So Many Docs, So Little Time - Full Frame 2022: Part 2

THE MARTHA MITCHELL EFFECT (Dirs. Anne Alvergue, and Debra McClutchy)

So many documentaries, so little time. I crammed as many doc viewings as I could in the four day window of the online offerings of the 25th Annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival around working shifts at two different jobs, and, of course, sleep. I was able to see some good ones (check out Part 1), but I was sorry I missed the winner of the Full Frame Grand Jury Award, Reid Davenport’s I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE, and the other award winners, Alejandro Alonso’s ABYSSAL, and Jannis Lenz’s SOLDAT AHMET, which won The Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award, and the The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Award respectively.

A prize-winning doc that I did catch was Timothée Corteggiani, and Nathalie Giraud’s THE SILENT SHORE (French title: LE SILENCIEUX RIVAGE) which scored The Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short. Running a swift 36-minutes, the film concerns famous fantasy author, Pierre Dubois, and his wife Aline’s quiet life living an idyllic yet haunted home and garden existence in Cartignies, a village in northern France. The couple recount the suicide of their daughter as they go about their days in their lush, often foggy settings, and the aura, and warmth of their resigned sentiment will likely remain in the minds of this film’s audience long after the last credits have faded. 

There always has to be at least one retro political doc in the roster at Full Frame, and this time it comes in the form of Anne Alvergue, and Debra McClutchy’s 40-minute short, THE MARTHA MITCHELL EFFECT. Mitchell was the loud-mouthed socialite wife of President Nixon’s Attorney General, who became an unlikely whistle-blower in the aftermath of the Watergate break-in in the early ‘70s. One of the burglars, James McCord, had been one of Mitchell’s bodyguards, which tipped her off that it had been an inside-job, so the cabinet wife blabbed about it over-time to the press leading to her being sequestered in a hotel room, injected with a tranquilizer, and held for four days to quiet her (one headline was “Who’s Needling Martha Mitchell?”).  

While the White House and the Republican Party did what they could to discredit her, there was a leftwing “Free Martha Mitchell” movement making itself known at the Democratic National Convention in 1972. Mitchell, known as “The Mouth of the South,” channeled her cause célèbre into a stint co-hosting The Mike Douglas Show, and stealing nearly every doc on Nixon and Watergate in the following decades with her outspoken soundbites. Alvergue and McClutchy wonderfully weave the archival footage into a supremely entertaining narrative, which organically mimes the material for key laugh lines.

 

Mitchell was memorably portrayed by Madeline Kahn in Oliver Stone’s 1995 biopic NIXON, and later this month, Julia Roberts will step into her shoes for the Starz series, Gaslit, so this doc could serve as a primer if its production company, Netflix, would give it a premiere date in time. Whenever TMME becomes available, folks should seek it out as its illustration of how someone who’s widely painted as being delusional, but later turns out to have been telling a crucial truth, makes Mitchell’s story so much more than just a funny footnote. 

Next up, Kevin Shaw’s LET THE LITTLE LIGHT SHINE shines a light on the fight to keep a high-performing predominately Black public elementary school, Chicago’s National Teachers Academy, from being replaced by a new gentrified high school in 2017. We get close up to the heated concerns of the students, and educators as they protest against the Chicago Public School system, and we watch as Isaac Castelaz gets in way over his head as the stressed-out NTA principal in the middle of it all (Castelaz gets frowned on by the board for wearing a “Black Students Matter” T-shirt at one point).

This professionally polished, and compelling film, the second doc I saw this fest about African American educational predicaments, has a lot of emotional drive in its conventionally stream-lined structure, and doesn’t waste any of its 86-minute screen-time in getting us to care about this community, and pull for these passionate people’s plight. The appearance of Chance the Rapper, an advocate for Chicago Schools through his foundation Social Works, certainly helps to power up the protests. Director Shaw has obviously learned well from documentarian great Steve James (HOOP DREAMS), with whom he worked with on America to Me (another Starz series), in making this inspirational crowd-pleaser. This is one that would’ve been great seeing with a packed Full Frame audience on the big screen. 

 

So that’s a few more docs from Full Frame 2022. I’ll wrap up the remaining films I saw at Full Frame 2022 in Part 3 so stay tuned.

 

More later…

Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2013: Day Two

The sun came out for the second day of Full Frame 2013, and so did masses of movie fans as attested by the long lines to the Carolina Theatre in Durham throughout the day. It’s late and I got to get up early for Day Three, so let’s get right to the documentaries I saw that screened today:

TAXIDERMISTS
(Dir. Nicole Triche, 2012)

As I tweeted earlier, Taxidermy has always weirded me out but after seeing TAXIDERMISTS ...well, it still weirds me out. Still, it's a good breezy 20 minute film that told me something I didn't know, that World Taxidermy Championships (WTC) are held every year. Durham film maker Triche's neatly edited succinct short doc puts forth interesting insights into a few of the competition's participants. If you don't get spooked by some of their work, that is.

FIGHT LIKE SOLDIERS, DIE LIKE CHILDREN
(Dir. Patrick Reed, 2012)

A moving portrait of Roméo Dallaire, a Canadian Senator and retired general who has made it his life's work to end the employment of child soldiers mainly in Africa. 

Based on Dallaire's book, “They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers,” the film features striking animation (produced by Together: Words+Pictures for Art and Culture) narrated by a former child soldier, and such stirring moments as when Dallaire visits a transit camp for former LRA abductees and notes: “These soldiers were killing machines, and abused, and indoctrinated, and seen every possible horror, and then they were there, back as children. Because the raw material of youth and positiveness was still there.” Highly recommended.

YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT
(Dir. Scott Calonico, 2012)

This 8 minute hoot and a half concerns recently declassified White House telephone tapes of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, with photographic and official diary enhancement. It's hilarious to hear LBJ's folkys gusto when talking with a clueless operator, or discussing his diet with his assistant.

OUR NIXON
(Dir. Penny Lane, 2012)

LBJ’s successor, Richard Milhous Nixon, gets a lot more screen time in this full-length doc constructed from over 500 reels of Super 8 home movies filmed by his top staff members (Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Deputy Assistant Dwight Chapin) that had been confiscated during the Watergate investigation and went unseen for 40 years.

Vintage news clips of Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and other late '60s to early '70s newscasters help the footage form a narrative, from the set-up of the Oval Office’s taping system to the dark downfall of the administration, and excerpts from those incendiary tapes give us some priceless Tricky Dick dialogue. I was into it, greatly enjoying all the glimpses behind the scenes (it felt like watching an evil version of The West Wing at times) however sloppy the filming, but other folks not as fascinated by the enigma that is Nixon might get bored.

MUSCLE SHOALS

(Dir. Greg ‘Freddy’ Camalier, 2012)

The legendary “Muscle Shoals Sound” gets its doc due in this rock, rhythm, and soul packed film that tells the story of two studios in the small Alabama town and the iconic artists who recorded there. First, there’s producer / songwriter / music publisher Rick Hall’s FAME (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) Studios, where Hall took elements of his tragedy filled life and turned them into hit songs, and then there’s the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio which was started by three of the Swampers, former members of FAME’s Rhythm Section.

Hall’s once trusted crew being enticed away by Jerry Wexler and leaving him meant that a war was on (in Hall’s words), but the doc never takes sides or tries to determine who won, but it doesn't need to when it has so many great anecdotes told by folks like Keith Richards (often ending sentences with a mumbled SLING BLADE-ish “Mhmmr”), Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge, Mick Jagger, Clarence Carter, and U2’s Bono, who waxes philosophically about the river being the source of the soulful country sound: “it’s like the songs came from the mud.” Musical documentary gold.

DOWNLOADED
(Dir. Alex Winter, 2013)

The final film for Friday was Alex Winter’s DOWNLOADED, which examines the downloading revolution through the story of Napster, the ill-fated file-sharing Internet service that was all the rage in 1999 to 2000. Winter, is best known for playing Bill in the 1989 cult classic BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (and a sequel and animated series), but he came to the subject via decades of directing music videos. 

Winter’s cutting and swift establishing shot skills are immediately apparent, and he engagingly covers the twists and turns of both a personal (mostly seen in the passion of Napster co-founder and developer Shawn Fanning), and a far-reaching narrative that asks good questions about how growing technology threatens the long running business models of the recording industry. Indeed Napster, at one point 80 million registered users strong, was taken down by über-expensive lawsuits, one that had co-founder Sean Parker (later of Facebook and Spotify) in trouble for using the dreaded words “pirated music” in an email.

As a former user of Napster, a lot of the film was a trip down memory lane with television clips (a lot of MTV when they actually had somewhat substantial news reports), old interfaces I’d forgotten, and Senate hearing footage (involving Lars Ulrich of Metallica, one of Napster’s biggest adversaries, but what made Winter’s doc ultra compelling is how he filled in so much fascinating information that I, and I’m sure many, hadn’t heard before. A production of VH1 Docs, DOWNLOADED is one of the finest films of the Festival, and one of the best documentaries about the Internet age that I’ve ever seen.

Whew! Another solid day of docs, especially those last two. But tomorrow's roster, which includes films about war photographer Tim Hetherington, songwriting icon Doc Pomus, and the infamous Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot, doesn't look too shabby.

Check back for coverage of Full Frame days three and four, and check out Day One if you haven't already.

More later...

FROST/NIXON: The Film Babble Blog Review

FROST/NIXON (Dir. Ron Howard, 2008)



Ron Howard’s adaptation of the Tony Award winning stage play moves briskly as it opens with a montage of early '70s archival footage and period news reports of the Watergate break-in leading to the first impeachment of a sitting President in history.

Seemingly derived from the sweeping intro to Oliver Stone’s JFK, this capsule of video and sound bites gives newcomers to this material ample back story while plunging those who lived through it back into the feeling and tone of the era.

Once that is established, it is summer 1977 - Ex President Richard M. Nixon, disgraced and in self imposed exile in his beach house in San Clemente, CA is approached by ambitious British broadcaster David Frost to make an expensive deal for a series of extended television interviews.

Nixon, portrayed grandly by Frank Langella, sees this as an opportunity to redeem himself in the public’s eye while Frost, given a quirky but still suave demeanor by Michael Sheen, sees opportunity of a different sort – a career breaking, star making spectacle sort, to be exact. Though it contains nothing but men (and a few women) talking in hotel rooms, cars, and the living room set where the interviews were conducted, this is compelling stuff from start to finish.

Paced like many boxing movies with back and forth training sessions up to the final round in the ring, the momentum never lags. Frost struggles to finance the endeavor, insulted by those who blow him off as a “talk show host” while still allowing time for a new love interest – Rebecca Hall (Vicky from Woody Allen’s VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA) who doesn’t have much to do except sit on the sidelines looking pretty.

Frost’s team includes Sam Rockwell as passionate anti-Nixon author James Reston Jr. and Oliver Platt as journalist Bob Zelnick who together provide considerable comic relief. Nixon’s corner is dominated by Kevin Bacon as Nixon’s fiercely over-protective post Presidential chief of staff, who both turns in one of his best performances while narrowing down the number degrees of separation between him and everybody else in show business. 

“Even Richard Nixon has got soul”, Neil Young once sang and the final third of this movie seems to suggest just that. First presented as a shady money grubbing player disguised as an elder statesman, Langella’s Nixon betrays hidden levels of dark conscience in his home stretch showdown with Frost which would make even Hunter S. Thompson tear up for the man.

If Langella isn’t nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award I’ll be royally shocked. 

Howard thankfully retained both Langella and Sheen, from the 2006 stage play written by Peter Morgan. Sheen, who had played British Prime Minister Tony Blair in THE QUEEN (also written by Morgan), has the definitive “deer caught in the headlights” look when first sitting down with Tricky Dick but over time assumes the prize fighter Rocky’s “eye of the tiger” – to bring the boxing analogy back into it.

FROST/NIXON is a tightly focused and deeply pleasing film, certainly one of Ron Howard’s best as director. Whether or not Nixon was redeemable or remorseful doesn’t matter; layered reflective takes on history like this make for the best art regardless (see Shakespeare).

More later...