documentary

Tim’s Vermeer: 5 minutes of wow and 75 minutes of boring

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The documentary Tim’s Vermeer tells the story of Tim, an accomplished technologist with plenty of money and time on his hands, who comes across the theory that the 17th century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer used optical devices to paint.  He embarks upon an experiment to prove this theory plausible. He invents an optical device, grinds his own paints, recreates Vermeer’s studio and spends four months trying to copy Vermeer’s The Music Lesson.  Tim, it turns out, is a buddy of the magicians Penn and Teller, so the whole thing has become a film (produced and narrated by Penn and directed – inartfully – by Teller).

There’s one captivating moment in Tim’s Vermeer, when Tim – who is NOT a painter – tries out his Rube Goldberg mirrors with his first ever oil painting.  Tim takes a photo of his father-in-law as a young man and completes an astonishingly perfect copy in oils.

Apart from this moment, Tim’s Vermeer is a yawner.   Although only 80 minutes long, the four months of painting seems like four years.  The film’s content could have been stretched into a 30-minute cable show.  Several critics have been unable to resist pointing out that watching Tim’s Vermeer is, in parts, LITERALLY watching paint dry.

The movie makes one intriguing point:  the idea that art and technology are separate is a modern one.  Now people go to school to learn art OR tech – which wasn’t the case in Vermeer’s time and may not need be today.   It’s interesting to me that, in Tim’s Vermeer, artists were comfortable with the idea that the old masters used technology, but art historians were not.  It didn’t occur to the artists that the use of technology would diminish Vermeer’s artistic genius, but the art historians felt the need to be defensive of Vermeer.  Hmmm.

Tim’s Vermeer is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

SPOILER ALERT:  Tim does paint a reasonable facsimile of The Music Lesson, but it has a paint-by-the-numbers feel and doesn’t have the mesmerizing quality of a real Vermeer.

DVD/Stream of the Week: The Unknown Known

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Rumsfeld: unruffled by the Errol Morris documentary treatmentErrol Morris is a master documentarian (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, Standard Operating Procedure), so he is the perfect guy to explore the personality and career – and, above all, the self-certainty – of Donald Rumsfeld, architect of the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For most of the film, Rumsfeld himself is on-screen talking to Morris’ camera. Rumsfeld is apparently completely immune from self-doubt, but ultimately reveals more about himself than he would like.

The title of the picture comes from a Rumsfeld memo that describes a policy maker’s “unknown known” as that which you thought you know but it turns out that you didn’t. Of course, the classic “unknown known” is the certainty that the Iraq War would be justified and would turn out well.

In contrast, the “unknown unknown” is something that you don’t know that you don’t know and that Rumsfeld says that you have to imagine (such as the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks). Of course, the imagining of all kinds of such attacks drives the neo-conservative theory of preemptive war – to strike at those who can be IMAGINED to threaten you.

Rumsfeld is remarkably glib and very effective at selling his own version of reality. Morris takes this on early in the documentary by getting Rumsfeld to deny linking Saddam with Al Qaeda and then shows him doing exactly that in a pre-Iraq War news conference. Indeed, Morris himself is an effective off-screen participant throughout, sparring with Rumsfeld, with each guy winning his share of verbal tussles.

When Rumsfeld thinks that he’s won a point, he grins the infuriating grin in the image above. The one time he loses his smile is when Morris mentions a moment when Rumsfeld almost became Reagan’s Vice-President (and then future President), and Rumsfeld acknowledges that, yes, this was possible. The film is brilliantly edited, and Morris knows EXACTLY how long to extend a shot to catch Rumsfeld in moments of reflection.

The movie traces Rumsfeld’s remarkable life and career from his marriage and early start as a young Congressman thru his roles in the Nixon and Ford administrations with the end of Watergate, the fall of Saigon, his salesmanship for defense spending increases in the 1970s and his service as Reagan’s Middle East envoy. After a time in the wilderness during Bush I, of course, he came to his greatest power during Bush II. He gives a stirring first-person account of the 9/11 attack of the Pentagon, relating what the scene was like even before the first responders arrived. But the core of the film is about the Rumsfeld decisions about Iraq.

Unusual for a current events documentary, there’s also some top shelf music from Danny Elfman, Oscar nominated for Good Will Hunting and Milk.

You can find The Unknown Known on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

Life Itself: Roger Ebert’s truth

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Roger Ebert in LIFE ITSELF
Roger Ebert in LIFE ITSELF

Life Itself is the affectionate but not worshipful documentary on movie critic Roger Ebert’s groundbreaking career, courageous battle against disease and uncommonly graceful death.  Ebert popularized movie criticism and evangelized for the lesser known foreign films, documentaries and indies that I love.  In a 2002 cancer treatment, Ebert lost his lower jaw and, with it, his ability to talk or eat.  Astonishingly, this didn’t slow him down; he replaced his television show with a pioneering blog and Twitter account – and remained just as productive and influential as ever.

Filmmaker Steve James set out to make a movie of Ebert’s memoir of the same name, but – just as the project started – Ebert’s cancer returned.  So the story includes Ebert’s final illness and death.  Ebert retained the joy in his life far longer than could most in his situation – it’s a marvel and a model for the rest of us.

James is one of the deserving filmmakers whose art was boosted by Ebert, who picked James’ obscure documentary Hoop Dreams as the best film of the year. Ebert similarly helped directors from Spike Lee in the 1980s to Raman Bahrani in the 2000s. In Life Itself, Errol Morris says that he would have had no career without Ebert and Siskel, and Martin Scorsese says that they saved his career.

But the primary theme of Life Itself is truth.  In his work, Ebert demanded truth from himself and from the cinema that he reviewed.  In this film, Ebert insisted on showing the person he was at the end – with his infirmities on full display.  There are moments of frustration where he is not so lovable and stories about his personal flaws.  We are all packages of virtues and weaknesses; seeing Roger’s weaknesses just adds credibility to his strengths and accomplishments.

Life Itself is a Must See for fans of Roger Ebert and for people musing on their own mortality.  People with less of an interest in Ebert may find the movie a little too long.  But the human story of a life – challenged and then ending – is very strong.

Citizen Koch: righteous but lame

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xxx Koch (center) in CITIZEN KOCH
David Koch (center) in CITIZEN KOCH

The advocacy documentary Citizen Koch exposes the terrible effects of the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allows the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers to anonymously spend unlimited treasure to promote political candidates, measures and legislation that I (The Movie Gourmet) abhor.  Filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, who have worked with Michael Moore, share Moore’s use of documentary to persuade by observation: here are the facts that will lead you to agree with us.

The very best aspect of Citizen Koch is the core story of Governor Scott Walker’s assault on public employees and their unions in Wisconsin.   Citizen Koch meticulously connects the dots between the Koch Brothers’ strategy of degrading the Democratic Party’s strength by weakening public employee unions and Walker’s machinations.  It’s a conspiracy in plain sight.  Citizen Koch is at its best when this thread is told from the perspective of a few Wisconsin public employees – who are themselves Republicans.

Unfortunately, what could have been a superb film on the political conflict in Wisconsin gets flabby and diluted with threads about Citizens United and Charles and David Koch.  The worst part is a fourth thread about Buddy Roemer, a sleazy opportunist who has changed political parties three times but is held up as some sort of beacon of good government; it’s outrageously naive and potentially discredits the rest of the film.

And here’s a little controversy that is illustrative of the Koch Brothers political power.  PBS was going to air Citizen Koch on its documentary series POV, but chickened out because David Koch sits on the board of PBS’ NYC affiliate WNET and is a huge contributor to PBS products like Nova.

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia: the man who invented snark

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GORE VIDAL: THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA

Nicholas D. Wrathall’s documentary Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia is an affectionate portrait of the famously prickly novelist. Vidal, himself an American blue blood, delighted in the harshest criticism of American society, culture and politics. In the film, he observes “When I want to know what the United States is up to, I look into my own black heart.”

Vidal practically invented snark. Most of all, he seemed to relish the role of provocateur, publicly spewing out outrageous (and oft factually unreliable) statements. There has never been a more entertaining TV talk show guest.  In Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, we see many of the famous talk show moments – including the 1968 NBC debate when he baited the ubercool William F. Buckley into calling him a queer; that was a pricelessly typical moment, where Vidal playfully PRETENDED to take himself very seriously in labeling Buckley “crypto-Nazi”, causing Buckley – who really WAS taking himself seriously – to erupt.

Wrathall’s film benefits from his access to Vidal himself, facilitated by Vidal’s nephew, the director Burr Steers (who co-produced and appears).  So there are glimpses into less well-known aspects of Vidal’s life, including his longtime partner and his love of living in Italy.

Say what you must, Vidal was both absorbing and ever-amusing, which makes Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia an intelligent diversion.

The Final Member: the Icelandic penis documentary – not so much about penises

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final chapter“Of course you are” is what The Wife says when I answer one of her questions with something like, “I’m watching the Icelandic penis documentary”.  Indeed, the documentary The Final Member is about the curator of the Icelandic Phallological Museum.  He has collected and displays sample penises from every mammalian species from hamster to sperm whale.   THAT’S NOT THE WEIRD PART.

The museum still lacks a sample from Homo Sapiens.  It’s the curator’s quest – and the men vying to contribute their own organs – that is central to The Final Member.   Like the
Errol Morris films Days of Heaven (pet cemetery) and Tabloid (Mormon missionary, cloning dogs), it’s not that the OBJECT of obsession is so funny – it’s the obsession itself.  It’s that the documentary presents people who are SO OBSESSED and SO EARNEST about the topic.  Of course, it is pretty funny when guys are each striving to put their penises on museum display.

In fact, the lengths to which one guy is willing to go for penis fame and fortune is astounding and, for male viewers, wince-inducing.  I’m working on a list of Jawdropping Documentaries, and – believe me – The Final Member is gonna make that list.  I recommend The Final Member for its 75 minutes of “he said WHAT?” LOL moments.

BTW that’s one-third of a sperm whale penis in the image at the top of this post.  (And the very last shot in The Final Member is a very wry filmmaking joke, too.)

The Final Member is now streaming on Amazon and iTunes.

Searching for Sugar Man director dies

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Malik Bendjelloul
Malik Bendjelloul

The Swedish filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul has died suddenly at age 36. He won the Best Documentary Oscar with his FIRST FEATURE – the powerful Searching for Sugar Man. Judging from Sugar Man, this is a significant loss to future cinema. At least we can still watch his one riveting and flabbergasting story – available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Xbox Video.

Finding Vivian Maier: hiding her own masterpieces

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vivian maier1
The engrossing documentary Finding Vivian Maier begins with the death of a Chicago woman so obscure that none of her neighbors knew her name.  She was a standoffish hoarder, and when a box of her junk is acquired at an estate auction, the buyer, a picker named John Maloof, finds lots and lots of photographs.  He posts some of them on the Internet, and it turns out that the woman was, hitherto undiscovered, one of the great 20th Century photographers.  So Maloof acquires the other boxes from the auction and embarks on a quest to find out who she was, why she took over 100,000 images and why she never showed them. Fortunately, we get to come along.

We quickly learn that her name was Vivian Maier, and that she worked as a nanny.   As Maloof’s journey of discovery takes us to another city and then to another country, we begin to piece together her life.  Because Maier lived with families to raise their children, we meet some of her former charges. We are able to construct what she looked and sounded like, how she dressed and walked and about her array of eccentricities.  We learn about a very disturbing dark side.

But Maier remained secretive even inside the families’ homes, so some of the puzzle pieces remain undiscovered.  We can infer that a pivotal event happened during her childhood.  We conclusively find out that she was obsessively private, but we can only guess why.

Vivian Maier is no longer obscure.  Her work is now shown widely in museums and galleries.  As a photographer, she had an uncommon gift to connect personally with her subjects and to document the humor and tragedy of the most human moments.  In the guise of a detective story, Finding Vivian Maier does her justice.


vian maier2

The Unknown Known: Rumsfeld exposed…by himself

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Rumsfeld: unruffled by the Errol Morris documentary treatmentErrol Morris is a master documentarian (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, Standard Operating Procedure), so he is the perfect guy to explore the personality and career – and, above all, the self-certainty – of Donald Rumsfeld, architect of the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  For most of the film, Rumsfeld himself is on-screen talking to Morris’ camera.  Rumsfeld is apparently completely immune from self-doubt, but ultimately reveals more about himself than he would like.

The title of the picture comes from a Rumsfeld memo that describes a policy maker’s “unknown known” as that which you thought you know but it turns out that you didn’t.  Of course, the classic “unknown known” is the certainty that the Iraq War would be justified and would turn out well.

In contrast, the “unknown unknown” is something that you don’t know that you don’t know and that Rumsfeld says that you have to imagine (such as the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks).  Of course, the imagining of all kinds of such attacks drives the neo-conservative theory of preemptive war – to strike at those who can be IMAGINED to threaten you.

Rumsfeld is remarkably glib and very effective at selling his own version of reality.  Morris takes this on early in the documentary by getting Rumsfeld to deny linking Saddam with Al Qaeda and then shows him doing exactly that in a pre-Iraq War news conference.  Indeed, Morris himself is an effective off-screen participant throughout, sparring with Rumsfeld, with each guy winning his share of verbal tussles.

When Rumsfeld thinks that he’s won a point, he grins the infuriating grin in the image above.  The one time he loses his smile is when Morris mentions a moment when Rumsfeld almost became Reagan’s Vice-President (and then future President), and Rumsfeld acknowledges that, yes, this was possible.  The film is brilliantly edited, and Morris knows EXACTLY how long to extend a shot to catch Rumsfeld in moments of reflection.

The movie traces Rumsfeld’s remarkable life and career from his marriage and early start as a young Congressman  thru his roles in the Nixon and Ford administrations with the end of Watergate, the fall of Saigon, his salesmanship for defense spending increases in the 1970s and his service as Reagan’s Middle East envoy.  After a time in the wilderness during Bush I, of course, he came to his greatest power during Bush II.  He gives a stirring first-person account of the 9/11 attack of the Pentagon, relating what the scene was like even before the first responders arrived.  But the core of the film is about the Rumsfeld decisions about Iraq.

Unusual for a current events documentary, there’s also some top shelf music from Danny Elfman, Oscar nominated for Good Will Hunting and Milk.

You can find The Unknown Known tomorrow in theaters and streaming now on Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video

Cinequest: Teenage

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teenageThe most important ingredient for a documentary is a good story, and Teenage has just that – the 20th century emergence of a hitherto unknown phenomenon: the teenager. Teenage postulates that through the end of the 1800s, kids – by going to work when they were 12 – transitioned directly from the child’s world to the adult one; the advent of child labor laws gave the 12 to 18-year-olds the leisure time to express all of that hormone-driven energy. Combined with the generational disgust felt by the young for the older generation that had wasted much of their cohort in WWI, that mix of rebelliousness, immaturity and bad judgement we now as the modern teenager was born – and has driven our popular culture ever since.

To make the case for that thesis, filmmaker Matt Wolf has assembled some stunningly evocative file footage and sprinkled in some re-creations.  The re-created characters are read by the likes of Jena Malone and are shot in color.  The problem is that some of the black-and-white footage ALSO has the look of re-creation, so I couldn’t tell what was a historical document and what was the filmmaker’s interpenetration of the period. This was just enough to lose me. I wish Wolf had the faith to let his file footage speak for itself.  Still, it’s a good story, and worth the watch.