popsublime: October 2022

This year’s GlobeDocs Film Festival had me thinking in kind of opposite directions film by film. I think we’ve reached a tipping point in the culture where virtue signaling has begun to override worthwhile philosophical thought and artistry, though all of the documentaries that I watched in this year’s festival were well-made and enjoyable. What’s interesting is that documentaries are largely observational in their aims, and yet they’re also crafted, so we’re watching something that’s shaped to the political mindframe of the filmmakers, regardless of their intentions in terms of objectivity. As soon as one edits a piece of film, the narrative becomes creative and interpretive, which is where I’d like to see more rigor put back into place regarding how deeply a film is willing to dive into its own material to emerge with more demanding artifacts.

Ryan White’s Good Night Oppy is a good place to start since it was produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin brand and bears all of the classic feel-good trademarks of his own movies. The documentary traces the 15-year journey of the Mars rover Opportunity, a robot that was designed to last only 90 days but just kept rolling along in the red dust of another planet, taking photographs, sending and receiving communications, and being cute enough to garner a faithful following on social media. (At one point we see the robot taking a photo and telling itself not to be afraid because “that’s just your shadow”). I mean, it’s hard to resist a film that starts off with the robot wandering around its long expedition on Mars to the tune of The B-52’s song “Roam.” Like the great animated movie WALL•E, Good Night Oppy anthropomorphizes its central figure as it goes about its daily and nightly business, which is why it ends up moving people. And that’s all very strategic on the part of NASA.

While I don’t question the authenticity of their mission, my cynical side did begin to question a roomful of adults crying over a robot in the guise of teamwork. Try looking around at our current world and its actual problems. It’s an ongoing controversy whether NASA’s colossal expenditure of public money could be used to do something like feed people instead, especially in an inflation economy that’s now becoming unsustainable for most of us here on this planet. For me, this seems bound up with the fact that the general public can now be more easily moved by a robot than by other human beings, though maybe it’s just nice to be reminded what human compassion used to feel like, even if it’s only something people feel for a machine. The most important aspect of the documentary, potentially, is the way that it (somewhat tentatively) emphasizes how vastly alone human beings are in the universe, both individually and collectively. Yet while re-emphasizing that bleak reality, the film also tries to undercut it. Trust me, unless the zoo hypothesis is correct, we’re alone, and no social media campaign driven by public awareness of NASA’s rover missions on Mars (Perseverance is the next iteration of the robot after Opportunity conked out with the message, “My battery is low and my world is getting dark”) can really change that stark truth. Oppy’s final wake-up swan song, Billie Holiday’s rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You,” contains some irony perhaps in the sense of how little we really see ourselves and our predicament. The human race won’t be escaping to Mars anytime soon, kids.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, directed by Laura Poitras, traces the activist mission of celebrated photographer Nan Goldin to take down the Sackler family for their role in the half-million deaths caused by the opioid crisis in this country via the pharmaceutical company that Richard Sackler funded and ran (Purdue Pharma, developer of OxyContin). About 15 years ago, I met a gay couple at a party who’d been photographed by Goldin together in their bathtub long ago, a photo that ended up being included in Goldin’s famous 1986 artist’s book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The seemingly accidental quality of her photographic work has made it legendary and deeply influential to the generation of artists since then. She’s an excellent and reliable guide throughout Poitras’ film, and nobody in the audience won’t be pleased to see the Sackler family get its comeuppance when a judge requires them to be present to hear painful and harrowing personal testimonies (if only via Zoom) from parents who’ve lost their offspring to opioid overdoses.

Because the Sackler family also donated millions of dollars to museums worldwide to have wings named after them, Goldin and the activist organization PAIN staged demonstrations and “die-ins” at museums and art spaces in major international cities. Goldin would cancel art exhibitions to protest the Sackler family’s involvement at an institution, so her activism sought to get those institutions to refuse funding from the Sackler family, with the ultimate aim of having their name removed from institutions all over the planet. That footage is carefully interwoven by Poitras with Goldin’s memories of her sister’s tragic death from suicide, a death that she interrogates her own parents’ role in bringing about. By the end, the film becomes a skillful meditation on the secrets we keep, with Goldin’s powerful claim that “the wrong things are kept private in this society.”

While I have total admiration for Goldin’s artistic and activist work, as well as her argument that “survival was an art” throughout her early years as a photographer in places like Cambridge, Provincetown, and New York, I found it a little hypocritical that she’s pictured smoking cigarettes throughout the film, including in indoor spaces with the activists from PAIN surrounding her during their filmed conversations. Perhaps tobacco companies simply aren’t within the scope of Goldin’s activist concerns, though to be honest, those companies have knowingly murdered far more many millions of people than the company that developed and pushed OxyContin on the populace. This culture seems to view cigarette smoking and alcohol abuse as “self-medication” or “comfort addictions” that the rest of us are just supposed to accept as our friends and family members succumb to those addictions and often become seriously ill over time and die from them. Sorry, but that also needs to be fucking challenged in this culture and other societies around the world. I’m not willing to overlook it, and the younger activists working with Goldin should have taken her to task rather than just sitting there breathing in second-hand smoke because it’s supposedly cool.

Ondi Timoner’s Last Flight Home is about as intimate as documentaries come. The film invites viewers into the final days in the life of her father, Eli Timoner, who ran an airline called Air Florida. He’s feisty right up until the very end of his life, a life that he chooses to end due to the pain of paralysis and old age. While getting a professional massage after work one day forty years before, the massage therapist cracked his neck, resulting in an accidental stroke. His life was never the same again, but it’s clear from his extended family who surround him by his deathbed that he remained loving and lucid for the rest of his days. A series of very sweet Zoom calls with his former employees demonstrates their clear devotion to him, even many years after Eli Timoner’s Air Florida airline company had ceased to exist.

The director’s close eye on the proceedings, while refreshingly candid, feels perhaps a bit too close at times, and I think the documentary may have benefited from some editorial objectivity to help distance it from the familial insularity. Yet we do get to know the various characters in the family quite well, especially Ondi’s sister and brother, who respond in nuanced ways to their father’s process of dying; her sister is a rabbi who approaches things cautiously and philosophically, whereas her brother mentions that he never cries except maybe once during a Pixar movie. (We do see him break down by the end of the film.) Eli remains at the movie’s center, appropriately, airing his views about the world at the time of the filming (he really hated Donald Trump), but mostly just being a steady beacon of love and compassion for his family members. It’s definitely one of the sweetest and most layered portraits of a family, and one taken from the inside, that I’ve ever seen on film.

I have quite fond memories of the much-loved, Emmy-winning PBS children’s television show Reading Rainbow, hosted by LeVar Burton. Butterfly in the Sky, a documentary directed by Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb, revived and deepened my interest in the show in a very moving way that I hadn’t really anticipated. We hear many interviews with the show’s creators, including the composer of its well-known and instantly recognizable synthesizer theme song (which was sung by Chaka Khan), who recreates the song in real time to demonstrate how exactly those nostalgic sounds were made. We also see the various “book review kids” all grown up and relishing their chance to relive their years as childhood public television stars. I was reminded, too, of the many celebrities who read books as part of the series: Angela Bassett, Matthew Broderick, Peter Falk, Whoopi Goldberg, James Earl Jones, and Regina King, among others. Even the early hip-hop trio Run-D.M.C. made an appearance rapping on the show to emphasize for kids the importance of reading. But my favorite moments in the documentary were the most surreal ones, like when we’re taken for the filming of one episode into a bat cave in Texas, the floor of which is covered in bat guano, in which carnivorous worms live, who devour to a tiny twist of skeletal bones any bat unlucky enough to fall down from the cave walls. The most powerful aspect of the documentary details just how many important themes Reading Rainbow touched upon, from slavery to gangs to incarceration to war to childbirth. Scenes from the episode about 9/11, with kids in a Manhattan school talking to LeVar Burton about finally being able to return to their school right near Ground Zero, moved me to tears.

LeVar himself was clearly an inheritor to Mister Fred Rogers, who’s featured in the film talking with LeVar at one point. Burton was also obviously a forerunner in highlighting race issues in relation to children’s lives, and he insisted on crafting his own image from season to season, despite pressure from the producers to keep his look consistent. LeVar recalls how, as a black man, he’d always been made to feel that something about his presence wasn’t right, so he rightly demanded his autonomy with his own self-image throughout the show. He also spoke eloquently at hearings on public broadcasting when the show had to fight for continued federal funding. By the time the show finally went off the air in 2006, there were no funders left, and no merchandise to sell to viewers as with a show like Sesame Street. As one commentator says of how adults now feel about LeVar Burton while thinking back to when we all watched Reading Rainbow as kids, “We knew he loved us.”

Another celebrity’s resurgence into public view is the focus of Kathlyn Horan’s documentary The Return of Tanya Tucker, a rousing look at the recent career revival of that particular country music legend, whose artistic trajectory got sidetracked as a result of an attempted shift from country to rock music. Fellow country musicians Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings enthusiastically helped to get Tucker’s superb 2019 comeback album While I’m Livin’ recorded and produced, winning Tucker her first two Grammy Awards in the process, both for the album itself and also for her gorgeous song “Bring My Flowers Now.” Carlile says that she knew from Day One in the recording studio that Tucker’s Grammy Award wins would be coming. That’s some very long overdue recognition for an artist who signed a $1.6 million recording contract way back at age 16.

Despite some initial industry skepticism about Tucker’s renaissance after her long-ago crash and burn due to drug abuse and temporarily hitting the skids, Carlile gently encourages Tucker about just how great the songs and her singing are as they’re recording them in the studio, comparing Tucker’s project to Johnny Cash’s famed American Recordings from late in his life. Tucker’s realness is what makes the movie. Throughout the documentary, she’s open and honest about her anxieties, saying that all she ever wanted was simply to be a singing entertainer. She certainly proves her masterful command at that particular skill during a live concert toward the end of the film, as well as proving the timelessness of her own songs. Tucker owes Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings a lot for plucking her out of a potential early retirement, and she clearly knows that. Tucker glows with appreciation for Brandi’s championing of her music, and Brandi glows with appreciation for having the opportunity to champion her musical hero.

Finally, Wildcat, directed by Melissa Lesh and Trevor Beck Frost, takes us deep into the Amazonian rainforests of Peru, where we meet a young British veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Harry Turner, who’s struggling from PTSD and volunteers to raise a wild ocelot named Khan at a sanctuary for wild animals. Having witnessed children dying in Afghanistan haunts Harry and pushes him into ongoing bouts of depression, which his caring for Khan helps to lift him out of, until Khan gets shot in his front leg by a stationary gun placed in the jungle by hunters, resulting in a tearful and excruciating burial scene. Harry’s colleague and girlfriend, Samantha Zwicker, who founded and later expands the wildlife sanctuary in the rainforest, tries to steer Harry through his spells of suicidal depression as best she can, though it’s a challenge for her since she had also grown up with an alcoholic father whom she loved very much in spite of his own regular harrowing spells of darkness and addiction.

Fortunately, Harry has another chance to raise a second young ocelot, this time one who’s named Keanu. As we watch heavily tattooed, baby-faced Harry frolic with Keanu and guide the ocelot through life in the jungle, it becomes clear just how calming it is for Harry to be with this small creature, and how much love he feels for the animal. “He’s saving me,” Harry says, “and I’m saving him.” And yet he continues to struggle with his PTSD-based depression, cutting himself on his forearm and wrists at his lowest points. “I’m in the most beautiful place in the world, and I can’t be fucking happy,” he laments painfully. Even though his relationship with Samantha doesn’t last, his work with Keanu at the animal rescue facility in Peru clearly prepared him to re-enter society by the time 18 months had passed and Keanu was ready to be released into the wild. Harry returns home to his family in England, and later heads overseas again to do more volunteer service with animals in Ecuador. He also goes a little overboard, perhaps, when getting dotted ocelot stripes tattooed right down the middle of his back, his tribute to the little animal that rescued him and brought him back to life.

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Monday, October 17, 2022

8th Annual GlobeDocs Film Festival (October 12th - 16th, 2022)

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