Apollo 11

— What an unexpected joy it was to watch this documentary. Instead of a grainy reminiscence in 4x3 aspect ratio, this is culled from long-lost NASA footage and more than 11,000 hours of audio recordings, is a visual thrill, and is tautly edited to give a good sense of the thrill of the Apollo 11 mission. From today’s perspective, the unified NASA workforce boggles the mind—we rarely have stories of such dedication and national pride anymore—as does the personal sacrifice made by many. It’s hard to know if the film will only interest those who remember the event in real time on their small, tube TVs, or if those who’ve grown up after NASA’s heyday will find it spellbinding as well. It is also difficult not to be reminded of “First Man” when seeing this, and if you missed that film, it’s a good, dramatic companion piece. (Shown at True/False Film Fest 2019 while premiering in Imax theaters.)

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[2019, 93 min. Directed by Todd Douglas Miller.]
https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/apollo-11-movie-review-795597/

The Hottest August

— “The Hottest August” is more a portrait of the times than a mere look at August in New York City. Brett Story presents a colorful and diverse cast of everyday characters, living their lives and expressing their hopes and fears. What emerges is a bustling city with gentrification, inequality, a vanishing middle-class, global warming, and plenty of daily challenges. Counterbalancing these negative aspects is a soul that’s still strong and filled with wry humor, neighborly love, and an uncertain hope that Americans adapt to difficulties, making adjustments for a better future. The filmmaker doesn’t really point the viewer in any direction, but just presents the images and comments, creating the portrait for the viewer to consider. (Shown at True/False Film Fest 2019.)

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[2019. 92 min. Directed by Brett Story.]
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/hottest-august-review-1189369

Mike Wallace Is Here

— In a world of “fake news,” innuendo, meanness disguised a memes, and selective reporting, it’s nice to look back on an early player in investigative reporting. This is a decent glimpse of Wallace’s career—even his successes as a game show host, actor, and advertising spokesperson—as well as how, in the 1950s and 1960s, his aggressive style of asking tough interview questions changed how news interviews were conducted. Times have changed and “news” sources have expanded to include social media, blogs, and ideologically focused web sites. Wallace’s confrontational style can still be seen in “real” news, but also in a new breed of journalists who blur the lines between news and commentary and entertainment. (Shown at True/False Film Fest 2019.)

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[2019. 86 min. Directed by Avi Belkin.]
https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/mike-wallace-is-here-review-1203119500/

Cold Case Hammarskjöld

— It’s hard to describe “Cold Case Hammarskjöld,” a quirky look at the 1961 crash of a plane carrying U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld to a ceasefire negotiation in the Congo, and the conspiracy theories that surround the event. A clever format adds humor to a documentary that moves from the investigation of a cold case to something much more sinister. Mads Brügger, the film’s investigator, acts as the ringmaster, juggling theories and lines of inquiry while the audience, though intrigued, suspects the theories are just that, unproven and unlikely conspiracy pap. When one of the theories appears to have a basis, suggesting the crash was, in fact, not an accident, Brügger lets the facts add up, making a believable case for an alarming plot to murder Hammarskjöld. It’s hard not to be sucked into the intrigue and to consider the veracity of the claims made, and to worry a little that, even if the conspiracy theory isn’t true, it is plausible. It’s an intriguing film, but I tend to favor documentaries that are under 2 hours, and this one could have been even better with a bit of judicious editing. (Shown at True/False Film Fest 2019.)

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[2019. 128 min. Written and directed by Mads Brügger. With Mads Brügger, Göran Björkdahl, Neddy Banda, and Jan Beuckels.]
https://www.indiewire.com/2019/01/cold-case-hammarskjold-review-sundance-1202039570/

Up the Mountain

— Ostensibly a look at life in a Chinese mountain village where master painter Shen Jianhua hosts a variety of followers including grandmothers engaged in brightly-hued, folk paintings of day-to-day life in the village. The result is a subtle, poetic film with amazing panoramas that are only rivaled by scenes of everyday life that are just as inspiring. In fact, the film has a rhythm and texture to it that emphasizes the beauty around us everywhere. Beautiful as the film is, it suffers from poor subtitles that are often have so little contrast as to be unreadable. A heavier hand at editing would have been welcome too, so the film might have been closer to 90 minutes instead of more than two hours. (Shown at True/False Film Fest 2019.)

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[2019. 126 min. Directed by Zhang Yang.]
https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/up-the-mountain-macao-review/5135158.article

Knock Down the House

— It would have been easy for this film to have been conceptualized as a look at four, grassroots, political candidates and their activist supporters as they challenge the status quo, but then to have morphed into a singular love fest, falling for a feisty attitude and the ability to charm with a media-savvy demeanor and a promise of better things ahead. Instead of abandoning three of the candidates and jumping on the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bandwagon, the film draws the story into something more substantial than one candidate’s victory. Instead of hailing AOC as David slewing Goliath, it places her in the context of a shift in politics, as one of the group of new politicians coming into their own, angry over the current state of affairs, and heralding changes for the future. Watching the film reminds us that an outsider who’s passionate about beliefs that mirror our own is more valuable than a powerful insider whose power isn’t working for us. It’s a look at how we thought democracy worked when we were in grade school, making us wonder if the 2018 elections were less a fluke and more a harbinger of things to come. You may not agree with the film’s views, but it’s still a very good film and likely to generate discussion. (Shown at True/False Film Fest 2019.)

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[2019. 86 min. Directed by Rachel Lears. Featuring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Joe Crowley, Paula Jean Swearingen, and Amy Vilela.]
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/28/knock-down-the-house-review-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-doc-brings-down-the-house

Amazing Grace

— If you’re a fan of Aretha or of gospel, this documentary’s for you. If you’re in one of those groups, you probably already know the film documents the recording of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 live album at a Baptist church in Watts, and was meant to be released with the album of the same name—still the top-selling traditional gospel LP in history. Warner Brothers had hired Sydney Pollack to document the event, but Pollack didn’t use clapper boards at the beginning of each take, making it impossible to sync sound with the 20 hours of footage, so the album came out and the footage remained on a shelf. After Pollack’s death in 2008, Alan Elliott managed to digitally sync the footage and planned to release it in 2011 until Aretha herself filed a suit against its release. No one knows why Aretha objected, but she did and it’s only now that the footage of Aretha, at the top of her game, can be seen. It’s an unbelievable chance to see an iconic singer who deserved to be known as the “queen of soul.” (Shown at True/False Film Fest 2019.)

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[2018. 87 min. Directed by Alan Elliott and Sydney Pollack. With Aretha Franklin, Reverend James Cleveland, C.L. Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and the Southern California Community Choir.]
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/13/amazing-grace-review-aretha-franklin-documentary

Cold War

— “Cold War,” with its black and white aesthetics, gorgeous photography, and director’s attention to every part begs comparison to “Roma” but the two, while both based on memories and associated emotions, tell their tales differently. For “Roma,” the recollections feed from a young boy’s perspective and are more personalized. With “Cold War,” there’s a sense of watching from a less involved viewpoint, but not with less emotion and still dependent on memory. “Cold War” may be a more disciplined film with the story pared down to its bare bones, and scenes, taken as a whole, provide the story, sort of a push and pull of love and life. Set in the Cold War, it looks at a love affair that seems destined to fail, at a time where ideologies and passions help bring a couple together and at the same time, keep them apart. The film’s set during a time when borders between East and West Europe move from porous to impermeable, when ideas of art and culture clash, when passions boil and then are lowered to a simmer. In the end, after all the politics and all the history, the sparks that linked the couple are still there but it’s hard not to wonder if the shifts from repression to freedom, and from fear to hope, weren’t necessary ingredients to keep the spark alive, to take the couple to a place where their relationship was what remained to hold on to. However you interpret the relationship, it’s told with such care that this is one of the best films of 2018.

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[2018. 89 min. Written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. Starring Joanna Kulig, Tomas Kot, Borys Szyc, and Agata Kulesza.]
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/cold-war-2018