Doc Corner: Nora Ephron and Mike Nichols Get Posthumous Tributes on HBO

Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. This week we’re looking at two biographical HBO documentaries about cinema legends.

Despite a resume that reads as limited, Nora Ephron's reputation over film and pop culture general looms large. Directed by her son, journalist Jacob Bernstein, there is likely little this new biographic documentary Everything is Copy that won’t be familiar to fans of the witty essayist/author/screenwriter/director’s work – not least of all when featuring old clips of Ephron narrating her own books directly the camera. But thankfully Bernstein’s film isn’t simply a rehash of his mother’s life, rather he occasionally finds minor nooks and crannies of her life that she herself hadn’t written about at length. Helped by words from her sisters and friends, an image of Ephron is formed that while no doubt glowing allows for us to learn even more about her than her famously candid words previously allowed.

Beyond all of that, first and foremost, Everything is Copy is an entertainment. A breezy and bright glimpse of a woman whose wit was matched by her scathing honesty and who left behind many works of cultural significance that are worth parsing over. 

New York movies, Nora's death, and a conversation with Mike Nichols after the jump...

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Review: Batman v Superman (aka the Dawn of Wonder Woman)

This review originally appeared in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

Just over a hundred years ago the movie serial was born. The stories were divided up into small chapters and kids would return each week to the movie theater to see how the cliffhanger endings were resolved. And then they’d watch the feature presentation. Cut to: March, 2016. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is now open in theaters. There’s no serial preceding it but it is one. While Warner Bros, the studio that owns the DC heroes, has several superhero shows on television and stresses that they’re unrelated to the movies, the lines are ever blurrier betwen the two mediums. In fact, Batman and Superman actually both had movie serials in the 1940s. The most popular movies seventy years later are all what you’d call “franchises”. That’s code name for a very expensive serial which doesn’t air weekly but annually. And you have to see them in movie theaters.

With serials/franchises/TV shows you’re perpetually aware that there will be another episode. So the heroes are never really in danger; contractually they’ll be back next episode/season. But let’s not leap tall buildings in a single bound into the future. Is Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice a worthy movie or satisfying episode on its own?

Spoiler alert: It’s not. Many reasons why come after the jump...

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Doc Corner: SXSW x3

Glenn here and welcome back to Doc Corner. Each Tuesday we're bringing reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. This week we’re looking at films that screened at the just-ended SXSW about musical icon Gary Numan, self-helper Tony Robbins, and mature-age trans women.

Gary Numan: Android in La La Land

You know I hate to ask
But are 'friends' electric?
Only mine's broke down
And now I've no-one to love

Like many artists of Numan’s vintage who were experimenting with electronic music, there was a queerness to him, an otherness that the made him a symbol to hordes of young audiences who had never seen or heard anything like him before. He was a musician whose dark and complex lyrics were perfectly paired with the aloof roboticism of his performance – an android dreaming of the electric beeps and boops of a Moog synthesizer. But for a performer who made much of his early fame and success off of the obscure oddness of his lyrics and imagery, this documentary by Steve Read and Rob Alexander is awfully straight.

I can only wish that Read and Alexander had taken some of that electro-punk attitude as inspiration for while Gary Numan: Android in La La Land will be an enjoyable sit for fans of the 58-year-old British singer famous for songs like “Cars” and “Are ‘Friends’ Electric” (like myself), but as cinema it lacks something propulsive. This brand of musical comeback doc is certainly popular – recent examples like Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets and I Am Thor were mostly more successful thanks to meatier narrative hooks – and the two directors are wise to focus in on some of the more unique elements of Numan’s life such as his long-standing marriage to a fan and his anxious worry about an impending comeback record while on a family vacation. Still, Android in La La Land works best with it fuses Numan’s abstract lyrics and music with strange beautiful images rather than the musician-moves-to-LA narrative that forms its core. The musical sequences are as vibrant as you would expect, but the power of the songs and his genius doesn’t shine through any clearer than if simply listening to them.

Two more after the jump...

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Krisha Deliriously Dares You Not To Spill The Turkey

Nothing just moves in Trey Edward Shults’ disorienting debut Krisha; it sloshes, slips, tackles, and caws. A dizzying symphony of brain-clattering sound, feverishly unhinged camerawork, and a tightknit, ink-blotter ensemble led by the ferocious Krisha Fairchild, Shults’ get the family together for Thanksgiving drama shoots you right off your seat and holds you hostage over the darkest edge of the human id. Red onions notoriously make you weep but under Shults’ rack-focus eye, they make you want to hurl too. Such portent may lead one to expect a draining, inhumane slog through the mud.

But that alone would be far too easy. This is an exhilarating hostage situation, not just by witnessing a filmmaker’s virtuosic warp over cinematic language but also by the hot cohesion of its richly observed and highly specific setting, and the barbed black comedy that comes along with it. It feels like home, which is to say, Krisha is the waking nightmare of reckoning yourself against the eyes and ears that know you best, a big hug from your aunt that just may choke you from the inside out.

More...

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Doc Corner: 'Videofreex' a New Angle on Old News

Glenn here and welcome back to Doc Corner. Each Tuesday we're bringing reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand.

The news is constantly changing, and never more so than in today’s evolving media landscape. Where once a story would unfold nightly on the broadcast network’s news programs, now it unfolds live and often unedited, captured by anybody, anywhere. Here Come the Videofreex is a new documentary by Jenny Raskin and Jon Nealon that examines the very beginnings of this shift in news reportage by going all the way back to the late 1960s and getting up close to the then breaking trend of grass roots video journalism that was birthed in the shadow of Sony’s first video recorder units. Focusing on the collective known as the “Videofreex”, this entertaining film charts how these documentarians – and that’s exactly what they were – captured daily life, beginning with the simple act of taking a personal video camera to Woodstock and in their first act of directorial voice ignored the music entirely and instead focused on the patrons.

Forged by a meeting of like-minded individuals with a passion in sharing their world experiences, the team quickly graduated to CBS news employees, but that was short-lived after an attempt at a television pilot was mooted and everyone was fired. More...

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