Two docs about very, very different kinds of obsessives…
The Short Game…This Netflix original documentary about children golfers hits all the familiar child-prodigy documentary beats: the pushy parents, the child prodigies who have a hard time with defeat, the kid with the overshadowing sibling (Anna Kournikova’s little brother), the underdog kid, and a lot of cute shots of kids playing golf. Sure, it’s adorable, but there’s a reason that cute cat videos on YouTube aren’t 95 minutes long. [Still, I loved the girl nicknamed “Tigress” because she’s the heir apparent to Tiger Woods, and hope we see her on the pro circuit one day.] Grade: B-
Room 237…This documentary about the obsessive mythology around Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining casts a mesmerizing spell. It has a handful of conspiracy nuts (we never see them, which only adds to the underground appeal) spin nearly-believable tales about how Kubrick filled The Shining with hidden imagery and themes that mean the film is really about the genocide of Native Americans…or the creation of man…or a sly admission of Kubrick’s role in faking the moon landing footage. As the film keeps going—-and these cult experts assign the deepest of meanings into even continuity errors—-you realize two things: 1. That The Shining may not be an entirely coherent horror movie, but there are some seriously interesting things going on underneath the surface, 2. That this documentary (far more than the actual Shining) takes you inside the mind of how a crazy person thinks.
In the end, we don’t know what connections are real, unintentional, or purely imagined, but it’s a lot of fun trying to find out. Grade: A-