Review: Weiner (2016)

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Director: Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg

Some documentaries require a bit of luck to achieve their potential for greatness. This was true of 2012's The Queen of Versailles, in which filmmaker Lauren Greenfield had the good fortune to already be filming David and Jackie Siegel to tell a different story when the housing market collapsed, turning their tale from a lifestyles of the rich and the famous type hagiography into an epic tragedy about greed and needless excess, and it's true of Weiner, Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg's film about disgraced politician Anthony Weiner. Conceived as a comeback story about a man putting his mistakes behind him and rescuing his legacy from the gutter, it instead plays witness to that man throwing his second chance away. Both documentaries were lucky to be in the right place at the right time with a camera, but they aren't great because they were lucky. They're great because their filmmakers know how to use what fortune has dropped into their laps to tell stories that are deeply compelling and fascinating.

Summer Not-Busters: Miami Vice (2006)

Director: Michael Mann
Starring: Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx
Domestic Box Office: $63,450,470

2006's Miami Vice is a lot of things, but a summer movie, in the traditional sense of what it means for a film to be a "summer movie," it is not. It's a long movie - though compared to the increasingly common 2.5 to 3 hours given over to action/adventure/superhero presumed blockbuster-type movies, Vice's 132 minute running time looks short on paper - that feels longer than it actually is as a result of a plot that is as nonsensical as it is overstuffed, and at times the whole thing feels like a direct repudiation of everything that the summer movie is supposed to be. It's an action movie in premise, but an art film in execution, and all told it's a movie that tests one's patience even though there are moments that are so beautifully transcendent that you almost want to forgive it for its flaws and its self-indulgence. Mostly though Miami Vice is a film that raises questions: Who was this made for? Who thought $135 million was a reasonable budget? What the fuck is even going on?

Review: Sing Street (2016)

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Director: John Carney
Starring: Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Lucy Boynton

Boy and Girl meet, they fall in love, and music is made. You could argue that that's also the plot of two of John Carney's previous films, Once and Begin Again, and you would be right, but that doesn't mean that all three films are the same, or even really all that similar. Over the course of those three films Carney has played around a lot with style and with Sing Street delivers something that falls somewhere between the unadorned realism of Once and the polish of a Hollywood musical. It's a delightful and even sometimes moving film that crosses the gritty kitchen sink drama with the glamour of music videos, back during a time when music videos were considered a new and exciting art form and actually got airplay. With so much original music to its credit, fully expect to see Sing Street pop up over and again as awards season rolls around and the contenders for Best Original Song start getting whittled down.

21st Century Essentials: Two Days, One Night (2014)

Director: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Starring: Marion Cotillard
Country: Belgium/France/Italy

The idea of capitalism is sold to us, in part, as a system of self-determination, as a system whereby your destiny is only limited by the bounds of your imagination and your perseverance. The basis of the “American dream” is the notion that no matter who you are and no matter where you’re from, you can attain success as long as you’re willing to put the work in. For some people this is true and circumstances align in such a way that they are able to become self-made successes. For most others, however, the experience of capitalism isn’t much different from any other system, in that it ensures that the wealthy and powerful remain so, and insofar as it creates a “dog eat dog” mentality within the labor force that ensures division and stagnation in terms of upward mobility. This is increasingly true as income inequality becomes greater and greater and those enjoying the spoils of success demand bigger slices of the proverbial pie and then turn to the people at the bottom of the hierarchy and tell them that there’s only a limited amount left and certainly not enough for everyone. The fact is, the poorer you are, the less you have the luxury of choice. You might be presented with a situation where doing one thing is “morally right” but so economically impossible as to be unthinkable. In their 2014 film Two Days, One Night, the Dardenne brothers tell a story that turns on such a choice, a moral quandary put to people living on the fringes of the economy and for whom making the wrong choice will mean slipping into financial oblivion. Like all their films it is observational rather than judgmental, and it is so deeply engaging that you will be riveted from beginning to end.

Friday's Top 5... Omissions from the BBC's Greatest Films of the 21st Century

On Tuesday the BBC released its list of the 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century. Why they've complied such a list in August of 2016 is something of a mystery, but it's a pretty decent list (their choice for #1 is impeccable). There are, however, some surprising (and frustrating) omissions:

#5: A Dearth of Documentaries
100 films (it's actually 102, as there's a 3-way tie for the last spot) and they could only find room for 2 documentaries. Those documentaries (The Act of Killing and Stories We Tell) are great, but the past 16 years have had a wealth of great documentaries that could have been included. Off the top of my head: My Winnipeg, The Look of Silence, Grizzly Man, The Fog of War, How to Survive a Plague, Searching for Sugar Man, The Queen of Versailles, Bowling for Columbine, Man on Wire, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, What Happened, Miss Simone?, Amy. Room couldn't have been made for a couple of these films?