NUTS! is the persistently hilarious (and finally poignant) documentary about the rise and fall of a medical and radio empire – all built on goat testicle “implantation” surgery in gullible humans. Yes, a huckster named J.R. Brinkley really did surgically place goat testicles inside human scrota – and, more astonishingly, this actually became a craze in the 1920s. Now that’s enough of a forehead slapper, but there’s more, much more and that’s what makes NUTS! so fun.
Brinkley’s story is one that leads to celebrity mega wealth and a colossal miscalculation. Improbably, Brinkley’s wild ride touched Huey Long,William Jennings Bryan, Rudolph Valentino, Buster Keaton, June Carter Cash and Wolfman Jack. There’s a radio empire, a Gubernatorial election and a dramatic, climactic trial.
“Dr.” Brinkley at work in NUTS!
Director Penny Lane tells the story with animation (different animators for each chapter, but you can’t tell) seamlessly braided together with historical still photos, movies and a final heartbreaking recording. NUTS! tells a story that is too bizarre to be true – but really happened. It makes for a most entertaining movie.
I saw NUTS! earlier this year at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF). It opens in Bay Area theaters today.
The important and absorbing documentary Zero Days traces the story of an incredibly successful cyber attack by two nation states upon another – and its implications. In Iran’s nuclear weapons development program, the centrifuges used to enrich uranium began destroying themselves in 2010. It turned out that these machines were instructed to self-destruct by a computer worm devised by American and Israeli intelligence.
No doubt – this was an amazing technological triumph. Zero Days takes us through a thrilling whodunit non-geek audience. We learn how a network that is completely disconnected from the Internet can still be infected. And how cybersecurity experts track down viruses. It’s all accessible and fascinating.
But, strategically, was this really a cyberwarfare victory? We learn just what parts of our lives can be attacked and frozen by computer attacks (Spoiler: pretty much everything). And we learn that this attack has greenlighted cyberwarfare by other nations – including hostile and potentially hostile ones. Zero Days makes a persuasive case that we need to have a public debate – as we have had on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons – on the use of this new kind of weaponry.
Director Alex Gibney is one our very, very best documentarians. He won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and he made the superb Casino Jack: The United States of Money, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer,Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,Going Clear: The Prison of Beliefand Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine.
Gibney’s specialty is getting sources on-camera that have the most intimate knowledge of his topic. In Zero Days, he pulls out a crew of cybersecurity experts, the top journalist covering cyberwarfare, leaders of both Israeli and American intelligence and even someone who can explain the Iranian perspective. Most impressively, Gibney has found insiders from the NSA who actually worked on this cyber attack (and prepared others).
Zero Days opens tomorrow in theaters and will also be available to stream on Amazon, iTunes, Vusu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox and various PPV platforms, including DirecTV.
Here is the perfect companion film to Weiner – it’s the inside story of ANOTHER campaign – one of Anthony Weiner’s opponents in the same 2013 mayoral election.
Hers to Lose: Inside Christine Quinn’s Bid for Mayor is an extraordinarily evocative political film, it’s only 30 minutes long and you can watch it for free. It’s the story of Christine C. Quinn’s bid for New York City mayor in 2013. At the start of the race, Quinn was the heavy favorite. She was the City Council President and a dominant force in Manhattan’s Democratic establishment. She would have been the first woman and the first openly gay Mayor of New York City.
Then, as happens in politics, two things went wrong. First, she had positioned herself as the Democratic partner and heir to Republican Mayor Bloomberg, which helped her immensely in the years of Bloomberg’s popularity in New York; but by the time of the 2013 primary, Bloomberg had become very UNPOPULAR among Democratic primary voters. Then, as voters looked to an anti-Bloomberg alternative, one of Quinn’s opponents, Bill de Blasio unleashed a killer campaign commercial, featuring his teenage son Dante, that crystallized the aspirations of the electorate. Quinn sank like a rock in the polls, and de Blasio shot upward. This was one of those moments in a political campaign when there is just nothing a candidate can do to stop a popular tsunami.
As Hers to Lose opens, we see Quinn – just after her defeat – explaining that she granted access to the New York Times documentarians so they could record her victory. She is composed, but her eyes are filled with pain. Quinn had dedicated years of her life to running in this race, suffering political and personal attacks, enduring long hours and living in a fish bowl; to see this film is to appreciate how much she put into the contest and how helplessly she watched her lead slip away. At its most searing, Her to Lose chronicles the never-ending torrent of abuse hurled at Quinn by haters – especially the single issue opponents of horse-drawn carriages, who hang around her building so they can revile her as she begins each day; as one might assume, this vitriol takes its toll.
You can view Hers to Lose: Inside Christine Quinn’s Bid for Mayorhere at the NYT.
WEINER. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.
Don’t miss the political documentary Weiner, probably the best documentary of the year. It also provokes some reflection on the media in this age.
You may remember Anthony Weiner as the politician forced out of Congress in a sexting scandal. A couple of years later, he tried to make a comeback by running for mayor of New York City. Weiner is the inside story of that campaign, which self-immolated when the sexting scandal popped up again. Weiner is a marvelously entertaining chronicle of the campaign, a character study of Anthony Weiner himself and an almost voyeuristic peek into Weiner’s marriage to another political star, Huma Abedin.
Co-director Josh Kriegman served as Weiner’s Congressional chief of staff and left politics for filmmaking. When Weiner was contemplating the run for mayor, Kriegman asked to shadow him in the campaign, and Weiner agreed. Kriegman and co-director Elyse Steinberg shot 400 hours of backstage footage and caught some searing moments of human folly, triumph and angst.
In office, eight-term New York Congressman Anthony Weiner was a firebrand, pugnacious and a master debater with a vicious sense of humor, always eager to mix it up. He is married to Huma Abedin, a close Hilary Clinton advisor often described as “Hilary’s other daughter”. Huma is as reserved as Anthony is ebullient, and her own distinguished career in politics has been behind the scenes. He lives for the limelight, but she is uncomfortable in it.
Anthony begins his comeback with brutally painful media launch. The press is in a complete feeding frenzy – all revisiting the scandal and nothing else. One of the highlights of Weiner is a montage of talking heads reviling Weiner, including Donald Trump, who bellows, “We don’t want any perverts in New York City”.
But when Anthony goes on the campaign trail, the electorate begins to really respond to his passion and feistiness. Weiner unexpectedly surges into the lead 10 weeks to go. We are treated to a first-class procedural and see what only political pros see – the banal opening of a campaign office, rehearsing speeches, shooting commercials, dialing for dollars.
But then the scandal re-opens when a publicity-seeking bimbo releases a photo of Anthony’s penis that Weiner had texted her. We see his Communications Director as the new scandal unfolds in real-time, her eyes becoming lifeless; my day job for the last thirty years has been in politics, and I have gotten some bad news, but nothing like this.
Amazingly, we see Anthony calling Huma and telling her. When the screenshot of Anthony’s penis shot goes viral, we watch as Hums see it for the first time on the Internet, and her anger builds into rage. Anthony finally kicks out the camera.
Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin in WEINER
New York Post prints headlines like “Weiner: I’ll Stick It Out” and “Obama Beats Weiner”. Anthony tells his shell-shocked and pissed off staff “nobody died”, but nobody’s buying it. Anthony has masterfully redefined himself to be more than the punchline once, but the second set of revelations make him indelibly a punchline – and no one can come back from that. From behind the camera, Kriegman plaintively asks Weiner.”Why did you let me film this?”.
Anthony’s pollster gives him the bad news: “There’s no path anymore to get to a runoff” and “So this is a solo flight”. The smell of death is about the campaign at the end, but Anthony is in “never quit” phase.
Anthony’s best moment is when he is obligated to face a hostile neighborhood meeting in the Bronx neighborhood of City Island. He knows that he is doing poorly there, and there aren’t many voters out there anyway, but he keeps his head high and delivers a courageous effort.
Anthony’s worst moment may be when he is re-watching himself in a mutual evisceration of a TV host on YouTube. He is relishing the combat, but Huma, behind him, is appalled by Anthony’s Pyrrhic victory. He smugly thinks that’s he won the verbal firefight, but Huma just says, “It’s bad”. She’s right.
I saw Weiner at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) at a screening with co-directors Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg. Kriegman said that he “intended to show the humanity behind the headline – the nuance that is Anthony”. Steinberg noted that “the most exposed are the least revealed”. As of the SFIFF screening on April 23, Anthony Weiner had to date declined to watch Weiner. In Weiner, Anthony looks back after the campaign and ruefully sums it up, “I lied and I had a funny name”.
Weiner has more than its share of forehead-slapping moments and is often funny and always captivating. It’s almost certainly the year’s best documentary and one of best films of 2016, period.
Meet the Patels is both a documentary and a comedy – and ultimately, a satisfying crowd-pleaser. Over several years, filmmaker Geeta Patel filmed her own brother Ravi and their parents in their quest to find a wife for Ravi. Ravi and Geeta’s parents were born in India, had a traditional arranged marriage which has resulted in decades of happiness. Their American-born kids, of course, reject the very idea of an arranged marriage. But Ravi finds the pull of his Indian heritage compelling enough to dump his redheaded girlfriend and try to find a nice Indian-American girl. His parents try to help him with unbounded and unrelenting enthusiasm.
Meet the Patels is very funny – much funnier than most fictional comedies. It’s always awkward when parents involve themselves in their child’s romantic aspirations. That’s true here, and produces some side-splitting moments. It helps that the Patel parents are very expressive, and downright hilarious. The dad is so funny that I could watch him read a telephone book for 90 minutes, and the mom is herself a force of nature.
We learn that the Patels of Gujarat have adapted an entire menu of marriage opportunities unfamiliar to mainstream American society: a matchmaking profile system called “biodata”, matrimonial fairs, “the wedding season” and more.
Meet the Patels has its share of cultural tourism and the clash of generations. But it is so damn appealing because it’s much more than that – it’s a completely authentic saga of family dynamics, dynamics that we’ve all experienced or at least observed. The family members’ mutual love for each other drives family conflict and, finally, family unity.
I saw Meet the Patels at the Camera Cinema Clublast year, and it had a brief theatrical run in the Bay Area. Meet the Patels is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play. It’s hilarious and heart-warming, so don’t miss it.
Ever notice how people who watch a lot of Fox News or listen to talk radio become bitter, angry and, most telling, fact-resistant? In the documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, filmmaker Jan Senko as she explores how right-wing media impacts the mood and personality of its consumers as well as their political outlook. Senko uses her own father Frank as a case study.
We see Frank Senko become continually mad and, well, mean. And we hear testimony about many, many others with the identical experience. Experts explain the existence of a biological addiction to anger.
Senko traces the history of right-wing media from the mid-1960s, with the contributions of Lewis Powell, Richard Nixon, Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. Senko even gets right-wing wordsmith Frank Luntz on camera to explain the power of buzz words. If you don’t know this story (Hillary was right about the “vast, right-wing conspiracy”) , Senko spins the tale very comprehensively. If you do know the material (and my day job is in politics), it is methodical.
This topic is usually explored for its impact on political opinion. Senko’s focus on mood and personality is original and The Brainwashing of My Dad contributes an important addition to the conversation. One last thing about the brainwashing of Senko’s dad – it may not be irreversible…
I first reviewed The Brainwashing of My Dad for its U.S. Premiere at Cinequest 2016. The Brainwashing of My Dad is available streaming on Amazon Video, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
In the documentary Meet the Hitlers, we are introduced to those few people who choose NOT to change their birth name of “Hitler”. And it’s a varied bunch. We meet a delightfully confident Missouri teen girl, a workaday Ecuadorian whose parents didn’t know who Hitler was and an affable Utah oldster who might be the most jovial fellow ever to brighten up a chain restaurant. And there’s an Austrian odd duck burdened with enough personal baggage that he surely didn’t need this name. Do they see the name as a curse, and how has it affected them? It’s a theoretical question to us in the audience, but it’s compelling to see the real world responses of the film’s subjects.
And then there’s a mystery about three Americans who HAVE changed the name – because they are the last living relatives of Adolph Hitler. We follow the journalist who has been tracking them down for over a decade. (Documentarian Matt Ogens makes a great editorial choice as to whether to reveal their current names.)
Finally, there’s the disturbing saga of a New Jersey neo-Nazi who is NOT named Adolph Hitler but WANTS to be. Of course, anybody can choose to adorn themselves with a Hitler mustache and swastika tattoos and spew hatespeech, but his choices are affecting not just himself, but his children.
Some of these threads are light-hearted and some are very dark. Meet the Hitlers works so well because Ogens weaves them together so seamlessly. It’s a very successful documentary.
I first reviewed Meet the Hitlers for its premiere at Cinequest 2015. Now Meet the Hitlers is available for streaming rental from Amazon Video and Vudu and for streaming purchase from iTunes.
There’s no slick TED Talk or cool graphics in the compelling and sometimes chilling documentary The Cross of the Moment. In that way, it’s exactly the film that An Inconvenient Truth was trying NOT to be. But The Cross of the Moment is actually the more ambitious film because it’s not trying to convince us that global warming exists or is caused by humans – it’s helping us understand the bleakness of the “or else” if we don’t stall or reverse climate change.
Indeed, we hear from talking heads (really, really smart talking heads). Director Jacob Freydont-Attie has selected scientists who are as able as the great scientific popularizers like Carl Sagan and James Burke. It’s stripped down, undiluted science from scientists – but ever lively. As a result, we in the audience are able to connect the dots ourselves. We are in Deep Shit. And capitalism itself may keep us from digging our way out.
The International Film Festival of North Hollywood (IFFNOHO) will present the world premiere of The Cross of the Moment on Sunday, May 1.
PROJECTIONS OF AMERICA. Photo courtesy of PBS International.
Peter Miller’s documentary Projections of America reveals the story of American-made World War II propaganda films, designed to reassure the soon-to-be-occupied Europeans. “Propaganda” is a sinister word, and the surprise in Projections of America is how indirect, subtle and superficially benign the filmmakers were. The goal of the films was to make the liberating Americans seem not so scary, even though they were bombing Europe and then showing up heavily armed en masse and speaking only English.
The government tapped Hollywood screenwriter Robert Riskin (It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) to make a series of movies, and Projections of America is also very much Riskin’s story. We even see Riskin’s family home movies and hear directly from his children (whose mother was the actress Fay Wray).
We are used to government propaganda being bombastic, obvious and heavy handed, which these films are not. Riskin’s team made slice-of-American-life films to showcase workaday America through the daily experiences of Americans – with their implicit American values shining through.
One film, Swedes in America, hosted by Ingrid Bergman, showed just one tile in the American mosaic, but the everyday lives of Swedish-Americans resonated with other European ethnicities, who could imagine themselves comfortable in American society. Another movie focused on a popular American immigrant from Italy, Arturo Toscanini. And still another film brought a boy from bombed-out Britain to the American West to show him the real-life cowboy experience firsthand (how cool that must have been!).
The most popular movie in the series was Autobiography of a Jeep, which tracked every step of a Jeep’s journey from its American assembly plant to its use in wartime Europe – with the Jeep’s internal dialogue as the film’s narration.
The movies, of course, show a favorable and idealized, but not completely phony, view of America. Certainly, the films did not dwell on problems of American society, such as racial segregation. One movie depicts a small town receiving European refugees at first with distrust, but finally with acceptance. The overall impact of the movies was to depict America and Americans as free, boisterous and alive with possibilities. That, at its core, was not untruthful.
Projections of America is narrated by John Lithgow.
The International Film Festival of North Hollywood (IFFNOHO) will host Projections of America’s LA premiere on Saturday, April 30. Autobiography of a Jeep is also playing separately at IFFNOHO.
I challenge anyone to watch the first one minute of the absorbing documentary Gazelle: The Love Issue without wanting to see more of Gazelle Paulo and his art. Gazelle’s art defies easy description – an unusual combination of fashion and performance art. He dresses, models, takes photos of others and has turned his photo blog (FreakChic.com) into the magazine Gazelle. In Gazelle: The Love Issue, director Cesar Terranova gives us the unvarnished Gazelle, with glimpses of the most personal aspects of his life and relationships.
Gazelle creates striking clothes and makeup that project ideas and feelings. Descriptions like “drag queen” or Gazelle’s own understated “dressing up to go out” are totally inadequate and misleading. Whether it’s funny or disturbing, this stuff is real art, more avant-garde than campy. And as art must be to be good, Gazelle’s is ever evocative.
Spending 94 minutes with Paulo is pretty easy because he’s so gentle and humble despite his flamboyant, even exhibitionistic, behavior. He’s an island of genuine kindness in a sea of snark and bitchiness.
The International Film Festival of North Hollywood (IFFNOHO) is showcasing the LA premiere of Gazelle: The Love Issue as the festival’s opening night film on Thursday, April 28, and it’s a sure-fire crowd-pleaser.
