documentary

MADOFF: THE MONSTER OF WALL STREET: adding some jawdroppers to a familiar story

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Photo caption: Bernie Madoff in MADOFF: THE MONSTER OF WALL STREET. Courtesy of Netflix.

Netflix’s documentary Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street is a pretty good watch. Most folks, like me, thought they understood the now 15-year-old story of Madoff’s house of cards collapsing at the same time as the 2008 mortgage meltdown, ruining hundred of investors, including pensioners and non-profits. But Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street contributes a comprehensive perspective and some jaw-dropping nuggets, to wit:

  • How the SEC whiffed MULTIPLE TIMES, even when the case was giftwrapped for them by a credible Wall Street expert;
  • The moment when the SEC and FBI learned that the fraud was not in the millions, but in the TENS OF BILLIONS;
  • How Bernie Madoff banned his own sons from the separate office in which the fraud was committed;
  • How Madoff concealed the fraud in plain sight with brazenness alone;
  • The one zillionaire investor who must have known about the Ponzi scheme and kept bailing Madoff out; and
  • What happened to the main characters in the saga, including Madoff’s family and confidantes – it is operatic.

We benefit from Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street‘s comprehensive look at the scandal because our knowledge of it come from the news coverage at time of his arrest, which focused on the plight of Madoff’s victims. That’s a key part of the story, but it helps to (in my case) learn that Madoff’s stature was earned by his building two entirely legitimate Wall Street businesses, co-founding the NASDAQ and becoming a sage adviser to the SEC. It also helps to revisit the scale of his fraud (the largest Ponzi scheme in world history) and how it differed from other Ponzi schemes – NONE of his victims’ money was ever invested.

One of the key themes is the contrast between the two suites of Madoff offices – with only Madoff himself having access to both. His sleek 19th floor suite housed the two legitimate businesses, was immaculately decorated in black and silver, and primarily staffed with well-educated Jews. The 17th floor, which housed the fraud, was staffed by high-school-educated Italian-Americans, and was a messy warren of cardboard boxes and a DOT MATRIX PRINTER.

Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street is well-sourced with the federal agents who arrested Madoff, his personal secretary and employees of both his legitimate and his fraudulent businesses, and clips of Bernie himself in prison garb, ‘fessing up, We also meet the guy who proved as early as 2000 that Madoff had to running a Ponzi scheme, only to be rebuffed by the SEC five times between 20000 and 2008.

Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street was directed by Joe Berlinger, who has directed some of the 21st century’s very best documentaries – the Paradise Lost series and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. This time, I did not care for his odd technique of using look-alike “actors” in “re-creations”, obviously to fill in for a scarcity of file footage, but it ultimately did not detract from telling a great story. Anyway, hopefully, Netflix will keep hiring Berlinger to make films, which is a great thing.

Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street is streaming on Netflix.

LOVING HIGHSMITH: intimate and revelatory

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Photo caption: Patricia Highsmith in LOVING HIGHSMITH. Courtesy of Frameline.

In the revelatory biodoc Loving Highsmith, documentarian Eva Vitija reveals intimate perspectives on the iconic author. Patricia Highsmith’s novels were turned into twisted movie thrillers that include Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and all the Tom Ripley movies, as well as the queer memoir Carol.

Vitija has sourced Loving Highsmith with the firsthand memories of Highsmith’s last live-in lover Marijean Meaker, her Berlin lover Tabea Blumenshein, her Paris friend Monique Buffet, and members of Highsmith’s rodeo-focused Texas family. The insights include:

  • Highsmith’s Texas roots.
  • Her heartbreakingly one-way relations with her mother.
  • The origin of the Tom Ripley character.
  • Her intentionality in crafting the ending of Carol.
  • Her obsession with her married secret London lover.

Even those who are familiar with Highsmith will be impressed with this 360-degree portrait. I screened Loving Highsmith for this year’s Frameline in June; it’s now in theaters.

THE AUTOMAT: nickels in, memories out

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Photo caption: THE AUTOMAT: Actress Audrey Hepburn photographed by Howard Fried in New York City as part of a multi-day photo shoot for Esquire magazine, 1951. Courtesy of A Slice of Pie Productions.

The charming documentary The Automat traces the fascinating seven-decade run of the marble-floored food palaces where one could put nickels in a slot and be rewarded with a meal. The story of the automat is essentially a business history of Holt & Hardart, which pioneered the automat concept in Philadelphia and New York, and dominated the market for years, at one point the nation’s largest restaurant chain. Mel Brooks, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Colin Powell speak to how the automat touched their lives, and Starbucks founder Howard Schulz credits the automat as his inspiration; (Mel Brooks even wrote and performed a song for the film).

The Automat is the first film for director Lisa Hurvitz, who spent eight years on the project. Along with the celebrities, Hurvitz has sourced her film with longtime Holt & Hardart employees, members of the founding families and even the guy who titled his Ph.D. dissertation, Trapped Behind the Automat: Technological Systems and the American Restaurant, 1902-1991.

The Automat is filled with unexpected nuggets, including:

  • The New Orleans origin of Holt & Hardart’s signature coffee.
  • The astounding percentage of the NYC and Philly populations once fed by Holt & Hardart.
  • The devastating impact of a nickel price increase.

Above all, The Automat features the automat as a democratic institution – a place and an activity enjoyed by a diverse collection of customers from all classes, genders and races.

The Automat gives voice to those nostalgic about the automat, but it is clear-eyed about why it didn’t survive – a business model based on volume when the volume of customers moved to the suburbs, along with social changes in post-war America.

The Automat had a blink-and-you-missed-it theatrical run in March, but now you can stream it from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and KinoNow.

OUT IN THE RING: macho and flamboyant, wrestling is also queer

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Charlie Morgan in OUT IN THE RING. Courtesy of Ryan Bruce Levey.

Out in the Ring is Ryan Bruce Levey’s encyclopedic yet irresistible documentary history of LGBTQ professional wrestlers. There is no sports entertainment that is more macho than pro wrestling. Or more flamboyant. Or, as it turns out, more queer.

Out in the Ring takes us back to the 1940s, when the straight journeyman wrestler Gorgeous George became a star and transformed wrestling by affecting a gay pose as his gimmick. George was just the first to do so, and Out in the Ring traces the many straight wrestlers who have pretended to be gay.

At the same time, many of wrestling’s best performers were closeted, notably the great Pat Patterson. Out in the Ring focuses on Patterson’s career and personal life, and how he grew into an important executive in the business. Out in the Ring surveys a long list of LGBTQ wrestlers who were forced to stay in the closet, like Patterson and Susan Tex Green.

[Personal note: The Movie Gourmet is a Boomer who, as a child, was glued to the TV for KTVU’s Saturday pro wrestling broadcasts, announced by Walt Harris. (Harris also called also roller derby.) In that era, Pat Patterson was a dominant presence in Bay Area pro wrestling.]

Out in the Ring showcases the panoply of today’s Out wrestling stars, led by Charlie Morgan and Mike Parrow. The variety is astounding: gay men, lesbians, bisexual women and men, transsexual men and transsexual women, asexual and nonbinary. There are those who make their queerness a signature of their act and those that don’t. They tell us about the homophobia that they have faced and their relief and joy from coming out.

Ry Levey has brought many films to Cinequest as a publicist, especially Canadian indies. The exquisitely sourced Out in the Ring is his first feature as a director.

I screened Out in the Ring for its US premiere at Cinequest. Both unflinching and uplifting, it’s a documentary as fun to watch as pro wrestling.

CHARM CIRCLE: you think YOUR family has issues?

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Raya Burstein and Uri Burstein in CHARM CIRCLE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

In the superbly structured documentary Charm Circle, writer-director Nira Burstein exquisitely unspools the story of her own bizarre family. At first, we meet Burstein’s father, a sour character who inexplicably is about to lose his rented house, which has become unkempt, even filthy. He is mean to Burstein’s apparently sweet and extraordinarily passive mother, and the scene just seems unpleasant.

But then, Nira Burstein brings out twenty-year-old videos that show her dad as witty, talented and functional. We learn a key fact about the mom, and then about each of the director’s two sisters.

Some of the publicity about Charm Circle describes the family as eccentric, but only one daughter is a little odd – three family members are clinically diagnosable. Charm Circle is a cautionary story of untreated mental illness and the consequences of failing to reach out for help.

This is Nira Burstein’s first feature, and she has two things going for her: unlimited access to the subjects and a remarkable gift for storytelling. Charm Circle works so well because of how Burstein sequences the rollout of each family member’s story.

I attended a screening of Charm Circle, with a Nira Burstein Q&A at the Nashville Film Festival. In July and August, it will play both the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and Cinequest.

DREAMING WALLS: INSIDE THE CHELSEA HOTEL: the artsy and the quirky

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Photo caption: DREAMING WALLS: INSIDE THE CHELSEA HOTEL. Credit: Merle Lister. Courtesy of ©Clindoeilfilms.

The documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel is set inside an institution with a remarkable cultural history. Residents of New York City’s Chelsea Hotel have included:

  • writers Mark Twain, Arthur C. Clarke, Jack Kerouac and William C. Burroughs,
  • playwrights Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepherd,
  • poets Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginzberg,
  • painters Diego Rivera, Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns,
  • singer-songwriters Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Tom Waits,
  • musicians Edith Piaf, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Cher, Iggy Pop and Madonna,
  • film directors Milos Forman and Stanley Kubrick,
  • actors Dennis Hopper, Elaine Stritch and Jane Fonda.

But that history is not what Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel is about – at least not directly. And neither is the now bedraggled hotel’s transition into yet another upscale Manhattan retreat for the wealthy. Writer-directors Maya Duverdier and Amalie van Elmbt have focused on the current residents, who embody the last remnants of the Chelsea’s quirky, artistic flavor.

Those tenants are ten years into a nightmare of a renovation, essentially living in a construction zone in their hallways, outside their windows and, sometimes, inside their own apartments.  Some of the tenants are very old and some are very, very, very old. There’s a clip of an interview with the painter Alphaeus Philemon Cole, who was the world’s oldest verified person when he died at the Chelsea at age 112.

And they are artsy. It’s the kind of place where one can turn the corner and be met with “Hey, we have a dance performance is underway”.  Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel is a cinéma vérité observation of these folks.

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel braids them into the hotel’s storied history by splicing in visual bits of the famed artists and art that are the Chelsea’s legacy. It’s impressionistic and ghostly, and the editing by Alain Dessauvage and Julie Naas elevates Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel from the standard cinéma vérité doc.

How much you enjoy Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel depends on how much you enjoy the company of artists and whether you find their eccentricities and self-absorption charming or annoying.

The film includes a passage of Dylan Thomas”: Do not go gentle into that good night. Indeed, the long artistic period of the Chelsea is going into the good night, but certainly not gently.

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and redbox.

MY OLD SCHOOL: how could this happen? and why?

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Alan Cumming in MY OLD SCHOOL, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The absorbing documentary My Old School is about a guy who fooled his Scottish high school classmates and, notably, the school authorities, into believing that he was not who he really was. The impersonation was extreme, audacious and more than a little creepy, and resulted in a scandal well-known in the British Isles.

Writer-director Jono McLeod was one of those classmates, and he has been able to garner more than a handful of the kids and teachers who were eyewitnesses. And he secured over five hours of audio from the impersonator himself, which are brilliantly lip-synced by actor Alan Cummings (kind of the opposite of voiced by).

MY OLD SCHOOL, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

If that weren’t creative enough, McLeod uses animation to illustrate key moments in the story. And, surprisingly, there comes a video clip of a high school performance of the musical South Pacific, a performance that would be excruciatingly mundane – except for what the audience knows.

In telling My Old School, McLeod reveals the deception itself right away and then gradually unspools a series of more shockers, about how the ruse was executed, with whose help and the motivation. It’s quite the story.

My Old School opens in theaters this weekend, including at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco.

SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD: immune from shame

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SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. Courtesy of Vanessa Lapa.

In her absorbing documentary Speer Goes to Hollywood, filmmaker Vanessa Lapa takes us inside a Nazi war criminal’s brazen attempt to rehabilitate his image into “the Good Nazi”. Previously unheard private audio recordings of Albert Speer himself reveal him to be one of history’s most audacious spin doctors.

Speer, the highest ranking Nazi to escape execution at the Nuremberg Trials, was the master of the Nazis’ wartime production efforts. A trained architect, any ability Speer had to design structures was surpassed by his genius in logistics. In Speer Goes to Hollywood, Speer displays an ever greater gift for dissembling.

After being released from prison in the mid 1960’s, Speer published a bestselling (and self-serving) memoir, Inside the Third Reich, to perpetuate what is known as The Speer Myth. Speer would have us believe that the worst crimes in history occurred – right under his nose and to his benefit – without any participation on his part. Speer’s defense was essentially, “Hey, it was the OTHER Nazis“.

(Note: not even a liar as bald-faced as Speer denied that the Holocaust happened.)

To supply the German war machine, Speer exploited the nearly limitless pool of those conquered, persecuted and to be exterminated by the Nazis. Powering his production with forced labor, Speer enslaved 12.5 million victims and worked many of them to death, all to perpetrate a war of aggression.

In the tapes, we hear Speer collaborating with Andrew Birkin, a Stanley Kubrick protege, on the script for a film to further Speer’s version of history. In the face of damning evidence, Speer never wavered in his deflections, dodges and denials. Speer Goes to Hollywood reveals Albert Speer to stay on message with unmatched relentlessness, discipline and audacity.

Andrew Birkin was trying to cash in on the popularity of Inside the Thrd Reich. The tapes show Birkin to be stunningly enabling in the attempted whitewash. Once Birkin slips and blames a kerfuffle on “the Jewish machine”.

Another Birkin mentor, Carol Reed is the truth teller. Reed, the director of The Third Man, gives Birkin a reality check – this IS a whitewash, pure and simple.

A prime example of the banality of evil, Speer doesn’t seem to be a fanatic hater, but an amoral grasper/climber, willing to swallow even genocide as an acceptable price for getting ahead. He does display an ingrained antisemitism, once tossing off “Of course, we resented the Jews“, as if, who wouldn’t?

Here’s a tantalizing nugget from Speer Goes to Hollywood. We hear Speer claim to have written the top Nuremberg prosecutor, American Robert Jackson, to claim important knowledge of Germany’s neurological warfare research, using it as leverage to avoid being turned over to the Soviets. Speer hints at an implied quid pro quo, but given Speer’s credibility, who knows if any of it is true.

The ever-watchable Speer Going to Hollywood chronicles unashamedness on a mass scale.

HALLELUJAH: LEONARD COHEN, A JOURNEY, A SONG: a reflective artist, a reflective movie

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Photo caption. Leonard Cohen in HALLELUJAH: LEONARD COHEN, A JOURNEY, A SONG. Courtesy of Leonard Cohen Family Trust.

Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song is a biodoc as reflective as the subject himself. That subject is poet/singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, creator of profound verse and ear-worm melodies. Cohen was such a seeker that he secluded himself for five years at a Buddhist monastery on Mount Baldy.

Co-writers and co-directors Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine have comprehensively sourced the film with Cohen intimates and a substantial dose of Cohen himself. Geller and Goldfine have braided together Cohen’s journey with that of his most sublime song, Hallelujah.

One doesn’t think of a song even HAVING a journey, but Cohen wrote Hallelujah over years and years, possibly composing over 150 verses, only to have Columbia refuse to issue the album that it had commissioned. Then the song was rescued by John Cale, rejuvenated in the animated movie Shrek, and became iconic with the spectacular cover by Jeff Buckley. Along the way, Cohen himself would reveal alternative lyrics in live performance. Helluva story.

I’ve seen splashier documentaries – this is, after all, about a poet. The one forehead-slapping shocker for me was the initial rejection of Hallelujah. At almost two hours, Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song is a settle-in-and-be-mesmerized experience.

(BTW, could there be a bigger producer/artist mismatch than Phil Spector and Leonard Cohen?)

Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song is opening July 8 in some Bay Area theaters (including the Roxie, the Opera Plaza, the Rafael and the Rialto Cinemas Elmwood), and will expand into more theaters on July 15 and 22.

Hang ten this summer

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RIDING GIANTS

Let’s go surfin’ now

Everybody’s learning how

Come on and safari with me

It’s a great time to get stoked with the two most bitchin’ surfing movies, the documentaries Step Into Liquid and Riding Giants.

In Step Into Liquid (2003), we see the world’s best pro surfers in the most extreme locations.  We also see devoted amateurs in the tiny ripples of Lake Michigan and surfing evangelists teaching Irish school children.  The cinematography is remarkable – critic Elvis Mitchell called the film “insanely gorgeous”.  The filmmaker is Dana Brown, son of Bruce Brown, who invented the surf doc genre with The Endless Summer (1966) and The Endless Summer II (1994).

Riding Giants (2004) focuses on the obsessive search for the best wave by some of the greatest surfers in history. We see “the biggest wave ever ridden” and then a monster that could be bigger.  The movie traces the discovery of the Half Moon Bay surf spot Mavericks.  And more and more, all wonderfully shot.

The filmmaker is Stacy Peralta, a surfer and one the pioneers of modern skateboading, (and a founder of the Powell Peralta skateboard product company).  Peralta also made Dogtown and Z-boys (2001), the great documentary about the roots of skateboarding, and wrote the 2005 Lords of Dogtown.

Both Step into Liquid and Riding Giants can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.