Doc Watch: Hoarders

JAY MYSELF (A-minus) - This all-around delight follows Jay Maisel, a venerated New York street photographer, now in his 80s, as he packs up and moves out of the five-story bank building he bought in the pre-gentrified Bowery back in the late 1960s and stuffed with art and artifacts. He's a classic New York character and an entertaining subject for a life retrospective.

The cigar-chomping Maisel, over half a century, filled dozens of rooms (including the vault) with ... things. One room is devoted strictly to round objects. One bureau has a drawer filled with screws that fit one particular machine that is nowhere to be found. Colors fill the window panes. There's a small basketball court. His archives spill from cabinets. Discarded film slides fill giant glass cubes. He estimates that 35 truckloads -- organized by Moishe's Last Minute movers -- will be necessary to clean the place out and resettle him in post-gentrified Brooklyn.

The film is by one of Maisel's former assistants, Stephen Wilkes, and points for the insider insight to the old days and for the revealing archival footage from back in the day, but a half point off for lack of objectivity here. This is more of a home movie but a nonetheless fascinating one. Maisel's force of personality, reinforced but softened by his younger wife and by their 20-something daughter, makes for an intimate portrait of a man with an almost child-like glee in observing every observable moment and reveling in the beauty of the everyday. This is an inspiring film infused with the fantastic photographs (and Wilkes' own captured moving images) that reveal the aesthetic splendor that is always around us.

FOOD INC. (2008) (A-minus) - This polemic against the corporate food industry that is killing us still holds up a decade later. Robert Kenner, working with Eric Schlosser (the book Fast Food Nation) casts a devastating lens on factory farming and food processing.

Kenner digs for glimmers of hope -- every day folks rebelling against the warehousing of chickens, organic-yogurt manufacturers breaching Walmart's borders. He exposes Monsanto's genetic manipulations and celebrates an old-fashioned chicken farmer. We've made some progress since this jangled the debate, but how many steps backward have we taken?

BONUS TRACK
The trailer for "Jay Myself":