Category: Documentary

By Joe Bendel. Like many filmmakers selected for this year’s New York Film Festival, Jia Zhangke gets more distribution internationally than in his native country. However, in Jia’s case, it is not because he is an elitist or lacks a popular following. In fact, many of his films have been widely seen through bootleg copies. It is simply a matter of government censorship. Despite his uncertain status with the official state film establishment, Jia is received like a favorite son when he revisits his home town and other scenes from his resolutely independent films in Walter Salles’ documentary, Jia Zhangke, a Guy from Fenyang, which screens during the 53rd New York Film Festival.

The concept behind Guy from Fenyang is hardly a new one. Damien Ounouri essentially did the same thing in his hour-long documentary Xiao Jia Going Home from 2008. However, a lot can change in seven years, especially in today’s China. Nor is Jia one to be idle for long. Indeed, as Salles’ doc opens, Jia and actor Wang Hongwei walk through the streets of Fenyang that were lined with karaoke bars when they made their earlyfilms like Platform, but are ominously shuttered now.

For someone who cannot get his films approved for Mainland theatrical distribution, Jia sure has a lot of people approach him on the streets. Yet, he is always gracious about it. He also seems like a dutiful son when he visits his mother and eldest sister. In somewhat oblique fashion, Salles reveals the importance of family to Jia, especially with respect to his father. As a university faculty member, who had the profound misfortune of keeping a diary since his teenage years, the Cultural Revolution was especially difficult on Jia’s dad. It was also hard on his grandmother, who was the widow of a land-owning doctor. Clearly, his family’s experiences have influenced his work, most notably Platform, but there is a nonconformist humanist perspective reflected throughout his work. Of course, that is exactly why he has such trouble with the censors.

In addition to Jia, Salles also talks to several of his key collaborators, notably including his wife, muse, and frequent leading lady Zhao Tao, who explains how her life inspired The World. In accordance with Jia’s democratic spirit, Salles also elicits insights from his frequent cinematographer Yu Lik-wai and sound designer Zhang Yang. Fittingly, he liberally illustrates the film with clips of Jia’s work, but none are as evocative as the visually striking (and perhaps comparatively underrated) The World.

Picking up on Jia’s concerns regarding overdevelopment and callous demolition, Salles often compares and contrasts the locales of Jia’s film as they were then with their present radically altered conditions. It is hard to miss the devastation wrought on working class neighborhoods. Although Jia never gets explicitly political, we get a clear idea of the social inequities that distress him.

At one point Jia suggests he makes films about average people living common lives. That is sort of true, but it is nearly impossible for anyone to be average or common during a period of hyper-reality. Jia captures that zeitgeist with vivid directness (see a Touch of Sin for a particularly blistering example). Salles provides the cultural and political context necessary to understand Jia’s significance in contemporary China, while conveying a sense of his resilient personality. Recommended beyond Jia’s admirers for anyone interested in independent Chinese film and culture, Jia Zhangke, a Guy from Fenyang screens this Wednesday (9/30) at the Beale and Thursday (10/1) at the Gilman, as part of this year’s NYFF.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on September 29th, 2015 at 9:21pm.

By Joe Bendel. Whatever you do, do not call slime mold fungi. That was yesterday’s classification. Mostly they are mycetozoan amoebozoa, but they definitely have a fungus-like look. However, they exhibit an unclassifiable collective intelligence that would scare the bejesus out of Dr. Nils Hellstrom. Slime mold finally gets its well-deserved close-up in Tim Grabham & Jasper Sharp’s The Creeping Garden, which opens this Wednesday at Film Forum.

Although slime mold has never attracted as much attention from nature lovers and scientists as birds or pretty much every other species of animal, it still manages to attract a small but hardy group of “admirers.” Grabham & Sharp will knock about the woods with one such citizen naturalist, ogling the oozing patches they find on dead logs. They will also retreat into the lab, where legitimate scientists study slime molds’ ability to navigate mazes and detour around poisoned spots. We even meet science-inspired artists who use the branching patterns of slime molds in their work.

In addition to marveling at its slow but steady creepiness, Grabham & Sharp also celebrate the time-lapse photography that made their film possible. They even pay tribute to Percy Smith, the British pioneer of time-lapse microscopic technology in a cool tangent. Frankly, his 1931 slime mold documentary Magic Mixies still holds up pretty well, at least from what we see of it.

Smith may have gotten there first, but Grabham & Sharp are not exactly traveling down a well-worn path. Perhaps realizing audiences might need some selling on slime mold, they evoke the trippy 1970s vibe of The Hellstrom Chronicle and the eccentric docs based on Future Shock and Chariots of the Gods without overplaying their hand. They also include archival footage of John Chancellor reporting the discovery of a mysterious batch of slime mold in Texas, on what must have been the slowest news night in recorded human history. Yet, the film still feels slightly padded, especially during a gimmicky human-slime mold social behavior experiment that goes on too long.

Still, you have to admire a film with this much confidence in viewers’ intelligence. It almost sounds like the product of a dare, but Grabham & Sharp prove you can make a compelling film about slime mold. Grabham and co-cinematographers Ben Ellsworth and Clare Richards capture some incredible scenes of slime mold growth and development—it is all pretty gross at times, but mesmerizing. Recommended for your inner nose-picking bratty kid fascinated by creepy-crawling things, The Creeping Garden opens this Wednesday (9/30) in New York at Film Forum.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on September 29th, 2015 at 9:17pm.

By Joe Bendel. For many classic movie fans, costume design begins and ends with Edith Head, but Orry-Kelly was nearly as prestigious in their day. He dressed some of Hollywood’s most elegant actresses, but he did it at the gritty guns-and-gangsters studio, Warner Brothers. Not that it’s anyone’s business, but he also happened to be Australian. His fellow countryman Gillian Armstrong provides Orry-Kelly’s overdue ovation in the documentary Women He’s Undressed, which screens during the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

In his early years, Orry Kelly (as he was born) probably knew more gangsters intimately than all of Warner Brothers’ tough guys put together. In some cases, “intimately” was indeed the right word. Surviving a number of scrapes, Kelly eventually made his way to Hollywood, by way of New York. Almost immediately, Kelly began living quite openly with a future legendary movie star. Armstrong’s talking heads make no bones about their relationship, but evidently the Hollywood icon was rather litigious on the subject, so we will leave it to Undressed to reveal his identity, when it screens again in Toronto, North by Northwest of here. (By the way, that was an impression of Walter Winchell.)

In time both men caught on with the studios plying their respective crafts. Warners wasn’t crazy about Kelly’s name, but they compromised on the hyphen, assuming it sounded classier, like Rimsky-Korsakov or something. Obviously, there was a falling out between Orry-Kelly and the other gent, but he had plenty of champions, most notably including Bette Davis and Rosalind Russell, neither of whom were shrinking violets. Of course, Orry-Kelly’s career had its ups and downs, but somehow he managed to not merely dress, but shape the images of some of Hollywood’s biggest sex symbols, such as Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable.

If you want dish, Undressed delivers dish, while always remaining impeccably tailored. In addition, Armstrong enlisted an actor play Orry-Kelly to help tell his story through dramatic monologues and expressionistic vignettes. However, these are rather hit-or-miss, especially considering Darren Gilshenan is not exactly a dead ringer for the actual Orry-Kelly (whom we only see in archival photos as the film winds down). Nonetheless, the designer’s Hollywood in-fighting and his deal-with-it attitude are always compelling and frequently entertaining stuff.

Like many classic cinema docs, Undressed features Leonard Maltin as a talking head, but the man sure knows his old school Hollywoodland. Frankly, Orry-Kelly seems to bring everyone out of their shells. Loaded with gossip and chic frocks, it is just a lot of fun, even for straight men from New York. Recommended with affectionate fans of iconic Hollywood glamour, Women He’s Undressed screens again today (9/17) and Friday (9/18), as part of this year’s TIFF.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on September 18th, 2015 at 2:33pm.

By Joe Bendel. Georg Guðni Hauksson did something rather remarkable. The Icelandic artistic came up with an original approach to traditional landscape painting. His work was internationally hailed, but he tragically died at the peak of his productivity. Fridrik Thór Fridriksson & co-director Bergur Bernburg survey Guðni’s work and try to evoke its spirit in Horizon, which screens during the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

In some ways, Guðni’s timing was perfect. He attended Icelandic art school in the 1980s, at a time when that was suddenly the thing to do. He duly experimented with loud, fast, punk-inspired styles, but it was his secret landscape work that would eventually make his reputation.

Although perfectly representational, his landscapes look otherworldly and almost avant-garde. Rather than outlining shapes and then filling in colors, Guðni’s laborious method involved the meticulous layering of horizontal lines, one atop another, sort of like a weaver’s loom. The resulting work was often stark, but undeniably Nordic. There are no online records of his art being used on ECM record jackets, but his work would certainly be compatible with Manfred Eicher’s aesthetic.

Fridriksson & Bernburg incorporate long excerpts from archival interviews with Guðni, but they are not as revealing as one might hope. However, they get some helpful context from Icelandic art critics and Guðni’s contemporaries, as well as actor Viggo Mortensen, who published a book with Guðni at his specialty imprint, Percival Press. They also punctuate the talking heads and close-ups of paintings with impressionistic scenes of the Icelandic fields and valleys that so inspired him.

Guðni’s paintings are quite striking once you acclimate yourself to his distinctive look and the nature scenes are perfectly pleasant, but what really makes the film is the haunting minimalist soundtrack composed by Sigur Rós sideman Kjartan Hólm. Frankly, it really sounds like something that could be released on ECM, which is high praise indeed.

Horizon is an earnest and thorough examination of Guðni’s oeuvre that should give any open-minded viewer a keen appreciation of vision. However, even with Mortensen’s participation and support, it is hard to envision it getting a wide American distribution, so if you are in Toronto and are intrigued to any extent, you should see it now. Recommended for contemporary art connoisseurs, Horizon screens again tomorrow (9/15) and Saturday (9/19) as part of this year’s TIFF.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on September 15th, 2015 at 10:31pm.

By Joe Bendel. We joked about shoddy Soviet technology, but it was no laughing matter to Col. Stanislav Petrov. One night while commanding a Soviet early warning station, the system erroneously reported the launch of five American nuclear missiles. In contradiction of standing policy, Petrov insisted on visual verification before proceeding with his own launch. Danish filmmaker Peter Anthony follows the older and crotchetier Petrov as he starts to receive his global accolades and dramatizes that 1983 Cold War night in The Man Who Saved the World, which opens this Friday in New York.

It is rather eerie how history repeats itself. On the night in question, Petrov’s colleagues were still brazenly justifying the accidental shooting down of KAL flight 007, even though it was an obvious mistake and an international PR disaster. Years later, Russian backed Ukrainian separatists similarly bragged about shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, before realizing their stupidity. In 1983, the incident further heightened the tension for Petrov’s colleagues in the Soviet Air Defense, priming them to expect western retaliation. That is exactly what they assumed was happening, but Petrov was not so sure.

Flashing forward from the dramatic recreations, we see the Petrov of today is rancorous and unsociable. Even though he was profoundly right, the 1983 incident did not lead to his promotion, but rather the contrary. Frankly, he never really had much affinity for the military, but when his wife finally succumbed to her long term illness (perhaps not receiving the fullest possible medical treatment, as the film maybe sort of implies), Petrov became an angry, bitter man. He will be quite the handful for Galina Kalinina, who agrees with some trepidation to serve as Petrov’s translator during his NGO-sponsored tour of America.

Probably nobody ever saved so many by doing so much or so little, depending on how you look at it. Russian actor Sergey Shnyryov viscerally conveys the extreme stress Petrov withstood during the longest twenty minutes of his life. However, the real life Petrov’s oracle of doom act gets a little tiresome. Yes, the 1983 near launch is deeply scary, but it was precipitated by Russian systems failures. However, his warnings of nuclear Armageddon certainly argue against welcoming further nations into the nuclear club, especially those governed by religious extremists with vast fossil fuel deposits and a history of supporting terrorism. Seriously, what rational person would want to see a country like that go nuclear?

Petrov is also a Kevin Costner fan, who conducts himself like a worthy ambassador when Petrov and Kalinina visit him on set. The Colonel also met De Niro, but Mr. Tribeca is predictably monosyllabic in his cameo. However, nobody is more awkward than the desperate-to-be-recognized Matt Damon, whom Petrov does not know from Adam.

The film compellingly recreates the slightly Strangelovian 1983 Soviet war room and Petrov scores some convincing points. Unfortunately, Anthony refused to ask the swords-into-ploughshares Colonel some blindingly obvious questions about Russian military interference in Ukraine and Georgia, or he refused to answer. Either way, the absence of such discussion is embarrassingly conspicuous, to such a point that it actually takes a toll on the film’s credibility. As a result, it only really holds up when directly covering the fateful night of 1983. Feeling inconsistent and incomplete, The Man Who Saved the World truly inspires mixed emotions when it opens this Friday (9/18) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on September 15th, 2015 at 10:30pm.