Doc Corner: 'Listening to Kenny G' and 'Jagged' at DOC NYC

By Glenn Dunks

DOC NYC starts today. The festival runs for in-person screenings from November 10–18 and then continues online until November 28. I have a Twitter thread covering what I am watching, but here we are looking at two music docs about artists from very different ends of the spectrum: Kenny G and Alanis Morissette.

Trust director Penny Lane to make a biographic documentary about a musician and have it not be the same old same old. The American filmmaker has been on a tear lately with Nuts! (about goat testicle charlatans), The Pain of Others (about Morgellons disease), and Hail Satan! (about the Satanic Temple). This run continues with the wittily assembled Listening to Kenny G, which plays today as the opening night film of DOC NYC.

Lane’s film isn’t the standard musician bio-doc, although it does chart his career from the early days discovering music in school and does make a spotlight out of his career highs and lows. What makes Listening to Kenny G so invigorating of a watch is because of the greater story within which this narrative is placed. One that interrogates the controversial anti-populous appeal of the multi-instrumentalist’s smooth jazz stylings from all angles.

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Doc Corner: 'Attica'

By Glenn Dunks

“Attica! Attica!”

The memory of the Attica Correctional Facility revolt has lingered throughout pop culture. Whether it was on the periphery of Best Picture nominee Dog Day Afternoon, inspiring a season-long story arc on Orange is the New Black, or as the direct subject of literature like Heather Ann Thompson’s acclaimed Blood in the Water, and in movies across cinema and TV. For our purposes, there have already been several documentaries about it, perhaps most notably Cinda Firestone’s 1974 doc Attica and Brad Lichtenstein’s Ghosts of Attica from 2001.

If you have seen all of these then it may feel like there isn’t much to say on the subject that dates back to September 9–13, 1971. And having only watched Firestone’s incredible and matter-of-fact feature some time last year (while unaware of a new titles being in the works), I did certainly remember many of this sorry saga’s painful and tragic moments. However, director Stanley Nelson and co-director Traci Curry have their own wealth of story to tell that makes for frequently fascinating storytelling...

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Portugal chooses "The Metamorphosis of Birds" for Oscar

by Cláudio Alves

When reading the list of films shortlisted for the Portuguese Oscar submission, I confess I was a tad disheartened. Only two of the six films had even been released when the finalists were announced, and I only had watched one of them. The other happens to be a project that reeks of exploitation, which I wasn't enthusiastic about promoting. At least, the film I did see, Catarina Vasconcelos' The Metamorphosis of Birds, was one I loved, going so far as voting for it as one of the best unreleased films on last year's Team Experience Awards. As luck would have it, the voting body responsible for the submission fell for it too…

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Doc Corner: 'A Cop Movie'

By Glenn Dunks

The release of Alonso Ruizpalacios’s A Cop Movie (Una película de policías) via Netflix was timed with a series hosted at New York’s The Paris Theatre. Named ‘New Directions in Documentary’, the series sought to highlight “the innovative films and filmmakers who have created new cinematic languages and forms by combining elements of fiction and documentary” (all Netflix titles, of course). Unsurprisingly, I have loved most of the films they played. Several of them (Strong Island, Shirkers, Bisbee ’17, Kate Plays Christine) made my own personal best of the decade list.

The series also recognised Robert Greene’s new film, Procession, which we will look at in the coming weeks. But Ruizpalacios’s feature—which directly taps into the series’ concept of playing with the concepts of artifice, performance, and the documentary filmmaking process—is an interesting inclusion. It’s the only non-American title for starters, from the director of Museo. It’s nice to see somebody recognise that innovation in doc filmmaking is happening everywhere.

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Doc Corner: Todd Haynes and 'The Velvet Underground'

By Glenn Dunks

It feels like something of a miracle that The Velvet Underground is as good as it is. Music bio-docs are hardly the most invigorating brand of documentary these days, and the story of this band and their Factory adjacent avant-garde artworld has been told many, many times before. So much so that Andy Warhol, the emperor of this New York underground art scene, would have probably been impressed by the assembly line of documentaries that emerged about him and his assorted acolytes, hangers-on, and affiliated artists whose fame (and/or infamy) are directly tied to him.

That Todd Haynes has made a great movie out of this all is hardly a surprise, though. After all, he is the man behind the 1998 glam rock opera Velvet Goldmine. Having said that, the recent milieu within which he has been working in Dark Waters and Wonderstruck hardly signposted that he had something so frenetically electric in him. If we never get another documentary about The Velvet Underground then it probably wouldn’t matter because we have this.

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