Doc Corner: 'American Symphony' is a biography misfire

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

Director Matthew Heineman has made a name for himself covering warzones in narrative film (A Private War) and most prominently in documentary (City of Ghosts, Cartel Land). I don’t blame him for stepping back just this once and making a movie about a charming musician and his rise to zeitgeist prominence. The film is American Symphony about Jon Batiste, a soft lob of a tribute that somewhat perversely is the film that could very well win him an Academy Award. Even documentarians can follow the same tried-and-tested path. I just wish I liked it more.

Batiste is 37 years old. American Symphony doesn’t say this stat outright as far as I recall, but it goes to great pains to make the audience very well aware that he is some sort of wunderkind. A Juilliard graduate who landed a big break as bandleader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and then shocked people by winning four Grammy Awards including Album of the Year as well as an Oscar for the original score to Pixar animation Soul.

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Friday Awards Wrap-Up: Critics, Documentaries and Top Ten Fever!

by Cláudio Alves

Lily Gladstone started strong, but Emma Stone takes the lead in Best Actress this week.
Another week, another slew of critics awards and top 10s from some of the world's most prestigious film publications. Though Killers of the Flower Moon continues to lead the Best Picture race, it's not a consensus pick. Indeed, a wide variety of titles have taken top honors, making for an exciting season. Well, at least it's like that in the most important category. Da'Vine Joy Randolph continues to sweep the Supporting Actress prizes, having won every single one in the season so far, while Emma Stone has taken the lead in Best Actress over Lily Gladstone. The men's categories are more chaotic, while Nolan is ahead among directors. All in all, it's been a busy week…

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Review: "Your Fat Friend" Is a Sigh of Relief and a Necessary Reflection

by Cláudio Alves

Not to be indulging in self-pity, but I think it's fair to say that existing as a fat person in our world is a complicated affair. And I'm not talking about the physical realities of being fat. Instead, it's how people see and treat you that irks, how so much of our society is full of insidious anti-fat bias, from the doctor's office to pop culture, from total strangers to those who call themselves your friends. Social codes so often teach us to conflate fatness with moral rot, laziness, stupidity, the worst of humankind, and something worthy of disgust. Feeling unlovable, inward hate is the inevitable endpoint. What's worse is that when you try to call attention to it, you're often met with euphemistic justifications or treated as if what you're saying is nonsense.

Even those who putatively sympathize can be doing more harm than good, confusing what they feel for empathy when it's pity. Look no further than last year's The Whale, an odious work that proposed a humanizing view of fatness by reveling in its assumed tragedy. And yet, many people I respect loved it, expounding about its "merits" in ways that had me question what they must think when they gaze upon my person. Well, they were not alone, seeing as that trash won two Oscars. To them and others, I'd like to propose Jeanie Finlay's Your Fat Friend as a necessary watch. While not a perfect documentary, seeing it felt like releasing a breath I didn't know I was holding…

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168 Documentaries to Compete for the Oscar

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

The Academy has announced the long (long, very long) list for this year’s Best Documentary Feature category. 168 titles have qualified for members of the doc branch to whittle down to a 15-wide shortlist and then a nominated five. That figure is higher than last year, which had 144 eligible titles and which culminated in a win for Daniel Roher’s Navalny. 

If you were to ask me right now what titles I expect to find on this year’s shortlist, I might say the following: Against the Tide (Sarvnik Kaur), American Symphony (Matthew Heineman), Anonymous Sister (Jamie Boyle), The Eternal Memory (Maite Alberdi), Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania), Lakota Nation vs United States (Laura Tomaselli, Jesse Short Bull), Little Richard: I Am Everything (Lisa Cortés), The Mission (Jesse Moss, Amanda McBaine), Occupied City (Steve McQueen), Silver Dollar Road (Raoul Peck), Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Anna Hints), A Still Small Voice (Luke Lorentzen), Still: A Michael J Fox Movie (Davis Guggenheim), To Kill a Tiger (Nisha Pahuja) and 20 Days in Mariupol (Mstyslav Chernov). But the whims of this branch can change on a dime, so we won’t know until the shortlists announcements later this month.

You can scroll through the entire list below beginning with After Sherman through to Your Fat Friend. I have linked to reviews of titles where we have them, but also included ten short capsules for other titles that I have seen and been unfortunately lax in actually writing about.

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An AI Biopic? No, Thank You!

by Cláudio Alves

Warner has released a proof of concept image showing what the animation will look like.

With the SAG strike over and a new three-year contract in sight for actors, it felt like we could all breathe a sigh of relief over the current Hollywood AI takeover. Not forever, but a temporary reprieve nevertheless. Well, guess what? There's no rest for the cinephile, for a new nightmare is upon us. The Warner Music Group has partnered with the Edith Piaf estate to create an AI-based biopic, running for 90 minutes and mixing archival future with animation. Over it all, a feat of technological necromancy will have the legendary French singer narrate her own story or the corporate-approved facsimile of it.

The execs behind the travesty speak of authenticity, but I only see mercenary intent. It's anti-art, sickening in the worst way…

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