With summer winding down, and movies being in a something of a slow holding pattern before the fall festival and awards seasons kicks off this week, Joe and myself dig into a few recent documentaries that’ve gotten attention recently: “Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World,” “Tickled,” and our main subject for this episode, “O.J.: Made in America.” The last segment features our discussion of Joe’s latest pick for Hold Up: Richard Linklater‘s 1996 mostly-forgotten film, “SubUrbia.”
We only talk briefly, though, about ‘Lo and Behold,’ the latest nonfiction work from Werner Herzog, who’s without doubt at his most Herzogian with this lean but entertaining look at the internet and its pros and cons, and “Tickled,” a bizarre story about a New Zealand reporter who stumbles onto a much stranger, unsettling mystery after discovering the world of competitive tickling competitions.
The main thrust of this episode, however, is devoted to director Ezra Edelman‘s brilliantly constructed “O.J.: Made in America.” The film, now available on Hulu and ESPN, is a high watermark for nonfiction cinematic storytelling, capturing the trial of the century in all it’s varied complexity and crazy turns. It’s a fascinating and utterly thrilling watch, one that shows the power of long form storytelling that wouldn’t be possible were it not for TV’s recent rise.
READ MORE: The 20 Best Documentaries of 2016 So Far
And on our latest edition of Hold Up, where we look at a film from the past and reexamine how it holds up today, we examine “SubUrbia,” the 1996 film that essentially began a rare fallow period in the career of Richard Linklater — after it he made the big budget under-performer “The Newton Boys” and then didn’t come back until the early 2000s with a string of low budget efforts. It’s an oddly prescient film, one that, despite its obvious mid-90s signifiers that date it now, is still a potent and angry screed that feels like the angrier cousin to “Dazed and Confused” and this year’s “Everybody Wants Some!!”
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