documentary

Stream of the Week: LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY – an unimaginable escape and a quirky guy

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LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY

Werner Herzog’s documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly is a portrait of Dieter Dengler’s unimaginable life journey, highlighted by one of history’s most amazing feats of human endurance. With a childhood (as Herzog’s) in WWII Germany, Dengler survived US bombing raids that reduced his hometown to rubble; a glimpse of an American pilot spurred Dengler’s obsession with aviation. His drive to fly led him to emigration and a career as a US Navy aviator. Shot down in the Vietnam War, Dieter was captured and tortured. He made a daring escape, and, after the war, pursued civilian aviation; we finally see Dieter in his Marin County home with its odd survivalist features . Unsurprisingly, given the traumas he endured, Dieter has his quirks.

But the core of Little Dieter Needs to Fly is the amazing jungle escape. It was a 23-day ordeal with a manhunt hot on his heels. His 167-pound frame was whittled to 98 pounds. Herzog takes Dieter back to Southeast Asia and pays the locals to re-enact the capture and chase.

Werner Herzog, known for his German New Cinema art house hits of the 70s and 80s (Aguirre:The Wrath of God, Strozek Nosferatu the Vampyre, Fitzcarraldo), switched gears in 1997 with Little Dieter Needs to Fly and followed it with the masterpiece Grizzly Man. Since, Herzog has become a prolific and masterful documentarian.

Note: It’s not in Little Dieter, but, four years after the 1997 release of the film, Dieter was diagnosed with ALS and died from a self-inflicted gunshot.

The brisk 80 minutes of Little Dieter Needs to Fly can be streamed on Criterion, the Amazon Fandor channel, iTunes, Vudu and Google Play.

D.A. PENNEBAKER – giant of documentary cinema

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D.A> Pennebaker invents the music video in BOB DYAN: DON’T LOOK BACK

The influential filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker has died at age 94. Among Pennebaker’s innovative achievements:

  • His 1968 Monterey Pop is in the conversation as the best ever concert film, and it undeniably influenced the other great concert movies that have followed (Woodstock, The Last Waltz, Stop Making Sense). This is one of the few DVDs that I still own, for the performances by Mamas and the Papas, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Canned Heat, Simon and Garfunkle, Jefferson Airplane, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Country Joe and the Fish and The Who.   Pete Townsend and Jimi Hendrix had a guitar-destroying competition, which Hendrix, aided by lighter fluid, undeniably won. The Otis Redding set is epic.
  • Pennebaker’s 1993 The War Room, about the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign, sets the standard for the insider political campaign documentary.
  • Pennebaker directed Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back (1967), the story of Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England, when he was transitioning from an acoustic to an electric artist.  In the film’s opening, Pennebaker invented the music video, as Dylan holds up cards with the lyrics for Subterranean Homesick Blues.
    The pump don’t work
    ‘Cause the vandals took the handles
Otis Redding in MONTEREY POP

Stream of the Week: PROJECT NIM – a chimp learns the foibles of humans

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PROJECT NIM

The documentary Project Nim tells the extraordinary story of a chimpanzee that was taught a human language – American Sign Language.  In a remarkable and compelling journey, the chimp Nim is first placed as a baby with a human hippie family and then at a university-owned country estate and at college laboratories.  Amazingly, he learns to use an ASL vocabulary – not just responding to commands, but initiating communication and forming sentences.  Then, the experiment ends, and he is off to an assortment of post-placements, some terrifying.

Along the way, we hear from the motley assortment of humans involved in his raising, his exploitation and his care. One human who enters the story as a grad student, Bob Ingersoll, emerges as the hero of the story.  It’s the story of a chimp, but we learn more about the foibles of humans.

Acclaimed documentarian James Marsh (Man on Wire) delivers another great story – one of the 2011’s best documentaries.  Project Nim can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

MAKING MONTGOMERY CLIFT: exploding the myths

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MAKING MONTGOMERY CLIFT

The best documentary in this year’s Frameline festival may be Making Montgomery Clift, from directors Robert Anderson Clift and Hilary Demmon. It’s an unexpectedly insightful and nuanced probe into the life of Clift’s uncle, the movie star Montgomery Clift. And it explodes some of the lore that has shaped popular understanding of Montogomery Clift.

Clift is the son of Brooks Clift, Montogmery Clift’s brother and archivist. The younger Clift never met his uncle Monty, but had access to his father’s vast collection of Monty memorabilia and to the memories of family, friends and previous biographers.

Many of us think we know the arc of Montgomery Clift’s life: success as a 1950s movie heartthrob is torpedoed by the inner torment of his closeted homosexuality; then alcoholic self-medication and disfigurement from an auto accident propel him into drunken despair and an early death. It turns out to be a much, much more nuanced story.

It turns out that some in the Clift family indulged in secret audio taping to a jaw-dropping degree. Directors Clift and Demmon take full advantage of the actual conversations of Monty and others. Their gift is to drop in the most startling revelations without lingering or even emphasizing them. To watch Making Montgomery Clift is a constant exercise in “wait…WHAT?” Demmon’s brisk editing helps, too.

How tormented was Monty by his sexuality (which we learn was a robust bisexuality)? Witnesses – who would know – let us know that Monty was comfortable in his own skin and fairly open – for the times – about his sexuality. This wasn’t Rock Hudson or Tab Hunter.

We learn that Montgomery Clift’s refusal to sign a studio contract was to preserve BOTH his artistic independence and his sexual independence (avoiding being forced into faux marriage and the like).

Making Montgomery Clift also discredits the view that Monty sank into depression after the accident changed his looks. His personally most satisfying performances came AFTER the accident.

The insights into Monty’s artistic process are unique and significant. We hear the actual conversation between Montgomery Clift and director Stanley Kramer about Clift’s riveting cameo in Judgment at Nuremberg. Monty’s intentionality in shaping the scene dispels the myth that, instead of giving a performance, he had an actual breakdown before the camera. Yes, he was acting it, and it was spectacular.

There has been a handful of recent showbiz biodocs made by younger relatives of the famous artists. Usually, these films add some personal family anecdotes, but are so fond of their subjects that they’re not especially insightful. Making Montgomery Clift is not that – it ascends above the pack – and should change how all of us understand Monty Clift.

ROLLING THUNDER REVUE: A BOB DYLAN STORY BY MARTIN SCORSESE: doc and playfully not

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Scarlett Rivera and Bob Dylan in ROLLING THUNDER REVUE: A BOB DYLAN STORY BY MARTIN SCORSESE

So you think you know what you’re going to get from a movie titled Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. Indeed, Scorsese documents Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder tour. But he also, in what critic Jason Gorber calls an “anti-documentary” adds some fictional flourish, as befits Dylan’s longtime trickster persona.

Now for the documentary, which gives us a look at a mid-career Dylan (on the downside of his superstardom). The talking heads are great: lots of Bob Dylan himself, his sidemen, performers Joan Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Ronnie Hawkins and Ronee Blakley, and even the subject of a Dylan song, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. There’s a hilarious encounter between ex-lovers Baez and Dylan, as they mull over who left who.

There are explosive concert performances of Hurricane, Isis and A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall (but also a disappointing version of the tour’s signature song, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door).

Baez aside, the real co-star of the Rolling Thunder Revue was violinist Scarlett Rivera, whose violin licks elevated almost every song, especially Hurricane. My favorite Dylan performance – One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below) from the live album – is really more Rivera’s song than Dylan’s. In Rolling Thunder Revue, we get to hear from Rivera – and about her and her spirited personal life.

And now for the playful part – Scorsese has dotted this “documentary” with stuff that is not true. The performance artist Martin von Haselberg claims to have shot the concert footage for a pretentious art film that was never made, which Dylan credits to Stefan van Dorp. Hasleberg didn’t shoot it and van Dorp doesn’t even exist. The guy identified as the tour promoter is actually a movie exec. And Sharon Stone was too young to have been on this tour, although she spins a ROFLMAO faux anecdote about Just Like a Woman.

Michael Murphy, who starred in Robert Altman’s political mockumentary Tanner, is shown as a real Congressman Tanner. And did Scarlett Rivera really have a sword collection? Was Allen Ginsberg really a good dancer?

The critical praise for Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese has been rapturous, with one respected critic pegging it as the best doc of year. This reeks to me of Scorsese worship. I’m not sure I would recommend Rolling Thunder Revue to a general (non-Baby Boomer) audience. It does do a great job of taking us backstage for the inside morsels – and it is creatively sly.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese is now streaming on Netflix.

BTW I highly recommend Peter Sobczynski’s comprehensive essay on the Cinema of Bob Dylan in rogerebert.com. It’s kind of spectacular.

FRAMING JOHN DELOREAN: a pulpy story, partly rehashed

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John DeLorean in FRAMING JOHN DELOREAN

Ever since the myth of Icarus, we have understood that audacity can take you only so far – but it often makes for a great story. The biodoc Framing John DeLorean tells PART of the story of a man whose audacious risk-taking invented the muscle car, propelled a meteoric corporate career, led him to found an automaker and to become a global celebrity and to marry a supermodel. And then to stumble into criminal prosecution, bankruptcy and divorce.

Framing John DeLorean leads through the familiar DeLorean story of his rise and flame-out and General Motors, the founding of the DeLorean Motors Company and the FBI videotaping him in a hotel room with $6.5 million of cocaine. We hear from Bill Collins – DeLorean’s engineering whiz for the Pontiac GTO and the DeLorean – and from DeLorean’s son and daughter. (But not from Cristina Ferrare, DeLorean’s celebrity trophy spouse). There a few unfamiliar nuggets, like DeLorean’s getting cosmetic surgery to enhance his jaw – and make him look like the swashbuckler that he was.

However, there’s a massive hole in Framing John DeLorean. A sketchy deal with a company called GPD is mentioned, but even with a forensic accountant as a talking head, the film doesn’t answer, or even pose, some questions that come immediately to mind. This article in Car and Driver provides more insight into the real story than does Framing John DeLorean.

The actor Alec Baldwin claims that DeLorean himself once suggested that Baldwin play him on screen. Framing John DeLorean has Baldwin play DeLorean in re-enactment scenes (along with Josh Charles as Bill Collins). The scenes with Baldwin add nothing to the film. I suspect that these Baldwin scenes were added only to use Baldwin’s drawing power to create a more marketable, not a better, film.

Framing John Delorean repeatedly asks why a narrative feature film has not been made about DeLorean and his pulpy story. But there isn’t a clear answer, and asking that question should be left to the audience of any documentary.

If you don’t know anything about John DeLorean, Framing John DeLorean is a decent primer. If you already know the story, I’d recommend the Car and Driver article instead. Framing John DeLorean is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

DVD/Stream of the Week: STORIES WE TELL – when life surprises…and how we explain it

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Michael Polley in STORIES WE TELL

Stories We Tell is the third film from brilliant Canadian director Sarah Polley (Away From Her, Take This Waltz), a documentary in which she interviews members of her own family about her mother, who died when Sarah was 11. It doesn’t take long before Sarah uncovers a major surprise about her own life. And then she steps into an even bigger surprise about the first surprise. And then there’s a completely unexpected reaction by Polley’s father Michael.

There are surprises aplenty in the Polley family saga, but how folks react to the discoveries is just as interesting. It helps that everyone in the Polley family has a deliciously wicked sense of humor.

The family story is compelling enough, but Polley also explores story telling itself. Everyone who knew Polley’s mother tells her story from a different perspective. But we can weave together the often conflicting versions into what seems like a pretty complete portrait of a complicated person.

Polley adds more layers of meaning and ties the material together by filming herself recording her father reading his version of the story – his memoir serves as the unifying narration.

To take us back to the 1960s, Polley uses one-third actual home movies and two-thirds re-creations (with actors) shot on Super 8 film. Polley hired cinematographer Iris Ng after seeing Ng’s 5 minute Super 8 short. The most haunting clip is a real one, a video of the actress Mom’s audition for a 60s Canadian TV show.

Make sure that you watch all of the end credits – there’s one more surprise, and it’s hilarious.

You can rent Stories We Tell on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Stream of the Week: OJ: MADE IN AMERICA: finally, the sensational story stripped of the sideshow

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oj-made-in-america
This week’s video choice is perfect for binging over the upcoming holiday weekend:  OJ: Made in America.  Initially, I hadn’t thought of putting it on my Best Movies of 2016 because it’s an eight-hour ESPN documentary series, but, after it wound up on lots of critic’s year-end lists, I put it on mine because it’s good enough to merit it.

I remember the OJ saga with distaste because it became a sideshow – the Bronco ride, the Trial of the Century, the bloody glove (“if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”), Kato Kaelin, Judge Lance Ito and the seemingly unfathomable verdict. The genius of director Ezra Edelman is that OJ: Made in America rights a media wrong by keeping a laser focus on the crime itself and setting out the societal factors that explain how this all went so far off track. The sideshow elements are shown to be what they really were – distractions from the greater truth of a domestic violence murder.

OJ: Made in America is an unflinching look at a marriage that disintegrated because of chronic domestic violence, and then evolved into a terrifying stalker situation. We also see glimpses of crime scene photos, grisly but not exploitative, that reinforce the gravity of the crime.

With more clarity than in any other film treatment of this case, we see OJ Simpson’s abandonment and even rejection of the African-American community and of his own racial identity – “I’m not Black, I’m O.J.”. We see OJ creating a new community for himself of wealthy white men and refusing to perform advocacy, fundraising or even lending his name for African-American causes. And so we are left with the sickening irony of OJ becoming a posterchild for black victimhood and a rallying point for resistance to white oppression.

To set the stage for the trial, Edelman shows us the historic racist oppression by the LAPD and the missteps by prosecution that created an environment that the legal team for a celebrity could exploit. Through file footage and talking head witnesses, Edelman takes us through the trial to explain the critical choices that resulted in the verdict. Finally, we see the surveillance video of the bumbling, thuggish crime that OJ was imprisoned for until last year.

OJ: Made in America benefits from an impressive group of witnesses, including prosecutor Marcia Clark, detective Mark Fuhrman, defense lawyer Barry Scheck, DA Gil Garcetti, former OJ confidantes Ron Shipp and Mike Gilbert and Nicole Brown Simpson’s sister.

ESPN, with its reliably solid 30 for 30 series, is, along with PBS and HBO, one of the most prolific sources of excellent documentaries. With OJ: Made in Americas, ESPN has produced one of the top three or four documentaries of the year.

The trailer is on the film’s homepage. You can watch the entire movie on ESPNWatch and on some other streaming platforms such as iTunes and Hulu.

AN AMERICAN STORY: NORMAN MINETA AND HIS LEGACY

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AN AMERICAN STORY: NORMAN MINETA AND HIS LEGACY

An American Story: Norman Mineta and His Legacy traces the life and times of Norman Mineta, who amassed a startling number of “firsts” and other distinctions in America history:

  • The first Asian-American mayor of a major U.S. city.
  • The first Japanese American member of Congress elected from the 48 Continental states.
  • A Cabinet Secretary in both Democratic and Republican Administrations.
  • The nation’s longest-serving Transportation Secretary.

The achievements were even more remarkable given that, as a child, Mineta was imprisoned by his own US government in a WW II internment camp. And given that his political base had, during his career, an Asian-American population of far less than ten percent.

This didn’t happen by accident.  Norm Mineta is a driven man. At the same time, his ambition and will is tempered by his buoyancy and ebullience.

Documentarians Dianne Fukumi (director and co-producer) and Debra Nakatomi (co-producer) embed the story of Japanese-Americans, from immigration through internment, and on to reparations.

AN AMERICAN STORY: NORMAN MINETA AND HIS LEGACY

The defining event for Mineta’s Nissei generation was the WW II internment of 120,000 Americans by their own government. The central thread in the Mineta story is that the injustice of Mineta’s internment informed George W. Bush’s resistance to treating American Muslims that same way in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Mineta being sworn into the US House of Representatives by House Speaker Carl Albert in AN AMERICAN STORY: NORMAN MINETA AND HIS LEGACY

The film’s most delightful moment may be the octogenarian Mineta sunnily taking his luggage through security at Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport.

[Full disclosure: I have known Norm since I served in his 1974 primary campaign and interned for him on Capitol Hill in the mid 70s.]

I saw An American Story: Norman Mineta and His Legacy at an October 2018 special screening with Norm Mineta, Fukumi and Nakatomi in San Jose. A brisk 60 minutes, it will be broadcast on PBS in May 20.

https://vimeo.com/266805068

MEETING GORBACHEV: uncritical but humanizing

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Mikhail Gorbachev in MEETING GORBACHEV

Meeting Gorbachev is Werner Herzog’s admiring biodoc of Mikhail Gorbachev, unquestionably one of the 20th century’s most pivotal figures. Herzog filmed three conversations with the then 87-year-old Gorbachev in 2018.

Gorbachev is revered in Germany – particularly by Werner Herzog – for allowing the peaceful, and startlingly quick, reunification of Germany. This biodoc is, to a fault, uncritical. At one point, Herzog even tells Gorbachev, “I love you”.

As the leader of the USSR, Gorbachev’s concepts of Perestroika and Glasnost transformed the political, economic and foreign policy of the Cold War superpower. More than any other individual, Gorbachev can claim credit for ending the Cold War, abolishing and destroying mid-range and short-range nuclear weapons, and the unchallenged independence of the Iron Curtain countries.

Gorbachev is also a tragic figure of Shakespearean proportions. He was intending to reform the USSR, not to destroy it. A coup by fossilized communists knocked him out of power but couldn’t be sustained, spinning out of control and leading to a chaos taken advantage of by the strong man Putin,.

Herzog’s film is excellent in its well-researched and well-told story of the rise of Gorbachev from a modest agricultural backwater – a talented achiever on the rise. Herzog’s irreverent sense of humors, as always, peeks through in the state funerals of Gorbachev’s predecessors, each more absurdly funny than the last.

The greatest gift of Meeting Gorbachev is, as the title suggests, is the unfiltered Gorbachev himself – now a grandfatherly raconteur. We get to appreciate his intellectual curiosity and his clarity of thought and direction. His charm and charisma, even at 87, help us understand how he rose to world leadership.

Werner Herzog and Mikhail Gorbachev in MEETING GORBACHEV

Herzog was a charismatic and innovative leader of German New Cinema. Between 1972 and 1982, he created the art house hits Aguirre:The Wrath of God, Strozek Nosferatu the Vampyre, and Fitzcarraldo.

In 1997, Herzog switched gears with the underrated documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly and followed it with great docs like Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World. Most remarkably, Herzog has also become one of the greatest narrators of English language documentaries; somehow, his German-accented narrations are hypnotic. (In 2007, Herzog slipped in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans with Nicholas Cage in the Klaus Kinski wild man role and cinema’s funniest iguana hallucination.)

Meeting Gorbachev played at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). I saw Meeting Gorbachev at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club.