documentary

Buck: the man inside the horseman

by

Buck is a documentary about real-life horse whisperer Buck Brannaman, an exceedingly grounded and gentle man who knows everything about horse behavior.  But the movie is more about human behavior,  about the disturbing crucible that formed Buck, and about what we can learn about people from their handling of horses.

Fortunately, Director Cindy Meehl realized that she had a great story and got out of the way.  The understated guitar-based score never becomes melodramatic.  And Meehl never lets the admiring talking heads elevate Buck to more than what he is, which is remarkable enough.  This movie could have easily been painfully corny or pretentious and is neither.  I’d happily view it again today.

Buck’s own background is so nasty that it would totally unremarkable for him to have emerged mean or emotionally crippled – and he is the farthest from either.  With some help from loving people, Buck has chosen to become something different from his apparent fate.  In this way, Buck could be a companion piece to Mike Leigh’s Another Year.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCMm5uoZtXw]

Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times: whither journalism?

by

Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times takes advantage of insider access to the newsroom and editorial conferences at the Times to explore the transition from the Era of Print Media to the Era of New Media Age.  Bopping between topics like WikiLeaks, Gawker.com, Iraq coverage, the Tribune Company bankruptcy and ProPublica, Page One is kind of all over the place, but I recommend it for hard news junkies (such as myself).

Fortunately, director Andrew Rossi recognizes an appealing character in NYT media columnist David Carr and lets the idiosyncratic and passionate, yet highly professional, Carr carry most of the film.  Rossi also makes the exceedingly wise choice not to predict how journalism will evolve in the new environment.

Project Nim: a chimp learns the foibles of humans

by

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 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 year’s best documentaries.

DVD of the Week: Kings of Pastry

by

This documentary chronicles the physically grueling and emotionally draining three-day competition for the MOF, the highest designation for French pastry chefs. Amid impossibly towering sugar sculptures and delectable cream puffs and layer cakes, we see the essential cores of competition – aspiration, ambition, perseverance, commitment, desperation, heartbreak and victory. Kings of Pastry is directed by the brilliant documentarians Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker (The War Room).

It has earned a spot on my list of 10 Food Porn Movies.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: 3D for grownups

by

Come along with Werner Herzog as he explores the 33,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings in southern France. It’s a great topic for a film – a specially authorized descent into the claustrophobic confines of a prehistoric cave, littered with human footprints and the skulls of extinct cave bears.  Surprisingly, some of the paintings look like they were painted in the Renaissance or later.

And, of course, Herzog (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Grizzly Man) is a great story teller.  Here, he made the wise choice to film in 3D.  The paintings are not on flat canvasses, but on uneven rock faces.  The 3D allows the audience to appreciate how the artists used the curves in the rock to give the illusion of motion in their subjects.

Don’t miss Cave of Forgotten Dreams while it can be seen in 3D.

Coming up on TV: The great Erroll Morris and Gates of Heaven

by

On May 1, Turner Classic Movies is showing Gates of Heaven (1978), the first masterpiece by documentarian Erroll Morris.  It’s overtly about a Bay Area pet cemetery, but as Morris interviews the cemetery owners and the pet owners (as well as the guy at the rendering plant), the subjects expose their passions, aspirations and vulnerabilities.  And it’s hilarious.

This is an excellent introduction to America’s best documentarian, whose other films include The Thin Blue Line (which freed a wrongly convicted man from Texas’ Death Row) and Standard Operating Procedure (which exposed what was behind the abuses at Abu Ghraib).

Morris’ newest film, Tabloid, will be released on July 15.

Blogging from Cinequest: War Games and the Man Who Stopped Them

by

This documentary tells the remarkable Cold War spy story of Army Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski.  In his service on the Polish General Staff, Kuklinski saw that the Warsaw Pact’s war plans for an invasion of Western Europe would inevitably lead to the nuclear obliteration of Poland.  To avoid that horror, he passed on the Warsaw Pact war plans to the West so NATO could strengthen its stance and thereby deter the invasion by making it a less attractive option for the Soviets.

Kuklinshi passed over 40,000 pages of secret Warsaw Pact documents to the CIA – the largest act of espionage in world history.  After the screening, Director Dariusz Jabloński said that Kuklinski considered himself a Polish soldier doing his duty, not a spy for the West.

Kuklinski died just before he could be interviewed for this documentary.  However, Jabloński did secure interviews with the senior commanders of the Soviet and Polish militaries, former Polish heads of state, CIA officers and Kuklinski’s widow, as well as screen shots from Warsaw Pact war simulations.  At 110 minutes, it’s a little long, but the story is compelling.

DVD of the Week: Inside Job

by

Charles Ferguson’s brilliant documentary Inside Job may be the most important movie of the year.  It is a harsh but fair explanation of the misdeeds that led to the recent near-collapse of the global financial system.  Unexpectedly, the film begins in Iceland, setting the stage for the collapse and kicking off the easily understandable explanations of the various  tricks and bamboozles that have hidden behind their own complexity.

It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2010.

DVD of the Week: The Tillman Story

by

The Tillman Story weaves three stories together: the making of Pat Tillman, how he died in Afghanistan and his family’s struggle to pull the sheets back on the US military’s cover-up.  At its core, it is the story of people who insist on truth dealing with a system that operates on perception.

I thought I knew the story. Tillman left the fame and wealth of an NFL career to enlist in the Army post-911.  He was killed in a firefight in Afghanistan.  The Army reported that he was killed while heroically charging the enemy to save his comrades.  It was later revealed that he was killed by fire from his comrades.   Still later, it became clear that the heroic death story was immediately concocted by the military for spin control or, worse, propaganda.

I didn’t know that Tillman predicted that the Army would propagandize his death and smuggled out to his wife the documentation of his wish for a civilian funeral.  I didn’t know that Tillman crouched on a hill watching the bombing of Baghdad, and said, “This war is so fucking illegal.”  I didn’t know that Tillman was with the team that waited hours to “rescue” captured soldier Jessica Lynch (abandoned by her captors) until a film crew arrived.

The US military made a huge miscalculation:  they assumed that the family that produced someone with Pat Tillman’s values would be satisfied with a phony narrative of cartoonish heroism.

The more I think about The Tillman Story, the more I admire it.  And I am increasingly grateful that Michael Moore didn’t make this movie and degrade it into a screed.  Instead, Director Amir Bar-Lev avoids the simplistic and satisfying formulas and respects his subject matter and the audience by letting the story speak for itself.

2010 in Movies: Documentaries

by

As usual several documentaries made my list of  Best Movies of 2010:  Inside Job, The Tillman Story, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, and Sweetgrass.

And there were still more excellent documentaries.  Ken Burns augmented his brilliant Baseball with The Tenth Inning.  PBS’s Earth Days told the story of the modern environmental movement through the voices of key players.  The Most Dangerous Man in America brought new texture to the story of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.   The fine PBS series Independent Lens brought us Lost Souls (Animas Perdidas), in which filmmaker Monika Navarro trailed an uncle deported to Mexico and discovered secrets in her own family.

Here’s the trailer for the magical Sweetgrass.