Category Archives: Releases

Coming to theatres today, Friday, December 4: ONLY THE DEAD

Michael Ware and William Guttentag’s personal experience of the Iraq War made its world premiere at Sydney this Summer. The doc has also screened at Melbourne, New Zealand, and Telluride.

Constructed as an essay from Ware’s perspective, the film follows the war correspondent as he arrives in Baghdad in 2003 to report on the war for CNN and Time Magazine. Collecting footage over the next decade, Ware offers his reflections via narration on the invasion and the morass of occupation while loosely following the trajectory of al Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after the notorious jihadist sends the journalist a videotape claiming credit for brutal crimes. While the film is notably concise, there’s a looseness to the proceedings that never quite coheres, and Ware’s incessant musings have a tendency to grate. At the same time, he captures a harrowing and visceral experience of the front line of battle, often with a disturbing amount of hauntingly graphic violence on display that offers little respite from the brutality of modern-day warfare.

Coming to theatres tomorrow, Friday, December 4: THE MESSENGER

Su Rynard’s exploration of the plight of the songbird in the modern world had its world premiere at Hot Docs this past Spring. Other fest appearances have included Jackson Hole Wildlife, Vancouver, Mill Valley, Reykjavik, Calgary, and Bergen.

A response to the alarming decline in the population of songbirds, Rynard’s film travels around the world to explore some of the causes, from pesticides and light pollution to climate change and predators, human and feline alike. The film features beautiful lensing, including standout slow-motion sequences of various birds in flight, and profiles a wide-range of avian champions, from activists fighting against poaching (already well-covered in EMPTYING THE SKIES) to scientists employing the latest technology to track the songbirds’ migration patterns to a remarkable degree of accuracy never before possible. Rynard gets the point across that these melodious creatures are imperiled, and that their fates are intertwined with our own, but the survey approach taken here makes the film feel too episodic and at times scattered, diminishing from the greater impact that some of these vignettes might otherwise have.

Coming to theatres today, Wednesday, December 2: SOUND OF REDEMPTION: THE FRANK MORGAN STORY

NC Heikin’s story of a jazzman’s fall and rise bowed at the Los Angeles Film Festival last year. It has also screened at Hot Springs Doc, Palm Springs, Virginia, Vancouver, Atlanta, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Sound + Vision fests.

After seeing Charlie Parker play, seven-year-old Frank Morgan – the son of musician Stanley Morgan of the Ink Spots – was bitten by the jazz bug. Within a few years, he was acclaimed as a sax prodigy, and began touring in the late 1940s as a teenager for the likes of Billie Holiday. As a young African-American man attempting to come up at a time of overt racism and segregation, many opportunities were blocked for Morgan, precipitating desperate decisions and setting him off on a path of heroin addiction and crime that would see him incarcerated for the greater part of three decades. But, as signaled by Heikin’s film title, his fall wasn’t Morgan’s end, with prison offering the surprising possibility for music to help him get clean and refocus via the prison band, the San Quentin All Stars. Once released, he continued on the straight and narrow, recording a long-overdue second album, performing, and speaking out against drugs and crime. This often-familiar redemption trajectory is creatively, if somewhat awkwardly, set against a 2012 tribute concert at San Quentin, celebrating Morgan’s life and music five years after his death, with a surfeit of talking heads offering insight into the compelling performer’s story.

New to DVD this week: DENNIS RODMAN’S BIG BANG IN PYONGYANG

Colin Offland’s look at an attempt at basketball diplomacy made its premiere at Slamdance this year. It also screened at the Dublin, NYC African Diaspora, and East End fests.

Offland documents the unlikely, controversial decision by former NBA star Dennis Rodman to set up an exhibition basketball game with other pro veterans to face off against a team in North Korea, partly in celebration of his friend Kim Jong-un, a big basketball fan, and partly in some half-cocked idea of thawing international relations through sports a la Nixon-era ping pong diplomacy in China. While the film does a pretty efficient job of providing Modern Korean History 101 lessons for context, and gleefully embraces the absurdity of the non-conformist exemplar somehow serving as an unofficial American ambassador to a nation of enforced conformity, the project, as a whole, is unfortunately cringeworthy, a tone established from the outset with its incessant, cheeky Irish narration. Beyond this irksome device, neither Rodman nor his team bother to entertain the idea that they might just be part of a propaganda exercise, and instead offer soundbites about loving North Korea and it not being as bad as the media says it is – apparently naively believing they’re being given an uncensored experience during their visit. Worse than this, however, is the trainwreck that is Rodman, who responds to the criticism over the trip by succumbing to old addictions, frequently getting drunk and screaming inarticulate nonsense at inopportune moments such as an official dinner or a US news interview. While his more media-savvy teammates try to deflect politically-oriented questions, even denying that the exhibition game is in any way a birthday present to North Korea’s dictator, Rodman can’t help but put his foot in his mouth several times, undercutting the supposedly politics-free nature of this ill-fated cultural exchange. It’s a bizarre premise, not well-executed enough to be either entertaining or informative.

New to DVD this week: THE IMMORTALISTS

David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg’s profile of eccentric anti-mortality researchers debuted at SXSW last year. Other festival engagements followed at Hot Docs, Mill Valley, Philadelphia, Portland, London, Denver, and Sydney Underground.

I previously wrote about the doc upon its theatrical release here.

Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, December 1: NATURAL RESISTANCE

Jonathan Nossiter’s look at artisanal Italian vintners struggling against conformity bowed at Berlin last year. The film also screened at Toronto, CPH:DOX, BAFICI, Athens, Docs Against Gravity, Montreal, Beirut, Rio, Seattle, Miami, and Santa Barbara, among others.

A companion piece to Nossiter’s better-known MONDOVINO, his new film is less sprawling, focused on four winemakers in two Italian regions, but covers similar general terrain as the earlier film: the impact of globalization and corporate culture on the craft of wine production. Here, the concerns are stated primarily in local terms, as so-called “natural” winemakers rail against the bureaucracy of “quality control” boards which demand a stifling uniformity to the vintages they’ll accept, ignoring the realities of weather, region, and environment and their impact on production. Couching this in a paradigm of economic control which has seen the European Union discourage farming in favor of urban development, these impassioned artisanal creators rightfully feel imperiled. Nossiter, however, employs an ambling, and at time rambling, approach – what the various clips from random classic films inserted here have to do with winemaking is a headscratcher, for example. Ultimately, this is a pleasant enough diversion, but not quite as effective as a call to action, if, in fact that is its intent.