Movie Lists

2011 in Movies: documentaries

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PROJECT NIM

As usual, several documentaries made my list of Best Movies of 2011:  Project Nim, Buck and Tabloid.

Werner Herzog gave us the wonderful 3D Cave of Forgotten Dreams.  Page One highlighted David Carr of the New York Times.  The Polish documentary War Games and the Man Who Stopped Them was a great find.  I also admired Thunder Soul (about a Houston high school stage band in the 60s), Magic Bus (featuring actual footage of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters), American Grindhouse (about the grindhouse films of the 40s, 50s and early 60s) and These Amazing Shadows (about the National Film Registry).

PBS had stellar year, especially with Woody Allen: A Documentary, Jimmy Carter, Stonewall Uprising and Troubadours.

HBO delivered Bobby Fisher Against the World.  And ESPN has entered the documentary arena with the surprising The Marinovich Project.

RIP Smokin’ Joe

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Joe Frazier in THRILLER IN MANILA

Former heavyweight champion Joe Frazier has died.

Many consider the 1975 Thrilla in Manila, the heavyweight championship bout between Frazier and Muhammed Ali, to be the greatest boxing match of all time.  Ali usually dominates the narrative of 1970s boxing.  However, the 2009 HBO documentary Thriller in Manila revisits the fight and its aftermath from Frazier’s point of view.  The film depicts Frazier in his final years, broke and living on the margins of society, still boiling with resentment from the experience.

In contrast, the 2009 documentary Facing Ali showcases Ali’s other rivals, who have all embraced their experiences with Ali as their career-defining moment.  We hear from George Chuvalo, Sir Henry Cooper, Earnie Shavers, George Foreman, Ernie Terrel, Larry Holmes, Ken Norton and Leon Spinks.  Chuvalo, Cooper and Shavers prove to be surprisingly charming raconteurs.

Thriller in Manila is on my list of 10 Best Boxing Movies, and I’ll put Facing Ali on the list when I have time.

They shouldn’t have done this to John Doucette

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I was watching the 1950 Western Rancho Notorious when I asked myself, “Who’s the bad guy in the pageboy?”.  Indeed, the reliable character actor John Doucette has been forced to don a platinum blonde pageboy wig to play Whitey.  When shot in the back at the campfire, he gets to die with his boots on  – and with his pageboy.  I’ve added this on to my list of Least Convincing Movie Hair.

the John Doucette that we all recognize

BTW Rancho Notorious – directed by Fritz Lang and starring Arthur Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich and Mel Ferrer – really doesn’t stand up very well.  It’s easily the most disappointing Lang film that I’ve seen.

Coming up on TV: Brute Force

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On November 2, Turner Classic Movies will be airing Brute Force (1947).  This Jules Dassin noir is by far the best of the Hollywood prison dramas of the 30s and 40s.  A convict (Burt Lancaster) is taunted by a sadistic guard (Hume Cronyn) and plans an escape. It’s a pretty violent film for the 1940s, and was inspired by the 1946 Battle of Alcatraz in which three cons and two guards were killed.  Charles Bickford, Whit Bissell and Sam Levene are excellent as fellow cons.

It’s on my list of 10 Best Prison Movies.

The essential Holocaust films

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This week, Sarah’s Key and The Debt explore aspects of the Holocaust.  Sarah’s Key is the story of the French round-up of French Jews in 1942, and of how a present day investigation shakes up several lives.  The Debt is about a team of three Mossad agents  charged with kidnapping a Nazi war criminal out of 1964’s East Berlin – and how they must revisit the mission 30 years later.   I recommend both movies.

The Holocaust has inspired many movies.  Here is my list of the 5 Essential Holocaust Films.

One of them is the 2002 documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary.   One of the central questions of the Holocaust is how could ordinary humans tolerate and even enable such monstrous acts?  Blind Spot is the story of Traudl Junge who, as a rural, naive 22-year-old, happened on a job in Hitler’s secretarial pool.  After the war, she lived in obscurity for decades.  Wracked with guilt, she was interviewed for 90 minutes shortly before her death by a filmmaker who lost his parents in the Holocaust.  This 90 minute interview is the core of Blind Spot.

Worst Movie Mothers

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She's only number 8

 

Here’s another random movie list:  Worst Movie Mothers.  These range from the stomach-turning to the chuckle-inducing.  And three of the top ten are in movies from the past three years.

Least Convincing Movie Monsters

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The Killer Shrews: This is a dog in a fright mask.

Given the Cowboys & Aliens hubbub and my post on 1994’s Oblivion, I’ve been thinking about phony looking movie monsters.  So here’s my list of the Least Convincing Movie Monsters.  These monsters are so bad that Godzilla doesn’t even make this list.  And the dogs wearing fright masks in The Killer Shrews (above) are only #3.  Enjoy.

More prison movies (the raunchiest of the genre)

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It’s not often that I get accused of being too high brow, but my friend Steve has criticized my heretofore well-regarded list of 10 Best Prison Movies for not including Women in Chains (1972).  Women in Chains is part of the subgenre of women-in-prison exploitation movies.  A prison setting offers a filmmaker the possibility of violence, sex and S&M to exploit.  With women’s prisons, nude shower scenes and catfights are added to the mix.  Steve fondly remembers this aspect of Women in Chains.  But, Steve, it was a made-for-TV movie, so it couldn’t have been THAT racy.

The absolute master of this genre is the website BigBustOut.com – The Original Encyclopedia of Women in Prison Films, which lists over 300 women-in-prison movies.  BigBustOut.com also has an excellent history of the genre. I’ve included BigBustOut on my list of Other People’s Great Movie Lists.  Here is BigBustOut’s take on Women in Chains.

My own guilty pleasure from 70s prison exploitation films is 1971’s 1,000 Convicts and a Woman, which I saw in a drive-in during a misspent evening of an otherwise upstanding youth.  1,000 Convicts and a Woman doesn’t make BigBustOut because it’s not about a women’s prison.  Instead, the oversexed daughter of the warden returns from finishing school and moves into the men’s prison.  Played by vamp-eyed blonde Alexandra Hay, she immediately begins to tease the incarcerated, with forseeable results.

 

Coming up on TV: Midnight Express

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On July 23, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting 1978’s  Midnight Express. This film is so gripping that, thirty-plus years after its release, you can’t hear “Turkish prison” without immediately thinking of Midnight Express.  It’s probably done more to keep American kids from bringing drugs into Turkey than any other factor.  Midnight Express is based on a true story, and is amped up considerably by Oliver Stone’s screenplay.  Nominated for six Oscars, it won two.

TCM is also showing Cool Hand Luke on July 23.  Both are on my list of 10 Best Prison Movies

DVDs of the Week: hang ten this summer!

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Let’s go surfin’ now

Everybody’s learning how

Come on and safari with me

It’s a great time for the two most awesome and gnarly surfing movies, the documentaries Step Into Liquid and Riding Giants.

Step Into Liquid (2003):  We see the world’s best pro surfers in the most extreme locations.  We also see devoted amateurs in the tiny ripples of Lake Michigan and surfing evangelists teaching Irish school children.  The cinematography is remarkable – critic Elvis Mitchell called the film “insanely gorgeous”.  The filmmaker is Dana Brown, son of Bruce Brown, who made The Endless Summer (1966) and The Endless Summer II (1994).

 

Riding Giants (2004):  This film focuses on the obsessive search for the best wave by some of the greatest surfers in history. We see “the biggest wave ever ridden” and then a monster that could be bigger.  The movie traces the discovery of the Half Moon Bay surf spot Mavericks.  And more and more, all wonderfully shot.

The filmmaker is Stacy Peralta, a surfer and one the pioneers of modern skateboarding (and a founder of the Powell Peralta skateboard product company).  Peralta also made Dogtown and Z-boys (2001), the great documentary about the roots of skateboarding, and wrote the 2005 Lords of Dogtown.

 

Both of these films make my list of Best Sports Movies.