Category Archives: Film

New to DVD/VOD this week: MENTOR

Alix Lambert’s smalltown bullying exposé debuted at Newport Beach in the Spring. It has also screened at Frameline, Austin, Woodstock, and Chagrin.

Mentor OH has been recognized as one of the best places to live in America, but this designation ignores a rash of teen suicides that have taken place – suicides that seem linked to bullying and homophobia. Lambert’s investigation focuses on two of the victims, Eric and Sladjana, as represented by their parents, who reveal the treatment their children faced in the hallways of Mentor High School. Eric’s is a sadly familiar and simple story: He internalized the homophobic slurs and taunts of worthlessness levied against him on a daily basis, while also suffering physical violence, and kept his torment from his parents until he one day shot himself. Sladjana suffered similar abuse, compounded by her family’s Croatian immigrant background and their corresponding ethnic, cultural, and language differences – but in contrast with Eric’s family, hers were all too aware of what she was going through, and vocal, persistent advocates for their daughter. They actively sought solutions to the bullying, seeking institutional changes at the high school, getting counseling for Sladjana, and expressing their concerns that she might harm herself if she didn’t get relief from the ill treatment – and there pleas fell on deaf ears as their daughter eventually hanged herself. Sladjana’s experience is much more complex, and for that reason takes on a greater weight here – which consequently leads to Eric’s story getting somewhat lost by the time the film wraps up. Lambert spends a bit too much screen time painstakingly laying out Sladjana’s parents’ detailed evidence – email messages with school administrators, records of Sladjana’s visits to the school nurse, logs from counseling sessions – evidence, noted here, that the school itself went out of its way to quickly dispose of in order to protect itself. The film does have clear impact, particularly in revealing Sladjana’s heartbreaking story and exposing the reprehensible actions of the school administration, but leaves somewhat underdeveloped a larger sense of the underlying aspects of the town’s culture that would allow them to willfully ignore or excuse such behavior that sacrifices young people like Sladjana and Eric in its wake.

Coming to VOD today, Tuesday, December 16: THE JOE SHOW

Randy Murray’s revealing look at the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio debuted at the Sedona International Film Festival this Winter. It has also screened at Hot Docs, Phoenix, DocuWest, Las Vegas, and Poland’s American Film Festival, among others. FilmBuff now releases the film on VOD platforms including iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Xbox, PlayStation, Vudu, and Google Play.

Since 1992, Arpaio has spent his time as the sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County seeking publicity, and his public relations director Lisa Allen and he are more than happy to relive past press coups and celebrate themselves in front of Murray’s camera, the sheriff even allowing himself to be coaxed into karaoke numbers to bookend the film. As already signaled by the film’s title, these badly crooned songs underscore what’s at Arpaio’s core: a desire to be in the spotlight, no matter what – good or bad. Murray cannily constructs his film at first to seem to be more-or-less a puff piece, allowing Arpaio space to make a joke of the stunts he’s pulled as harmless or entertaining, and giving more screen time to someone who would likely shrivel up and vanish if the media stopped indulging him. Allen, for her part, treats her extensive interviews as chummy, reality TV confessionals, reveling in how great a job she’s done for Arpaio, and obnoxiously asking “So what is the downside, exactly?” to their media-hungry antics. As the portrait proceeds, however, critical voices become stronger, and demonstrate exactly what that downside is as they reveal Arpaio and his office’s abuses of power, from racial profiling in the targeting of undocumented immigrants to failing to investigate hundreds of sex crimes, to prisoner deaths through cruel treatment and the systematic intimidation of political opponents. Adopting a “tough on crime” approach not because it’s a deeply-considered philosophy to matters of law enforcement but instead because it’s what will get him attention and, in turn, popular support, Arpaio emerges not just as a reprehensible, self-serving public figure, but as a deeply cynical, amoral one, more than happy to play around with serious issues that hurt real people in the desperate pursuit of celebrity.

Coming to VOD today, Tuesday, December 16 and to theatres this Friday, December 19: A SMALL SECTION OF THE WORLD

Lesley Chilcott’s profile of a women-run coffee collective made its bow at Woodstock this Fall. Other festival screenings have included DOC NYC, Indie Memphis, and Savannah. In addition to theatrical engagements, FilmBuff now releases the doc on VOD platforms including iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Google Play, Playstation, Time Warner Cable, VHX, Vudu, XBOX, and Xfinity, with Netflix to follow next month.

I previously wrote about the film for DOC NYC’s program, saying:
In equal measures inspiring and endearing, Leslie Chilcott’s film spotlights a group of Costa Rican village women who, seeking a way to offset the economically motivated flight of their husbands and sons from the community, form ASOMOBI, a coffee-growing collective – despite not knowing the first thing about growing coffee. Persevering through a steep learning curve and numerous setbacks, ASOMOBI captures the attention and support of a local exporter, and through her, the international coffee industry.

Coming to DVD tomorrow, Tuesday, December 16: RED HOLLYWOOD

Thom Andersen and Noël Burch’s examination of the work of blacklisted directors originally debuted at Locarno in 1996. This revised version has screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real, as well as at a special retrospective series this past August.

I previously wrote about the film here.

Coming to DVD tomorrow, Tuesday, December 16: LEVITATED MASS

Doug Pray’s record of the installation of Michael Heizer’s titular sculpture premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival last year. Its festival circuit also included DOC NYC, Florida, Cleveland, Napa Valley, and Martha’s Vineyard.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to theatres this Friday, December 12: MAIDAN

Sergei Loznitsa’s front line chronicle of the Ukrainian protests made its world premiere at Cannes this May. It has screened extensively since, including berths at Toronto, London, Karlovy Vary, Vancouver, DOK Leipzig, Zurich, Sarajevo, and IDFA, among others.

Filmed between December 2013 and February 2014, as hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians gathered at the historic, titular square to demand their country align with the European Union, Loznitsa’s rigorously formalist portrait documents the mood of the crowd as the situation shifts from righteous euphoria to embattled revolution. Composed of a series of static, widescreen shots, the film foregrounds the idea of mass protest – there are no individuals here, no cutaways to interviews, no identification of protest leaders – as the business of revolution is carried out, from the logistics of distributing food and other supplies to the camaraderie-building singing of songs. While Loznitsa resists providing much in the way of context, allowing diegetic announcements to provide the scene setting, the audience soon enough makes sense of what is transpiring around them. As time passes, and the government bans the protest, the mood changes, with altercations taking place between protestors and armed police, tear gas fired at the cameraman, necessitating the camera’s only real movement as it captures the commotion and concern. While its initial slow-moving pace may tax some viewers’ patience, the film’s ability to envelop its audience within the unfolding revolution proves to have quite the impact, making this a memorable entry in the recent spate of protest documentaries that have emerged in the wake of such events as Occupy and the Arab Spring.