Four for the price of one!
PROCESSION (A) - Robert Greene scores again with this unique perspective on victims of abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. The gimmick here is that Greene assembles five such men (with an assist from a sixth) to collaborate and tell their individual stories by creating their own short dramatic films. If ever a gimmick was justified it is here, and not just because it pays off.
The men, now in middle age, experience therapeutic moments of emotional release while performing the mundane tasks of writing and laying out the visuals for the particular stories they want to tell. The sixth member stands in as a priest, and one young boy plays the victim in every version.
Greene is a bold filmmaker, with hits and misses. In his last effort, "Bisbee '17," he similarly staged a centennial anniversary performance to tell the story of the union-busting at the mines in Bisbee, Ariz., in 1917. Greene is good at embedding himself in a situation such that you forget about his own presence and feel embedded yourself. He gains the trust of his subjects, who open up here in a rather matter-of-fact manner, without any faux dramatics, and genuinely bond and empathize with each other. Greene's tactic is truly effective and brings a fresh perspective on the banal evil visited upon these men when they were vulnerable boys.
ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE (A-minus) - "Who're you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" -- Chico Marx.
This fascinating documentary launches from the idea that the human eye is not perfect (it has a literal blind spot) and then explores the concepts of perception in an age of digital electronic surveillance, most notably police body cameras. It is an ambitious examination of the human gaze, a variation on Bentham's Panopticon.
Theo Anthony -- who struggled in a previous attempt at high-concept storytelling (the tedious "Rat Film") -- shows a stronger command of the subject from start to finish. He delves into the history of the moving image captured by devices, including the 19th century Venus transit across the sun and early 20th century pigeon-cams, linking them to coincidental military applications. Anthony more narrowly focuses on Axon, the company that makes body cameras and tasers, and its use by police in Baltimore in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.
A flat female narration adds an ominous overall tone to the production. A cocky Axon executive probably thought he and his company would come off as cool and cutting edge. The bottom line is that the eye sees what it wants to see. There is built-in bias in every observational tool, whether natural or manufactured. It's surprising to have that presented to us in this way.
PAPER & GLUE (B+) - This egregiously upbeat documentary follows J.R., whom we met when he teamed with Agnes Varda in "Faces Places," as he spreads his positivity through his grand-scale photography and art installations around the world. This is a feel-good movie in just about every sense, even if it mainly consists of J.R. tooting his own horn for an hour and a half.
This is another production from the Ron Howard stable of smarm (see also "Rebuilding Paradise"), so it can be a bit too sugary sweet at times. But J.R. is a truly engaging character, and he dreams big, so it's fun to follow him around and join in his projects. His shtick of blowing up portraits to monumental size has a primal appeal -- we all want to be seen, and having your mug on the side of a building or on a border wall certainly does that.
J.R. acts as an ambassador, as he unites people on both sides of the border between California and Mexico with an installation that bleeds across the boundary. He embeds in a prison full of hardened criminals (including one with a swastika on his cheek) to capture their portraits and then cover the prison yard with their images. Like with the border residents, J.R. works closely with the prisoners, giving them buy-in to the artistic endeavor. The artist also delves back into his own origins, explaining how a directionless street punk's life was changed by randomly finding a camera lying around. This film shows him paying that moment of grace forward to those who usually go unseen by the rest of us.
A COP MOVIE (incomplete) - We made it through only a half hour of this enhanced (fictionalized? who knows?) documentary that follows a couple of police officers in Mexico. It starts off on the wrong foot by blaring a droning siren for about the first five minutes. That's followed by five or ten minutes of jabbering police radio jargon narrating a distress call, just letters and numbers being rattled off, in Spanish with subtitles. It all seems rather meaningless.
When we finally get to meet and follow one of the officers, her narration tends to drone on. At times that narration plays over random scenes; at other times she speaks the words to another person in the film. Eventually, at the half-hour mark, it becomes evident that this exercise seems to be nothing more than a stylized episode of "Cops," only less real and with subtitles whizzing by. Nothing suggested that this was anything more than a routine profile of police officers doing their jobs, and the world isn't clamoring for more of those.
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