By: Henry J. Fromage –
This week was another one dominated by spreadsheets and documentaries I’ve meant to watch in years past, plus a miss from last year’s Sundance.
49. Presence
Steven Soderbergh makes his first foray into the horror genre, even if it plays as more of a familial drama probing the mysteries of existence, like A Ghost Story with more of a commercial bent on one hand, but also an at least equally daring formal conceit in its first-perso…err first-ghost handheld camera POV. It takes a minute to get used to, but patience is rewarded with a story that pulls you in and ends with a mind-bending metaphysical twist. Two Beers.
50. Eno
I missed this at last year’s Sundance (which Presence also debuted at, although not for virtual viewing). It’s not hard to see why Brian Eno was drawn to director Gary Hustwit’s approach, which was to shoot and compile a massive pile of footage of Eno and his contemporaries and use AI to compile a new combination of scenes and ergo a new version of the film literally every time it’s shown. On one hand it demonstrates how interesting Eno’s musings on music and life itself are to have this much footage in the first place, but on the other it may also show how relatively simple it is to edit such a project together when you do have this much material (or how essential human vision is to creating something from it all that transcends being a sum of its parts). Three Beers.
51. The Devil’s Climb
Incredibly brazen and skilled free climber Alex Honnold has featured in a couple of standout documentaries now, and here returns in a two-hander with one of his youthful climbing idols, Tommy Caldwell, as they seek to climb Alaska’s treacherous Devil’s Thumb. They don’t do the classic Honnold no ropes approach, but between Caldwell recovering from a ruptured Achilles and them deciding to scale it on a traverse, which entailed climbing not one, but all three primary peaks on the mountain, all in a day. This is a swift documentary without quite the interest in the why of it all that other docs have covered better, but it’s impressive nonetheless. Three Beers.
52. Children of God
This OG cults & crime documentary from 1994 (narrated by a very young-sounding Helen Mirren no the less) examines the Children of God cult, which like many started as a Christian splinter group before devolving into a cult of personality that went where these all go- sex crimes. It’s a well put together takedown of what is still very much a going concern (rebranded as ‘The Family International’, although founding sex pest David Berg only barely survived the release of this doc). Two Beers.
53. Kidnapped for Christ
Speaking of evil perpetrated in the name of Christ, this is another OG doc (2014, this time) about a heinous practice that is still very much occurring- namely the kidnapping of Christian youth to take them to often international (and hard to prosecute) “behavior modification program” to fix things like their gayness or proneness to panic attacks (sure, this will help!). As a couple of documentary series even last year go to show, this million-dollar industry has not been slowed at all, although it is inspiring to see the resilience of those who suffered through it. Two Beers.
54. The Amazing Johnathan Documentary
This complex and complicated documentary is nearly as much so as its subject, shock magician and comedian The Amazing Johnathan, known for hyperviolent magic tricks and a raging drug habit in his time. When he announces he has a terminal disease and a year left to live, one documentary about him surprisingly becomes two, and then three, much to the chagrin of original filmmaker Benjamin Berman. Is this all just another comedic provocation? This doc takes you places, but there’s never any doubt its subject is well worthy of one. Two Beers.
55. 3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets
This maddening HBO documentary from 2015 covers the 2012 murder of black teenager Jordan Russell Davis in a gas station parking lot at the hands of white adult Michael Dunn over the volume of the music in the car he shared with two other high school friends. Dunn tried to use Florida’s Stand Your Ground law to claim he reasonably feared for his safety, despite his girlfriend’s testimony that he made no mention of the shotgun he claims he saw on the drive back to their apartment, where they ordered pizza, nor in the days after that. Curing racism and staggering white entitlement may be impossibly difficult, but maybe we can start with making sure they don’t have guns to act on it with? Two Beers.
