Documentaries

Doomsday SnoBorderZero thebtskink PG Cooper Dracula

Definitely on my watchlist

The Tinder Swindler(5/12/2022)

This Netflix documentary looks at the case of Simon Leviev, a conman who met upper-middle-class women on Tinder and fooled them into thinking he was a millionaire, then tricked them into “loaning” him hundreds of thousands of dollars when he “suddenly had his accounts frozen.” Despite the buzzy title, the titular dating app doesn’t really have a lot to do with it, the scam would probably work the same if he’d met these women in nightclubs or something. Much of the film consists of his victims recounting their stories alongside some phone recordings and footage from the places they were traveling. It’s certainly infuriating hearing about these women being defrauded, but some unsavory part of my psyche sort of couldn’t help but admire just how much of a player this guy was. As for the film itself, it’s fine, maybe a bit too long. I felt like I got the gist of the story pretty early and maybe didn’t need every last detail it gives about what went down in the con, but at a certain point it does transition into more of an investigation into where this dude came from and what’s been stopping him from seeing justice and that was also interesting. This might have made more sense as an episode of Dateline or 20/20 or something, but it’s alright as a Netflix doc as well.
*** out of Five

Didn’t watch that one but the similarly themed Bad Vegan is interesting to say the least.




I agree. Documentary is okay. Outside of his work for Rolling Stone in the late 1960’s and 70’s, Ben Fong-Torres is just a columnist/broadcaster for San Francisco. I would have opted for a full fledged Rolling Stone documentary too. The best parts, the audio interviews with the musicians, were the best parts and they glossed over it. Or they coulda done The Tapes of Ben Fong-Torres and just focused on that.

Look at Me: XXXTentacion(6/1/2022)
No artist has made me feel old quite like Jahseh “XXXTentacion” Onfroy. When he was on the rise I followed his career quite closely despite finding his music to be chaotic unlistenable noise and also despite finding everything I’d hear about his personal life to be highly disturbing. Despite all that it was immediately apparent to me just by looking at him that, for better or (more likely) worse, this guy was a born star and I definitely understood why he could be called a “voice of a generation.” This must have been the feeling boomers got while watching Kurt Cobain emerge on the scene and recognizing his appeal while still having no idea how to process the noisy excesses of “It Smells Like Teen Spirit” with the (justified) controversies around him and his fame in the wake of #MeToo in some ways only elevating his legend and making him more of a flashpoint. But Onfroy died in the June of 2018, shot in an apparent robbery attempt. They say that a lot of artists who die young end up becoming martyrs and icons after they die the way that people like Tupac and the aforementioned Cobain did, but I’m not entirely sure that was the case for Onfroy. Maybe without the immediacy of his social media interacting some of the luster died off and some of the shortcomings of his actual music came more to the forefront, or maybe he just got overshadowed by other Soundcloud rappers living and dead who came after like Juice Wrld, 6ix9ine, and Travis Scott.

In many ways this new documentary, which was made with the full cooperation of Onfroy’s estate, is in some ways an attempt to rekindle interest in the artist and ostensibly set down the definitive version of his story. The authorized nature of the film means it has interviews with most of the necessary subjects including his mother, his second long term girlfriend, his posse including Ski Mask the Slump God, various producers and record label types, and most critically Onfroy’s ex-girlfriend/victim, who is allowed to tell her story. With authorized biographical documentaries like this you’re always worried that what you’ll be given is a toned down and hagiographical rather than giving you the warts and all story, but this one certainly goes a long way toward seeming not to have that problem. The film does not attempt to deny that Onfroy was a deeply disturbed individual and that he engaged in domestic violence to some extent. However, the film does still downplay all of this in certain subtle ways. It cops to him having been violent with a woman but does not get into all the grizzly details (and the details are extremely grizzly) and it also omits entirely the fact that he beat a gay man half to death in prison and then more or less bragged about it on a podcast. The film also really wants to lean into a redemption arc for its subject in its second half, interpreting Onfroy’s “Sad!” video as him fighting and defeating his old self, and yet no mention is made of the fact that lyrically “Sad!” is a song about gaslighting a woman into staying with him upon the threat of suicide, which is certainly something his “old self” would do.

For that matter the movie is pretty generally disinterested in really focusing too much on Onfroy’s music in general. It didn’t give me any sort of new appreciation for his actual music at all and continue to find it almost cringingly unlistenable. So, I think this documentary isn’t quite as hard hitting as it tries to present itself as being, and yet it’s hard to deny that the story at the center isn’t still as compelling and hard to look away from as the story of the real XXXTentacion was to some degree when he was alive. I don’t think this movie really did as much as I was hoping it would in terms of sorting out my complicated feelings about this guy who I hated on paper while still finding him deeply compelling as a pop culture figure if not as a musician or as a human. I’m not really sure society at large is quite sure how they feel about him and with his career being tragically cut short I’m not sure whatever reckoning we were all going to have with him will ever come. And my feelings about the documentary are not dissimilar from my feelings about the man: I see the flawed morality in how its presenting its subject and yet would also be lying if I wasn’t pretty rapt by the story it was telling.
**1/2 out of Five

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off(6/19/2022)
Though he’s been a celebrity of the periphery of pop culture for years I really didn’t know much about Tony Hawk except that there was a series of video games named after him. You’d see him in coverage of said video games on G4 occasionally and occasionally be exposed to some of his (mostly charming) twitter antics but otherwise he’s been a pretty easy person to avoid if you aren’t into the X Games, and I’m not. In broad strokes this is a very straightforward biographical documentary that was made with the full cooperation of Hawk himself. The film is probably at its most interesting when it looks at Hawks early career when he was competing professionally at fourteen and had a lot of people rooting against him because his father was involved in the skateboarding league and he was perceived as benefiting from nepotism. Later on the movie starts to become more about Hawk as an older semi-retired skater who’s still trying to do dangerous tricks and the toll that wiping out hundreds of times is taking on his body. The fellow skaters that are interviewed for the film give some pretty candid insights and the film is pretty slickly produced with a cool but dignified visual style. I don’t think this documentary ever really transcends its subject matter but I have few complaints about how it’s put together.
*** out of Five

Dracula

The Girl in the Picture is really good , but they omitted a ton of shit. You have to go to outside sources to get the full story and full picture. It paints an issue with lots of modern day documentaries (especially those made for streaming services). They’re way too editorialized. No one is gonna deny the perpetrator in the story is a piece of shit and deserves the death sentence. But life isn’t black & white. It’s nuanced. Sometimes the victims aren’t necessarily innocent either. You have to fairly portray both sides and tell the story objectively.

The Janes(7/13/2022)

The latest documentary from HBO is nothing if not timely… sadly, tragically, irritatingly timely and relevant. The film is about abortions in a pre-Roe America, specifically in Chicago during the late 60s where a group of young activists took it upon themselves to secretly help desperate women obtain illegal abortions while using the codename “Jane” to make their arrangements. The film’s style is straightforward, but in a good way that avoids gimmickry and flash. Most of the narrative is built around interviews with the former “Janes,” most of whom are of retirement age now and seem to have settled into middle class life away from “revolutionary” politics in much the way other boomers have. But unlike a lot of people of that generation, these women have a lot to be proud of; they were plainly interested in helping people rather than just espousing rhetoric to seem cool and unlike other groups like the Weather Underground who “lived their politics” during that era they didn’t hurt anyone. The film gives a pretty clear overview of how they started, how they managed their clandestine operation, what complications they ran into along the way, and how everything came to a conclusion. There’s not really a whole lot else to point out, it’s just an efficient and dignified piece of non-fiction storytelling that tells a highly relevant story deftly. Kind of wish it had come out before 2016, but otherwise it does pretty much everything right for what it is.
**** out of Five

Doomsday SnoBorderZero

The ILM docu-series on Disney+ is surprisingly good. They didn’t shy away from the unpleasantries.