documentary – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – For Sama

For Sama (2019)
Directed by Waad Al-Kataeb and Edward Watts

Our film series for March is 13 Countries, 13. On the website Letterboxd, if you pay for an annual subscription, you unlock a stats page that tracks your films watched. One feature I started looking at was the world map highlighting the countries from which you’ve seen movies. I decided to go through all the countries I hadn’t seen a film from and select a feature to watch at some point. While I won’t be watching them all in one go, I decided to pull some of them for this series.

Patron Pick – Soundtrack to a Coup D’état

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Soundtrack to a Coup D’état (2024)
Written and directed by John Grimonprez

Being a media-obsessed person for my whole life, I have come to a new understanding since my university days about the United States and the way it uses media as a weapon. Depending on how far along your understanding of the mass media’s purpose and how power becomes gained & is wielded, you might not see the reality just beneath the surface. As Michael Parenti said in his book Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, “Power is always more secure when cooptive, covert, and manipulative than when nakedly brutish. The support elicited through the control of minds is more durable than the support extracted at the point of a bayonet. The essentially undemocratic nature of the mainstream media, like the other business-dominated institutions of society, must be hidden behind a neutralistic, voluntaristic, pluralistic facade.”

Movie Review – Landscape Suicide

Landscape Suicide (1987)
Written and directed by James Benning

You likely haven’t ever heard of James Benning. He’s never directed a film that ended up in a multi-screen Cineplex. He’s never been nominated for an Oscar or won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. On the most recent Sight & Sound filmmakers poll, Benning was sent a ballot and returned it with a list of his films. His reason when asked about this is that he just doesn’t watch movies, really. Benning makes them, but his influences are literary, and he simply observes the world around him. He’s considered a minimalist but has actually employed many methods & styles as he explores the form. At age 83, he’s still making movies, with almost all of them examining America and its people.

Movie Review – The Battle of Algiers

The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Written by Franco Solinas and Gillo Pontecorvo
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

From 1954 to 1962, the French government was at war with the Algerian people. Algeria had been a French colony since 1830 when King Charles X decided to take the land. They blamed pirates on the Barbary Coast and their ransoming of French captives. In reality, French sentiments towards their increasingly authoritarian king led Charles and his advisors to dream up a foreign conquest to calm the people. In the first thirty years of French occupation, it is estimated that up to one million Algerians were killed, nearly a ⅓ of the entire population.

TV Review – Ren Faire

Ren Faire (2024)
Directed by Lance Oppenheim

The term “reality TV” is thrown around so liberally these days, when most of the programming under that umbrella is highly contrived, and its figures’ personalities are obviously contrived. The performative nature of “reality TV” seems to have leaked out into the real world, where we see those who shape their identity around a quirk or two. How do you make a documentary in a landscape where capturing authenticity has become much more complicated. Lance Oppenheim seems to have found it. His style layers melodrama over the mundane, embracing the audience seeking something heightened. Yet, it never feels as if its subjects are being misrepresented.

Movie Review – The Atomic Cafe

The Atomic Cafe (1982)
Written and directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty

The context of the atomic bomb at its inception is not the same as it was viewed by the public two decades later. Our relationship with this weapon of mass destruction continues to evolve. We no longer have children practice “duck and cover” drills under the fear that the Soviets or their allies might launch nukes on the United States. Those drills weren’t really about protecting anyone if a bomb was dropped. We can look at what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to see that our buildings would be of little protection to anyone. Those drills were about instilling fear of communists in the population. This is quite ironic, as no communist nation has ever dropped an atomic weapon on a civilian population. That “honor” is held by one country on this planet, and they did it twice.

Patron Pick – Federer: Twelve Final Days

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Federer: Twelve Final Days (2024)
Directed by Asif Kapadia and Joe Sabia

Once upon a time, I played tennis nearly every day. In the late 1990s, my family started frequenting the public tennis courts. Being homeschooled, solo sports were the easiest to play rather than team-based ones. I also watched a bit of tennis and knew the players at the time: Sampras, Agassi, Seles, Hingis, Kournikova, etc. Then I went to college, and other than taking tennis as a physical education prerequisite for my bachelor’s degree, I haven’t touched on the sport since. I had heard of Roger Federer; he was emerging as a top player when I stopped paying attention, but I couldn’t say I knew much about him. After watching this documentary about his retirement from the sport, I still can’t tell much about him.

Patron Pick – Hack Your Health

Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut (2024)
Directed by Anjali Nayar

In an ongoing battle to make me watch the oddest things we have, Hack Your Health is a Netflix documentary about the digestive system and its connection to the body. The educational film is hosted by Dr. Giulia Enders, MD, a German scientist studying digestive health and working towards her doctorate in gastroenterology. Enders and other talking heads in fields like neuropsychology, epidemiology, neuroscience, and microbiology share their perspective on how our diets affect our digestion, which has a domino effect on the rest of our health. There are some wild takes here coming after a first half that feels like basic elementary school science.

Movie Review – City Hall

City Hall (2020)
Directed by Frederick Wiseman

At age 94, Frederick Wiseman is still making documentaries. While elements of his style have changed over the decades, and he has very distinctive periods within his filmography, Wiseman has always retained sight of what is important to him in making docs. He believes presenting a moment as true to the heart of what was happening when the camera was rolling is more important than anything else. The process of making movies is inherently biased. There is no way to be objective in the editing bay; each cut is a subjective choice, and we can see that it feels different when someone re-edits a movie. Wiseman does not believe his films are THE final word on anything. They are simply the director and his camera being present in a moment and capturing what happened.

Movie Review – Public Housing

Public Housing (1997)
Directed by Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman didn’t slow down in the 1980s or 1990s. He continued to put out a film almost every other year about topics as varied as horse racing, a Neiman Marcus department store, Central Park, and a series of docs about people with disabilities. In 1997, he delivered this three-hour exploration of the politics that governed the Ida B. Wells public housing development in Chicago, Illinois. Much like Welfare, Wiseman is trying to capture the voices of the people in power within the institutions as well as the recipients (or people who should be getting, but often don’t get) these services.