Doc Corner: Musical Chairs with Whitney, Elvis and Ryuichi Sakamoto

By Glenn Dunks

We’re playing a bit of catch up this week in the lead up to the hectic fall festival and award season. Nathaniel already looked at a bunch of recent indies and mainstream blockbusters. Now it’s my time to look at a trio of recent documentaries all about musicians: Whitney, The King, and Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda.

Why can’t we get a documentary about the one and only Whitney Houston that truly works? Kevin Macdonald’s Whitney follows on a year after Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal’s Whitney: Can I Be Me, an appalling film that Whitney easily supplants if only by default. Macdonald, an Academy Award-winner for One Day in September (a personal favourite, but he is probably best known as the director of The Last King of Scotland) brings a glossy sheen to Whitney that was missing in that earlier title, but it still falls short of giving Houston the treatment she deserves.

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Doc Corner: 'Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood'

Amy Winehouse died seven years ago today and several years removed from its Oscar win and box office success, Asif Kapadia’s Amy lingers in the public consciousness. A popular work of non-fiction due to its remarkable access to the story of a spiralling genius. For me, however, Amy remains a personal bug bear; an unethical and cruel work of documentary filmmaking that uses the words of its dead subject against her.

It was purely coincidental then that I thought about Amy while watching Matt Tyrnauer’s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. The two films definitely do not share the same world, but this revealing piece of Inside Hollywood muckraking does raise questions about ethics all its own. I admit I got a bit of a salacious thrill out of it, but that doesn’t stop me questioning whether I ought to have.

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Doc Corner: 'McQueen'

Of all the fashion designers who have been given the biographic documentary treatment in the last decade, perhaps none feel as appropriate for the cinema than the late Lee Alexander McQueen. There have been many designers whose work is in a way cinematic – including others from 2018 alone like Guo Pei (Yellow is Forbidden) and Vivienne Westwood (Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist), although the success of those films vary – McQueen the man is such a vividly big personality, even in his quiet and introspective moments, that a film about him is naturally going to boast a more broad appeal and intense fascination.

In McQueen we witness the boy who rose from working class roots in London’s East End buying fabrics with his government dole money to working on dozens of fashion lines a year for a variety of brands and world famous fashion houses.

Seen through personal tapes and footage from his increasingly elaborate and astonishingly striking runway shows, director Ian Bonhōte and co-director Peter Ettedgui assembles with beautiful clarity the essence of not just Lee’s work, but Lee’s humanity, too.

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Doc Corner: Kimberly Reed Returns with 'Dark Money'

by Glenn Dunks

Talk about a sharp turn. Director Kimberly Reed is best known for her 2008 feature Prodigal Sons, an autobiographical documentary about Reed’s journey as a transgender woman returning home to her small town high school reunion where she not only must confront the people who knew her as a football quarterback when living as a male, but also the strange story of her adopted brother’s newly discovered heritage to Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth and his declining mental health. It was an astonishing film and one that The Film Experience loved and covered at the time.

In the time since, Reed brought her story to audiences once more in the opera As One (which I also covered in 2014) as well as produced Paul Goodman Changed My Life and last year’s The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson for Netflix. It was a great surprise to me then to discover Reed’s latest film – her first as director for a decade – was a swerve away from themes of identity, gender, sexuality and family, but was instead a piece of investigative political journalism imbued with the narrative thrust of a court-room thriller.

Dark Money examines the various threads that make up the confusing and alarming world of American election campaign financing...

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Box Office: Ant-Man Grows, Mr Rogers Moves In, and LaKeith Stanfield Phones In

by Nathaniel R

I've been reading mixed things on the success level of Marvel's latest superhero flick The Search for Michelle Pfeiffer in the Quantum Realm. Some say it's opening weekend of $76 million is a big step up from Ant-Man's debut, others think that that's all too low for a Marvel film at this juncture in their history. It does work as a nice after-dinner mint for the heavy meals of Black Panther/Infinity War (though I could've done without the bitter aftertaste of its post credits sequence.) At any rate this is the last Marvel Studios film for awhile. We now have a eight-to-nine month break from Marvel heroes unless of course Black Panther becomes a big Oscar conservation. The next Marvel Studios film is Captain Marvel (March 8th, 2019) which will be followed by the as yet untitled Infinity War Part Two (May 3rd, 2019). 

Weekend Box Office Estimates (July 6-8)
W I D E 800+ screens	L I M I T E D excluding prev. wide
Ant-Man and the Wasp	Sorry to Bother You
1.🔺 ANT MAN AND THE WASP $76 *NEW*	1. 🔺 WHITNEY $1.2 on 452 screens *NEW*
2. INCREDIBLES 2 $29 (cum. $504.3)	2. SANJU $1.2 on 359 screens (cum. $5.9)
3. JURASSIC WORLD FALLEN KINGDOM $28.5 (cum. $333.3)  REVIEW	3. 🔺SORRY TO BOTHER YOU $717k on 16 screens *NEW*
4. THE FIRST PURGE  $17.1 *NEW*	4. 🔺 THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS $717k on 51 screens (cum. $1) REVIEW
5. SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO $7.3 (cum. $35.31) REVIEW	5. 🔺 LEAVE NO TRACE $425k on 37 screens (cum. $800k) TRAILER DISCUSSION

In other box office news, the LaKeith Stanfield starring comedy Sorry to Bother You opened to very full houses (albeit only 16 of them) which bodes well for significant expansion and the popular Mr Rogers doc Won't You Be My Neighbor? went wide...

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