, and so why am I and my efforts left out of your filmmaking agenda? I would like to suggest that Red Bull start promoting Extreme Thinking — movies that depict writers and scholars and scientists doing amazing feats of demanding mental labor. It might be a good influence on those impressionable youth who watch the other films at your site. Just a suggestion.
And so, Helen doesn’t really recommend The Longest Wave, unless you are interested in the latest wave of advertising.
* Btw, Tribeca Film Festival 2019 had a special section they called Tribeca X, which specifically explored the intersection of film and advertising. It was a legitimate and interesting presentation of films that were made by consumer-product companies. I wrote about a series of films produced by HP, and I gave them a thumbs up. But it’s significant that those films never once mention or show any HP product or logo. They are actually “advocacy films,” promoting a lifestyle or concept that is consistent with their brand. It’s the overt sales aspect of The Longest Wave that chafes — the fact that Robby Naish seems to have a Red Bull in his hand whenever he isn’t in the water. Just sayin’. (But hey, extra points for Red Bull selling their beverage in cans instead of plastic bottles. Good for them. See my review of The Story of Plastic, below.)
In 2008, after a show celebrating the 20th anniversary of his fashion house, Maison Margiela, visionary designer Martin Margiela left the fashion world for good. Throughout his career, the Belgian designer remained anonymous, refusing interviews and never being photographed, leading some to call him the fashion world’s answer to Banksy. Now, more than a decade after his departure, Margiela digs into his meticulous and idiosyncratic personal archives to reflect on his revolutionary career and legacy.
Yes, Helen is Highly Recommending one more fashion film. I haven’t seen this one yet, but it sounds especially appealing due to the mystique around this legendary designer. They compare him to Banksy, which makes it sound even more intriguing. And it’s another Archival Movie, which has become my pet subject (brilliant, insightful article soon to be published). It’s also another end-of-career memoir-ish biopic, which seems to be the popular mode these days. And why not let the artist have a say in how he is remembered?
Aung San Suu Kyi, “On the Inside of a Military Dictatorship”
In 2016, 50 years of military rule in Myanmar ended when power was transferred to former political prisoner and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. While her ascendancy represented a victory for democracy, she came under fire after military involvement in the ethnic cleansing of Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya minority. In this film, archival footage and candid interview access to Aung San Suu Kyi and other key players in the government provide a wide-ranging look into the troubling complications and compromises of a regime change decades in the making.
I am listing this film not because it’s supposed to be especially excellent, but because it is such an important world topic, and reporting on it has been difficult due to the strict controls by the government. As we face increasing challenges to the US Constitution and issues about the power of the US presidency, it’s worth looking at how easily one can turn from Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning activist-for-democracy to Part of the Problem (if not THE Problem). Also, IndieNYC writer Ian MacKenzie did a good interview with the director, Karen Stokkendal Poulsen, which addresses the challenges she faced in gaining access in order to make this documentary. The film has been criticized for not being tough enough on Aung San Suu Kyi, but some access is better than no access. This was some patient and careful journalism. It’s worth reading our interview at least.
Plastic, a seemingly indispensable product, has wrought all sorts of innovations, but at what cost? The plastic industry’s success depends on consumers discarding the product and purchasing new items, creating an endless supply of litter that lingers forever. Filmmaker Deia Schlosberg’s incredibly detailed investigation into the plastic-production pipeline will shock, horrify and forever change your perception on recycling. Timely and critical, this film is a must-see for anyone who uses this infamous product.
“The future of plastic is in the trash can.”
I included this film in my previous DOC NYC list. But I am including it again because I have now seen it and I am going to call this The Most Important Documentary of the Year. And it tops the list of my own category of films that I call “You Think You Know But You Don’t.” It absolutely blew my mind. This is an advocacy film, which tend to make me uncomfortable, and honestly I was not looking forward to seeing it, but felt obliged, and now I am an advocate for this film. This documentary does one of the deepest dives into one of the most horrifying subjects that I have ever seen. You will not be the same person after you watch it; it will change your world view and your private life (but in a good way).
More plastic than fish
Early in the film, reporter Zoe Carpenter says that when she researches a story she likes to ask the people involved what they think about the media coverage it’s been getting so far. And what she discovered about the story of plastic is that there was a journalistic gap at the front end of the story, before it gets to the back of the story and becomes the problem we all know about — how plastic is a huge waste problem, washing ashore on beaches, swirling in giant ocean eddies, gumming up the insides of whales and seabirds, and provoking Donald Trump to warn that the liberal extremists “want to take away your straws!” and offensively disputing the mere mention of a Green New Deal by printing the name TRUMP on big red plastic straws and selling them on his website. (This is true. This is not in the film, but I want you to know that President Trump is selling his own plastic straws.) What is very rarely reported is who is making plastic, and how and why, and of course that turns out to be the most important part of the story.
The burden of plastic pollution falls onto marginal communities
This movie is full of profoundly distressing moments (for example, the depiction of how the trash of rich nations has become the deadly burden of poorer countries), as well as simply shocking scenes and surprising information — the opposite of what you think the story is really about. And that is where I will start writing, hopefully before I lose your interest. The first thing I want to tell you is the idea (and one-time public service announcement) that “people start pollution and people can stop it” and the very concept of recycling is essentially a con job to put the guilt of pollution and the responsibility for fixing the problem on the consumer and obscure the fact that the producers of plastic are the source of the problem and they are realistically the only ones who can fix it.
“The story of plastic production and recycling is simply one of American history’s greatest deceptions.”
Break Free From Plastic
And guess who those plastic producers are? Ever think about it? Well, plastic is essentially petroleum! And 99% of what goes into plastic are fossil fuels! So, it’s the same sinister corporate entities that have been ruining the planet and our lives for decades — Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP and of course Dow Chemical. And you think they are only providing supply that meets our demand for packaged foods and single-use plastics? Wrong. They systematically have strategized (and yes it is documented) that due to our intentional reduction in the use of fossil fuels to create energy — in order to combat global warming, they need to find another market for their product, and plastic is it (if only they can continue to make us all believe the lie that plastic is recyclable); that’s what will keep them rolling in money as they continue to destroy the planet. And destroy it does. It’s not only whales and sea turtles who are choking on the stuff. Plastic creates greenhouse gases as it degrades (or as it is incinerated, which is becoming increasingly more common as third world countries are refusing to let us use their homeland as our landfills), so you don’t have to choose between caring about global warming and caring about plastic pollution; it’s the same problem!
This is not in the film, but a correlating message from Greenpeace, on Twitter:
Well… that’s why we recycle, you say? The truth is that only about 14% of the 400 million metric tons of plastic that is created annually can be recycled. And actually, most of that is made into something worse that will degrade into even more toxic material. (It’s called “downgrading.” Unlike glass and paper, plastic can only be recycled once, and then it’s too unstable and toxic to deal with.) So, only 2% of all plastic can be effectively reused, which means 98% of all plastic CANNOT be recycled in any practical way, so you are wasting your time separating your plastic for recycling, and it’s all to keep you busy and distracted from the terrible truth.
Local boatman swims amongst plastic trash discarded in Manila Bay,
One comically horrible scene in the film shows a man who runs a recycling enterprise in Indonesia (or such — can’t recall exactly), who reluctantly agreed to start accepting plastic and is now woefully sorry, as he stands in front of neatly bound giant bails of plastic and says, “What do they think anyone is going to DO with all this plastic garbage?” As he pulls pieces from the bails, he starts explaining that it’s all different colors… some of it was printed on so it has ink inside it… and there are 83 (eighty three!) different categories of plastic into which it all needs to be separated before anything can conceivably be made from it, which is virtually impossible to do in the vast quantities that we have. And then, the process of cleaning the plastic creates polluted water that has nowhere to go, and if you melt it, you get toxic fumes… and on and on. The absurdity of the situation becomes clear, and the outrageousness of the fact that we have all been told a completely different and entirely untrue story is dumbfounding, and infuriating.
How fossil fuel companies are killing plastic recycling
My statements may sound too extreme and inflammatory to be true (we are drinking tiny plastic pellets, even in our bottled water!), which is why you need to watch this film and have these very calm and reasonable experts explain it all step by step. They have some astounding and incontrovertible facts. And I have not really begun to get into all the details of the disease and crimes and lies that are directly affecting quality of life Right Now in the United States — not just later or somewhere else but in your own backyards (where, in one Texan town, some ridiculously — unfathomably — high number of babies are dying from leukemia, the number which I need to double-check, but I assure you is waaay too high). The story of plastic production and recycling is simply one of American history’s greatest deceptions.
Put the responsibility where it belongs.
And yes, there is a solution, or at least a path to a solution, so there is a reason to watch. In this case, it is very much true that identifying the real problem is half the way to solving it, so there are things to do and steps to take. But the solution mostly requires large, structural change starting at the top. And it begins with educating ourselves and each other so that we can fight back against the forces that want to distract and deflect from the truth (and that have forced single-use plastics into our lives and then blamed us for the results). This film does not yet have a distributor and is continuing to make the rounds of film festivals (follow the progress here, at The Story of Plastic website) but I promise you, if they don’t get a legit distribution system soon, I will personally start sending out emails with the screener links, because you MUST. SEE. THIS. MOVIE.
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In the meantime, go to the website and read the literature. The Story of Plastic is a production of The Story of Stuff Project, a nonprofit dedicated to changing the way that we make, use, and throw away Stuff so that it is more sustainable, healthy, and fair. Since 2007 the nonprofit’s nine award-winning animated movies have garnered more than 50 million online views around the world and inspired a million-member global community to take action for systemic change. To learn more, visit storyofstuff.org
The Story of Stuff Project is a member of #breakfreefromplastic, a global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution. To learn more about the push for lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis, visit breakfreefromplastic.org
Here is an excellent article, written by the journalist in the film, Zoe S. Carpenter: The Toxic Consequences of America’s Plastics Boom “Thanks to fracking, petrochemicals giants are poised to make the plastic pollution crisis much, much worse.”
Excerpt: “But plastic recycling is in trouble. Too much of the indestructible material exists in the world, more than our current recycling networks can handle. And the very same companies that say recycling is the answer are about to unleash a tidal wave of fresh plastics that will drown recyclers struggling to stay afloat. “We’ve been trained [to think] that we can purchase endlessly and recycle everything,” said Genevieve Abedon, a policy associate who represents the Clean Seas Lobbying Coalition. “There is no way that recycling can keep up.”
Big oil, natural gas and chemical companies have poured an estimated $200 billion into more than 300 petrochemical expansion projects across America from 2010 to 2018, according to the American Chemistry Council. Fossil fuel giants ExxonMobil and Shell, as well as plastic makers like SABIC and Formosa Plastics, are building and expanding at least five ethane cracker plants in Appalachia and along the Gulf of Mexico. The facilities will turn ethane, a byproduct of natural gas fracking, into polyethylene pellets, which can be made into a variety of products, including milk jugs, shampoo bottles, food packaging and the air pillows that protect your Amazon orders.
by Guest Contributor, Ron Simon (w/ Comments by HelenHighly)
Note: This review of Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project was originally published 4/27/2019, as part of my coverage of the Tribeca Film Festival. It has been updated for the national theatrical release of the film, beginning 11/15/2019 at New York’s Metrograph Theater.
Television thrives on the neurotic lunacy of hoarders, but rarely do we experience the passion and purpose of a methodical collector, who really made a difference. Matt Wolf’s masterful documentary, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Projecttakes us into the visionary psychic and cluttered physical worlds of a woman who turned her acquiring fury into a unique archive of contemporary history. Recorder had its world premiere at Tribeca Film Festival 2019.
Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project poster
Marion Stokes was obsessed with how the media framed the crucial issues of the day. From the Iranian Hostage Crisis in November 1979 until her death during the Sandy Hook School Shootings in December 2012, she secretly recorded various news channels twenty-four hours a day. Stokes amassed over 70,000 videotapes, maintaining a record of how television interpreted or misrepresented events. But Stokes herself remained very much of an enigma, with director Wolf relating her incredible legacy through stories of her son and assistants.
Born poor in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, the African American Stokes found her calling as a librarian. But her professional career was scuttled because of her Communist leanings. She became active in progressive causes, producing a local Philly series Input in the late sixties, which was a revelation in local television and an impressive accomplishment for a Black woman of that era. Input provided a platform for citizens, academics and activists to debate frankly about social justice, race, and culture. (Clips can be found here.) Marion also found an intellectual partner in the show’s host John Stokes, a wealthy white philanthropist. The excitement of the duo sharing ideas on this program is palpable.
Stokes and Marion became married partners in life, and he underwrote her technological curiosity, moving her beyond newspaper and book stockpiling. Always the librarian, she was gripped with innovative ways to share information. Although she never sent an email or used the Internet, she amassed hundreds of Apple computers. But video recording was her mission, having tapes carted to her apartment on ritzy Rittenhouse Square in anonymous black bags.
VHS tapes in the Marion Stokes collection
There is little existent footage of Marion outside Input, but her archives speak volumes. Stokes planned every outing so that she could be home in six hours to change a VHS tape. Wolf creatively uses images from her off-air recordings to perhaps probe her subconscious. Using her tapes, he creates a mosaic of how the major networks initially broadcast news of 9/11. It is chilling how silly morning news suddenly became sober. Stokes’ archive gives us the perspective to compare the instantaneous reactions of several news gatherers grappling with live events.
Stokes’ story has been passed around via a 2013 Fast Company article, which inspired Wolf to make the film. Her taped treasures found a home at the Internet Archive, which is making the contents available online*. Her preservation of local news programs in Philadelphia and Boston is particularly invaluable for researchers.
Internet Archive
Wolf’s illuminating documentary is part detective work to uncover an unconventional life and part love story of two individuals devoted to preserve that which everyone else takes for granted. Stokes was an activist-archivist and her tenacity of holding on to our media past can only be completed by future historians. Stokes lived a life well saved.
///
* But note that none of Marion Stokes’s recorded footage is identified as hers; there is no indication that any of her archival materials were collected by her, which HelenHighly thinks is a little odd, if not Highly Odd. I guess this answers the question “What’s the difference between a hoarder and a collector?” Answer: an archive — an index or log by which to sort, manage and identify what has been saved. If Marion had created an index system, then the Internet Archive would not have had to make one of their own (and in the process, make the entire collection their own).
Helen Highly Compelled to Comment:
Takes one to know one!
Ron Simon is Senior Curator for Television for Paley Center for Media, and as a devoted archivist and historian (and possible obsessive hoarder), he surely sees a kindred spirit in Marion Stokes. His ability to understand the extraordinary historical significance of what Marion created speaks to his expert insight. His admiration of her speaks perhaps to something else, more personal.
I find it interesting and odd that Ron sees a romantic love story behind the film’s pained narration by Marion’s long-suffering son Michael and her husband John’s reported fear of Marion learning of any interaction he had with his deserted daughter from a previous marriage. Marion’s son Michael Metelis was born to her first husband, who is seen in the film speaking of Marion’s “withering criticism” and her making it nearly impossible for him to maintain a relationship with his young son.
Marion Stokes at home in Recorder
In Michael’s caring for the things his mother left behind — things she seemed to care about more than she did him, the emotion that was “palpable” to me was that of a neglected and rejected son still trying to please his deceased, controlling mother. Helen Highly Cynical suggests that the only love she sensed was between Marion and John’s money. My impression is that she managed to recruit John into her cult of one. But maybe I don’t understand the unique passion that beats in the hearts of hoarders.
Engrossing as the film is, there is no joy in it, nor in Marion’s compulsive collecting. The documentary portrays a reclusive woman who was so suspicious of the world that she secretly recorded using multiple TVs and VCRs and organized her life around changing the VHS tapes — not even trusting TIVO to know what she was recording. In the film, her personal chauffeur remembers Mrs. Stokes by her strict rules of “no talking” and “no touching.” Usually I am thrilled by stories of craziness giving birth to genius, but there was no brilliance in Marion’s obsession – only a dark world view against the flickering of TV tubes.
Savvy director Matt Wolf paints of complex portrait of a complicated woman, and it becomes something like a Rorschach test for viewers — seeing what you take away from it all. Any way you look at it, this is a fascinating and startling film. And Ron is clearly right to recognize the highly important story it tells about modern American history and the nature of television. The human story… that is something much more murky. But of course, that is what makes it so compelling. Despite the disturbing darkness, Helen Highly Recommends Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project.
It’s great to live in New York City, land of film festivals. Following the two biggies, Tribeca Film Festival and New York Film Festival, is the country’s biggest and best documentary film festival, DOC NYC, and this year’s 10th anniversary fest is bigger and better than ever before. It’s a tremendous opportunity for New Yorkers to view what in some cases will be your one-and-only chance to catch a film that may not find a distributor and will be here and then gone forever, and also to connect in person with more than 500 filmmakers and industry experts who will speak and otherwise participate at the festival. For those outside of New York, DOC NYC is an insightful forecast, cluing you in to what to look for that will be playing at theaters near you in the coming months or available for streaming via Netflix, HBO or elsewhere. Watch for reviews on this website with detailed recommendations and commentary (starting with my Part 2 DOC NYC article). But in the meantime, this article will offer an overview of Helen’s Pre-Fest Picks.
DOC NYC 10th Anniversary
Documentaries – The New Cinema
To say that this is the heyday of documentaries can only be a great understatement. Thanks to advancements in technology and easier access to equipment – an iPhone in every hand, more and more people are able to tell their stories with moving pictures. But having a camera doesn’t necessarily make you a “real filmmaker,” and that’s a judgment that critics will make when assessing documentaries (and a reason for you to read reviews), although in the documentary universe, sometimes a highly relevant subject will outweigh artistic merit. Home-movie docs have become almost their own genre. (See my review of 17 Blocks). At the same time, master filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese are also making docs.
Today’s world seems more serious and urgent than ever, in terms of understanding the facts and truths that surround us – demand pushing the supply of doc movies. Or is it that the more we know, the more we want to know more – supply pushing demand? Either way, this is the golden age of knowledge and awareness, perspective and insight. And it’s also a time when many filmmakers are looking backward – creating retrospectives and analyzing pieces of history, both due to a desire to learn from the past and a sentimental sense of nostalgia for what has been lost in the all the rapid changes. It’s fair to say that documentaries are the new cinema.
What to See
DOC NYC 2019 will run from November 6 – 15 and include more than 300 films and events, with 28 world premieres and 27 US premieres. Films are curated into 21 different Sections. It’s an overwhelming amount of content to contemplate, and I’ll do my best to help you sort through it. (See my Overview Part Two for a detailed breakdown of all the sections.) I would have liked to offer a catchy headline such as “Top Ten Docs to See,” but ten barely scratches the surface. Even twenty seems to leave out films that warrant a mention. So… without counting, here are the films that Helen feels Highly Compelled to suggest. I will organize my list loosely by category (or categories), to assist in matching viewers with the right movies. Although, I need to repeat here what I always say about film festivals: The best parts are the films that surprise you and that challenge your assumptions about what you think you care about, so I encourage you to at least read outside the categories that are of obvious interest to you. Because I am listing so many films (really a small percentage of films at the festival, but still), I will mark my MOST recommended with asterisks. And I confess that I also recommend a few other documentaries that seem relevant, even if not part of the DOC NYC festival.
“Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band”
(Special Events: Opening Night Film and unofficially Sonic Cinema, otherwise known as Music Movies)
Section Note: The official DOC NYC section is “Special Events,” so that’s where you will find it listed, but for your information I am also identifying it as a movie about music, which the festival calls “Sonic Cinema.”
Helen Highly Recommends this documentary film based on the story of The Band (Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson). The Band originally formed as The Hawk, a backing band for rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins but came to prominence during its time backing Bob Dylan on tour and later grew into a legend in its own right, widely credited with being on the forefront of three different musical revolutions. The Band was one of the first rock groups to appear on the cover of Time. This is one of the few films I’ve already seen as of this posting, so I can to tell you more than the official synopsis. (It seems I just went ahead and wrote my review. Here it is.) If you are in New York and are able: Go see it. Otherwise, keep your ear to the ground for when Magnolia begins its national theatrical run early next year.
As both music films and biopics go, Once Were Brothers is a Must-See.
Note: I feel I must qualify that statement by divulging that I am neither a music historian nor expert. I will bet that there are others who will view this film differently. So, this is a Helen Highly Impressionable review. I am not a source of music intelligence, but I do know movies and this film easily won me over. But don’t take it from me; take it from Martin Scorsese.
Executive producers Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer give this film a pedigree that sets it apart from the average music-history documentary and elevates it on every level – including a well-paced and smartly arranged narrative structure, some amazing archival footage and a cast of music legends to provide commentary. Plus, Robertson’s own intelligence and reflection make this seem like a truly valuable document about the history of American music. (The film is based somewhat on Robertson’s 2016 memoir, Testimony, which covered the first three decades of his life, but this documentary goes both deeper and wider.) First-time feature-length film director Daniel Roher may have had something to do with the film’s success, but he surely gets a ride on some long coattails.
“Testimony” by Robbie Robertson
Once Were Brothers is an ideal film to open the DOC NYC festival due to its multi-dimensional timeliness, most notably its connection to Martin’s Scorsese’s new mob epic, The Irishman, currently in theaters, coming to Netflix next and one of the hottest films of the year. (Click here to read IndieNYC’s Irishman review.) In addition to Scorsese executive producing this film (and filming The Band’s spectacular 1976 farewell concert and turning that into a documentary – The Last Waltz), Robbie Robertson created the score for Scorsese’s latest film (in addition to four others since 1980). The tight Scorsese/Robertson relationship seems unlikely and is fascinating to me. Scorsese also participates in this film as a commentator and gives a detailed description of how he shot The Band’s famous, swan-song concert – what camera angles he used, why he chose not to show the audience, etc. This film feels very much like a collaboration of two great artists and thinkers and surely that’s what helps to make it so good. Plus, there’s the music.
There is even more to the timeliness of this film: At about the same time as this documentary first premiered at Toronto International Film Festival, Robertson also released his sixth solo album, Sinematic, and some of its tracks, including the Van Morrison collaboration “I Hear You Paint Houses,” are part of his score for The Irishman. Plus, coinciding with the documentary’s premiere, it was announced that The Band’s seminal sophomore album – declared “better than the Beatles’ Abbey Road” when it was first released – is getting a deluxe reissue later this year. That album includes two of the important songs from this documentary, “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” both rich with cinematic stories and eccentric Americana characters that are explored in the film. “The Weight” –perhaps The Band’s most significant song and number 41 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time – also figures prominently in the film, with tales about its inspiration and influences.
“The film excels in its humanity. It is about the great possibilities and painful frailties of human nature.”
All this is to say that this documentary is about the music of The Band as much as it is about the people in and around The Band. It manages to be a thoughtful, candid and compelling biopic of Robbie Robertson, The Band’s lead songwriter and guitarist (more on this later), in addition to exploring the uniquely close and crucial relationships – for better and worse – between The Band’s members, while balancing all that with broader historical perspective and commentary from other major musicians, including Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel and Bob Dylan, which may be worth the price of admission in itself. (And music. Did I mention lots of great music?)
So… for you Bob Dylan fans, yes indeed you will get your Dylan fix in this film. A hefty and heartfelt amount of time is spent recounting The Band’s infamously troubled tour with Bob Dylan (in which they were booed across America and throughout Europe) as well as their move to Woodstock, NY due to Dylan’s invitation and the vitally important time they all spent huddled together up there changing the very nature of popular music while creating “the basement tapes” in their little pink house. Yes, car crashes, heroin and romance too.
Bob Dylan and The Band
You don’t have to be a music history buff or even a particular fan of The Band’s music to appreciate this movie. It may also be true that being a serious music history buff may diminish your appreciation of this film. I get the impression that not every tale in this film is being told for the first time. Perhaps more importantly, three of the five Band members are now dead, and one in relative obscurity, so this film sometimes has the tone of a last-man-standing version of history. It is part biography but also part personal memoir of one man – Robbie Robertson, although he is one super-talented and articulate fellow. To my eyes, the film seems to bend over backward to be fair, but if you’re looking for an earth-shaking confession of some sort, you won’t find it here. We learn that members of The Band had some dispute about the equitable distribution of income and some other unresolved tensions, and while the film does not reveal any long-hidden secrets, it thoughtfully addresses the issues and moves on to what Robertson thinks is more important, and I believe the average film-goer will agree.
The film excels in its humanity. It is about the great possibilities and painful frailties of human nature. And it’s about the process of creativity – what it is, how it works, how it falls apart. It’s full of music. It’s full of wisdom. It’s full of inspiration (despite the profound sadness).
Once Were Brothers is pretty much the direct opposite of The Quiet One, if anyone remembers that documentary from earlier this year, about bassist Bill Wyman, founding member the Rolling Stones. (Click here for myQuiet One review.) That film also featured its lead character speaking extensively about his past – a sort of end-of-career self-assessment, an attempt to break through the veil of myth and mystery that had long shadowed him. But The Quiet One failed in every way this film succeeds; that film was shallow where this one goes deep and that film evaded controversy where this one explores it.
For example, The Quiet One didn’t even mention any tension between Wyman and the rest of the Stones, but this film discusses the late-in-the-game internal problems at some length. (It never does mention that before the final, official break-up, the group toured briefly without Robbie, to mixed reviews, but at that point he was technically “on a break” and waiting for the others to clean up their acts, which they never did. One might credit Robertson for taking the high road and not dwelling on their failures or contributing to gossip. This is more a movie that attempts to understand success.) Both films have Eric Clapton doling out praise, but this one includes an amusing and telling moment where Robertson and Clapton were out of sync and Clapton passes some small judgement. Both Robertson and Wyman poignantly tell us their childhood tale of how they acquired their first guitar. Both men’s careers share significant milestones and tragedies. But their memoir films couldn’t be more different.
Robbie Robertson goes deep
I compared The Quiet One to Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, feeling as if I were watching Wyman fade into a confused, disappointed silence and this would be the last we heard from him. In this case, we learn that Robertson is still very much alive and well and working productively, and he has managed to transform his past pain and success into new artistry. He’s mentally inquisitive and emotionally connected and speaks with a surprising humility that seems genuine to me. It might be worth noting that Robertson’s wife – the same one he originally married in the early days of The Band – is said to now be an addiction therapist, which I would guess helped him to be as self-aware and honest as he is in this film. Wyman is on wife #3. Just saying.
Helen Highly Recommends Once Were Brothers. I don’t think there’s a trailer yet, so get a taste by listening to the “Once Were Brothers” song from Robbie Robertson’s new album:
(Shortlist Features and unofficially Sonic Cinema)
Note About the Short List: Each year, DOC NYC’s programming team picks 15 films for their Short List for Features, representing the best of the year. These films are distinguished by festival honors, critical accolades, audience enthusiasm and strong distribution. For the past eight years, the festival has showcased the film that went on to win the Oscar, making the Short List a strong prognosticator for awards season and a category worth exploring. I am personally also suggesting that this film would topically fall into the festival’s Sonic Cinema section, although don’t look for it there on the website or in the festival book.
From Roger Ross Williams, the director of the Oscar-nominated Life, Animated, comes this rich history of Harlem’s Apollo Theater. For 85 years, this cultural landmark has played host to legendary African American artists and to newcomers willing to take the stage on the venue’s famed Amateur Night. For many years The Apollo was the only theater in New York that would hire black entertainers. The Apollo served as a launchpad and/or artistic sanctuary for Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Gladys Knight, the Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and more (and you get to hear them all in this movie, including awesome footage of Ella Fitzgerald’s Amateur Night performance when she was 15 years old and Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit”). Framed around the inaugural staging of Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ acclaimed book, Between the World and Me, this Apollo portrait demonstrates the pivotal role that the arts play in the African American experience. (Common’s exceptional rap as part of Between the World and Me helps bring the film from the historical realm into present-day.)
In an interview with the film’s director, The Guardian, asked how hard it was finding archival materials about the Apollo’s history, noting that the struggles around archiving black history are well documented. Williams answered, “Oh, the challenge was massive. Lisa Cortez, who was a producer on this film and a Harlem resident, she would search through boxes in people’s basements. She would find moldy tapes and photos. It was really a treasure hunt. Especially because the Apollo had previously fallen into bankruptcy and disrepair and its basement in the 70s was filled with sewage. We don’t document black history as well as we should. That’s why I’m glad this film serves as its own document.”
“They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Apollo is an HBO Documentary film, so you can wait and see it streaming, but if you have a chance to see it in a theater, do it. It’s full of enthralling archival footage and is a huge movie in every sense. You will want to stand up and applaud and best to do that in a theater rather than your living room.
Inside the Apollo Theater
The Apollo is another film I’ve already seen (at Tribeca Film Festival) so I can testify: This is much more than an astounding collection of music from many of America’s greatest and most influential talents, and more than surprising and poignant anecdotes about an iconic place (although some of the details revealed about Sydney Cohen and Morris Sussman, who ran The Apollo, are pure gold); it is as good as any documentary gets – entertaining, jaw-dropping, heart-throbbing, gut-wrenching, uplifting and enormously relevant. It’s almost an investigation film in the way it exposes untold truths. The effect on me felt earth-shaking. (Go ahead and see if you can make it through without welling up a tear or gasping once; I bet you can’t. See if you can watch it and not tell someone else about it; you will want to share this.)
Kind of like that ESPN documentary OJ: Made in America (which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, by the way, and if you haven’t seen it, you still should), you think you basically know this story but you don’t. It’s American history they didn’t teach you in school but is crucial that you understand because it’s not over yet; it’s as much current event as it is history. And it’s also a personal journey. It works from every angle. And no, it is not preachy for even one moment. No matter who you are, it’s important that you see this film, and I also can guarantee you will be delighted that you did.
New News:It’s Out! Opened Nov. 6 on HBO! Go watch it immediately! Here’s the trailer:
“The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese”
(Special Events: Visionaries and unofficially Sonic Cinema)
Section Note: This is part of DOC NYC’s “Tribute to Lifetime Achievement,” thus the “Visionaries” section. But topically it’s a music movie.
In 1975, Bob Dylan embarked on a two-year tour that became legendary. Now Martin Scorsese draws upon footage shot on that tour to create a documentary as unique as Dylan, with fictional elements interwoven. (Yeah — fictional elements interwoven, so it’s maybe not formally a “real documentary,” but close enough. It’s Scorsese, and Dylan, after all.) The film includes a parade of iconic figures including Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot and Patti Smith. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis wrote, “It’s stirring how Dylan keeps coming back to film, with its beautiful masks and lies, and it is a gift that Scorsese has been there ready to meet him.” Rolling Thunder captures the troubled spirit of America in 1975 and the joyous music that Dylan performed during the fall of that year. Part documentary, part concert film, part fever dream, this film is a one of a kind experience, from a master filmmaker.
Why have I put this on my list? They had me at Dylan and Scorsese. Add in Patti Smith and “fever dream” and I am all in. Can’t wait to see it. (It’s ridiculous that I haven’t already; it’s a Netflix film. But surely best to see it in a theater if you can.)
Section Note: “Sonic Cinema” is DOC NYC’s official section for this film, but I am also calling it out as part of my own category – Literary World films, because that’s a special interest of mine and a few of this festival’s films intrigue me as touching on that subject, in this case journalism.
Cheekily declaring itself “America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine,” Creem launched in 1969 Detroit as an irreverent upstart to rival the pre-eminent rock publication of the day, Rolling Stone. Scrappy, subversive and gleefully puerile, the magazine soon became wildly popular, thanks in large part to its forward-thinking publisher, Barry Kramer, and its gonzo journalist, Lester Bangs. Boy Howdy! offers a riotous look back on Creem‘s history, the dysfunctional family of outsiders behind its pages and its lasting impact on music and culture.
I mostly am including it on my list because it’s about journalism, and it seems like a fun angle on the music theme.
“Scandalous,” the National Enquirer documentary
***Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer
(American Perspectives and unofficially Literary World)
Section Note: The “American Perspectives” section is intended to “Explore the USA.” How this is more USA than the Creem story, I do not understand. So, I am adding my own category – Literary World.
At the forefront of tabloid journalism for more than 60 years, the National Enquirer has left an indelible mark on American culture. Its brand of attention-grabbing headlines and sensationalistic coverage captivates curious readers even as it stretches the limits of truth. Director Mark Landsman delves into the shocking yet true story of the most infamous newspaper in US history, detailing its wild history and its surprising, continuing role in shaping what the news has become and what the enquiring public wants to know.
In my mind, the recent Donald Trump tie-in makes this all the more enticing and relevant. A full review of this film to come, but in the meantime: I saw the film and it’s spectacular. It’s way smarter than one would expect, with captivating settings and cinematography. It’s fun and politically important. And this movie opens in theaters Friday Nov. 15th, so go friggin see it! It’s really an appropriately bizarrely gorgeous movie — something you want to see in a theater.
Jazz bassist Buster Williams‘ storied career includes playing with past greats John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughn, Miles Davis and Nancy Wilson, amongst others. Spend some time with Williams and his present-day collaborators—icons Benny Golson, Herbie Hancock, Carmen Lundy, Kenny Barron and more—as they jam, tell tales and create beautiful music. Buster Williams Bass to Infinity is a toe-tapping film celebrating the soul and magic of jazz.
I am excited by the prospect of this jazz film because it seems it might be the perfect companion piece to another jazz film I recently saw. ***Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes was excellent and enlightening but more a jazz-improvisation conversation than a musical film, and it seems Buster Williams Bass to Infinity includes lots of music from some of the same legendary musicians. Director Adam Kahan told me, “This is a true music doc that celebrates the music! No smoking gun, no drugs, and no one murdered – just a beautiful story, spirit, a deep cultural contribution.” Sounds like a reason to show up. (And I am told some heavy-hitters from the jazz world will be at the premiere.)
But I will also take this opportunity for Helen to Highly Recommend (again) the other documentary for jazz lovers: Blue Note Records screened at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, had a brief theatrical run and is now available for purchase on DVD and Blue-ray and streaming on Amazon and iTunes. (Click here to read IndieNYC’s reviewand click here to read me discussing it as a “Freedom Film.”) Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes explores the unique vision behind the iconic jazz record label. Through rare archival footage, current recording sessions, conversations with Blue Note artists and lots of way-cool album covers, the film reveals a powerful mission, details a visual as well as musical legacy and illuminates the vital connections between jazz and hip hop.
One of the most important record labels in the history of jazz — and, by extension, that of American music — Blue Note Records has been home to such groundbreaking artists as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Bud Powell and Art Blakey, as well as present-day luminaries like Robert Glasper, Ambrose Akinmusire and Norah Jones. Founded in New York in 1939 by German Jewish refugees Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, the history of Blue Note Records goes beyond the landmark recordings, encompassing the pursuit of musical freedom, the conflict between art and commerce and the idea of music as a transformative and revolutionary force.
New York City. 1966. Truman Capote at his Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel.
(Special Event: Closing Night Film and unofficially Literary World and New York Stories)
Section Note: The festival officially categorizes this as a Special Event because it is the Closing Night Film, but it also topically belongs in the festival’s New York Stories section, which they call “Metropolis,” as well as Portraits and my own Literary World category).
Truman Capote was a singular figure in the 20th century; he’s been called a “candied tarantula.” He presented himself unapologetically on television at a time when most gay men took pains to avoid scrutiny. His books Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood were bestsellers and critical darlings and both adapted into Hollywood films. Now The Capote Tapes delivers a fresh portrait that reinvigorates our understanding of this vital writer. Among the film’s revelations are newly discovered tapes of interviews that The Paris Review co-founder George Plimpton conducted with Capote’s friends after his death.
The film dwells strongly on Capote’s final, uncompleted novel, Answered Prayers, which set out to viciously (at least nakedly) expose Manhattan’s social aristocracy after he befriended them. Plimpton’s tapes shed new light on what happened. They are interwoven with Capote’s notorious television appearances and insightful interviews with the likes of Dick Cavett. One unexpected interview is with Capote’s assistant, Kate Harrington, who introduces herself as his adopted daughter.
I’ve seen this one too, and Helen Highly Recommends The Capote Tapes. The film is the epitome of “meta”; both it and its subject are gossipy and scandalous, with unpublished tapes revealing insight into Capote’s unpublished book. It’s also a great writer’s film – getting into the nitty gritty of Capote’s research and writing habits, his literary struggles and inspirations. Plus, it’s a terrific old-New-York high-society flick. If you enjoy vintage, fictional films like All About Eve, The Women or even High Society, this one has all the bitchy glamour and it’s a true story (and it goes all the way from the Plaza Hotel to Studio 54). And finally, this film begins and ends with shots of a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which puts it squarely within my Archival Movie category, about which I have written briefly but intend to soon publish a more thorough and thoughtful essay, exploring the recent prevalence and significance of archival movies.
(Metropolis and unofficially Sonic Cinema and Portraits)
Section Note: Remember, “Metropolis” means “New York Stories.”
Turning trauma into precise and angry feminist rock, American singer, writer and actress Lydia Lunch helped birth the No Wave music scene in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and she’s still killing it today. Fellow No Wave pioneer Beth B constructs a lively portrait of this innovative performer, whose confrontational artistry resonates loudly in today’s feminist landscape. Critics, filmmakers, musicians and friends discuss the relevance of Lydia’s brilliantly vitriolic world.
As a new New Yorker, I dig New York stories, especially about the fierce old days in the 70s, with powerful female performers like Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson and Nico. I don’t know about Lydia Lunch but am eager to find out, especially if she is actually “still killing it today.” Plus, a photographer friend of mine says he has photos in the film, and he’s cool so… let’s all go see it. (Or let’s at least all keep an eye on it and wait for it to come to some streaming platform.)
(Special Event: Centerpiece Film and unofficially Investigations and Portraits)
Section Note: Just want to let you know that there is an official DOC NYC section called “Investigations,” including films that “reveal real-life tales.” This film would seem to fit into that category if not for its status as the Centerpiece film. It also qualifies as a Portraits film.
Bikram Choudhury was at the forefront of popularizing yoga in North America and around the world. An Indian immigrant with a Beverly Hills base, Choudhury was a born entertainer, known for dressing in nothing more than a black speedo and a Rolex. His teaching style was tough love sprinkled with salty language and punctuated by spontaneous bursts of singing. He built a franchise empire with hundreds of Bikram studios around the world. Filmmaker Eva Orner traces Choudhury from his rise in the 1970s to his disgrace in accusations of rape and sexual harassment in more recent years. She taps a vast trove of archival footage that demonstrates Choudhury’s charm and offers clues to his dark side. Over the years, Choudhury’s story has received steady press coverage, but there is a fresh power in this telling, with key figures going on camera for the first time including his longtime lawyer, Micki Jafa-Bodden.
The film raises larger questions about the nature of leaders and followers and the corruption of messianic figures. To this day, Choudhury has evaded prosecution and continues to attract yoga students from all over the world, bringing added tension to this rigorous investigation. It’s a Netflix film.
Okay, one more film from the Investigations category because it seems so bizarre. Remember, this is documentary, not fantasy: Welcome to the House of Latitude, where absolute discretion is demanded in exchange for entry into a mysterious social experiment in the form of an elaborate immersive experience. Drawing a community of curiosity seekers, this secret society becomes a way of life for some, putting increasing pressure on the organizers to maintain this sophisticated and fantastical parallel world. From the minds who inspired AMC’s upcoming series Dispatches From Elsewhere, In Bright Axion weaves an intriguing cautionary tale about the unforeseen consequences of embracing the unknown. (Note: I recommend another cult-themed film in my Part 2 article — Blessed Child, about a woman who grew up in the Moonie “religion.”)
(Art + Design and unofficially Politics and China)
Section Note: Politics and China are my own categories. DOC NYC has a section called New World Order, for “today’s most urgent issues” (politics), although they formally do not include this film in that section.
In 2013 artist Ai Weiwei and curator Cheryl Haines created an interactive art installation on San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island. Formerly imprisoned by the Chinese government for his art and political activism, Ai uses his experiences as inspiration. Through a unique combination of kites, Legos and postcards, Ai and Haines pay tribute to prisoners of conscience across the globe. Visually impressive and uplifting, this film is a celebration of freedom of speech, human rights and the power of art.
I haven’t seen it yet but it interests me for a few reasons: 1) I enjoy films that depict art and become part of the art experience in the process (such as Walking on Water – click to see my review); 2) I am particularly interested in political art because I think that is when art is most relevant and overtly necessary; and 3) I am especially concerned about the current, increasingly tense political situation in China and Hong Kong, which highlights the ongoing fight for freedom of speech around the world. Also, under President Trump, freedom of speech is on the verge of becoming an endangered human right in the United States, so it’s worth looking at how serious an issue it is to those who live without it.
Section Note: “Viewfinders” is described as films with “distinct directorial visions,” although it looks to me like what would otherwise be called Foreign Films, in this case, Chinese. And I added in my own “Comedy” category because somewhere in all the complicated literature I recall reading that the festival made it a point to include some “documentaries with a sense of humor,” which is an idea I welcome.
Documentary comedies are a rarity, even more so from China. But Weijun Chen has proven himself a master with such mirthful films as Please Vote for Me and The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World. Now he finds comedy in Wuhan, the biggest city in Central China. We watch over a year as the Urban Management Bureau tries to displace a cantankerous street vendor. Chen brings out the humanity of everyone, even when they’re pushed to their limits.
“Our Time Machine” movie poster
This film interests me because it’s a comedy and also because it’s Chinese. There were recently two Chinese fictional films screened at New York Film Festival, which I will soon be writing about, and I also wrote about a Chinese documentary at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which Helen Highly Recommends – ***Our Time Machine(which does not yet have a distributor but is still doing the festival circuit, so keep an eye out, and click here for myOur Time Machine review).
China has recently created new, much stricter censorship rules for filmmakers and actually pulled two films last-minute from recent international film festivals, for political reasons, so the status of Chinese filmmaking, especially indie filmmaking, is an open question. We can expect to be seeing fewer films from China, so best to appreciate the ones able to make it out now. I anticipate this will depict China in a positive light consistent with the government’s values, which does not make it lose credibility but the political restraints are worth considering while watching.
As long as I’ve ventured into the foreign film (Viewfinders) category, it’s worth mentioning this Polish film, which looks strangely unconventional and like a bit of a genre-bender. Fires, heart attacks, acts of madness and even suicide—these are the consequences of the halny wind. This destructive windstorm regularly wreaks havoc in Poland’s Tatra Mountains, impacting the lives of several characters and their animal companions. Brilliantly photographed and with special attention to soundscapes, Michal Bielawski‘s mysterious tale of ecological revenge pushes the documentary form and keeps you on the edge of your seat while portraying humanity at odds with nature. Wow, right? Sounds like something that will activate all your senses and make you think.
“Corpus Christi” Polish film
And as long as I’m talking about an unconventional Polish film, I need to just type the title ***Corpus Christi– Poland’s submission for Foreign Film at the Academy Awards. I saw it just recently and it blew my mind. I plan to write about it but in the meantime, if you get a chance to see it… go. It’s not a documentary but is strangely based on a true story. It’s the perfect example of the kind of movie I would assume I would not like, but it grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard. I am still processing it. Subject matter becomes a non-issue when a brilliant film is a brilliant film. I think maybe Polish filmmakers are having a moment. So, put both The Wind and Corpus Christi on your to-watch list.
Section Note: Continuing on this foreign film tangent, I will explain that DOC NYC has another confusing category called “Winner’s Circle,” which are “international award winners.” These are films that have won major festival awards, in many cases from Oscar-qualifying festivals but might fly below the radar of American audiences (such as Corpus Christi, above, although that is not part of DOC NYC). Films in this category are the prime examples of the hidden gems that good film festivals unearth and the reason to pay attention.
Filmmaker Hassan Fazili documents his family’s journey as they’re forced to flee their home in Afghanistan under threat of death. We follow him, his wife Fatima and their daughters Nagris and Zahra over several years and through several countries. They travel with few possessions besides the cell phones used to shoot this remarkable documentary. Indiewire writes, “The film is designed as a homeopathic antidote to apathy; it… renders visible what so many of us tend not to see.”
I will add that there are many films at this year’s festival that deal with the global refugee crisis in a variety of ways. My list of suggested films disproportionately represents them (okay, mostly ignores them), perhaps because I am so often confronted with the great injustice of it in the news and am weary of feeling powerless against the devastation. It’s not fair but it’s my gut reaction. I include this film in my list because it seems to have the flavor of a road trip movie, and I’ve always liked road trip stories, especially ones that take me through multiple countries. Also, this is one of those new documentaries made mostly from cell-phone footage, which makes it current on an aesthetic level. So, on that basis, I pick this one film to represent all the others with similar themes, most of which I assume are very worth watching. But I suggest we start with this one.
Charming and engaging, with a youthful curiosity well into his 80s, Elliott Erwitt has always let his photos speak for themselves. His iconic black-and-white shots of presidents, popes, celebrities and everyday folks span over six decades and multiple countries. Narrated by his assistant, this film takes us inside his extensive photo archives and along with Elliott as he travels to Cuba to take photos for his newest book and exhibition.
This 62-minute film will be screening with Tasha Van Zandt’s One Thousand Stories: The Making of a Mural(14 min.) Follow artist JR in the creation of his first video mural project, “The Chronicles of San Francisco.”
Why is this on my list? Well… just photos. I love photography (and archives), and I am intrigued by the global perspective. There is also another photo-filled film in this festival that I have already seen and Helen will Highly Recommend, next:
(Masters and unofficially Art + Design and Literary World)
Section Note: DocNYC has officially put this in their “Masters” category, which they define as “films by nonfiction auteurs.” Not sure exactly why that needs its own category separate from all the other nonfiction films, but if you’re looking for it, you will find it in that special category. For your information, I am also suggesting that it would fit within the festival’s Art + Design category due to its focus on photography and within my own Literary World category, due to its focus on journalism.
Composed almost entirely of newspaper photographs, Letter to the Editor is New York native Alan Berliner’s personal journey through 40 years of pictorial history culled from daily printed editions of his beloved hometown paper, The New York Times. Berliner approaches documentary like a collagist and memoirist in films such as Nobody’s Business and First Cousin, Once Removed (2013 DocNYC Short List), and this film is his greatest project.
Part musings of a self-described news junkie, part heartfelt elegy for the death of the printed newspaper in the digital age, the film is filled with observations, stories, opinions, humor and idiosyncratic reflections on the news—good, bad and fake, past, present and future. This is a playful and profound visual essay commenting on photojournalism and what will be lost if print newspapers go away. It will air in December on HBO.
I’ve seen Letter to the Editor and will write a more detailed article about it later, but Helen Highly Recommends this astonishing film that portrays Berliner’s roughly 70,000 photographs (!). And this film will certainly figure prominently in my upcoming article about Archival Movies. In the film, Berliner states that he is creating the movie for an audience in the future, telling them “I am writing from a time in history when we are about to lose a source of news you have probably never heard of – a newspaper.” He talks about how newspapers are “on the verge of extinction.” So, it’s a film about news as much as it’s about photographs.
It’s also a film about the nature of archiving and the compulsion to keep a record of what is happening. Berliner talks about the 1,600 categories he used to organize his photos and the obsession it became for him. In some ways, I felt he was articulating what Marion Stokes might have said in ***Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project if she had been alive to narrate her own story. Stokes collected over 70,000 videotapes of televised news, recording 24 hours a day for over 30 years, and hers is an extraordinary tale. (Click here for our Recorder review.)
Marion Stokes in “Recorder”
Stokes was in many ways quite a different personality than Berliner, but there are significant connections. Coincidentally (or not), they both began their collections about the time of the Iranian hostage crisis, inspired by the news coverage it was getting. That documentary premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival and is scheduled to open November 15th at New York’s Metrograph Theater, so absolutely go see that film while you have a chance. After the Metrograph, it is scheduled to play for limited runs at select theaters around the country. Click here to go to theRecorder: The Marion Stokes Project website, where they list all the upcoming screenings and dates.
Pierre Cardin forever changed fashion in multiple ways. He freed women from figure-molded clothes and introduced new shapes, styles and colors. He was a pioneer in crossing over from haute couture to ready-to-wear. And he brought his designs to multiple products beyond clothes. From the premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Variety wrote, “This is a deliciously entertaining and perceptive take on Cardin’s life and how he shaped both the silhouette of fashion and branding in the fashion world and beyond.”
I enjoy a good fashion film. Fashion is a metaphor for so many things. I don’t know yet if this is good film, but if Variety gave it a thumbs up, I’m gonna guess it’s worth seeing. And then I will add it to my ongoing list of Recommended Fashion Films, which never go out of style (click here to read my Fashion Film List).
Okay, one more art doc. Believe it or not, I am only listing the ones I can’t resist. This year’s festival is brimming over with them; it’s an art-lover’s paradise.
Clyfford Still’s striking compositions and idiosyncratic personality made him one of the preeminent figures of the American Abstract Expressionist movement. Through interviews and previously unreleased recordings, Still’s artistic philosophy and his relationships with contemporaries Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock are revealed. After his death, the legacy of the enigmatic artist faces further uncertainty, as museums vie to be the permanent home of the Still collection—if they can meet the strict demands of his will.
“If they can meet the strict demands of his will”?! Ooh, intriguing twist there at the end of the synopsis. I love a demanding, cantankerous artist who knows his own mind and wants to control everything even after his death. I want to see this.
Section Note: Just want you to be aware that there is an entire section in the festival called “Portraits,” featuring “singular individuals” – films otherwise known as biopics. Also of interest is one about Cory Booker, one about Mike Tyson and one about a woman with Multiple Personality Disorder (with a twist). The Portraits film I’ve chosen seems attractively odd and compelling and of course I like the literary angle.
For 30 years, Terry Gilliam struggled to make a screen adaptation of Don Quixote, including an abandoned attempt chronicled in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha. Gilliam never gave up and neither did the documentarians. He Dreams of Giants represents the culmination of all their efforts in an epic and poignant portrait. We watch Gilliam bring all his talent, obsession and humor to confronting self-doubt, the pressure to compromise and the need to realize a long-held dream.
(Shortlist Features and unofficially Natural World)
Section Note: Remember Shortlist? They’re the ones that might win an Oscar. You’ll want to have seen these. I picked this one because it seems like a beautiful nature film of the highest quality and is also highly important.
This extraordinary portrait of African elephants focuses on the matriarch Athena as she leads her extended family on a heroic journey in search of water. The sensitive story appeals to all ages with suspense, humor and hope. The stunning cinematography captures a whole ecosystem, from the majestic giant tusked mammals to the tiny dung beetles at their feet. Filmed over four years, The Elephant Queen belongs to the highest rank of films about nature. This epic story of love, loss and coming home is a timely love letter to a species that could be gone from our planet in a
Update: Okay, now I’ve seen this film, or at least enough to turn it off. It really only took hearing the first line: “Oh wise and gentle spirits…” in addition to their obnoxious screener-link policy that gave me a mere 48-hour time limit for viewing the film, required I download their software onto my computer and then sprawled my full name in giant letters across the entire bottom half of the screen (to prevent my stealing it). No worries; no interest in even watching it in full. Helen Highly Recommends you Skip this film. However, I have a much better elephant-film suggestion.
“When Lambs Become Lions,” a documentary about survival
The wonder of film festivals, as I have mentioned, is that you get a chance to see small films that may not find a distributor and will be never see again. That was the sad fate of a documentary I saw at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and called “what every documentary aspires to be” — When Lambs Become Lions. I flat-out loved that film, and I was amazed it got so little attention and seemed to go nowhere. Well, as film-festival-miracles would have it, When Lambs Become Lions is suddenly BACK and getting a limited release in LA (starting 11/22) and NYC (starting 12/6) and hopefully a national rollout to follow.
It’s a film whose story uses elephant poaching in Africa as a setting, so it’s a would-be competitor to Elephant Queen, but Helen Highly Suggests that it is really a film about so much more than poaching; it’s about family and a fight for survival (of people, more than elephants — a human story more than a nature story). Unlike Elephant Queen, When Lambs Become Lions has no narration, no romantic scenes of elephants at sunset running in slow-motion across the plains, and it could never be mistaken for a Disney film. This documentary film tells an astoundingly strong narrative tale and plays like a thriller. It will captivate and give you a lot to think about when you leave the theater. I urge you to go see it if you possibly can. Click here to see my full review of When Lambs Become Lions (and the trailer).
In the 1980s, an Army wife-turned-glamorous party girl named Tish ruled New York City’s downtown nightlife, often out on the scene with the likes of Michael Musto. Just a few years later, after more than a decade as a woman, Tish transitioned back to being Brian. Now, in his sixties, Brian Belovitch reflects on the unique and fascinating turns his life has taken as he’s learned how to feel comfortable in his own skin.
New York just finished up with its LGBTQ film festival, NewFest. There is an endless stream of cutting-edge, brilliant, entertaining and urgently important LGBTQ films, and I would have covered that festival, but I am just barely catching my breath after New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center and there are not enough days in the week or hours in the day. But this one film found its way to DOC NYC and it’s a true stand-out. I’ve seen it and Helen Highly Recommends it. You will watch this movie and you will get it; whatever you didn’t understand before or felt you couldn’t relate to regarding “trans” people… this movie is the answer. It couldn’t be simpler. It’s a simple, straightforward story of one person and it somehow explains the entire world of humanity – the pain, the joy, the difficulty, the humor, the singular fact of being alive.
“Born to Be’ documentary at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital
And I also have the perfect companion piece for it. At NYFF, I saw Born to Be, which is sort of the technical flip-side of I’m Gonna Make You Love Me, and also unofficially a New York Story. Born to Be follows the work of Dr. Jess Ting at the groundbreaking Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York City-where, for the first time ever, all transgender and gender non-conforming people have access to quality transition-related health and surgical care. With extraordinary access, this feature-length documentary takes an intimate look at how one doctor’s work impacts the lives of his patients as well as how his journey from renowned plastic surgeon to pioneering gender-affirming surgeon has led to his own transformation. Helen Highly Recommends it. I will keep you posted about distribution and where to find it.
“The Graduate”: “Just one word – plastics.”
And finally, I end my list with two DOC NYC movies about plastic. Remember that famous quote from The Graduate? Mr. McGuire: “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.” We didn’t begin to imagine how wrong he was.
Section Note: Yup, there’s an entire section of “environmentally focused films” at DOC NYC. This is only one of at least six.
Plastic, a seemingly indispensable product, has wrought all sorts of innovations, but at what cost? The plastic industry’s success depends on consumers discarding the product and purchasing new items, creating an endless supply of litter that lingers forever. Filmmaker Deia Schlosberg‘s incredibly detailed investigation into the plastic-production pipeline will shock, horrify and forever change your perception on recycling. Timely and critical, this film is a must-see for anyone who uses this infamous product.
Sure We Can is a nonprofit in Williamsburg, Brooklyn founded by a Spanish missionary as both a recycling center and a community space. Here, a diverse group of immigrants, homeless individuals and outcasts engages in work, friendship and deep thinking, forging a surrogate family. Ana, René, Malvin, Pierre and Walter discuss God, physics, loneliness and UFOs while feeding kittens, playing music and recycling, in this artful observational film with touches of magic realism. In Spanish and English.
I saved the best for last. This film looks wild and wonderful. And it’s local too – a Spanish film that takes place in Brooklyn! What could be more interesting than a movie about UFOs, kittens and recycling? And remember, Winners Circle means it’s already won awards; you know it’s gonna be great. Let’s all go see it. (Winner Circle films have a reduced ticket price of $12.)
