Author: UncaScroogeMcD

DURHAM – Once more The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is a four day film festival that plays like it should last a week They show so many films that it’s impossible to even come close to seeing them all. Five theaters are going at once and the only repeats are the award winning movies. It’s hard to pick while going through the schedule. I’ve yet to hear anyone complain about the movie they saw so much as wishing they could have seen two or three of the other ones that were showing concurrently. This is the best festival for documentary film viewers. The 2010 edition kept up the lofty standards with films about basketball, pork, pastries, scoundrels, nomads and undiscovered superstars.

Steve James created the greatest film about the dirty business of Chicago high school basketball in Hoop Dreams. ESPN gave him a chance to look into the life of another high school superstar. No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson takes us back to a time when the controversial star wasn’t covered in tattoos and having public meltdowns about practice. In his junior year, he led his high school to football and basketball state titles. His senior year was spent behind bars when he was convicted for being part of a bowling alley fight. How did this happen? How was a minor charged as an adult and originally sentenced to several years in prison? James goes back to his boyhood home to investigate the role of race and being at the wrong high school might have played in Iverson not getting a slap on the back of his superstar hand. I had a chance to speak with the director about his 2 hour special that is currently airing on the various ESPN channels and is out on DVD.

And here’s part two of our chat:

Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker thought they’d been in the most intense space in the world when they made The War Room about Bill Clinton’s campaign. The found out quickly that was relaxing compared to the heat of a kitchen making desserts. Sweets are not a simple matter in The Kings of Pastry. In order to qualify for the red, white and blue collars on their shirts, pastry chefs compete in the Meilleur Ouvrier de France. This three day marathon has them create over 40 items from little puffs to huge sugar sculptures with no outside help. This makes Iron Chef look like reheating a TV dinner. The movie follows Jacquy Pfeiffer rigorous training makes him the Rocky of sweets. Don’t see this on an empty stomach.

Divine Pig is the ultimate pork film. A Dutch butcher spends two years raising a pig in order to serve them up in his shop. The last two pigs were saved by animal lovers and sent to a piggy heaven farm. Director Hans Dortmans follows the latest pig to see if it will be saved or succulent. The movie delves into religions that have dietary laws against pork. Why is the pig singled out? Is the pig that dirty of an animal when compared to modern farming of cows and chickens? I can’t believe in a God that will deny me bacon. Dortmans’ 50 minute film is must viewing for anyone who can’t get enough babyback ribs. This ought to be shown on the Food Channel followed by a roundtable discussion of the pork lovin’ trio of Duff Goldman, Michael Symon and Chris Cosentino, Director Dortmans sat down for a chat about the joy of pork in the greatest BBQ region in the world.

Casino Jack and the United States of Money is Alex Gibney’s untangling of the evil lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Cash flowed all over D.C. when Jack was playing the political game. Ever want to shut up Sen. John McCain at Red Lobster, ask him how much money Jack Abramoff gave his various campaigns. Abramoff’s specialty was representing Native American tribes on gambling issues. He played dirty and both sides for hefty prices. While Fox News wants us to forget Abramoff, Gibney reminds us why everything is screwed up inside the Beltway. Producer Zena Barakat sat down to describe how her job at Nightline led to this feature project. The movie will be coming out shortly from Magnolia.

The Kids Grow Up is a deeply personal film for director Doug Block. He follows his daughter Lucy as she graduates from high school and prepares to go to college on the West Coast. He culls through old family videos to show how fast his daughter shoots up. There’s plenty of humor when her French boyfriend comes to visit. How does a dad read the riot act to someone who doesn’t speak the language? His wife goes through a depression spell as things progress. At the end of the film, you learn to appreciate the time with your kids. Block sat down for a talk about child rearing and home videos.

Do It Again is a classic rock impossible dream. As he approaches 40, Geoff Edgers gets the noble quest to reunite the Kinks. It’s been over a decade since Ray and Dave Davies played on the same stage. The original British invasion band had an amazing run from the 60s to the 80s. They introduced the heavy metal distortion sound on “You Really Got Me.” They waxed poetic on “Waterloo Sunset” and “Come Dancing.” And they rocked us out with “Destroyer.” As a Boston Globe writer, he uses his reporter instincts to enlist other singers and actors into his campaign. John Cusack phones in support. Robyn Hitchcock and Peter Buck sing a Kinks tune. Ray Davies isn’t quite so thrilled at Edgers’ mission. You know something is messed up when he has an easier time getting Sting to appear than Ray. The personally heartbreaking moment comes when Zooey Deschanel admits her favorite record is The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. I was ready to leave my wife and kids for her. Those big eyes were tempting me with her extremely cool taste. The fantasy’s shattered since she doesn’t eat bacon. Why can’t I have my dreams come true? Not to give away the film, but you will get to see all the various Kinks members. As an extremely cool “bonus feature,” members of the dBs and Mitch Easter came out to perform a few Kinks tunes for the audience after the feature ran. Do It Again is a perfect celebration of a band that should still be as huge as the Rolling Stones. During my talk with Edgers, he supported my campaign for the J. Geils Band in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Although there’s no need for him to do a movie about reuniting them since they’ll be playing with Aerosmith at Fenway Park this summer.

There were several films I was able to watch between interviews.

Waking Sleeping Beauty charts the revival of the animation department at Disney. Instead of the usual talking head parade, we’re treated to 86 minutes of vintage video from the time. Plenty of video was shot by the animators including a young Tim Burton playing midway games. The key players narrate the struggles that started with the animators getting kicked off the lot. Ultimately they found the magic again with The Little Mermaid. Even though this is being distributed by Disney, don’t mistake it for a pure fluff piece that would end up as a DVD bonus feature. There’s plenty of bile between Roy Disney, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Things truly get nasty for Katzenberg as he makes himself the new face of animation like Uncle Walt. The knives come out as the executives enjoy the success while the animators nearly drop dead from the over ambitious workload. The real people behind the films success don’t seem to get to enjoy it. The best moment in the film is a Lion King photo op in which Katzenberg nearly gets mauled by a real lion.

Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields is an intimate portrait of a man who wants his personal space. My first encounter with the band was at a Mergefest. In barely 40 minutes they went from an obscure act to the soundtrack of my life. The same can be said about this movie. Directors Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara get extremely tight with the band as they hang out for years in Merritt’s New York apartment. It also serves as his studio space. You’ll think you’ve played the triangle on their last album. This isn’t just about music and a band on tour. Merritt’s creative process is laid bare. At the core of the band is the lifelong friendship of Merritt and his semi-muse Claudia Gonson. This isn’t a conventional band romance since he’s gay and she reminds me of the nun at a Catholic school that was in charge of the folk mass. It’s hard to completely tell what the duo are like since we don’t get much insight into Claudia’s social life. It seems like she sits around her apartment waiting for Merritt to call. The crisis in the film happens when a reporter decides to call Merritt a racist because he doesn’t like rap. After that moment, it became a field day for upstart music writers to pick apart anything he did to show he was somehow a Klu Klux Komposer.

I Am Secretly An Important Person introduces most of us to the obscure outside of Seattle poet Jesse Bernstein. He is best known for being on a few Sub Pop records releases when flannel ruled the world. Bernstein falls into the literary environment of William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski with his gritty tells of bad living. At one point he opened up for Burroughs at a reading and held his own on the stage. He used his poetry to open up for Big Black and Nirvana. The guy was the real deal as he had lived a rough and tumble life while dealing with addictions and mental health issues. He also knew how to land girlfriends. Director Peter Sillen and his crew create a film that brings together Jesse’s art, music, life and lovers into one cohesive form. While you don’t know the man, you experience him at his fullest through this documentary. Jess Bernstein secretly was important.

Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould is chocked full of archival footage of the iconic Canadian pianist. He was a strange perfectionist who sang along while playing classical pieces. At the peak of his fame, he quit performing live to focus on studio work. The film does a fine job setting up the myth and explaining a bit of reality as to his quirky ways. Mostly it lets us enjoy his artistic genius at the keyboard. The film will be shown on PBS in the near future. Set your DVRs.

Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture gives a glowing spotlight to the father of the skyscraper. He dared to make buildings look tall in the late 1800s. He also thought American instead merely copying the Europeans. His opera house in Chicago is beyond magnificence. Director Mark Richard Smith and cinematographer Pete Biagi let the camera bring out the detail in Sullivan’s work. He’s mostly thought of now as Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor. This film will enlighten you to Sullivan’s career which ended with him designing small banks that look better than most cathedrals.

Notes on Others should be watched by Hemingway scholars. It brings together a bull goring, an Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest and the writer’s suicide so disturbingly pure. Papa would have loved it.

Summer Pasture is a sociology film as we hang out with a nomad family in Tibet. They raise yaks and harvest caterpillar fungus so they can buy things from the town in the distance. Ever wonder how you can raise a baby without Pampers or cloth diapers? You’ll learn here. The film gets rather poignant as we discover how Chinese birth policies have affected the family we stay with during the summer. Lynn True and Nelson Walker create an insight into this far off land at the top of the globe.

My Perestroika visits five classmates who were the last students of a major communist high school to see how they’ve adjusted to democracy. These were the kids that were shown off in various propaganda films that made life under the communists look perfect. Director Robin Hesseman gets extremely tight with them. Some have flourished with one scoring big in high class men’s fashion. A few are struggling in the new economy. Most seem nervous about Putin’s political maneuvers.

A Film Unfinished shouldn’t be watched on a TV screen at home. This is a story that must be witnessed on a large screen with a group. Before the Nazis cleared out the Warsaw Ghetto by sending the Jewish residents to the death camps, they sent a camera crew to create a propaganda film. While the film was cut for picture, there was no narrative on the 35mm print uncovered in a Nazi vault. They mix real moments of people starving to death on the streets with staged dinner parties. There point was to show how even under such miserable conditions, Jews are heartless and won’t band together for group survival. They’re in it for themselves. They interview survivors of the ghetto and reference diaries from the mayor to give us the truth about those forced to play the rich and well-fed. They played their parts to keep from being killed. The images of skeleton bodies being piled up like firewood reminds us how easy it is for people to lose touch with humanity. The producers locate one of the Nazi cameramen to get his memories of how moments were staged. What was their point? The film restores the dignity to those who were forced to act for the cameras. They are given the proper context in this propaganda horror show. This is essential viewing if it comes to a theater near you.

Regretters features a conversation between two Swedish men who had sex changes only to have them reversed. This is kind of a trans-transgendered My Dinner With Andre. Orlando was a gay man in the ’60s who transformed since it was illegal to be gay in the country. Mikael didn’t feel happy as a man. Later he felt less happy as women and wanted his penis back. The conversation between the two is compelling and probing. Director Marcus Lindeen told me after the show that this project evolved from radio interviews between the two into a stageplay and finally the movie. I’m wanting to produce the play version off Broadway with Christopher Walken as Orlando and Harvey Keitel as Mikael.

Target Shoots First celebrates its 10th anniversary with a screening at Full Frame. This is the greatest film about an office rebel ever made. It’s not some Hollywood tale. Christopher Wilcha really did show up for his first day at the Columbia Music Club with a videocamera to document his life in the straight job world. He fears that he’s selling out working for a company that used to tempt us with 12 records for a penny without mentioning they also own your first born and soul. Wilcha gets hired because his boss thinks the young college kid can tap into the hot Alternative scene led by Nirvana. The rebel in a tie eventually gets his chance to create a new Alternative magazine for the club with a staff of fellow pirates the lurked in the hallways of the World Trade Center tower. His crew brought in good buzz for their revamped magazine that dared to offer under-appreciated vintage titles along with the hot Alternative acts from 120 Minutes. The film shows how the folks in corporate had to tame it down to make it their own. The movie ends with him finally deciding if he’s a company man after the death of Kurt Cobain. This film goes beyond The Office and Office Space. What’s strange is how nostalgic Target is since there’s no more World Trade Center and Columbia House Record Club (they only sell DVDs now). Wilcha has been directing This American Life on Showtime and I Pity the Fool.

Enemies of the People about the Killing Fields of Cambodia won the Grand Jury Award while the trash art Waste Land took the Audience Award. Special prizes went to Restrepo – a year with an Army unit in Afghanistan and The Oath deals with brothers that worked for Osama Bin Laden. There are those who want to pick this upcoming Oscar nominees out of this pool. All these films are worthy of your consideration.

STATE OF THE DOCS

Because of it’s popularity, the festival had two sessions dealing with the business of getting your documentary into the marketplace. The good news is that there’s more platforms then ever for getting eyeballs onto your film. Most of the panelists were happy about Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature. The fact that you can now use this on your wii has opened up a new way to get on people’s TV sets. Far as the money goes, one guy said a movie they represented had pulled in $38,000 so far. They also said if your movie gets listed as Coming Soon by Netflix, get your friends, family members and facebook friends to put it on their queue since this will help the company buy more copies and want to run it on Watch Instantly. There was also good news about how many theaters in major markets had no qualms running documentaries from a video source.

The bad news seemed to be that the theatrical action for documentaries is getting tighter. Once you take Michael Moore out of the pot, there are few profitable releases in the genre. The theatrical run becomes part of promoting the DVD release. But most theaters don’t seem to mind showing docs with projected video. The only reason why you should consider striking 35mm prints of your movie are for an Oscar run and archiving. So you can save there if you dream of the big screen and a marquee.

Ultimately nobody should view documentary films as a quick way to buy a house in Malibu.

DVD SHELF

Gamera: The Giant Monster finally brings the Japanese version of the mutant turtle’s first rampage in Tokyo to America. Fear the turtle. For decades we had to suffer from a pan and scan version instead of getting to see the complete glory of Gamera in black and white cinemascope. Even Mystery Science Theater 3000 had to settle for the American cut distributed by Sandy Frank. Shout! Factory has given us the real story of Gamera. He was a prehistoric turtle frozen in the Arctic ice until an atomic blast unleashed him. He does what comes natural to all giant radioactive prehistoric creatures: head to Japan. The big advantage to Gamera is how he can use his streamlined shell to turn into a rocket. Can anything stop his slow, but steady destruction? I grew to adore Gamera from when it ran on the Creature Double Feature on Boston’s WLVI. The bonus features include a 23 minute long history of the franchise. Shout! will be releasing the other 7 classic Gamera titles. There’s also a commentary track from August Ragone that fills us in on the legend of Godzilla’s biggest reptile rival. An anatomical drawing explains Gamera’s guts that give him power. This is the right tribute to the turtle that would eventually become a friend to all children named Timmy. Here’s a peak at his atomic shell action:

Iron Man: The Complete 1994 Animated Television Special brings the complete adventures of Tony Stark and his magnificent flying suits. He spends a lot of the time battling it out with The Mandarin. This Asian menace has 10 deadly rings like Phil Jackson. Luckily Iron Man doesn’t work alone as he gets to count on Nick Fury, War Machine, Scarlet Witch and Hawkeye watching his back. Because of the era, the normal guys in the cartoon wears the Miami Vice uniform of t-shirt and sports jacket. The animation looks like an extension of the GI Joe style. Tony Stark is voiced by Robert Hays (Airplane). Chuck McCann pops up as the voice of Blizzard. Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (The FBI) nails the vocal part as Justin Hammer. There are 26 episodes spread over 3 DVDs. This is fine for kids who get hooked on the Robert Downey Jr. Here’s a peak at what’s in the box.

X-Men: Volume 5 wraps up the animated series that ran on Fox in the ’90s. These are the 14 episodes that brought the story of Professor Xavier to an end. “The Phalanx” has another batch of aliens sneaking onto the Earth. Magneto wants to use these newcomers to take down humanity. “Storm Front” has Storm engaged to the alien Arkon. The other X-Men aren’t sure of the stranger from another planet. “Jubilee’s Fairytale Theater” has her taking a group of kids in a cave near the mansion. Things get hairy when a cave in strikes. “Old Soldiers” throws us back to when Wolverine and Captain America were beating up on the Red Skull during World War II. This is the prime episode of the season. “Graduation Day” is the finale with Xavier’s life in the balance and only a radical treatment as the cure. Magneto comes into play. It’s a good caper for the afternoon animated series. Here’s a little treat from the show: