Doc Watch: Bright and Dark

JANE (B+) - This is a bright, upbeat found-footage piece that reveals Jane Goodall's pioneering field studies of chimpanzees in Africa starting in the early 1960s. The archival video, in tactile color, plays like a real-life Disney nature movie from that era. It was an era in which headline writers routinely referred to her looks, not above calling her "comely" in headlines.

The talented Brett Morgen ("Cobain: Montage of Heck," "The Kid Stays in the Picture") curates this found footage like a pro, crafting a fascinating narrative and building drama. The chimps become real characters, as we come to know them across generations through this groundbreaking study of their social interactions. We also watch, in wonder, as the chimps reveal the skill to use crude tools.

Goodall is calm and poised throughout her experience, raising her own child with famed wildlife documentary cinematographer Hugo Van Lawick, whom she met at the start of the project at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. She tutors research assistants. She interacts naturally with her hosts. We see her own life unfold before our eyes. We are transported to that place and that time, the camera close over her shoulder as she traipses through nature, and we are close enough that it seems we can reach out and touch that familiar ponytail. At other times, she just sits and observes, and we're lucky enough to do so too.

I CALLED HIM MORGAN (C+) - A surprisingly boring recounting of jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan and the woman implicated in his fatal shooting in February 1972. Talking heads -- mostly fellow musicians -- tell a sluggish tale of a junkie who seemed destined to meet a premature, messy end.

Helen Morgan, as one of Lee's old pals says, literally dragged Lee out of the gutter and rescued his career -- saved his life. But her jealousy over another woman sent her into a rage, and she shot him dead at a club. She served some time but was released on probation after pleading to second-degree manslaughter.

The shooting itself doesn't happen until about 20 minutes before the end of the movie. Before that point, the movie wallows in Lee Morgan's woes as a deadbeat drug addict wasting his talent away. We never see Helen -- she died in the mid-'90s -- but we hear her voice on cassette tape, from an interview recorded shortly before she died.

The problem here is that she rambles along telling stories that are just not that compelling. It may be that there just isn't a profound message to convey from the life of the jazz man. This is the second jazz documentary from Swedish director Kasper Collin; maybe it's time for him to move on to another subject.

BONUS TRACK
Lee Morgan with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers performing "Dat Dere":