Benjamin Netanyahu in KINGS OF CAPITOL HILL. Photo courtesy of JFI.
The Israeli documentary Kings of Capitol Hill traces the history of an American political institution, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Founded as a lobby group to advocate for the interests of Israel, AIPAC has grown in power and has shifted (and narrowed) its mission.
AIPAC is controversial because the policies of the recent right-wing Israeli governments, supported by AIPAC, and those of most Jewish-Americans have diverged.
Kings of Capitol Hill highlights two pivotal moments. The first came in 1984 when Paul Simon unseated Charles Percy as US Senator from Illinois, and AIPAC was given the credit and the accompanying political fearsomeness. The second came a decade later, when AIPAC abruptly rejected bipartisanship to become a mouthpiece for the Israeli Right and the US Republican Party.
For 60 years, AIPAC leaders have refused to be interviewed about the organization. Israeli filmmaker Mor Loushy has secured the oral histories of many of AIPAC’s top leadership from its founding and fashioned them into a compelling story.
Note: The film was completed before both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, two of Kings of Capitol Hill’s villains, were unseated in the past nine months.
I screened Kings of Capitol Hill for this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which opens on Friday. You can peruse the festival’s program and schedule at SFJFF, and here’s my own SFJFF preview. Here’s where you can stream Kings of Capitol Hill.
Photo caption: ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN
Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is an unusually profound, revealing and unsentimental biodoc. Rarely has a documentary revealed so much about such a complicated and ambiguous person. Roadrunner deliberately builds into a triumph for director Morgan Neville, Oscar-winner for 20 Feet from Stardom.
In Roadrunner, we hear from Bourdain’s brother, second wife and his close friends and associates. His friends were creatives – artists, musicians, writers, chefs. His work partners — agent, publisher, producers, TV crew – had all stayed with him for many years.
Bourdain attained overnight celebrity as the Bad Boy chef with his ribald and iconoclastic memoir Kitchen Confidential. That platform propelled him into his television career as a traveling professional foodie – and then as a professional traveler.
I didn’t know that, before his TV shows, Bourdain had not traveled outside the US except for boyhood visits to family in France. One friend observes that, “his travels were in his head“. Tony himself was allured by the chance to “have adventures while antisocial“. Bourdain’s brother said that Tony was “reborn” through travel.
ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN
Bourdain was so fun to watch because he was a kind of adult Holden Caulfield, perpetually aggrieved by phoniness in any form. The dark humor in his caustic observations was unfiltered. Yet, Bourdain was an unexpectedly shy man for such a bad ass. Often, when someone (including Bourdain himself) made an incisive statement, Tony would furtively glance directly into the camera – was this his “tell”?
His friends saw Bourdain, despite his overt cynicism, as a romantic . Romantics are always disappointed in – and sometimes betrayed by – reality.
Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain does reveal what upset him on the night that he, cold sober, chose to kill himself. But it doesn’t label that disappointment as the simplistic reason for his suicide. Instead, Roadrunner thoughtfully documents his life as a “runner”, focusing his addictive personality on everything from heroin to jujitsu to evade his demons.
Ultimately, Roadrunner is about the people who loved Tony and his difficulty in accepting their love. The saddest scene in Roadrunner recounts when Tony dramatically summoned his producers and proclaimed that he needed to quit; he never anticipated that, far from pushing back, that they would be wholly supportive.
Bourdain was beloved by his fans (including me). If you need a dose of the sentimentality that Roadrunner eschews (and there’s nothing wrong with that), CNN-produced retrospectives are available in episodes 93 and 95 of Parts Unknown, which can be streamed from HBO Max.
[Note: Roadrunner has provoked some contretemps in the chattering class. A computer-simulated voice reads one of Bourdain’s emails as if it were Bourdain himself, and Neville chose not to invite Asia Argento, Bourdain’s last girlfriend, to participate as a talking head (although we see and hear plenty of her on film). In both cases, Neville was seeking the fundamental truth about Bourdain and made the absolutely best choices as a filmmaker. Ignore the hoohaw.]
One more thing – Neville went with the perfect ending for Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, so perfect that, now that I’ve seen it, I can’t imagine any better one. This is one of the Best Movies of 2021.
THE BOYS IN RED HATS. Photo courtesy of Shark Dog Films.
Remember the resulting frenzy when the Kentucky prep school boy at the Lincoln Memorial smirked at the indigenous tribal elder? Documentarian Jonathan Schroder is an alum of that very prep school – Covington Catholic or “CovCath”. In The Boys in Red Hats, his point of view shifts as he peels back the onion on what really happened. It comes down to insights into media, social media and, especially, White privilege.
Like most of us, Schroder was initially outraged at the boys; as more facts emerged, he became sympathetic to what seemed like mistreatment of the boys in social media. Don’t give up on this movie as a whitewash – as the story gets more complicated and Schroder becomes more reflective, his needle sways back and forth until the final payoff.
This was a Rorschach event at the Lincoln Memorial. One thing is for sure, these privileged kids and their chaperones, confronted by a crazy hate group (Black Hebrew Israelites), were unequipped to deal with a momentary convergence of disorder and diversity.
To put my own cards on the table, I am not disposed to sympathize with rich kids who were comfortable in being shipped to an anti-choice rally, wearing MAGA hats. In The Boys in Red Hats, the journalist Anne Branigan’s perspective most resonated with me.
Schroder gives plenty of rope to a professional conservative talking head, two CovCath dads and the school’s alumni director, none of whom display a modicum of sensitivity or empathy to those less rich, less white or less male than they.
Schroder sees the significance when one of his CovCath buddies says, “I like my bubble”.
I screened The Boys in Red Hats for its world premiere at Cinequest, and it made my Best of Cinequest 2021. The Boys in Red Hats releases in theaters and streaming on Virtual Cinema on July 16.
Sly Stone in SUMMER OF SOUL (…OR, WHEN THE REVOLUTION COULD NOT BE TELEVISED)
In Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Questlove recovers the never-before-seen film of the Harlem Cultural Festival over six weekends in 1969. The promoters had tried to market the footage as “the Black Woodstock”, but had no takers at the time (for the obvious reason).
This is a superb concert film, but that’s not all it is. 1969 was an important historical and cultural moment – especially for American Blacks, and Questlove supplies the context. A 2021 audience cannot miss the parallels between 1969’s Black Is Beautiful and Black Power and today’s Black Lives/Black Voices.
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is widely-known as drummer of The Roots and bandleader for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Creative and versatile, he is Emmy-nominated and Grammy-winning, he is going to win an Oscar for this, his directorial debut for a feature film. Summer of Soul proves that Questlove is such a gifted storyteller that I hope he takes on narrative fictional filmmaking, too.
The music in Summer of Soul is fantastic:
Sly and the Family Stone shattered expectations with their garb, racially integrated band and female musicians on trumpet and keyboards. Their psychedelic funk and super-charged ebullience blew away the audience. (BTW Vallejo native Sly Stone is now age 78.)
Stevie Wonder was only 19, 3 years before Superstition, and already taking his remarkable creativity and musicianship down new roads.
Gladys Knight and the Pips – watch the Pips and appreciate how those guys really worked it.
BB King at the height of his popular breakthrough, singing Why I Sing the Blues.
The Fifth Dimension were best sellers among the white mainstream – and here they were finally accepted by a Black audience. Billy Davis Jr. and Miriam McCoo get to relive the experience on camera in one of Summer of Soul’s most touching moments.
The musical high point is a rendition of Precious Lord, Take My Hand by Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples. Mahalia was then 58 and a legend, and this was her signature song. Mavis was already a showbiz veteran at 30 and at the top of her game. The Reverend Jesse Jackson introduces the song with a heartbreaking account of Martin Luther King asking for this, his favorite hymn, seconds before his murder. Mahalia was not feeling well, and asked Mavis to kick off the song. Mavis’ first verse is volcanic, then Mahalia takes over and the two finish together in an explosion of emotions. Epic.
Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson in SUMMER OF SOUL (…OR, WHEN THE REVOLUTION COULD NOT BE TELEVISED)
Something else happened that summer – the manifestation of JFK’s pledge to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth. Questlove uses file footage of person-on-the-street interviews to contrast the reactions of Blacks and Whites. It’s a Rorschach test of privilege and alienation.
Gladys Knight recounts “it wasn’t just about the music”. BB King performed here just weeks after the release of The Thrill Is Gone, and he must have included Thrill in his set, but I’m sure that Questlove instead chose Why I’m Singing the Blues to focus on that song’s larger subtext for Black Americans.
And the need to show the militant commitment to self-determination must be why Questlove features so much of Nina Simone at her rawest. If she had ever worried about being too harsh, Simone was well past that point in 1969.
On a lighter note, ironic sombrero-wearing must have been a thing in Harlem that summer – check out the crowd shots (and drink a shot for every sombrero.)
Summer of Soul etc. etc. has also earned the #13 ranking on my list of Longest Movie Titles.
How good is Summer of Soul, which swept the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at Sundance? It’s hard to imagine it not winning the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, and I’m guessing it will be that rare doc nominated for Best Picture. FWIW I’m putting it on my list of Best Movies of 2021 – So Far.
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is in theaters and streaming on Hulu. It’s worth watching for the music and worth it for the history, too; for the combination, it’s a Must See.
Photo caption: Russell Mael and Ron Mael in THE SPARKS BROTHERS. Photo by Jake Polonsky, courtesy of Sundance Institute.
The Sparks Brothers is Edgar Wright’s affectionate documentary on a pop band that has been active for 54 years (and that I had never heard of). The band is Sparks, comprised of brothers Ron and Russell Mael, and The Sparks Brothers is one fun movie.
Ron writes the songs and plays keyboards, and Russell is the singer and front man. In the film, Sparks is described as “the best British pop band to come out of America” and “a snaky lead singer for the ladies and then the Hitler mustache”. Sparks was first produced by Todd Rungren, of all people, in 1967. (Both Rungren and Russell Mael were dating Miss Christine of the GTOs.) Pop success eluded them until they surged in the UK in 1974-75.
Then Sparks pioneered electro dance a couple years too early, came to hard rock a little late, and have kept moving on to the next project and musical style that interests them. Of course, that approach doesn’t let their fans get comfortable.
A musician says, “they don’t care about money or fame – just art for art’s sake”, which isn’t EXACTLY true. The Maels really DO want their music to be heard, and they really DO want to be popular and famous. They just won’t compromise artistically to get there.
What they WILL do is work with remarkable stamina and discipline. This is the rock first rock documentary I’ve seen without somebody’s serious drug use being a point of deflection. These guys marry an intense work ethic with their often bizarre art.
Their stage presence is remarkable. With his pretty boy looks and charisma, Russell bounds about as the quintessential front man. Ron silently stands behind his keyboard, posing with his, well, Hitler mustache (which he has now replaced with a pencil mustache).
Above all, Sparks is ever playful, and The Sparks Brothers is very funny. They match their stage persona with lyrics like “dinner for 12 is now dinner for 10 because I’m under the table with her“. Ron and Russell Mael themselves kick off the movie with a hilariously deadpan questionnaire.
Their performances are fun and witty, and their music is peppy and catchy. The overt humor sometimes masks lyrics that are poignant and even despairing.
Growing up in LA, Ron and Russell cherished their boyhood weekend matinees with their dad, filled with Westerns and war movies. As artsy UCLA students, they admired Ingmar Bergman and French New Wave cinema as much as they did The Who and the Kinks, They had lined up a movie project themselves with the great auteur Jacques Tati that fell through because of Tati’s health. In the 1990s, they invested six years in trying to make the Japanese manga Mai, the Psychic Girl as a movie musical with director Tim Burton. When that movie also died, they were devastated.
Happily, they have written the screenplay for a movie which has actually been finished. Annette, directed by Leo Carax (Holy Motors) and starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, is coming out later this summer,
I may not love their music or think that Spark is important, but I sure like these guys. The Spark Brothers is a delight, and it’s damn funny, too.
William Bulger in MY NAME IS BULGER. Photo courtesy of discovery+.
The documentary My Name Is Bulger traces the life of one fascinating man – made even more compelling by the life of a second man. Bill Bulger, one of nine kids raised in the projects, was a political wunderkind. First elected at age 26, his 35-year career in the Massachusetts State Legislature was topped by 18 years as President of the State Senate. No less than the squeaky clean former Governor Michael Dukakis credits Bill Bulger for cleaning up the previously corrupt institution.
Now, here’s the kicker – while Bill Bulger was dominating Massachusetts politics, his brother James “Whitey” Bulger was the state’s most fearsome crime lord.
Politics is public, and crime is private. Politics requires self-promotion, and crime requires secrecy. The brothers Bulger are parallel studies in power.
For decades, my day job has been in politics. It’s not unusual for politicians to deal with embarrassing, and even unsavory, relatives, but what do you do if your vocation is politics and your older sibling is a notorious criminal?
Very bright and armed with wit and charm, Bill Bulger was able to artfully, even miraculously, keep his career separate from Whitey’s. As Whitey became more infamous, Bill was able to delay being hurt by the association. It was widely known that Whitey had been in Alcatraz as early as 1959.
We meet Bill Bulger himself, now 85, and several of his adult children (who also remember their “Uncle Jim”). Dukakis appears, along with another former governor, William Weld. There’s also a former crime partner of Whitey’s. And we hear from the recently released Catherine Greig, Whitey’s longtime girlfriend and fellow fugitive, captured with Whitey in Santa Monica.
As sympathetic to Bill Bulger as is My Name Is Bulger, it doesn’t hide his opposition to busing in the 1970s, a political necessity that put him on the same side as South Boston’s ugliest racists. Nor does it shy away from the moment Whitey became a high-profile fugitive and Bill was cornered into taking the Fifth.
William Bulger in MY NAME IS BULGER. Photo courtesy of discovery+.
My Name Is Bulger is told from the point of view of Bill Bulger’s family. The Bulgers are understandably resentful of Bill’s political enemies in the press (and former Governor Mitt Romney). It’s more difficult to appreciate the family grudge against the government for harshness to Whitey, who, after all, was convicted of 19 murders.
For the story of how Whitey was able to use the FBI to eliminate his competition in the local Italian Mafia and the Irish mob, I also recommend another recent doc, Whitey: The United States vs. James J. Bulger.
My Name Is Bulger will stream on discovery+ beginning June 17.
Photo caption:BILLY GRAHAM. Photo courtesy of PBS American Experience.
The fine PBS documentary series American Experience brings us Billy Graham, an especially insightful look at back at the famed evangelist.
i hadn’t though much about Billy Graham lately. When I was growing up, Billy Graham was already a national institution and the most famous American religious leader – and the world’s most visible Protestant clergyman. Then, what happened?
Billy Graham traces Graham’s meteoric rise from Boy Wonder preacher to national stardom, taking evangelism from tent revivals in the rural Bible Belt to big city stadiums and television.
That story of Graham’s talent and ambition is interesting in itself, but Billy Graham examines both the strengths of his character and his vulnerability. Graham was rigorously disciplined in refusing to enrich himself and in his strict devotion to his marriage. Almost uniquely for TV preacher, Graham was never tainted by a financial or a sexual scandal and seemed impervious to hypocrisy.
But Billy Graham explores Graham’s yearning to become pastor to Presidents – both to promote his evangelism and as a manifestation of his own vanity. That paid off for Graham with his close relationship with Ike (and Ike and Billy’s impact on the nation’s public religiosity).
But then came Richard Nixon, who Graham was naive enough to think a soul mate. Being publicly anchored to Nixon made Graham’s position as an arbiter of national morality, well, untenable.
Graham’s career – through his consorting with politicians and his pioneering use of mass media – set the stage for the Moral Majority-type politicization of culturally conservative evangelicals. Notably, he intentionally took another path.
In his final act (which I had lost track of), Graham became an international peace campaigner. He mellowed into a more tolerant, less hell-fire theology and we glimpse him on a NYC stage at age 87. I was surprised to learn that Graham died in 2018 at age 99.
There’s no better movie choice for Memorial Day than the documentary We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company. A companion to the fine 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers, this oral history gives voice to soldiers as they revisit what they endured.
The Easy Company of the title was part of the 101st Airborne, a storied WW II unit of regular guys who became elite paratroopers. We meet a bunch of those guys as they recount their journey of 55 years before – their basic training, their first combat – on D-Day. Easy Company went on to play a part in WW II’s most pivotal moments: the Normandy invasion, the liberation of the Netherlands, beating back Germany’s last offensive at the brutal Battle of the Bulge and conquering Hitler’s own private getaway, the Eagle’s Nest.
These are men of The Greatest Generation, a term coined four decades later by Tom Brokaw. For those most part, they didn’t share their war experiences with their families and friends. We are hearing many of them tell their stories for the first time.
I’m a Baby Boomer, and my Dad and all of my friends’ dads were WW II vets – basically every dad-aged adult male. We knew them as grocery clerks, science teachers, factory workers, insurance agents and mechanics like my Dad. All of us kids, growing up on a steady diet of WW II movies and TV, asked them, but they would never talk about the war. I now realize that I knew men who had served as infantry in Europe and Marines in the Pacific.
One family member did tell me about getting shot down over New Guinea and spending time with an indigenous tribe before his rescue. What he didn’t relate was in a journal that I found long after his death – that the repeated terror of over twenty bombing missions finally became more than he could bear.
Above all, We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company is the story of men who experienced one trauma after another. The unit suffered over 50% casualties on D-Day. Their eleven months of combat missions must have seemed endless. They deserve, finally, to be heard.
We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company can be streamed from HBO Max.
Photo caption: Dan Sundstrom (Ten Mile Brewing) in Christo Brock’s BREWMANCE. Photo Credit:BROCKLAMATION FILMS
The appealing documentary Brewmance traces the evolution of the American craft beer phenomenon – and it’s quite a story.
The United States may have been the richest and most powerful country in the world, but before bottled Anchor Steam came out in the early 1970s, you couldn’t find a good beer in America. The passions of individual home brewers morphed into the first tiny craft breweries. We meet the undisputed father of the movement, Fritz Maytag of Anchor Steam, along with the founders of once-microbrewers Sierra Nevada and Boston Beer Company (Samuel Adams).
It’s interesting that craft brewers initially had to teach people to drink good beer. A populace conditioned to bland lagers like Budweiser, Coors, Miller’s High Life, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Schlitz was slow to embrace beers with strong flavors and aromas (and more alcohol). But, eventually, just as the American market began to appreciate good bread, good cheese and good wine in the late 1970s and 1980s, an acceptance of good beer followed. Indeed, we’re not surprised to see that the craft brewers we meet in Brewmance are also foodies.
Because The Movie Gourmet’s own taste has settled in India Pale Ales, I particularly appreciated Brewmance’s chronicle of the explosion of IPAs once brewers were able to source more varieties of hops and to deploy them more imaginatively. (Here’s a tip from The Movie Gourmet – if you can find an IPA brewed with New Zealand’s Nelson Sauvin hops – buy it.) And, yes, I will think less of you if you order a Bud Light, a Coors Light, a PBR or a Corona.
Here’s why Brewmance is so watchable, given that a 5-10 minute explanation of how beer is made is kinda geeky and that the history of any movement is, well, history. Director Christo Brock seamlessly braids these topics together with the stories of two startup craft breweries.
Underdog stories are irresistible, and every craft brewery starts out as an underdog. Brewmance features two very different sets of home brewers as they launch their own commercial craft breweries in Southern California.
Brewmance is a Must See for beer lovers and foodies, and a 102 minute delight for anyone. Brewmance is streaming on AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play and is coming to Amazon (included with Prime) on June 1.
The entertaining documentary That Guy Dick Milleris about an actor whose name you may not place, but that you’ve seen. It’s a straight-ahead documentary about a delightfully offbeat guy.
Dick Miller amassed 184 screen credits as a protégé of legendary independent filmmaker and schlockmeister Roger Corman. Along the way, he rubbed shoulders with indie film icons Jack Nicholson, Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.
Miller’s career started in 1955 as an Indian in the Roger Corman-directed Western Apache Woman and then Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors, The Terror, The Wild Angels and The Trip. Continuing as the king of the low budget movies, Miller went on to work for a second generation of Corman acolyte directors and then plunged full throttle into horror films. Miller was the unfortunate Murray Futterman in Gremlins and Uncle Willie in Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight.
On the screen and off, Dick Miller was glib and Bronx-accented, the quintessential wiseacre. In That Guy Dick Miller, we get to meet Miller and his wife Lainey; it’s clear the the two of them were lots of fun to be around. Irresistibly a card, Miller is even bawdy when he recalls his appearance in Night Call Nurses, a 1972 sexploitation film (that I actually saw in a drive-in 1972).
On screen, Miller always swung for the fences, no matter how small the part. Lots of actors play the ticket-taker or the security guard, but it’s Dick Miller that you remember for those minuscule roles.
Dick Miller as Walter Paisley, getting smooched in A BUCKET OF BLOOD
Miller is most well known for the lead character, Walter Paisley, in the beatnik-flavored cult film A Bucket of Blood. Miller appeared over ten more times as different characters named with some version of Walter Paisley. In fact, his final role was as Rabbi Walter Paisley in Hannukah, which opened after his death in 2019.
That Guy Dick Miller was recommended to me bySandy Wolf, who had screened it as a Cinequest submission. However, That Guy Dick Miller premiered at SXSW instead of at Cinequest.
That Guy Dick Miller can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime).
