REVIEW | Old Joy: Stephen Walker's "Young @ Heart"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Can rock music and colostomy bags mix? (Insert your own hilarious "Shine a Light" joke here.) The subject of Stephen Walker's new documentary is Farmingham, Massachusetts' "Young @ Heart" chorus, a 24-member group with several international tours under its belt. The singers' median age, we're informed, is 80.
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DOC COLUMN | Music Documentaries Take Center Stage

When the movie started to roll, the image was only a quarter the size of the screen. I'm wondering if I'm in the right place -- the IMAX Theater at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin -- just as black and white images of Martin Scorsese begin to flash across the screen. He directed the movie I'm about to watch so I'm convinced I'm in the right spot, but won't it cover whole screen? Why show it at IMAX? I'm not sure of the exact moment, but suddenly the movie is filling the screen and like a roller coaster ride, we are at the top just waiting for the big drop that is The Rolling Stones as they take the stage of the Beacon Theater in New York City for a legendary performance.
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REVIEW | A Winning Argument: Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp's "War Made Easy"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Though the early to mid-aughts documentary boom has recently died down, it's still difficult to believe there hasn't been a serious nonfiction indictment of the collusion between the government and the media in selling the invasion of Iraq to the American public. This accounts for a somewhat shameful omission in the ever-growing Iraq War doc catalogue--the sheer amount of lies, distortions, and fear-mongering titillations on display in a typical CNN or Fox News broadcast circa 2002 (and today) would offer enough evidence on the sorry state of our national media for a book-length study, let alone a feature film. Columnist, critic, and antiwar notable Norman Solomon has now, remarkably, provided both: his 2005 volume "War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" has been adapted into an explosive, compact 73-minute documentary by filmmakers Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp. If a few years ago Solomon was a lonely voice in the wilderness, with this film he has a major stage from which to educate a potentially greater audience.
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REVIEW | Malignant Growth: Laura Dunn's "The Unforeseen"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Due to the onslaught of environmental documentaries that prioritize urgency over intelligence, Laura Dunn's "The Unforeseen," an inquisitive, elegant rendering of the battle between land development and dwindling natural resources in Austin, might get lost in the shuffle. And what a shame that would be, for Dunn's refreshingly thorough look at the encroachment of capital on untouched land is smart enough not to treat its subject as a horror show. The film is more sobered than alarming, yet it's hardly defeatist. An impressionist's portrait of contemporary American economic life, "The Unforeseen" is for nature both a paean and an elegy, and for contemporary American nonfiction a challenge, in both scope and aesthetic.
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REVIEW | True Dedication: Ilana Trachtman's "Praying with Lior"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] No film critic would dare print a negative word about a film as well-intentioned as Ilana Trachtman's affable, purposely enriching documentary "Praying with Lior"; the reassuring news is that they'd have no reason to. One may be compelled to note the film's unremarkable visual textures, yet more apropos to mention would be Trachtman's commendably unintrusive style, both in her film's shooting and construction. And certainly such tender subject matter warrants this gingerly approach: an assured, straightforward video portrait of a devout Jewish prepubescent with Down syndrome, the film manages to avoid exploitation of its subject matter at every turn.
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PARK CITY '08 NOTEBOOK | Under Construction: The Nonfiction New Wave Takes Root at Sundance

At the end of a recent blog posting, Premiere film critic Glenn Kenny wondered aloud about some of the documentaries he'd seen at the Sundance Film Festival. Summing up his thoughts on Nanette Burstein's hit "American Teen" Kenny wrote "Burstein's trim, fast-moving film utilizes tricks and techniques that would give old-schoolers such as Wiseman and the Maysles Brothers rage attacks. The pop soundtrack, the voiceovers, the graphic collages, the animation sequences illustrating the dreams and desires of some of its subjects...none of it's a surprise, coming as it does from the co-director of the Bob Evans fantasia "The Kid Stays in the Picture," but all of it does raise the question of just how documentary is defining itself these days." Kenny's questioning reflects a decades-old discussion, often fueled by film critics (and sometimes by journalists or by some within the documentary community) over the use of construction -- created or recreated content -- within the context of nonfiction filmmaking. Often this is accompanied with a similar name check of a veteran filmmaker, with the implicit understanding that construction represents a shift in tradition within the genre.
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PARK CITY '08 NOTEBOOK | Docs Shine at Sundance; "Teen," "Polanski," and "Myths" Among Hyped Titles

The buying frenzy that has engulfed a number of nonfiction films at Sundance 2008 is all the more remarkable for the fact that 'A,' everyone was predicting a hands-off approach to docs after a lackluster 2007 for theatrical documentary and 'B,' not a single narrative film -- as of this writing early on Tuesday -- had landed a distribution deal. While it's a well-worn idiom that the Documentary Competition lineup at Sundance is usually superior to the Dramatic Competition, that gulf feels especially profound this year. In fact, a number of industry insiders have been saying that many of the nonfiction titles in the Slamdance lineup are superior to the narratives here.
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REVIEW | House of Pain: Alex Gibney's "Taxi to the Dark Side"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Presidential hopeful and all-around sleaze bucket Mitt Romney's desperate equivocating over the use of waterboarding during this season's Republican YouTube debate nearly left the man a frothing mess. That's because there really isn't any room for equivocation: torture is torture, no matter how much the administration and other assorted "defenders of freedom" try to make excuses or strict, revisionist definitions. In his simultaneously harrowing and soberly parsed new documentary, Alex Gibney ("Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room") trots out endless footage of disgraced Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld smugly invalidating queries into American torture of Muslims at Guantanamo Bay and George Bush musing into what really constitutes torture, after all.
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REVIEW | Draft Bored: Bryan Gunnar Cole's "Day Zero"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Of all the varied strands of post-9/11 cinema, the speculative film--the one showing us what life would be like if it were slightly (but significantly!) different--is by far the most superfluous. Last year's lame "Right at Your Door," which sank right into oblivion, pondered a world where Los Angeles is hit by a biological weapon: suffice it to say that civilians panic, human bonds are frayed, and military authority acts really mean. Strangely, Bryan Gunnar Cole's "Day Zero" (not to be confused with another desperate stab at topicality, 2003's Columbine-riding "Zero Day") could be "Door"'s unasked-for spin-off. Here, a recent terrorist attack on L.A. is referred to, right along with 9/11, making its world an ostensibly more vulnerable one in which the draft has been reinstated. Of course, the return of a draft would probably be more dependent on the situation in Iraq and the one on Capitol Hill, but first-time film director Cole and screenwriter Robert Malkani (whose only other credit is the brilliantly titled "Dot.Kill") don't really care about realistic politics. They're more interested in the "human side" of this fictional issue, which they seem to know just as little about.
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REVIEW | The Kid Is Alright: Jennifer Venditti's "Billy the Kid"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Like its protagonist, Jennifer Venditti's acclaimed documentary "Billy the Kid" is both pretty hard to dislike and difficult to parse. It's already scooped up awards at Edinburgh, Los Angeles, and South by Southwest film festivals, and it's easy to see why: this compelling, ingratiating portrait of some days in the life of a charming and troubled fifteen-year-old New Englander, with its canny intimacy and sharp editing, manages to be up-close-and-personal as well as safely discreet. Venditti, following around the not-quite-outcast teenager Billy verite-style, is inoffensive in her intrusion, yet also manages to make the boy a compelling screen presence. What the film lacks in painful revelation it makes up for in the way it avoids exploiting its subject; and, refreshingly, in these days when most documentaries seem couched in meta-commentary, the film never falls back on the crutch of having the filmmaker's ethical dilemma as a pivotal plot thrust.
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REVIEW | Stuck Figures: Jessica Yu's "Protagonist"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] When she was commissioned to make a documentary about Euripedes (a tall order, indeed), filmmaker Jessica Yu instead chose to see if she could apply the classical Greek playwright's dramatic structuring principles to present-day living. Rather than rehash what made the tragedian's works great or set them apart from those of Aeschylus or Sophocles, or probe his dramatic intentions through a flat biography format or literal stagings of his plays, Yu decided to make Euripedes somewhat tangential, a unifying force rather than the center of attention. She then spent a long time trying to find four individuals who would reveal for the camera, in soul-bearing conversations, the social conditions and moral decisions that brought them to where they are today--which is, to say, emerged from cycles of destructive and extreme behavior. To focus on truly ruptured lives not only gives Yu the appropriate dramatic hooks and embellishments she needs but also helps her fit her subjects' rites of passage and emotional turmoils into elegantly appointed narrative arcs right out of the Greek tragic playbook.
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Happy Trails: Jonathan Demme's "Jimmy Carter Man from Plains"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Titled like an old-fashioned Western where a man in a white hat gallops in to save a town from ruthless villains, Jonathan Demme's "Jimmy Carter Man from Plains" portrays the 39th president as an intrepid political lone ranger, unafraid of provoking discussion on sensitive international matters at an age when most retired representatives ride inoffensively into the sunset. Following Carter in autumn 2006 on a publicity tour in support of his controversial book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid," Demme reveals Carter as a highly intelligent, dedicated, religious, humble, and concerned man constantly engaged with the world around him, and for that the film is time well spent with a human being who, even if one doesn't agree with his ideas, must be at least admired for his unwavering integrity. Nonetheless, this is a limited documentary, unavoidably dependent on Carter's public speaking appearances and talk and radio show interviews for much of its material, making "Man From Plains" a compromised product and nowhere near a full accounting of Carter's legacy.
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"Hoop Dreams" Tops IDA's 25 Best Docs List; Morris' "Blue Line" #2

Celebrating its 25th anniversary, the International Documentary Association (IDA) has announced a list of the 25 best documentaries, as selected by its membership (and presented by Netflix). The IDA's 3,000 members, including filmmakers, executives and educators, named Steve James, Peter Gilbert and Frederick Marx's "Hoop Dreams" as the best documentary, selecting the movie from a list of some 700 films. In the #2 spot is Errol Morris' "The Thin Blue Line." According to the IDA, its members ranked and submitted choices, with the option of also including write-in suggestions. The full list, included below, will be published in the Nov./Dec. issue of Documentary, the IDA magazine, which will be published next week and will include essays on the selected films.
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iW REVIEW | Gays and the Good Book: Daniel Karslake's "For the Bible Tells Me So"

EDITORS NOTE: This review was originally published during the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Smorgasbord moviemaking means director and co-writer Daniel Karslake can tell the stories of five conservative families grappling with gay children in his sprawling social message film "For the Bible Tells Me So." The fact that the religious right uses a literal, and arguably incorrect, interpretation of the Bible is nothing new and Karslake (working with screenwriter Nancy Kennedy) offers no additional insights into the culture war between evangelicals and the gay community.
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DOC COLUMN | Showing Movies, Making Change: P.O.V. at 20 Years

As film lovers, we tend to remember our significant film moments. One such moment for me was Elizabeth Barret's "Stranger with a Camera." In it, Barret revisits the 1967 murder of filmmaker Hugh O'Connor by a Kentucky local who was fed up with what he considered exploitation of people and poverty in his hometown. Barret, who grew up in Appalachia herself, uses her personal and regional history to explore the relationship between filmmaker and subject, with profound results. The story is at once personal to the filmmaker, and to me having grown up in West Virginia, while it also explores our nation's collective ambivalence and fascination with poverty and relationship to media. My experience with the film steered me toward a career in media because, like the staff of P.O.V. which aired the film in 2000, I whole-heartedly believe that media has power to change the way that we think and influence our actions.
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iW DOC COLUMN | To Oscar or Not to Oscar, Looking Ahead to DocuWeek

Academy Award. The Oscar. A golden knight holding a broad sword, perched on a reel of film with five spokes that signify the original branches of the Academy: actors, writers, directors, producers and technicians; no wings to represent the soaring of art, or perhaps abstract sculpture to represent the possibility of the unformed. It is a stern representation of accomplishment, phallic and powerful, and to win this particular prize in filmmaking is the penultimate. And these days, Oscar is on the mind of more and more independent documentary filmmakers.
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iW DOC COLUMN | Hybrid Films Take Center Stage

"Bye bye, Africa" are the words spoken by Mahamat Saleh Haroun as he leaves his native Chad for life as an ex-pat in Europe in the film of the same name which screened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as part of Flaherty at MoMa program running from June 22 - 30. Haroun stars in his film and though the story is fictional, he plays a character of the same name who is a filmmaker. Haroun, the character, returns to his native soil upon hearing of the death of his mother whom he hadn't seen in ten years. He has changed.
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DOC COLUMN | Flying: Confessions of International Co-Production

The phrase "international co-production" sparks a variety of responses from US independent filmmakers. Some think "essential strategy to fund a film," or "I wish I knew how to do that," while others (probably the lion's share) think "international what?" After watching Jennifer Fox's opus "Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman", a 6-hour series that uses Fox's personal life (her indecision between two lovers) as the springboard for a prescient discussion with women from around the world about modern womens' issues, I understood that this film couldn't have been made relying on American financing. But the "why" was more elusive. Style? Length? Subject matter?
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DOC COLUMN | Are Green Docs Hot?

It seemed to come out of nowhere: a high-production value theatrical doc featuring the then media-shy former presidential candidate Al Gore. Skeptics abound prior to the release -- it was tough to imagine that an intellectual stiff like Gore could carry a feature doc about, of all things, global warming, yet the film seems to have raised the profile of a whole crop of new "green" work. Yet, filmmaker and blogger AJ Schnack polled some industry folks before the release of "Truth" to gauge the buzz. David Poland of Movie City News said what others felt, "I think anything over $2 million is a real success for this film. It's just not a pop event."
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DOC COLUMN: Fests Bring Out the Docs in March

It wasn't too many years ago that March was considered a relatively quiet month for North American film festivals, but these days there may not be such a thing as a "quiet" month, given the proliferation of important festivals spread throughout the year. With increasingly high quality programming at these events, even March has its fair share of world premieres and highly anticipated films - and documentaries are no exception. A handful of festivals are already generating buzz on some great new docs, with the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, True/False Film Festival, and SXSW offering some of the most talked about selections this month.
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