"The Mauritanian" for the Oscar Race?

by Eric Blume

Yesterday, Variety leaked word that STX will provide a late-entry film into the Oscar race.  The Mauritanian, which was formerly titled Prisoner 760 (going from one bad title to another), is The Last King of Scotland director Kevin Macdonald's latest film.  It stars A Prophet's leading man Tahir Rahim as a tortured captive in Guatanamo Bay and Jodie Foster as his lawyer. Variety critic Clayton Davis claims that Rahim and Foster deliver electrifying performances, and that they could find themselves in the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress races, respectively.

Macdonald has had a bit of an erratic career since he directed Forest Whittaker to an Oscar back in 2006.  His last film, the documentary Whitney, profiled the singer with limited depth but curiosity and sympathy.  It'll be good to see him return to the arena of global politics, which seems to be his strength...

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1999 with Nick: Best Documentary Feature and "realness"

This week, in advance of the Oscars, Nick Davis is looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now.

The Blair Witch Project

When I taught my Winter 2017 seminar about the movies of 1999, to a classroom of first-year college students who were all born in the last two years of the millennium, one of the trickiest ideas to historicize was how decisively the visibility and cultural stature of documentary cinema has shifted over the last 20 years. Compared to the decades when I grew up, nonfiction cinema has reached much further outside a relatively niche audience who tracked that filmmaking tradition. The explanations are too numerous to get into here, though they include all of the following: cheaper and more numerous technologies for recording and assembling footage; proliferating platforms for distributing and watching nonfiction films, especially in the era of the internet and of exploding cable-TV offerings; and some epochal, admittedly eclectic success stories in the commercial market, from The Thin Blue Line to Hoop Dreams to Fahrenheit 9/11 to March of the Penguins, that inspired more students and artist to pursue documentary tracks and more institutions to finance, release, and program the work.

More abstractly, I would add to that list a specifically millennial, post-postmodernist erosion of all faith in objective “reality,” differently crystallized in such landmark films of 1999 as The Matrix, eXistenZ, Eyes Wide Shut, and Fight Club. That erosion produces both a resistant hunger for whatever “real” images and stories might yet survive and its dialectical opposite: a contagious discovery, dismaying but darkly energizing, that even vérité images are subjective, manipulated, and at some level “fake”...

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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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