God bless HBO. While most networks surrender the summer time period to bottom rung reality shows or a few scripted series so awful the networks know they can’t compete in the regular season, HBO has been unveiling a different documentary every Monday night. I believe last week was the final one, but luckily most of them are still available on HBO OnDemand. If you don’t have HBO, some of these movies are worth tracking down online.
Hot Coffee: This is an excellent doc about the U.S. justice system. It covers “tort reform” (tort deform) laws capping damages against a corporate sector run amok, big business buying up state supreme court justice seats, and mandatory arbitration clauses being slipped into employment contracts meaning that you can’t sue your employer even if you’re raped on the job (as Jamie Lee Jones was when she worked at Halliburton). If all that sounds a little dry, the movie presents it in an endlessly fascinating way. Grade: A
Love Crimes of Kabul: This documentary takes you into an Afghanistan women’s prison. It might not surprise you to learn that most of the women jailed are there for “moral crimes” (premarital sex, not going home at a certain hour), until you realize this is supposedly an improvement over post-Taliban Afghanistan. This subtitled movie is most fascinating when detailing all of the crazy laws someone can receive jail time for in Afghanistan and making you wonder if that’s where we’re headed here. Grade: A
Gloria Steinham, In her Own Words: Definitely the weakest of the bunch. I guess this documentary just took me into a world I was the most familiar with and didn’t really shine any new light into it. The most interesting thing to me is how boring Gloria seems, and by that I mean that even though she was labeled a 60’s “radical” she is always, unfailingly level-headed, monotone, and well reasoned. The radicals are actually all the people around her who get ferociously overheated by her just saying that women should have the same rights as men. The loathsome Glenn Beck makes a startling, brief cameo towards the end. Unfortunately, it’s one of the more interesting things in the movie. Grade: C+
Koran By Heart: Another subtitled Middle Eastern doc, this one not nearly as interesting as Love Crimes of Kabul but still very good. Koran By Heart details a competition held every year in Cairo to see which country’s kid has best memorized the Koran. I think the rules of the competition are interesting (Tajweed is something used to not just judge the memorization but also the rhythm of what’s said) but the documentary’s limited focus doesn’t lend itself to be as fascinating as some of the other subjects. Also, a lot of the kids have been raised to memorize the Koran but not to be literate in anything else, and the adorable, razor-sharp girl from the Maldives (who places second in the competition and first in my book since the “winner” is a kid from Cairo that might have been the beneficiary of home favoritism) has a terrifyingly ignorant father that will leave you fearful of her future. Grade: B+
Superheroes: Perhaps the most well-known of HBO’s doc series is this film about real life “Superheroes” who are mostly just glorified neighborhood watchmen in costumes. The movie is interesting, but is essentially a one-joke movie. After about 30 minutes of seeing these self-styled “superheroes” talk about doing good more than actually doing it, you’re ready for the movie to take a deeper psychological look into these guys, but it really doesn’t. It becomes clear to me that some of these guys are just deeply sad and delusional kids that won’t grow up–like Mr. Xtreme in Orlando who eventually winds up living in a van because he’s flat broke but says it’s for his own “safety” to avoid living in the same neighborhood as the villains he’s tracking–but others of them just really want to hurt people and aren’t all that interested in helping the defenseless. Yet the documentary refuses to take the joke deeper into the psychological instead of dwelling on “Hey, can you believe this dork?” archness. This is the type of simultaneous celebration/mocking that the term “B Movie” was invented for. Grade: B
The number one for a second week