Doc Watch: Against All Odds

A MOST BEAUTIFUL THING (B+) - This moving documentary is full of heart and positivity as it revisits alums of Chicago high schools all-black rowing team from the late '90s and reunites them in the present day. This succeeds on the personality and relatability of its cast of men who survived the city's dangerous West Side and lived to tell the tale.

Director Mary Mazzio ("I Am Jane Doe") doesn't overreach but instead lets the men tell their story. She doesn't lean on any one of them in particular, but each develops a personality over the course of an hour and a half. Almost all of them tell tales of abuse, drug-addicted mothers or serious brushes with the law in the 20-year interim since their improbable emergence in the mostly white sport of rowing.

Mazzio, with writing help from Robert Fitzgerald and Alec Sokolow, has Common as narrator and a stable of producers that includes some NBA royalty and the Winklevoss twins from Facebook infamy. Visually, she is blessed with a slice of bucolic beauty on Chicago's West Side, with the iconic skyline as a backdrop.

The first half of the film is the strongest, because it focuses on the origin story. Things deflate a bit in the second half as the film turns into a reunion story wherein the men resume training for another go in the boat. While this feels like a forced premise, it pays off in the end, because we really get to know the men better, in spite of the gimmick. It all builds to an emotional ending featuring a round-robin reading of Maya Angelou's "And Still I Rise."

WHAT WE LEFT UNFINISHED (C+) - This is an obscure take on an obscure subject. Five lost/unfinished films from the communist era of Afghanistan between 1978 to 1991 get their day in the sun. Mariam Ghani curates the footage and puts it in perspective with the present-day help of some of the filmmakers and actors.

Ghani adds a bit of historical perspective of the time between the monarchy and the Taliban -- including the 10-year Soviet occupation -- but how can you fully convey the convoluted political structure of Afghanistan at the time? The old filmmaking seems impossibly crude, though the effort is somewhat impressive, considering the obstacles that were faced and the lack of a cinematic foundation. It is difficult to get excited about the lost films of Afghanistan's checkered past.

A few tidbits stand out. One filmmaker explains how live ammunition was used on the set of his film because blanks simply were not available; they simply relied on the skills of the marksmen to miss their target while looking like they hit it. No reports of accidental deaths are reported.

RIP, Peter Bogdanovich

 In memory of the director (and psychiatrist to the psychiatrist on "The Sopranos"), who died last month at 82, we catch up with two of his films.

WHAT'S UP, DOC? (1972) (B+) - We travel back nearly 50 years to catch up with a farce that itself turns back time by about 40 years to the golden era of screwball comedies. Insulated from criticism over the movie's broad humor and silly gags, Bogdanovich has a lot of fun, mostly riding the charisma of his star, Barbra Streisand. Unfortunately, he also is saddled with Ryan O'Neal who has no ear for the goofy nerd he is supposed to play against type.

This is the director's follow-up to his breakthrough, "The Last Picture Show," and "What's Up, Doc," so bright and delirious, can't be further afield from that previous downer. Bogdanovich was in the middle of a fantastic three-picture run, culminating the following year in "Paper Moon," which would meld elements of "Last Picture" and "Doc."

The plot here is not much more sophisticated than an episode of "Get Smart." Four identical-looking pieces of luggage in the hands of four people get scrambled up in a hunt for top-secret documents and precious jewels. Streisand shows up as Judy in a meet-cute with Howard, O'Neal's dorky music anthropologist who is on a trip to San Francisco with his hen-pecking fiance, Eunice, played by Madeline Kahn in her feature debut. 

Streisand, in just her fifth film, bursts forth with a glow and confidence that carries the production via her feline physicality and her energetic line readings, often borrowing from broad Borscht Belt deliveries. She is tan and mischievous and fearless. O'Neal, however, is adrift, desperately trying but failing to wring true comedic juice out his flat character. Turns out, it takes a lot of talent to play a straight man, and O'Neal is merely a dud. 

But there are plenty of supporting characters who rise to the occasion and take up Bognanovich's challenge to let the silliness ring out in this goofy game of musical bags. Kenneth Mars ("The Producers") is giddy as Howard's academic rival; Austin Pendleton mugs cleverly as the holder of a coveted research grant; John Hillerman shines in a cameo as a hotel manager; and Liam Dunn is giddy as a harried judge trying to sort everything out in the end.

THEY ALL LAUGHED (1981) (D+/incomplete) - It is difficult to figure out the point of this film 30 minutes in, besides Bogdanovich's burning need to announce to the world that he -- and the male avatars he creates for his movies -- are not nerds but in fact are irresistible to young beautiful women. So there, critics!

It's not the passage of years that makes this movie seem like an anachronism. You get the sense that it was curdled before it first hit the screen. We gave it the ol' college try, lasting about an hour, waiting in vain for any of this to make sense. For some reason (it was never clear to me), Ben Gazzara and John Ritter are private eyes (glorified stalkers) each following a married woman that they presumable eventually (not quite in the first hour) will fall head over heels in love with -- Ritter literally, as he was known to do, at a roller disco, in pursuit of Dorothy Stratten (the tragic Playmate girlfriend of Bogdanovich's who would be brutally killed by her ex before the movie was released). 

Not only is Stratten propped up as a goddess to be ogled, but we also get a curly-haired middle-aged Audrey Hepburn, who doesn't speak until the second half of the film, and yet another slice of cheesecake, Patti Hansen, as a wise-cracking cabbie named Sam -- a character you would only find in a bad movie -- before she high-tailed it out of Hollywood to marry Keith Richards and breed more models. 

Gazzara's character is irresistible to every woman he passes (in this alternate universe), and Ritter dons Bognanovich's signature eyeglass frames in case it wouldn't be clear to the viewer than he is the writer-director's stand-in (and thus irresistible to not only Stratten but others). Colleen Camp plays a country singer (the soundtrack is a cacophony of the Frank Sinatra style and the Johnny Cash school, and all of it sticks out like a sore thumb), and her portrayal is an insufferable slog of line-readings. It's the kind of movie where her character uses Ritter's character's name (Charles) in literally every sentence she utters to him, in some sort of homage to those old screwball comedies -- or perhaps just a result of Bogdanovich's sloppiness that no one was bold enough to point out or correct. It was at that point I gave up.

BONUS TRACK

See also our review of "Paper Moon," here.

New to the Queue

 ... lost in a reverie of ennui ...

From Belgium, a harrowing tale of a little brother and sister navigating the pitfalls of school life, the debut feature, "Playground."

Steven Soderbergh is back with a dark techno-thriller involving a Siri-type device, "Kimi."

A quirky, surreal exploration of dreams, "Strawberry Mansion."

A droll spoof of those '70s Mystery Movies of the Week, "Inspector Ike."

Dammit, we keep falling for that trailer for Channing Tatum's film about a war veteran and a service animal, "Dog."

Claire Denis is back with Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon for a triangulated melodrama, "Fire."

The Immigrant Experience

 A pair of entries from Steve McQueen's series of "Small Axe" films, focusing on the experiences of West Indian immigrants in England from the 1960s to the '80s.

LOVERS ROCK (A-minus) - A reverie about one night in the lives of young party-goers, this qualifies as a true slice of life, or even just a vivid memory from the 1970s. Steve McQueen gets his fingernails dirty re-creating a neighborhood house party, from the cooking of the food and the setting up of the turntables and amps to the arrival of the crowd stomping and swaying to the songs we now call dusties.

We experience this through the eyes of Amarah-Jae St. Aubin as Martha, who has a meet-cute with Franklyn (Michael Ward) that leads to the inevitable slow-dance and the threat of staying out till dawn. (For whatever reason, Martha had to sneak out of her house.) Circulating around them are a vague cast of characters who are either spinning music, tearing up the dance floor or making their move on the opposite sex. 

With this and "Red, White and Blue," I had to use subtitles to keep up with the patois of the West Indian immigrants, and even then some of the jargon went over my head. But that's not really a flaw. This film, barely longer than an hour, is about mood and style. The swirl of sensations culminates in the middle of the film when the crowd grinds of an obscure R&B classic "Silly Games," singing along with fervor as the recording eventually cuts out but the singing continues a cappella for minutes, until we can hear shoes scraping on the wood floor, as if no one wants the song or the night to ever end. You could say the same about the movie itself.

RED, WHITE AND BLUE (B) - McQueen didn't interest us with "Hunger" in 2008, and we walked out of his brutal "12 Years a Slave," but, as indicated above, he has found a groove and a distinct voice mining the fertile period of his youth. Here he is blessed with John Boyega ("Star Wars") as Leroy Logan, a young immigrant in London who vows to respond to police mistreatment of his people by becoming a cop himself. This comes as an outrage to his father, Ken (a stern Steve Toussaint), who recently got an undue roughing up from the men in blue (and who is pursuing the matter in court). 

Leroy excels at the academy, but once on the beat, he and an East Asian rookie experience racist taunts and cold shoulders from the overwhelmingly white crew, while also drawing sneers from those in the immigrant community who consider the men sell-outs to the system. Leroy, determined to plant the seed of change (while also providing for his wife and baby), perseveres, and McQueen strips the stories to simple essentials, as if producing an "Afterschool Special."

Leroy is practical, whereas his father is hard-headed and prideful. Will the son engender a generational shift that will change British society? We don't have enough time here for such a sweeping dramatic wringing out of history. Instead, we get an earnest portrayal of one man trying to make a difference. This one is a little flat, but it's effective.

BONUS TRACKS

"Lovers Rock" seethes with deep cuts from someone's R&B and dub collections. A central scene involves "Silly Games" by Janet Kay:

And then there is the mesmerizing "More Warning" from King Tubby & the Aggrovators:

Doc Watch: Domestic Warfare

 

ATTICA (B+) - The first three-quarters of this two-hour documentary -- about the September 1971 inmate uprising at the infamous prison in upstate New York -- might lull you into thinking that this is a fairly rose-colored nostalgia trip. Don't be fooled. Whether intentional or not, the film can lure you into letting your guard down. If you do so, you might not be prepared for the horrific resolution to the conflict.

Don't go googling the event. Watch these two hours and let it unfold. The talented Stanley Nelson --  with some solid work under his belt, including 2015's "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution"; a 2006 documentary about the Jim Jones cult; and recent pieces on the Tulsa race riots and the crack cocaine epidemic -- pairs with newcomer Traci Curry to create time capsule of unrest in the prison-industrial complex of Nixon's America.

The filmmakers assemble some of the men who survived the crisis, along with family members of inmates and guards who died when authorities finally stormed the prison to end the standoff. Like with his "Black Panthers" retrospective, Nelson refuses to sugarcoat events or glorify the prisoners as heroes standing up to the Man. 

There certainly are some villains here. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, heard in telephone recordings sucking up to President Nixon during the standoff, uses the crisis to burnish his law-and-order bona fides and takes a hard-line stance, refusing to give an inch to the rioters. The prisoners who survived are clear-eyed about the protest against inhumane conditions at the time. Extensive file footage from inside the prison shows inmates celebrating this sliver of freedom and power, even if they knew at the time that it probably would not end well. We get extensive footage of the ambassadors, like attorney William Kuntsler, who tried to negotiate a peaceful settlement (a release of hostage guards and immunity for the death of one guard who died early on), and TV reporter John Johnson, who was on the front lines for most of those four days of tense developments.

And then comes the bloodbath. The filmmakers are not shy about showing dead bodies or the humiliation of the survivors who were forced to crawl naked through filth back to their cells. It is shocking but necessary. In some ways we've come a long way since those times, but in other ways, law enforcement's brutal crackdown on a group of men, mostly black and Puerto Rican, feels eerily familiar more than 50 years later. The first half of this film could have been streamlined, but the storytelling overall remains powerful.

BONUS TRACKS

Speaking of the rancor of generational and racial divides from 50+ years ago, HBO is providing a home for a trove of raw footage from turbulent Chicago in the late 1960s.  The short films come courtesy of the Chicago Film Archives. Most of the films deal with the riots at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention, including a stunning reminder of how brutal the Chicago police pounded on demonstrators.

The first short film I sampled, 8 minutes long, was "Cicero March." Like the others, there is no narration, just crude footage shot with handheld cameras picking up scraps of dialogue and ambient noise. It is a snippet of a civil rights march cutting through the notoriously racist near-west suburb of Cicero, just a stone's throw from where I grew up (and where I started my journalism career in 1986).  

The Democratic Convention series includes the 11-minute "Law and Order vs. Dissent," which features news conferences by Mayor Daley (barely able to read a simple statement) and the spokesman for the Police Department, who comes out of the blocks with a chip on his shoulder, apparently convinced that his hard-ass demeanor and his demeaning of "communists" and "revolutionaries" will be eaten up across America's heartland. By contrast, "A Right to Dissent" gives us 9 minutes of mostly David Dellinger and Rennie Davis meeting the fairly hostile press from the left side.  "Social Confrontation" (11 minutes) includes some classic footage from the floor of the convention, such as Abraham Ribicoff's denunciation of Mayor Daley's "gestapo" tactics.

"Black Moderates and Black Militants" is a 9-minute conversation between a Chicago Black Panther leader and a middle-age teacher, as Bobby Rush (only this year stepping down as a Congressman from the South Side after 30 years) mostly lurks in the background. It's not the polemics that hit home so much as the earnest effort on both sides to have a dialogue, which now seems downright quaint.

Some of all of the above makes up the 75-minute "American Revolution 2," melding the stories of the Black Panthers and the Yippies into one narrative.  You can close out the decade (December 1969) with the powerful full-length documentary "The Murder of Fred Hampton."

Noir Chronicles: Survival of the Fittest

 

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH (B) - Joel Coen (taking a break from brother Ethan) plays with shadows and light in his spare, faithful rendition of the Shakespeare tragedy, coasting a bit on the backs of his impressive stars, Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as the lord and lady of Dunsinane. There is plenty of gloom and drudgery in Coen's black-and-white depiction that looks like could have aired on "Playhouse 90" in 1958.

Screeching birds and an eerie hag open the proceedings heavy with premonition. Coen has a few cool camera tricks up his sleeves, especially war-hero's Macbeth's initial meeting with a witch who splits into three images. Washington still brings a modern everyman sensibility to 400-year role, and McDormand avidly chews her lines as the scheming wife. Stephen Root pops up in a cameo as the frantic Porter, and while I barely understood a word he spewed, his appearance was a hoot. 

This doesn't have the zip or narrative discipline of Joss Whedon's tart "Much Ado About Nothing" from 2012 (shot in a snappier black-and-white). But it gets the job done and might even leave you a bit jangled by the end.

EDGE OF THE CITY (1957) (A-minus) - This debut big-screen feature from Martin Ritt ("Hud," "Norma Rae") has a jangly, jazzy feel to it, as he juggles three fine lead performances in a tale of racial animosity and brotherhood. Sidney Poitier is loose-limbed and charming as Tommy, a loading-dock foreman who befriends a troubled newcomer on the run from the law. John Cassavettes, giving off a strong Travolta vibe, plays Axel Nordmann, the outlaw who is under the thumb of the mobbed up foreman who got him the stevedore job, racist Charlie, played with blue-collar swagger by Jack Warden.

It's refreshing to see Poitier's character exude confidence and flaunt a loving nuclear family as he seeks genuine friendship with Axel, who is shy around women, flinty at work, and emotionally impaired. The two actors have an improv ease with each other. Tommy encourages Axel to open up, which only make Axel more vulnerable when the inevitable reckoning comes. That reckoning involves a racially motivated violent act by Charlie, and Axel will be put to the test, required to choose between his loyalty to a friend and self-preservation, namely avoiding 20 years in a federal penitentiary.

Ruby Dee is critical as Tommy's loving but frustrated wife. In less than 90 minutes, Ritt, showing an eye and ear for the cadences of working-class life, builds a potboiler to a series of compelling crescendos that can leave a viewer drained by the final tragic images.

ROOM AT THE TOP (1959) (B+) - This smart, moody love triangle stars Laurence Harvey as an ambitious small-town transplant looking to work his way to the top but tripping over an entanglement with two different women. Harvey's Joe Lampton is quite the lecherous wolf who feels right at home in the corporate world's sexist culture. He joins a theater troupe in order to pursue Susan (Heather Sears), the daughter of a captain of industry, but he falls hard instead for Alice, an older married woman played with a perpetual smolder by Simone Signoret. 

Bold for its day, the film by journeyman director Jack Clayton explores such issues as adultery, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and class distinctions. Glum Joe struggles to overcome his bumpkin roots and the fact that his parents were killed in a bombing during World War II; he wallows in anguish when he revisits the rubble. Signoret and her modern look jolt this production above the cliches of its day and make the film seem less dated. A key scene of one of the breakups between Joe and Alice takes a petty disagreement and blows it out of proportion in a thoughtful, believable manner that will be familiar to any couple of any era.

At times this feels like a beta-test version of "The Graduate," and it continually manages to rise above conventions. With Harvey and Signoret carrying the load, this one never feels like it is overstaying its welcome in a nearly two-hour run.

BONUS TRACK

The corny trailer for "Edge of the City":

Doc Watch: A Way With Words

 

THE ONE AND ONLY DICK GREGORY (B) - The family of the stand-up comic, civil rights activist and healthy-living guru backs this loving overview of the life of Dick Gregory. The archival footage is fascinating, as we watch him break big in Chicago in the late 1950s and early '60s. Gregory is an engaging figure, with a stand-up style that influenced Dave Chappelle, who appears here as a talking head alongside other modern comics like Chris Rock, Wanda Sykes and Kevin Hart.

The film is thorough in its chronicle of Gregory's awakening of conscious around 1963 and The Rev. Martin Luther King's March on Washington. Gregory was patently outspoken (his first autobiography, from 1964 was titled with a racial epithet), and he used fasting as a method of drawing attention to causes. He was a noted vegan who sought to improve Americans' diet to fend off obesity and diabetes. (Alas, he didn't succeed.)

Andre Gaines, debuting as a writer-director, does a workmanlike job juggling the video archives with current interviews, including Gregory's wife and a few of his kids, plus the widow of Medgar Evers, Myrlie. The visuals, at least in the first 15 minutes, can be dizzying and distracting, with needless razzle-dazzle added to the old black-and-white footage. While not a hagiography, it is rather protective of its subject, and while some of Gregory's faults are mentioned, you might get the feeling that a few things are glossed over. Still, this is a valuable biography that does justice to a truly driven performer and activist, never forgetting to remind us how funny Gregory was.

BLACK WAX (1983) (B) - This documentary from blues archivist Robert Mugge spends time with self-proclaimed "bluesologist" Gil Scott-Heron, whose jazzy compositions presaged rap. This is a choppy visit with the musician, alternating between his performances and musings in concert with a separate traipse through Washington, D.C., neighborhoods, with Scott-Heron offering philosophical musings in opposition to the Reaganism of the day.

The music in concert has a heavily jazz tilt. Highlights include "Waiting for the Axe to Fall" and "Johannesburg." Scott-Heron traipses through a cheesy museum of American history, having fun mocking poorly constructed replicas of presidents like Nixon and Ford. He was a key political voice for urban America, and many of his takes would not seem out of place in our current climate, which is a sad commentary. Here, the music and the monologues have a simple power to them, with Scott-Heron sharp and insightful, before drugs would drag down his career and his life.

BONUS TRACK

Gil Scott-Heron with "B Movie," his diatribe about Ronald Ray Gun:

Moral Ambiguities

 A couple of missed opportunities ...

A HERO (B+) - No good deed goes unpunished. This is the moral of Asghar Farhadi's brilliantly intricate morality play about an inmate on furlough who comes across a bag of gold coins and eventually decides to give it back.

A second viewing might raise the grade, but as good as this story was, it occasionally crossed the line from meticulously plotted to confusing. The dialogue is quick (and hard to read via subtitles) and there are a lot of characters to keep track of; during the climax, one character returns from early in the film and I frankly couldn't remember exactly what his connection to everything was. 

Farhadi returns to the bumblings of the bureaucratic state in Iran that he explored in his earlier masterpiece, "A Separation," a film that echoes often here. Rahim (Amir Jadidi) plots with his fiancee (Sahar Goldust) when a handbag containing 17 gold coins comes into her possession (I was never sure how that happened). While on a weekend leave from prison -- where he is serving time for failing to pay a business debt -- he meets up with his fiancee to cash out the coins and pay off about half his debt, which would spring him from prison. But he develops second thoughts, and given time, he decides instead to do the right thing and seek out the owner of the handbag. 

Ironically, that's where his problems start. Jadidi is quietly effective in the lead role. Rahim is accused of having a hangdog look, and his sly smile can appear both innocent and mischievous at the same time. His frustration is palpable as his attempt at a simple good deed begins to boomerang and backfire, until he starts to look more like a villain than a hero. To explain more would ruin the intricate nesting that Farhadi relies on here to build momentum toward a damning conclusion. It's difficult to discern whether the writer-director is getting too clever for his own good, or if I wasn't patient enough to let him work his magic. Either way, this is still a thoroughly satisfying movie.

THE LOST DAUGHTER (B) - I'm sure this story of inter-generational feminine warfare means a great deal to Maggie Gyllenhaal, but her debut as a writer-director fails to communicate the gravity of the story clearly and forcefully enough. Throughout its two-hour running time, this slow-burn of a film constantly feels like it is going to break out into full-blown suspense, but it never does.

Three fine actresses show up ready to give it their all, but none of their storylines feels weighty enough to carry the film. Olivia Coleman is Leda, an academic who wants to have a quiet holiday on a Greek island. Dakota Johnson's Nina is part of an extended Greek-American family that big-foots the beach, leading Leda to seek petty revenge against them. Jessie Buckley, showing the most promise here, plays a young version of Leda, struggling to raise two high-energy girls while pursuing her academic future and falling into the clutches of a suave older professor (a bushy-bearded Peter Sarsgaard). 

Leda and Nina connect through their marital/parental ennui. But their stories don't quite click, and the Young Leda backstory competes too much with the present day. So little happens between Leda and Nina (besides the brief disappearance of Nina's daughter and the girl's doll) that Buckley's flashback scenes become more appealing but still elusive. You wonder what a whole movie about Young Leda would be like.

Leda's petty actions on the Greek island are fascinating at first -- what is motivating her, you wonder -- but the repetition can get tedious. The three women are awfully appealing (as is Dagmara Dominczyk as Nina's sister(in-law?)) but too often the story just sits on the screen. Gyllenhaal finds interesting ways to visualize the frustrations and longings of mothers -- those insights, often conveyed with glances and layered with interesting soundtrack choices, are the best part of the movie -- but you just wish that the narrative (based on a novel by Elena Ferrante) could snap out of its own doldrums. 

BONUS TRACK

Leda, driving along the open road as if she doesn't have a care (spoiler alert: she does), sings along to the car stereo to Talking Heads' "People Like Us":

New to the Queue

 ... no end in sight ...

A story of a woman's unnatural obsession with a man, "A Simple Passion."

A documentary that jumps off from a lecture series, "Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America."

Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen follows up "The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki" with a tale of a woman's journey of self-discovery, "Compartment No. 6."

A debut film centered around a teenage girl coping with the aftermath of a shooting at her school, "The Fallout."

Tim Roth (with an assist from Charlotte Gainsbourg) does a slow burn in Acapulco in "Sundown."

A daughter's perspective of her troubled punk-rock mother, "Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliche."

From Joachim Trier ("Oslo, August 31st," "Louder Than Bombs"), a woman juggles relationships and seeks her path forward in "The Worst Person in the World." 

From Chad, a follow-up to "A Screaming Man," the story of a mother and her pregnant teen daughter, "Lingui, the Sacred Bonds."