As the fifth and final day of Doc/Fest 2013 dawns, I am still waiting for that one documentary that strikes me as truly exceptional. Several of the films have come close to greatness - The Act of Killing, in particular, is almost certainly a masterpiece in the two hour cut that I didn't see, at least based on what I've read and heard elsewhere - but there always seems to be something that holds them back. I've certainly not seen any terrible films, but also nothing on a par of a Bombay Beach, Marwencol or Searching For Sugar Man, all of which were great films that played at Doc/Fest in the past. Today is the last chance for something to reach out and really do something amazing. Even if nothing does, though, I think the overwhelming quality of the events and sessions, not to mention the parties and general atmosphere, will make this qualify as a successful Doc/Fest, even though I might not end up putting any of the films I've seen here on my Top 10 at the end of the year.
Emptying the Skies
Based on an article written for The New Yorker magazine by novelust Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, Freedom), Emptying the Skies is an earnest film about the decline of migratory bird populations due to poaching in Europe, as well as the efforts to fight that poaching, which has its heart firmly in the right place, but also feels a little slight.
This is a particular problem considering that the problem is not a small one: millions of birds are being slaughtered illegally every year, and by focusing on the actions of CABS (Committee Against Bird Slaughter), a group who go around destroying traps and freeing birds, it feels like a very small piece of a larger problem. Franzen occasionally appears in the film to talk about the relationship between birds and humanity, the poetic nature of birdsong and other more philosophical matters, but it's mainly about the activists' individual efforts.
While you do feel that they are doing something great, and there are moments - such as a sequence in which they are threatened by gangsters in Cyprus who make money off the illegal trade - that get across how dangerous their efforts are, there just isn't much weight to the film. It's an interesting look at the issue, and it does a good job of getting across the pure intentions of the people involved, but one which feels like it could have benefited from being given a far grander treatment.
Sunday, 16 June 2013
Saturday, 15 June 2013
Doc/Fest 2013 Coverage: Day Four
We're firmly over the hump and the end is in sight. As people start to think about going home for another year the screenings begin to get quieter, the parties less boisterous, and the coffee starts tasting more bitter. Yet even as a slightly melancholy air starts to descend over Doc/Fest, there are still plenty of films and events to see, and even though nothing I've seen so far has completely blown my socks off, there's always a chance.
Walter Murch: From The Godfather to The God Particle
The main takeaway from the festival so far for me has been that even though many of the films have been merely okay, the events have been exemplary, and this master class from legendary sound designer and editor Walter Murch was no exception.
Although Murch was in attendance to promote Particle Fever, a documentary about the search for the Higgs-Boson particle which he edited, this master class was more focused on his general approach to editing and his opinions on film I general. What really came across in his talk was what an advocate of change he was. I tend to have a preconception that anyone involved in the film industry for multiple decades, and particularly those who have worked with celluloid, will be resistant to digital filmmaking.
It's a preconception that Murch easily shattered as he talked at great length about the potential digital has for creating vibrant art, as well as showed the extent to which he has embraced digital editing in his own work. He also demonstrated a keen, varied intellect in his talk and the Q&A, using examples for biology, physics and metaphysics to illustrate his ideas about art.
I'm loathe to use the term because it's over-used and dickish, but he truly was inspiring, and lived up to his considerable reputation as the man who had a hand in making The Conversation and Apocalypse Now such great works of cinema.
After Tiller (dir. Martha Shane and Lana Wilson)
Forty years after Roe v. Wade, the abortion debate continues to rage throughout America, with fierce and angry rhetoric coming from both sides. In focusing on the handful of doctors who perform late-term abortions, especially in the aftermath of the assassination of the abortionist George Tiller, Shane and Wilson manage to make a film which doesn't touch on or sensationalise the broader debate, but rather uses an intimate, human focus to cast the issues into sharp relief. They capture the deeply moving stories of patients who choose to have a late-term abortion and their reasons behind it, but also offer a rare, captivating glimpse into the struggles that the doctors face as they face harassment a, death threats and their own ethical and moral choices. It's a quiet but captivating film that manages to offer a new angle on an issue which has been covered before, but not always with such nuance or sensitivity.
Ira Glass: This American Life
This accidentally wound up being my last event of the day - I had planned to see Blackfish but unfortunately this event was delayed by about half an hour, for reasons that are not the fault of the festival or Ira Glass - but it was more than worth it. As someone who has been devouring Mr. Glass' radio show This American Life for several years, the opportunity to see him speak live, and in his first public appearance in the UK no less, was something I would not have missed for the world.
Anyone familiar with Glass' style on the show will have a sense of how he is in person. Conversational, hypnotic and with a wry, self-deprecating sense of humour, he's the perfect anchor for a show that aims to match serious journalism with a funny, entertaining tone, one which was ably demonstrated in the clips Glass used from both the radio and TV iterations of This American Life.
Over the course of nearly two hours, he talked candidly about the difficulties of getting the right angle on a given theme, how many of the stories commissioned by the show are cut from the broadcast because they ultimately don't fit for whatever reason, and why he loves working in radio more than either film or television because of the freedom it had allowed him in shaping a show that perfectly matches the aims of himself and his collaborators. He also had some witty and hilarious observations about sometimes getting bad interview subjects ("Why do interesting things sometimes happen to people who are inarticulate?"), trying to understand the motivations of the Tea Party movement ("[They seemed to be] older white people on government assistance who didn't think other people should get government assistance.") and have interesting, honest accounts of episodes he was particularly proud, including the much-discussed two-parter about shootings at the Harper High School in Chicago.
As a huge fan of Mr. Glass, this was catnip to me, and even though he wound up running over, it still felt too short.
Walter Murch: From The Godfather to The God Particle
The main takeaway from the festival so far for me has been that even though many of the films have been merely okay, the events have been exemplary, and this master class from legendary sound designer and editor Walter Murch was no exception.
Although Murch was in attendance to promote Particle Fever, a documentary about the search for the Higgs-Boson particle which he edited, this master class was more focused on his general approach to editing and his opinions on film I general. What really came across in his talk was what an advocate of change he was. I tend to have a preconception that anyone involved in the film industry for multiple decades, and particularly those who have worked with celluloid, will be resistant to digital filmmaking.
It's a preconception that Murch easily shattered as he talked at great length about the potential digital has for creating vibrant art, as well as showed the extent to which he has embraced digital editing in his own work. He also demonstrated a keen, varied intellect in his talk and the Q&A, using examples for biology, physics and metaphysics to illustrate his ideas about art.
I'm loathe to use the term because it's over-used and dickish, but he truly was inspiring, and lived up to his considerable reputation as the man who had a hand in making The Conversation and Apocalypse Now such great works of cinema.
After Tiller (dir. Martha Shane and Lana Wilson)
Forty years after Roe v. Wade, the abortion debate continues to rage throughout America, with fierce and angry rhetoric coming from both sides. In focusing on the handful of doctors who perform late-term abortions, especially in the aftermath of the assassination of the abortionist George Tiller, Shane and Wilson manage to make a film which doesn't touch on or sensationalise the broader debate, but rather uses an intimate, human focus to cast the issues into sharp relief. They capture the deeply moving stories of patients who choose to have a late-term abortion and their reasons behind it, but also offer a rare, captivating glimpse into the struggles that the doctors face as they face harassment a, death threats and their own ethical and moral choices. It's a quiet but captivating film that manages to offer a new angle on an issue which has been covered before, but not always with such nuance or sensitivity.
Ira Glass: This American Life
This accidentally wound up being my last event of the day - I had planned to see Blackfish but unfortunately this event was delayed by about half an hour, for reasons that are not the fault of the festival or Ira Glass - but it was more than worth it. As someone who has been devouring Mr. Glass' radio show This American Life for several years, the opportunity to see him speak live, and in his first public appearance in the UK no less, was something I would not have missed for the world.
Anyone familiar with Glass' style on the show will have a sense of how he is in person. Conversational, hypnotic and with a wry, self-deprecating sense of humour, he's the perfect anchor for a show that aims to match serious journalism with a funny, entertaining tone, one which was ably demonstrated in the clips Glass used from both the radio and TV iterations of This American Life.
Over the course of nearly two hours, he talked candidly about the difficulties of getting the right angle on a given theme, how many of the stories commissioned by the show are cut from the broadcast because they ultimately don't fit for whatever reason, and why he loves working in radio more than either film or television because of the freedom it had allowed him in shaping a show that perfectly matches the aims of himself and his collaborators. He also had some witty and hilarious observations about sometimes getting bad interview subjects ("Why do interesting things sometimes happen to people who are inarticulate?"), trying to understand the motivations of the Tea Party movement ("[They seemed to be] older white people on government assistance who didn't think other people should get government assistance.") and have interesting, honest accounts of episodes he was particularly proud, including the much-discussed two-parter about shootings at the Harper High School in Chicago.
As a huge fan of Mr. Glass, this was catnip to me, and even though he wound up running over, it still felt too short.
Doc/Fest 2013 Coverage: Day Three
A very quiet day for me since I took much of the day off as a break from the festival to instead catch up with friends, eat some nice food and generally stay out of a screening. However, I was still able to see one of the most purely enjoyable films of the festival so far, which made for a pretty successful day despite the lack of incident.
Friday, 14 June 2013
Doc/Fest 2013 Coverage: Day Two
Today at Doc/Fest was both quieter and busier than yesterday since although I saw fewer things, they were on average longer and more time consuming than yesterday's batch. As such, I wasn't able to blog the day live, but I will endeavour to cover everything in this wrap-up.
The Act of Killing (dir. Joshua Oppenheimer)
It's hard to convey just how strange and disturbing The Act of Killing is without making it sound fatally quirky. Oppenheimer set out to make a film about the victims of the Sumatran genocide, a truly horrifying anti-Communist purge which resulted in millions of deaths between 1965 and 1966. However, since many of the self-described gangsters who carried out the executioners remain in power, it proved next to impossible to get the victims' side of the story, so Oppenheimer offered the killers an opportunity to tell their side of the story. What then follows is a truly disquieting film in which these murderers candidly and proudly talk about their past violence and actually reenact some of it for the cameras. It is quite simply jaw-dropping, and what's great about it is the ease with which Oppenheimer is able to tease out these details not just about his subjects, but about Indonesian society in general, which treats the killings as a glorious, necessary event.
While the film is incredible, the version that I saw was the 2 hour 40minute director's cut and, for fear if sounding churlish, it was simply too long and baggy to be as great as the subject matter deserved. Apparently the regular cut is only 2 hours, and I'd imagine that it is probably better, if no less grueling.
The Best of BUG (dir. Various)
I've been hoping to see Adam Buxton's show BUG for literally years now, and while the presence of a comedy show about music videos, Internet comments and Zavid Bowie impressions seems a touch out of place at a documentary festival - a fact that Buxton himself admitted - it was still one of the most purely enjoyable things I've seen in a while. (And it provided a nice palette cleanser after The Act of Killing.) Buxton acts as curator and showman, showing off some if his favourite music videos and interspersing them with gleefully silly comedy routines, jingles and animations to create what is a rollicking good time. The only misstep came with the inclusion of two fairly sexual videos which, while funny and innovative, did kind of suck the air out of the room.
The Summit (dir. Nick Ryan)
Any film about a mountain climbing expedition gone awry, especially one which features a lot of reconstructions, is inevitably going to draw comparisons to Touching the Void, so it's to The Summit's credit that I spent the majority of the film wrapped up in the story, rather than thinking of that other film. Ryan uses an interesting non-linear structure to detail the events that led to the deaths of 11 climbers on K2 in August 2008, marrying reconstructions with interviews of the survivors and archive footage shot by the climbers themselves to tell a propulsive and compelling story of people caught in an impossible situation, trying desperately to hang on in the face of the implacable forces of nature.
The Act of Killing (dir. Joshua Oppenheimer)
It's hard to convey just how strange and disturbing The Act of Killing is without making it sound fatally quirky. Oppenheimer set out to make a film about the victims of the Sumatran genocide, a truly horrifying anti-Communist purge which resulted in millions of deaths between 1965 and 1966. However, since many of the self-described gangsters who carried out the executioners remain in power, it proved next to impossible to get the victims' side of the story, so Oppenheimer offered the killers an opportunity to tell their side of the story. What then follows is a truly disquieting film in which these murderers candidly and proudly talk about their past violence and actually reenact some of it for the cameras. It is quite simply jaw-dropping, and what's great about it is the ease with which Oppenheimer is able to tease out these details not just about his subjects, but about Indonesian society in general, which treats the killings as a glorious, necessary event.
While the film is incredible, the version that I saw was the 2 hour 40minute director's cut and, for fear if sounding churlish, it was simply too long and baggy to be as great as the subject matter deserved. Apparently the regular cut is only 2 hours, and I'd imagine that it is probably better, if no less grueling.
The Best of BUG (dir. Various)
I've been hoping to see Adam Buxton's show BUG for literally years now, and while the presence of a comedy show about music videos, Internet comments and Zavid Bowie impressions seems a touch out of place at a documentary festival - a fact that Buxton himself admitted - it was still one of the most purely enjoyable things I've seen in a while. (And it provided a nice palette cleanser after The Act of Killing.) Buxton acts as curator and showman, showing off some if his favourite music videos and interspersing them with gleefully silly comedy routines, jingles and animations to create what is a rollicking good time. The only misstep came with the inclusion of two fairly sexual videos which, while funny and innovative, did kind of suck the air out of the room.
The Summit (dir. Nick Ryan)
Any film about a mountain climbing expedition gone awry, especially one which features a lot of reconstructions, is inevitably going to draw comparisons to Touching the Void, so it's to The Summit's credit that I spent the majority of the film wrapped up in the story, rather than thinking of that other film. Ryan uses an interesting non-linear structure to detail the events that led to the deaths of 11 climbers on K2 in August 2008, marrying reconstructions with interviews of the survivors and archive footage shot by the climbers themselves to tell a propulsive and compelling story of people caught in an impossible situation, trying desperately to hang on in the face of the implacable forces of nature.
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
Doc/Fest 2013 Coverage: Day One
Monday, 10 June 2013
Shot/Reverse Shot: Top Ten - DocFest 2013
In the second of approximately seven thousand* things I'll be doing this week around Sheffield Doc/Fest, Joe Gastineau and I run down all the aspects of the festival that we are most looking forward to sampling. In contrast to my own personal preview, this is less about specific films that we excited about - although there are several that we are pretty keen on - than about the experience of the festival overall, so we talk about the films, the events, the general ambiance of the place and, of course, the many opportunities to attend free-wheeling, stereotype-confirming parties.
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*Possible over-estimation. Or under-estimation.
Saturday, 8 June 2013
Doc/Fest 2013 Coverage: Intro
This week is a most thrilling and exciting one in my little corner of the Internet. Not because of the impending release of Zak Snyder's Man of Steel, a film which I have very mixed and tentative feelings about. No, the reason I'm excited represents the exact opposite Snyder's opus, because right in the middle of a summer season awash with big, booming spectacle and fantasy, I'm going to spend five glorious days watching films dedicated to the real world, or something very much like it.Yes, it's time for Sheffield's Doc/Fest, one of the biggest and brightest documentary festivals in the world, and I am delighted to say that I am going to be covering it, both on my lonesome and in partnership with my comrade-in-pod Joe Gastineau of The Wooden Kimono and Shot/Reverse Shot. Expect plenty of words, both written and spoken, to spill out onto this space over the next couple of days.
Friday, 7 June 2013
Shot/Reverse Shot: Arrested Development Season 4
On May 26th, 2013, something strange and miraculous happened: Arrested Development, the cultishly adored sitcom which was cancelled back in 2006 returned to airwaves, or whatever Netflix travels on, bringing the saga of the fantastically awful Bluth family back from oblivion. It was a day long awaited by both fans of the show and creator Mitch Hurwitz, who has worked tirelessly to bring the show back in one form or another, and hopes to use this new season as the jumping off point for a feature-length installment.
Yet for all the crowing about how unprecedented the revival has been both in form - the episodes were released all at once rather than being parceled out over weeks - and content - the episodes focus on individual characters and move away from the ensemble storytelling of the original run - the question remains: is it any good? Was it worth waiting seven years, or has time - not to mention the incredibly crowded schedules of the cast - not been kind to this new form of a modern classic?
These are the questions that Joe Gastineau and I set out to answer when we committed to watching the season not once, but twice in the space of a week, hoping to glean as many of the show's densely packed jokes as possible, as well as offer up our thoughts on whether the show is, in fact, still great. There is some mild disagreement on that front, but it's a fun and informed discussion which, frankly, could have gone on for much, much longer (and risked being as saggy as Arrested Development '13) because there was so much to unpack.
So grab an ice cream sandwich, slip into a $5,000 suit and settle in for our Arrested Development special. Hopefully it'll char your tree.
SPOILERS, duh.
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Monday, 3 June 2013
Shot/Reverse Shot: Community Season 4: Redux
In the first of two podcasts this week, we offer up a mea culpa for saying, as part of our wrap up of Community Season Four, that it was utterly laughable and absurd to say that Dan Harmon would return to the show after being fired, something which happened mere weeks after we proclaimed it to be impossible. Clearly, we forgot that life is utterly laughable and absurd, and that anything is possible where Greendale Community College is concerned.
After a bit of self-flagellation, we get to the serious business of asking what this all means for the show; can Harmon right a badly listing ship; does this improve or worsen the show's chance of making it to its fabled sixth season and possible move; and will Chevy Chase be coming back as well? (Definitely not. Unless he totally is.)
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As always, you can stream the podcast using the link above, or preferably (from our point of view) you can subscribe using iTunes. If you choose the latter, please rate it and leave a review because it helps us to get more listeners, and also gives us something else to obsess over. Speaking of which, you can also Like us on Facebook, assuming that you do.
Wednesday, 22 May 2013
Shot/Reverse Shot: Top Ten TV Adaptations
Following some disgruntled notes from our executives ("executives" being a euphemism for the incessant, self-critical nattering that constantly runs in our heads) Joe and I have decided to make a few changes to the podcast. From now on, we're not going to be doing Top 10's at the end of every episode since, though they are fun and easy to do, they tend to take up a lot of time - in the case of the Childhood episode taking up half the podcast - and would probably function better as standalone or supplementary episodes.
In this spirit of massive retooling, this episode finds us doing a Top 10 entirely about TV Adaptations, by which we mean TV shows that have been turned into films, films that have been turned into TV shows, and even one instance of a not very good TV show being turned into a great TV show. There are tangents galore, as is our custom, but as a first step towards streamlining the show it works pretty well.
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As always, you can stream the podcast using the link above, or preferably (from our point of view) you can subscribe using iTunes. If you choose the latter, please rate it and leave a review because it helps us to get more listeners, and also gives us something else to obsess over. Speaking of which, you can also Like us on Facebook, assuming that you do.
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