Doc Watch: Nature vs. Nurture

MINDING THE GAP (B+) - Bing Liu tells a compelling tale of his skate-punk upbringing through profiles of his two best pals from their teen years into the challenges of adulthood. Bing is mostly behind the camera, but we often hear his voice during conversations with Zack and Keire. Bing emerges late in the film when he confronts his mother about why she allowed a stepfather to physically abuse Bing and his half-brother. Buddy Zack also suffered abuse growing up. Keire doesn't offer a similar excuse as to why he is a dysfunctional young man (bordering on simpleton), but I suspect there is a decent amount of pot-smoking in his case. (His father died young, leaving Keire directionless.)

Bing has a fluid style -- literally at times, as he skates along behind his pals to film their maneuvers. These guys are seriously talented. But Zack is an alcoholic who abuses his girlfriend and often ignores the son they have together. Keire lives in a series of pig sties. Neither has his shit together, and a contrast with Bing is implied through the existence of this film, his big accomplishment. Is there a bit of exploitation involved? If so, no one calls him on it. Bing does overreach in the scenes with his mother, edging toward the line of mawkish and exploitative.

But, unlike the two films reviewed below, this documentary digs deep into the psyches of each man and their relationship, tenuously held together by their love of skating. It helps that Bing took a reported 12 years of filming to complete the project. His patience paid off with a sharply observed study of boys struggling to grow up.

HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING (B-minus) - This 86-minute tone poem has flashes of brilliance but is too artsy and scatter-brained to tell a coherent story of an African-American community in rural Alabama. This debut from RaMell Ross plays more like a montage of images from a film-school thesis. Teaching photography and basketball at the local school, he alights on several teens to focus on -- though "focus" is a generous term.

It's difficult to track with either a narrative or even a theme among the folks living in relative poverty. Infants and toddlers play a starring role -- a fatal flaw unless these are home movies of your own kids. Some images are so fleeting as to be undefinable (kids reveling in a storm, and boy skidding to a stop on his bike -- both of which are in the trailer), while interesting ideas like watching a toddler do laps around his living room drag on interminably. By contrast, watching a basketball player practice his jump in an around-the-world drill is compelling as Ross' camera hugs the hot shot's every move (behind the shoulder, like a Dardenne brothers maneuver).

Ross flashes a lot of talent, but this mix of Frederick Wiseman and David Lynch (Ross likes bugs, too) simply lacks a hook. A baby soaking himself in the bath? Cute. But random and uninteresting.

SHIRKERS (B-minus) - Singapore filmmaker Sandi Tan gets in the way of a good story, falling into a trap of self-indulgence. In the early '90s, as a teen film geek, she and her friends scraped together the resources to film Tan's screenplay called "Shirkers." They were assisted by a creepy, mysterious foreigner named Georges, who drained their bank accounts for the production and then absconded with the film.

Tan makes the mistake of thinking that the most granular elements of her teen-zine existence and the film itself are fascinating to anyone other than her former social circle. We don't get to the meat of the story -- George's theft -- until halfway through the 97-minute running time. She just doesn't understand that her youthful film antics, while admirable, are not that interesting; Georges is the story here, and that's why the second half is more interesting than the first.

The production here is also muddled with amateurish narration (by Tan) and annoying mood music. A third party could have told this story better with a shorter run time.