Last Monday, I reviewed the majority of what the Academy Awards considered the best documentaries of 2012, and yet…I don’t think a one of them would have made my list. Only The Invisible War would even be close. So what would make the cut?
Runner-Up: Mansome…Morgan Spurlock’s dissection of what makes a man in the modern age and exactly how much masculinity has changed isn’t groundbreaking or particularly insightful about the human condition. But it is fun, interesting, and occasionally hilarious. What it does is what so many docs fail to do, it doesn’t just cover events, it tries to explain them. One of the most fun documentaries you’ll see in the last year.
5. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry…This doc about China’s premiere artist, revolutionary, and “troublemaker” Ai Weiwei isn’t an entirely flattering portrait of him. For every person that watches this doc and thinks “there goes a brave, brave man” there might be one (like me) who thinks less of Weiwei after watching it. And that’s a good thing. No sense getting lost in hagiography, and there’s no doubt that Weiwei isn’t a phony, and doesn’t really need our empathy. What he needs is a freer country that doesn’t traffic in censorship and arrests of “subversive” artists.
4. Side by Side…Keanu Reeves interviews dozens of great filmmakers in this doc that deals with the shifting change from film to digital. And if that sounds boring, it’s not. I learned more about movies and the process of making movies than in most of the college classes I took on the subject. And there’s something strangely compelling about watching pro-digital filmmakers (James Cameron, George Lucas, Robert Rodriguez) square off against pro-celluloid advocates (some cinematographers and the great Christopher Nolan as a lonely voice for film). It seems like megalomaniacal directors who want to use really long takes and instantly see what they’re shooting prefer digital, but the only real advantage of film is the nostalgia of it. By the beginning of the doc I was firmly pro-film, by the end…well, somewhere in the middle.
3. Queen of Versailles…A fantastic doc that was supposed to be about billionaire time-share magnet David Siegel and his trophy wife (the strangely likable, fully delusional Jaqueline, who’d be a great addition to some Housewives show on Bravo) building the largest house in America, actually follows them as the bank crisis of 2008 hits and they begin to downsize their extravagant lifestyle. [Jackie actually thinks million dollar purses are a good investment at the beginning…by the end, she’s shopping at Wal-Mart.] This is the rare doc that I could recommend to anyone, as reality TV fans will revel in seeing the rich-yet-trashy, new-rich Siegel clan (even when they’re billionaires, they eat at McDonald’s and Pizza Hut), economics majors will love the expose of the scam-driven time-share business, liberals will enjoy seeing Siegel (who illegally helped George W. Bush win Florida in 2000 and continues to be a huge fundraiser for conservatives) cut down to size, and movie lovers will savor the great arc that is King David’s fall from grace, building the largest home in America simply “because he could” but becoming angry and bitter as that house threatens to fall into foreclosure.
2. The Imposter…A draw-dropping and fascinating film that plays more like a great thriller than anything close to a documentary. It’s about a Spanish con-artist/identity-thief who pretended to be a missing boy from Texas despite looking and sounding absolutely nothing like him. And yet…the family of the missing boy takes him in and won’t let him go. Could the family be hiding something? Watching this compelling bunch of crooks——-the sociopathic con-man, the potentially murderous family, a sleazy private eye who wants to find out the truth——–try to out-manuever each other somehow winds up being the most tense, absorbing documentary of the year. I felt my skin crawling in the best way possible as the film sucked me into its own sordid universe.
1. The House I Live In…The only “serious issue” doc of the bunch beats all the Academy nominees at their own game. It covers the drug war (the title refers to prisons) backwards and forwards and somehow makes a very old issue brand new. By going back to the War on Drug’s history (where it’s been used to harass opium-smoking Asians in 1800’s California, and imprison inner-city crack addicts 100 times longer than rich cocaine users) you can see how the prison industrial complex has now rippled out to include a brand-new type of customer: the poor whites who deal in crystal meth. This is a race issue, a class issue, and a justice issue, and this is the single best documentary I’ve ever seen on it. Emotional, outrageous, and perceptive, it needs to be seen by every high school student in the country, along with every politician.