Doc Corner: Jamal Khashoggi and the 'Kingdom of Silence'

By Glenn Dunks

It has been a while since I was quite so turned off by a documentary as quickly as I was by Kingdom of Silence. Well-intentioned in its exploration of the special relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, and how journalist Jamal Khashoggi came to be executed, but built in a fashion that mimics some sort of Tony Scott crime thriller from the 1990s. Using every trick in the book when the story at its core is so interesting only seeks to diminish its impact.

Director Rick Rowley, an Oscar-nominee for Dirty Wars, isn’t just content with verite filmmaking to create a sense of urgency. Rather his film is edited through a woodchipper, it has an over-abundance of unnecessary focus pulling and slow-motion, plus over-the-top zooms and anonymous overhead camerawork of cities and crowds implying menace everywhere you look. All played against an incessant droning soundtrack full of technological bleeps right out of The Matrix. And that’s just its first two minutes and 51 seconds.

The cumulative effect of it all is exhaustion.

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Doc Corner: 'Dick Johnson is Dead'

By Glenn Dunks

One of the heartiest laughs I have had in months comes towards the end of Dick Johnson is Dead during Dick’s funeral as his best friend pulls out a bugle to play a tune and bid his buddy farewell. Why is it funny? Well, you’ll have to watch the film to find out. But it’s a moment that epitomises what the entire film, directed by Johnson’s daughter, Kirsten Johnson, does so well. It confronts our own morbid idea of life and death and laughs in the face of the idea that we have any sort of real control over our mortality.

For a film about death and grief, Dick Johnson is Dead is also probably one of the funniest movies of the year.

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NYFF: "Hopper/Welles"

by Jason Adams

Picture it: the year is 1970 and the director Orson Welles has just recently begun filming his experimental film The Other Side of the Wind, the production of which would ultimately outlast the director himself (Welles died in '85) and many of the people he put in front of his camera. (Wind was finally released by Netflix in 2018 after nearly 50 years of tinkering.) One such person Welles filmed was actor-turned-director Dennis Hopper, who was fresh off his counter-culture sensation Easy Rider. Strange bedfellows, these two, but they sat down for over two hours of filmed and oft-antagonistic conversation, and now producer Filip Jan Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski, who finally got Wind across the finish line, have gifted us with Hopper/Welles, the fly-on-the-wall footage of that moment screening at NYFF. It's something!

Full disclosure: I went in to Hopper/Welles expecting to find Welles a bit of a boor and Hopper a pip. Fuller disclosure: I came out with quite the opposite...

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NYFF Doc Corner: Frederick Wiseman's 'City Hall'

By Glenn Dunks

The idea of ‘seeing ourselves’ on screen relates most often to race and sexuality, which is fair enough. Rarely is it spoken about in terms of occupation. But one of the my most unexpected experiences this past week was watching Frederick Wiseman’s latest institutional observatory documentary City Hall and seeing my other non-film life as a public servant on screen for four and a half hours.

The world of stakeholder meetings and budget discussions, community functions and office dynamics is more often than not the world of comedy (Working Dog’s Utopia being the best, if you ask me). But here Wiseman captures the daily grind and ticking realities of what goes into making a city—in this case Boston—keep moving with steely realism and refinement...

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Doc Corner: 'The Way I See It'

By Glenn Dunks

If 2020 has taught us anything, it is that the grand ideal of America is a lie. It may then seem like the right time for a film such as The Way I See It, which appeals to the country’s more idealised image of itself through the (figurative and literal) lens of the man who was there to witness first hand one of its most historic moments. And yet watching Dawn Porter’s film is a bit like watching a fantasy film. All the money in the world may be able to create the most realistic dragons and wizardry, but it’s a total lie. This film is a fallacy of American idealism invented in the daylight among the most vile and hateful bigotry. Do I sound pessimistic? Well, I am.

If Porter’s film, as subtle as a sledgehammer, attempts to immortalize this myth of democratic optimism and goodness then she needn’t have bothered...

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