REVIEW: A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness [2015]

“Because they had sworn on the Quran, I had no fear in my heart” When you read that Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy‘s documentary short A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness concerns a Pakistani girl shot and left for dead who survived to become a beacon of strength and bravery, do not simply dismiss it as “just like Malala Yousafzai.” While similarities do exist, the two couldn’t be farther apart in their contextual meaning above serving as two examples that prove women are treated as worse than second-lass citizens around…

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REVIEW: Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah [2015]

“Claude used to be a friend of mine—he no longer is.” Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah is a document of a documentarian: a time capsule of the twelve-year gestation of what’s possibly the greatest non-fiction works in cinematic history. Shoah‘s a ten-hour look at the Holocaust’s devastation via survivors and perpetrators in varying modes of interview whether out in the open or through hidden cameras, so no one would believe its director if he told Adam Benzine stories about the wonderful experience had during its creation. His was a…

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REVIEW: Body Team 12 [2015]

“My life is a sacrifice for the country to succeed” For Americans the Ebola scare was a handful of cases and nurses who weren’t as careful as they should have been. To the world it was thousands upon thousands of dead bodies—loved ones that family members can’t normally mourn because every second the deceased’s blood lays in the streets is an extra second risking greater contamination. It’s easy to forget the scope of epidemics like this when ground zero isn’t in our own backyard. We blame countries for being inferior,…

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REVIEW: Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief [2015]

“We’re out to make every life extraordinary” Scientology is almost too stupid to believe. No it is too stupid to believe. That’s why I always just dismissed it as a joke—a religion founded by a science fiction author in order to never pay taxes like the rumor went. Celebrities love it, there are weird “stress” tests happening, and their God is a creature named Xenu. It was fun to laugh at them even though the whole thing screamed of brainwashing. It was fun to believe they controlled every aspect of…

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REVIEW: Best of Enemies [2015]

“The way to end the Vietnam War was to put it on ABC and it’d be canceled in thirteen weeks” It was the birth of punditry and epitome of television as theater: William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal head-to-head wherein they themselves respectively became Conservatism and Liberalism for the whole country to watch. Did they talk about the National Conventions as they were ultimately hired to do? Not really. Did they feed the “unconventional” nature of ABC’s hour-and-a-half-a-day coverage as opposed to the wall-to-wall talking heads of competitors NBC and…

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REVIEW: Amy [2015]

“Love is a losing game” I think perhaps I’m tapped out where it comes to stories about musicians’ tragic lives. Binging on “Behind the Music” during my teens probably doesn’t help matters and seeing Montage of Heck earlier this year carries no favors either. Asif Kapadia‘s Amy seeks to do the same thing Brett Morgen did on that Kurt Cobain documentary with Amy Winehouse, but it doesn’t find the same impactful intrigue. It’s weird because I do feel like this is a very similar film to his previous effort Senna…

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REVIEW: The Look of Silence [2015]

“If we didn’t drink human blood, we’d go crazy” Just when you thought a documentary couldn’t get more harrowing than Joshua Oppenheimer‘s look at murderers in The Act of Killing, the director gives editorial power to their victims in The Look of Silence. The descriptive label “companion piece” is apt because they both exist in tandem to find the truth from every angle of the 1965 Indonesian genocide wherein all who opposed a military coup (“Communists”) were rounded up and exterminated. Rather than Oppenheimer behind the camera asking questions of…

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REVIEW: Les glaneurs et la glaneuse [The Gleaners and I] [2000]

“There’s no shame, just worries” What makes Agnès Varda such an integral voice in cinema is her colloquial way of engaging subjects. Everything appears as though unplanned when she visits locales believed to align with her current topic so as to capture unknown truths and adventure. None of her work does this better than Les glaneurs et la glaneuse [The Gleaners and I]: a French road-trip in honor of Jean-François Millet‘s 1857 painting The Gleaners at the Musée d’Orsay. In it she travels with a hand-held camcorder to unearth the…

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REVIEW: Meet the Patels [2015]

“If you wanted to get married you’d be married” The title Meet the Patels seemed strange for a movie about an almost-thirty year old Indian-American (Ravi Patel) allowing his parents to commence the process of an arranged marriage for him over the course of a year. I knew we’d obviously meet his family since Dad (Vasant K. Patel) and Mom (Champa V. Patel) were playing matchmaker, but it seemed weird since everyone he’d date would have a different name. Well, as Ravi explains very early on, the first “by-law” of…

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REVIEW: Listen to Me Marlon [2015]

“Get people to stop chewing” The above line pertaining to audiences and their popcorn is but one gem of many spoken by acting legend Marlon Brando into a tape recorder. Others—original or quoted—like, “Life’s but a walking shadow,” “You are the memories,” or “Acting is surviving,” each provide a glimpse into his introspection and warring mind between celebrity and humanity. They are what make Listen to Me Marlon as close to an autobiographical documentary as you can get without the subject simply sitting in front of the camera partaking in…

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REVIEW: Les plages d’Agnès [The Beaches of Agnès] [2008]

“I feel pain everywhere” I think it should be a new rule that documentaries about filmmakers can only be made if the subject him/herself directs. How could you not want this enforced after watching Agnès Varda‘s Les plages d’Agnès [The Beaches of Agnès]? It surely helps that the Frenchwoman is candid, funny, and fearless when it comes to combining whatever she has into one cohesive whole. As she says: her movies are puzzles with many disparate pieces strewn about that find themselves coming together in the end. If some footage…

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