The post DATW: “Thirty Days” appeared first on The Faster Times.

The post DATW: “Born Rich” appeared first on The Faster Times.

Johnson’s tone in “The One Percent” is almost prescient of the “Occupy Everywhere” movement proliferating around the world. Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson cosmetics fortune, is a member of the one percent – in fact, his family is among the 400 richest in the U.S. He has unique voice. He is not Michael Moore who speaks, often vociferously, on behalf of the people. Nor is he Charles Ferguson, a pedantic, but insightful journalist.

Johnson is anything but wonky. He is candidly naïve. He interviews Milton Friedman and admits on camera that he’s never read “Capitalism and Freedom.” There’s a brief, rudimentary segment in which he explores how wealthiest one percent holds undue influence in our political system.

The raison d’etre of this film, the idea that plagues Johnson at every family reunion, is financial transparency. His family, his father in particular, beseeches him to put down the camera. “It’s good for you to have something to do with your life,” his family’s wealth manager says, as condescendingly as possible, “but I hate to see you doing this to yourself.” But Johnson insists, for not especially clear reasons, that it’s important to be forthright about one’s financial privilege. It’s a similar impulse that that led to the development of the We Stand with the 99 Percent Blog, which features the stories of the sympathetic, yet financially fortunate, some concealing their faces.

Johnson is wide-eyed and young, and shot this film with the indiscriminate eagerness of a newly-inspired college student. He shoots at private golf club and in the lobby of the decrepit Cabrini-Green Housing projects in Chicago. He interviews his taxi driver and the CEO of Kinkos. He’s especially apt at interviewing fellow once-percenters. His presence – or last name – inspires candor, sometimes of the most unsavory variety. “Well, one day I’d like to go to the Moon and look at the planet Earth and say, ‘Wow, there’s part of my portfolio, ‘” the Kinkos CEO says.

Like the protesters on Wall Street, and across the world, Johnson could not provide you with a coherent list of demands, nor policy recommendations. He just knows that wealth inequality is a subject that needs to be addressed. And sure, there’s a bit of rich-boy shame in the film. But staging a conversation about wealth inequality, even somewhat naïvely, is anything but shameful.

See the trailer:

The post Doc Revisited: “The One Percent” appeared first on The Faster Times.

For the inaugural film, here’s Last Minutes with Oden, which won Best Video at Vimeo’s first-ever awards ceremony earlier this month. I warn, this film may not be work appropriate, unless crying at your desk is encouraged and you work close your dog – as you will want to hug him or her as soon as you see this.

The post Docs Around the Web appeared first on The Faster Times.

In 1978, Joyce McKinney, a curvy blonde beauty queen, chartered a plane to London to “rescue” her beloved from Mormonism. His name was Kirk Anderson. He was a religious man, dowdy and bespectacled – an unlikely object of a southern belle’s young lust. They had a weekend of raunchy sex in Devon, England; she chained – or tied, depending on your favorite version of the story – to the bed of their cottage rental. When he returned to his mission in London, he reported that he had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted. She was arrested. And the tale of “Manacled Mormon” was born, to the great delight of English tabloids and their readers.

In “Tabloid,” a thrilling new documentary, Errol Morris returns to Joyce McKinney’s story. This is her show. Anderson decided not to cooperate, a decision that was in his and the film’s best interest. By avoiding a he said/she said story, the film doesn’t get bogged down by the crude facts of the case and instead, explores the still untapped mystery of McKinney’s wild, delirious mind.

McKinney, now in her fifties, revels in the camera like a starlet. The supporting cast includes the pilot who escorted her to England, two tabloid editors, and a Korean scientist. They’re not a trustworthy bunch. The editors are sensationalists by trade. The pilot is blinded by a decades-long crush. McKinney lies out of defense, or impulse, or because she’s “barking mad,” as one editor argues. The truth, meanwhile, slips away like a planet drifting out of orbit.

In later years, McKinney lived with her pitbull Booger and when he died, she paid over $100,000 to clone him. (Enter Korean scientist.) Booger, by her account, knew how to call 9-1-1 in an emergency and could fetch a soda from the fridge. With Booger, as with Anderson, McKinney is deranged with love. The fringe of madness is one of Morris’s favorite topics and in “Tabloid” he’s found his perfect heroine.

Tabloid is out in select theaters and will air on Showtime later this year

The post “Tabloid” Review appeared first on The Faster Times.

You might recognize Michael Rappaport, a pale and tawny haired actor, as the tough man in movies like “Cop Land” or “The Basketball Diaries.” But as the director of “Beats, Rhymes, and Life,” a new documentary about a Tribe Called Quest, he plays the gushing fan boy. Rappaport never appears in the movie, but you can almost hear his heart palpitations from off-screen. His interview questions have the same this-is-too-cool-to-believe quality as the main character from Almost Famous.

The documentary is an ode to a Tribe Called Quest as well as other hip hop groups and MCs from the 90s. There are appearances by De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers, DJ Red Alert, Busta Rhymes, the Beastie Boys, A+, and Special K, among many others. The audience at the screening I attended burst into a collective sigh – the groan of unexpectedly induced nostalgia – every time one of them appeared on screen for the first time. The film celebrates the era of Toast of New York lipstick, geometric prints, bulky stereos, and really great music. Rappaport gets some great footage of the group while they’re preparing for their Rock the Bells reunion tour in 2008. But the best moments of the film aren’t with the group, but with other musicians reflecting on how much Tribe influenced them, like when Busta Rhymes says he can’t listen to “Lyrics to Go,” his favorite song, without crying.

For fans of A Tribe Called Quest, this movie will jog your memory. It will remind you how Q-Tip grew up off Linden Avenue, in Queens. It will remind you of just how young they were – 17! – when they started performing. You’ll recall how Pfife’s jittery, high voice paired with Q-Tip’s R&B-like croon made for perfection. The film shows Q-Tip’s crazy musical genius in action. He’s a scholar. He listens the same way Harold Bloom must read – widely and rabidly. Younger rappers, like Common, say that Q-Tip taught him to appreciate his parents’ music – soul, jazz, bebop.

Documentaries about musicians and artists are supposed to do what Q-Tip did for Common – bridge the gap between music lost to the archives and a new audience who has no idea what they’ve been missing. Typically this happens by choosing someone a bit obscure, like with Matt Wolf’s film about Arthur Russell or Michael Cohl’s film about Harry Belefonte, to name two recent examples. For well-known bands, the prevailing, and successful tactic is to cut down on back-story and just let the music speak for itself, like in Jonathan Demme’s “Stop Making Sense” or even Martin Scorsese “Shine a Light.” The problem with “Beats, Rhymes, and Life” is that there’s not enough of Tribe’s music in it. By my count, only two and a half songs. That’s not going to create any converts! Instead, the movie focuses on all the drama that’s only interesting to fans, who by this point have read about it years ago. It’s not clear who this movie is for – other than Rappaport, that is. “They still want us,” Q-Tip says at the very end of the film. Why didn’t Rappaport listen to him?

A Tribe Called Quest wasn’t too thrilled about the movie either. Listen to their reaction here.

Beats, Rhymes, and Life opens at select theaters nationwide Friday July 15

The post “Beats, Rhymes, and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest” Review appeared first on The Faster Times.

Project Nim, a mesmerizing new documentary by James Marsh, is like Jungle Book in reverse. Back in the 70s, Herb Terrace, a professor at Columbia University thought it might be interesting to see what might happen to a chimpanzee raised by humans and taught sign language. So, he asks Stephanie, his former student and lover, to open her brownstone on the upper west side to a two-week old chimp – Nim. Stephanie complies a bit too eagerly: She breast feeds little Nim and encourages him to “explore her body” (she had recently completed a thesis on Oedipus complex). From there, the experiment becomes even less professional. After Nim outgrows Manhattan, he’s brought to Riverdale, where he is cared for by a string of very well-intended, very young girls who are as clueless about chimpanzees as they are about Professor Terrace’s real motives in hiring them (Hint – Chimps do it, too.) In the ensuing years, Nim charms, cuddles, and occasionally mauls these girls. And when Nim turns five and outgrows his diapers, Terrace decides it’s time to return Nim to the colony where he came from.

All of the characters are so archetypal that they border on cartoonish. There’s an evil scientist who looks like John C. Reily with a Hitler mustache, a chimp who loves to love, an Earth Mother with less than maternal instincts, and a hippie with shaggy, blonde hair who befriends Nim after he’s been abandoned. Its surprising Pixar didn’t beat Marsh to the chase. You forget you’re watching a documentary, partly because of story’s sheer entertainment value and partly because of the movie’s brilliant editing. To say that Marsh interviewed each of his subjects would be a misnomer. He films them talking-head style – just like any History Channel documentary – but they don’t sound like interviews: There’s no trace of an interviewer and everyone is so shockingly open that it feels as if they’re speaking to the camera voluntarily, no prodding needed. They become narrators, rather than subjects.

Even Terrace calls his experiment a failure, but not for the obvious reasons. While Nim developed a large vocabulary, he never learned to combine the words into grammatical sentences – meaning that he never spoke with humans as Terrace hoped he would. But the film proves that Nim communicated with all of his human companions. He got angry, forgave, and manipulated them. He attended their parties, smoked their weed, and even kissed away their tears. Nim is a tender, misunderstood protagonist certain to resonate with any audience, as long as they’re human.

Project Nim is showing in select theaters nation-wide and will air on HBO later this year

The post “Project Nim” Review appeared first on The Faster Times.

The post POV Lineup Announced appeared first on The Faster Times.

Andrew Rossi’s riveting documentary provides just that. Most of the scenes take place in the corner of the newspaper’s shiny, new offices occupied by the media desk and its top reporters, David Carr, Brian Stelter, Tim Arango and editor Bruce Headlam. Watching them at work is unexpectedly entertaining. They have a charming, banter-filled rapport. Carr likes to complain that Stelter, a fresh-faced Internet guru with three screens beaming from his desk at all times, “is a machine specifically created to destroy me.” They collaborate on how to approach high-stake stories – WikiLeaks, an investigative takedown of the Tribune Company – and provide each other with a preventive buffer against over-hyping. It’s a testament to the benefits of collaboration, the, albeit old school and expensive, habit of working together under one shared, Renzo Piano-designed roof. There’s an advantage to writing from one’s own lair, as I am at the moment: You can go barefoot without offending anyone, there’s easy access to leftovers. But “Page One” shows how having an editor 12-feet away is part of what makes the New York Times as good of a paper as it is.

By focusing on the media desk, and especially on its charmingly gruff spokesman David Carr, the film looks into larger issues of journalism today. Carr has a superhero capacity in the film. He faces off against aggregators and less serious journalists, a crusader of journalistic integrity in the new media rubble. Carr is a dexterous, foul-mouthed debater – he single-handedly earned the film its “R” rating – and every time he fires back against someone belittling the Times, you want to cheer.

Carr is indefatigable, but one wonders about his employer. There’s much talk of layoffs and pay walls and, more explicitly, whether the Times will ever go extinct. To answer this question, Rossi takes an impressionistic, rather than an investigative approach. In fact, Rossi spends very little time with the executives at the paper – the people who actually know where the newspaper stands financially. (He spends even less time with women at paper. The office, as far as the film goes, is roaring with testosterone.) Rossi situates the media desk within history of journalism. His montage includes the Pentagon Papers, the IPad, and Jayson Blair, the reporter caught plagiarizing and fabricating, among other disparate topics. It’s a long-winded and, at times, confusing way of saying that this, too, will pass. Page One opens nationwide on July 1

The post “Page One” Review appeared first on The Faster Times.

But my friends urging me to see the movie aren’t doing so because they’re big Apatow fans or because they found “Bridesmaids” to be especially funny – in fact, most of them haven’t seen it yet. They’re urging me to see it because, as one email explained, “we MUST show Hollywood that women DO want movies that are not vapid romcoms or something about shopping.” “Bridesmaids” is a comedy that just happens to be written by women and starring women. This might not seem like the seed of social revolution, but it is, in fact, a big deal. As Tad Friend, writing in the New Yorker about comedic actress Anna Farris, recently pointed out, “Studio executives believe that male moviegoers would rather prep for a colonoscopy that experience a woman’s point of view, particularly if that woman drinks or swears or has a great job or an orgasm.” If women come out in droves for “Bridesmaids” opening weekend – and some of them drag their husbands and boyfriends along – perhaps studio executives will start to think differently.

As someone who thinks a lot about documentaries, I’m constantly surprised by the gender imbalance in Hollywood. That’s not to say gender inequities don’t exist in non-fiction filmmaking. In fact, all the biggest brands in documentary filmmaking are men – Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, Errol Morris, Davis Guggenheim, Alex Gibney, Eugene Jarecki. But compared to Hollywood, the documentary film industry is as female-friendly as a gynecologist’s office. There are lots of women making non-fiction films. Only 4 women have ever be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director, but in the documentary category, women are nominated all the time: Lucy Walker for “Waste Land,” Laura Poitras for “My Country, My Country,” Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady for “Jesus Camp,” to name but a few. The president of HBO Documentaries, the fairy godmother of documentary filmmaking, is Sheila Nevins – a woman. OWN, Oprah’s new network, is about to become a huge showcase of non-fiction movies. There are lots of documentaries about women who swear and have good jobs and orgasms (and sometimes all 3!), like “Orgasm, Inc” and “12th and Delaware” and “Miss Representation,” all of which came out in the last year.

I’m not sure why this would be case: Is it easier for women to break into documentary filmmaking, where movies have much smaller budgets and smaller crews to manage? Are documentaries another manifestation of women’s charitable, bleeding hearts? (Much in the way so many women doctors go into pediatrics, rather than, say, plastic surgery.) Is being a woman in Hollywood so tiresome, that it’s easier to just pick up a video camera and fly to Iraq than politick with executives? Is there just more professional support for women in documentary films, through groups like Chicken and Egg Pictures and Women Make Movies?

So, kudos to the documentary film world for being an industry that represents women. I’m excited to see “Bridesmaids” soon. But I’ll be even more excited when Hollywood catches up with documentaries and a movie that just so happens to be about women isn’t a big deal, at all.

The post “Bridesmaids” and Lady Filmmakers appeared first on The Faster Times.