Doc Corner: Three Music Docs Cover A Century of American Culture

by Glenn Dunks

As Madonna once opined, music makes the people come together! There's literally centuries of the stuff to cover so it's little surprise we get a lot of documentaries on the subject - and we didn't even get to cover the four-hour Grateful Dead doc from earlier in the year, and who knows if we'll get to cover Chavela, Tokyo Idols, Give Me Future: Major Lazor in Cuba, G-Funk, The Go-Betweens: Right Here, Revolution of Sound: Tangerine Dream or any of the others that are fluttering around the festival and VOD circuit.

So this week rather than just covering one, I'm looking at three!

RUMBLE: THE INDIANS WHO ROCKED THE WORLD

The history and influence of Native Americans in music is explored by director Catherine Bainbridge and co-director Alfonso Maiorana in Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World. Taking its name in part from Link Wray’s famed 1958 instrumental (the only of its kind to be banned), it is perhaps easy to align the films with other popular music history docs such as 20 Feet From Stardom and Waiting for Sugarman, but doing so only highlight this new feature’s shortcomings.

More Rumble + East Bay punk and the woman who made the sounds of '80s after the jump...

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Doc Corner: 'An Inconvenient Sequel' and 'Chasing Coral'

Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth was a brilliantly effective work of agitprop. It pushed Al Gore’s pet climate change cause into the cultural stratosphere and won two Academy Awards for the effort. Of course, one’s mileage with it as a good film or not likely depends on whether you consider good intentions as Oscar worthy. I personally don't care for the movie, and could easily list a dozen documentaries from 2006 worthier of the Oscar. Not the mention dozens of enviro-docs that are worthier of your time.

Still, despite this, I do not necessarily begrudge Guggenheim his Oscar (remember, Gore did not get a statue – something a right-wing commentator mistakes in the opening passages of this sequel). There is something to said about a film, documentary or not, that makes an audience feel and become as impassioned about as subject like this one did. It's just particularly frustrating with Truth given the inherently fascinating subject that inspires so many critical and scientific paths and which took the easiest and most pedestrian path.

Which brings us to a rare documentary sequel...

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Doc Corner: 'City of Ghosts'

Consider it the Spider-Man: Homecoming effect. One of the smartest things that director Matthew Heineman does in his film City of Ghosts is do away with any sort of Syrian primer for the audience. Far too many movies do not trust their audience to already know a thing or two about the subject at hand and in this documentary, ostensibly about the Syrian citizen journalist group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), knows that we already have the basic gist of this conflict filed away and instead dives right into its story.

Like I said, it’s a smart move, and one that already marks this as an improvement over the director’s last film, the Oscar-nominated, but sloppy Cartel Land. Still, while it does indeed have a keener focus on the subject at hand, the frustrating elements of that earlier film nonetheless remain in Heineman’s repertoire.

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Doc Corner: 'The Reagan Show'

Ronald Reagan was the most videoed President by the time he left office in 1989. As told to us in The Reagan Show, there was more video taken of Reagan than the five Presidents before him combined. Sierra Pettengill and Pacho Velez’s documentary is a compilation of this footage, taken by personal videographers as he filmed televised addresses, walked the grounds of the White House and attended events, as well as news footage from the era. Whether one agrees with the controversial President or not – and, fair admission, I do not – there’s something interesting in the cinematic trawling through this video content and through this film’s early passages, I was pleasantly enthralled by the backstage pass to an old Presidency.

However, the title “The Reagan Show” suggests something that the film ultimately does not deliver. Across its brief 75-minute runtime, The Reagan Show veers away from a broad path of general observation, and instead focuses almost exclusively on one subject...

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Doc Corner: 'Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press'

Get ready to hear the words “Bubba the Love Sponge” way more than you ever thought possible. As somebody who isn’t especially knowledgeable about Z-grade American radio celebrities, this came as quite a shock to me, but I guess that is keeping in theme with the film in general. This is a documentary that covers such a salacious and outright bizarre story that nothing should really shock. A film about serious issues that plays at times like an absurd comedy. A film that sadly reflects the gutter within which we live.

Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press is the latest documentary by Brian Knapperberger. Like his last film, The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, which looked at the life of the late Reddit co-founder, this Netflix streaming doc examines a part of the online world that often goes unseen. Knapperberger’s demonstrates a weightier sense of confidence here, but like that earlier film, he has a keen ability in finding the central beating heart of a story that could easily confuse and confound audiences – whereas before it ones and zeroes, here it is legal jargon and the first amendment.

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