Doc Corner: Taylor Swift is 'Miss Americana'

By Glenn Dunks

A film like Miss Americana is always going to be something of a piece of image rehab. It’s just a part of the process of making a documentary about the biggest pop star in the world whose mega-fame makes her equally loved and loathed (as these sorts of things always do; hi, Madonna) by large swathes of the population. And while it is unlikely that the many shouting “fuck Taylor Swift!” in boorish unison at a Kanye West concert or those whose deep-dive into stan culture is unhealthy in its obsession are unlikely to be moved – or, probably more likely, reminded that they ever cared enough about her in the first place– from the looks of it, Lana Wilson’s doc appears to have worked.

Many journalists and listeners who once criticised her for any number of reasons (her perceived lack of sincerity, her cunning, her dating life, her choice of friends, a craven need for attention, etc) have come out to perform mea culpas and many casual observes of its subject’s meteoric rise to fandom acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, she’s human after all despite everything that they had been previously led to believe. 

Premiering as one of the opening night films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Miss Americana may seem like something of a peculiar choice for it’s director, too.

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Doc Corner: 'At the Heart of Gold' prizes the voice of survivors above all else

By Glenn Dunks

It has become somewhat unkind to describe a documentary as old fashioned or traditional. It seems to be that talking heads intercutting a single, linear story is somehow considered by some to be stodgy and boring. If you watch enough of them, you see recreations and animations and all sorts of gimmicky tricks to, I suppose, dazzle the viewer into thinking they are watching something that is more ‘cinematic’ than it is (whatever such a term may mean to you). They don’t always work, and in those time that they do in fact not work it can often harm a film, distracting from what could have been a, yes, simple, but usually better film. You could call it old fashioned or traditional.

Thanks heavens then that director Erin Lee Carr didn’t try any of that nonsense in the HBO documentary At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastic Scandal.

Even its title is so meat and potatoes that those who expect works of non-fiction to have evolved beyond the classical form will probably zone out just hearing the name. But Carr’s movie is one of such harrowing despair that anything other than clear, direct, unfussy filmmaking would have been all wrong.

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Doc Corner: 'Circus of Books' and 'Gay Chorus Deep South'... Two Very Different Gay Documentaries

By Glenn Dunks

If you’d told me that I would definitely cry during either the documentary about a gay erotic book and pornography store or the documentary about a gay men’s chorus travelling through the deep south and bringing a message of acceptance to hard red states, then the safe money would have been on the latter. Although this is me we’re talking about, notorious non-cryer and dismisser of the Up opening sequence so it’s not entirely a surprise per se.

Ultimately, I think it says more about the movies than it does me (although, yes, it probably does say a lot about me, too).

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Doc Corner: 'The Kingmaker' and 'On the President's Orders'

By Glenn Dunks

Disingenuousness is a disaster for a documentary. I recently watched two documentaries about St*ve B*annon and while it’s obvious he is a despicable human and despite whatever I may have felt about the movies themselves, one thing you can never call that man is disingenuous. He truly believes every that he says.

The same cannot be said for former First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, who is the narrative thrust and central subject of The Kingmaker. Something of a natural progression for director Lauren Greenfield’s whose earlier films The Queen of Versailles and Generation Wealth have each dealt with the lives of people with too much time and money. Marcos is foregrounded for the documentary’s first half and listening to her seemingly endless self-aggrandising about beauty, love, and this idea she holds so dear of being a mother to the Filipino people is – to be perfectly honest – a complete bore.

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Doc Corner: Five Highlights from the 159-deep Documentary Longlist

By Glenn Dunks

Have you heard? The Academy has announced the longlist of eligible titles for the 2019 Best Documentary Feature category. All 159 of ‘em; they don’t call it a longlist for nothing. The 15-wide shortlist will be derived from these and from there the five nominees will be chosen by the documentary branch.

As I suspected, Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old is not on the list. It is also worth noting – as I have done all year – that Amazing Grace gambled with the odds last year on a qualifying run and sadly didn’t make it. There were only a few films that we have written about in Doc Corner that either did not submit or were not eligible including Vision Portraits, The Raft, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché and Beyoncé’s Homecoming would be the best of that lot.

All the big titles that we have long expected to show up, however, did. Box office hits like Apollo 11, The Biggest Little Farm, Maiden and Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice sit next to streaming heavyweights American Factory, The Edge of Democracy and Knock Down the House (Netflix), One Child Nation and Citizen K (Amazon), Gay Chorus Deep South (MTV), The Apollo (HBO) and big-name specialty titles like Western Stars and Diego Maradona with buzzy, low-key titles waiting to pounce like Advocate, Honeyland, The Kingmaker, 5B and Roll Red Roll.

We still have many of the movies featured on there to watch and (hopefully) get the chance to discuss. But we’re going to cheat and use this as a moment to play catch-up with some short paragraphs on some of the titles featured on the long list.

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