Some quick documentary reviews before getting to films currently in theaters…
Score…If you’ve ever been interested in movies about a film’s musical composition, this may be of interest to you. However, I wish they’d spent a little more time getting into the details of film composition. It’s more a cliff-notes history of famous film scores than something that will tell you a lot about how the actual nuts and bolts are put together. Grade: B-
Saving Capitalism…The message is extremely important (more than any of the other docs in this article) but the execution isn’t. Robert Reich is a tireless champion for income equality, but his 2013 documentary “Inequality for All” (which made Alabama Liberal’s “Top Ten Best Films of the Year List”) was a much more thorough and interesting doc on basically the same material. Here, we’re mostly following Reich around the country as he ambles through a book tour, and—I hate to say it—but this really just comes off as “Netflix filler,” right down to the end credits where Reich is goofily dancing around. Grade: B-
Citizen Jane: Battle for the City…I wasn’t even aware there was a battle over city planning and a “street’s eye” view of city planning (which title subject Jane Jacobs championed) vs. the top-down vision promoted by legendary planner Robert Moses. This doc doesn’t delve much into who Jane Jacobs was as a person—or at all, really—and it seems to be as much about how much Robert Moses sucks as Jacobs was right. Still, it’s well-made, moves quickly, and you wish at least some of this professional polish and razzle dazzle had been deployed for “Saving Capitalism” as well. Grade: B
The Eagle Huntress…Whereas people have at least a passing knowledge of income inequality, film scores, and city planning, it’s safe to say few are well-versed in the Kazakh tradition of “eagle hunting” and competitions for such. This follows Aishol-Pan as she hopes to become the sport’s first female eager hunter. Straining this thing into some larger societal significance (the anti-female eagle hunter elders really do look like breathing oil paintings from a different century or even millennium) feels a bit forced, but Aishol-Pan is an irresistible heroine and open shots of the snow-covered mountains are breathtaking. The best looking doc of the bunch. Grade: B+
The Great Beyond: Jim and Andy…It feels like an odd omission that this doc doesn’t mention how playing Andy Kauffman ruined Jim Carrey’s career (and lead to rumors that the film took a toll on Jim’s sanity). If that sounds like hyperbole on my part, just check out his IMDB page, and you might see a pretty clear “Before ‘The Man on the Moon'” and “After,” as you may have heard of only a few of Carrey’s films after “Moon” and he was the biggest star in the world beforehand. The last few years have only seen cameo roles in junk like “The Bad Batch,” and his only upcoming project is a Showtime series, quite a step-down from the first man to be paid 20 million dollars for one movie.
Anyway, the doc combines footage from Jim going ultra-method to portray Andy Kaufman with a new interview of a fully-bearded (and weirded) Carrey waxing philosophic on the idiosyncrasies of a comedian few people probably even remember. Still, it’s a well-made and exhaustive portrayal of a subject Carrey may wish he’d never encountered, and you can learn a thing or two about the power and transcendence that comes with artistic madness (or what at least looks that way to the rest of the world). Grade: B