2019 Documentary Feature

I'm really tired. This has been a year of highs and lows, and these last few months have been rough for me. Not as bad as last year, but it still wasn't that easy to handle, with anxiety being a constant menace, especially in terms of writing. Nevertheless, this is my yearly tradition, and since I cover every film I see, it would feel incomplete with the documentaries. So, here we are. Just a recap: I do all documentaries I saw this year, whether or not they actually came out this year. I rank them from highest to lowest recommendation. That said, I've laxed on other documentaries, at least as far as I can remember, and I don't feel like digging to find other documentaries I may missed. Again, anxiety, don't feel like writing. So, without further ado,

Apollo 11 (2019)

Yeah, yeah, big surprise this is my number one for the year. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landings, the documentarians decided instead to take hours of  achive footage from television broadcasts and the mission cameras (including previously unreleased 70 mm  from NASA's archives) to make a play-by-play recreation of the mission, from its launch from Cape Canaveral to its landing entirely from it, eschewing the normal documentary cliche's of talking heads and recreations. This makes for a very tense experience, which makes you feel like you are with Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins as they go on their mission. Even for a big space nut like me, I could feel tense as I went along, saw the clock, the distance, the velocity. It is easily the most captivating experience I've had in a theater in a while, documentary or otherwise.

Amazing Grace (2018)

This comes a close second though. Filmed all the way back in 1972, this film about Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace live album performance at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles went through years of development due to technical difficulties and legal trouble, before it was released some months after Franklin's tragic death. Aretha Franklin is, of course, a talent of the ages, with an incredibly powerful voice that really grabs and holds your attention no matter what she is singing. This film really captures the feeling of being in the audience at that church, completely captivated by the performance and feeling the energy of it coming through. It's really hard to capture in words. I recommend watching the doc itself to see exactly what I mean by it

Fyre/Fyre Fraud (2019)

Yes, the year of two Fyre documentaries. Netflix had hyped their take for months. Then, a few days before it was released, Hulu dropped its own Fyre documentary. If you don't remember, Fyre Festival was a complete disaster of a music festival, conceived by con man Billy McFarlane and rapper and punchline Ja Rule to promote some app to have celebrities play at events, I think, which was supposed to be elite, but ended with FEMA tents and styrofoam boxes with sandwiches. Anyway, these two put together really give a full picture of the scale of failure that facilitated such a disaster of this scale. While compromised by their own producers and/or associations (which is why they're roughly equal on this list), it shows the chronology of hyping up this exclusive music festival on social media, getting interest despite suspicions, and the increasingly insane choices that went into planning and executing this festival, and just who the various characters were who made these decisions despite all opposition, all leading to the day when everything just went kaput. Really, both should be watched to gain a fuller context, of everything that went down. I look forward to another few years when narrative films are made based on this. It is too insane to be true. Yet it is.

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)

Peter Jackson decided to upend the usual view of World War I as an ancient war recorded in black and white, by making feel real. Taking hours of footage and interviews archived in London's Imperial War Museum, Jackson colorized the footage to the finest detail, and set the interview audio over it, cutting both to make a general experience of the average British soldier within the trenches. It is highly emotional, especially both in the calm moments in the trenches and the brutal battles and the haunting imagery it invokes. It is clearly very personal to Jackson (whose grandfathers served in the war), and helps make history feel realer and more intimate than merely reading it on the page.

Red Gringo (2016)

I've been fascinated for a while by the story of Dean Reed, a Colorado born singer who ultimately defected to the Soviet Union and became something of a Red Elvis. This Chilean documentary primarily focuses on the period in-between, when he used his inexplicable Latin American success to pursue larger career opportunities in Chile. Interact with Reeds rise with the Chilean music listening public is his growing political awareness, especially with his friendship with socialist singer-songwriter Victor Jara and the election of socialist Salvatore Allende. Allende would signal a hope and dream of an equal, prosperous Chile. A dream undone by reactionary backlash and Allende's overthrow by General Augusto Pinochet, whose reign would see thousands imprisoned and killed (including Jara) and the Chilean economy wrecked by disastrous Chicago School economics. Disillusioned by Jara's death, Reed would leave for East Germany. The documentary is fascinating into that promising period of Chilean history and a fascinating historical figure that existed alongside it.

Milius (2013)

Regardless of what you think of his politics, John Milius is an incredibly fascinating filmmaker. His philosophy of machismo and conservative, pro-militarism oozed into every project he was involved with, from Dirty Harry to Conan the Barbarian to Red Dawn. This film so aptly captures the man, his movies, and how his quixotic, oddball personality and sometimes contradictory, but ultimately very reactionary politics were captured in his film. Even for someone with very left-leaning politics like me, it gives reason to show Milius as a filmmaker worth paying attention to, and his work an indication of brazen, outspoken personality

Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks (2019)

I'm a big fan of the documentaries of Mark Hartley, which take a look at the underreported parts of international film with a ton of energy and style which keeps the viewer interested, along with bizarre or intriguing anecdotes from some of the participants. This film from Serge Ou (apparently having the same producer as Hartley's documentaries) captures that same energy to discuss the history of kung fu movies. While light on the actual participants and sputtering out towards the end, the film manages to interweave the actual production of seminal kung fu films with the general direction of the Hong Kong film industry and some of its biggest stars, including Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, doing so with gusto and style that keeps the viewer interested throughout, and shows why kung fu movies have had such an enduring appeal.

Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008)

An old favorite of mine, directed by the aforementioned Mark Hartley. Same deal as above, except with the low budget Australian "Ozploitation" movies of the 60's, 70's, and 80's. Always fascinating to watch, especially all the bizarre, diverse films to come from the Land Down Under, from horror to gross-out comedy and their influence, especially on American schlock connoisseurs like Quentin Tarantino. It really is NSFW, so be warned.

ReMastered: The Lion's Share (2019)

Earlier this year, I learned the interesting international history of the old song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." It was, in fact, based on a song called "Mbube" by South African singer Solomon Linda, which was then covered by famed folk singer Pete Seeger as "Wimoweh" (Seeger had misheard the Zulu phrase in the song "Uyimbube" or "You are a lion"), and was given lyrics by George Weiss, and given to the Tokens to be released as the song well-known today. However, Linda himself would never see any money from the explosion of his song (despite attempts by Seeger to ensure that payment was sent), and despite Disney using the song in the Lion King franchise, the Linda struggled in poverty. The documentary covers this entire history, including a massive team-up of South African lawyers and politicians against the mega-Disney empire, and the bittersweet ending of royalties given to Linda's children. It is fascinating, and it ultimately leaves you upset at the byzantine wranglings and confusing precendents that prevent something that was seemingly so obvious (that the writer of the original melody and his descendants deserved a share of the song's massive success) from truly benefitting those that need it.

Studio 54(2018)

This is the lowest recommendation, because the first half was considerably weaker than the last one. This was mainly because the middle dragged with the standard depiction of the titular nightclub being a celebrity hangout during the late 1970's, which really adds nothing new to the thousands of similar celebratory depictions in other media. However, where it really shines is showing the relationship at the center of both Studio 54 as an institution and the documentary, that being the two co-founders, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. Seeing them deal with the law, the actual running of the nightclub, the fallout of their eventual arrest and sale of Studio 54, and their other ventures, showed a lot more of a interesting story that rarely explored, and has a lot more to say about the two and their vision than a standard depiction normally would.

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So, that's that. I do recommend all of these, since each cover their own topics well. Stay tuned for my list of 2019 films in the next few days.

Coming to a Video Screen Near You- A Million Little Pieces

    I was severely disappointed by the fact this was dumped onto VOD like last week's salami, because I was actually fairly intrigued by this film. If you don't know, A Million Little Pieces was a 2003 novel by James Frey, ostensibly about his extensive drug use and experience in rehab. The book would garner critical acclaim and financial success, especially after Oprah put the book onto her Book Club list in 2005, and had Frey on as a guest. It then emerged from investigations that he had fabricated siginficant parts of the book, including his arrest records and involvement in several incidents described. His subsequent appearance on Oprah saw her eviscerate him on air, his "memoir" was reclassified as fiction, and Frey himself would become a punchline for defrauding people, and would fade into obscurity (popping up only to make a YA slave factory and apparently came up with the initial concept for Queen and Slim). Now, I myself don't remember any of this, because I was 8, but the story has intrigued me for a while. The idea of a fake memoir, someone embellishing or fabricating their own life and selling it successfully is an intriguing notion. I feel that it taps into so many intriguing aspects of memory, fiction vs. fact, people's perceptions of real and fake. In this era of misinformation and fake news running rampant across the internet with little rebuttal, telling the story of a man who made up a memoir and successfully pitched it to the American public might had some relevance and might've been a biting look into media hype and how mistruths can spread. Unfortunately, director Sam Taylor-Johnson and her husband and star of the film, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, decided to take the memoir as it was, and ignore all this interesting material for the most mundane telling of this story.

    Based on James Frey's "memoirs" of the same name, the story follows Frey (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) as he is forced to go into rehab in Minneapolis by his brother Bob (Charlie Hunnam, doing this horrible what I think is supposed to be a Boston accent) after an incident where . While he is initially reserved and in denial of his extensive drug and alcohol abuse (even as he deals with no drinks or even anesthesia) , through the acts of people like Leonard (Billy Bob Thorton), Miles Davis (not that one, he plays a clarinet) (Charles Parnell), Joanne (Juliette Lewis), and Lilly (Odessa Young), he learns to overcome his struggle, and yadda, yadda, yadda, you know the rest.

    There are parts of this movie that are actually quite well done. There's some very good shots down that are surprisingly evocative, especially a parallel shot at the beginning and end. Billy Bob Thorton and Charles Parnell are also very good for the stock roles they end up giving. Thorton in particular has some great emotional moments that are really gripping.

     First and foremost, Aaron Taylor-Johnson is awful in this. Just horrible. His line delivery is muddled and incoherent, his physicality seems distractingly unnatural, and during the vaunted scenes of drug use, this physicality really doesn't work with stumbling and bumbling anywhere. I can tell he's trying to capture the angst and agony going through this character as he tries to recover, but it really, really doesn't work to convey that. James Frey comes off a cypher wandering through life. What doesn't help is that the film itself is mostly a generic, middle-of -the-road story of addiction, that largely goes through the motions stipulated by other works of fiction (and yes, I do consider the "memoir" fiction), done better in other films. Other than those shots I mentioned, it's filmed generically, it's written generically with bland speeches about overcoming, and mostly, it's just... generic. Not especially good, not especially bad, just .... there. When compared to films like Beautiful Boy (based on an actual true story) or Ben is Back, both from last year, this film, with its after-school preachiness and ridiculous scenes, comes off really dated and absurd. Which might make it entertaining if it weren't so dull. I completely zoned out of large parts of this film because it was so monotonous and unengaging, with so many speeches about overcoming and not a lot of actual overcoming. Finally, and this is a real life criticism, but that the fact the memoir was a proven fraud, casts a shadow over this film. They acknowledge it briefly with a quote at the beginning, but like I said in the intro, instead of treating it like the story of a man who tricked millions of people, we instead get the full, largely fabricated account of the fake memoir, by extension endorsing it. If it had actually happened, a lot of the earlier flaws might've been forgiven, but this is all made-up and the fact that filmmakers don't seem to want to acknowledge it really undercuts the power of the film and any help it may give to other addicts.

    I read a bunch of interviews with Sam and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and they seem very sincere in bringing this to the screen. The director, in particular, talked about people she had known who had struggled with addiction as a reason to make the film. I appreciate the reasons they had to go through with this project in spite of the controversy and years of production hell, but honestly, it's really hard not to think of it and the potentially more interesting story that might've been told around this book. At the end of the day, though, this was just mediocre. The fact of its very existence is probably much more interesting and thought-provoking than the film itself. It's not even bad in a particularly interesting way. It's bad in dullest manner. If you're interested, read up on the real story and especially The Smoking Gun's investigation into the inaccuracies and suspicious elements of the book, and see it with that mind. Otherwise, I can't quite think of a reason to see it.