NOBODY SPEAK ~ Brian Knappenberger's documentary will prove a chilling corrective to anyone who thinks the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker had anything to do with them providing a showcase for Hulk Hogan's sex tape (something they barely even did, as they only ran brief excerpts). The real story here is that quasi-fascist Silicon Valley billionaire vampire Peter Thiel (easily one of the worst people in the world today) used the trial as a stalking horse via which he was able to deal a lethal blow to a journalistic outlet that he despised for having previously published stories that pissed him off, that pesky first amendment be damned.
***
11/8/16 ~ A mesmerizing, meditative, wide angle exploration of election day, USA, 2016. Eighteen directors from coast to coast follow a vast array of citizens, families, organizers and volunteers of every political stripe as the contest evolves from a relatively boring foregone conclusion to a cause for shocked panic and genuine distress in some quarters, while others are overcome with joy at having apparently beaten impossible odds. There is no voice-over narration to guide your thoughts as you follow the film's subjects from home to work to the voting booth to back home again, which makes it a Rorschach test of sorts. How you react to this film will definitely depend on your politics. To me, and I suspect a great many of you, 11/8/16 comes close to being a horror film.
***
GLOW: THE STORY OF THE GORGEOUS LADIES OF WRESTLING ~ You've seen the entertaining, highly fictionalized version of the story of the first all female professional wrestling league, now find out the inspiring true story behind it all! Seriously though, if you enjoyed GLOW as much as I did, I think you'll get a lot out of this doc. It's fun and moving and more than a little bit inspiring.
***
BEST OF ENEMIES ~ Speaking of cat-fights, it's unfortunate that the makers of Best of Enemies--a documentary about the long-running feud between arch-liberal Gore Vidal and ultra-conservative William F. Buckley--chose to focus on the tawdry and salacious particulars of the enmity between these two men, rather than using them as examples to help illuminate one of the 20th century's most important and still-raging philosophical struggles. For those interested, Michael Lind's review is essential reading.
***
AMERICAN ANARCHIST ~ As a history lesson in how The Anarchist's Cookbook, a poorly written collection of dubious and dangerous recipes for poisons and explosives, became a perennial international publishing phenomenon that's been found at or near pretty much every single significant act of terrorism in the last five decades, Charlie Siskel's American Anarchist is a worthy documentary. As a character study of the book's author, William Powell, it is frustrating and unsatisfying. But perhaps that couldn't be helped, because despite his occasional declarations about how the book haunts him, Powell seems to have given precious little thought to the consequences of producing his book, and is singularly uninformed about its ubiquity among those who have engaged in atrocities. This flaw is magnified by the fact that all of Powell's comments come from a single interview. Perhaps a follow-up meeting would have helped clear a few things up?
No comments:
Post a Comment