Doc Corner: 'Gaga: Five Foot Two' Does the Lady a Disservice

by Glenn Dunks

Lady Gaga can be a great musician, it’s true. But the new documentary about her, Gaga: Five Foot Two, would make anybody unfamiliar with her question why. The film follows a year with the singer as she records her latest album, Joanne (admission: I’m not a fan), and prepares for the big stage of the Super Bowl Halftime Show. Yet something about this film lingers as ever so slightly off.

Part of the problem with Chris Moukarbel’s film is that it’s never quite verite. The camera is never just a fly on the wall to Gaga’s world, but instead a witness to events that lack authenticity...

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Doc Corner: Tribeca's Big Winner, 'Bobbi Jene'

by Glenn Dunks

Who is worthy of a documentary about themselves is a question that comes up a lot when watching and occasionally writing about documentaries. A long life doesn’t necessarily make you any worthier of one, just as youth doesn’t imply unworthiness. Of course, who is a worthy subject is ultimately in the eye of the beholder so to speak and it is the film itself is what should be judged.

I am sure there was a reason that director Elvira Lind chose to follow Bobbi Jene Smith for a documentary. Beyond ‘she’s a great dancer’, of course...

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Doc Corner: 'House of Z'

Fashion documentaries have been going downhill ever since Unzipped. Douglas Keeve’s 1995 portrait of Isaac Mizrahi, a box office smash and critical hit, remains the pinnacle of what so many since have attempted. Like Madonna: Truth or Dare, from which it took much inspiration, that riotously funny glimpse into Mizrahi’s world full of design, famous friends, creativity and wickedly self-depreciating neurosis was a perfect storm of sorts between personality, fashion and celebrity that a film about this sort of person ought to be.  

Every year brings us several of these sorts of documentaries. Like the majority of them, Sandy Chronopoulos’ debut feature, House of Z, is easily digestible and barely raises a sweat; a work of celebrity portraiture that fans won’t regret watching, but which offers little beyond what is promised on the tin. Taking the same narrative hook as Unzipped of a talented young designer’s comeback from the precipice of total failure, House of Z is an act of personality redemption for a man whose career nearly fell apart because of his outlandishness and brattish behaviour. This makes it a humble film in many ways, one that deliberately chooses to show its subject as one appreciative of his position.

That also means that it is a humourless one, too; sapped of the fun and the outrageousness and the glamour that should be natural.I can only imagine how fun this film may have been half a decade ago.

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Doc Corner: 'Icarus' Doesn't Fly

By Glenn Dunks

It is easy to see why Netflix purchased Icarus for a record five-million dollars. Charting director-and-subject Bryan Fogel’s attempts to prove how easily it is for athletes to dope and how easy it is to get away with it before getting sucked into the Russian Olympic doping scandal of 2015, it’s a premise that swings between two wildly popular forms of documentary. But blending the personality theatrics of Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me with true crime, Icarus ultimately isn’t able to replicate the entertainment and the sheer chutzpah of that 2004 perfect storm of charming lead and grotesquely captivating experiment.

For starters, Fogel greatly overestimates the desire to watch somebody screw the system and (attempt to) get away with it. After all, we live in a world with Lance Armstrong already in it – and it takes Icarus just 58 seconds to feature him in archival sound and video – so there seems little need for a talented, but self-admitted amateur cyclist to muddy the waters and prove how scandalous it all is...

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Doc Corner: The Awe and Wonder of 'The Farthest'

by Glenn Dunks

There is a reason that filmmakers keep going back to space. The very concept of an ever-expansive mass of significant nothingness can inspire the mind in infinite ways. But whereas for many, the immediate idea is to resort to fireballs, aliens and standard hero versus villain storylines, I find myself far more attracted to those who turn towards the stars with a sense of wonder and awe. It is perhaps why I respond so well to documentaries like Roman Kroitor and Colin Low’s Universe (the short that inspired Kubrick’s 2001), Al Reinert’s For All Mankind, and now Emer Reynolds’ The Farthest, one of the year's finest.

Celebrating the 40-year anniversary of NASA’s 1977 mission to send two Voyager satellites into space, this Irish documentary is a work of stunning beauty. A film that grapples with the concept of not just what this giant science experiment is, but what it means to us, to the Earth, and to the very idea of humanity. It’s also just a whole lot of wide-eyed fun, a scintillating journey through the galaxy that is as illuminating as it is exciting...

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