Archive for the ‘Documentary’ Category

Derby

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

tn_derbyI meant to put this review up months ago when DERBY was new on DVD, but I lost it or something. I bet you didn’t know it came out or that it existed anyway so let’s pretend it’s real timely.

DERBY is a 1971 documentary that you think is gonna be about roller derby. In the locker room team captain Charlie O’Connell talks to a young guy who wants to join the derby and keeps bragging that he can do a handspring on skates. The young guy is Mike Snell, 23 year-old of Dayton, Ohio, father of one, wearer of sunglasses, seems to think he’s James Dean. The cameras follow Mike to his wife, who is very supportive of his plan to quit his job at the tire factory and head to San Francisco for 6 weeks of training that he has to take before he can even try out. Obviously this is gonna be like THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS, he’s gonna pull himself up by the rollerskate straps or whatever. Or at least it’ll follow him as he learns the ropes and at the end he’ll try out and we’ll see if he achieves his dream or not. (more…)

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Posted in Documentary, Reviews, Sport | 14 Comments »

Tyson (2009 Documentary)

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

tn_tysonWell, shit. Mike Tyson’s poor 4-year-old daughter died. I was already working on a couple of Mike Tyson-related reviews and I don’t want it to seem like I’m trying to tie in with that terrible news. But he’s an interesting dude and these movies are worth discussing, so I’m gonna put them up anyway.

TYSON is a documentary about Mike Tyson. Actually, it’s an interview with Mike Tyson, illustrated by old clips and photos, so it’s his life story and career from his point of view. In the beginning there’s some split screen with overlapping clips of him talking. For a second I thought “Oh shit, that’s right, James Toback did that shitty movie TIMECODE with the 4-way split-screen. I forgot about that movie.” (I bet you forgot about it too until I mentioned it. Sorry.)  But don’t worry, most of it is a simple, straightforward documentary about an unusual person.

[UPDATE: and as Handsome Dan pointed out in the comments I was confusing Toback with Mike Figgis. Toback is guilty of BLACK AND WHITE, but innocent of TIMECODE.]

I don’t really follow boxing so I didn’t know much about him, and it turns out it’s an interesting story. He talks about being picked on as a kid, then getting in his first fight (a guy killed his pigeon) and winning. That changed his whole attitude about himself. Then he started boxing and he met this grizzled old white guy Cus D’Amato, he’s like Burgess Meredith in ROCKY, he takes Mike under his wing and molds him mentally and physically into a warrior. At first Mike wasn’t taking it that seriously, he was still on the streets robbing people and shit, until this D’Amato convinced him he could be great. They had a father-son type relationship, you see through vintage interviews how much they meant to each other, then the guy died when Mike was 19. Real sad story. (more…)

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Posted in Documentary, Reviews, Sport | 20 Comments »

Southern Discomfort

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

Nope, this is not a sequel or rebuttal to Walter Hill’s SOUTHERN COMFORT, and it’s not a withering expose of labor unrest at the Southern Comfort liqueur factory. SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT is an hour long documentary about a night of indie wrestling in Alabama made in 2000 by Fred Olen Ray, a director I thought only did no-budget movies with babes and dinosaurs and shit like that. Although much more upbeat than THE WRESTLER or the Jake “The Snake” Roberts portion of BEYOND THE MAT this is that same world, the bonebreaking for small crowds and small pay in high school gyms.

The Iron Sheik is the superstar of the bunch, doing a good job of not seeming drpessed that he went from 19,000 fans at Wrestlemania in Madison Square Garden to 400 at the Saks High gymnasium. But the stars are all wrestlers I never heard of before who as far as I can tell have mostly never achieved much more fame than this and in their interviews never imply that they want to. They’re happy working regular small town jobs and then on the weekends putting on a mask and throwing people around.

The interviews don’t go too deep, and many of them stay in character, but it’s still a great visual record of a world most of us have never seen. It’s wholesome but ugly – lots of hairy, fat bodies sweating in the 100 degree Alabama heat. The crowd boasts a complete collection of every redneck stereotype ever invented, especially the one about wrestling fans thinking wrestling is real. Some of them get in heated arguments with the bad guy wrestlers, looking incensed, their eyes about ready to pop out of their heads like Nerf darts. Two of the bad guys successfully egg the crowd on about being rednecks, and one of them even pulls it off while wearing a Jim Beam t-shirt and Hank Williams Jr. headband. They still don’t seem to catch that he’s just trying to get a reaction out of them. Both fans and wrestlers sport hair styles that must’ve been holed up somewhere where they never heard that the ’80s ended. (more…)

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Posted in Documentary, Reviews, Thriller | No Comments »

J.C.V.D.

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

This is one of those things that almost seems too good to really exist. Did a talented French director really convince Jean-Claude Van Damme to play himself in an arty hostage thriller, giving him his best production values in years, one of his best movies, and definitely the best acting performance and most personal artistic expression of his career (so far)? Okay, I can believe somebody would come up with the idea, I can sort of believe Van Damme would be interested, but it’s hard to believe that they really found the money, really made it, really executed it this good. 2008, I love you.

This is the story of Jean-Claude Van Damme (Jean-Claude Van Damme), an action star getting too old to do long takes and depressed because he’s in a losing battle for custody of his daughter. The worst part: his daughter says she doesn’t want to live with him because everybody makes fun of her every time he’s on TV.

Jean-Claude goes home to Brussels, where he plans to stay with his parents and get his life back together. But he needs to get some money to send to his lawyers and just happens to choose a bank that’s in the middle of being robbed. So the thieves take him hostage, but instead of seeing him as a threat like they might in most action movies they just think this is surreal – holy shit, that’s Jean-Claude Van Damme! One guy in particular is excited and gets him to kick a cigarette out of a guy’s mouth. I mean, what would you do if you had Jean-Claude Van Damme hostage? I wonder why he didn’t try to get him to do the splits on a wall like he did in CYBORG?

The feel is more art movie than Van Damme, at times it’s even kind of pretentious, which you gotta kind of appreciate in a Van Damme movie. Never thought you’d be able to accuse him of being pretentious. The storytelling is very confident, bordering on cocky, some good non-linear tricks and unfolding the story from different perspectives. The soundtrack is nice and soulful, lots of horns used in the score, a throwback to action movies from the pre-Van Damme era. (more…)

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Posted in Documentary, Reviews | 57 Comments »

The Jesse Ventura Story

Sunday, September 14th, 2008

In 1999, after the pro-wrestler and PREDATOR badass Jesse “The Body” Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota, they made this quickie TV movie about his life. My main problem with it is that it kind of sucks.

TV movies don’t have to be bad. There is the obvious DUEL precedent, but I’m not gonna hold anything to that standard. A more fair comparison would be the EVIL KNIEVEL movie starring George Hamilton. That one’s pretty cool, and personally I think a wrestler who becomes governor is an even better biographical subject than a dude who jumps motorcycles over canyons.

At the time I thought a wrestler becoming a governor was a poetic gesture. I thought “See that? People have more faith in a professional wrestler than a politician. His job is fake and they believe he is more real than Democrats and Republicans.” But I also had a predisposition to like him because, to be frankly honest, I watched my share of WWF wrestling in the ’80s. I don’t remember Jesse too much as a wrestler, but I always liked him as the bad guy commentator. It was him and Vince McMahon, who was the whitebread goodie-two-shoes commentator who would be outraged by Jesse’s comments. He was like the Alan Colmes of the WWF – the guy who did a poor job of making you root for the good guy point of view. I didn’t know at the time that McMahon owned the WWF, or that he was a huge prick who would later beef up on steroids and become the supervillain of the league. He was just some dork in a tie. (more…)

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Posted in Documentary, Reviews | 1 Comment »

80 Blocks from Tiffany’s

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

This review might as well be part of an ongoing FOR GOD’S SAKE, SOMEBODY PUT THIS OUT ON DVD series. I found it for rent on VHS and before I was even done watching it I was so impressed I stopped it and went online to see if I could order a used copy. There was exactly one on half.com, but for $60. Only one copy on ebay, and it was $100. So most of you will have to see it some day in the future if it’s ever released on DVD, or chopped up into little files on youtube or something. But it will be worth it.

80 BLOCKS FROM TIFFANY’S is an amazing 1979 documentary about New York Street gangs The Savage Skulls and The Savage Nomads. I read somebody claiming somewhere that it was an influence on THE WARRIORS, and I believe it. It made me realize that as exaggerated as that movie was, it wasn’t as exaggerated as I thought. These are gangs who wear Nazi storm trooper helmets in public. There’s a guy with a cowboy hat and a bright red bandana over his face. They have names like Comanche, Fly and Crazy Joe. You see them practicing high-flying karate kicks, climbing up the side of buildings, jumping from fire escapes.
There’s a couple funny re-enactments showing how they steal TVs from apartments and hijack shipments from delivery trucks.

But mostly it’s just a movie where they leave the camera running for a long time and let these guys talk. In one or two spots it can get tedious as it illustrates the type of shit they are obsessed with (it wasn’t fair that we got arrested that one time, we didn’t do anything), but other times it’s great that the filmatists just let the film keep running. My favorite scene is where two guys have a long negotiation about the fight they plan to have. The bigger guy wants to fight now but the smaller guy refuses because his leg is hurt. The bigger guy promises not to hit the injured leg, but the smaller guy says he needs it “to dance around.” Then the big guy offers to wrap a belt around his legs to make the fight fair, but the small guy thinks that would be unfair to the big guy. They agree to have the fight two Fridays from now, after quibbling about whether or not that means the last Friday of this month. After the scene cuts we learn that their fight was punishment for the small guy allegedly trying to keep people’s change after going to buy food for them. (He swears he didn’t, and that he even showed them the receipts.) (more…)

Posted in Documentary, Reviews | 1 Comment »

Confessions of a Superhero

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

With all these questions surrounding JUSTICE LEAGUE (will it be delayed by the strike, who will be cast, when will Vern stop telling us about how awesome George Miller is) there is one fact that most of us have missed: a Justice League movie has already been made starring your favorite Justice League heroes Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and of course The Incredible Hulk. There are also guest appearances by lesser heroes like Ghost Rider, Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin.

This version is called CONFESSIONS OF A SUPERHERO and it comes out on DVD in January. It’s a documentary about those people who dress up as cartoon characters on Hollywood Boulevard, pose for pictures with tourists and then guilt them into giving them tips. We all remember the notorious Spongebob incident. Spongebob was probaly too dangerous and unpredictable for a camera crew to follow, so instead the movie focuses on Superman. You may have seen this guy interviewed on TV before. He looks eerily like Christopher Reeve, but he’s really skinny, like Superman got the space cancer. It’s disturbing to look at. His friend Batman looks alot like George Clooney. Wonder Woman doesn’t look like anybody famous, but she seems like a nice girl. And the Hulk is just a guy in a costume who blacks out on hot days. They’re all aspiring actors, some aspiring harder than others, and at first they seem pretty normal and reasonable. Except Superman.

Sorry Kryptoniacs, but it’s true. Superman is a total wear out. The movie is really cleverly put together, revealing information a piece at a time so that the picture keeps changing and keeps you guessing. At first Superman just seems like kind of a weirdo with a strange job. And full of shit. In the interviews he keeps saying “We don’t work for tips, we accept donations,” but in the footage him and Batman keep saying “And we work for tips” and holding their super hands out after a photos is taken. (more…)

Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Documentary, Reviews | No Comments »

Zoo

Monday, September 10th, 2007

ZOO, directed by Robinson Devor, is a movie you might’ve heard of when it played Sundance last January. For some reason it had a very limited theatrical run, it was not really given the same chance a SPIDER-MAN or a SHREK would get to catch on with the public, but fortunately THINKFilm releases the DVD September 18th.

I really liked Devor’s first movie THE WOMAN CHASER. That one, COCKFIGHTER and MIAMI BLUES are the only movie adaptations of my favorite writer, Charles Willeford. Patrick Warburton is so good playing a bored used car salesman turned desperate embezzler/nihilistic independent filmmaker that I have a hard time not picturing him as the lead in other Willeford books as I’m reading them. I can’t recommend that movie enough, but unfortunately it’s never been released on DVD, and good luck finding the VHS.

What I didn’t know when I saw that one was that the director was somewhat local. He apparently splits his time between L.A. and Seattle, where with local writer Charles Mudede he filmed his second and third movies, POLICE BEAT and now ZOO. Based on a true incident in the small town of Enumclaw, ZOO is mostly set in the outlying rural areas of the Puget Sound region, the camera floating dreamily through barren farms, glimmery blackberry bushes and beneath ominous cloudy skies. But the central character, called “Mr. Hands,” works as an engineer for Boeing, so there is some footage of him on a balcony looking out on Seattle proper, the home of John Wayne’s McQ, Bruce Lee’s grave, me, and I guess Frasier. The cinematography by a guy named Sean Kirby is excellent, and he shows Seattle not as a postcard of the Space Needle, but as a menacing explosion of buildings springing from the earth between water and mountains. This is my Seattle, this is how the city should be shown. (more…)

Posted in Documentary, Reviews | 13 Comments »

The Hip Hop Project

Friday, May 11th, 2007

Here’s a little documentary not many of you will probaly bother to see, but I just saw it and I have to vouch for it. I know THE HIP HOP PROJECT sounds like a working title they never bothered to change, but it’s actually the name of the youth outreach program documented in the movie. This is the story of a guy in his 20s named Chris “Kazi” Rolle who finds some troubled teenagers with a talent for rapping and helps them record an album. It’s not only his way of keeping them off the streets, or giving them a voice for self expression, or even getting into their lives to be a mentor and a positive influence. It’s all of those things, but it seems like it’s also a form of redemption and self discovery for him, having been an orphan and a homeless criminal and still not having come to terms with where he came from.

Kazi lures these kids in with the promise of recording, and then he tells them the catch: you can’t talk about “money, hoes and clothes.” He wants them to talk about their lives, their problems, try to touch somebody emotionally, maybe change somebody’s life. We do see a scene of some rappers battling, insulting each other to each other’s faces, and it’s very entertaining. But Kazi is trying to get at something more sincere and from the heart. As an exercise he asks them to tell about something that has happened to them in their lives. This leads to an amazing scene where one of the kids rhymes (and I’m not clear whether he has had time to write this or if he is improvising) about his father. While he’s rhyming he starts to cry, his voice quivers, tears start pouring out. But he keeps going. I heard DMX gets tears on stage sometimes but I don’t know if he rhymes while crying. I never seen anything like it.

So then the movie starts to go into the lives of these kids. The girl whose dad got locked up 3 weeks before the movie started, the guy whose mom dies during the 4 years of the project and his landlord uses it as an excuse to evict him. You can see how having the album and the influence of Kazi keeps them going. The lyrics they write about their troubles sometimes sound a little forced, a little too much like an assignment, but sometimes they’re really good. The most powerful is probaly the song by Princess about the pain and guilt she feels over having had an abortion. That’s one topic I haven’t seen Little Jon or 50 Cents delve into yet. (more…)

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Posted in Bruce, Documentary, Reviews | No Comments »

Double Dare

Saturday, April 28th, 2007

This is a 2004 documentary about two stunt women. One is a veteran, Jeannie Epper, double for Lynda Carter on WONDER WOMAN. The other is more of a newcomer, Zoe Bell, double for Xena the warrior princess. And of course now we know her for playing herself, Zoe Bell, stuntwoman, as the heroine of Tarantino’s DEATH PROOF. But this was before.

The movie splits between telling the stories of these two women. Jeannie is in the US, having a harder time getting jobs at her age, also involved in organizing younger stunt women and helping them out like a mom. (In fact, one stunt woman she helps is her daughter.) Meanwhile, Zoe is in New Zealand worried about her future because XENA is about to end.

Then – and I’m guessing this involves a breach of the documentarian code of honor, but oh well – Jeannie and Zoe meet. Zoe goes to the World Stunt Awards with Jeannie, almost gets groped by Gary Busey, goes to a workshop for learning how to fall from great heights, tries to get a new job. Jeannie helps her make headshots and gives her lots of tips.

It’s cool that they chose to make this documentary about Zoe at this particular time, because during the filming she ended up getting the job of all jobs as stunt double for The Bride in KILL BILL. I guess it would’ve been an interesting story if they just followed her after XENA and she faded off into obscurity. It’s hard out here for a stunt girl. Instead they’re there when it all goes down. First you see a scout for KILL BILL checking out Zoe at the falling workshop. Then you see her audition in front of Yuen Woo Ping and Tarantino, she keeps doing flips off a trampoline but not sticking the landing. Later you hear the actual phone call when they told her she got the job. And her calling her parents and telling them. It’s all in the movie. (more…)

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