Archive for the ‘Documentary’ Category

Free Lisl: Fear & Loathing in Denver

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

Howdy boys,

I sent you guys this review several days ago and you never ran it, so I added this new paragraph to get your attention. Rocky Rocky Rocky, dragons, silver surfers, x-men, etc. As well as boobs and ass, boner boner boner, everybody has a boner, bodily fluids all over the place, geekgasm, etc.

Now to FREE LISL: FEAR AND LOATHING IN DENVER. I know, what kind of a name is Lisl, but I didn’t name her. This is the new documentary by Wayne Ewing, who did the great Hunter S. Thompson documentary BREAKFAST WITH HUNTER. It is his third Thompson-related movie, although with the good doctor’s passing each one gets more removed from the man himself. This one is not really about Thompson, but it’s about a cause he aligned himself with in his last years. Lisl Auman is a woman who, at the age of 21, was sentenced to life in prison for a murder everyone agreed she did not commit. She was actually handcuffed in the back of a police car while a dude she just met the day before, who had been helping her move, killed a police officer and then himself. Because she was an accomplice to his crime she was considered guilty of the murder.

That crime, according to the movie, was moving her belongings out of the apartment where she lived with an abusive boyfriend. A friend who was helping her move out decided to enlist two skinheads. These assholes stole some of the ex-boyfriend’s stereo equipment and basically took Lisl as a hostage in a stolen car – I’m sure about the time they were hauling down mountain roads and firing out the window at cops she knew these were not the best movers to be dealing with.

We hear the story from the point of view of Lisl and her parents. We see a rally on the capitol steps, where Thompson enlisted Warren Zevon to sing a song. We watch Lisl and her parents watch a video of the rally. The story of the case comes out suspensefully (sometimes frustratingly) in little bits. The movie shows how the media got the story wrong from day 1, portraying Lisl as the murderer’s girlfriend and repeating questionable allegations as if they were fact. (more…)

Tags:
Posted in Documentary, Reviews | 1 Comment »

Shut Up & Sing

Monday, November 27th, 2006

This is a documentary about the Dixie Chicks. Now, you probaly won’t be surprised to hear that I got no interest in the music of the Dixie Chicks. But you may or may not be surprised to hear that I liked the movie alot.

Of course the title refers to the main subject of the movie, the controversy that came in 2003 after Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines ad-libbed the dangerous sentence, “We’re ashamed that the President of the United States comes from Texas,” during a concert in London. Because of that one sentence (and some mild anti-war, pro-human life comments on the eve of the invasion) right wing web sights organized call-in campaigns to country music stations across the country, causing the corporation that runs the computer that programs every radio station to not play Dixie Chicks songs anymore. Meanwhile, idiots with bad handwriting made signs and stood outside of Dixie Chicks concerts reinforcing all the worst stereotypes about lower class white southerners.

This political context is the hook that makes the movie interesting, it’s obviously what got me in the theater, but thankfully it’s not the whole show. What really makes the movie work is the charisma and humanity of these three woman in the band. We see them doing alot of things: answering criticism in interviews, performing, writing new songs, giving birth, discussing security after death threats, calling Bush a “dumbfuck.” What we don’t see them doing is fighting. Maybe it’s selective editing, I don’t know, but it was refreshing to see a music documentary where the whole band supports each other for the entire running time. They don’t always agree, but they never seem to get mad at each other. Diane Sawyer tries to bait the two backup Chicks to turn on Natalie for having the nerve to say one honest sentence while performing. But they don’t do it. More than anything this is a story about them standing united and not backing down. In the end they have switched out some of their old fans for new ones, they aren’t being played on the same radio stations, and they have had to scale down their tour a little bit. But they have kept their integrity and their dignity. And it doesn’t hurt that they were obviously right about the war, as hinted by occasional appearances by the notorious “Mission Accomplished” banner, vintage statements about weapons of mass destruction, etc. Although I’m sure they’d rather have been wrong about that. (more…)

Tags:
Posted in Documentary, Music, Reviews | No Comments »

When I Die

Thursday, September 21st, 2006

(The Gonzo Monument… A Documentary)

After the great Hunter S. Thompson died last year, we all heard about how Johnny Depp had put up the money to make good on Thompson’s wish to have his ashes fired out of a cannon from a giant statue of the two-thumbed gonzo fist. You may have seen him discussing this in an old BBC documentary, it showed him making the plans and sketching it up with Ralph Steadman. And last year it actually happened at a memorial service at his Woody Creek ranch.

The whole thing was pretty mysterious. There were some distant, blurry photos, but no press were allowed during the party. Some fans criticized it because it was attended by many celebrities, and because a whole bunch of police and security people kept the fans away. At least one thing I read complained because John Kerry was apparently there. They said Hunter would’ve hated it.
And maybe so, but who the fuck knows. This thing was put on by his family and friends, for his family and friends, so who the fuck are we to think we should be able to crash or tell them how it should be done? Hunter himself was a celebrity, he hung out with celebrities and politicians, he had two Hollywood movies about him. The last thing he wrote was an espn.com column about calling Bill Murray in the middle of the night. He had predicted in Rolling Stone that John Kerry (who he was acquainted with him since the Vietnam protest days) would become president. And he was happy about it. Ah shit, there’s two deaths for us to be bummed about.

Anyway, in all the hubbub I remember reading that Wayne Ewing, the director of the great Thompson documentary BREAKFAST WITH HUNTER, had been allowed to tape the making of the Gonzo Memorial, and his film about it had shown at the Whatsisdick International Film Festival in Somewhereville, North Wherever. But I didn’t know until just now that he had put it out on DVD already and sells it on the Breakfast With Hunter web sight. (more…)

Tags:
Posted in Documentary, Reviews | No Comments »

An Inconvenient Truth

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006

This summer there will be many exciting movies you can watch. There will be guns, cars, pirates, snakes, probably Superman or somebody, maybe Spiderman will show up, maybe a time machine or space ape of some kind. These are all thrilling scenarios, but I got another one for you. What about a movie about A GOD DAMN GLOBAL CATASTROPHE? Cities under water. Whole lakes drying up. Glaciers disappearing. Hurricanes and tornadoes, bugs and diseases, miscellaneous terror. Pretty much everything horrible except giant snakes and killer bees. Innocent polar bears drowning right and left. A fuckin’ nightmare.

Global catastrophe – that’s pretty cinematic, huh? But you know what, I’ll do you one better. What about Al Gore doing a SLIDE PRESENTATION about global catastrophe? Huh, what about that?

Bam. Sleeper hit of the summer.

Okay, maybe you aren’t getting a “geekgasm” or “nerdboner” or “semen stains” over this particular movie. Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. But AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, or AL GORE’S SLIDESHOW as I would have called it, is a good movie. And usually I wouldn’t want to say corny bullshit like this, but you could say that it is An Important Movie. I read a lot of things this week saying that it is important to watch the UNITED 93 movie. Well I wouldn’t know anything about that but it is definitely important to consider the issues that AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH addresses. Unless you are some kind of earth hater and polar bear drowner. And I don’t want to be controversial, but FUCK polar bear drowners. You suck.

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH is almost like a concert movie. Apparently since college, Al Gore (former vice president of the United States, looks like Superman*, etc.) has been very concerned about climate change. And over the years, especially after 2000 for some reason, he has been traveling around doing this slide show demonstrating through charts and diagrams and photos and etc. a very convincing argument. He argues that somehow the near-unanimous scientific community are actually right that we are causing climate change, and that the guy who did WESTWORLD is wrong. (He doesn’t specifically mention that guy though. Sorry bud, maybe some other documentary.) (more…)

Posted in Documentary, Reviews | No Comments »

Dave Chappelle’s Block Party

Thursday, March 9th, 2006

DAVE CHAPPELLE’S BLOCK PARTY is the happiest, warmest, most joyful movie I’ve seen in a long god damn time. And not in a stupid way. The problems of the world are not ignored. There’s some light-hearted jokes about race issues, there’s a mention or two of the war, there’s some militant rap lyrics and a brief sermon by Fred Hampton Jr. All things I’m in favor of discussing. But mostly what this movie is is a whole bunch of people coming together to laugh and make beautiful music and have a good time together. In that sense it turns out it is kind of like WATTSTAX, the movie they mentioned as a model when they were filming this. I made fun of my ain’t it cool colleague Quint for writing that the trailer gives off a Wattstax vibe as if he came to that conclusion on his own. But there is a faint whiff of that vibe in the final movie I guess, if you’re really making a close examination of its vibes.

I saw this movie in what I consider a JASON X set up: the same big auditorium where I saw JASON X, mostly empty with only a few people peppered throughout, but sharing their love for the movie across the empty rows. At the end of the movie people clapped, like it was a live performance. I can’t remember the last time I saw that at a regular multiplex showing like this. (more…)

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Documentary, Reviews | No Comments »

Black and Blue: Legends of the Hip-Hop Cop

Friday, February 24th, 2006

I don’t know if you ever saw that Nick Broomfield documentary BIGGIE AND TUPAC. It’s a pretty good one, but I mention it because it had this one part that kind of threw me off. At one point in the narration, Broomfield claims that the government had Tupac under surveillance. It seemed believable, but the movie doesn’t back it up or mention it again and I’ve never seen it explored since then. I just wondered if this was true why the documentary didn’t explore it at all. I mean that seems like a pretty big story to me.

This movie is not exactly that story, but almost. It’s about a special task force of the NYPD set up specifically to spy on famous rappers. At first the movie kind of seems like it’s full of shit. They interview various A-list and B-list rappers who sort of brag about getting harassed by cops. In particular I noticed there was a white dude named Pitbull who bragged that “the hip hop cops” must be following him, he bets, in his opinion. I almost turned the movie off at this point figuring this was going to be the level of documentation they were willing to settle for. Some dumbass white rapper you never heard of claiming that MAYBE people are spying on him. Not because he has noticed being spied on, but because he’s fuckin PITBULL, man. Why wouldn’t they spy on him?

But then right away the movie actually proves that it’s not full of shit. They talk to some journalists in Miami who were the first to prove the existence of the long rumored “hip hop cops.” It started with a reporter who did a profile on some local rapper, and later she received a letter from the police department asking for contact information on this rapper, and the letter specifically stated that it was for a database the Miami Police Department was keeping on rappers. The reporter was smart enough to realize there was a story there and investigated until she uncovered that the Miami rap squad had been trained by the long-rumored-but-never-before-proven-to-exist task force in New York. And specifically she found a retired cop named Derrick Parker who had started the task force. Apparently the NYPD still hasn’t officially admitted to its existence, but Parker and other retired cops tell all about it. None of them think there’s anything wrong with the task force so they’re pretty open about it. (more…)

Tags:
Posted in Documentary, Reviews | No Comments »

Ringers: Lord of the Fans

Wednesday, October 12th, 2005

This review is for anybody out there who is a poor sucker, like me. If you are a poor sucker you might foolishly assume that this documentary about LORD OF THE RINGS fans is called RINGERS because it is like the movie TREKKIES. A horrifying look into the abyss. You stare at that fucker and it stares right back at you, or whatever. A freak show. A good time at the movies. A cultural document that gives you the fuckin creeps even thinking about it years later.

But you remember how TREKKIES seemed like it was trying to be respectful and non-exploitative of the fans, but the people they found were just so fuckin over the top that it didn’t work? You know, like halfway through the interview with the guy dressed as a woman that he says is the never shown on screen wife of a minor astrounaut character for one episode, they figured “Ah, fuck it, we can’t make a respectful documentary about these lunatics. Let the freak show begin.” Well this is not like that. This is more like a rejected VH-1 special.

The movie has sort of an overview of the writing and publishing of the books, how they got popular and then just a bunch of interviews with the stars of the movies talking about how they hope the movies give people hope and believe in theirselves or whatever. Some of this stuff is actually pretty interesting. They interview David Carradine and at first you’re thinking okay, yeah, let’s see what the guy from KUNG FU thinks about Lord of the Rings, I guess. Er– huh? Then you find out that in the ’70s when he heard there was a LORD OF THE RINGS movie being made he called up the studio trying to get in on that, but they told him it was gonna be animated. He claims he was a fan of Ralph Bakshi but actually went and tried to talk him out of doing it as a cartoon.

Also there’s a part in here where they claim the Beatles tried to make a LORD OF THE RINGS movie, first with David Lean and then with Stanley Kubrick. Ain’t that a bitch? They act like this means the Beatles would’ve starred in it but I’m betting they just wanted to fund it like HOLY MOUNTAIN. I mean how would you do LORD OF THE RINGS starring the Beatles? On the other hand Ringo would’ve been good as those two fuckup hobbits that get stuck in a tree for most of the trilogy. (more…)

Tags:
Posted in Documentary, Reviews | No Comments »

Tell Them Who You Are

Wednesday, September 14th, 2005

This is a documentary about the legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler, only it’s directed by his son Mark, so instead of being about Wexler’s career and genius, it’s more about daddy doesn’t love me enough. The son rebelling against the father and then trying to make up before he kicks it (he’s in his ’80s).

The opening scene won me over right off the bat. Haskell is in a big store room in front of all kinds of camera equipment, talking about what he does. From behind the camera, Mark asks him to tell where he is.

Now, we the audience aren’t retards. We know he’s in some sort of room where he keeps his camera equipment, because he’s standing in front of a bunch of camera equipment. Mark is a grown man and has directed documentaries before, but he clearly doesn’t know about “cinema verite,” also known as “direct cinema” or “good documentaries.” Haskell tries to explain that he shouldn’t have to say where he is, the audience will know where he is by watching what he’s talking about, seeing his surroundings, watching what happens. But Mark isn’t having it. He keeps asking Haskell where he is, and Haskell flips out. Immediately I knew I liked the guy.

I wasn’t so sure about Mark, though. After this great opening, you are hyperaware of the cornball techniques Mark uses for his documentary. The old first person narration bit, lots of photos altered to look 3-D, etc. It’s like he’s purposely trying to use bullshit documentary techniques just to torture his dad. He doesn’t seem like he has the kind of charisma that makes you accept one of these documentaries about the act of making a documentary either. And then you find out he’s some kind of a republican. (more…)

Posted in Documentary, Reviews | No Comments »

Lipstick and Dynamite

Thursday, August 25th, 2005

Well I should get this out of the way upfront, there is no actual dynamite in this movie, or explosions of any literal kind. What this is is another wrestling documentary. It is not nearly as good as BEYOND THE MAT or my favorite, HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS, because it’s done mostly in that tv special kind of way with talking head interviews and Ken Burns style photo montages. (There is not all that much footage of the era they focus on.) But it’s a different and interesting angle on the wrestling topic. This one is all about lady wrestlers, told through interviews with a group of elderly women that used to do the deed back in the golden age.

Most of these women looked like b movie stars when they were young, but they were tough ladies with names like Gladys “Killem” Gillem, and as we know from the other wrestling documentaries, even if it’s fake, it’s a dangerous sport/artform/opera that destroys the body of pretty much anybody who does it long enough to be successful.

These are real interesting characters and they tell real interesting stories about the old days. They would have one guy in charge who sounds almost like their pimp, who would try to screw them both figuratively and the other figuratively. They talk about the days when it was actually illegal for women to wrestle and what it was like to go out there and do it anyway. Raging against the machine. And there’s a tragic story about a young girl who actually died during a match. Her opponent is still around to be interviewed in the movie and even though it wasn’t her fault, she seems to still feel guilty about it.

One thing they’re frustratingly vague about is the actual workings of a match. They talk about not being able to beat the head of the league’s girlfriend because they would get in trouble – so are they pretending the matches were real? Or were they fake but the outcome was improvised? I mean wouldn’t they already know they were gonna lose the match? It’s not really clear. (more…)

Tags: ,
Posted in Documentary, Reviews | No Comments »

Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession

Thursday, August 25th, 2005

This is a documentary about something I never heard of before, one of the first pay cable channels, one for movie buffs. This was in Los Angeles of course and started in the ’70s, before home video. The movie focuses on the obsession and tragic life of Jerry Harvey, who was the programmer for most of the time the channel existed.

This guy starts out watching the channel at home, writing a letter to complain about their programming choices and how he thinks they should do it. They end up liking his ideas and hiring him, and he becomes a force, one of those ones that you have to reckon at or whatever. He starts playing foreign films, forgotten masterpieces, movies he loves that he thinks were unfairly panned. He makes friends with Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman, Michael Cimino (they don’t mention Thunderbolt and Lightfoot though) and guys like that, using his connections to get movies nobody else knew were out there. He creates an event out of the director’s cut of the Wild Bunch. The director’s cut of The Leopard. Which it turns out is not about a leopard, but some kind of prince or somebody. The way the movie tells it, this guy singlehandedly turned around the reputation of Heaven’s Gate by showing the director’s cut. Same thing with Once Upon A Time In America. They interview James Woods and he says how the critic Sheila Benson called the theatrical release one of the worst movies of the year, then after seeing the director’s cut called it one of the best of the decade. (I’ve only seen the bastardized version and I thought it was great – can’t wait til I have 4 hours free.)

So basically what you have is a haven for people who love movies. They show movies people have heard about but never thought they’d be able to see. They resurrect movies from the dead. They get a reputation so they can show a movie you heard was shit and you think wait a minute, Z-Channel is showing this? Maybe I better give it a chance. And late at night they show Emannuelle movies and shit. So you got everything you need.

They also put out a newsletter that even people who didn’t get the channel wanted to subscribe to because it was not just program listings but critical writings, probaly like the kind of stuff I write except more knowledgeable and not as good. (more…)

Posted in Documentary, Reviews | No Comments »

Page 4 of 7« First...23456...Last »