Berlinale: Three queer docs and one all too brief feature

Seán McGovern's continued reporting from the Berlin International Film Festival. Click back to part one if you missed it the opening film "Isle of Dogs". Here are notes on four more films playing at Berlinale 2018. 

Shakedown (dir. Leilah Weinraub, 2018)
This slightly chaotic documentary charting the history of a Los Angeles lesbian dance club in the early Aughts is dope-tempered and energetic. Leilah Weinraub's confident and assured filmmaking features several years of footage of Shakedown's nights – the women who performed and the women who watched. There are plenty of anthropological documentaries about queer subcultures, but Weinraub's doc is anything but...

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Doc Corner: 'The Most Dangerous Man in America' Goes Where 'The Post' Doesn't

By Glenn Dunks

If The Post gave you a hankering for the truth behind the Pentagon Papers, then the 2010 documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers will prove uncommonly fulfilling. In fact, watching this Academy Award-nominated doc (it lost to The Cove), you would be hard-pressed to believe that it's about the same events as portrayed in the Steven Spielberg movie.

Last week we looked at The Price of Gold and how closedly I, Tonya mimicked it, so it's actually quite amusing to see that this week's Best Picture / Documentary cross-over is the complete opposite. Sure, they overlap here and cross-over there, but The Most Dangerous Man in America goes longer, deeper, wider, and somehow all but completely ignores The Washington Post and the personalities within the 2017 film...

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Podcast: Black Panther (plus underseen gems)

With Nathaniel now ensconced in new digs, the podcast can resume. Up first a mini-podcast on Ryan Coogler and Marvel's Black Panther blockbuster with Nick Davis and Katey Rich. It's paired with a "deleted scene" from the last podcast as Nick, special guest Teo Bugbee and Nathaniel discuss favorites that were never really in the awards conversation but we hope people will find on streaming including super-hero adjacent Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. 

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Black Panther and More

Doc Corner: 'The Price of Gold' Brings Clarity to 'I, Tonya'

By Glenn Dunks

The defining trait of I, Tonya that has separated it from a glut of biopics is that darkly comedic tone achieved significantly through fake direct-to-camera interviews by an assortment of ghoulish villains and anti-heroes. One could argue that with its cast of monstrous characters and flamboyant yet true-to-life costumes and wig-work, the film’s mock documentary device was entirely unnecessary at achieving its desired laughs.

Yet while I saw the value of its method as a sort of short-hand directorial device used to wrangle the story’s many real life contradictions and he-said-she-said-he-said-she-said-he-said narrative, having watched Nanette Burstein’s sublime The Price of Gold, it comes off as actually just lazy...

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Doc Corner: Ranking the documentary short nominees by 'How much politicians could learn from them'

by Glenn Dunks

Last year we had fun (well, about as much fun as could be had) ranking the Best Documentary Short Subject nominees by how depressing they were. And while this year’s collection of nominees tackle subjects like racial police brutality and the opioid crisis, the five selected titles are somewhat lighter in their touch. If this category is too often (yet not exactly unfairly) criticized for being a home to just the most miserable bunch of films imaginable, this year’s nominees should at least leave audiences with a bit more hope and inspiration.

So let's instead rank the Best Documentary Short Subject nominees in order of which we would most like to force our current political leaders to watch if given the chance. Documentaries can be extremely powerful in changing people’s perception of the world around them – and while we are politically more divided now than ever, I’d like to believe that if people with power actually watched these shorts (totalling around two and a half hours) then maybe they would think twice. Maybe. Probably not. But we’d like them to try...

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