Tag Archives: Documentary

CAPSULE: PIECE BY PIECE (2024)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Morgan Neville

FEATURING: Voice of Pharrell Williams

PLOT: An autobiographical documentary about hip-hop producer/musician Pharrell Williams, with all interviews and dramatizations recreated in Lego animation.

Still from Piece by Piece (2024)

COMMENTS: Pharrel Williams, of course, is well-known as the composer and producer of such hits as… um… well, I confess I can’t actually remember any of the titles. With his band/production unit the Neptunes, Pharrel has worked with a lot of other performers whose names I’ve heard but whose tunes I can’t hum: Kendrick Lamar, Gwen Stefani and No Doubt, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake. He primarily produces and sells “beats” (as an old fogey, I still haven’t adjusted to the fact that “beats” have replaced “songs” as the primary unit of pop music). All of them have the quality of being “catchy”: i.e., unique enough to tickle your ear, but generic enough to feel familiar and comfortable.

I write the above not to praise my own snobbishness or to disparage Williams’ art. He’s clearly an accomplished pop craftsman, but his musical style just isn’t my thing. But the remarkable thing is that, by telling what otherwise would be a self-serving, by-the-book musical biodoc about a subject I don’t care about through the unexpected format of Lego animation, Williams captured my attention. It’s a gimmick, but it works: not only is it visually (and even synesthesially) interesting, but there is just enough resonance between Lego blocks and the modularity of the creative process to make for an apt metaphor.

It is, of course, amusing to see scenes like Lego Pharrell Williams meeting Lego Snoop Dogg. A plastic box labeled “PG Spray” puts a smile on everyone’s face during their audience, which embodies the carefree, child-friendly approach to Williams’ story. The film never loses its optimism that everything will always work out for Pharrell (and, it suggests, for anyone else who adopts his gee-whiz, gung-ho workaholism. But, in between the cute cubist celebrity cameos lie more ambitiously animated sequences. The Lego visuals, supplemented by digitally-applied neon, demonstrate more grandeur than expected. The tone is set in an early dream scene where a blocky yellow Triton knights young Pharrell in his undersea kingdom. It’s best exemplified by a bravura sequence where the musician explains his childhood synesthasia: he sits before speakers blaring a Stevie Wonder LP, which draw him into a trippy world where sound becomes “beautiful cubes of light cascading” over his blissed out Lego features. Pharrell’s commercial beats are depicted throughout as bouncing blocks arranged in novel geometric patterns with blinking lights attached. There also are singing whales, and a trip into space where Carl Sagan delivers cosmic wisdom. Piece by Piece may not be completely accurate, or provide much practical insight into the creative process, but it accurately conveys the ecstasy of inspiration that keeps artists slaving away at their craft. Like any mega-celebrity, Williams is primarily a marketer, devoting more care to the sizzle than to the steak. And this is great sizzle.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… a film that is boisterously childlike, surreal and eager to please, but also (I couldn’t help thinking) a strangely wrongheaded attempt to use Lego graphics to tell the remarkable, complex story of a brilliant musician and producer…  The Lego Pharrell is an intriguing, absurdist high concept, but not nearly as interesting as the real thing.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Anonymous,” who correctly noted “most of the weirdness is solely in the visuals, in a Fantasia sort of sense.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

CAPSULE: THE POCKET FILM OF SUPERSTITIONS (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Tom Lee Rutter

FEATURING: Voice of The Shend

PLOT: A narrator elucidates various superstitions whilst they are presented on-screen, with both live actors and animation.

COMMENTS: Crank the understated cheek to eleven and put your brain pan in the oven set to “Regulo Brittania,” because here’s a documentary that’s so quirkily English it could pass as a scone-geared Big Ben clock crowning Queen Victoria. Squeezing Häxan through a blue filter and making heavy use of its “toffee” toned narrator, Tom Lee Rutter assembles a light-minded diversion covering all manner of mankind’s nonsenseries. Why does a bride want “something blue” on her wedding day? Where is the best place to look for faeries? And just what is “Devil’s Nutting Day”? All these questions, and more, are answered here.

You can come and go from this film, as it is broken into easy, bite-sized bits of trivia (and I mean that in the classical sense of the term), and it’s so compact it fits in your pocket for quick and easy consultation. This Pocket Film, by and large, is a documentary, or perhaps more accurately, a primer; but since its subject matter is nonsensical pre- and post-cautions for irrational dangers, it may best be viewed as an anthropological study. A silly anthropological study. The narrator guides the viewer throughout, offering both advice to the viewer and observations of the actions on-screen, these performed in grand early-cinema style by a large cast (including cameos from horror legends and .)

Having a fairly thorough personal knowledge superstitious troubles and solutions, the cinematic interludes—and the sage counsel from Shend, narrator-extraordinaire—all ring true. Most pertain to the Death and the Devil, and their various agents. Saint Agnes was new to me—along with her ritual of the “dumb cake” (Shend is silenced by an on-screen lady as he is about to explain; and for good reason: it is a dumb ritual, after all); and while I always know to cover my mouth when I yawn, I know now that it’s to block off my “soul hole,” thus preventing the Devil from sneaking inside of me. Around a third of the way in we meet a new font of information, the “Hand Maiden,” who gives a five-minute refresher on various hand gestures and their purpose (“Whenever in doubt, you can always use Jazz Hands!”)

With old and new “information,” The Pocket Film of Superstitions never bores, often tickles, and is always very, very British. It closes on the declaration, “we leave you to ponder the great weirdness of man,” having provided a good many explanations, of sorts, pertaining to some couple dozen irrational behaviors, reactions, and practices. Not a terribly long film—running for a sensible hour and a half—its breeziness wafts gently, and winkingly, over the viewer. And while it occasionally risks sailing into twee territory, Rutter holds the rudder just firmly enough to prevent Pocket Film from inducing true groans of regret.

The Pocket Film of Superstitions is currently on the festival circuit, and is expected to debut on streaming (and physical media?) by the end of the year or in early 2025. It next screens at the BUT (B-movie, Underground and Trash) Festival in Breda, the Netherlands, on August 29, followed by a date at the Amazing Fantasy Fest in Buffalo, New York in September. You can keep up with the schedule at The Pocket Film of Superstitions‘s official Facebook page.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It won’t be for everyone, but if you have an interest in superstition and folklore as well as a taste for English humour, The Pocket Film of Superstitions will be right up your alley. And for those who keep saying the genre needs something different, this is the kind of different it needs.” — Jim Morazzini, Voices from the Balcony (contemporaneous)

CAPSULE: QUEENDOM (2023)

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Queendom is currently available for VOD purchase or rental.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Agniia Galdanova

FEATURING: Jenna Marvin

PLOT: A queer Russian performance artist fears for her freedom as she clashes with the law.

Still from Queendom (2023)

COMMENTS wrote that the responsibility of the artist is to “keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.” It’s difficult to imagine anyone embodying this principle more explicitly than “drag” artist Jenna (sometimes spelled “Gena”) Marvin.

I put “drag” in quotes, because, although her act is drag-inspired and drag-adjacent, that term hardly describes Marvin’s bizarre performance art. The locals who are discomfited by her appearance clearly recognize that she is challenging gender norms—she is frequently met with the Russian word for “fag”—but her costumes are so otherworldly and alien that they don’t meet a strict definition of cross-dressing. Tall, lithe (almost a ballerina body), and completely hairless, Jenna adorns herself with elaborate makeup and an assortment of bizarre sartorial choices including ruffs, duct tape, giant pipe cleaners, tentacle fingers, surreal latticed headgear, and so on. The only consistently feminine element are the high heels that accessorize every outlandish outfit.  She ventures out in public to, at best, stares, and at worst verbal abuse and harassment. She also makes short films for Tik Tok and Instagram—often set in amazing Siberian wilderness locations—where she takes out her frustrations by thrashing around in the mud in wild interpretative dances. Most dangerously, she attends protests against the Putin regime. In one, she dresses in a stilleto-heeled mockery of the Russian flag, which gets her thrown out of college; when the Ukrainian invasion comes, she walks down a Moscow street nearly nude wrapped in homemade barbed wire, which earns her a citation from the police and the threat of a court date.

With no narration and only a tiny bit of direct questioning from the documentarian, Queendom is almost entirely a fly-on-the-wall affair. It conveys enough information to keep you grounded in the developing story, although some knowledge of recent developments in Putin’s Russia is helpful. Anti-LGTBQ sentiment is encoded into the law there; faces of protestors or Jenna ‘s artistic collaborators are often blurred or carefully kept out of frame out of a sense of caution. But the social ostracism Jenna faces is perhaps even more telling. (“We have fear and subservience in our DNA,” Jenna’s friend tells her, referencing the country’s Soviet legacy.) Jenna’s contentious relationship with her grandfather—who, we gather, raised her—takes up a large portion of the story. Grandpa supports her, in his way, but does not pretend to understand either her sexuality or her creativity. His main concern is that, if she’s going to continue dressing as a freak, she better figure out how to make some money at it.

In the end—mild spoiler alert—Jenna does not go to prison or (worse) succumb to conscription, but is able to flee Russia to a European capital where she feels at home in a far more tolerant society. She has more courage than most of us, but does not, like Alexei Navalny (whose protest she attended dressed as the flag) have the ultimate courage to become a martyr. And who among us would? If I were in her heels, I would have fled far faster. She may have a duty to keep a margin of nonconformity alive—but she also has a responsibility to keep herself alive.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…more than a mere cabaret act, Marvin’s myriad outfits are a thrilling combination of theatricality, circus craft, avant-garde performance art, high camp, and something more otherworldly besides — as if H.R. Giger and Derek Jarman had a grotesque, unsettling baby… as well as the straight documentarian footage, there are surreal vignettes, Marvin creating visual art with her outfits and her emotions.”–John Nugent, Empire (contemporaneous)

CAPSULE: DARIO ARGENTO: PANICO (2023)

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Dario Argento: Panico is available for VOD rental or purchase (or free with a Shudder subscription)

DIRECTED BY: Simone Scafidi

FEATURING: , , , , Gaspar Noé,

PLOT: Dario Argento visits a hotel to write a script, while those who know or admire him praise his movies in interviews.

Still fro, Dario Argento: Panico (2023)

COMMENTS: Dario Argento: Panico gives you exactly what you would expect from this kind of biodoc: choice clips, some behind-the-scenes stuff, and a bunch of talking heads saying nice things about its subject (while awkwardly trying to avoid talking much about his twenty-first century work). The structure is mildly novel in that there is a ‘wraparound’ story: Argento, in the present day, travels to a resort to hole up and write a new script (his usual procedure). The opening cleverly juxtaposes Argento’s ride to the hotel with Suzy’s tempestuous taxicab journey to the ballet school in Suspiria. After this creepy prologue, the film follows Argento’s career chronologically, with select clips and testimony from friends, admirers, and Argento himself (both in the current day and in archival interviews). There are even a few humorous moments where the octogenarian director congenially complains about the heat, the other hotel guests, or the length of the interview.

The filmmakers interviewed here all come from the weird end of the cinema pool (each, in fact, has an entry in our Canon of 366 Weird Movies). Together, they make a case for Argento as a genuine horror auteur—one of the few, in a genre that is more often ruled by commercial considerations than artistic ones. Gaspar Noé even compares Argento’s work to the / films (which is an amazing compliment, if a bit of a stretch stylistically). Guillermo del Toro boils the work’s appeal down to its essence, declaring that Argento’s horror reveals “a cosmic sense of an angry, evil universe. Everything in Argento’s movies is trying to kill you.”

Every fan, casual or dedicated, likely has a particular curiosity about some aspect Argento’s canon. Personally, I’ve always wondered if its merely a coincidence that the director’s greatest decade (1975-1985) coincides almost exactly with his collaboration and romance with actress/writer (who was also the mother of his next greatest collaborator, Asia Argento.) Although Dario credits her as an inspiration, he already was on an upward trajectory before meeting Daria while planning Deep Red. Yet, his work begins a slow decline after their divorce. One clue comes from Asia, who explains that her mother had an interest in magic a lot of books on witchcraft. Before Nicolodi, Argento’s movies were mainly ian thrillers and gialli that had little of the supernatural in them; afterwards, his palette opens up to let in the eldritch and the paranormal. This confirmation of Nicolodi’s underappreciated influence alone made the documentary worth the watch for me.

This sort of retrospective is probably most appealing to viewers with a partial knowledge of the subject. Rabid fans will know most of this stuff already, and total newcomers won’t have the baseline knowledge to see why the connections being made are meaningful. But they perform a useful gap-filling function in the cinematic ecosystem: in this case, reminding me that I still need to catch up on Inferno.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Throughout, Scafidi (whose 2019 biopic of Lucio Fulci proves he’s no stranger to bedeviled auteurs) presents Argento primarily as a visual artist, emphasizing the surreality of his images and the shadowy menace of his anonymous cityscapes.”–Jeanette Catsoulis, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS (2013)

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DIRECTED BY: Ben Rivers, Ben Russell

FEATURING: Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Nicholas McMaster, Weasel Walter

PLOT: A commune member goes off on his own for a more solitarty existence but eventually heads to the city, where he plays in a black metal rock band.

Still from A Spell to Ward off the Darkness (2013)

COMMENTS: Michael Winterbottom’s 2004 romantic drama 9 Songs is ostensibly about the life of a relationship, in which we see the central couple enjoy each other’s company, argue, and have sex; in between, they go to concerts and see bands like Franz Ferdinand, the Von Bondies, and the Dandy Warhols. The back-and-forth nature of the production begs the question of whether the songs are there to justify the explicit sex scenes, or if the sex is an excuse to showcase all these up-and-coming bands. 

I thought of this as I followed the tripartite journey of the central figure in A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. This man who goes from a commune to a lone encampment in the woods to a concert in a small nightclub never speaks, never offers any insight into his heart or mind. Even in performance, he and his fellow bandmates sing exclusively in wordless intonations. So what are we seeing? Is this concert the culmination of a journey? The logical endpoint for his travels from nature to urbanity? Or did the band come first, and the movie was reverse-engineered to get us here?

As winner of the award for Best Documentary Feature at the Torino Film Festival—aside from reminding us just how many film festivals there are out there—Spell brings up the question of just what a documentary is. Nothing in A Spell to Ward off the Darkness is fictional, strictly speaking, because nothing in it is functionally narrative. Arguably the most vérité section of the film is in the first third, when we hang out with a bunch of hippies at their wooded retreat as they build a small dome, frolic about in the sauna, laze by a river, and engage in idle chit-chat. It seems pleasantly rustic (they still have wi-fi and sound systems), and the residents are a little crunchy-granola, but not annoyingly so. Still, there’s a distinct lack of specifics. We don’t even know anyone’s name, let alone what led them to walk away from society or permitted them to find each other. It documents by capturing on film, but completely elides the facts or context that would give the images meaning.

But the remainder of the film doesn’t even possess the veneer of the found moment. When one of the campers (Lowe, whom we’ve only seen occasionally up to this point) decides to go off and live on his own, it feels enormously calculated, as we jump directly to the middle of his escape in a canoe. Nothing has precipitated the move, and not much will come of it as he hikes his way to a remote cabin where he can read, fish, and get dressed for the last portion of the film. Having put on makeup and set fire to the cabin, Lowe heads into town to join a concert in a tavern. Surely this was no surprise to the filmmakers. Certainly these are known events, staged and shot with forethought and intention. So the questions arise again: What are we seeing? Does the dog wag the tail, or vice-versa?

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness is a beautifully shot motion picture, and the slow and contemplative pacing is enticing, encouraging you to watch to see where it’s going to go. But it isn’t going anywhere, because it isn’t really storytelling. It feels more like a collection of the most professionally shot home movies ever assembled. Having seen the pretty pictures, the viewer leaves with no more than when they began, without even hot sex or a cool song to take as a souvenir. So I guess it’s weird. I’m not sure if it’s a movie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This muddled curio doesn’t coalesce into anything, even by its own dreamy, associational terms.”–Tara Brady, The Irish Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Blizard. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)