Doc Corner: Amy Poehler's 'Lucy and Desi'

By Glenn Dunks

I hadn’t expected it, but I somehow became a defender of an Aaron Sorkin movie across the most recent awards season. Unexpected because I was not a fan of Sorkin’s earlier directorial efforts. But his somewhat fictionalized film about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez, Being the Ricardos, had—for all its faults—a point of view about its subjects and as a piece of storytelling. At least one that went beyond the more predictable birth-to-death narrative of star-laden biopics where performers are essentially asked to pantomime through famous moments across history.

I am sure many fans who disliked Sorkin’s film will embrace Amy Poehler’s documentary, Lucy and Desi. It’s also not a comedy in the way that non-fiction can be funny, but it plays a lot of clips from I Love Lucy, The Lucy Show and more, so it plays more like one...

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Doc Corner: David France's 'How to Survive a Pandemic'

By Glenn Dunks

Documentaries about the COVID-19 pandemic aren’t rare. Just over two years into it, and already a long list of titles exist claiming to offer us insight into some area of the response. Some have worked (Nanfu Wang’s In The Same Breath, Hao Wu and Weixi Chen’s 76 Days—both shortlisted for the Oscar) while others haven’t delivered where you would expect. They have been sometimes rushed, likely out of sheer determination to be completed in time for relevance, little knowing just how deep we would be without a clear exit. Because of this reason, many are dated by the time we get to see them.

How to Survive a Pandemic is unfortunately more of the latter. The film is something of a curiosity for its director David France. Curious because despite having the weight of timeliness on its side, Pandemic lacks the propulsive immediacy of his earlier films How to Survive a Plague and Welcome to Chechnya.

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Doc Corner: A comeback for 1992's 'Rock Hudson's Home Movies'

By Glenn Dunks

Subtext is a funny thing. The very idea of it revolves around the idea that some people just don’t get what’s being shown on screen. That for some, there’s nothing there at all. For others, there is a whole other world bubbling away told through code, gestures, innuendo, and subtlety. In today’s very connected world, this isn’t a good thing. Where once artists and scholars may have been revered for being the smartest person in the room—when did you last see anybody credited as an “intellectual” on television news anymore? —nobody today likes to be told “you just don’t get it”. How else could we have multiple online discourses at once about the artistic merits of Spider-Man: No Way Home versus (of all things) Drive My Car? Curiosity with art by the masses seems more or less gone completely.

Perhaps that is why Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog has frustrated so many viewers. That film, like many Rock Hudson films, plays with the ideas of masculinity and femininity in ways that don’t immediately leap out. But once they do...

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Doc Corner: 'The Andy Warhol Diaries' on Netflix

By Glenn Dunks

There have been a lot of films, series and books about Andy Warhol and the company he kept. Documentaries alone, I could definitely list off a dozen titles by heart from prestige to the trash. And there's no reason for that to stop now. After all, Warhol’s factory of superstars and the art they produced will no doubt continue to inspire other creatives for as long as there is art. The Andy Warhol Diaries on Netflix will certainly not be the last. Although it may just go down as at least one of the more definitive of the bunch—as well as the slickest...

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SXSW: Exploring Volcanoes in ‘Fire of Love’

By Abe Friedtanzer 

I’m grateful that SXSW includes a “Festival Favorites” section that includes titles that have played elsewhere and been popular since it’s often not until a festival has ended or all of its screenings have concluded that I hear about something I’m told I have to see. Fortunately, the documentary Fire of Love which was acquired by National Geographic (for quite a sum), meaning that those without access to film festivals will be able to see this inventive and visually striking film soon enough…

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