Doc Corner: Memories of the past in four new films at DOC NYC

By Glenn Dunks

DOC NYC starts today in New York where something like 100 films will screen. Of the 300+ screenings and events, there are 135 features and 43 world premieres including the just announced screening of the once-thought-lost Aretha Franklin concert doc Amazing Grace. We will be looking at a just a small slice of the selections based loosely around themes. Part one is focused on memories of the past returning to the surface and involves four films which are about grieving families, the NYC art scene of the 1960s, an underappreciated photographer, and the rise of the Nickelodeon network.

EVELYN
Despite his familiarity with war zones in the Oscar-nominated Virunga from the frontlines of Congo’s bloody poaching crisis and Oscar-winning short The White Helmets from the Syrian civil war, director Orlando von Einsiedel has apparently been less well-equipped to deal with the wars of his own family’s anguish. His latest film, recently nominated for the BIFA Best Documentary prize, is an examination of his own family following the suicide of his brother many years ago. Sending himself out into the Scottish highlands alongside various family members and childhood friends for a series of memorial treks, he hopes the wintry walks will allow his family a chance to talk and confront their pain head-on like they have never done before...

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Doc Corner: Frederick Wiseman's 'Monrovia, Indiana'

By Glenn Dunks

Depending on your point of few, Frederick Wiseman films exist in a realm of apoliticicm or are stealth political missiles. I believe it’s a little bit somewhere in between. It is easy of course to see the markings of a political filmmaker in his works if you know where to look, and can be done so in essentially all of his works from his debut with Titicut Follies in 1967 right up to his most recent works In Jackson Heights and Ex Libris: The New York Public Library.

And yet he’s obviously no Michael Moore or Alex Gibney, and the way his camera silent observes with little regard for constructed narrative (at least in any traditional sense, although his films all tell a story) means that it is easy for his films to feel as if any political ideology that rises to the form of text is purely accidental.

With a film such as Wiseman’s latest – his 42^nd and his seventh this decade – it is once again a little from column a and a little from column b. How much you’re willing to indulge, however, may vary considering the topic of his patiently attentive eye is the town of Monrovia, Indiana, a god-fearing, gun-loving town in America’s rust belt that it’s all too easy to assign the moniker of “T***p Country”.

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Doc Corner (Surprise Weekend Edition!): 'The Price of Everything'

By Glenn Dunks

We took a week off recently due to office job duties so as a means of not getting behind in the schedule, we're posting a (for now) one-off weekend documentary review for your Sunday reading.

The world is a distressing place right now where seemingly everything is terrible. It’s only natural that documentary filmmaking would reflect this global tussle for law and democracy. If these films aren’t telling us something frightening and new then they at least usually these films at least attempt to show us something familiarly awful from a new angle or with an unfamiliar point of view. I’m here to tell you, however, that one of 2018’s most miserable moviegoing experiences isn’t about war or famine, disease or political unrest. Rather, it’s about the art world. A ghastly portrait of some of society’s worst impulses of greed and capitalist grotesquery.

The world of Nathaniel Kahn’s slickly polished and glossy yet hollow documentary The Price of Everything is one ripe for interrogation. And yet this film doesn’t take advantage of the uniquely wide-net of talent and personalities that it has access to. Among others, there’s the delightful yet sad parallels in name and career of Jeff Koons and Larry Poons, there’s Gerhard Richter albeit briefly, and there’s the back rooms of Sotheby’s of New York with Executive Vice President Amy Cappallazzo as she prepares for an auction worth obscene amounts of money including one painting by Henri Matisse that she ballparks at around a couple of hundred million dollars. Far out.

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• Glamour Amandla Stenberg goes au naturel with the body hair at the Rome premiere of The Hate U Give. Oh and also its their 20th birthday today. Happy birthday to them!
• /Film Release date shuffle. Wonder Woman 2 has been pushed back to 2020 so now it's the Terminator reboot (with the original stars) and a reboot of Charlie's Angels facing off in Wonder Woman's old Novemeber 2019 date
• Self Styled Siren anecdote of the week involves 1940s and 1950s star Jennifer Jones
• MNPP lots of photos of Cory Michael Smith to celebrate his coming out and his new film 1985

• MCN first Gurus of Gold chart of the season with the actressing awards and Best Picture
• Orlando Weekly Indiana Jones Land is probably coming to Disney World in the early 2020s with various parks dreaming up pitches
• Variety it's going to be a big year for traditional studios at the Oscars
• Coming Soon In demand Jean-Marc Vallée attached to a Yoko Ono / John Lennon biopic
• Variety Critics Choice nominees for Documentaries. I really can't with the randomness of 6-9 nominees (are there any rules) in 12 different categories. It's like CHOOSE. If you nominate everything there is zero drama and no reason to look at what's been chosen.
• THR How to Build a Girl about a young woman (Beanie Feldstein) becoming a rock critic is building an impressive supporting cast with Emma Thompson, Paddy Considie, and Chris O'Dowd all joining
• New Yorker lottery drawings in the age of plutocracy
• Next Best Picture a report on 'lone acting nominations'
• Deadline Be More Chill, opening soon on Broadway has already auctioned off its film rights. Meanwhile Hamilton still hasn't ironed out a deal for the film rights but its expected to be a $50 million sale

Exit Video
Hey look & listen, it's a brief soundbyte of a Mary Poppins Returns song in this "special look" that's basically pieces of the original trailer recut with a pieces of a song.

Doc Corner: HBO's 'The Sentence'

By Glenn Dunks

If I told you The Sentence was a documentary about the frustratingly pedantic injustice of the American judicial system and how it directly targets minorities and in particular one specific mother of three in Michigan, you would probably think there is much ground to cover and any number of directions the film could go. Unfortunately for viewers intrigued by the subject, The Sentence isn’t that film. In its place is a documentary that too often feels like just a collection of home movies strung together with little insight into the processes and machinations of the system.

The Sentence follows the story of director Rudy Valdez's own sister, Cynthia, and the efforts that eventually lead to her pardon in 2016 on drug charges. Cynthia was jailed in the mid-2000s due to something of a loophole known as “the girlfriend problem” despite years apart from the man who actually committed the crimes and now living a life of domestic normalcy...

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