Doc Watch: Disruption

1971 (B) - This debut film from director Johanna Hamilton is a sweet homage to the eight unspectacular folks who broke into FBI headquarters in Media, Pa., in March 1971 -- and got away with it. Now their secret is out.

Hamilton relies heavily on re-enactments, and I was rolling my eyes early in the film. (Either do a feature film or a documentary, but not both, please.) But in the end, the tactic works. (She does a surprisingly good job of matching faces.) It's hard not to get swept up in the narrative and the era. The group chose the night of the first Ali-Frazier heavyweight bout to conduct their raid, because they figured most people would be distracted.* The documents -- shared with congressmen and news organizations -- revealed the FBI's extensive domestic campaign of surveillance and disruption, mainly through COINTELPRO. The leak is credited with eventually leading to a congressional investigation into both the FBI and CIA.

The real folks, mostly in their 60s now, show up to finally break their silence, or at least most of them do. They called themselves at the time the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. Keith Forsyth, the technical expert, still has a strong mischievous glint in his eyes. We get glimpses of Bill Davidon, the physics professor and antiwar agitator who was their leader, before his death in 2013. John and Bonnie Raines look like your average all-American grandparents. Bob Williamson maintains his hangdog look and sharp tongue. (He and Forsyth were later part of the Camden 28, a group acquitted of destroying Draft Board documents in New Jersey.)

The clear message here is this: By banding together in a small, tight group, ordinary citizens can engage in civil disobedience and effect great change. As Bonnie Raines acknowledges near the end of the film, she and her husband soon went back to a quiet life raising their children; they figured that they had done their small part for the cause of a free democracy.

* - The haze of nostalgia on display here feels warm but it distracts at times. Forsyth claims that while he was picking the lock on the door of the offices that night, the security guard was watching the prize fight and that the sounds of the TV announcers were audible. Reliable reports say the fight was shown only at closed-circuit locations; perhaps it was a radio broadcast he heard. It's a petty complaint. The Media 8 surely earned the right to embellish their tale a bit in their twilight years.

GOING CLEAR: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE PRISON OF BELIEF (B) - The prolific Alex Gibney trains his skepticism on Scientology in this solid but not necessarily groundbreaking HBO documentary.

The two-hour film (airing on HBO) is chock-full of bizarre tidbits about Scientology that most viewers will find creepy, including the entire L. Ron Hubbard backstory. Gibney, however, refuses to go for the knockout punch. He doesn't necessarily pull his punches; he just doesn't go for the throat. For instance, he ignores the controversy surrounding the apparent disappearance of the wife of David Miscavige, the cult's leader the past three decades since Hubbard's death.

Instead, he spends an inordinate amount of time on Scientology's two superstars, John Travolta and Tom Cruise. The former comes off fairly sympathetically; the suggestion is that he is being blackmailed by the leaders who hold tapes full of intimate revelations. The latter is one bizarre human being, if in fact he is human.

The tales of harassed ex-members, enslaved workers, and cheesy rallies is often quite compelling. Former members speak out and hold court as anchor talking heads. Gibney paces each of their reveals nicely, using their own personal exit stories as a way to build to his climax. The technique keeps you tuned in to the end.

One final nitpick: The word graphics are minute and at times impossible to read without 20/16 vision. I would have needed to have my nose pressed against my modest 32-inch screen to read it all.

BONUS TRACK
SINATRA: ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL (C+) - Gibney (we told you he's prolific) got HBO to lavish four hours on Frank Sinatra to mark the centennial of his birth. It ain't exactly Scorsese on Dylan. Oddly, we see none of the talking heads; instead we get only the voices, with his kids doing most of the narration. (Nancy's pieces sound as if they are lifted from an audio book.) The vintage footage is engaging at times, as it hints at the Beta Beatlemania that Frank sparked in the '40s and later takes a fascinating detour into the Mia Farrow affair. In the end, though, Sinatra is just not that interesting a guy, and Gibney glosses over his brutishness and mob ties. It is fun to hear about how few copies he sold of his 1969 bomb "Watertown" (it failed to crack the top 100), prompting his brief retirement before Ol' Blue Eyes came back in the early '70s. This is a cut-and-paste job that fails to justify its length. (Gibney did a better job with last year's HBO doc "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown.")

BONUS BONUS TRACK
I got a library copy of Bob Dylan's "Shadows in the Night," in which he digs deep into the Sinatra catalog for an album of standards. Holy crap. What doesn't make you wince will probably make you guffaw. Dylan has been horsing around the edge of the shallow end of the pool for a decade and a half now, but this time he's gone off the deep end.