Category Archives: Film

Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, September 22: THAT SUGAR FILM

Damon Gameau’s experiment on sugar’s impact on health premiered at IDFA last year. Since then it has screened at Edinburgh, Seattle, New Zealand, San Francisco Green, Bentonville, and Encounters, among other events.

Like so many other food and health-focused docs of the past decade, Gameau’s is a shameless knock-off of Morgan Spurlock’s SUPER SIZE ME. Instead of McDonald’s, the Aussie filmmaker/human guinea pig tackles a more insidious culprit: sugar. And not just in the obvious taboo forms like confectionaries, ice cream, and the like, but in foods that are marketed to the consumer as healthy but are actually packed with sugar. Long weaned off of refined sugars, he sets out to consume the supposed average sugar intake of his fellow Australians, a staggering 40 teaspoons a day, for two months, while maintaining his regular exercise regimen. As is de rigueur in this doc sub-genre, he consults doctors to obtain a record of his baseline health as well as nutritionists and other vague experts to get their take on the insanity of his plan. Surprise, surprise, he gains weight, suffers worrisome health consequences, and has apparently proven the deleterious affects of the oh-so-sweet toxin on the human body. But while a viewer might question some of the science, the experts’ qualifications, and their conclusions, Gameau presents everything at face value, making the entire proceedings feel oversimplified and perhaps best suited for a younger, uncritical audience who could certainly benefit from the idea of eating in moderation, and would likely be drawn to the often over-the-top special effects and animation employed here. For his part, while fulfilling the role of on-screen host gamely, frequently exposing his growing belly and dancing around in his underwear like a fool, Gameau takes things a step too far in the narcissism department with an ill-advised final music video.

Coming to DVD tomorrow, Tuesday, September 22: HARPER LEE: FROM MOCKINGBIRD TO WATCHMAN

Mary McDonagh Murphy’s updated version of her previous Harper Lee film debuted on VOD this past July, timed to coincide with the publication of GO SET A WATCHMAN.

I previously wrote about the previous version of the doc, HEY, BOO: HARPER LEE AND TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD in 2011 here. McDonagh Murphy essentially keeps the spine of the original film, but incorporates elements related to WATCHMAN, aiming to counter the speculation and criticism engendered by the surprise release of Lee’s second novel more than a half century after MOCKINGBIRD‘s initial release. Among the tidbits noted here are that, contrary to rumor, WATCHMAN was not a first draft that became the beloved classic; instead, Lee and her editor diligently reworked a separate, related collection of short stories called ATTICUS into MOCKINGBIRD, while drawing some elements from the completed WATCHMAN. Significantly, the film also dismisses claims that Lee never wanted WATCHMAN published, or that dementia was a factor in allowing the manuscript to be published. Finally, McDonagh Murphy’s interviews, including with Lee’s aged sister and with the literary patrons who enabled her writing, yield information about other novels the author had planned, as well as the suggestion that there are other, more recently written works waiting to be discovered. While the film is fairly rudimentary on a technical level, it offers welcome insight about Lee and her work.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, September 18: THE MAN WHO SAVED THE WORLD

Peter Anthony’s hybrid account of mankind’s closest brush with nuclear destruction debuted at Woodstock last year. It also screened at CPH:DOX, Denver, Docville, and the International Uranium festival.

On an innocuous evening on September 26, 1983, an unassuming Soviet lieutenant named Stanislav Petrov made a split second decision that averted assured armageddon. Warned by malfunctioning Russian computer detection systems of an incoming American missile strike, his cool head prevailed over protocol, which demanded immediate retaliation. The world wouldn’t know of his pivotal act for years to come, and party officials downplayed the incident internally. In the post-Cold War years, Petrov’s life unravels, and he descends into alcoholism and bitterness. Sadly, despite the drama and pathos at the core of the story, Anthony fails to trust his material and instead muddies the waters in his retelling by wrong-headedly incorporating a messy and utterly unnecessary fictional element, as well as a general sense of staginess, to the whole proceeding. The resultant docudrama is a hokey, ineffective misfire, and distracts from the stark reality of the fascinating, singular incident which could have changed life on the planet.