documentary

RODENTS OF UNUSUAL SIZE: 5 million orange-toothed critters and a Cajun octogenarian

by
Thomas Gonzalez in RODENTS OF UNUSUAL SIZE

The offbeat documentary Rodents of Unusual Size, with its bizarre subject, is charmingly addictive. That subject is the nutria, a 20- to 30-pound Argentine rodent that threatens Louisiana’s wetlands and coastline.  Yes, 30-pound swamp rats with orange teeth.

Although Rodents of Unusual Size is decidedly non-preachy, the nutria is serious business. Imported for the commercial potential of its fur by a Tabasco sauce heir, nutria escaped into the Louisiana wilds and propagated wildly. When the US fur market crashed in the 1990s, the locals stopped trapping them, and Louisiana’s nutria population exploded to 20 million.

The problem is that nutria eat the roots of the vegetation in the Louisiana wetlands, causing erosion that has converted at least 42 square miles of land into open water. Worse, those wetlands are the storm buffer for the rest of the state.

Louisiana offers hunters a $5 bounty for the tail of each dead nutria, which has reduced the nutria population to a more manageable 5 million.  We even meet a guy whose official job title is Nutria Tail Assessor.

One of the reasons I love Louisiana is that folks just don’t take themselves too seriously there. Even when they are focused on the grave environmental impacts of the nutria invasion, they still appreciate the absurdity of a 30-pound, orange-toothed swamp rat.  (And, fittingly,  Rodents of Unusual Size is narrated by Louisiana native Wendell Pierce.)

Along the way, we are also introduced to nutria fur and the fur company Righteous Fur, nutria meat, nutria sports mascots and even nutria as pets.
But most compellingly, we meet Thomas Gonzalez, an 80-year-old bayou native, nutria hunter and bon vivant. Gonzalez is a force of nature, complete with strong-willed opinions and some impressive dance moves. Gonzalez serves as the voice of Louisiana and finishes the movie with a profound perspective on the nutria.

I saw Rodents of Unusual Size at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club with filmmaker Chris Metzler available for Q&A. Metzler and his colleagues Jeff Springer and Quinn Costello filmed Rodents of Unusual Size over four years during Louisiana’s nutria season (November to April). The affable Metzler is a font of nutria knowledge, full of tidbits like albino nutria being prized by taxidermists. Because nutria are very difficult to spot and film in the wild, the filmmakers used Nooty the stunt nutria throughout the film. Nooty joined the filmmakers in creeping along the red carpet at various film festivals and has her own Facebook page.

Thomas Gonzalez alone is worth meeting on film, and, as told by Rodents of Unusual Size, the story of the nutria is quirkily fascinating. This weekend, Rodents of Unusual Size will be opening a new run at theaters in Marin and the East Bay.

Stream of the week: BRIMSTONE & GLORY – people who blow stuff up

by
BRIMSTONE & GLORY
BRIMSTONE & GLORY
BRIMSTONE & GLORY

Life in Tultepec, a city of about 90,000, just north of Mexico City is dominated by the main local industry – fireworks manufacturing.  That’s the subject of the documentary Brimstone & Glory, which is alternatively jaw-dropping and visually amazing.

The overwhelming majority of Mexico’s fireworks are handmade in Tultepec.  Brimstone & Glory traces the townspeople’s march toward their annual National Pyrotechnic Festival. At the festival, giant toros are set afire as they roll blazing down the commercial streets.  People actually dance within a cacophony of fireworks.

This may not sound entirely safe to you.  Indeed, Brimstone & Glory takes us into the pre-festival training sessions, where paramedics review their triage protocols.  During the festival, we’re in the medical tent as the actual injuries flood in.

One of the festival highlights is a competition with 75-foot high towers embedded with fireworks.  As a lightning storm approaches, one guy climbs the metal tower to repair some wind damage.  It’s clear that Mexican safety regulations, if they exist, are quite relaxed.   Brimstone & Glory is probably a fantasy movie for American personal injury lawyers.

Remember that the manufacturing is by hand.  Without comment, Brimstone & Glory observes an old fireworks craftsman working with three digits left on one hand and none on other.

Brimstone & Glory follows one local kid, the boy Esau (“Santi”).  Everyone expects him to follow in the family fireworks tradition, but his own feelings about fireworks are very ambivalent.

Cinematographer Tobias von dem Borne and director Viktor Jakovleski deliver a feast for the eyes, as you can tell from the photos above.  Slo mo is used very effectively, and the night photography is very special.

Brimstone & Glory can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime), iTunes and Vudu.

JANE FONDA IN FIVE ACTS: self-assessment and self-revelation

by
Jane Fonda appears in JANE FONDA IN FIVE ACTS by Susan Lacy, an official selection of the Documentary Premieres program at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo courtesy of Everett Collection.

HBO is airing a remarkable biodoc of Jane Fonda, Jane Fonda in Five Acts.  It turns the talking head documentary on its, well, talking head, because the main narrator/commentator on Jane Fonda’s life is Jane Fonda herself.  She reveals the most personal, even intimate, experiences and feelings; you could tag this as “extremely personally revealing” or even as “oversharing”.  either way, I found it irresistible.

The theme is that Fonda’s life was shaped, in phases, by (or to reflect), the four most important men in her life: her father Henry Fonda and her husbands Roger Vadim, Tom Hayden and Ted Turner.  Hayden, Turner,  her son Troy Garity and her BFF Paula Weinstein get the most screen time among various confidantes.  But mostly, this film is Jane herself, neat with a chaser.

From being the daughter of a movie super star dad and a suicidal mom, through a starlet period, to the shrill activist with the Klute hairdo, to the video exercise queen and then billionaire’s bride, it a helluva story.  If you dislike Jane Fonda, you’ll find this biodoc annoying.  If you’re like me, you’ll find it fascinating.

WYETH: what is a muse?

by
Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, featured in WYETH

Wyeth, the latest documentary in the PBS American Masters series, takes on the odd case of the great painter Andrew Wyeth and explores the question, what is a muse?    And how can great art come from the most unlikely and obscure subjects?

Every artist has a source of inspiration, and it’s amazing that Wyeth was able to find his while living an unusually parochial life.   Choosing not to “see the world”, Wyeth spent his entire life in two rural settings – his childhood home in  Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. and his summer coastal home in Cushing, Maine.  Fortunately, some of his neighbors allowed him to hang around and watch them in their daily lives.  Wyeth would then pad along home to his studio and churn out hundreds of finely detailed paintings from what he remembered.

In doing so, he rendered iconic some very unlikely subjects by painting them again and again – a disabled neighbor woman, a stolid farmer, an alcoholic eccentric.

We learn that Wyeth could spend all of his time on his two obsessions – studying the locals and painting them – because of his wife Betsy.  From age 17, Betsy managed Wyeth’s business, household and family, freeing him to devote every thought to the artistic process.

That’s why it was so shocking when Wyeth revealed fifteen years’ work – over 200 paintings, many erotic – with a subject Betsy had known nothing about.

Wyeth draws upon rich source material, including never-before-seen family photos and artifacts, and we meet Wyeth’s family members, neighbors and subjects, and visit the actual homes where Wyeth studied his subjects.

Wyeth will be airing on the PBS American Masters series beginning on September 7.

DARK MONEY: following secret money

by
John S. Adams in DARK MONEY

The gripping documentary Dark Money exposes our new political environment, with unlimited secret money unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Writer-director Kimberly Reed takes us to her native Montana as conservative (but independent) Republican legislators find themselves deluged by massive and monstrous attacks from some even more conservative out-of-state sources. Intrepid small-town reporter John S. Adams and the understaffed state regulators follow the money and try to hunt down who is pulling the strings.

As the mystery unfolds, Dark Money also takes us to Wisconsin, where dark money has assaulted an unexpected branch of government. And we go to Washington, DC, to the Federal Elections Commission, where Ann Ravel, the Obama-appointed chair of the FEC, has resigned in disgust after Republican commissioners have blocked all enforcement of federal campaign finance regulation. (Disclosure: I have worked with Silicon Valley native Ravel in my day job.)

Here are some of Dark Money’s most disturbing revelations:

  • While it’s bad enough that we don’t know the extent of wealthy Americans like the Koch Brothers trying to buy elections, neither do we know about the secret election participation of FOREIGN players.
  • Dark Money sources are not stopping at trying to buy legislators and governors, but are also trying to take over state supreme courts!

And just when we need MORE scrutiny of the attempts to buy the legislative and judicial branches of state governments, we are witnessing the death of statehouse journalism.

In one particularly nasty nugget, we witness GOP FEC Commissioner Don McGahn unashamedly grinding the FEC’s gears of enforcement to a stop.  Today, McGahn is the Trump White House Counsel, with major responsibility for the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanagh.

Dark Money keeps us on the edges of our seats throughout and culminates in a real-life courtroom drama.

I attended the sold-out Bay Area premiere of Dark Money, co-sponsored by Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club and by Santa Clara County. Both Ann Ravel and John S. Adams appeared at the post-screening Q&A.

THE MOSSAD: epic cloak and dagger

by
Subject Peter Malkin in a still from THE MOSSAD. Photo courtesy JFI

Anyone with an interest in historical cloak-and-dagger will appreciate the documentary The Mossad, about Israel’s legendary foreign intelligence service. We meet some current and recent Mossad officers, who are extremely tight-lipped.  But decades of intervening history have freed their older colleagues to spin first-hand tales of the Mossad’s most legendary operations:

  • The kidnapping of Nazi death camp czar Adolph Eichmann (and we hear from the guy who physically grabbed Eichmann in Buenos Aires).
  • The cultivation of a longtime mole at the highest level of the Egyptian government.  The mole is identified.  We hear how the Israeli military reacted to the advance warning of Egypt’s 1973 invasion – you may be surprised.
  • The methodical hunting down of the Palestinian terrorists who kidnapped and murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

The Mossad is a natural bookend to the The Gatekeepers, about another Israeli intelligence agency.  The Gatekeepers is centered around interviews with all six surviving former chiefs of Shin Bet, Israel’s super-secret internal security force. We get their inside take on the past thirty years of Israeli-Palestinian history. What is revelatory, however, is their assessment of Israel’s war on terror. These are hard ass guys who went to the office every morning to kill terrorists. But upon reflection, they conclude that winning tactics make for a losing strategy.
The Gatekeepers is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and for streaming on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.

You can find how to watch The Mossad along with the entire SFJFF program at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

THE TWINNING REACTION: research playing with lives

by
From L:R – Subjects Doug Rausch and Howard Burack in a still from THE TWINNING REACTION. Photo courtesy JFI.

The startling and moving documentary The Twinning Reaction tells the story of a Mad Men-era research project and its profound human impact. To perform a longitudinal study of nurture vs. nature, researchers INTENTIONALLY separated identical twins and placed them with families that the researchers kept in the dark. The placements occurred AFTER the twin babies had bonded together in the crib for many months. Legally and ethically sketchy at the time, this is monstrous by today’s standards, and, in fact, caused harm to the adoptees.

Somehow, some of these twins learned the truth as adults and located their birth siblings. In The Twinning Reaction, we meet three sets of separated identical siblings. Because we meet the subjects of the study, the effects of separation are clearly apparent and highly personalized.

Writer-director Lori Shinseki has found an amazing story and source material to match. In a gripping 52 minutes, she weaves it into a coherent and compelling story.

THE TWINNING REACTION
THE TWINNING REACTION

The most astonishing set of sibs are triplets which are the subject of a film in current theatrical release, Three Identical Strangers. The Twinning Reaction focuses on the study; we meet several sets of twins, and the triplets are the jaw-dropping final act.   Three Identical Strangers focuses on the triplets and then takes a more current dive into the study.

The Twinning Reaction’s world premiere was at Cinequest two years ago. The Twinning Reaction is not yet available to stream, so your only chance to see it will be at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival this July and August.

WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?: gentleness from ferocity

by
Fred Rogers with his Daniel Tiger in WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is the surprisingly moving biodoc of Fred Rogers, the originator and host of the PBS children’s program The Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.  I had missed this movie at the San Francisco International Film Festival where it submerged audiences in their hankies.

Of course, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? tells the story of the show.  But, more than that, it relates Rogers’ fierce passion for the plight of small children, and his need to protect them and help their emotional development.

What is so surprising is that Rogers’ sometimes laughably gentle affect sprang from such internal ferocity.  It turns that Rogers was a man who hated, hated, hated the moral emptiness and materialism of commercial children’s television.

His need to help children through difficult times drove him to explain the word “assassination” the day after RFK was killed.  And to demystify, clarify and normalize divorce and a host of other potentially child-traumatizing topics.  Utterly unafraid of (most) controversy in a timid medium, he was first and foremost the champion for small children, a cardigan-clad champion.

I am immune to Mr. Rogers nostalgia because I am too old to have watched the show as a kid, and it was no longer a first-run show when my own kid came of age.  So I was surprised to find myself choked with emotion when Fred Rogers explained to a very skeptical Senator John Pastore the need to “make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable”.  As Rogers recited the lyrics of his song about having feelings and staying in control, Pastore visibly melted (and so did I).

In Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Rogers’ family and his TV crew reveal their insider views of Rogers and his show.  The origins of the characters, the puppets, the songs and themes are explained.  But the core of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is that Fred Rogers resolutely believed that every small child is deserving of love and has value, a view which has sadly become controversial among some.

THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS: a Feel Good until we peel back the onion

by
THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS

The startling documentary Three Identical Strangers begins with a young man’s first day on a college campus, being greeted by strangers who are convinced that they know him; that night, a fellow student connects him to his double, born on the same day. They turned out to be identical siblings separated at birth and adopted by different families.  Even more stunning, the two brothers soon find their identical triplet.

The first third of Three Identical Strangers is a wonderful Feel Good story of family discovery.  But then we find that the triplets’ separation had been orchestrated as part of a  longitudinal study of nurture vs. nature.  Researchers INTENTIONALLY separated identical twins and placed them with families that the researchers kept in the dark. The placements occurred AFTER the twin babies had bonded together in the crib for many months.

This study was not detached observation, it was human experimentation.  As details reminiscent of Josef Mengele unfold,  the fact that both the researcher and the adoption agency were Jewish becomes even more chilling.

A film that covers much of the same factual territory, Twinning Reaction, premiered two years ago at Cinequest.  Twinning Reaction focuses on the study; we meet several sets of twins, and the triplets are the jaw-dropping final act.   Three Identical Strangers focuses on the triplets and then takes a more current dive into the study.  Twinning Reaction is not yet available to stream, but it will be playing at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival this July and August.

Three Identical Strangers won the Special Jury Prize for Storytelling at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.  It also played at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM).  Well-spun, this is an amazing story.

AMERICAN ANIMALS: a preposterous heist

by
AMERICAN ANIMALS

In Bart Layton’s clever documentary/re-enactment mashup American Animals, four college kids plan a major art heist. The film opens with the title words THIS IS NOT BASED ON A TRUE STORY morphing into THIS IS A TRUE STORY. Indeed, in 2003, four college kids really did target $12 million in rare Audubon and Darwin books at the Transylvania University library in Lexington, Kentucky.

The story follows the classic arc of a heist movie -the intricate planning, the assembling of a team and, finally, the Big Day.  Because the heist is so preposterous (and because these guys are smoking a lot of weed while planning it), the whole thing is pretty funny.

Layton has his cake and eats it, too.  He has actors re-enact the real events.  And he has the real participants commenting as talking heads.  (With the retrospect of fifteen years, none of the participants now thinks that the heist was a good idea.)

I was especially eager to see American Animals because director Bart Layton also made The Imposter, one of the most jaw-dropping documentaries I have seen. American Animals is not as good as the unforgettable The Imposter, but funnier and more inventive – and damn entertaining.

I saw American Animals at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM).  It opens in the Bay Area this weekend.