Doc Corner: 'Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie' is a big Emmy contender

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

Even if Michael J. Fox wasn’t American television royalty, including being a five-time Emmy Award winner, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie would probably prove to be quite popular with the television academy. However, as a three-peat winner for Family Ties (“I feel four feet tall!” he said from the stage), a winner once more for Spin City, and a regular nominee in the guest acting category for just about anything he would take time to appear in (including Curb Your Enthusiasm; The Good Wife five times; and Rescue Me, another winner), I feel pretty confident that Davis Guggenheim’s moving biographic documentary will do well at this year’s Emmys.

And rightfully so...

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Queering the Oscars: Knowing Our History in “Changing Our Minds"

For Pride Month, Team Experience is looking at LGBTQ+ related Oscar nominations... 

dr evelyn hooker

by Eurocheese

When this series was announced, my first goal was to find a film that was completely new to me on a subject outside of my cinematic wheelhouse. Watching this film served as a reminder of how little I know about LGBTQ+ history. While I’d heard the name Evelyn Hooker before, I’m ashamed to admit I couldn’t have told you what role she played in history, much less the impact she had on the state of gay rights today. If the same is true for you, dear reader, I highly recommend carving 107 minutes out of your day to learn a bit about her impact in the Oscar nominated documentary Changing Our Minds: The Story of Evelyn Hooker (1992). I want to offer a trigger warning though as this film delves into difficult topics and images.

The sliding doors nature of Hooker coming to study homosexuality is mind-boggling if you stop to picture a world where her findings never existed...

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Doc Corner: John Ford and the 'Midnight Cowboys'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

“When in doubt, make a western.” – John Ford.

This quote stuck out to me in the opening of The Taking, the latest film about film from Swiss director Alexandre O. Philippe. Like ford, director John Schlesinger made a western himself after an early-career stumble. The films of John Ford and Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy aren’t linked too much; at least not on the surface. But with two new documentaries, they are given visual deep-dives that tie them together as logical ends of a spectrum that used images to sell America as a hard land or hard men.

Both Philippe’s The Taking and Nancy Buirski’s Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy err on the side of cinematic essays than traditional behind-the-scenes making-of documentaries. Each offer their subjects’ take on the (quote unquote) western as both of their time and in many ways timeless. I enjoyed them both.

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Doc Corner: The latest musician biographies

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

You’re a little bit damned if you do and a little bit damned if you don’t when it comes to musician bio-docs these days. They remain prolific, a cottage industry that is popular with audiences and easy choices for distributors and sales agents with a built-in audience. It makes sense that we get so many of them each year. And if you’re not inclined to watch so many of them, you may not be as burnt out on them as I appear to be. But—and I swear I’m not just being grumpy—are they actually getting worse, too? They certainly don’t seem to be getting any better, with most choosing to abandon any real directorial vision in favour of standard story beats.

Three recent examples all have strong elements, telling their subject’s life story in ways that I have no doubt will appeal to many fans, devoted or casual alike. But Love to Love You, Donna Summer; John Farnham: Finding the Voice and Fanny: The Right to Rock have all left me relatively cold despite the icons at their centre, plagued by frustrating tech choices and failing to reach the heights of the music that made their subjects famous in the first place.

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Doc Corner: 'Victim/Suspect' on Netflix

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

Nancy Schwartzman’s latest documentary wades forcefully into sensitive territory. As she had done with (the superior) Roll Red Roll in 2018, she charts stories of sexual assault and rape in places where police, the justice system, and society at large too often find ambiguity and uncertainty. An audience watching Victim/Suspect is probably not among those who do, although I suppose launching on such a platform as Netflix may help capture some viewers whose attitudes towards people like those in Schwartzman’s doc are ingrained enough to need rewiring and allow them the empathy required to understand their circumstance.

As the title implies, Victim/Suspect is about women who have reported the crime of rape and have instead become the one arrested. Whether it be due to apathy or investigative sloppiness on behalf of the police or just plain old misogyny and bias, they end up handcuffed and sent to prison. Charged with the crime of falsely reporting a rape—which, to some of the police featured within the film via videotape, appears to be more offensive than the sexual crime itself. As one officer observes, they need to be taught a lesson for the police time that they suggest has been wasted. All because they can’t find (or don’t care to find) the sufficient evidence needed to believe them.

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