Best Documentary - The Long List Is Here

AMPAS has narrowed the Best Documentary Feature competition. If not by much. The long list from which they'll choose 15 or so finalists which will then become 5 nominees in January has arrived. It's double the size of what the Foreign committees have to get through each year but there's more members voting. The seventeen titles in bold we've already reviewed so click away to your docu-loving delight, won't you?

Which films are you rooting for or eager to see? 

A-C
Above and Beyond. All Things Must Pass, Amy, The Armor of Light, Ballet 422, Batkid Begins, Becoming Bulletproof, Being Evel, Beltracchi – The Art of Forgery, Best of Enemies, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Bolshoi Babylon, Brand: A Second Coming, A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story, Call Me Lucky, Cartel Land, Censored Voices, Champs, CodeGirl, Coming Home

D-F
Dark Horse, Deli Man, Dior and I, The Diplomat, (Dis)Honesty – The Truth about Lies, Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll, Dreamcatcher, dream/killer, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, Eating Happiness, Every Last Child, Evidence of Harm, Farewell to Hollywood, Finders Keepers, The Forecaster, Frame by Frame

G-J
Gardeners of Eden, A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile, Godspeed: The Story of Page Jones, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, He Named Me Malala, Heart of a Dog, Hitchcock/Truffaut, How to Change the World, Human, The Hunting Ground, I Am Chris Farley, In Jackson Heights, In My Father’s House, India’s Daughter, Ingrid Bergman – In Her Own Words, Iraqi Odyssey, Iris, Janis: Little Girl Blue

K-N
Karski & the Lords of Humanity, Killing Them Safely, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, Lambert & Stamp, A Lego Brickumentary, Listen to Me Marlon, Live from New York!, The Look of Silence, Meet the Patels, Meru, The Mind of Mark DeFriest, Misery Loves Comedy, Monkey Kingdom, A Murder in the Park, My Italian Secret, My Voice, My Life, 1971

O-R
Of Men and War, One Cut, One Life, Only the Dead See the End of War, The Outrageous Sophie Tucker, Peace Officer, The Pearl Button, Pink & Blue: Colors of Hereditary Cancer, Poached, Polyfaces, The Prime Ministers: Soldiers and Peacemakers, Prophet’s Prey, Racing Extinction, The Resurrection of Jake the Snake, Ride the Thunder – A Vietnam War Story of Victory & Betrayal, Rosenwald, The Russian Woodpecker

S
Searching for Home: Coming Back from War, Seeds of Time, Sembene!, The Seven Five, Seymour: An Introduction, Sherpa, A Sinner in Mecca, Something Better to Come, Song from the Forest, Song of Lahore, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, Stray Dog, Sunshine Superman, Sweet Micky for President

T-Z
Tab Hunter Confidential, The Tainted Veil, Tap World, (T)error, Thao’s Library, Those Who Feel the Fire Burning, 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets, The Touch of an Angel, TransFatty Lives, The True Cost, Twinsters, Very Semi-Serious: A Partially Thorough Portrait of New Yorker Cartoonists, The Wanted 18 (also on the Foreign Submissions List), We Are Many, We Come as Friends, We Were Not Just…Bicycle Thieves. Neorealism, Welcome to Leith, What Happened, Miss Simone?, What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy, Where to Invade Next, Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, and The Wolfpack

Noticeable Absences 
Where is Silvered Water: Syrian Self-Portrait? When it wasn't on the long list last year we assumed it had arrived too late and would be there this year. Perhaps we'll see them next year -- it's difficult to understand the eligibility with Oscar's doc branch - but missing are: the Nora Ephron doc Everything is Copy, the Orry-Kelly costume design doc Women He's Undressed, 

DVD/Blu-ray: Choose a Dinosaur, Reenact a Movie

It's that time of the week again. New DVDs and Blurays are out tomorrow which means it's time for a poll. Woohoo. Your answers are totally binding. We begin with the big one, Jurassic World.

Choose your Jurassic death

1. Swallowed by a Mosasaurus

2. Snatched by a Pteranodon

3. Hunted by Indominus Rex & Velociraptors

Poll Maker

 

More new releases / Questions for the comments...

Going Clear: Scientology & The Prison of Belief in which Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney takes on the Church of Scientology, its cadre of lawyers and imprisoned celebrities.
Q 1: Which famous Scientologist do you think is the actual craziest person IRL: Cruise, Travolta, or Kirstie Alley? 

Paper Towns after the success of Fault in Our Stars everything John Green is going to get greenlit. 
Q 2: Cara Delevigne. Yay or Nay?

Testament of Youth Alicia Vikander and Kit Harrington fall in love & despair during World War I. (Reviewish)
Q 3: Do you think Vikander called up Chastain for advice on how to survive a 7 film year?

The Wolfpack the popular documentary about a group of homeschooled brothers who learned about the outside world only from the movies. (Review)
Q 4: Which movie could you reenact/quote from heart?

Z for Zachariah the apocalypse is never going out of style at the movies. Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Chris Pine might be the only people left on earth. Good thing that when they repopulate the Earth all humans will be super duper beautiful moving forward. (Review)
Q 5: Which two movie stars would you be okay with as the last two people with you on Earth?

Peaky Blinders: Season 1 1920s set crime drama with Helen McRory, Cillian Murphy and Sam Neill
Q 6: If you've seen it is it worth our time? 

NYFF: In Jackson Heights

Manuel here visiting one of my favorite New York City neighborhoods with a great guide by my side, the great Frederick Wiseman in his new doc which screened as part of the New York Film Festival.

Last summer, the day before Colombia played its World Cup match against Brazil, I was set to meet some friends in Jackson Heights to grab some hot dogs (such good hot dogs!) and go out to some of the gay clubs around Roosevelt Avenue. Little did I know Frederick Wiseman was busy filming In Jackson Heights right around the same time: framed by the World Cup and ending with the July 4th fireworks, it seems totally plausible he was shooting that very same day!

I share this anecdote because more than anything else, Wiseman’s film feels like a truly immersive visit to this Queens neighborhood. [More...]

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NYFF: Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next

Manuel here reporting from the New York Film Festival, where Michael Moore’s latest documentary had its first American screening after a bow at TIFF last month.

Moore’s Where to Invade Next is born out of the same sense of anger and despair that characterizes his earlier docs, but as he noted himself in yesterday’s press conference, he found a way to funnel that anger in a more productive way. Indeed, while the opening images (which juxtapose anti-terrorism presidential sound-bites with horrific national images from Ferguson and Sandy Hook) feel driven by an unwavering anger at the current state of US affairs, what follows is a rather optimistic portrait of the potential for change, presented, of course, with the irreverent wit that Moore epitomizes.

Tasked with “invading” countries by himself, Moore visits various European countries in hopes of, as he says, being able to “pick the flowers, not the weeds”: finding, that is, the best ideas about public policy that are thriving in other countries in hopes to steal them, bring them back to America, and watch them be implemented. The entire premise was a way, Moore explained, to make a documentary about the United States without shooting a single frame in the United States. Every hot button issue you can think of, from police brutality to women’s reproductive health, from the industrial prison complex to school lunches, from labor regulations to women’s equality, is tackled head on from the outside in. He travels to Italy to learn about their paid vacation policy (8 weeks!). He travels to Norway to visit their maximum security prison (where inmates carry the keys to their cells which come equipped with TVs, and who can use the state of the art recording studio or the expansive library at their leisure). He travels to Tunisia (an Islamic state, let’s remember) to visit their women’s health centers where abortions have been legal since the 1970s and learn how riots by women toppled a conservative government that hoped to repeal those female rights and protections. And so on, and so forth, talking to school cafeteria chefs, factory workers, multinational CEOs, and policemen, from Portugal, Iceland, France, Germany and Norway.

“I am American. I live in a great country, built on genocide and grown on the backs of slaves.” - Moore, candidly summing up what he sees so few jingoistic Americans acknowledging.

Each “idea” he hopes to take back after his invasion is at its core, both impossibly simple and also similarly absurd: five months paid maternity leave? sex-ed that isn’t based on abstinence? school lunches that value health over pizza and fries? teachers who value their students’ happiness over standardized tests? a prison where guards carry no guns and inmates have access to kitchen knives? a policy that decriminalizes drug possession? But the ultimate message is utopian in its simplicity: every one of these “flowers” he picked began with small gestures that, like the hammers and chisels that led to the physical dismantling of the Berlin Wall (which Moore witnessed first-hand in 1989 and which alongside the Mandela election helped cement his idea that things can change seemingly overnight), can make all the difference. They also continually hint at words and values that seldom find themselves in American political rhetoric: happiness, curiosity, community, human dignity. That the film ends in a powerful call for women’s equality, suggesting in no uncertain terms that having women in power is a necessary part of political and cultural progress, is perhaps the film’s most surprising element. (Do stay through the end of the credits to find Moore riffing beautifully off of Marvel’s most emulated trademark: the post-credits sequence).

How you feel about the film and its message will no doubt depend on your own political affiliations. Even as the audience at my screening clapped rapturously as the credits rolled, suggesting perhaps Moore was merely preaching to a converted choir that could wave away the tricky logistics that would make these ideas hard to implement wholesale in these shores, I could pick out snippets of dialogue that suggested this choir was a tad more cynical than Moore anticipated: “I mean, it’s so reductive, really.” “Well, but none of that will work here.” “I wish it were that easy!” Where to Invade Next is, in that, classic Moore: a conversation starter that will be greeted with equal number of wolf-whistles as exasperated sighs.

Check out the teaser for it below:

Where to Invade Next played Saturday October 3rd at the NYFF, and while concrete release date plans or distribution are up in the air, Moore’ doc is bound to open wide sometime soon.

HBO’s LGBT History: Be Like Others (2008)

Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions.

Last week we looked at Bernard and Doris, which gave us a chance to wax on about two underrated actors, Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes. This week, we look abroad as we pause to think about Tanaz Eshaghian’s documentary Be Like Others (also known as Transsexual in Iran). More...

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