Documentaries

The Jurassic Park episode was brutal.




The ILM docu-series plus the Vice TV series on Star Wars have been great this summer. I miss unfiltered behind the scenes content. Reminds me of the glorious days of DVD’s bonus feature documentaries.

Simmons one is the HBO one, right?

Way too many faux intellectual talking heads blaming music for actions in that one, as if Break Stuff triggered mass chaos. Fuck that noise.

I got pretty much everything I needed out of the HBO/Simmons one. Great overview of the logistical problems combined with a cultural analysis of what led up to the issue (and they very specifically do not blame Limp Biscuit).

The Girl in the Picture(8/4/2022)

I mostly try to avoid the slightly half-assed true crime docs that Netflix seems to crank out on a near weekly basis. At a certain point they seem to have just become the 21st Century version of ABC’s “20/20,” which is a formerly legitimate newsmagazine program which at a certain point transitioned into being a crime of the week series using the language of straightforward news broadcasting to give fairly sensationalistic accounts of various murders. I did, however, hear enough about this one from enough people to give it a look. The film tells the story of an Oklahoma woman who was found dead, and looking into her past unveiled some fairly lurid realities about her life ultimately pointing towards her adopted father who appears to be a kidnapper, murderer, and rapist. Is there interest to be found in this story? Well, it’s certainly a rather extreme example of the human experience, though I’m not sure how much there is to be learned from the wider world from it nor do I find it to be unique enough by the (admittedly very high) standard of true crime as to make it inherently novel unto itself. So I think it would be fair to say this fall under the category of “exploitative true crime” but it is at least a little more aesthetically honed than your average “20/20” episode and the film does get a good array of interviews from people involved in the case. I don’t think this one is going to stay with me for long but I guess its effective enough at what it’s trying to do even if I find what it’s trying to do to be rather dubious.
**1/2 out of Five

Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché(8/12/2022)

X-Ray Spex were one of the less conventional bands in the first wave of British punk rock in the 70s. They were fronted by a mixed race woman who went by the name Poly Styrene (a statement on the manufactured nature of pop stardom) they never had quite the impact of The Clash or The Sex Pistols and ultimately only produced one album before Poly Styrene’s insecurities led her to have a bit of mental breakdown and break up the band. This film is about Poly Styrene (real named Marianne Joan Elliott-Said) and is directed by her now thirty-something daughter Celeste Bell and is structured as this daughter’s traveling and trying to come to terms with her mother’s legacy and with some of the less pleasant aspects about being raised by her when she began to have her mental issues. I can’t say I was a big fan of Poly Styrene’s music going in, I’d listened to the one X-Ray Spex album at one point when I was exploring the history of punk and thought it was fine, but the film does make a pretty good case for the band’s importance and how important it was to have a voice like her’s in that scene. As a film unto itself the doc is alright; Bell maybe inserts herself into more than some people will like, but I think that extra bit of novelty does help what could otherwise feel like a fairly by the numbers biographical account. I’m not sure that hardcore fans of Styrene will get much out of it but I found it a fairly interesting primer.
*** out of Five

Fire of Love(7/29/2022)

This summer has been disturbingly devoid of theatrically released documentaries. By this time last year we’d already gotten pretty wide releases for Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, Summer of Soul, The Sparks Brothers, and Rita Moreno : Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, but this year the one and only partial breakout has been the film at hand: Fire of Love. Produced by National Geographic and almost entirely created through archive footage, the film tells the story of Katia and Maurice Krafft, a pair of married French volcanologists who dedicated their lives to studying volcanos up close and spent their lives doing this until they were caught in an eruption and killed in the early 90s. The Krafft’s were briefly featured in Werner Herzog's recent documentary Into the Inferno and Herzog is apparently working on his own documentary about them but this movie seems to have beaten him to the punch. The film takes a pretty straightforward format being built out of the footage the Kraffts took over the course of their careers, much of it quite beautiful despite having been taken with rather dated equipment. The Kraffts themselves are, however, somewhat elusive characters. There’s a lot of footage chronicling their various volcano expeditions, but not a whole lot in the way of “home movies” and as they had no children there isn’t a lot of info about what their domestic life was like. The film’s title emphasizes the love story aspect of their story, which is perhaps true in broad strokes but isn’t really the focus as much as their passion for their work is front and center. Honestly I might have liked a little more about the specifics of their work as it’s not entirely clear what scientific experiments they’re doing for much of the runtime, occasionally the film makes them seem more like daredevils than true volcanologists which I don’t think was really the case. But ultimately that’s a quibble and this is an interesting doc that I would recommend pretty easily.
***1/2 out of Five

Aftershock(8/19/2022)

Aftershock is an advocacy documentary about the epidemic of childbirth deaths amongst black women and the extent to which their disproportional to the black population. I must say this is an issue I’ve seen pretty widely reported in the media circles I frequent but I’m often frustrated by the way it’s discussed. Whenever the issue comes up it becomes very easy to tell the horror stories about the issue affecting people and to bring up how grave the issue seems to be, but the actual explanations for why it happens and how to solve it tend to be a lot more abstract and unclear. So, you have people “raising awareness” with absolute urgency but often not presenting much in the way of actual solutions beyond just kind of making doctors less racist somehow in some fairly vague way. I’d say this movie kind of falls into that trap as well; it’s maybe 80% raising awareness and 20% presenting solutions. The two solutions it basically comes up with are an expansion of midwifery, which seems to be largely taken for granted, and the creation of these places called “birthing centers” which I’m not sure is a solution that’s really going to scale as well as the filmmakers hope. Now, I can’t exactly say I blame the movie for “not having all the answers,” this is in fact a rather complex problem that likely doesn’t have any one obvious silver bullet solution, but that kind of clashes with the advocacy doc format which by its nature is going to demand swift and urgent action.
** our of Five

Descendant(10/24/2022)

The number of lingering scars left by the legacy of slavery are too innumerable to count, but one of the many is that most African Americans are left without much ability to trace their roots back to their homelands or even know where their homelands were with any specificity. Every once in a while things become a little less murky. For instance I saw this episode of the show “Finding Your Roots” where The Roots’ drummer Questlove learned that his family can be traced all the way back to a specific slave ship called The Clotilda, which was notorious for having illegally smuggled enslaved people into the United States around 1860 after the ban on the international slave trade was in place. His story is not unique and the new documentary Descendant is about the whole community near Mobile Alabama called Africatown that was largely built off of descendants of slaves illegally imported by that ship and others like it. It is not, however, really a history doc and is more about the legacy of those past events today. The descendants of the people involved in the illegal slaving are rich, own large portions of the town and have largely used it in ways that involve high pollution rates in black communities where the descendants of the slaves live. Such dynamics basically exist across the South (and rest of the country for that matter) but here they actually have the goods with the specifics of the transaction and who descended from whom out in the open. The specific event at the center of all this is the discovery of the Clotilda itself, which had been sunk and hidden to cover up the crimes. Reactions to this discovery, which will likely result in the construction of a museum, differ among the locals and the film is largely about meeting the people involved on the ground and chronicling the community. Events don’t always follow a completely structured narrative as its more of a peak into events than a full chronicle, but the film does a decent job of framing that peak and making a point with it.
***1/2 out of Five

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed(11/13/2022)

What do you do when people you hate make great art? “Hate” might be a strong word but I think director Laura Poitras has not been a good influence on the world. The outlet she founded, The Intercept, along with her co-founder and sometimes subject Glen Greenwald have pioneered a very poisonous brand of paranoid and grievance-based politics whose reflexive contrarianism is completely counter-productive and frankly ignorant of the real stakes of electoral politics. They have at best been useful idiots in helping the rise of the global right and at worst… well, they seem awfully willing to advance lines of argument that are rather helpful to Vladimir Putin. However, this is not to say that Poitras is a bad filmmaker, and when her attitude is directed at the right topic there is a use for it and she probably has found an appropriate target in the Sackler family of Purdue Pharma “fame,” who are almost singlehandedly responsible for the opioid epidemic out of sheer greed. The Sacklers are not necessarily the sole subject of her new documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, but they’re certainly in the mix. Rather, the film follows an acclaimed photographer named Nan Goldin, who has recently become known for her work for an organization called P.A.I.N, which has been instrumental in the movement to remove the Sackler name from the wings of various museums where they had been donating over the years.

The film cuts back and forth between these recent protest activities but is also uses Goldin’s photographs to tell her life story. Goldin lived a life that began with a traumatic childhood in which her sister committed suicide and her narcissistic parents essentially abused both of them. She then moved to New York and lived within that bohemian arts community during the 80s and began presenting slideshows themed around feminist themes and also went on to curate gallery shows. In the latter role she came to be involved with the NEA fights of the 90s and was also part of the ACT UP movement, all while dealing with her own struggles with domestic abuse and addiction. Needless to say, she’s someone who has a lot of “cred” for hanging out with the right people at the right time within her generation and championing the right causes and her recent advocacy around the opioid epidemic and the Sackler family will also age pretty well. The movie does not feel like a hagiography though, or at least not a shameless one. Much of Goldin’s story is simply told in her own words and with her own photos and it doesn’t feel a need to include a bunch of talking heads to back up and worship her history. On some level this actually does resemble the “profile documentaries” that I usually decry in which it intercuts a few weeks in the life of some famous old person with biographical background, but even the most overdone formulas can still work when done correctly like this one is. Goldin’s modern exploits aren’t just being documented to prove that said senior citizen being profiled is still “vital and relevant” and the biographical background elements catch the audience up with the somewhat prickly story of someone who isn’t already a household name and her life intersects with a lot of interesting developments in recent American cultural history.

The film is not really meant to be a primer on the larger story of the opioid epidemic, at least not in any detail. If you’re looking for that you will probably be better served by Hulu’s “Dopesick” miniseries. This film is more narrowly focused on the actions of Goldin’s activist group, which entered into the story once the Sacklers’ wrongdoing had already been uncovered and they were trying to eke out some justice that “the system” likely wasn’t going to be able to deliver. At first it feels like this modern story is kind of disconnected from the narrative of Goldin’s earlier life but by the end of the film it all does connect together kind of beautifully. We see the anti-Sackler advocacy as a result of her earlier ACT UP experience, which by extension was a something she was involved in because of her life in the New York art world, which was itself the result of how she became isolated from her family early on. There is thematic linkage as well, with many of the themes of Goldin’s early life (stigmatization, the tyranny of politeness, art world gatekeeping) coming very much into play during the opioid epidemic and the challenges Goldin eventually faces as an activist. One can also certainly see the connections to Poitras’ own politics and philosophy in all of this, specifically its militant anti-establishment attitude, very personally directed anger, and fears of surveillance, which as I’ve established are all things that can become very unproductive if misdirected but which work well for this story and make the whole project feel like a much more personalized expression than it might otherwise. Without using any gaudy gimmicks the movie manages to be both a strong character study, a strong political statement, and a story about trends in humanity all at once and I think it’s a pretty big achievement within the modern documentary form.

****1/2 out of Five

Lucy and Desi11/8/2022

“I Love Lucy” was a TV show that ended thirty years before I was even born and yet its reach was such that reruns of it still managed to be a staple of my childhood in the 90s. It’s a show that basically everyone loves and yet on some level I still don’t think it’s quite as appreciated as it needs to be, it may well be the most important and influential show in television history and at the center of it all is the palpable chemistry between real life spouses Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, a couple who built a show business empire off of the success of their show but were then split up by the pressures of it all. It’s great documentary material for what was clearly a labor of love on the part of director Amy Poehler, though I’m not sure I can necessarily say the resulting film is too much better than “basically fine.” Of course I say that in part because I’m enough of a fan that I basically already knew most of the stories being told here which is kind of a “me problem,” but the movie and it’s by the book “talking heads and archival footage” approach doesn’t do much to make the material feel fresh for me. But that might just be some pickiness on my part, people just tuning in to learn about this story will get what they’re looking for and the movie is pretty good at curating clips from the show in order to illustrate certain points.

*** out of Five

Navalny(11/15/2022)

I must say, the true depths of just how messed up Russia has become sort of snuck up on me over the years and I think that’s true of a lot of people. During the whole “war on terror” era they just seemed kind of irrelevant, but that whole time Putin was forming quite the dictatorship and we’ve recently seen the dire consequences of that via the war in Ukraine, but even without that military aggression the domestic terror in Russia is also frightening. That is put on full display in the recent documentary Navalny, which looks at the Russian dissident politician Alexei Navalny, who survived an assassination attempt by poisoning and then returned to Russia only to be arrested at the airport on obviously trumped up charges. This film was made with Navalny’s cooperation during his time recovering from the poisoning in Germany before that defiant return and features interviews with him (he’s fluent in English) and also behind the scenes footage of him as he remotely tracks down the truth about the assassination attempt. In fact the most compelling part of the film is a jaw dropping moment when he essentially does a prank phone call with one of his would-be assassins and gets him to basically confess to the crime under the mistaken impression he’s talking to a superior. That said I think it’s safe to say that this is not exactly an unbiased look at Navalny, and while I don’t doubt that his opposition work in Russia is important and positive, he is at the end of the day a politician and as such his answers are guarded. I maybe would have appreciated a slightly deeper look into why Putin has such a grip on the public opinion and why Navalny faces such an uphill battle when trying to win people over (besides the obvious media blackouts, arrests, and murder attempts). This is clearly a documentary intending to give the basic Western public a peak into the opposition against Putin rather than give them a deep dive and it serves that purpose well, but it only does so much.

*** out of Five



Beba11/18/2022

Beba is the work of Rebeca Huntt and is named after a childhood nickname she once used and is a sort of autobiographical video essay about her thoughts about her life and identity. I think I’ve seen Huntt described as a poet or perhaps just as an “artist” but it’s not terribly clear to me that this thirty two year old has really accomplished before this, so it’s not necessarily a recounting of various accomplishments and what led to them, but more just her accounts of her feelings about herself. That, could come off as a bit naval gazing in the wrong hands and… I’m not so sure these are the right hands. To be blunt, if the “BIPOC pangender” student who got into an argument with the title character of Tár about whether or not Bach needs to be canceled was asked to make a movie it would probably be a lot like Beba. Huntt describes the film as an exploration of her afro-latina background and the “generational trauma” involved in that but… you know, she doesn’t seem to be doing all that badly to me. She didn’t grow up rich, but she had two present parents working to give her the best life possible and eventually went to college and became a successful artist. Sounds like the American dream, and her horror stories of the racism she experienced mostly seems to amount to a few kind of cringe conversations, but she certainly thinks these are great struggles. Her Venezuelan mother seems similarly baffled at her attitude as well in a particularly tense and revealing interview where she accuses her clearly war weary mother of having a “microagressive attitude” for what certainly sounded like straightforward answers to me. So, I can’t say I was terribly impressed by Huntt’s insights here, but there is some talent onscreen. Huntt does mix home video footage and other imagery into this pretty effectively and also knows not to overstay her welcome too much. I think if she finds some subject matter she has a bit more distance from she could do some good work but this thing really just isn’t it.

** out of five

Louis Armstrong’s Black and Blues(11/24/2022)

AppleTV+ has seemingly made some kind of market play in the realm of biographical films about legendary black entertainers. Earlier this year we got their Sidney Poitier biodoc Sidney and now a few months later we get this new take on the life of jazz great Louis Armstrong, which is in many ways a much more challenging project as its being made decades rather than months after its subject’s death. Director Sacha Jenkins has however gotten access to Armstrong’s extensive archives including some recordings of conversations he had behind closed doors where his persona was pricklier and more profane than the affable and apolitical public persona that would lead some future generations to accuse him of “uncle tomming” for white audiences. The film does have regular biographical material as its bones, but discussions of what it meant to be a black celebrity in the first half of the twentieth century and the various compromises this required are the true meat of the film. I don’t believe there are any onscreen talking head interviews in the film but there are quite a few archival interviews with Armstrong himself, his family, and also the future generations of jazz musicians that often admired Armstrong’s music but could often be judgmental about the compromises Armstrong made. The film includes a particularly affecting interview late in its runtime that Ossie Davis appears to have recorded sometime in the 70s or 80s where he described seeing Armstrong go into and out of his stage persona almost on a dime the second he realized he wasn’t alone. In the grand scheme of things I’m not sure that there’s much here that will come as too much of a surprise to jazz aficionados and its filmmaking isn’t exactly innovative, but it is skillfully constructed and comes to this subject from a pretty modern point of view and is very strong as a feature length primer on a giant of American music.
***1/2 out of Five

Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story(12/7/2022)

For better or worse, trans athletes have become a matter of some heated public debate as of late, so it’s perhaps a little surprising that this documentary about a prominent trans athlete didn’t get more attention when it showed up on Netflix. The film looks at Leo Baker, formerly known as Lacey Baker, who was a fairly prominent “female” skateboarder before coming out as trans-masculine a few years ago. I can’t say I’d ever heard of this person before this film came out but I can also probably count the number of skateboarders I knew by name on two fingers so that’s probably not saying much. The film follows Baker as he first goes public with his situation after having been relatively gender-nonconforming in recent years but still officially being declared a “female skateboarder” competing in women’s skateboarding competitions. This is of course the opposite of what most of the controversies around trans athletes revolve around: he’s a trans man competing as a woman rather than a trans woman competing as a woman. He did this in accordance with all the rules involved by delaying medical transition until around the time the movie started and appears to have basically left formal competition once it started. In a sense he was doing exactly what the conservative critics of trans athletes want trans athletes to do: compete based on the gender assigned at birth, but I don’t think this is really what they have in mind when they say that. The movie, I think, could have done quite a bit more to interrogate this little irony. We don’t see Baker so much as consider simply competing with the male skateboarders and we don’t really see him reckon with his feelings about apparently not believing he can make it in that world. The tone is instead pretty heavy on the “it gets better” of it all, which isn’t “bad” exactly but it feels like it could have gone a bit deeper into all of this.
*** out of Five

Katrina Babies(12/12/2022)

Hurricane Katrina is one of those events that seemed like a monumentally important tragedy and a major political scandal at the time, hell, it pretty much sealed George W. Bush’s legacy as a failed president. But after a few years the people not immediately impacted by it just sort of moved on and are unlikely to even think about it as a major event of the 2000s if not prompted to. The new documentary Katrina Babies intends to serve as a reminder that the effects of this disaster are in fact very long lasting and still certainly matter today in the places where it happened. On one hand that isn’t something a documentary should have to “prove” but on the other hand it is kind of a broad thesis and I’m not sure the film is ever quite able to fit all the pieces together to really make the argument. The film mostly consists of interview with various people who were children when the storm happened and trying to sort of piece together a narrative about the various ways that generation of gulf coasters were disadvantaged by the experience. The pattern of the various stories aren’t terribly hard to predict; a lot of trauma and a lot of seemingly misplaced priorities. At a certain point it becomes hard to entirely tell which disadvantages are the usual results of modern urban poverty, though the truth is it’s probably both. The film’s director, Edward Buckles Jr., was himself thirteen years old when hurricane Katrina hit and does add more of a personal touch to his work here because of it. In some ways I almost wish he’d leaned into that even more. The film more or less does what it set out to do but I don’t know that it did it in a way that was fully remarkable.
*** out of Five

Skandal! Bringing Down Wirecard(12/14/2022)

One of the big trends in documentary and elsewhere is the obsession with “true crime,” and when it comes to the endless parade of murderers and serial killers that get exploited by the genre I start to bristle. But one form of “true crime” that I can’t get enough of are these tales of corporate fraud and large scale financial scandal, and I tend to get interested in even the lesser known ones. In fact one of the great assets of Skandal! Bringing Down Wirecard is that, because it largely revolves around the downfall of a German company which wasn’t covered extensively in the U.S. media that I remember, I can watch this one without having had everything about the scandal having been spoiled for me ahead of time. The company at the center of this one, Wirecard, was meant to be sort of a paypal type thing but whose actual business was kind of unclear to outside observers. Long story short the whole business turned out to basically be a fraud, one that was basically making up profits and insomuch as they actually did anything it was basically to accommodate money laundering. It was also being partly run by a very shady person with a bunch of ties to foreign intelligence who is to this date a fugitive from justice. It’s kind of a wild story, and the film is mostly told from the perspective of the people who exposed the company’s wrongdoing, namely a cadre of short sellers and a group of reporters at the Financial Times newspaper who had to fight against a lot of evasiveness by the company as well as a bunch of nationalistic refusal to believe on the part of Germany and its regulators. As a film the documentary does absolutely nothing to break the mold and while the story is interesting it’s not earth shaking, so if you’re not already fascinated by docs like this this probably isn’t the most important one to start with but it gets the job done.
*** out of Five

Cow(12/16/2022)

Andrea Arnold is a filmmaker who seems to have sort of disappeared since making her film American Honey and this year we finally learned way; her time was divided between making the second season of HBO’s “Big Little Lies” (which Jean-Marc Vallée apparently took back over at a certain point) and also making this documentary, which chronicled several years in the life of a dairy cow. The film kind of plays like an on land version of the fishing vessel documentary Leviathan in that the camera is focusing in largely on non-human subjects with the human workers on the periphery. Arnold has said she "wanted to show [audiences] her consciousness. I wanted to show the character and the aliveness of a nonhuman animal." I must say, if the goal was to make this animal look particularly intelligent and emotive then it didn’t really work on me, it kind of just seemed like a dumb animal being put through the motions to me. She says that her intention was not to make a movie advocating for veganism but, I must say I don’t believe her about that because I’m not sure what else this is supposed to be or what anyone not coming at it from that angle are supposed to take away from it. I suppose this is a well-made as something with these goals is ever supposed to be but it probably requires a different perspective and a different set of assumptions than I possess and it didn’t really work at all on me.
** out of Five

If These Walls Could Sing(12/19/2022)

I’ve come not to expect much from documentaries that are made for Disney+, at least outside of their National Geographic stuff or certain one-offs like The Beatles: Get Back. In fact that Peter Jackson Beatles documentary almost certainly had something to do with their greenlighting of this documentary about the recording studio which was made famous by that band. However, this is not a Peter Jackson archival footage epic, it’s a puff piece that mostly exists to string together some interviews with famous rock stars like the two surviving Beatles, Elton John, Jimmy Page, John Williams, and members of Pink Floyd. They even somehow manage, likely through extensive editing, to get profanity free interviews out of Liam and Noel Gallagher from Oasis. These interviews try to stay on the topic of the recording studio but at the end of the day there’s kind of only so much to say about the place beyond the fact that it’s a place with some good microphones and nice acoustics. For the most part these artists are telling highly abbreviated career stories, many of them not terribly related to Abbey Road, that anyone interested enough in classic rock to be watching something like this will have already heard before and in less truncated form elsewhere. If you just want an easy watch that will give you a couple fun stories, I guess this will be inoffensive enough viewing, but to me this is really a wasted opportunity that does nothing to probe any deeper than the very top of the surface level and just isn’t good enough generally.
** out of Five

McEnroe(12/21/2022)

I’m not exactly sure why it was decided that 2022 was the year we needed a new movie about troubled tennis star John McEnroe, but we got it just the same. Actually we’ve gotten a lot of McEnroe related projects lately like the experimental doc John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection and the scripted film Borg Vs. McEnroe. It is perhaps interesting that he’s so well remembered given that he was only playing champion level tennis for about four years in the early 80s, but it isn’t really the tennis that he’s remembered for is it? No, he’s remembered for cursing out umpires and showing up in tabloids. Ostensibly this doc’s job is to try to get to the bottom of why McEnroe was so pissy, and I’m not sure it ever really does come up with an explanation, in no small part because McEnroe himself doesn’t seem to really know and this is very much an “authorized documentary” on his part. The film doesn’t really seek out sports journalist to be its talking heads, instead mostly opting to stick to McEnroe himself, his friends and family members, as well as fellow athletes like Billie Jean King and his one-time rival Bjorn Borg. We get some dishy talk about his disastrous marriage with Tatum O'Neal, though she (perhaps understandably) did not choose to participate herself, and the film never really gets into McEnroe’s second life as a commentator. All in all I can’t say I’m terribly impressed by the doc, which is made professionally enough and provides a biographical overview well enough but otherwise really isn’t much to write home about.
**1/2 out of Five

Meet Me in the Bathroom(12/22/2022)

Meet Me in the Bathroom is a documentary adaptation of the book of the same name by Lizzy Goodman, which was an oral history of the 2000s New York rock scene typified by bands like The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, and LCD Soundsystem. I was a bit too young and too uncool to really get into these bands at the time, but their careers were highly sentimentalized by the music critics I grew up reading so I’ve been familiar with their reputations even if they aren’t really my thing. The documentary is not terribly interested in deflating the legend of any of this and it is kind of wild seeing a movie chronicling events within my lifetime looked at through the same language of cultural shifts and rises and falls that I tend to associate with documentaries about decades prior. Given the oral history nature of the source material it will not be too surprising that this is largely told through interviews with the various bands and of course it also has a pretty sizable amount of archive footage to work with. The film also tries to fit the emergence of these bands within the larger cultural context and historical events that occurred in New York at the time, with September 11th being the most obvious of them. At the end of the day this is still definitely a documentary for the initiated and I’m not sure it has that much to offer people who aren’t already into these bands and as someone who is himself only kinda/sorta into them I’m not sure it was really for me.
*** out of Five

Doomsday SnoBorderZero 1godzillafan

Everybody you’d expect is in this, except the people that actually made the holiday special and could offer some genuine insight. Vice TV’s Star Wars documentary with Marcia Lucas should be in a museum.

If you don’t learn history you are bound to repeat it.