Author Topic: DOCember 2017  (Read 18078 times)

pixote

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Re: DOCember 2017
« Reply #100 on: June 29, 2018, 05:24:24 PM »


Karl Marx City  (Petra Epperlein & Michael Tucker, 2016)

Despite some very appealing aspects, this exploration of life under Stasi surveillance in the GDR never fully comes together. The film uses the personal story of director Epperlein father's suicide as almost a McGuffin for a tour of the apparatus of the surveillance state in Karl Marx City. The stylistic touches — the crisp, black-and-white cinematography, the playful titles, and the prominent onscreen presence of Epperlein as both emcee and sound recorder, decked out in large headphones and carrying a microphone — feel a bit overly precious in juxtaposition to the subject matter. The personal story isn't irrelevant, but it eventfully seems somewhat of a bait-and-switch. (I had meant to read some other reviews of the film to help flesh out this poor effort on my part, but it's a bit late for that now.)

Grade: C+

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pixote

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Re: DOCember 2017
« Reply #101 on: June 29, 2018, 09:37:52 PM »


LoveTrue  (Alma Har'el, 2016)

Alas, this film added up to a whole lot of nothing for me. Half the film consists of standard portraits of three unconnected people: a young stripper in Alaska whose boyfriend has fragile bones and isn't ready to have sex with her; a beach blond surfer dude in Hawaii who's a single dad under unusual circumstances; and a teen girl in New York City whose large family sings on the street for money, except the mother, who's left the family due to the dead's infidelity. These portraits are fine but unexceptional; they'd feel very at home in a Real World Casting Special.

Har'el adds some interest with poetic recreations of the memories and dreams of her subjects. These scenes are artfully done, and the intersection of the real people and their past and future selves is interesting (albeit in a rote, art project sort of way), but they feel almost superfluous. I found myself wishing I was watching a fictional tone poem (Wild Tigers I Have Known kept coming to mind, probably because that was also a goodguy recommendation) or a more rigorous nonfiction examination. LoveTrue feels trapped in the middle, thus failing to satisfy on either level. The editing seems to acknowledge the lack of cohesiveness, eventually just throwing in any interesting footage that came out of the shoot, with no regard for relevance.

I hope Har'el continues to follow the teen girl. The three scenes where she's playing guitar and singing by herself suggest a great deal of potential, and a multi-year documentary that focuses on her music, her faith, and her relationship to her family could result in something great.

Grade: C

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pixote

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Re: DOCember 2017
« Reply #102 on: June 30, 2018, 10:10:37 AM »


Oklahoma City  (Barak Goodman, 2017)

Solid American Experience doc that's elevated by excellent archival material, strong editing, and most especially its timely focus on the white nationalist ethos, of which Timothy McVeigh was just a symptom. In fact, the two sections in the first half of the film that cover Ruby Ridge and Waco are perhaps stronger than the second half and its more direct focus on the Oklahoma City bombing. I really liked the structure of opening with the bombing, going back in time to Ruby Ridge ("The Spark"), returning to the bombing, but then moving back again to Waco ("The Flame"), and then returning to the bombing ("The Inferno"). Seemingly very fair film, with the government not coming across great by any stretch, and the notions of resistance and insistence on second amendment freedoms being at least understandable. There's probably a whole separate film to be made about one connection touched on nicely here — the intersection of gun shows, nationalist groups, and racism/antisemitism.

Grade: B-

Hmm, that grade seems a tick low, from what I remember.

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pixote

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Re: DOCember 2017
« Reply #103 on: June 30, 2018, 11:52:00 AM »


Antarctica: Ice & Sky  (Luc Jacquet, 2015)

I was initially mad that the version I watched (on Amazon Prime) subjected me to an English-language reading of the narration by the glaciologist Claude Lorius, but then I found out that even the French version has an actor read the narration and, worse yet, the words belong not to Lorius (as implied) but to director Luc Jacquet. That's a crippling decision, especially given the ubiquity of the narration which turns the rather good archival footage into disposable B-roll. I actually felt bad for Lorius, who, in the present day, is just used as a mute prop at various locations while the camera swirls around him from a helicopter. The Los Angeles Times review sums this all up nicely:

Quote from: Gary Goldstein
Jacquet's approach feels misguided in several ways. First, although we see crisply shot new footage of the latter-day Lorius pensively beholding the same remote Antarctic spots he traversed as a much younger man, he never speaks with Jacquet for what might have proved a remarkable, firsthand interview with one of the world's most enduring climate scientists. The elderly Lorius is all crinkled eyes and wistful gazes; he could be anyone's taciturn if hearty granddad out for a hike in the snow.

Second, the film's extensive narration, matched to the enlarged and spiffed-up 8-millimeter and Super 8mm footage from Lorius' many polar expeditions (his travels began in 1956), functions more like a series of meditative diary entries than a contextual history of Antarctic exploration.

That this commentary was written by Jacquet and spoken by French voice actor Michel Papineschi — seemingly as if composed and read by Lorius — feels somewhat ingenuous and, at times, overly dramatic. It only serves to distance us from the explorer.

Jacquet's film failed to work for me as an adventure story, a science procedural, or as a biography. I came away from it with new respect for Jane. Ice and Sky seemed like Saturday morning tv filler by comparison.

Grade: C

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pixote

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Re: DOCember 2017
« Reply #104 on: June 30, 2018, 01:37:35 PM »


Seasons  (Jacques Perrin, 2015)

I really liked the first five minutes of Seasons then rather quickly became disenchanted; by the end I was downright annoyed. It might have helped to know that the film is barely more a documentary than Homeward Bound or Quest for Fire. The animals are actors here in the epoch-long story of Man's ever-increasing disruption of Nature. It's a pretty flimsy construct. Despite some good shots, Perrin and co-director Jacques Cluzaud often film nature in a way that turns it unnatural. The camera's standard composition turns the widescreen frame into a shoebox and transforms the wild animals in the vast forest into tame figures in a diorama. It's all played straight, like your average nature doc (with some Disney anthropomorphism thrown in), so it's a shock (unforgivable, for me) when cavemen actors shoot a bird out of the air with a arrow, run over a porcupine with a carriage, trap a fox in a snare, and fire bullets into a pair of wolves. The end credits' statement that "no animals were harmed" doesn't retroactively make things alright. There's not much narration, but what there is is too self-righteous and didactic for my tastes. After Seasons and Antarctica: Ice & Sky, I'm going to swear off French nature film for DOCember 2018.

Grade: C-

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Teproc

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Re: DOCember 2017
« Reply #105 on: June 30, 2018, 01:48:40 PM »
I loved La glace et le ciel/Ice and the Sky as an adventure story, I guess I wasn't bothered by the narration (I didn't know it was Jacquet rather than Lorius's though).

Les saisons/Seasons worked really well before the introduction of Man for me, which is where the tiresome didacticism comes in. That's only the last 20 minutes or so though, isn't it ? Maybe I just remember the good early parts more.
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pixote

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Re: DOCember 2017
« Reply #106 on: June 30, 2018, 02:05:59 PM »
Les saisons/Seasons worked really well before the introduction of Man for me, which is where the tiresome didacticism comes in. That's only the last 20 minutes or so though, isn't it ? Maybe I just remember the good early parts more.

Yeah, it's just the last third of the movie (according to the first IMDb review I just glanced at). I suspect that if I watched any five-minute sequence from the first hour in isolation, I'd rather like it — but taken all together, they didn't mesh for me. I probably let myself get distracted by the title, which is a bit of a red herring.

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MartinTeller

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Re: DOCember 2017
« Reply #107 on: June 30, 2018, 02:14:28 PM »
pix, are you just watching a million movies right now, or are you catching up on months of backlogged reviews?

pixote

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Re: DOCember 2017
« Reply #108 on: June 30, 2018, 02:26:55 PM »
pix, are you just watching a million movies right now, or are you catching up on months of backlogged reviews?

A little of both. The reviews in this thread are all films I watched back in December. I only have five total reviews left to catch up on (across all threads), and four of those are for films I watched this week.

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Re: DOCember 2017
« Reply #109 on: June 30, 2018, 02:51:30 PM »


Detropia  (Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady, 2012)

I bumped this up in my queue after watching Ewing and Grady's Norman Lear documentary last year and remembering that they're two of the more talented documentarians working today, as well as perhaps two of the most humane. This 2012 film finds them turning their empathetic camera on Detroit, and the result is a bit of a muddle. The film works best as a poetic lament for a fallen city, finding a sad beauty in images of foreclosed houses falling into ruin. The more traditional documentary aspects — portraits of residents fighting for the life of the city — don't add up to quite enough, merely scratching the surface of this complex story that's years in the making. The filmmaking, too, isn't nearly as polished as that of Norman Lear, specifically the camerawork.

Grade: B-

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