A fitting subtitle for director Lance Oppenheim’s Spermworld would be Dispatches from the End of the World. That’s less to do with anyone we meet in the documentary and more an indictment of the entire system. The film explores the unregulated wild west of online sperm donation mainly from the perspective of a few of the men offering up their genetic material.
Their clients are people who want to become parents but who, for myriad reasons, can’t go about it either in the conventional way or even by using established medical options like sperm banks or IVF. The latter options, as you might have guessed, since everything in our society revolves around money, are often prohibitively expensive.
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I have a friend – who shall remain nameless – who, I think, enjoys trying to wind me up every once in a while with a particular movie hot take. Every so often in my presence, this person will say a slightly different version of, “Any movie made before 1993 is basically hot garbage, right?” (This person is known for making incendiary and facetious statements, and it’s always in good fun. The sage observation comes from a third party (whom I’ve never met) who said that Demolition Man is the Rosetta Stone here.) Each time this little nugget gets trotted out, a half-smile appears on my face, and I respond with some variation of, “Yeah, it doesn’t matter how many times you say that, I’m never going to agree with you.”
If there is any single work to once-and-for-all incinerate the notion that “old movies are bad,” it’s Northern Irish documentarian Mark Cousins’s epic, 18+ hour magnum opus The Complete Story of Film, a meditation on the greatest art form ever invented.
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Almost from the start of Lana Wilson’s intimate yet sprawling portrait of the life and career of model and actress Brooke Shields, it becomes apparent that the director wants to use her subject to dig deep into the psychology of the culture that produced a figure like Shields. It’s also quickly apparent that Shields – who was used for the purposes of others long before she had the slightest bit of agency in the matter – is a willing and enthusiastic conspirator in the project.
Together the two women have crafted a searing indictment of how our society did, and, more importantly, still does, treat woman solely as sexual objects for the gratification of straight men. Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields also manages to present its subject as a whole person. By the end of the film, we feel we’ve seen Ms. Shields from every angle of her personality. It should be no surprise that this thoughtful and careful examination is infinitely more fulfilling than what those early in Shields’s career coveted her for, namely her beauty and her body.
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What Questlove did last year for a single music festival with his documentary Summer of Soul, film and cultural critic Elvis Mitchell has done for an entire decade of cinema and beyond with Is That Black Enough for You?!?, the first-time director’s new Netflix documentary.
With a focus on the 1970s, one of the greatest decades in American cinema by almost any measure, Mitchell succeeds wildly with Black Enough as a reclamation project for Black cinema of the era. His film is an erudite mix of interviews with numerous luminaries of the film and entertainment world – Harry Belafonte, Samuel L. Jackson, and Whoopi Goldberg are only a few – and incisive video essay-style film and cultural criticism from Mitchell.
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Executive produced by Bryan Fuller, Queer for Fear looks at queer representation in horror movies from the beginnings of cinema through roughly the 1990s. It covers everything from gay director James Whale’s outsized influence on the horror genre, via his seminal work for Universal Studios in the 1930s, to the Wachowski sisters exploring queer desire in 1996’s Bound.
Any person committed to understanding the world with as much complexity and nuance as possible craves ideas and perspectives other than their own. Queer for Fear gave this (mostly) straight guy a new perspective on dozens of cultural artifacts and made them richer and more interesting for it. It also validates and reclaims a vibrant history for people who have experienced intolerance, rejection, hostility, and violence from those in society – sad to say, probably still the majority – who can’t slap their hands over their ears fast enough when new ideas are presented to them. Queer for Fear is a wonderful achievement in queer cinema. Both LGBTQ+ and straight folks should relish the ideas it presents.
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With Moonage Daydream, documentary filmmaker Brett Morgen has reinvented the form, synthesizing a kaleidoscope of images and sounds from the life and work of David Bowie into a vibrant, electrifying experience. Like its subject’s nonconformist, taboo-smashing body of work, Morgen’s 140-minute tone poem meditation on one of the most sui generis artists who has ever lived is breathtaking in its scope and originality. Morgen’s film is one of the best of the year. David Bowie pulses in every frame, reminding us from beyond the grave that we’ll never see his like on this planet again.
Upon reflection, Moonage Daydream is (slightly) more conventional than it at first seems. Beneath the surface of the film’s elliptical, almost phantasmagorical tapestry is a roughly chronological examination of Bowie’s career over the course of about 30 years. This is the first documentary about the glam rock pioneer that is officially authorized by the estate of the artist, who died in 2016 from liver cancer.
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“Understanding is love’s other name.”
That quote is attributed to Thích Nhất Hạnh, an influential Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk and peace activist. Known as the “father of mindfulness,” Hanh died at the age of 95 in January of this year. The quote appears in documentary filmmaker Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love, an examination of the lives and work of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. At this moment, I can’t recall in what context the quote appears in the movie. I don’t remember if it’s spoken by either Katia or Maurice, if the film’s narrator – filmmaker and actor Miranda July – utters it during the film, or if it appears on screen in text form. I quickly jotted it down in my notes as I watched Fire of Love, but I failed to add an attribution.
The exact context of those words within the documentary isn’t important. At a broader level, the sentiment behind Hanh’s idea is a beautiful and apt thesis statement for everything Dosa explores in her picture. Understanding was at the heart of Katia and Maurice’s personal and professional lives together. It is what the pair were trying to achieve with the white-hot intensity of their decades-long study of volcanos.
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Iconic director Todd Haynes’s first documentary feature is a florid chronicling of an iconic band and larger artistic movement that was responsible for dissolving the line between so-called low-art and high culture. In The Velvet Underground, Haynes uses every tool at his disposal to transform what might have been a fairly conventional narrative arc into an artistic experience that approximates the environment that his subjects conjured in their own work.
The Velvet Underground is the story of a band every bit as influential as The Beatles who also worked in uncharted artistic waters. Revelatory interviews with surviving members John Cale and Maureen "Moe" Tucker, as well as dozens of other artists active in The Velvet Underground’s time and place in history, bring the band’s initial ten-year creative period – the mid-1960s to the mid- ‘70s – to vibrant life.
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The immensely talented musician and writer Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson has righted a historical injustice with his debut directorial film Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). The documentary, about an, until now, almost completely forgotten music festival that took place during the same summer as Woodstock, is a work of infectious exuberance as well as a contemplative examination of why the festival was forgotten in the first place.
Focusing on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, Questlove’s picture would be a significant achievement for its restoration and presentation of the festival performances alone. Forty hours of videotape footage of the event sat in a basement for fifty years before producer Robert Fyvolent secured the rights and brought it to Questlove’s attention.
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The one-line synopsis for director Theo Anthony’s new documentary, All Light, Everywhere, says everything and nothing all at once. The movie “explore[s] issues of subjective perception and fallibility in both human and technological modes of surveillance.” That description is slippery because All Light, Everywhere is about that idea, how humans see things, but it’s explored in a hundred different ways. Anthony takes the epistemological method of dialectics – presenting opposing points-of-view of a topic as a way to uncover its truths – to new heights with his film.
Dialectical montage, the editing technique pioneered in early Soviet silent cinema by filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, in which two contradictory images are juxtaposed in order to create a new, third meaning, is used to soaring effect in All Light. It doesn’t quite all hang together; by the picture’s last passage, I got the feeling that Anthony might have been ultimately overwhelmed by his material. His film is, overall, an exhilarating experience. It implicates the very act of its own creation in its exploration of the flaws of human observation. All Light, Everywhere destroys the conventional wisdom that “seeing is believing.”
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Despite my efforts, my cynical tendencies did their best to control my thinking about the music documentary With – A Journey to the Slow Life. I try to stay open to any message a film and a filmmaker are attempting to convey. Sometimes I worry that this approach causes me to shut down my critical thinking. In the end, I enjoyed and respected much of what I saw in With, even while harboring a suspicion that the picture was a clever marketing tool and that the message comes from a place of privilege.
With is a personal project from poly-hyphenate Rami Mekdachi. The Beirut-born perfumer-photographer-musician is based out of Paris. His company, Lola James Harper (his kids came up with the name, and it gets a credit in Mekdachi’s film), sells candles, perfumes, and other hipstery products that promote taking joy in the simple things in life. He’s selling a brand, and his brand is heavily tied into the Slow Movement, which emphasizes exactly that – slowing down, taking time to enjoy and appreciate life instead of hectically running from one thing to the next. As the old cliché goes, “take time to stop and smell the roses.”
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With her second feature film, director Garrett Bradley has earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary for Time, her searing portrait of struggle in the face of injustice. What makes her movie so effective is how personal it feels. Bradley didn’t have a prior connection to her subject, but her picture put me in mind of another Oscar nominated film, the extraordinary documentary from 2018, Minding the Gap. That movie’s director was the subject of his own film, and Bradley imbues Time with a similar sense of personal connection, despite telling someone else’s story.
In 81 brief minutes, we get to know Sibil Fox Richardson, who also goes by Fox Rich, and the hell that was her life for two decades. In 1997, when the small business that she and her husband, Rob, opened together ran into serious financial trouble, the two became desperate and committed the armed robbery of a bank. Fox served three and a half years for the crime. After a series of botched plea deals and his lawyer dropping out of the case when the Richardsons couldn’t pay him – none of which the film covers – Rob faced trial. He was sentenced to 60 years in Angola State Prison, without the possibility of parole.
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The fatal flaw of documentarian Errol Morris’s latest film, My Psychedelic Love Story, can be summed up in one quote from the movie’s subject, Joanna Harcourt-Smith. At one point during an interview, Harcourt-Smith is relating that one of her lovers died. She says that she felt like the man was killed, then immediately follows up that assertion by saying, “You know, don’t ask me for any proof.” If that caveat doesn’t bother you, then you’ll most likely enjoy My Psychedelic Love Story. If you enjoy listening to someone spin conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory without being bothered to offer the slightest shred of evidence to corroborate any of it, Harcourt-Smith’s tale will be a wild, irresistible ride. If, like me, the prospect of listening to a string of unrelated stories so outlandish that they might have come straight from a QAnon message board makes you want to tear out your hair, avoid Morris’s movie at all costs.
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Direct cinema documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s 46th feature film is called, simply, City Hall. It chronicles the workings of the local government of a great American city, Boston, Massachusetts. Shot during the fall of 2018 and the winter of 2019, Wiseman and his crew give us glimpses into Boston Mayor Martin Walsh’s administration and examines in incredible detail what makes a city run.
Over the course of its 4.5-hour runtime, we witness moments like Walsh giving a state of the city address, city employees holding a meeting about reducing evictions, and garbage collectors tossing waste into the maw of a garbage truck. It might sound mundane – much of the film is devoted to presentations by city employees and city meetings in which people troubleshoot issues – yet in Wiseman’s expert hands, it’s anything but.
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There’s a tradeoff made when producing an authorized work of art examining the life and career of a famous person. The documentary Zappa, which focuses on the life and times of musician, filmmaker, and iconoclast Frank Zappa, makes that tradeoff with mostly successful results. Director Alex Winter – an actor who moonlights as Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the Bill and Ted movies – had full access to Zappa’s extensive personal archives for his film. The extensive amount of concert video, behind-the-scenes home-movie footage, and interview archives allow Winter to paint a portrait of Zappa – who died from prostate cancer in 1993 – that feels exhaustive and intimate.
The danger with authorized biographies is the risk for them to slip into hagiography. The biographer might smooth over some of the rough edges of a subject in an effort to keep in the good graces of those offering the unfettered access. Zappa doesn’t shy away from some of its subject’s negative qualities. We learn about Zappa’s serial philandering and his tendency to treat his musical collaborators like props who only existed to fulfil his vision. There are darker strains to Zappa’s work, though, that Winter fails to explore. The enfant terrible creative genius, who used satire and comedy in his music to great effect, often incorporated sexist-bordering-on-misogynistic lyrics and racist cultural appropriation into his art. Winter looks the other way from all this, and his film suffers for it.
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I had my first colonoscopy this year at age forty. Most people don’t start getting this preventative care procedure until they turn fifty. I won’t bore you with the particulars of why I started early, but rest assured that everything is fine. Just before I was wheeled from the prep area back to the O.R., I had my first truly profound existential epiphany. The I.V. drip that the anesthesiologist hooked me up to started to take effect, and I began feeling a little drowsy. I had the comforting realization that death was like going to sleep. I thought about how I would be unconscious, knowing nothing, as the doctor performed this procedure, and how death, too, would be identical to unconsciousness; death is the act of never knowing anything again. In that moment, as the twilight of artificial sleep was coming on, I was fine with that realization.
Director Kirsten Johnson’s heartfelt, moving new documentary, Dick Johnson Is Dead, takes ninety minutes – culled from years of shooting for the picture – to make an uneasy, gallows humor sort of peace with the finality of death. It is a love letter from a daughter to a father, and vice versa. My only reservation with the film is how Johnson, right up until the final cut to black, prioritizes the main conceit of the film. She gleefully pulls the rug out from under us in the very last frame. I appreciated the playfulness of it, but not as much as was probably intended.
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I’m imagining the year 2060, when I’ll be 80 years old. In my mind’s eye, I see someone who’s my age now. Like me, this fictional person is a history buff – and a cinephile, too, of course – and she watches old movies and reads books about (mostly pop-culture) history. (What will this time period’s version of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls be called, anyway? Stan’s World: When Marvel Ate the Entertainment Industry?)
This person, who was born in 2020, reads part of the Wikipedia entry for “COVID-19 pandemic in the United States” and becomes fascinated. After watching a few YouTube videos of archival news footage about the pandemic, she stumbles across the trailer for Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger’s documentary Totally Under Control. She watches the whole movie with an unbelieving half-grin on her face.
It’s a disturbing watch, but for her it’s a little like when I watched Triumph of the Will. It all happened so long ago, it’s hard to imagine actually living through it. This invented person – like the actual people who might one day watch Totally Under Control four decades from now – will never know the rage, frustration, and sense of hopelessness that watching Gibney, et al.’s film engenders in someone living through this moment.
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It’s the ultimate hopelessness of the situation that made it hard for me to buy into the uplifting ending of the new political documentary Feels Good Man. There are a lot of emotional and intellectual nooks and crannies in the picture, and what resonated with me was the aforementioned hopelessness and an impotent rage at the callousness of other human beings. First time director Arthur Jones covers a lot of ground in Feels Good Man. He paints a personal portrait of an artist who has lost control of what his art means; he captures the zeitgeist of a singularly odious time at the intersection of American politics and culture; he provides a cogent exegesis for one small part of the 2016 presidential election. Jones’s film is an engrossing look at the power of the internet to shape the world that lies beyond the screen.
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Filmmaker Jesse Moss considers Harlan County, USA to be the high-water mark of documentary filmmaking. You can see that influence all over Boys State, the new documentary that Moss directed with his wife and frequent collaborator, Amanda McBaine. The film is a masterful piece of observational, verité cinema. It’s every bit as engrossing as Harlan County – although the stakes of that film, about striking coal miners in Kentucky, are literally life-and-death – and carries on the grand tradition of the direct cinema approach of the Maysles Brothers and Frederick Wiseman. Moss and McBaine’s largely fly-on-the-wall approach exposes the deepest flaws in our democracy – and the flaws of how we teach it to our children – while offering a fascinating inside look at a society with a one-week lifespan.
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Journalist and short-film producer Cara Jones chose as her first feature-length film to explore intensely personal subject matter in the documentary Blessed Child. Jones serves as the director, co-writer, and central subject in a film that documents her long process of walking away from her religion – what she now regards as a cult – while struggling to not do the same thing to her family. The film is a good first effort and is told in such a personal way that it couldn’t have been made by anyone else. The director’s unique perspective on the life she abandoned is the movie’s greatest strength.
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