Bombay Beach (2011)

director Alma Har’el
viewed: 02/16/2012

Bombay Beach is a small community on California’s the Salton Sea.   Though I never saw the movie The Salton Sea (2002), a neo-noir set in this milieu, I have been intrigued by it.  Apparently, the current “sea” was formed in the early part of the 20th century when the Colorado River flooded, bursting dams and other man-made attempts to harness it, and water poured into this low-lying area, which had been connecting lakes, rivers, waterways back through the ages.  Apparently, briefly, it became a tourist destination, an inland sea for partying on.

Now for some time, the area around much of this isolated sea has become a home for various people who have removed themselves from society, generally through poverty or intentional isolation.  As for the Val Kilmer film, I think it focused on the methamphetamine communities and other more criminal elements.  Whatever it is or isn’t, I’ve been curious about it.

Bombay Beach is a sort of “artistic” documentary by Israeli-born director Alma Har’el, who focuses on a few key people and families in the Bombay Beach community, following them throughout their lives and travails for a period of time.  I say “artistic” documentary because while it is a documentary, is attempting to capture and document these people, this place, Har’el also takes some liberties with the reality, staging scenes and instances with some poetic license.  While some of these are more clearly fictional or contrived, others are more subtle and confusing.

There is a surreal nature to this.  There is perhaps a surreality to the world itself, untouched by anything other than the camera eye.  It reckons of David Lynch or Diane Arbus, a weirdness of the world that just is.  The landscape, with dead fish on the ground, desolate, decaying structures, damaged, withered people, it speaks a lot.

The core of the story is living with these people, the elderly racist fellow who makes his living selling cigarettes, the young African American boy who relocated from the rough parts of LA after a cousin was killed in gang violence, the young boy on insane medication with behavioral issues.  The ultimate portrait of the people is less exploitative than might seem at first.  Har’el follows them through their aspirations and life changes, and while initially reveling somewhat in their outre-ness, the story is more sympathetic than many.

Still, I feel the “artistic” license employed degrades the possibilities of the documentary.  While documentary is never truly objective and perhaps belies itself in projecting that ideal, Har’el’s surreal moments of dance and dialogue, perhaps meant to suggest the characters’ inner worlds seem contrived and false to me.  It seems like the protagonists participated cheerfully and willingly in these sequences, and while it pushes beyond their natural language and behavior, it grated on me.  Perhaps as more and more documentaries are made as production costs drop, the variety and challenge of the form will come under further and further expansion and testing, such discordances as this will feel more part of the language of these forms.  I don’t know.  I recognize it’s a personal response on my part.

Buck (2011)

director Cindy Meehl
viewed: 02/12/2012

My step-sister had recommended this film to me, and others since, and now I am recommending it to a lot of people because I can think of so many people who would appreciate it.

Buck Brannaman is not “the horse whisperer”, though he did inspire the character of Nicholas Evans’ novel and  consult with Robert Redford on the 1998 film.  In a lot of ways, he’s “the horse therapist”.  In reality, he espouses a practice known as “natural horsemanship” which is kinder, gentler and far more “humane” than traditional practices of “bustin’ broncos”.  He’s noted for his amazing way to approach a new horse and within minutes having it follow him where he goes.  He does this without violence of any kind, only patience and empathy.

The film follows the low-key cowboy from one training session to another and recounts his own troubled childhood in which he withstood immense physical abuse at the hands of his father.  A truly inspiring story of coping with trauma, he has gone on to deal with horses with the same steady conscientiousness and good will that most any person would find a valued attribute in another.

The most dramatic sequence of the film occurs when a truly wild, damaged animal, noted to be one of the most dangerous that one of his collaborators had ever seen, attacks another horseman who is trying to use the gentle practices and tears a gash in his head, and perhaps easily could have killed him.  The horse’s owner realizes that the animal will have to be put down, but Buck comes in and with only his steady patience and flag, manages to coax the animal back into its traveling compartment.  Buck tells the woman, one of his great truisms, that animals often reflect their owners’ issues and problems, that it’s best to deal with oneself first than try to work with a creature beyond oneself.

It’s an impressive portrait of humanity, a portrait of humanity in a very idealized state, a state of patience, tolerance, and kindness that most anyone can appreciate and perhaps admire.

Tabloid (2010)

director Errol Morris
viewed: 01/13/2012

Documentarian Errol Morris’ latest film, Tabloid, recounts a racy tabloid news story from England from 1977, known popularly as the “Mormon sex in chains” case.  The reality behind the reality is that of Joyce McKinney, a pretty young woman who stalked (from America to England) a young Mormon man, who she and accomplices helped to kidnap, taking him to Surrey, where she chained him to a bed and had sex with him for several days.

Her version of the story suggests that the young Mormon man was somewhat more complicit (or willing) and that all of this was done “for love” against the brainwashing of his church.  The papers had a field day with the material, for obvious reasons…the story had it all.  And it just kept getting better and better.  As for the Mormon fellow, he declined to be interviewed for the movie, and if decades of life tell outside of the limelight say anything about him, he was quite likely the victim of a stalker, a pretty loopy stalker, though possibly a moderately benign one in the grander scheme of things.

McKinney is the main interviewee of the film, telling her version of events in great detail, answering back about nudie pics that surfaced by the press, further stalking issues, and finally, oddly, her return to the limelight as a cloner of her favorite pet dog.   Since the film, McKinney has come out in protest of its portrayal of her.

Unlike some of Morris’ best films, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) or The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003), Tabloid doesn’t seem to reach some transcendent discourse beyond its core subject.  While there is at the heart a question of “the truth”, a version of reality not unlike the elusive facts (a la Rashômon (1950), in which several accounts of a story depict a missing level of truth while suggesting a greater, less knowable version of truth), it ultimately plays out as a strange, somewhat humorous lurid tale, teasingly made palatable by the “barking mad” but quite charming McKinney.

Still, it’s not at all uninteresting.

The Tillman Story (2010)

director Amir Bar-Lev
viewed: 01/12/2012

There may be many ways to feel about the reality behind The Tillman Story but it’s hard for me to imagine any variation that doesn’t include being extremely pissed off.

Pat Tillman was the former NFL star who enlisted in the Army Rangers after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, abandoning a multi-million dollar contract to fight for his country.  Tillman did fight in Afghanistan, but he was also tragically killed by “friendly fire,” the euphemism for being killed by one’s own side by mistake.

This, in itself, was perhaps an accident that didn’t have to happen, an unfortunate situation that probably bore various degrees of inevitability.  In “the fog of war” it is something that is tragic but understandable, amid the chaos of firefights, foreign lands, with death and ambush all around at any time.

But the thing that is the pisser is how Tillman’s story was spun.  So very much against his wishes.

Like perhaps many people, when a square-jawed football player jumps on the war bandwagon, the thought is that “this guy is your typical American war-hawk, full of pride, but blindly following a military force that God knows how such blind faith will be rewarded” (or some such thing.)

This is a discredit to Tillman.  From a long line of American military men, who had served in many wars and fought for the ideals of the country, he wasn’t your average jock by any means.  Growing up outside of San Jose, he was a local boy (to us here) and his family, while strong on many traditional American values were also not entirely of that world either.  They were atheists for one.  They believed in an individualism of American values that far exceeded that of others willing to put their lives at risk in defending.

The bottom line is that Tillman was not a glory-seeker.  He signed documents when he enlisted asking specifically not to be made into a model, hero, martyr.  He was serving for his own beliefs.  His notoriety was not something that he pursued.  And once he had served some time, he started really questioning American foreign policy.  The film suggest that he even met with Noam Chomsky, a noted critic of American foreign policy.  Tillman was serving his time, and dutifully, but he was at odds with what was really happening in the war.

And the government tried to use him as a model of American ideals.  Against his wishes.  And that thing about being killed by his own side?  That was something that needed to be suppressed.

This is a story of lies and subterfuge, an attempt to make a martyr and hero of a man who was certainly heroic, but humble.  The irony is that his heroism had as much to do with “the truth” and free speech as it did with “fighting the good fight”.  The administration wanted to use him, his image, his surface as an icon, a football player, enlistee, a true fighting American, while ignoring his own desires and the truth of his ignoble death.

One of the great moments from this story, caught for the film, is when his brother is at the big, military funeral, broadcast widely and attended by many important people, proselytized by many.  His brother says thank you to the people but that Pat was not up in Heaven.  He was an athiest.  He was “fucking dead”.

The integrity of the Tillman family comes through in a way that is extremely compelling, a family of unquestionable American ideals, including those that don’t gibe with becoming a war hero, a military emblem, a campaign image.  Beyond this, they’ve had to fight for the truth of Tillman’s death, through the lies of the government, the true “gratitude” handed out to someone who offered themselves for their country.

It’s a story of crude ironies and yet of true heroism and American values.

Bill Cunningham New York

(2011) director Richard Press
viewed: 12/26/2011

Like a lot of things in this world, you probably either know who Bill Cunningham is or you don’t.  I fell in the latter category before watching the film.  Now I reside in the former.  Despite not knowing who Bill Cunningham was, I had been hearing that Bill Cunningham New York was supposed to be one of the better documentaries of the year.

Cunningham is a fashion and society photographer for The New York Times.  He’s had two weekly spreads now since the 1970′s, one of society events and people, the second of people on the street, wearing the fashions that catch his eye.  He’s now in his 80′s and has been covering the scene for decades.  The film examines his experiences going back to his early days as a haberdasher.  He lives in Radio City Music Hall studios along with a few other old time hold-outs from another era.

The real thing about Cunningham is he is an incredibly sweet, humble guy, whose life is devoted to fashion and photography, entirely.  He’s beloved by the people who are familiar with him and his work.  And the one of the aspects of his charm and humility is the fact that he rides his bicycle across town, up and down, from one posh society outing to another, snapping photos as he goes of anything that catches his keen eye.

The reason that people have no doubt come to like the film so much is quite simply that Cunningham is such a sweet, intelligent, humble  and likable person.  The film-makers treat him with great kindness as well, not delving very hard into his upbringing, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs.  Eventually, they do query him, but this film summarizes his life as this singular, classically New York City individual, a unique and key part of the legendary content of The Times.

Frankly, it’s a decent documentary, not a great one, but it is interesting and is a “feel good” sort of vibe.  I know people who would like it too, and I’ll be recommending it.

Nostalgia for the Light

(2010) director Patricio Guzmán
viewed: 10/10/2011

Contemplative and thought-provoking, the documentary Nostalgia for the Light peers into space and time, the deepest edges of which astronomers use massive telescopes to view.  But the film also peers into the muddy depths of a more recent history, the coup d’etat in Chile in 1973 that brought to power the murderous Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the many people tortured and killed under his regime and the ongoing silence that mars Chile’s presence about this dark time not long in the past.

What brings these potentially distant topics together is the setting of the Atacama Desert, considered the most arid place on Earth.  For those looking into the sky, the clarity is better than anywhere else on the planet, adding impact of vision to these earthbound telescopes, whose tasks are to venture back in time.  The concept of looking “back in time” in Astronomy relates to the fact that though light travels at such a great speed, even the light of the sun takes time to reach us.  So the stars that we see, the moment of light that we see, actually occurred in the past.  And the further into space one looks, the further and further in time we “see”.

Both poetic and scientific, these concepts drive director Patricio Guzmán.  He opens the film on the opening of one of these massive telescopes and shares his personal connection to astronomy.  As he turns his gaze to the desert itself, this dry wasteland (rich as it has been in minerals), the comparison to the surface of a foreign planet is not a hard one to follow.  But beneath the cooked, cracked desert are many, many bodies of “the disappeared”.  And some of their loved ones continue to scour the desert for their bodies.

Due to the aridity, bodies do not decompose as they would in many other places, and a body of some ancient llama driver, millennia-old could show up almost as complete as one that had been left there in the last century.  The Pinochet government cruelly removed many of the bodies (or claimed to at least), saying that they tossed them into the ocean so that they could never be reclaimed.  One woman who shares the story of having found her brother’s foot, how even alone with that small fragment, connected in a way that mourners yearn for.

It’s a remarkable film in that sense.  While not at heart a post-modern discourse, it did actually bring me to mind of Jacques Derrida.  Not so much a “play” on concepts, but a deepening and enriching of these two potentially disparate foci.

The Arbor

(2010) director Clio Barnard
viewed: 10/08/2011

An unconventional documentary, The Arbor sets its sights on British playwright, Andrea Dunbar, who is best known for the film made from her screenplay called Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1986).  While that film is perhaps her most well-known work, documenting the voice and culture of northern England’s poor housing estates, the title of the film, The Arbor, is taken from Dunbar’s first play, which debuted in London in 1980 when she was 18 years old.  Dunbar would die of a brain hemorrhage at age 29 in a pub in her native Bradford.

The film’s two main tropes that break significantly with documentary convention are that the interviews with friends, family, and others, were all recorded audio, but in offering a bit of anonymity, director Clio Barnard has actors lip-sync these oral histories, allowing at times for subtle commentaries and breaks with “reality” as well as “hiding” the real people behind the voices.  When I had read about this approach, I thought it sounded artificial and arty, but the reality of it carries some weight, enhances the artifice which documentaries usually tend to try to pretend doesn’t exist in the form.

The other interesting conceit is having a group of actors perform the play “The Arbor” in the Arbor itself.  The Arbor itself is an open plane of grass in the center of the housing estate, nicknamed “The Arbor” for the name of the road that runs past it.  It takes little irony to recognize how little it resembles a true arbor.  Among the people that live in the neighborhood now, the actors play out the drama from nearly 30 years before, bringing it “home”, so to speak.

Really, the film is about more than just Dunbar herself.  It’s about, in part, the world of the housing estates that she wrote about, how twenty years have now passed since Dunbar’s death, and the life in those buildings has shifted.  More specifically, the film focuses on Dunbar’s oldest daughter, Lorraine (she had 3 children by 3 different men in her short life).

Lorraine is the mainstay of the narrative.  11 years old when her mother died, she was the only one of her siblings to be of mixed race (her father was Pakistani).  Britain’s great national racism was virulent in the late 1970′s-early 1980′s, and while Dunbar was perhaps rebelling against that in her youth, Lorraine notes that her mother regretted having a mixed-race child in later years.  As difficult enough as it would have been for any non-white child in that place at that time, Lorraine’s life was inflected by her mother’s perceived lack of love.  And when her mother died, Lorraine got into drugs, then harder drugs, then prostitution.  Lorraine’s story, both sympathetic and at times abhorrent, is deeply sad and tragic.

Andrea Dunbar died too young, never as one producer tells us, having achieved her “mature” phase of her work.  She also died an alcoholic with a highly dysfunctional home life for her two girls and one young boy.  It’s as if the genius of her precocious teens, who crafted theater from her real life, also went on to carry on with the same lifestyles that would leave her children bereft and broken.  The brutal naturalism of the characters and language of Dunbar’s writing were ultimately her deep reality as well.  And had she lived, and as life on the housing estates became more infested with crack and heroin and prostitution, perhaps the world of her “Arbor” would also have darkened.

The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story

(2009) directors Gregory V. Sherman, Jeff Sherman
viewed: 08/06/2011

More that 20 years ago, a friend turned me on to a 3 CD collection of Disney music, which I took to in a big way.  It featured songs from the earliest films through to the then present, but also contained theme songs from live action films, television shows, and even theme park rides.  I’d say that about 75% of it was brilliant stuff.  And oddly, of that 75% that I was really into, I discovered that the songs were written by a team named “Sherman/Sherman”.  At the time, I didn’t know that these two were brothers, but that they wrote a good deal of the best of the Disney music, for animated films like The Jungle Book (1967), mixed live-action/animation films like Mary Poppins (1964), and even Disney theme “rides” like  In the Tiki Tiki Tiki Room.

Who were these amazing song-smiths?  Brothers Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman.

When I saw that this documentary was coming out, I was probably of a small minority of people who were kind of excited about it.  I really knew little of the brothers who wrote songs from “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, and “Winnie the Pooh”.  It turns out that the story between this writing team is more interesting than one might expect.

For all of being siblings only 2 1/2 years apart, the two are as different as night and day.  And for all of their success, they are not at all close.  The film is actually directed by two of their sons, Gregory V. Sherman and Jeff Sherman, who along with others of their children, have tried to find ways to bring them together.

Bob, the elder of the two, is the lyricist, the darker of the two, who served in WWII at the age of 17 and saw some terrible things.  Richard, the younger and more buoyant, is the music writer.  They both earned their musical ear from their father, who had also some success as a songwriter before the war.

The film is one of a number of Disney documentaries that seem to further the story of the studio, the legend of Walt Disney, and capture a larger story behind the movies, the theme parks, the world of Walt.  In this sense, the film only really deals with the strange estrangement of the brothers, not delving into any real issues with Walt of the studio.  And this is certainly the case for the Sherman brothers, who seem to have been personal favorites of Walt’s from the time they earned their first hit for The Parent Trap (1961).  And the two brothers refer to Disney as a wonderful, imaginative paternal figure for whom they both have great respect and admiration.

Interestingly, the Shermans had big successes outside of the studio, such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and interestingly to me, Snoopy Come Home (1972).  So many of their songs are so hummable and catchy, you have to really strive to get them out of your head.  They also wrote It’s a Small World After All.

I don’t know if you could compare them to the great American songwriters like the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and the others who are considered as part of the Great American Songbook. Certainly, their music comes at the close of that classic period, and certainly, some of their songs are probably either more inane or kitschy, compared to the classics of the middle 20th century.  But they certainly are the best musical writing team to have worked at the Disney Studios and they have a well-earned legacy.

There is a sadness to their lives, their estrangement, a melancholy beneath the story.  It makes for an interesting film, for me because I was already interested in them and their music.  But it could be an eye-opener for a number of fans of the Disney classics, a pair who had some fame in their day (they won Oscars for Mary Poppins for instance).  But how many have heard of them today?