The environmental justice documentary Demon Mineral explores the impact of uranium mining on the Navajo people. In her first feature, director and co-writer Hadley Austin uses indigenous voices to tell the story, including her co-writer, environmental scientist Dr. Tommy Rock. It’s the testimony of Navajo people themselves that traces the history of uranium mining, subsequent health problems and the science connecting the dots. Some of the first-person narratives are heart-breaking.
This real life story takes place in one of the most iconic locations in American cinema – Arizona’s Monument Valley. (The Navajo themselves have complicated feelings about the legacy of John Ford Westerns made in their homeland.) Cinematographer Yoni Goldstein’s black-and-white photography soars, bringing out the majesty of the harsh landscape and imparting a gravitas to the story.
There’s even a cameo by hard right Congressman Paul Gosar, who is so stupid that he doesn’t comprehend just how stupid he is.
Demon Mineral has enjoyed a robust film festival run and won the Audience Award for Documentary Feature at the 2024 Slamdance.
Jon Voight in his screen test for Midnight Cowboy from DESPERATE SOULS, DARK CITY AND THE LEGEND OF MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.
The remarkably insightful documentary Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy explores the making of Midnight Cowboy and its place both in cinema and in American culture.
Midnight Cowboy won Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay, all with an X-rating. Sure, we know Midnight Cowboy as a groundbreaking film, but Desperate Souls argues that it both reflected the zeitgeist of the moment and opened new possibilities in American filmmaking.
This was a transitional period in Hollywood and in the culture. Midnight Cowboy won its Oscars at the same Academy Award ceremony that honored John Wayne as Best Actor. Midnight Cowboy’s protagonists were completely unDukelike, one a would-be gigolo and the other an almost homeless conman.
So, we have two marginal anti-heroes and their unconventional bond, along with, shockingly, incidents of gay sex, heterosexual impotence and incontinence. The director John Schlesinger himself was a closeted gay man. Anyone who was alive in 1969 can tell you that this was extraordinarily transgressive content to penetrate the cultural mainstream.
Besides the unsettling themes, Midnight Cowboy, along with The Graduate (1967) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) pioneered the effective use of popular music on the soundtrack. Midnight Cowboy is notable for both John Barry’s Emmy-winning score and for the use of Fred Niel’s Everybody’s Talkin’, which Schlesinger used as the theme.
Filmmaker Nancy Buirski, who died in September, builds her case with superb sourcing. She hit gold with the unique perspective of Jennifer Salt, who observed her father, screenwriter Waldo Salt, and the director John Schlesinger birth the film; she also acted in the movie and came to date its star, Jon Voight. Voight himself bookends the film with emotionally powerful reflections.
Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy also includes Voight’s screen test, and I dare you to explain why the filmmakers, after watching it, said THAT’S THE GUY.
As I write, Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy is number 21 on my carefully curated list of Longest Movie Titles.
This is a strong film, and a Must See for cinephiles, especially Jon Voight’s intro and outro. saw Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, Midnight Cowboy at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and you can stream it now on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
Photo caption: Lady Bird Johnson in THE LADY BIRD DIARIES. Courtesy of Hulu.
For students of 29th Century American political history, The Lady Bird Diaries is essential. In her time as First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson audio-recorded her candid observations of some of the nation’s most dynamic and turbulent years. The 123 hours of those recordings, now released after her death, have been excerpted into the core of this singular documentary.
We hear Lady Bird’s unique point of view on the JFK assassination, LBJ’s battles with depression, the infamous White House luncheon Eartha Kitt incident and RFK. And, after all, she was living in the White House with LBJ through his Civil Rights triumphs and the morass of Vietnam. LBJ’s presidency was so jampacked, we get the tiniest mention of Medicare (Oh, yeah, THAT was LBJ, too).
Lady Bird’s first-person perspective would be valuable enough in a written document, but hearing her actual voice brings even deeper insights into the events, LBJ and Lady Bird herself.
Indeed, The Lady Bird Diaries Lady Bird’s own voice is almost the entire film, annotated only by director Dawn Porter’s exceptional use of explanatory titles, archive clips and photos. Porter’s use of images is as brilliant as I’ve seen in a doc.
Lady Bird’s narration, combined with recorded phone calls between the Johnsons, makes clear Lady Bird’s involvement in her husband’s career. She gave him advice on matters both tactical, critiquing his speeches, and strategic (including whether to seek re-election). LBJ was notoriously thin-skinned, came closest to welcoming criticism only from Lady Bird. One of the most sharp and insightful segments is a disagreement between the Johnsons on how to handle the Walter Jenkins scandal (LBJ’s chief of staff caught in a homosexual haunt) days before the 1964 presidential election. Clearly, Lady Bird was determined to give LBJ her best thinking, whether he wanted it or not.
The Lady Bird Diaries also reminds us of:
Lady Bird’s groundbreaking work on the environment, then known as the “beautification” campaign.
Her gameness to campaign in a 1964 whistlestop tour through the South, facing down White voters howling about LBJ’s Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The toll on the Johnsons from the the unrelenting public scorn about Vietnam.
This is fantastic history and an extraordinary film. The Lady Bird Diaries is streaming on Hulu.
Photo caption: John le Carré in THE PIGEON TUNNEL. Courtesy of AppleTV.
The espionage novelist John le Carré was one of our greatest storytellers over the past sixty years, and, in The Pigeon Tunnel, the great documentarian Errol Morris cajoles le Carré (real name David Cromwell) to tell his own life story – and what a story it is.
I love the twists and turns in le Carré’s stories, which are set in the world which le Carré himself experienced in his youth as a Cold War British spy. But the underlying theme of le Carré’s work is that his characters are engaged in the highest stakes when it really doesn’t matter who wins;. The comic strip character Pogo wisely told us: We have met the enemy and he is us. The spymasters are incented by their own bureaucratic imperatives and the gamesmanship itself, not by righteousness or utility. His credo seems to be, rage against the machine, with futility.
Indeed, the title of the film stems from a most unsettling and revelatory image from the young le Carré’s trip with his father to Monaco – a grim analogy about the hopeless position of those who are pawns in the games of others.
What formed the cynical rage behind the cultured and ever so pleasant le Carré? As Morris probes le Carré’s childhood, we learn of his father, a sociopath and career con artist, a man so psychotically selfish that his mother abandoned her sons as the only way to escape their father.
Le Carré also explains the impact on him of the British traitor Kim Philby, the pivotal moment of his time in British espionage, which cemented Le Carrie’s own fascination with betrayal.
It is important for le Carré to take the measure of Morris as interviewer/interrogator. It is so interesting that le Carré/Cromwell’s storytelling (the means? the depth? the very content?) depends on whom he is engaged with.
Erroll Morris has created some of the best ever American documentary films, including Gates of Heaven and The Thin Blue Line. He is the master of the interview doc, where he uses a gizmo to photograph his subjects while they maintain direct eye contact with him; he has employed the technique to let Robert McNamara (The Fog of War) and Donald Rumsfeld (The Unknown Known) reveal more of themselves than they intended and to introduce us to the woman who kidnapped a Mormon missionary as a sex slave and later cloned her pet dogs (Tabloid) and the designer of execution techniques who denied the Holocaust (Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A Leuchter, Jr.).
Many le Carré novels and stories have been made into excellent films, which are available to stream, including
Raya Burstein and Uri Burstein in CHARM CIRCLE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.
Inthe superbly structured documentary Charm Circle, writer-director Nira Burstein exquisitely unspools the story of her own bizarre family. At first, we meet Burstein’s father, a sour character who inexplicably is about to lose his rented house, which has become unkempt, even filthy. He is mean to Burstein’s apparently sweet and extraordinarily passive mother, and the scene just seems unpleasant.
But then, Nira Burstein brings out twenty-year-old videos that show her dad as witty, talented and functional. We learn a key fact about the mom, and then about each of the director’s two sisters.
Some of the publicity about Charm Circle describes the family as eccentric, but only one daughter is a little odd – three family members are clinically diagnosable. Charm Circle is a cautionary story of untreated mental illness and the consequences of failing to reach out for help.
This is Nira Burstein’s first feature, and she has two things going for her: unlimited access to the subjects and a remarkable gift for storytelling. Charm Circle works so well because of how Burstein sequences the rollout of each family member’s story.
The Nashville Film Festival returns in a few days, and I attended a screening of Charm Circle, with a Nira Burstein Q&A at NashFilm two years ago. It went on to play both the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and Cinequest, and can now be streamed on the Criterion Channel.
Photo caption: Mike Veeck in THE SAINT OF SECOND CHANCES. Courtesy of Netflix.
The endearing documentary The Saint of Second Chances is about a guy who is both a character himself and the son of another character. Mike Veeck, the film’s subject, is the son of the legendary Bill Veeck, who was kind of the P.T. Barnum of baseball, known for the many gimmicks he used to draw paying fans into the ballpark. Unlike his father, Mike Veeck is not in the Hall of Fame, but he has earned his place in his self-described “family of baseball hustlers”.
This a movie about baseball people that really isn’t about baseball itself. It’s about Mike’s irrepressibility, ingenuity and audacity in conjuring up publicity stunt after publicity stunt. The story, cleverly divided into innings, traces Mike’s life through his very high highs and his very low lows. You may already know about his most famous low point – the Chicago White Sox’s “Disco Sucks Night” in 1979 that turned into a riot. That disaster drove Mike out of baseball, until, years later, he started promoting obscure minor league baseball teams with wacky novelties like the St. Paul Saints and their baseball-delivering pig, their nun masseuse and their blind radio broadcaster.
Like anyone’s life, Mike’s has had his share of heartaches, and The Saint of Second Chances‘ wistful moments are genuine and touching.
Photo caption: THE LEAGUE, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The League is a comprehensive documentary on the history of Negro League baseball. As one would expect from a Sam Pollard doc, it’s well-sourced and reveals some less well known history:
Rube Foster, remembered as a pitching great and inventor of the screwball, was the impresario and strategic mind behind the first Negro League.
Effa Manley, the canny co-owner of the Newark Eagles, was a pioneering female AND African-American businesswoman with the spunk, if not the resources, to stand up to MLB.
The Negro Leagues’ surprisingly brief lifespan and even briefer glory days.
Why the immensely talented, even Ruthian, Josh Gibson wasn’t put forward to integrate MLB (like Jackie Robinson was).
How MLB execs like Branch Rickey and Bill Veeck worked with the Negro Leagues (or not).
The painful trade-offs from the long-awaited integration of MLB.
The League is the work of filmmaker Sam Pollard, who directed the more compelling MLK/FBI. The League will appeal to those with interests in baseball and/or civil rights. The League is streaming on Amazon.
Over 23 million Americans are living in long-term recovery from addiction. How many (or how few) of us know this, is the core of the thought-provoking 2013 advocacy documentary, The Anonymous People.
We all know about Alcoholics Anonymous, where anonymity makes it possible for alcoholics to work on their recovery without stigma. Anonymity is an integral pillar of AA, but some in AA interpret this to preclude publicizing their own recoveries. The Anonymous People challenges that orthodoxy.
The anonymity of those in long-term recovery also keeps the manifestations of recovery invisible to the general public, including the addicts who need it and the policy makers who need to know about it.
The carnage of celebrity addiction, as with Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen, is high profile fodder for the popular media. But comparatively few of us know the stories of Samuel L. Jackson and Russell Brand, who are open about their own long term recovery.
The Anonymous People is about the open recovery movement (or public recovery movement). We hear from John Shinholser, President of The McShin Foundation, a leader in the movement, and others in long term recovery like actress Kristen Johnson of Mom. They advocate that folks come out of anonymity to say, “I am a person in long term recovery, and for me that means that I have been sober for X years.”
After all, who needs a role model more than someone struggling with addiction?
There is a strong parallel to the AIDS activists in the 1980s who defeated the stigma of AIDS by shedding the secrecy.
I saw The Anonymous People at a special screening, in an audience with over 90% people in recovery, and they loved it; (I am what people in recovery call a “Normie”). The Anonymous People will also resonate with anyone also for anyone interested in public policy issues like treatment and incarceration.
The Anonymous People can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
Reed Harkness in SAM NOW. Courtesy of HA/HA Productions.
In the surprisingly complex documentary Sam Now, two brothers go on a road trip to solve a family mystery – but that’s only part of the story. Beginning as a teenager, writer-director Reed Harkness spent his teen years shooting movie projects that starred his younger half-brother Sam. Reed and Sam grew up in a blended family of spirited brothers, a family with one striking anomaly – Sam’s mother had suddenly vanished.
Shortly after the disappearance, the family learned that the mom was alive, having left of her own volition. She was choosing to live elsewhere secretly, severing all contact with her family. Reed and Sam’s family went on with their lives, and the subject of the missing mom was no longer discussed.
Years later, as young men, Reed and Sam decide to get in the car with Reed’s cameras and track down Sam’s mom. Will they find her? Why did she abandon her children? Can they resume/salvage their relationship or work out a new one?
The subject Harkness famiy in SAM NOW. Courtesy of HA/HA Productions.
Those are compelling questions, but the quest to find the mom isn’t the whole movie. Once the initial mystery is solved, Reed Harkness kept his camera focused on the participants over the next decade.
Beginning with home movies when the brothers were kids, Sam Now documents 25 years of family life and individual personal growth. It’s all complicated, as we might expect with multigenerational trauma.
Reed Harkness’ use of music in Sam Now is particularly strong. Reed and Sam’s rowdy boyhood and the brother’s road trip is accented with boisterous garage rock. More contemplative music accompanies the personal reflections later in the film.
Sam Now garnered various film fest awards, aired on PBS’ POV, and releases on streaming platforms, including Amazon and Vudu, on June 6.
The documentary 32 Sounds strives to be an immersive dive into sounds of all types and the impact of sounds on humans. It’s an anthology of 32 bits, each related to sound in different way.
The immersive quality is where 32 Sounds falls short. After seeing the trailer, I made an effort to see 32 Sounds in a theater with surround sound. But, after the filmmakers address the audience at the beginning, the surround sound is not really necessary to enjoy (or, in my case, NOT enjoy) the film.
The two most powerful scenes don’t have much to do with the technical or artsy stuff that comprise much of 32 Sounds. In one, a scientist listens to a long-forgotten letter to his future self that he taped as an 11-year-old. Later, a man muses on “ghost voices” – how he can ALMOST recall the voices of his dead loved ones.
Overall, the 95 minutes I invested in slogging thru 32 Sounds was wasted, except for the ten minutes that I drifted into a deep, blissful nap.
