One of our most anticipated titles at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (oh, yeah, did we mention we’ll be at the Sundance Film Festival? Because we totes will) is Room 237, a new documentary by Rodney Ascher about the obsessive fans of The Shining. According to Entertainment Weekly, one of them posits an intriguing two-part conspiracy theory. First, he holds that Kubrick “directed” the faked Apollo moon landings while shooting 2001 — itself a mere cover for his bigger job. (This one’s been floating around for years — hell, it inspired its own “mockumentary,” Dark Side of the Moon.) But here’s the kicker: the fan also contends that, since Kubrick would have faced dire consequences if he ever revealed his involvement in the moon landing, he instead smuggled clues into The Shining, using his Stephen King adaptation as a giant coded message to tell the world about the ruse.
“It’s a film-nerd love-fest,” according to Sundance programmer Trevor Groth. “These obsessive people dissect The Shining, and they’ve watched it thousands of times, all finding their own coded meaning and language in it.” Reading about Room 237, and salivating for it, got us thinking about some of our other favorite “film-nerd love-fests”; after the jump, we’ve compiled ten of our favorite documentaries about famous films.
The Academy Award for Best Documentary has always been, let’s face it, problematic. For decades the Documentary branch was notorious for snubbing, on an almost yearly basis, any doc that’d had the good fortune of actually accomplishing box office success; some of the most acclaimed nonfiction feature films of recent years (including Grey Gardens, The Thin Blue Line, Roger & Me, and Sherman’s March) weren’t even nominated for the award. In 1994, amidst charges of unfair rules and cronyism, the critical outcry following the snubs of Hoop Dreams and Crumb prompted the Academy to change, at long last, the way it nominated and voted on documentary films. The new rules certainly improved matters, and well-regarded, deserving pics like The Fog of War, Man on Wire, and Inside Job won the award.
But it’s still an imperfect system, and this year’s 15-film “short list” had several puzzling exclusions: Werner Herzog’s masterful Cave of Forgotten Dreams and powerful Into the Abyss, Errol Morris’ Tabloid, and the sharp and moving The Interrupters (from Hoop Dreams director Steve James). It’s hard to say if the louder-than-normal response to those snubs caused the new round of just-announced changes to the documentary nominating and voting procedure; what we can say is that they are a decidedly mixed bag.
Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. It’s rather a light week, presumably due to the holiday and/or the kickoff of the Toronto Film Festival (which serves as something of a starter’s pistol for the fall movie season), but you can check out the meager pickings after the jump.
Last night, Current TV wrapped up “50 Documentaries to See Before You Die,” a month-long countdown series summarizing the best of non-fiction cinema. And our sympathies go out to the folks at Current, because as we well know, any time you put together a “best of” anything list, you’re going to get second-guessed from here to kingdom come. But let’s face it: there are some absolutely puzzling exclusions. No Grey Gardens? Gimme Shelter? Hearts of Darkness? Gates of Heaven? Woodstock? The oldest titles on the list are The Thin Blue Line and The Decline of Western Cilvilization Part II: The Metal Years — golden oldies from 1988. We liked Catfish fine, but is there anyone on this earth who thinks it’s a better doc than Salesman? Who thinks Shut Up & Sing tops Don’t Look Back? Who finds Food, Inc. more vital than Titicut Follies?
And don’t even get us started on the fact that Dear Zachary isn’t on there.
But let’s put those complaints aside, because a list like this ultimately does more good than harm — any time a cable network can shine a light on great documentary films, we’re all for it, and these are (almost) all genuinely great documentaries. Where we really disagree is in the ranking — they picked the right movies (post-’88, anyway), but they’ve got them in the wrong order. Super Size Me at #5? Seriously? (Yes, yes, of course it’s just a coincidence that the show is hosted by Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock.) So we’ve taken the 50 titles Current compiled and reorganized then into own top 10, with the reasons why, after the jump.
Burning money! Crying fat cats in business suits, with cigars! Tough, conservative women in business suits, without cigars! And most of all, glamour shots! Yes, friends, it’s the official trailer for The Undefeated, the Sarah Palin documentary that comes out in limited release next Friday. The all-out celebration of Mama Grizzly, with its parallel-universe title, will also feature a diverse cast of Tea Party types saying things like,”to hell with the Establishment.” Sixties radicals, contemporary ultra-conservatives — what’s the difference, really? If you’re in the mood for a good laugh, watch The Undefeated trailer after the jump and confirm once and for all that your decision to buy advance tickets for Harry Potter next Friday was the right one.
Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, Rodman Flender’s intimate documentary account of the comedian’s 30-city “Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour,” goes into limited release tomorrow. Aside from being uproariously funny (with O’Brien at his spontaneous, reactive best), it is also a fascinating account of a superstar comedian’s life on the road: the rehearsals, the travel, the meet-and-greets, the stress. Of course, Flender isn’t the first documentarian to take a close look at the business of stand-up, or the complex psychology of the working comedian; we’ve assembled just a few of the best documentaries about comics after the jump.
A couple of weeks ago, an interesting comment popped up in one of our posts. On Tuesday, January 25th, we wrote (as countless other blogs did) about that morning’s Oscar nominations — the snubs, the surprises, etc. The next day, this comment from “ANGA” appeared: “Claims in the film Gasland have been widely documented to be untrue. See the investigative documents for yourself here,” followed by the URL for a “truth about Gasland” page. Here’s what’s interesting about that comment: all we did in the post was mention Gasland — we listed it, among the Best Documentary nominees, without comment.
At risk of getting ourselves mixed up in this controversy over the accuracy of Gasland, we will merely note that we’ve seen the film and it seemed awfully convincing to us; that Fox has responded to each of the claims being lobbed against him; and that ANGA is a high-profile natural gas company which certainly benefits from Fox’s reportage coming into question. The fact that they have the resources to troll the Internet and comment on blogs that so much as mention the film gives you some idea of what a documentary filmmaker is going up against when taking on big targets like this.
The Sundance Film Festival kicks off today in Park City, Utah, welcoming a crush of filmmakers, industry types, cinephiles, critics, paparazzi, and gift-bag hoarders for eleven days of film fun in the freezing cold. This year, Sundance will present 118 feature-length films, representing 29 countries by 40 first-time filmmakers. You’ll hear all about them in the days to come — the big premieres, the star Q&As, the breakouts, the flame-outs, the high dollar distribution deals. You might even hear about some good films! (Maybe.)
But most of us can only look over the slate longingly and leave it at that. This year and forevermore, we will never have the actual Sundance experience, for a variety of reasons: day jobs that get suspicious if you call in sick for eleven days in a row, pricey airline tickets, pricey festival passes, pricier accommodations (hotel rooms will run you at least a grand a night). Without a pretty healthy expense account, most of us are probably stuck having the Sundance experience in our living room.
PBS’ Frontline series pretty much wrote the book on public-affairs documentaries; now you can watch full episodes of the Peabody and Pulitzer award-winning show online, with more opportunities for in-depth investigating and interaction.
Frontline has been exploring the weightiest of topics since 1983. On the series’ website, you can watch 88 entire episodes, covering everything from Mormons to the meth epidemic, Abu Ghraib to the Madoff affair. Go “Behind Taliban Lines,” or learn the secrets credit-card companies don’t want you to know. Look for online extras, too: for the recent “Flying Cheap” show, about Buffalo Flight 3407, you can read responses from the producer and key figures in the story, learn safety info by airport, and join the discussion yourself.
A documentary begs to be made. There are months, maybe years of filming and editing, and what results is a visual incarnation of journalistic work that’s meant to inform and inspire. There’s no guarantee that a documentary will be well received beyond its niche audience, but when it is, there’s a certain magic that unites. Who knows what makes the stars align for often-underdog docs? It could be anything from storyline to controversy to something as simple as curiosity. There are always the big boys, a la Michael Moore or Ken Burns, but docs as a genre have that gritty DIY feel; it’s a guerilla medium for those with something to say.
After sifting through 89 films, The Academy has chosen 15 documentaries for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar short list. And this year, the aforementioned Michael Moore has to sit at the kiddie table.
