Doc Corner: The Thrilling Failure of 'Shirkers'

By Glenn Dunks

Apologies once again for the recent absense, but working 12-to-15-hour days in an office somewhat curb one's ability to sit down and write reviews. However, we're returning to regularly scheduled programming with one of the best documentaries of the year.

Documentaries about moviemaking aren’t uncommon. We see several released each year, usually offering creative insight and historical context to works of art both great and terrible – and in the case of those like American Movie even surpassing the reputation of the movie they’re about. Documentaries about failed movies are less common, although no less fascinating and often allow their subject to attain something of a mythical status. The latest addition to this sub-genre of non-fiction is Sandi Tan’s Shirkers, a thrillingly assembled combination of cinematic mystery, sombre tribute, and aching paean to lost potential.

“Shirkers” is not only the name of the documentary, but also the name of the film that Tan made in 1992 with her friends Jasmine Ng, Sophia Siddique and the mysterious older man named George Cardona. The original Shirkers was to be the first Singaporean film directed by a woman and was a radical change from the sort of film that the island nation was typically known for like 1972’s They Call Her Cleopatra Wong.

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Doc Corner: DOC NYC - Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 11/9'

DOC NYC is currently underway in New York and one of the great things is that alongside all the world, American, and New York premieres, the festival includes significant documentary titles from throughout the year. We’re using this opportunity to catch up with the latest from Michael Moore, Fahrenheit 11/9, which screened at the fest and is still in limited release across America.

Love him or loathe him – or probably more likely, sit somewhere in the middle of the two emotions – it’s hard to overstate Michael Moore’s importance to American documentary filmmaking. It’s not often that documentaries become pop culture touchstones and he has several that have become just that. The film that this new title is theoretically a sequel to will likely remain the highest grossing documentary of all time for the foreseeable future of cinema. It is interesting to note, however, that the two biggest zeitgeist-hitting political documentaries of the new century – that would be Fahrenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth – have floundered at the box office with much-belated sequels. Are audiences simply too bombarded by news that the thought of going to see a two-hour movie about the horrors of modern politics is just too much to bear?

Moore's decision to make a sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11 makes a lot of sense in theory, although watching the final product is a curious experience.

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Doc Corner: Frederick Wiseman's 'Monrovia, Indiana'

By Glenn Dunks

Depending on your point of few, Frederick Wiseman films exist in a realm of apoliticicm or are stealth political missiles. I believe it’s a little bit somewhere in between. It is easy of course to see the markings of a political filmmaker in his works if you know where to look, and can be done so in essentially all of his works from his debut with Titicut Follies in 1967 right up to his most recent works In Jackson Heights and Ex Libris: The New York Public Library.

And yet he’s obviously no Michael Moore or Alex Gibney, and the way his camera silent observes with little regard for constructed narrative (at least in any traditional sense, although his films all tell a story) means that it is easy for his films to feel as if any political ideology that rises to the form of text is purely accidental.

With a film such as Wiseman’s latest – his 42^nd and his seventh this decade – it is once again a little from column a and a little from column b. How much you’re willing to indulge, however, may vary considering the topic of his patiently attentive eye is the town of Monrovia, Indiana, a god-fearing, gun-loving town in America’s rust belt that it’s all too easy to assign the moniker of “T***p Country”.

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Doc Corner (Surprise Weekend Edition!): 'The Price of Everything'

By Glenn Dunks

We took a week off recently due to office job duties so as a means of not getting behind in the schedule, we're posting a (for now) one-off weekend documentary review for your Sunday reading.

The world is a distressing place right now where seemingly everything is terrible. It’s only natural that documentary filmmaking would reflect this global tussle for law and democracy. If these films aren’t telling us something frightening and new then they at least usually these films at least attempt to show us something familiarly awful from a new angle or with an unfamiliar point of view. I’m here to tell you, however, that one of 2018’s most miserable moviegoing experiences isn’t about war or famine, disease or political unrest. Rather, it’s about the art world. A ghastly portrait of some of society’s worst impulses of greed and capitalist grotesquery.

The world of Nathaniel Kahn’s slickly polished and glossy yet hollow documentary The Price of Everything is one ripe for interrogation. And yet this film doesn’t take advantage of the uniquely wide-net of talent and personalities that it has access to. Among others, there’s the delightful yet sad parallels in name and career of Jeff Koons and Larry Poons, there’s Gerhard Richter albeit briefly, and there’s the back rooms of Sotheby’s of New York with Executive Vice President Amy Cappallazzo as she prepares for an auction worth obscene amounts of money including one painting by Henri Matisse that she ballparks at around a couple of hundred million dollars. Far out.

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Doc Corner: '306 Hollywood'

By Glenn Dunks

Hollywood 306 is the debut documentary from the sister-and-brother directing team of Elan Bogarin and Jonathan Bogarin. It’s a special film about a very un-special person. The film is not grand, but one rooted in the experience of a woman, the Bogarins’ grandmother, whose very unremarkable life in some funny way makes her entirely remarkable. It’s a film that is both intimate and large in generosity and heart, filled with delicate whimsy. That might sound like the type of movie that can be sickly sweet but the movie is visually interesting and evocative in its narrative choices.

Following the death of their grandmother Annette Ontell at the age of 93, Elan and Jonathan decided to perform a sort of ceremonial “archaeological excavation” on her home at 306 Hollywood, New Jersey. While initially laughed at by their delightfully profane mother who wants to empty the house and sell it, she agrees to give them one year...

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