documentary

I’M AN ELECTRIC LAMPSHADE: the final score is Doug 1, Expectations 0.

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I’M AN ELECTRIC LAMPSHADE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

In the winning and surprising documentary I’m an Electric Lampshade, we meet the most improbable rock star – a mild-mannered accountant who retires to pursue his dream of performing.

60-year-old Doug McCorkle is fit for his age and has an unusually mellifluous voice, like a late night FM DJ or the announcer in a boxing ring. Other than that he looks like a total square.

There may be no flamboyance about Doug McCorkle, but it thrives inside him. His own artistic taste is trippy, gender-bending and daring. Think Price Waterhouse Cooper on the outside and Janelle Monáe on the inside.

We follow Doug as he goes to a performance school in the Philippines (where most of his classmates are drag queens) and the montage of his training resembles those in Fame and Flashdance. Doug is a good enough sport to wear MC Hammer pants in a bizarre Filipino yogurt commercial. It all culminates in a concert in Mexico.

Doug’s quest would be a vanity project except he has no apparent vanity. He must have some ego to want to get up on stage, but compared to subjects of other showbiz documentaries, he is most humble, emphatically not self-absorbed and low maintenance. We can tell from how his co-workers, friends and wife react to him, that he is just a profoundly decent guy.

Eminently watchable, this is a successful first feature for writer-director John Clayton Doyle. The stage-setting profile of one of the Filipino artists could have been trimmed, but Lampshade is otherwise well-paced.

The final score: Doug 1, Expectations 0. I screened I’m an Electric Lmpshade for its world premiere at Cinequest, and it made my Best of Cinequest 2021.

I’M AN ELECTRIC LAMPSHADE

I screened I’m an Electric Lampshade for its world premiere at Cinequest, and it made my Best of Cinequest 2021. You can stream it during the festival for only $3.99 at Cinequest’s online Cinejoy.

THE MAGNITUDE OF ALL THINGS: grief with hope

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Derrick Pottle in THE MAGNITUDE OF ALL THINGS. Photo courtesy of 2020 Magnitude Productions.

The meditative documentary The Magnitude of All Things explores the emotional response to Climate Change. An Inconvenient Truth is now 15 years old and seems almost quaint today; Al Gore was certainly not an alarmist.

We in California, with our catastrophic wildfires, may think that we are Ground Zero for Climate Change ground zero, but for those that live on flat atolls in the ocean or in the formerly frozen ice and tundra, it’s even more of a RIGHT NOW phenomenon. The Magnitude of All Things takes us from the Amazon to Australia to Labrador. We meet folks from the uber earnest child crusader Greta Thulin to an indigenous youth activist in Amazon.

We see bleached coral reefs (who knew we needed to worry about THAT?) and “snowing” wildfire ash. An indigenous poet surveys the less-frozen North and asks if his grandchildren will see what he sees.

THE MAGNITUDE OF ALL THINGS. Photo courtesy of 2020 Magnitude Productions.

With especially beautiful photography, a contemplative pace and New Agey piano music, The Magnitude of All Things reminds us that, while we may be ruining it, we still live on a beautiful planet. Even the fires are beautiful in their terrible way.

How do we face extinction – self-caused extinction? Will the grief overwhelm us? Documentarian Jennifer Abbott’s sister recently died, and Abbott brings us inside her own grieving process as a parallel. One subject suggests, “Make peace with the grief but don’t just give up“.

Are grief and hope exclusive? Or, as Abbott posits, can hope be found within grief?

I screened The Magnitude of All Things at Cinequest, it’s fourth stop on the film festival tour, and the first in the US.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’S LETTER TO YOU: wiser and still vital

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The documentary Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You, sometimes sage and sometimes exhilarating, is a companion movie to the latest studio album from Springsteen and the E Street Band.

This is an obvious MUST SEE for devoted Springsteen fans like The Wife. For everyone else, Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You is worthwhile for Bruce’s comments (in narration and in song), the creative collaboration in the recording studio and the songs themselves.

Springsteen is now 71 and this film was shot a year-and-a-half-ago. He is frankly conscious of mortality, the explicit subject of two of the songs. I’ll See You in My Dreams is a heartbreaking call to friends who have passed. Last Man Standing came to Bruce when he found himself the sole survivor of his high school band, The Castiles. (BTW that’s a way cool band name for back when Ricardo Montalban was hawking “rich Corinthian leather”.)

Springsteen’s reflections bring poignancy without melancholy.

On the upbeat side, The Power of Prayer is about devotion and charismatic experience – but the kind we get from pop music. We recognize that this is from the songwriter of Girls in their Summer Clothes.

The best song IMO – and the hardest rocking – is Burnin’ Train. Turn up the volume and settle into Max Weinberg’s drumming and Garry Talent’s bass line. Sounds like an extremely tight band of 20-somethings.

In the studio, we get a glimpse into the collaborative aspect of songwriting and recording, where the musicians and producers get the charts and then start making suggestions about how to hone each song.

Writing rock music is usually a young person’s jam, with the best and the most productivity front-loaded in the earliest segments of songwriting careers. It’s remarkable that Springsteen still is imagining and forging such vital songs. And it’s remarkable that the E Street Band, almost all of them about 70, still can crush and shred.

Director Thom Zimny is Bruce’s personal filmmaker, and also made the fine HBO doc Elvis Presley: The Searcher. The quick cutting of the scenes in the recording studios allow us to miss the drudgery of repeated takes and highlight the sparks of creativity. The exterior shots of the winter-bare woods of rural New Jersey remind me of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. This is a very handsome black-and-white film.

Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You is streaming on AppleTV.

NIGHT STALKER: THE HUNT FOR SERIAL KILLER: a good man tracks down evil

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Gil Carrillo in NIGHT STALKER: THE HUNT FOR A SERIAL KILLER

The true crime limited series Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer tells a story of a public justifiably terrorized by profound evil, but it is elevated by one genuinely good guy.

In a five-and-a-half month 1985 crime spree, the serial killer nicknamed the Night Stalker inflicted unspeakable atrocities, mostly in a swath of Los Angeles. There were at least 14 murders, along with rapes and child rapes, brutal beatings and mutilations – enough carnage to ultimately to earn him 19 death sentences. And, to make it all even more sensational, he embraced Satanist symbology.

This was not a serial killer case to be solved by a profiler. The victims were of different ages, genders and races; his weapons of choice and his horrific acts all varied. There was no pattern to the crimes except that they were all nighttime home invasions.

Instead, it was a case for two dogged detectives, armed only with a single shoe print, trying to piece together more physical evidence. Frank Salerno, was the seasoned star detective of the LA Sheriff’s department, a local celebrity for cracking the notorious Hillside Strangler case. His partner was a fresh young cop who had just made detective, Gil Carrillo, underestimated by everyone except Salerno.

The whodunit and the man hunt make for a great story. It’s a roller coaster, with at least two breathtakingly squandered opportunities and a huge gaffe by, of all people, Dianne Feinstein,

Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer is graced by the the testimony of survivors, victims, journalists and witnesses who encountered the Night Stalker face-to-face.

But the man reason I recommend Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer is Gil Carrillo, who is an intoxicating story teller. As professional detectives can be, Carrillo is a disciplined observer who has the gift of narrative, whether in a bar or in a courtroom. He also wears his salt-of-the-earthness on his sleeve. I’m sure that Carrillo can be as terse as any cop on the street, but he lowers his guard here, and lets his humanity flow. The good guy, Carrillo, not the evil guy, is the real star of this movie.

And now a creepy possible connection with The Movie Gourmet. Many of my acquaintances have heard my “rats in the toilet” story from 1983-84, an episode that culminated when a city crew eradicated a colony of sewer rats from the sewer main under South 16th Street in San Jose. I later learned that, at the time, the Night Stalker himself was working as a San Jose sewer worker.

Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer is streaming on Netflix.

MLK/FBI: about America then and about America today

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MLK/FBI. Photo courtesy of IFC Films.

In MLK/FBI, Sam Pollard, the master of the civil rights documentary (Eyes on the Prize), takes on the FBI’s quest to discredit and even destroy Martin Luther King, Jr. Over many years, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI targeted King with wiretaps, bugs, surveillance and informers. The FBI built a trove of audio tapes of King having extramarital sex; these tapes are now in the National Archives and will be released publicly in 2027. The tapes themselves are not included in MLK/FBI, but the film reveals the many secret FBI memos that discuss them.

Pollard bookends MLK/FBI with historians considering the questions of how we should process the behavior on the tapes and how we should face the actual tapes when they are released six years from now.

MLK/FBI documents the moment that Hoover and his top lieutenant William Sullivan became obsessed with King – and the moment they tried to force him into suicide. From their perspective, if King’s movement wanted to upend the racial inequities that included legal segregation, then of COURSE he must be an anti-American subversives. They started by red-baiting King for associating with communists, and then moved to focus on sexual behavior.

MLK/FBI reminds us who we were back in the 1960s. King had not yet been martyred and many in the mainstream shared Hoover’s discomfort with racial progress and his driving fear of communism. When MLK and Hoover had a public spat, the polling documented 50% of the American public siding with Hoover and under 20% with King.

While today, a male public figure would likely not be ruined by consensual heterosexual sex outside of marriage, that was not the case in the 1960s. Then it was still controversial about whether a divorced person – or even someone married to a previously divorced person – should be elected to high office.

And MLK/FBI says a lot about our society today. Although this salacious material was leaked to many journalists in the 1960s, none actually made it public. I find this particularly sobering, because today there is no way that the temptation to generate clicks, likes retweets and ratings would have been resisted – it would have gone viral, as we now say, probably with history-changing consequences.

MLK/FBI can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

BELUSHI: more texture to the story that you already know

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John Belushi in BELUSHI

We all know the story of John Belushi – a career soaring like Icarus, propelled by comic genius and then death by drug overdose at age 33. The new biodoc Belushi brings us more texture because of unprecedented access to Belushi’s friends and widow and to Belushi’s own letters, notes and journals.

There are many insights into Belushi’s family and his upbringing, the fodder for some of his unhappiness. We learn about a year of white-knuckle sobriety when he was protected by a bodyguard named Smokey. Friend and fellow addict Carrie Fisher weigh in regarding that unsupported year of sobriety.

And their are some new stories of Belushi’s zaniness, like when he wandered off a movie set to be found in a house across the street by Dan Aykroyd – Belushi had convinced the resident, a total stranger, to feed him a sandwich and milk and to let him stretch out for a nap.

Belushi is streaming on Showtime.

THE MYSTERY OF D.B. COOPER: the hijacking that keeps on giving

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THE MYSTERY OF D.B. COOPER

We are justifiably still intrigued by the only unsolved American air hijacking. The documentary The Mystery of D.B. Cooper takes us back and adds some detail to the story. Most importantly, it makes four suspects become almost tangible to us.

We get to meet the flight attendant forced to sit next to the hijacker, and the guy who sat across the aisle and the pilot. But, the highlights come from the folks that are today convinced that they knew D.B. Cooper. These stories range from odd to bizarre.

The Mystery of D.B. Cooper is streaming on HBO.

MY PSYCHEDELIC LOVE STORY: Errol Morris and the unreliable narrator

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Timothy Leary and Joanna Harcourt-Smith in MY PSYCHEDELIC LOVE STORY

The documentarian Errol Morris has a remarkable gift for finding interview subjects with bizarre stories to tell. In My Psychedelic Love Story, Morris introduces us to Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who was swept off her feet in 1972 by bad boy celebrity Timothy Leary and spent a few years as his romantic partner. This was a period when Leary, hounded by US authorities for advocating psychedelic drug use, was on the lam in Europe and the Middle East, and finally imprisoned.

Joanna Harcourt-Smith in MY PSYCHEDELIC LOVE STORY

Morris extracts the tale from Harcourt-Smith herself. We learned that Harcourt-Smith came from a wealthy but difficult and unconventional upbringing. She plunged into a hippie version of what we would now call a Eurotrash lifestyle.

While much of her story is undeniably factual, we suspect that Harcourt-Smith is less than a reliable narrator. She drops bits like “I was happy we were stopping in Lebanon because the President was in love with my mother”. It’s either an astonishing fact or a an astonishingly brazen lie. Either way, she’s entertaining.

I’ve loved Morris since his first feature in 1978, Gates of Heaven, the story of a Bay Area pet cemetery and its quirky owners and customers (plus digging up all the dead pets and moving them from Cupertino to Napa). For bizarre personal stories, it’s tough to top Morris’ Tabloid, about a woman who kidnapped and sexually abused a Mormon missionary in England and retired in North Carolina to a pastime of tending dogs cloned in Korea,

My Psychedelic Love Story, which is minor Morris, is streaming on Showtime.

coming up on TV: WHAT SHE SAID: THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL – the drive for relevance

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Pauline Kael in WHAT SHE SAID: THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL

What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael is the remarkably thorough and insightful biodoc of the iconic film critic Pauline Kael and her drive for relevance. Set your DVRs for it on Turner Classic Movies on December 12.

Documentarian Rob Garver has sourced What She Said is well-sourced with the memories of Kael’s colleagues, rivals and intimates. Garver’s portrait of Kael helps us understand her refusal to conform to social norms as she basically invented the role of a female film critic and what today we might call a national influencer on cinema.

Of course, one of Kael’s defining characteristics was her all-consuming love of movies, a trait shared by many in this film’s target audience. Fittingly, Garver keeps things lively by illustrating Kael’s story with clips from the movies she loved and hated. Garver’s artistry in composing this mosaic of evocative movie moments sets What She Said apart from the standard talking head biodocs.

Kael was astonishingly confident in her taste (which was not as snooty as many film writers). For the record, I think Kael was right to love Mean Streets, Band of Outsiders, Bonnie and Clyde, and, of course, The Godfather. It meant something to American film culture that she championed those films. She was, however, wrong to love Last Tango in Paris. She was also right to hate Limelight, Hiroshima Mon Amour and The Sound of Music. But Kael was just being a contrarian and off-base to hate Lawrence of Arabia and Shoah.

Kael was by necessity an intrepid self-promoter and filled with shameless contradictions. She famously dismissed the auteur theory but sponsored the bodies of work of auteurs Scorsese, Peckinpah, Coppola and Altman. She loved – even lived – to discover and support new talent.

Most of the people we like and admire possess at least some bit of selfishness and empathy. Kael’s daughter Gina James says that Kael turned her lack of self awareness into triumph. This observation, of course, cuts both ways.

I screened What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael while covering the 2019 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. It’s coming up on Turner Classic Movies this Friday.

MY OCTOPUS TEACHER: an octopus and her human pet

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MY OCTOPUS TEACHER

As nature documentaries go, My Octopus Teacher, is pretty singular. Filmmaker Craig Foster, stewing in mid-life disillusionment, is diving in a South African kelp forest when he encounters an octopus and decides to shadow her over a year and document her life every day. The octopus takes to Foster and adopts him as kind of a pet. But My Octopus Teacher is mostly worthwhile for the amazing resourcefulness of the octopus and the harrowing shark attacks.

I knew that octopuses are wizards at camouflage and at squeezing through tight spaces. I didn’t appreciate how intelligent they are and that they commonly live for only one year.

There are some sequences in My Octopus Teacher that are just astonishing. The underwater photography, especially the scenes just below the surf in the first fifteen minutes are among the best I’ve ever seen. The cinematographer is underwater specialist Roger Horrocks.

Foster himself narrates the film. The Movie Gourmet doesn’t cotton to the simpering of grown men, so I wish I had turned off the sound for the first fifteen minutes of his personal angst and the final ten minutes when he forges a blissful father-and-son shared interest in the ocean.

I do admire Foster for two things. First, he generally didn’t interfere with the course of nature (i.e., rescue the octopus from shark attacks). And he didn’t give her a human name. Good for him.

Off South Africa, the octopus’ major predator is the pajama shark, so named because of the stripes that resemble old-fashioned vertically-striped pajamas. Pajama sharks are especially well-equipped to attack in the narrow and deep crevices where octopuses hide out.

I can’t really blame the sharks because octopus is one of my favorite foods, too. It takes some mastery (which I haven’t as yet attained) to cook them so they’re not rubbery. So, I order octopus every time I see it on the menu (usually at Greek, Spanish, Mexican or Portuguese restaurants).

My Octopus Teacher is streaming on Netflix.