The default four-star documentary

I've fallen into a pattern with documentaries, which is that if they are competently made with even a hint of outside-the-box thinking, I am automatically going to give them four stars on Letterboxd.

Even if I found getting through them somewhat tedious, as I did with the 115-minute Paul McCartney documentary Man on the Run. 

Star ratings, it should be said, have two primary functions, in my view:

1) To indicate how much you personally liked a film;

2) To indicate how good this film is relative to its own goals/potential limitations. 

When it comes to documentaries, I often default to the second, more objective usage of the star rating, disregarding the more subjective usage. 

With documentaries, it is a given that you will not be equally interested in the subject matter across the whole genre. There are going to be films about things that speak to you personally, and films about things that don't. However, if you are a critic, you feel like your personal interest should be removed from the equation in assessing how well the film does what it sets out to do. In a way, this is true with any genre, since any individual critic is going to gravitate toward some and not toward others, and the star rating shouldn't suffer from that personal preference. But with documentaries I think it's even more clearly delineated.

So whether I am fully interested in the film the whole time may be more a function of whether I am fully interested in the subject matter, though I think you would also agree that a truly great film makes converts out of even people who are disinclined toward its topic. And that's why I do tend to give a well-made documentary four stars out of five, but no more than that, even if I find that its length or other parts of its execution try my patience. I think I assume that the length would try my patience less if I were more interested in the subject matter, though that's not a given, and unfortunately you can't really test it. 

The thing is, with Man on the Run, I am actually plenty interested in the subject matter. Although I am not nearly as familiar with Paul McCartney's solo career, I love the Beatles and have done so for a good 30 years now. And what McCartney did in the ten years following the Beatles' breakup is actually something I would like to know more about.

But ... 115 minutes of this was quite a lot. 

And here's the issue: it was largely undifferentiated. There are no talking head interviews in this doco, only archival footage. I should clarify that. Subjects are interviewed, but you don't see their talking heads. You see the archival footage and you hear their answers to questions -- but not the questions by documentarian Morgan Neville themselves -- over that footage. 

Even when the archival footage is as priceless as that included here, and even when it is strung together by interesting techniques in which images are played with on screen and bleed into one another, it's still too samey without the talking heads. And that leads it to feel quite repetitive, even as the narrative is moving forward through the approximately ten years that are covered here. 

Of course, there's a bit of a fallacy in saying that I missed the talking heads. Talking heads are generally the least interesting part of a documentary. So am I really saying Man on the Run would be better if I were looking at images of Paul McCartney sitting against a bland background in his early 80s?

I'm not saying that. I think all I'm really saying is that a movie does not deserve four stars if you are frequently checking to see how much time it has left, and if you don't feel specifically inspired or moved or uniquely informed by it. And that's kind of how I feel about Man on the Run.

So I didn't do it. I didn't give it the four stars. I gave it only 3.5.

And this is when I remind you, and myself, that 3.5 stars is a perfectly acceptable rating, and among some fellow critics who are harder on movies than I am, it's a great one. 

There's a funny footnote to this story.

I wrote this piece yesterday to get a head start on today. Truthfully, I just write the ideas whenever they come, and if that happens to be three in one day, I'll write them in one day (if I have time) and save them for the next available opening.

On my way home from work, after I had already written the rest of what you read above, I was listening to a podcast about pop chart history, and they were talking about one of the later albums by David Bowie -- one that critics recognized as a superlative example of his craft, but which didn't particularly connect with them or endure in their memories. The interviewee referred to critics giving it a "respectable gentleman's four stars." Which seems to suggest this is a struggle in the broader critical community, in situations where we want to show our respect for a piece of art, but also to indicate that something about it doesn't quite do it for us personally.

So maybe by this definition, Man on the Run is a four star-movie that I gave 3.5 stars -- opting, for once, for the subjective. 

Netflix documentaries, mid and otherwise

Desperate to add a documentary to my in-progress 2025 rankings -- there was only one out of 32 movies seen, and that was a music documentary, which is in its own category -- I reluctantly threw on the Netflix documentary Con Mum on Tuesday night.

Reluctantly? Yes. I am wary of Netflix documentaries.

The ones with colons in the title, I pretty much universally avoid. You know what I'm talking about. Just taking two at random that are being spruiked when I go on Netflix right now, how about Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare and Into the Deep: The Submarine Murder Case. 

See, rather than Netflix creating a platform for documentaries that would otherwise have no outlet to our eyeballs, I feel like it is creating documentaries that would not otherwise exist. While this is also, on the surface, a good thing, it's not a good thing when they are Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare and Into the Deep: The Submarine Murder Case.

But Con Mum had no colon, so I went for it.

Mid.

I'm not going to say Nick Green's film is bad, but it's very mid, in a perfectly Netflix way.

What do I mean by that?

A lot of talking heads, shot straight on. A lot of archival footage, much of it repeated, sometimes more than once. A subject that is interesting enough to warrant a movie, only just, but might have just as easily never been filmed. 

Past examples of this? Sure, I've got 'em. And it doesn't mean I disliked these films. In fact, I was reasonably appreciative each of them:

Longest Third Date
The Tinder Swindler
Our Father
The Social Dilemma

Not a colon in there, but maybe there should be.

Speaking of colons, I am avoiding anything in this relatively recent Netflix Untold series, where everything is Untold:, and then something that, well, hasn't been told, and that I don't want to have told.

I get it. I am not your typical Netflix viewer. I don't gravitate toward true crime. Things that exist for purely salacious reasons don't particularly fascinate me (though don't get me wrong, I can get into the salacious when it's done correctly). I don't want what I'm watching to go in one of my ears and out the other.

But Con Mum did. 

Look it's an interesting enough story. A woman gets in touch with her son after 45 years and then starts to con him out of his money, claiming she is the illegitimate daughter of the Sultan of Brunei. She builds a convincing enough facade, as all good scammers are capable of doing, that he doesn't seem like an idiot for falling for a story that seems very much adjacent to the letters you get from a Nigerian price offering you a big financial inheritance if you just send some small amount of money for processing fees.

But I don't know, aren't these true crime stories a dime a dozen? And hasn't Netflix, with its relentless content fire hose approach, made us intimately aware of just how cheap and disposable and interchangeable they are?

The very next night, though, this perspective slightly shifted.

Perhaps wanting to get my lagging documentary content up overall, whether it helped me with my 2025 rankings or not, I put on another documentary that was playing on Netflix, from 2024, not perhaps realizing, when I first heard about it, that Netflix was also a distributor of this documentary, not just a service that happened to be streaming it.

Why didn't I make this connection, you ask, especially when I was so attuned to the mid quality of the Netflix documentary? And not just because there was no colon?

Maybe because I heard The Remarkable Life of Ibelin discussed briefly on Filmspotting, one of the oldest film podcasts and one I have been listening to and trusting since 2011. Their discussion of a film gives it a certain imprimatur, or at least distinctiveness beyond the sea of non-fiction content Netflix make available to us all. I think it's fair to say they have never mentioned a Netflix documentary that had a colon in it. 

What's more, I remembered that Ibelin was directed by Benjamin Ree, a filmmaker whose previous effort, 2020's The Painter and the Thief, was one of Filmspotting co-host Adam Kempenaar's favorite films of that year. Which seemed to remove it from the realm of the director-for-hire projects I am considering Netflix guilty of today. 

Well, it was a lot more than mid.

I'm not sure the subject matter of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin exceeds our most cynical expectations of a documentary, as it is quite sentimental in remembering a young man who succumbed to complications from muscular dystrophy. But the execution is what makes a film clearly surpass its own potential limitations, and Ree's film has that big time.

For one, it put me in mind of one of my favorite movies of last year, which wasn't available to most people until this year, though I got out ahead of them by seeing it at MIFF. That's Grand Theft Hamlet, the documentary that takes place entirely inside Grand Theft Auto as the avatars stage Hamlet during COVID. That movie mixes its comedy with profundity, while this one is much more skewed toward the profundity side. But like that movie, a lot of this takes place inside a video game, or at least, the animators' rendition of that video game, as Mats Steen, the young man at the center of the movie, escaped the limitations of his body by existing in a World of Warcraft game community that came to consist of very real friendships, even though they had not met IRL. There's something about watching video game characters engage in activities involving real pathos that really gets me.

Then there's the little details about how to handle the rest of it. Instead of every talking head interview being shot at brightly lit medium depth -- the kind of setup that engendered the dismissive term "talking head" in the first place -- I noted that some of these interviews were ata  side angle, and halfway across the room. If that seems like a superficial change for misguided reasons of artistry, or just intentionally breaking the mold of the typical talking head interview, that is not how I perceived it. Or even if that was Ree's thinking, then I congratulate him for it rather than faulting him for the choice.

Even lathering it on a little thick about its central character and his impact on others in the world despite the lack of likelihood that he would ever be in a position to do that, it's a really good film. 

So I guess I can't really prejudge the problematic subgenre of the Netflix documentary, even as I might like to -- which is probably a good thing, considering that Netflix is our only consistent source of access to documentaries out there.

Who knows, maybe I'll even watch one with a colon in the title. 

The end of a year of documentary alternate Tuesdays

At the beginning of August last year, I set out to reverse my personal trend of watching fewer and fewer documentaries. I vowed to watch one every other Tuesday, in perpetuity.

A year later, the end of that perpetuity has arrived.

It's not that I haven't kept it up. I have. In fact, I've never missed a turn in the two-week rotation. Some weeks it worked out that I needed to watch it on Monday, and other weeks on Wednesday, but never in that year have I missed by more than one day on either side. And if you watch it on a Monday, a day before you were supposed to, it can hardly be described as "missing," now can it?

My upcoming trip to America, which starts six days from now, would create my first real scenario where it would be hard to continue. (Which means it times out pretty well for the end of this year-long project. If I did one more two weeks from now, it would overlap with the date of the first one a year ago, which is one more than necessary.)

The two bi-weekly Tuesdays on that trip would be once when I'm in Maine visiting my father and his wife, and once when I'm in California sorting through the stuff in our garage, preparing to finally sell the house we bought ten years ago (and lived in for exactly one year before moving here). Oh, I could fit in viewings -- I'm pretty determined when I have arbitrary schedules to keep -- but I suspect I'll have better things to do, and it'll be nice not to think I have to, even if you, dear reader, are the only person I'm answering to here, and you are very forgiving.

But I think the trip to America is really just an excuse to do something I've wanted to do for a while. I think the goal of this mission has been accomplished, with an asterisk. Yeah sure I watched 26 documentaries in the past year, which is great -- but I watched only those 26. That's a pretty high number for a year and I wouldn't likely watch more than that anyway, but the point is, I watched them only because I felt obligated to, not organically. The real goal is to watch a documentary whenever I feel like it, not because I should or because I said I would.

If I dwindle back down to the single digits per year in documentaries, this past year will ultimately have been sort of a failure. But I don't think I will. It'll just be nice to watch them when the mood strikes me, not when a predetermined schedule tells me it's time.

The Errol Morris documentary Gates of Heaven, about pet cemeteries, seemed like a perfect way to finish, dealing as it does in issues surrounding the end of life. Plus Morris is one of our most vital documentarians, whose previously unseen work is the sort of thing this "series" was designed to push me toward. (Plus it was short, only 82 minutes, which is always great.)

Far too often, these weren't the kinds of movies I watched in this series. Many of the slots were filled with documentaries from the current year that I thought I should see because there was a little buzz around them and I wanted to rank them. That seems like a bit of a cheat because I might have watched those films anyway. Then there were weeks where I had no idea what to watch so I just threw my hands up in the air and picked some random thing that ended up disappointing me, by documentary standards. (I say "by documentary standards" because most documentaries are pretty good.)

So instead of holding my own feet to the fire every two weeks, my intention now is to keep referring back to my Letterboxd list of documentaries I haven't seen, which I created just for this series, and continue to tick off documentaries I actually want to see, because I have a free night and because it will contribute to my overall edification as a cinephile.

Free nights were actually one of the issues. Because of my commitment to two of these movies a month, as well as two viewings per month among my previous #1s since the start of this year, as well as other movies I need to watch because I'm reviewing them, as well as other movies I need to watch as part of three different series (two on this blog and one elsewhere), I was finding relatively few free nights on my calendar, nights when I really could just watch anything I wanted. I want that back.

But I do want to send off this series with a quick recap of what I saw, when, and a few thoughts on the experience. So here goes:

1. Gunda (2020, Viktor Kossakovsky)
Watched: Tuesday, August 3, 2021
If you read this post, you'll recall that this was the inaugural film -- and that it was so meditative (a documentary about pigs that has no voiceover or other spoken language) that it put me into sort of a trance. The right kind of trance, though. An art film trance, and so what if I needed to take a couple naps in the middle, pausing as I did? A promising start.

2. We Are The Thousand (2020, Anita Rivaroli)
Watched: Tuesday, August 17, 2021
My second movie fell right in the midst of MIFF, and since MIFF was online last year, it was easy to arrange this documentary of Italian origin to line up with my schedule. The movie looks at the viral event that occurred when organizers got musicians from across Italy to come together and simultaneously play the Foo Fighters' "Learn to Fly" in one thousand-piece orchestra of singers and instrumentalists, as a way of wooing the Foos to come play in that small town. The viral event was pretty awesome. The 30 minutes of tacked on material to approach feature length was not.

3. Step Into Liquid (2003, Dana Brown)
Watched: Tuesday, August 31, 2021
The first time I wondered whether this experiment was a great idea was only three installments in. This surfing documentary, which I threw on with a shrug after striking out elsewhere on streaming, was pretty slipshod and all over the place, even if the director is the son of the guy who directed The Endless Summer. 

4. Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary (2019, Jack Bennett)
Watched: Tuesday, September 14, 2021
Although this was a second straight movie I sort of grabbed out of my ass when it came to be Tuesday night, it ended up being a huge pleasure because of how much I love Galaxy Quest.

5. Tim's Vermeer (2013, Teller)
Watched: Tuesday, September 28, 2021
This brought the series back on track in terms of giving me an excuse to watch documentaries I'd been meaning to watch for years ... this actually being the first example of that. This is a fascinating story of a non-painter who used scientific techniques and refracting lenses to paint a Vermeer that was indistinguishable from the real McCoy.

6. Jodorowsky's Dune (2013, Frank Pavich)
Watched: Tuesday, October 12, 2021
It was logical for me to follow up Tim's Vermeer with Jodorowsky's Dune, because I wrote about both of these films back in 2013 when I could not get my hands on them in time to rank them before the end of the year. Loved this one and it single-handedly prompted me to buy and read Frank Herbert's novel before Denis Villeneuve's version of the film came out.

7. Val (2021, Ting Poo & Leo Scott)
Watched: Tuesday, October 26, 2021
This is the first "watch it to rank it for the current year" movie I watched. I was pretty touched by his portrait of Val Kilmer's career from the perspective of his own struggle with throat cancer, requiring him to use an electrolarynx or "throat back" in order to speak.

8. Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed (2021, Joshua Rofe)
Watched: Tuesday, November 9, 2021
As we're getting into November and into the end of the year, expect these late-season list contenders to keep coming. Despite feeling primed to really appreciate this due to the subject matter, I was underwhelmed.

9. The Truffle Hunters (2020, Michael Dweck & Gregory Kershaw)
Watched: Tuesday, November 23, 2021
It's listed as 2020 here, but this fulfilled my requirements for a movie I could rank in 2021. This was the first time where life threw me a curveball that might prevent the viewing, as I was on the second of two nights away with my wife. But after we played a lot of pool and went our separate ways for televised entertainment to end the night, I determined I could still fit in this film's brief 84 minutes, which went down pretty well.

10. My Name is Gulpilil (2021, Molly Reynolds)
Watched: Tuesday, December 7, 2021
I'm a big fan of the recently deceased indigenous actor David Gulpilil, who has been in all sorts of classic Australian films, so it counting for the current year was sort of a secondary interest, since he'd just died within the past few weeks. The movie was not great from a filmmaking perspective but I loved learning more about him. 

11. Summer of Soul (... or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021, Questlove)
Watched: Tuesday, December 21, 2021
Even being in the new house for just over 24 hours did not prevent me from fitting in my documentary alternate Tuesday. I'm a dedicated man. This was one of the most acclaimed films of last year and I was obviously going to fit it in before ranking. It ended up in my top 20 for the year.

12. The Rescue (2021, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin)
Watched: Monday, January 3, 2022
My first Monday, but not my last. Cannot remember why I needed to watch it on Monday night instead of Tuesday. On that Tuesday I watched The Lost Daughter. It seems like I could have just as easily flipped those two. Really liked this, just outside my top 20 for the year. These filmmakers excel in movies about climbing, and it appears, also in movies about rescuing people from flooded caves.

13. The Velvet Underground (2021, Todd Haynes)
Watched: Monday, January 17, 2022
After I'd broken the seal the previous time, kept the Monday night viewings going with my last movie before I closed off my 2021 rankings. It ended up somewhere in the 60 to 65% range in those rankings, as the these final viewings usually do, when I've lost all my critical faculties and just want to be done with the whole thing. It's an impressive film but not being a huge VU fan probably limited my appreciation. 

14. Looking for Richard (1996, Al Pacino)
Watched: Tuesday, February 1, 2022
I got back to Tuesdays but I got a little cheeky with this one nonetheless. Hey I never said they all had to be documentaries I hadn't seen before, did I? By this point I had already decided I was going to revisit all my former #1s in order to rank them at the end of 2022, and this is the only documentary I have ever crowned as my favorite of the year.

15. In & Of Itself (2020, Frank Oz)
Watched: Monday, February 14, 2022
This indescribable self-help/magic special fits my description of a documentary enough to qualify. Unlike some people -- my wife included, who was watching it on the couch next to me -- I didn't know what to make of this film and am still not sure if I really liked it. Maybe it's just the frustration of not knowing how Derek DelGaudio does what he did. The weirdest thing is probably that we chose this as our Valentine's Day viewing.

16. Flee (2021, Jonas Poher Rasmussen)
Watched: Tuesday, March 1, 2022
This 2021 critical darling -- which was somehow Oscar-nominated for best documentary, best foreign language film and best animated feature, even though two of those three would seem to contradict each other -- was right up my alley as a big fan of Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir. 

17. The Tinder Swindler (2022, Felicity Morris)
Watched: Tuesday, March 15, 2022
New year, new documentaries to rank in the current year. This movie had its moment in the zeitgeist but I didn't find it particularly interesting.

18. Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press (2017, Brian Knappenberger)
Watched: Tuesday, March 29, 2022
I think this was another result of a streaming deep dive -- I remember going through a lot of pages here -- but the results were better than the previous time I did this (Step Into Liquid). Was really interested in the Hulk Hogan portion of this, not so much in the other portions -- and in fact, can no longer remember what they were about.

19. The Imposter (2012, Bart Layton)
Watched: Wednesday, April 13, 2022
My first Wednesday, but there was no way I was watching a documentary that Tuesday, which was my 14th wedding anniversary. (Valentine's Day was bad enough.) I had remembered wanting to watch this documentary when it first came out and was glad to come across it, though it's another milquetoast 3.5 star rating where I don't remember all that much about it.

20. Do I Sound Gay? (2014, David Thorpe)
Watched: Tuesday, April 26, 2022
This might not have been the best documentary I watched in the last year, but it hits an absolute sweet spot by being about an interesting topic (the phenomenon of gay men speaking effeminately) with some (but not overwhelming) social importance, managing to be fun and funny while also uncovering a real sense of sadness and self-loathing. A great way to pass an evening in COVID quarantine, and it was only 77 minutes to boot.

21. Miss Representation (2011, Jennifer Siebel Newsom)
Watched: Tuesday, May 10, 2022
I ended up liking this pretty well after a deep dive into Kanopy to see what I could find, but I wouldn't say that it really says anything new about women's attempts to be viewed equally, and not as sex objects, in popular culture and entertainment. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it in my mind is that the director, a former actress, is married to the governor of California, and therefore, a possible future first lady? Maybe?

22. Can We Take a Joke? (2015, Ted Balaker)
Watched: Monday, May 23, 2022
It wasn't a great sign for the longevity of this project that I took a deep dive into Kanopy for the second installment in a row, and didn't come up with something I felt very excited about for the second time in a row, opting for this primarily because it would be over in 74 minutes. It's basically about whether our culture has become too sensitive to jokes, though it doesn't have quite the right-wing perspective you might assume from that premise.

23. Beastie Boys Story (2020, Spike Jonze)
Watched: Wednesday, June 8, 2022
Clearly feeling a bit desperate to get back on track here, I was glad to remember I had wanted to watch this documentary that was among the first bits of original content I was aware of to be released by AppleTV+. Even though my viewing was divided between work, a long bus ride home from baseball practice and home, I really, really liked this -- glad to see the two remaining Beasties with such a fun perspective on their careers, delivered in a manner that suggested they no longer worry about being perceived as cool.

24. Burden of Dreams (1982, Les Blank)
Watched: Wednesday, June 22, 2022
This was a pivot from the movie I had planned to watch as my documentary the night before, which, I realized after starting it, turned out not to be a documentary: Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom. But what a pivot. This was pretty easily my favorite documentary from the whole year, something I had long wanted to see, about Werner Herzog's fateful experiences shooting Fitzcarraldo. It lived up to everything I hoped from what I'd heard going in, especially his famous speech about animals murdering each other in nature and birds screaming.

25. Our Father (2022, Lucie Jourdan)
Watched: Tuesday, July 5, 2022
Yes I got to tick off a 2022 documentary I needed to see, but more than that got a really fascinating story about a fertility doctor who used his own samples dozens, and dozens, and dozens of times, potentially screwing up the whole gene pool in a major metropolitan area. This is one of the few times I remember really liking staged recreations in a documentary.

26. Gates of Heaven (1978, Errol Morris)
Watched: Tuesday, July 19, 2022
Alas, I didn't love Gates of Heaven. In fact I'm not even sure I really liked it. I'm giving it three stars as an adjustment of my expectations of a documentary made at a very different time than today, but this was a lot of talking heads waffling on and going on whatever tangents they wanted, because Morris' interview style allows for that. I saw the seeds of what Morris would become in the future, but this first effort only brings the pets to life, so to speak, in fleeting moments. I learned all too much about the ins and outs related to the creation of the cemetery without really feeling like it was a vibrant space either. He also gave altogether too much screen time to the film's least appealing character. Maybe I just needed more b-roll than I got. Or maybe I was too tired, which is not a big surprise given that I'm leaving for the U.S. in six days. I'm obviously wrong because Roger Ebert put this on one of his Sight & Sound polls as one of the ten best films of all time. This film's completion and exhibition were also the occasion for Werner Herzog to eat his own shoe, as a result of losing a bet about whether Gates of Heaven would ever see the light of day. 

A few takeaways:

1) I'm still pretty allergic to earnest movies about social and human rights issues, the kind I watched extensively when I was choosing films for that human rights film festival back in 2015 and 2016 (for festivals taking place in 2016 and 2017). Yep, five years later I am still broken from that. 

2) Twenty-three of these 26 movies are from the 21st century, suggesting that documentaries don't have much of a shelf life. Either the older ones are not available, or they're not on my radar because, with a few rare exceptions, people aren't still talking about them 50 years after they were made. (Also, I watched 12 pre-1990 documentaries for my series Audient Authentic back in 2020, so perhaps I thought I scratched that particular itch then.)

3) When I saw a doco that I really liked, it definitely got me feeling enthused about this project all over again. However, instead of soldiering on with the project through good times and bad, I'll just remember that I can be enthusiastic about documentaries even if I am not doing this series -- and maybe that's the next step in bringing them fully back into my good graces.

If the problem before this was that watching documentaries felt like a chore, forcing myself to watch them every two weeks probably didn't help with that. But now that I'm reminded they don't have to feel like a chore, I'll look forward to opting in to them -- on my own schedule this time.

Documentary alternate Tuesdays - I'm Gunda do it

Since the end of my year watching classic documentaries last year for my monthly Audient Authentic series, I've dropped watching them like a bad habit.

I watched a couple in the waning days of finalizing my 2020 year-end rankings, but since I closed off that list and returning to "normal" viewing? Only three, and one of them (Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets) is not really a documentary as such. (For the record, the other two were They Shall Not Grow Old and Free Solo.)

Narrative films have always been my preference. See past discussions on my concepts like "the documentary ceiling," though that is not nearly the only post I've written where I've struggled with a waning desire to watch non-fiction films. In fact, looking over the "documentaries" tag on my blog, I seem to write a post bemoaning my on-again off-again relationship with documentaries at least once every two years. 

But as you know, a great documentary can still transport you like a great narrative film does, and just because I got burned out on documentaries while vetting films for a film festival a few years back, it doesn't mean I can/should just forsake them. 

So just as I launched Audient Authentic to goose my doco viewing at the start of 2020, now I'm determined to watch two documentaries a month on alternate Tuesdays, starting with the first Tuesday in August.

It's not a series -- I don't plan to write about them here, or only if something else about watching one of these movies inspires me to write. Rather, it's just a personal mandate that I hope to continue following in perpetuity.

I considered Monday night originally as an ideal night for this, but during the baseball season, Monday is problematic. I sometimes wake up early (like 3 a.m.) on Monday morning to watch the end of the baseball week as my weekly fantasy baseball matchup is being decided, so Monday nights often find me very sleepy. Tuesday it is.

Being comparatively less sleepy -- though I did also wake up around 5:30 on Tuesday morning -- was no help with Gunda, the first film in this mandate/non-series. This is one of the more visually beautiful films I've seen in a while, with its glorious black-and-white and its perfect lighting, the farm animals (mostly pigs) silhouetted by a fuzzy glow of sunlight. 

But it is, literally, 90 minutes of watching pigs walk around. That's it. 

Sorry. At about the ten-minute mark, there are some chickens introduced. Then it's back to the pigs. At about the 45-minute mark, some cows are introduced. Then it's back to the pigs.

And while everything on the screen is amazing to look at -- those piglets are cute AF -- a total absence of any human voice or real narrative is the kind of thing that puts you in a trance. I definitely paused at least twice, maybe it was three times, for a short nap, and in looking back on my viewing, it feels like I was in a kind of fugue state. Only this time I was not inspired to distract myself with other diversions, as I was when I watched Sweetgrass and wrote this post. I did, in the end, find it profound, and certainly not like what one thinks of as a "documentary" in most cases. (Sidebar: If it was filmed at farms in three different countries, as the end credits state, and yet the suggestion is that it is following the same pig as she and her piglets age, is it really a documentary? Are these not multiple pigs playing the role of one pig?)

Three other things I should tell you:

1) I may still watch documentaries on other days of the week. But most likely I will watch them on Tuesday.

2) If I miss an alternate Tuesday, which could happen for any number of reasons (like being on vacation), I will not watch my documentary on Wednesday. I will just skip ahead to the next available Tuesday, even if it resets the bi-weekly schedule to the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month rather than the first and third. (And this will get off schedule anyway as some months have five Tuesdays.)

3) I did already try this once before, as you can see in this post. It was ten years ago, and it was Mondays then, not Tuesdays. I don't remember how long we did it, but since it was a joint project with my wife, she might have pulled the plug on it if I didn't. Also I characterized it as a "summer series" in that blog, so maybe it just ran its course naturally.

I say I'll continue this one in perpetuity, but we probably know I won't still be watching a documentary every second Tuesday when I'm 70. But I'm gonna -- I mean, I'm Gunda -- do it in the short run, and let's just see how long it lasts.

The Audient gets authentic

Hey! Welcome to the post where I introduce you to my new monthly viewing series for 2020.

I had a topic all lined up, maybe for as long as the past year, but recent events have changed my thinking on the subject, and now that one will have to wait until 2021.

I couldn't help but notice that my top 20 of 2019 contained four -- count 'em, four -- documentaries, those being Hail Satan? (#7), The Australian Dream (#12), Apollo 11 (#13) and Fyre (#19). To give you some idea how different this is from recent years, my highest ranked 2018 documentary was Whitney at #29 and my highest ranked 2017 documentary was Quest at #17. (And, I actually had no documentaries in my top 25 of the decade -- shame shame.)

There has been an explanation for this, and in fact, it involves Quest. Quest was the final film I watched as part of my association with HRAFF, the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival, for which I vetted films for the 2016-2017 festivals. I didn't actually vet Quest, but watched it as the closing night film of the festival. And obviously really liked it.

But at that point it was too little, too late. I had already decided that I was not going to vet films again in 2018, as it added five (!) additional viewings per week from mid-August through late-January, and that was just too much for me. I was staying on top of the workload and still attending to my other viewing duties, but my wife was none too pleased with it.

The other problem was, an unexpected thing was happening -- or maybe, a thing I should have expected to happen but didn't:

I was starting to hate human rights documentaries.

And actually, what's more, I was starting to hate documentaries, period.

This won't do, not a for a cinephile. And yet you can't forcefully lift your aversion to something. If you're burned out on something, you're burned out on it, and only time heals that wound.

I think time may finally be catching up. And if so, I want to strike while the iron is hot.

So in 2020, I'm going to be watching documentaries. But not just any documentary. I'm still sick of the most common type of documentary I think we see nowadays, the prototypical example of which is a movie I have not seen. That prototypical example is called Chicken People, and it's about show chickens. That's right, chickens who compete in shows like their dog counterparts who compete in shows. Frivolous subjects like this just waste my time and yours, and even if Chicken People is actually a good movie, it offends my sensibilities as a person trying to rekindle his love of documentaries.

I'm not going to spend 2020 watching Chicken People.

In fact, I'm going to go into documentary's hallowed past and see the classic documentaries I haven't seen, the ones that really mattered, the ones that would either scoff at or laugh in the face of Chicken People. One per month, 12 in total.

I love the idea, but I do have to set some ground rules. Well, I guess just one. And that is, to figure out a line of demarcation between "classic documentaries" and "new documentaries."

I can't think of just one title that would function as a turning point, so instead, I'm going to look to my own life.

At first I thought of watching only documentaries from before the year I was born, 1973, but I decided that was too limiting. Part of my hesitation is that I already have a couple candidates in mind that are from later in the 1970s. So we need to look forward.

I probably didn't see a single documentary in the entire 1980s, or if I did, I'm not aware what it might be. I started really getting into film around 1990, and I probably saw my first doco soon after that. Something like Hoop Dreams comes to mind as a possible contender, but that was in 1994 and I know I would have started my documentary career before then.

So I've chosen 1990 as that cutoff, which is nice and even as the start of a decade. It'll also allow me to consider only movies that I wouldn't have naturally come across when they played in theaters, because I wasn't into that sort of thing yet.

As luck would have it -- "luck" -- this series also has a clever title that fits in with my preferred alliterative naming scheme. I'm going to call it Audient Authentic, which I slightly prefer over Authentic Audient. The latter makes it sound like I'm not usually being authentic with you. I hope I always am.

But I also think this gets in the idea that not only are these movies non-fiction, but they are non-fiction in a truly authentic way, when the documentary was seen as a serious-minded tool for revealing life's truths rather than a vehicle to put quirky stories into the world. I'm not saying every movie I watch will be a sober depress-fest, but I can guarantee you, there will not be the 1960s equivalent of Chicken People.

I've got a first title in mind that I plan to watch and post about before the end of January, and from there I'll bushwhack a path through the 20th century's best documentaries I have not yet seen.

I hope you'll join me.

Mid-winter documentary dump

It’s weird to have a July Thursday release date pass with no new major releases, but that’s what happened yesterday.

Australian release dates do not always line up with U.S. release dates, but when it comes to the summer’s big tentpole releases, usually they do – in fact, usually we get them at least a day early, allowing me to have short-term bragging rights on some of the recent Star Wars and Avengers movies. As it happens, the big release this week in the U.S. is Quentin Tarantino’s latest, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It’ll take until mid-August for us to get that here in Australia, probably because it doesn’t walk and talk like your normal summer tentpole release.

So what did open here yesterday was … a documentary about Diego Maradona.

Oh I imagine it’s a pretty good movie, since it was directed by Asif Kapadia, the guy who directed Senna and Amy. But I don’t care about soccer or Diego Maradona, so it just underscores how quiet the week is otherwise. Which is weird for the middle of summer, although in Australia, of course, it’s the middle of winter.

But it’s hardly unusual for documentaries like this to come out in July. In fact, July might be the biggest month for documentaries in Australia, whether that means they’re coming out before they release in the U.S., or after, since Americans don’t want to watch documentaries in the summer. When you’re all bundled and scarved up, though, it seems to Australians to be the prefect time to dump this stuff.

Even without intending to see Diego Maradona, I have seen three documentaries in the cinemas this month already. They are Apollo 11, Hail Satan? and Mystify: Michael Hutchence, all of which are currently in or hovering around my top ten for the year. Those came out in the U.S. in March, April and “not yet,” respectively. Diego Maradona will bow in the U.S. on the eminently documentary-friendly date of September 20th. 

The local arthouse theater is also playing documentaries called Defend, Conserve, Protect and It All Started With a Stale Sandwich, which I do not expect to see, in addition to the four already mentioned.

This is not new this year either. Last July there were enough documentaries out that interested me that I actually saw a pair of them in one evening, those being RBG and Whitney, as discussed here. I had also gone to the cinema to see The Gospel According to Andre earlier that month.

I can’t rely on my own viewing schedule to look farther back than that, because as I wrote about at the time, Andre was the first documentary I’d seen in the theater in two years. But I can only assume the aforementioned arthouse cinema was swimming with non-fiction content in July of 2017 as well.

It does feel more like the time of year to be seeing documentaries than to be seeing Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbes and Shaw. Gloves and a scarf are part of my standard getup when I ride my bike to work in the morning, and the only reason I’m not also wearing a winter hat is that it’s incompatible with my bike helmet.

So in the absence of nothing new to watch, I may dig back for a weeks-old fiction film by catching up with an 11 o’clock screening of Crawl tonight after I have dinner and drinks with former co-workers. At least, I’m pretty sure this story of a giant alligator attacking people during a hurricane isn’t based on real events.

Liking with blinkers on

Sometimes you don't really want to know how the sausage is made.

I saw the Netflix documentary Fyre this week, and it immediately became my #1 movie of the year. That's a bit of a joke, as I've only seen three movies this year. But I did really like it, and "love" would not be too strong a word.

Of course, it was then that I remembered the controversy I hadn't quite heard about, but did have delivered to me in secondhand form when the film was recently discussed on the Slate Culture Gabfest.

You see, both this film and its less distinguished cousin, Hulu's Fyre Fraud, have been made with the intimate participation of some of the very people responsible for the dumpster fyre that was the stillborn April 2017 island music festival, Fyre Festival.

While Fyre Fraud features the Svengali at the heart of this scam, Billy McFarland, as a core interview subject -- for which he was allegedly paid $250,000 -- Fyre lists as a producing partner Jerry Media, the outfit responsible for publicizing the event, who are considered complicit in its failure as they likely knew festival goers wouldn't be getting anything close to what they paid for, and did nothing about it.

I'm told I should hold these things against these movies, but I don't know. I really, really enjoyed Fyre, even if it doesn't in the least point the finger at Jerry Media. As I'm not a subscriber to Hulu, I have not seen Fyre Fraud, and won't prioritize it as people I trust say it's not in the same league as Chris Smith's film. (Yes, that Chris Smith, who made the classic documentary American Movie.)

If I'm only using half the available information to analyze it, though, it seems to me that Fyre's sin is a lot less dire. I don't think there's any way to say that Jerry Media is equally responsible for the disaster as McFarland, and sometimes, documentaries make strange bedfellows. You'd likely want to make a documentary about the Fyre Festival without any of those responsible allowing themselves to look innocent or directly profit from it, but how else would Smith have gotten all the priceless footage Jerry Media was able to provide? That includes behind-the-scenes of the shoot for the initial promotional video with its bevy of models frolicking on the beach. That's a necessary part of this story.

And Fyre is nothing if not great storytelling. It's tight yet feels complete, and it unspools the story in terrific fashion, holding back choice nuggets of information for the exact moment of their greatest impact. I don't know how it's possible not to be completely rapt while watching this movie. It's also got a number of great interviews with people around the margins of McFarland's empire, not to mention that now-famous scene featuring Andy King. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch the movie -- it's worth getting the surprise, as I did.)

Plus, Fyre Fraud gave $250,000 to a man who knowingly defrauded lots of good, hard-working Bahamians and lots of maybe not-as-good, but still generally innocent millennial concertgoers.

Although you'd wish documentaries could be made with the full measure of their journalistic integrity intact, these two movies provide good examples of how that's not always possible. Methinks Fyre Fraud (sight unseen) crossed a line but Fyre didn't. You can only sell your soul up to a point. Though maybe I'd watch Fyre Fraud and think it was a useful document too.

As long as a movie has the ring of truth and entertains the hell out of me, I'll keep those blinkers on.

Doco double

Ten days ago I'm telling you that it's been more than two years since I've seen a documentary in the movie theater.

Today, I'm telling you about seeing two in the same night.

And even as I've just crossed 5,100 movies seen in my life, I'm still experiencing some firsts.

Never can I remember seeing back-to-back documentaries in the theater. That's not to say it hasn't happened, just I don't remember it. These were not only in the same theater, they were in the exact same screening space. The Sun in Yarraville has about 20 movies playing at any given time on maybe a dozen screens, so there's a lot of space sharing going on. In retrospect it's no surprise they were in there cleaning long before the credits of the first movie were over, as they needed to let the crowd for the second movie -- which included me, though I wasn't aware of it at the time -- file on in.

So yes indeed, I followed up a viewing of Betsy West & Julie Cohen's RBG with a viewing of Kevin Macdonald's Whitney. And the films have more in common than you might think -- more than the women had, anyway.

For example:

1) Both films are named after the person they depict.

2) Both films feature women who had significant events in their lives occur in 1992; for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it was the election of the president who would nominate her to the Supreme Court the following year, and for Whitney Houston, it was the release of her film The Bodyguard, which the film argues sent her off into the pop culture stratosphere.

3) Both films show footage of the subject being parodied on Saturday Night Live.

4) Both films address how the husbands of these powerful women addressed playing second banana in their relationships.

5) The posters of both movies even use a yellow trim.

There might be more in common if I wanted to sit here and dig. But they also shared in common a star rating from me: 4 out of 5 stars. Which makes them both very good, if not quite great. (Though both women were certainly great, at least for a time.)

Although I figured Whitney would have a tough time topping RBG, if only because the subject of the first film is so much more upstanding and easier to praise than the second, I do think I liked Whitney better as a film. Veteran documentarian Kevin Macdonald has a real instinct how to use the form to make us feel, as he relies on kaleidoscopic montages of music and the moving image to conjure both the joy and the reckless horror that was Whitney Houston. West and Cohen don't have quite the track record and hence rely more on the natural wonders of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to sell their material.

Still, a great night of non-fiction at the movies.

I did want to say one thing about RBG, which is that it's almost impossible to talk about it without calling it "RGB" at least once. The reason for that is probably obvious and rooted in science. There's an instinct to think "Roy G Biv" when you are saying it, ROYGBIV of course being the acronym to represent all the colors in the rainbow. Anyway, it isn't only me as I noticed that they also spelled it as "RGB" on the theater's marquee. I thought of notifying someone inside, but decided against being labeled as "that guy."

Besides, they also had it spelled as "Miission Impossible" with consecutive I's in the first word, so maybe the marquee guy was just drunk that night.

Documentaries return to the theater

I've written more times than I can count about the change in the documentary landscape. If you want to count, a good place to start would be with my number of posts tagged with the "documentaries" label, which is 18. Probably not all of those posts are about the waxing and waning -- mostly waning -- in the prominence of documentaries, and to a lesser extent, my interest in them. (I'll get into that latter in a moment.) But a good chunk have been.

Even so, it took something like Thursday night to put into perspective how much things have really changed.

When I went to see The Gospel According to Andre at Cinema Nova, it was the first documentary I'd seen in the theater in 27 months.

That's two years and three months, people. The date of that last viewing was April 4, 2016, and the movie was the Mt. Everest documentary Sherpa.

And though I didn't love that movie, it was not that movie that drove me away from seeing documentaries in the theater. In fact, it was documentaries on the whole, and how so few of them were feeling like essential viewings that penetrated the zeitgeist.

I'm not going to rehash all of my thoughts on this. I will say that a complicating factor was likely my participation in the selection of films for two straight years of the Human Rights & Arts Film Festival (HRAFF), which oversaturated my viewing schedule with documentaries for a period of about five months over two consecutive years. I vetted my last such film 18 months ago and in ways I'm still recovering.

But documentary oversaturation or not, I'm still the type of viewer, the type of critic, who likes to see the movies people are talking about in the theater. And there just aren't as many documentaries that people, or at least the cinephiles I listen to on podcasts, have been talking about the last few years.

I'm wondering if the market is now correcting itself, however. Andre is kicking off an informal flurry of biographical type documentaries that are opening at Cinema Nova in the next few weeks, starting with RGB a week from now, followed quickly thereafter by Whitney and McQueen. I suppose at some point they'll also release the most acclaimed documentary of the year to this point, Won't You Be My Neighbor? Though they'll have to spell it "Neighbour."

I certainly won't be catching all of those on the "big" screen -- "big" being a relative term when you consider the postage stamp on which they screened Andre -- but RGB is a certainty, meaning there's no chance of another 27-month layoff between big-screen documentaries.

Alas, The Gospel According to Andre may have proven why I don't prioritize documentaries on the big screen like I once did. I do still think their general absence from the zeitgeist, the Mr. Rogers movie notwithstanding, has had more to do with it. But the fact that so many documentaries follow such a familiar structure, showcasing an interesting but inessential person or pastime, is the really limiting factor in their appeal to me. Even the ones that do break through to the zeitgeist are usually hewing to these age-old styles and formats.

But as I've also spoken about before, almost every documentary someone has seen it fit to curate for you to see has real merit. The floor for their quality tends to be high. And Andre conforms to that pattern as well. It was definitely well worth my time ... especially compared to that underwhelming sherpa documentary, anyway.

The year without documentaries or foreign films

I've written a couple times on this blog about the paucity of "legitimate" documentaries released this year. By that I mean documentaries released in such a way that they distinguished themselves from run-of-the-mill documentaries on lesser platforms and crossed over into the public consciousness/discussion. In fact, I seem to write some variation on this post about every six months.

What hadn't struck me until recently was how few foreign language films have gained any traction in the zeitgeist this year.

Because I assumed they had just eluded me, I asked the members of my Flickcharters Facebook group what they were looking at as their 2017 foreign language films. They didn't have any either.

Or really, they had some, but they were ones I ranked last year because that's when I saw them at MIFF.

They came forward with suggestions like After the Storm and The Lure, films I was glad to see attaining a certain prominence after I'd ranked them both high on my list last year. They also mentioned films I was a bit less high on, like The Salesman and Graduation, which I also saw at MIFF 2016. (Guess that was a pretty good MIFF.) Then there were those that I saw at this year's MIFF, like The Square, which I do indeed have on my current list. There were a few assorted others but I tend to think of them as stretches to qualify as "prominent." The one exception may have been the French film BPM, an award winner at Cannes. But that may be the only exception.

What gives?

As always, we should blame Netflix.

In addition to siphoning off legitimate films and making them seem somehow less legitimate -- or at least, removing any fanfare from their release and reducing them to "just another thing to watch on Netflix" -- the company also creates a platform for low-level foreign films, the type that might otherwise not make a dent anywhere except their country of origin. While this seems like a good thing, it also helps make the greater market more murky. We find it hard now to tell the difference between foreign movies that might have once crossed over and been marketed it to us as international phenomena, the type we should see in the theater, and "just another foreign film."

Funny, that's kind of the same as what they've done to documentaries.

Of course, whether to truly blame Netflix for this, or just to acknowledge that they were the best to capitalize on an inevitable trend, is a matter of debate. I do think, however, that the effects can be seen rippling outward and having an impact on areas such as this one. Whether anything Netflix has done has actually crippled the market, or the perceived market, for foreign language films is unclear. It does seem clear that the wider-ranging impact of the Netflix business model is not yet known, and may not be known for some time.

I also wonder if it can be explained by the fact that foreign directors no longer stay in their own countries, or at least not to the extent that they used to. Twenty seventeen saw new releases from Zhang Yimou, Yorgos Lanthimos, Tomas Alfredson, Olivier Assayas, Nacho Vigalondo, Ana Lily Amirpour, Luc Besson and Niels Arden Oplev, but all of their films had English as the dominant language. That's to say nothing of directors like Guillermo del Toro and Lasse Hallstrom, who have been entrenched in English language films a lot longer. Foreign films are becoming a victim of the success of their directors.

All I know is, when I want to go to the movies to see a foreign language film, there ain't much on to see.

Here's hoping it's just a statistical aberration, a function of the random nature of release dates and the fickleness of public tastes. I don't want my future as a consumer of foreign films to be sifting through all the "just another film"s available on Netflix.

Awards eligible

A simple two-word phrase clarified a bunch of things I've been thinking about related to the new streaming era we find ourselves in, and what "counts" as a legitimate movie.

That phrase is "awards eligible."

My wife was listening to the KCRW app -- or is it the All Things Considered app? -- anyway, some app. There was an "ad" on, or what passes for an ad on public radio, which is kind of like when hosts of podcasts read testimonials about their experiences with the products of sponsors. Anyway, it was for the documentary One of Us on Netflix, about Hasidic Jews who left the orthodox life.

It's something I'd seen advertised on Netflix, or perhaps even had the trailer start for me at the end of something else I'd watched (Netflix does that nowadays, curse them). I considered it and I thought "Nah. I can't be sure it's a 'real' documentary."

I've discussed this before so I won't get into it at length here, but let's just say that documentaries have been the most difficult to pin down in the streaming era, leaving me the least certain whether they would have had a theatrical release even two years ago. The probability of being released theatrically, either because they were released theatrically or because I can imagine they would have been when that was more common, has been my informal litmus test for whether I'll watch something to include it on my year-end list.

As I was listening to the sponsor segment on One of Us, the segment told me that it was from the directors of Jesus Camp, a "real" documentary from about ten years ago that I'd thought very highly of. That inched it closer to consideration for something I'd prioritize before the end of the year.

What clinched that, though, was the two-word phrase that came in at the end, almost like a legal disclaimer: "Awards eligible."

And it struck me: that's what I want to know about a film. Is it eligible for awards?

Because in order for something to be eligible for awards, it usually needs to have been released in the theater. Whether Netflix has it now or not doesn't necessarily matter to me. What matters is if it was ever, at any point, released theatrically somewhere. Presumably, this was.

I wondered why they bothered to include that at all, as that phrase was certainly not included in the ad copy just to legitimize the film in my eyes. No, I figure that KCRW being a Los Angeles station, its listeners might actually be in the position to include the movie on their Oscar ballot. While studios usually have to take out an ad in the trades to give their movie an Oscar push, I guess Netflix can accomplish the same thing by sponsoring KCRW.

Interestingly, wikipedia says nothing about a theatrical release for One of Us. It premiered at TIFF and then was available October 20th (my birthday) on Netflix worldwide. Don't see how that meets the theatrical criterion for awards eligibility.

In fact, I get this directly from the wikipedia page on the Academy Awards:

"The Best Documentary Feature award requires week-long releases in both Los Angeles County and New York City during the previous calendar year."

I suppose the wikipedia page could be out of date, but this gives lie to that:

"Effective with the 90th Academy Awards, to be presented in 2018, multi-part and limited series will be ineligible for the Best Documentary Feature award."

Well, no clarity here. We do know that OJ: Made in America can't win again, though.

Clarity or no, I'll be only too eager to add One of Us to my official Letterboxd watchlist (done so already, in fact). With the dearth of documentaries I've seen this year or can even be sure are "real" documentaries, I need any excuse I can get to promote one to full legitimacy.

Even if you can't back it up, just tell me it's "awards eligible" and I'll be good.

A documentary crisis

I know I got burnt out from watching documentaries in two years of vetting movies for the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival (HRAFF), but this is ridiculous.

Of the 75 films I've ranked so far in my upcoming year-end 2017 list, only two of them are documentaries -- and they're both films I watched at the tail-end of last year's HRAFF viewing period.

I'm taking HRAFF off this year in part because it takes up too much of my precious viewing time during the last four months of the year, in part because my wife is incredibly busy this year and needs 100% of my availability, and in part because I need a break from the cavalcade of non-fiction film viewing, as my love for that form has suffered these last two years.

It's a love that's been slow to recover, apparently.

Or has this just been a bad year for documentaries?

Last night I rented Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent from iTunes, as the beginning of an attempt to rectify this deficiency in my viewing schedule. I haven't watched it yet. I wouldn't have rented it if it weren't this week's 99 cent rental, but it was. And I probably wouldn't have rented it if I hadn't known it was a "real documentary" -- in other words, not some pseudo TV special or other special interest feature -- because a review of it still sits in my podcast feed of unlistened Joe Morgenstern reviews. But I do know that, fortunately.

I think it may be a bad year for documentaries, as I cannot think of any prominent ones that have crossed over to the zeitgeist (or, the documentary version of the zeitgeist, which is far more niche). But the bigger problem is what I have discussed before, which is that in the age of streaming, documentaries have been the first films to lose their status as "real films."

If I were truly generous, I would consider any moving picture of feature length a "real film." But in reality, I still need to set some aside in the ghetto of what we would have once considered "straight to video." Nowadays, that term has lost some of its meaning, as truly legitimate films are debuting on Netflix and never getting released theatrically. But it's kind of easy to figure out which fiction films would have been released cinematically in the olden days, and which would not have. The creative talent behind them is usually a tip-off.

Not so with documentaries. Since few documentary directors are household names, and since documentaries tend not to have the same featured players as other documentaries, you can't tell just by looking at a documentary whether it's one that we once would have seen in the theater, or one that would have gotten fobbed off to TV or some lesser format. There are some exceptions, like the 2016 film from Ava Duvernay that debuted on Netflix called 13th, which ended up reaching a lot of viewers and becoming talked about. But where might it have been without the director of Selma associated with it?

A larger problem documentaries have, at least for me, is the issue of their subject matter. A friend rants about what he calls "inconsequential documentaries," or some similar term, which are highly specific movies about eccentric things that no one really cares about. Movies like that can be fun, of course, but I agree with him that there have been far too many of them in recent years. I got that vibe majorly from a film released earlier this year called Chicken People -- one of the few 2017 documentaries I'm aware of -- that looked at people who entered their chickens into competitions, not unlike dog shows. Without even having discussed that film with him, I agreed implicitly with the perspective on that film I'm sure he has, which is that neither of us needs to see a movie about championship chicken specimens and the goofy people who breed them. Like many other "inconsequential documentaries," the Christopher Guest mockumentary of it is impossible because it already basically is a mockumentary itself.

But then the other problem is documentaries that are too consequential, too much like homework, too heavy to contemplate in a world where the news depresses us on a regular basis. For last year's HRAFF we considered not one but two documentaries about people who go into the rubble in Syria to pull out bodies, hoping to find some live ones. That's got the opposite problem. It's too sobering and has no possibility for humor.

So what's the middle ground?

Is it Jeremiah Tower? Could be. The movie is about a celebrity chef, which certain seems inconsequential enough. But he pioneered California cuisine, and maybe there's something more substantial in that, if it looks at interesting trends in culture and lifestyle.

Well, Joe Morgenstern saw it fit to review, so maybe that's proof of its value in itself.

Can you offer any suggestions of essential 2017 documentaries I need to get on my schedule?

My year-end list is depending on you.

Down on docs

A telling thing happened at the library on Friday night.

I was meeting the rest of my family and my mother-in-law, in town from Tasmania, for an early dinner on the main commercial drag of North Melbourne. Instead of coming home first, I met them there after work, but got there a good 30 minutes before they did. So I used the opportunity to browse leisurely through the movies at the library, instead of having to do it quickly while frantically looking over my shoulder to make sure one of my children wasn't destroying something or crawling out the door. (Or, walking out the door, these days.)

I did a bunch of that methodical finger flipping through the boxes -- you know, the kind made famous as a method of browsing used CDs back in the day. But when I came to the documentary section I stopped.

"Nah," I thought. "Not worth it."

As in, there could not possibly be any documentaries I would be interested in borrowing.

It's not something I would have consciously admitted to myself before this incident, but when it happened, it became abundantly clear what kind of fiction phase I'm in right now. In fact, the last documentary I watched was way back at the beginning of February, more than three months ago. But so total has my recent dismissal of documentaries been that I was at first convinced that I hadn't seen one since before I closed my 2014 movie list, when I watched the Nick Cave doc 20,000 Days on Earth on January 14th. Then I found Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father on February 6th, making my drought seem just a tad less staggering.

It's not like I'm down there with your average viewer, who watches fewer than one documentary a year. But considering how I used to program documentaries as part of my regular viewing habits -- probably on the order of at least one per month -- it seems like more than just a scheduling quirk. This is a pattern forming.

It's not like access to docs is hard for me right now or anything. I've got a ton on my Netflix queue that I mean to see -- eventually.

But "eventually" has been a timeframe I've found a hard time reaching lately.

I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I do have some theories. That Netflix queue is part of it. Now that Netflix shows a sprawl of recent documentary arrivals on the home page, and most of them are ones I have never heard of, I'm finding it harder to determine what's considered a "legitimate" documentary. Now that the means of delivery of all movies has changed so radically, that's even more the case with the documentary, which has never been a cinematic stalwart in the best of times. With more documentaries premiering on TV or online, it's hard to distinguish what is a "real documentary" and what might just be a "television program." I try to observe that separation of church and state (TV and movies) on the lists I keep, and a movie that doesn't easily categorize itself questions my sense of order. (Of course, most people would say you should just watch a non-fiction program whose subject matter interests you, and not worry about whether it neatly fits into the taxonomy of programming types.)

But I'm betting that the bigger factor is that I'm into escapism lately. That may be a rather obvious statement to make about a cinephile -- our need for escapism is what causes us to become cinephiles in the first place -- but I'm feeling the truth of it more than usual. Documentaries, by their structure and often their subject matter, can feel like work more than an escape from work.

Or perhaps I'm still reeling from the documentary that felt most like work of any I've seen in ages -- the one that came right before 20,000 Days on Earth. That was Particle Fever, whose poster has the honor -- or in this case dishonor -- of adorning this post. Who would have thought that a movie about something inherently awesome -- the Hadron super collider -- could be so deathly boring? Okay okay ... maybe it was our fault for thinking it wouldn't be.

Well, as I like to do in these pessimistic posts, I'll end with a vow -- a vow to aggressively force some non-fiction filmmaking back on my schedule. Because there are some docs out there that have been tantalizing me for a while -- I just have to let them come to the forefront. I just have to let them get "thrown on." There's the 2013 film The Institute, to name one. I understand I'm supposed to know as little as possible about it going in. Hey, that sounds like a good fiction film!

And maybe next time I'm at the library without any kids, I'll give that good old documentary section a finger flip.

The long wait for Tim's Vermeer

Tim's Vermeer has been on my Letterboxd watchlist for longer than all but a couple of 2014 movies.

I use my watchlist as a means of keeping track of which movies from the current release year I'm trying to watch prior to my ranking deadline, which arrives on January 15th (as I have started mentioning in just about every post). I keep adding to that list as I hear of new titles that interest me, so I basically never make a dent in it. It's at 85 films right now, and that's probably about where it's been since April or May.

Tim's Vermeer is sixth from the bottom, meaning that it's been on there since January or February ... and I have yet to get my hands on it.

The reason this surprises me is that I've developed an assumption about which movies will be available for streaming on Netflix sooner than later. Tim's Vermeer seems like exactly the type of title I should have been able to find shortly after its video release.

Yet like its writer-producer-directors, Penn & Teller, Tim's Vermeer remains elusive, the star of its own disappearing act. Or, never-appearing-in-the-first-place act.

I suppose what I really want to talk about is not the rather banal topic of a particular movie not being available for streaming on Netflix, but rather, the underlying assumption of which movies you expect to be available. Which is only slightly less banal, but hey, not every post can be earth-shattering.

I consume probably 90 percent of my documentaries by streaming them on Netflix. Then I probably see five percent in the theater and watch another five percent through some other a la carte rental option.

In fact, Netflix is so good at making the documentaries I want to see available that it's enough to prompt a post like this one, expressing surprise when a particular title does not eventually rear its head.

Since early on in the year I've been periodically checking Netflix for this title, considering it exactly the sort of movie that Netflix has excelled at making available. I have now probably checked a dozen times, and still, it's nowhere to be found. I am starting to think I might have to actually (gasp) pay to rent the movie if I want to see it before January 15th.

Which dovetails well with a discussion of just how much we're willing to spend on particular types of movies ... perhaps the worthiest discussion topic this post will yield.

Call me a philistine, but I don't tend to think of documentaries as the type of movie I want to spend much money on. It's rare that I will go to the theater to see one, though it certainly does happen. Two that I saw in the theater in 2013, though -- Blackfish and 20 Feet From Stardom -- were movies I snuck into as the second half of a double feature. If the doco promises to be a little more distinctive -- say, Stories We Tell or The Act of Killing -- I will pay for it as a single theatrical admission. Let it be noted, though, that I spent only $6 apiece on Stories and Act, since I saw them before 5 p.m. on discount Mondays at Cinema Nova.

It's also worth noting that without my matinee Mondays available to me in 2014, when I've been working nearly the whole year, I haven't seen a single documentary in the theater this year.

Earlier this year I did spend a full iTunes rental price on Mistaken for Strangers, and more recently, Life Itself. But that's rare. And that was in part to make up for the documentaries I'm not seeing in the theater this year, while still trying to see around my usual quotient of non-fiction films.

The weird thing is that documentaries are a much safer bet in terms of quality than fiction films, yet we are much more willing to gamble our money on the latter. Fiction films have higher highs and lower lows, and are also much more likely to benefit from being seen on a big screen. Documentaries, to us, feel barely more cinematic than television. So even if they're good -- which most of the ones we see are -- they don't have that certain oomph that makes us prioritize a theatrical viewing.

So although I'm incredibly eager to learn how an untrained artist can use science to produce a nearly perfect, nearly indistinguishable version of a Johannes Vermeer painting -- so eager that I've specifically sought it out a dozen times -- I'm too cheap to just go purchase the thing from one of the sites where it's available for rental.

I'll give Netflix a couple more weeks to comply. If my hand is forced, we'll see whether I drop the coin on Tim's Vermeer ... or just let it be lost to history, like all the other films I'll never see.

Fastidious, expensive & completely controlled

Last year I wrote a piece on this blog detailing my top ten documentaries, according to where I had them ranked on Flickchart. I then listed my next ten as honorable mentions, making 20 total.

Nowhere on this list of 20 was a film by the great Errol Morris, a fact indelicately pointed out to me by a commenter on the Flickchart blog, where the piece was reprinted. He wrote: "No Errol Morris? No Herzog? Do you really like documentaries ... or just nice film posters?" (The presentation on the Flickchart blog is heavy on the artwork).

I felt a bit annoyed by this accusation that I might not be a "real" documentary fan if I didn't cherish Morris' work more than I do. But that set me to thinking about why I don't love his work. After all, I do consider him "great" -- he's probably one of the finest and most accomplished documentarians we have.

I've seen five films by Morris, two of which (The Thin Blue Line and Tabloid) I've seen since writing that post. In fact, The Thin Blue Line (1988), his masterpiece, would certainly make that list if I were making it today. But neither Tabloid nor the other three (Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. and The Fog of War) would.

It's his 1997 film Fast, Cheap & Out of Control I saw first, and I still consider it representative of what he's trying to accomplish as an artist -- or not accomplish, as the case may be. You'll be disappointed to know it doesn't feature loose women with day-old mascara smudged across their faces. It's actually a portrait of four eccentric experts in four unusual and unrelated fields: a topiary artist, a lion tamer, an expert in mole rats and a scientist who makes bug-like robots. It's probably no surprise that Morris sees himself in these passionate pursuers of their respective crafts.

It was this film that introduced me to Morris' trademark style. The prototypical Morris film relies heavily on beautiful camerawork that's outside the box, including unusual close-ups and angles, and interview subjects talking directly to the camera. Morris' films also rely on a lot of slow-motion and a lot of what you might consider B-roll, an indulgence I interpret to indicate his preference for presenting beauty over his preference for presenting truth. He also employs a score almost constantly, usually one that's fairly reliant on a dominant instrument like the violin or the piano.

So while it's possible to find yourself wrapped in a certain spell as you are watching the beauty of Morris' craft, I'd argue that this beauty may be skin deep. Even when his subject matter is not frivolous, such as the modern history of the U.S. involvement in foreign wars, it seems like it exists primarily to serve his aesthetic sensibilities. And that's why none of Morris' films had yet penetrated their way into my top 20 at the time I wrote that piece.

Okay, how does this all relate to Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which I saw last night as the back end of a double feature with Richard Linklater's Bernie?

Simply put, I thought director David Gelb was doing his best Morris impersonation, right down to using a Philip Glass score. (Morris used Glass in at least three of his films.) And that's why I'm not compelled to wax rapturous over Jiro, even though many critics have, and even though it is, without a doubt, an excellent film of which a great documentarian like Morris would be proud.

Specifically, I saw Fast, Cheap & Out of Control everywhere in this movie -- even though those terms apply even less to the craft of making sushi than they do to the four crafts highlighted in Morris' film.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is the story of 85-year-old Jiro Ono, a world-renowned sushi master whose restaurant is located in a Tokyo subway station and can seat only ten customers at once. Thanks to a tireless dedication to his craft (which has included making apprentices of his two sons), his restaurant has received one of the highest ratings for any restaurant in the world, and customers book reservations months in advance. A 20-piece meal starts at 30,000 yen, or $300. But no customer ever leaves unsatisfied, in part because Jiro has mastered his palate and technique over the course of 75 years of maki sushi.

Gelb's film is absolutely beautiful, which shouldn't surprise you, since I'm comparing him to Morris. There are any number of mouth-watering shots of a hand depositing a freshly cut roll on the marble slab off of which it will be eaten, glistening with the sauce that has just been brushed on its surface, drooping ever so slightly as gravity starts to have its effect on the buoyant concoction. My words pale in comparison to the beauty of these images.

But is that all they are? In fact, is that all Jiro is? Just a bunch of beautiful shots of raw fish? Where's the meat, as it were?

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is only 81 minutes long, but it feels like it could be 20 minutes shorter. The problem is that there's not much of a narrative. The conflict, to the extent that there is one, is that Jiro's 50-year-old eldest son is essentially waiting for his father to retire so he can assume the position of sushi master at his father's restaurant. After all, his younger brother, who is not duty bound to follow directly in his father's footsteps, has already opened a successful restaurant across town.

Gelb faces a bit of a problem in that he is limited by the culture of his interview subjects, who are all quite traditional in their ways. Because filial piety is such a highly regarded trait in Japan, neither son is going to say the remotest thing negative about his father. What's more, any negative feelings they have toward one another are similarly repressed. So there is not, naturally, going to be any drama springing from these interviews.

Instead, we have what amounts to a loving montage on the process and dedication involved with the creation of great sushi. In many ways this is a joy to watch. In some other ways, it leaves a person hungry, as it were.

I imagine that those who disagree with me would say this, and they would have a good point: There is drama in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, it's just not the kind of open, unfiltered drama you might get in other documentaries. Jiro's eldest son, Yoshikazu, may not tell the camera of his frustration at still being only an apprentice to his genius father at the age of 50, at least not with his words. But it's there, in nearly imperceptible looks and glances, perhaps all the more powerful for the fact that it must go unspoken.

And this is why I hesitate to even write what may be construed as a "negative" piece about Jiro Dreams of Sushi. After all, if it seemed drawn out, that could have been because it was my second movie of the night and I started it at 9:45. This is a very good movie, and you should see it.

But if you have the same hesitations about Errol Morris that I have, just know that coming in.

My real top ten "real" films

Thank you for joining me for another edition of Flickchart Tuesdays, where I examine my favorites in some category of film, based on how I have those films ranked on Flickchart.

This week I wanted to look at documentaries. The main reason for that is that my wife and I have been watching documentaries on Monday nights this summer. Last night, however, we watched a slasher film made for about 12 cents called Murder Machine!, which my wife is vetting for a film festival where she serves as a judge. Let's just say in the absence of watching a doco last night, and in order to get the taste of Murder Machine! out of my mouth, I'm writing about documentaries today.

Also, I was interested to see how my official Flickchart rankings of documentaries stack up next to the top ten and honorable mentions I came up with organically in this post, written a little over a year ago. What truer measure of the effectiveness of Flickchart at distilling my true feelings, than to compare a list I produced from my brain with one produced from Flickchart's algorithms? Then again, Flickchart might also help me identify a movie I didn't realize I loved as much as I do.

In case you are bad at clicking on links in posts, here's the list I came up with on June 30, 2010:

10. Madonna: Truth or Dare
9. Religulous
8. Super Size Me
7. Man on Wire
6. American Movie
5. Sicko
4. Microcosmos
3. Anvil! The Story of Anvil
2. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
1. Looking for Richard

Honorable mentions: Bigger Stronger Faster*, Bowling for Columbine, The Cruise, Dig!, Dogtown and Z-Boys, Jesus Camp

I'm also interested to see how far down in my rankings I'll have to go to get 20 films (since I talk briefly about the first ten, then just list 11-20). Last week, when I wrote about foreign films, film #20 was ranked just over 200th overall. However, I also argued in the post linked above that there is a "documentary ceiling" -- in other words, for me, a documentary can be only so good, and can never quite approach the impact of a fiction film.

As a side note, the comparison can't be truly accurate because I've seen possibly as many as 20 more documentaries in the year since I first wrote that post. But I'm not sure if I've seen anything that was so great that it would jump into my top ten.

But we're about to find out, aren't we? That's one of the rules of this series on my blog -- I start writing before I know what results I'll get. So let's see where the day takes us ...

1. Looking for Richard (1996, Al Pacino). And #1 is the same, as I knew it would be. I counted this as my favorite film of 1996. A potentially great Shakespeare teaching tool, Pacino's movie interweaves interviews with average people about Shakespeare and an informal staging of Richard III using fellow film actors (Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, Winona Ryder). It's totally captivating. Flickchart: #127

2. Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010, Banksy). And here comes the first movie I've seen since last year's list. How could I forget about Exit Through the Gift Shop? Wherever the film falls on the spectrum of truth, there's no other way to categorize it than as a documentary. Not only is it an amazing and unprecedented insider's look into the community of street artists, but it also plays with the traditional documentary structure in ways it's almost impossible to describe, as each of the two main characters end up making a film about the other one. Flickchart: #164

3. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007, Seth Gordon). The second-ranked documentary on my original list ends up third here, but it's still second among movies I'd seen at that time. Gordon uses the world of competitive video gaming to give us a classic story about a hero you can cheer and a villain you can hiss, and it's also just a wonderful tale about human aspiration. No wonder they're supposedly making a fiction film version of the story. Flickchart: #177

4. American Movie (1999, Chris Smith). And now we start to see some variation in the rankings. What was sixth on my original list is fourth here -- or third, if you take out Exit From the Gift Shop. However, the ranking is appropriate -- this story of two deluded dreamers trying to make a low-budget horror movie in the dead of a Minnesota winter is both funny and heartbreaking. Flickchart: #322

5. Man on Wire (2008, James Marsh). And Man on Wire came in just behind American Movie on my original list as well, meaning that both were displaced a couple spots by movies I don't actually think of as highly. The most amazing thing about this entertaining movie about a French tightrope walker trying to illegally cross between the two towers of the World Trade Center is that it does not evoke 9/11 -- not once. Marsh knows he has a great real-world spy thriller on his hands, which would only get bogged down by discussions of the terrorist attacks. Flickchart: #345

6. Microcosmos (1996, Claude Nuridsany). A middle-lister on both lists. Nuridsany's look into the microscopic world of insects is fascinating and alive, making the tiny titanic, and the insignificant significant. Possibly the best nature film of all time? Anyone who watched the Earth series might beg to differ. Flickchart: #362

7. Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991, Alek Keshishian). I saw this movie at the height of my interest in Madonna as an artist and a public figure, and I loved the way Keshishian captured her and showed us the "real" Madonna -- even if she was carefully controlling exactly what she wanted us to see. Which I assume she was. Apparently, I liked it a lot better than my tenth favorite documentary, as it was listed previously. Flickchart: #438

8. Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2009, Sacha Gervasi). My third-ranked film on last year's documentary list has fallen since then because I've heard some people make convincing arguments that this wonderful rock documentary had to have been at least partially staged. But this real life Spinal Tap is such a goofy delight, and also so touching, that I don't know if I care that the narrative might have benefited from some manufactured conflict. The movie left me feeling great, and that's what I still take away from it. Flickchart: #443

9. Bowling for Columbine (2002, Michael Moore). I guess I chose to honor the wrong Michael Moore film in my original top ten. I had Sicko, but Flickchart informs me that I like Bowling for Columbine better. Which is probably true. I remember getting emotional at the end of Sicko, but the gun rights debate in Bowling is funnier and probably more consistently astute. However, I still don't love him brow-beating a sickly old Charlton Heston at the end. Flickchart: #456

10. Sicko (2006, Michael Moore). Okay, now Sicko gets its turn after all. Flickchart: #543

I expect Religulous and Super Size Me, the two documentaries that showed up on last year's list but not this year's, as well as most if not all of my honorable mentions, to show up in 11-20:

11. Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001, Stacy Peralta). Flickchart: #544
12. Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (2008, Chris Bell). Flickchart: #567
13. The Cruise (1998, Bennett Miller). Flickchart: Flickchart: #592
14. DiG! (2004, Ondi Timoner). Flickchart: #617
15. After Innocence (2005, Jessica Sanders). Flickchart: #630
16. When We Were Kings (1996, Leon Gast). Flickchart: #673
17. 51 Birch Street (2006, Doug Block). Flickchart: #688
18. Super Size Me (2004, Morgan Spurlock). Flickchart: #704
19. Jesus Camp (2006, Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady). Flickchart: #722
20. Eddie Murphy: Delirious (1983, Bruce Gowers). Flickchart: #738

I was hoping to avoid the appearance of any standup comedy movies to avoid the debate on that particular topic -- is it a documentary or is it "something else"? -- but Eddie Murphy's first concert film snuck in there at #20.

So Religulous, which I ranked #9 on last year's list, does not even make it onto my Flickchart rankings until #1184 overall. I've definitely revised my stance toward it a little bit -- in the same way I don't think it was all that nice for Michael Moore to bully Charlton Heston, I also don't think it was all that nice for Bill Maher to bully the people he bullies in Religulous, both of which occur in the name of a liberal agenda with which I agree. But it's definitely lower in my rankings than I would have thought. I'm sure the dueling process will take care of that over time.

So the lists compared pretty well to each other, with all the honorable mentions and all but one of the top ten accounted for in my first 20 on Flickchart. It is interesting to note how long it takes to get to my 20th documentary, all the way down at #738 overall. Which is consistent with what I've said about fiction films having an advantage over non-fiction.

Back next Tuesday with more scintillating investigations of my personal Flickchart.