Category Archives: Documentary

Coming to PBS tomorrow, Tuesday, August 21:
BETTY WHITE: FIRST LADY OF TELEVISION

Director:
Steven J Boettcher

Premiere:
Oriental Theatre, Milwaukee (August 2018)

About:
A celebration of the pop culture icon and her nearly 80 years in television.

Filmed over the past decade, Boettcher’s profile is a love letter to Betty White, whose career stretches from television’s earliest years to the present day. Different generations of viewers will undoubtedly have distinct associations with her roles and appearances over the decades: As the star of the 1950s sitcom LIFE WITH ELIZABETH, serving as a celebrity guest on 1960s game shows like PASSWORD, the two-faced Sue Ann Nivens on 1970s staple THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW, the loveable dimwit Rose Nylund on THE GOLDEN GIRLS and its short-lived spin-off THE GOLDEN PALACE in the 1980s and ’90s, Elka Ostrovsky from 2010s series HOT IN CLEVELAND, and, of course, the resurgence of her appeal over the past decade that saw a fan-driven campaign to have her host SNL and led to additional commercial and film work. PBS’s tribute touches on all of these aspects of White’s career – plus her dedication to her late husband, Allen Ludden, and to her work as an animal advocate – but unfortunately attempts to do so in just under an hour, resulting in something of a missed opportunity, and some strange choices. Jennifer Love Hewitt takes up valuable minutes talking about White’s dramatic turn in a Hallmark TV movie that it’s unlikely most viewers ever saw, and the star’s arguably most popular show, THE GOLDEN GIRLS, is given surprisingly short shrift compared to the far less successful HOT IN CLEVELAND, over-represented here by gushing co-star Valerie Bertinelli. Still, Boettcher’s portrait succeeds in reminding the audience how much we love Betty White.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, August 17:
DAVI’S WAY

Director:
Tom Donahue

Premiere:
Hamptons 2016

Select Festivals:
Nashville

About:
A character actor attempts to honor Frank Sinatra’s centenary by re-staging one of the legend’s concerts.

Robert Davi has long traded on his straight out of central casting looks for a career as a Hollywood heavy. He’s appeared in more than 125 films, playing tough guys ranging from Bond villains to mobsters, but what he’s always wanted to do is play the lead. He’s also a die-hard fan of Frank Sinatra. On the occasion of his idol’s 100th birthday, Davi concocts a plan to pay tribute to the Chairman of the Board: Recreating Sinatra’s legendary 1974 concert, “The Main Event” – starring himself. While the actor’s musical training means that he’s likely able to pull off a passable performance, it’s his inflated sense of self that casts a huge question over the viability of the endeavor. Even if he might be able to pull off some scaled down version of the concert, why should he, and who’s likely to care? Donahue plays the proceedings like Davi’s the star of his own cringe-inducing version of CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, and there’s some schadenfreude appeal. Still, this is tempered by a nagging feeling that everything the audience is watching is manufactured or at least heavily performative in a reality TV kind of way, ultimately making for a less than satisfying viewing experience.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, August 17:
DO YOU TRUST THIS COMPUTER?

Director:
Chris Paine

Premiere:
Regency Village Theater, Westwood (April 2018)

Select Festivals:
CinemAmbiente

About:
An exploration of the current and potential impact of artificial intelligence on the world.

Chris Paine set himself a difficult task with this project, a kind of “big question” documentary that is more or less impossible to satisfactorily answer in any kind of definitive or comprehensive way. The main reason for that, of course, is that when one is dealing with a technology like AI, much remains purely speculative. While Paine and his experts can point to present day applications of machine learning that could well be argued to be a nascent form of AI, it remains somewhat removed from what most viewers think of when confronted by the concept – something that the doc itself trades in when it uses clips of popular Hollywood films that have shaped our fears around autonomous computer intelligence, from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY to THE TERMINATOR franchise and beyond. What results, then, is a series of profiles of a variety of present-day proto-AI, all far too brief to be particularly informative or even properly vetted (such as the championing of the Da Vinci surgical robot, shown in a decidedly less flattering light in Kirby Dick’s THE BLEEDING EDGE), followed by cautions about the seemingly inevitable dark side of the technology, whether through deliberate military weaponization or theoretical machine evolution that sees humanity as something that’s simply in the way. The rapid-fire survey of these viewpoints, set to a frankly irritating score and barrage of stock images, yields some thought-provoking moments, but ultimately feels too unfocused.

Coming to theatres tomorrow, Friday, August 17:
A WHALE OF A TALE

Director:
Megumi Sasaki

Premiere:
Busan 2016

Select Festivals:
Japan Cuts, Toronto Reel Asian, Philadelphia Asian American, Tromsø, Rhode Island

About:
The small fishing village of Taiki reckons with its depiction in Louie Psihoyos’ Academy Award-winning film THE COVE.

A previous documentary, BEHIND THE COVE, which predates this film by about a year, also offered a rebuttal to Psihoyos’ film, but Sasaki’s is far superior. An accomplished documentarian, she brings a more assured approach, even as she uses many of the same arguments around THE COVE’s misrepresentation, cultural imperialism, and unwillingness to contextualize the practice of dolphin and whale hunting within Japanese culture and history. In addition to trying to set the record straight with facts about the exceedingly low consumption of dolphin and whale meat by Japanese, the non-endangered status of the species which are hunted, and the hunting caps placed on the fishermen, the filmmaker chronicles the ongoing standoff between Western conservationists like Sea Shepherd and local fisherman. These largely consist of attempts by the activists to capture and share footage of the slaughter to mobilize their followers’ outrage, essentially continuing the proliferation of the same kind of images from Psihoyos’ film, and tellingly demonstrating a seeming unwillingness to engage in any tactic other than forcing a change via international pressure. That said, like the earlier counter-narrative, this one also fails to sufficiently address the issue of cetacean intelligence and its chief role in motivating the Western opposition to the hunt – something that is given short shrift by those here arguing the Japanese perspective.

Coming to theatres today, Wednesday, August 15:
CIELO

Director:
Alison McAlpine

Premiere:
New York Film Festival 2017

Select Festivals:
Hot Docs, RIDM, Full Frame, DOXA, Karlovy Vary, SANFIC

About:
A meditation on the night sky above Chile.

Venturing out to the Atacama Desert, the same setting as Patricio Guzmán’s exceptional NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT, McAlpine constructs a reflective essay on the heavens, absent the political context that lent a gravitas to the previous film. When filtered through the perspectives of astronomers, taking advantage of the unique conditions of the desert to make their observations of the universe; and through the thoughtful views of local residents, the film works best, aided by some stunning footage of the nights skies. Where McAlpine falters is with her whispery, overly poetic narration and unfortunate choice of score, too often distracting from the beautiful visuals upon which she ostensibly wishes her audience to focus.

Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, August 14:
GRACE JONES: BLOODLIGHT AND BAMI

Director:
Sophie Fiennes

Premiere:
Toronto 2017

Select Festivals:
CPH:DOX, Zurich, Vienna, Rio, Adelaide, Antenna Doc, Docaviv, Docs Against Gravity, Doclisboa, Image + Nation, Bahamas, Indie Memphis, Florida, Sarasota, Montclair

About:
An impressionistic portrait of the iconic performer.

Filmed over the course of a decade, Fiennes profile of Grace Jones is not a standard, retrospective music biography. It’s not restrospective at all, save for the singer’s occasional memories of growing up in Jamaica, shared with family members on a visit back home. Instead, the director captures Jones in the moment over the years of filming, demonstrating her still active career, from working in the recording studio and going on photo shoots, to demonstrating that she is still the consummate diva in tense phone call standoffs with her manager over contract details. Interwoven with these scenes from her work are more personal sequences, including the previously noted Jamaican family trip, and, of course, concert footage showing off her singing and indelible stage presence – not to mention her always-extravagant headwear. Fiennes’ film feels very much for the devoted Jones’ fan, providing virtually no context and absolutely no historical background, and, at nearly two hours, threatens to overstay its welcome given its discursive approach, but is just about saved by the strength of her subject’s presence.