15. “They Shall Not Grow Old” [Review]
The power of film to resurrect, or at least try to — whether it’s the genius of Orson Welles with “The Other Side of the Wind” or Aretha Franklin‘s onstage energy with “Amazing Grace” — has seldom been more tested than in 2018. But the apotheosis of this comes from Peter Jackson, with his WWI documentary “They Shall Not Grow Old,” a work of archival archaeology that is part ground-level history lesson, part technological marvel. Using selections from over 100 hours of archival footage, retimed to recognizably human speed, rather than the jerky, borderline comedic effect that old-timey 12-frames-per-second shooting normally gives, Jackson was already on his way to a compelling grunts-eye view of WWI. But with the dazzling addition of colorization and 3D, as well as a little post-dubbing courtesy of lip-readers, and a wealth of voiceover interviews from veterans recorded in the 1960s and ’70s, the sense of you-are-there immersion is borderline uncanny. At times the confluence of picture and sound is little short of miraculous — how on earth did they find an interviewee talking about having a civil conversation with a German POW who was wounded in the hand, when there’s footage of a British soldier chatting and laughing with a captive who indeed sports bandaged fingers? At other points, for all the technical wizardry it’s the sheer banality of the remembrances that have the most impact: The popping noise made when you burn louse eggs off your clothing; the apparently endless brewing of tea — sometimes using the boiling run-off from water-cooled machine guns; the difficulty of shaving in the trenches; the bloody, exhausting boredom. 3.5 million people are estimated to have died in the trenches of the Western Front, but that is a statistic you don’t really feel until you listen to these few dozen voices, and see these few dozen faces, 100 years old but also absurdly, heartbreakingly young. Currently in theaters.
14. “United Skates”
It’s one thing to learn about a new culture through a documentary, it’s quite another to end up feeling thoroughly expert in its intricacies, even when pushing off from a standing start. But Dyana Winkler and Tina Brown‘s passionate, affectionate “United Skates” is basically a one-stop(per) shop for all things American roller rink, taking in the rise of the little-heralded roller-skating subculture of the 1980s, its racial component and its importance to the Black communities that the euphemistically billed “Adult Nights” increasingly came to serve. But though interspersed with bursts of joyous, kinetic skating footage and peppered with celebrity appearances (Queen Latifah, Coolio, Salt’N’Pepa) the real story it tells is of skating’s gradual decline which, unsurprisingly for anyone who has looked out of their window in the last 20 years, the film persuasively argues is less to do with natural wastage and far more a program of systematic dismantlement calculated to further disempower those rinks with a predominantly Black clientele, and especially to target those that were black-owned. Brown and Winkler are not blind to the valid issues that such a segregated skate culture did raise — there’s a large section on LA’s rival rinks, World on Wheels and Skateland, which became aligned with the Crips and the Bloods respectively, before World of Wheels was declared neutral territory following its Compton rival’s closure. But more often it’s a celebration of diversity and solidarity within the Black rollerskating community — typified by a gleeful montage explaining the different styles and musical accompaniments favored by different regional rinks. It whirls by in a flurry of lights, music, chatter and poignant, well-visualized statistics, and in a slim 89 minutes, Brown and Winkler’s fabulously entertaining film takes you from introduction to immersion, straight through to grief at this disappearing world, without breaking its smooth, well-oiled, whirring stride.
https://youtu.be/Nj2nibxpwJE
14. “Wild Wild Country” [Review]
In September it was 40 years since the Jonestown massacre, an anniversary that is perhaps one reason why filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Mary Harron to Drew Goddard to Panos Cosmatos are choosing now to tell stories about cult leaders building followings that defy outward logic and end up destroying the followers themselves. There may be other zeitgeisty reasons, though I can’t think what they might be. And so Netflix’s limited docu-series “Wild Wild Country” is particularly well-timed, comprehensively telling the jaw-dropping story of one such, not to be judgy, charlatan, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and even more vividly, his charismatic lieutenant, Ma Anand Sheela, and her acolytes. Over six episodes, directors Chapman and Maclain Way (and exec producers the Duplass Brothers) expertly uncover an episode in American history that is bafflingly little-known today, in which the guru’s followers, dubbed “Rajneeshees” established a would-be self-sufficient township in Oregon. For a moment it looked like their spectacular utopian experiment might work, before infighting, corruption, greed, ego and the rankling mistrust of their Oregonian neighbors, contributed to an equally spectacular, bitter and deeply sinister implosion. The filmmakers deploy the newsreel footage, interviews and archive documentation with such a feel for dramatic rhythm and revelation that it would be manipulative if it weren’t such engrossing storytelling, and if mythic tales of well-intentioned idealism being exploited by the ruthlessly self-interested were not so necessary right now. Available now on Netflix.
13. “Bisbee ’17”
With “Kate Plays Christine” and “Actress,” director Robert Greene established his glitchy, reflexive filmmaking m.o., in which a Brechtian awareness of artifice collides, in creative ways, with more traditional, empathetic documentary portraiture. Those films, however, were also necessarily intimate in scope, devotedly focused on their lead actresses, so “Bisbee ’17,” in casting light on a forgotten incident in American labor history that scars an entire town to this day, marks a broadening of ambition in every way. And the inflation of scale justifies Greene’s metafictional approach more than his previous, perhaps more indulgent explorations: As well as the dazzling form, there’s a real thrust of righteous anger, grief and dogged journalistic discovery that powers “Bisbee ’17” through even its most self-conscious sections, and gives it an urgency and a relevance that is unignorable. The Arizona mining town suffered the closure of its copper mine in the 1970s, and that’s clearly foremost in the minds of the citizenry when they’re asked about formative moments in Bisbee history. But Greene wants to confront a much older, wilfully buried tragedy: in 1917 the townspeople, (the forefathers of those living there now), helped with the rounding up of 2,000 striking miners (most of them immigrants) and their “deportation” i.e. their being driven into the middle of the desert and left, presumably to die. In having the townspeople themselves reenact this shameful episode, thus reframing their culpability and denial through performance, Greene’s film may not exorcize Bisbee’s demons nor provide much justice for the vanished, but it does feel peculiarly cathartic, as though it relieves some long-building pressure like a steam valve or a factory whistle opened to emit a shrill, clear note.
https://youtu.be/etwjMcdvxx8
12. “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” [Review]
The second of two films by “20 Feet From Stardom” director Morgan Neville to make this list (see “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” above) Fred Rogers biography “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” provided us with both the documentary hit of the summer and a handy indicator, by contrast, of where the national psyche is at. Would this gentle, kindly bio-doc about a gentle kind man who wore decency as naturally as knitwear, have connected so well in a different age when those softer values were not such exotic, endangered animals? It’s hard to tell, though the craft involved in creating rich, if soothing drama out of such straightforward, uncynical and largely conflict-free subject matter also deserves mention. Proving that not all blockbuster heroes wear capes, carry weapons and fight crime, in fact, some of them wear cardigans, wield puppets and sing catchy little ditties about being nice to one another, the film’s reputation as a soothing, nostalgic balm to be applied to chafing rawness of life in 2018 quickly spread. And apply America did, to the tune of $20m, making this the most successful bio-doc of all time. For non-U.S. viewers, the appeal is a little more obscure, and anyone who didn’t grow up in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood might be almost suspicious at times, of the purity and simplicity of his portrayal here. But ‘Neighbor’ does also get to the sadness at the heart of all the sweetness: to watch Rogers undemonstratively share a paddling pool with a black friend or use his puppets to explain the assassination of Bobby Kennedy to pre-school infants, is to see a man contending with the harshness of the world outside his lo-fi studio kingdom, and preparing his wide-eyed charges for those times when life would no longer be about happiness and cardigans. Available now on Amazon.
