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.