The people vs. George Lucas

A-

Love-hate docu complexity for Star Wars and its creator.

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Documentary features can be entertaining ways to learn things one didn't know, or even realise one wanted to know. The People vs. George Lucas took 90 minutes to show me that a true force of film fans willingly exhibit a love-hate complexity for Star Wars and its creator.

They, and Alexandre Philippe's interesting film essay, initially appear to be making a lot of fuss about nothing really special. Bit by bit, though, the charges leveled at Lucas add up to a damning indictment of the commercial film industry (and its unstated dumbing-down of movie audiences).

1. Lucas's "special editions" of the initial trilogy re-wrote Hans Solo's character so that he wouldn't be seen cold-bloodily shooting an assassin. The fans' rage isn't directed at hypocritical PC squeamishness by Lucas's Hollywood associates.

2. The introduction of Jar Jar Binks as an unfunny (to the older fans) creature apparently designed for a new generation of kids expecting silly voices and fart jokes.

3. The prequel trilogy's diminution of "The Force" into a genetic disturbance.

4. Lucas's control-freakery and apparent deliberate slights for Star Wars fans.

5. The fundamental commercialism of an entertainment industry that either overpowered Lucas or encouraged him to exploit, preventing him ever making another creative film, instead devoting himself to a Darth Vader-like existence running his Star Wars empire.

The most damning evidence of the sixth charge is the Star Wars Christmas [aka Holiday in Wikipedia, probably for the usual modern pc reason] Special for TV in 1978, which Lucas subsequently attempted to deny and destroy. A quarter of the two-hour disaster reportedly comprises an un-subtitled setpiece of growling for Chewbacca and his newly-introduced family.

Although the documentary tries to present a balanced critique of aspects of Lucas's achievements and failings with Star Wars, the non-cooperation by his empire and Hollywood production associates leaves the field clear for the fervent fans' rants (most of which are fairly comical, including an early Simon Pegg send-up).

Clips from many of the fans' home-filmed parodies, satires, animations and denunciations (one re-working Misery to great effect) provide the heart of the documentary, and confirm its claim that Star Wars inspired a generation of film-goers. Lucas "raped their childhood", some fans assert, self-mockingly, even though his sins provoked a new art form of amateur cinematics.

The professionals do the best job though: an excerpt from South Park's condemnation of the Lucas-Spielberg re-launch (depicted as a two-man rape of Indiana Jones) offers the blackest comic commentary on the whole business.

Page one: inside the NYT

A+

If columnist David Carr didn't actually inspire Page One: Inside the New York Times, he attracted the focal attention of the documentary's makers.

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David Carr, a reformed drug addict and ex-convict, scruffy and off-balance physically, shuffles around the Grey Lady's stylish palace of news like a Method Actor in search of a back alley. Vaguely deadpan, eyes seething, his face looking like a lost character from a Chandler short story, Carr tip-taps his laptop, recording interview notes about media morality with fierce self-righteousness. His existence and survival in the NYT is vital proof of the newspaper's unique character and role.

Inevitably, having been given access to the financially troubled paper's editorial offices and meetings, writer-director Andrew Rossi doesn't dig for dirt. He briefly acknowledges and then totally ignores the role of the NYT's white knight, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, (whose multi-million-dollar loan saved the paper, and will surely give him long-term possession of its valuable real estate.)

Much of the time, the documentary and NYT personnel fret about the future, the actual existence, of the printed newspaper business and the NYT itself. As they see it, the Internet era's media barbarians are not at the gate, they're ransacking the whole castle and destroying its viability.

One of bearded crusty Carr's many dramatic moments is his put-down of Gawker, after the news aggregator's owner joins a debate proposing that the demise of mainstream media is welcomed. Carr holds up a print-out of Gawker's front "page", from which he's cut out all the news items provided for it by the mainstream. There's just a sheet of holes.

Media buffs will enjoy many other moments when the virtues of well-researched news stories and backgrounders are displayed. Even more, they'll savour the Media desk's expose of the despicable characters who took over and pillaged the Tribune group, and Carr's role in forcing its CEO's resignation.

The documentary records an eventful period in the paper's history: Wikileaks was working with it, it was recovering from self-inflicted wounds from a lying journalist and the Iraq-WMD scandal, and the mercenary menace of Rupert Murdoch's empire was becoming clearer. The documentary shows that if ever there was an American institution that's too important to be allowed to fail, it's the NYT.

Cameraman

Cameraman, a documentary overview of "The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff", appeared in 2010, the year after the Oscar-winning 94-year-old British cinematographer died. Directed by Craig McCall, who also edited and produced the tribute feature, it expands on McCall's previous short studies of Cardiff's use of cameras as an artistic medium, showing how much Cardiff was consciously inspired by artists as varied as Vermeer, Turner and the Impressionists.

The cross-references are truly illuminating, unlike the humdrum words of praise from Hollywood celebrities and some of the director-cameraman's living leading ladies. Cardiff's genius with colour composition, shadows and framing is confirmed though, most clearly in the one Oscar nomination of his that succeeded: for The Black Narcissus, in 1948 (also winning the Golden Globe that year). He gained other cinematography nods for Fanny (1962) and War and Peace (1957); in 2001 he was awarded the first Honorary Oscar given to a cameraman (who was commended as a "master of light and color").

Although he directed more than a dozen commercial features, he only had one major success. In 1961, Sons and Lovers earned an Oscar for its B&W cinematographer, Freddie Francis (another Brit), and eight more nominations, including one for Cardiff as director. He did collect a Golden Globe for it as best drama director, but Billy Wilder's comedy The Apartment was that year's Oscar-winner.

It would have been interesting to hear Cardiff talk about his two jobs' differences and their particular difficulties, and why he found it necessary to re-focus his career behind the camera after the British film industry collapsed. His life from clapper boy to Rocky II's cameraman covered seven decades, and he appeared to be a modest talent who chose to memorise funny moments on and off the sets rather than the "hypocrisy and hyperbole" that he found in Hollywood. The trouble with modesty is that it can make its subject seem inconsequential.

Shine a light

The Rolling Stones in concert, as seen by Martin Scorsese. What more needs to be said? Shine a Light (issued in 2008) is a set of slick recordings, an exciting tribute and a wry documentary as well as a superb showcase for five extraordinary old men (including Scorsese himself, once again showing himself off as a film editor with an exceptional ear for pop music).

Seven cinematographers were at work in New York's Beacon Theater at the end of 2006 for the special charity concerts staged during the band's A Bigger Bang Tour. The last show was attended by Bill Clinton, his family and invitees, whose photo ops were better managed than the music line-up. Scorsese doesn't get the song list until a moment before the Stones strut on stage for their opening number, Jumpin' Jack Flash.

Dancing dreams

Pina Bausch, a leading German modern dance choreographer, died in 2009, during the completion of a documentary report on her teaching style for young people, Tanztraume (Dancing Dreams).

Then aged 69, she did see the class of more than 30 non-professional teenagers complete their eight-month course of Saturday morning dance classes and perform her "Kontakhof", first staged in 1978, in a German theatre.

An ideal exercise for young beginners, the lightly comic dance revue shows teenagers exploring their own personalities, needs and sensual bodies through a sequence of varying dance styles. The documentary focuses on and follows the learning steps of a handful of youngsters who were likely lead roles in the "graduation" performances.

The true stars are Bausch's two middle-aged dance mistresses, visibly loving their work as Bausch's disciples and the apprentices' dance teachers and life counsellors. Bausch herself, a gaunt poker-faced heavy smoker with an imperial stride and smile, only appears in the rehearsal room occasionally, to assess the project's progress and make casting choices. As with documentaries showcasing similar busy cultural icons (Anna Wintour, YSL, etc), the dedicated assistants, their masters' apostles, are the true cultural heroes.

The students are an interesting bunch, some from first or second-generation Germans (from the former Yugoslavia and its Romany migrants), while other dance-curious youngsters sport gelled hairstyles, male earrings and black faces. Overall, they present an almost incredibly happy image of well-adjusted, ethnically-diverse German urban teens, forming a friendly team in which the only foreign influence is the occasional usage of "international" English and French words for limbs and steps.

Although the youngsters' interviews include moments of grief, shyness and despair, it's primarily a self-effacing record of an aspect of Bausch's work. No more, no less, and therefore disappointing. Although a study of dance shouldn't look so pedestrian, it does clearly illustrate Pausch's belief in using modern dance to liberate a teenager's self-esteem.

Notebook on cities and clothes

Egocentric Dutch director Wim (My American Friend) Wenders attempted the impossible with Notebook on Cities and Clothes: he had been commissioned by the director of the Pompidou Centre to look at the fashion industry through a 1988 documentary centred on the working style of Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, a long-haired man in black clothes constantly.

Initially, Wenders focused on his own thoughts about cities, life and identity in the digital age. That provided a rationale for including camcorder replays of Yamamoto interview comments on materials, inspirations and other fashion pointers.

When the designer speaks Japanese, subtitle translations convey the words of his thoughts clearly even if the thoughts are vague. Unfortunately, most of the time Yamamoto murmurs in the English language, hesitantly as well as vaguely. It's hard, and unrewarding, to try and follow his chugging trains of thought.

Wenders' cameramen watch Yamamoto in his workhop, snipping and arranging cloth. Truly inscrutable and seemingly shy, the designer is not an exciting documentary subject to observe or listen to. So Wenders takes him to a billiards hall to ask some questions in a livelier and slightly more colourful setting than in Yamamoto's monochromatic environment.

[Interestingly, Yamamoto subsequently developed a second career as a movie costume designer, including work on four productions for the prolific actor-director Takeshi Kitano between 2000 and 2005.]

[Wenders, also a workaholic, has directed a further 26 titles so far, 15 of which were full-length features or documentaries. He's garnered nominations for an Oscar and a BAFTA (for Ry Cooder's scintillating 1998 documentary Buena Vista Social Club), having already won a BAFTA for Paris, Texas in 1984.]

Scissor sisters

Movie presentations of pop groups' live shows are occasionally cinematic delights per se, and not just when Martin Scorsese directs them. If a group is confident enough, it will let a talented director frame and edit their performances, on and off stage, to create the movie equivalent of a parade of visually exciting floats conveying their music to fresh heights of thrills or meanings. Were the arch-gay NY-formed UK-resident Scissor Sisters glam-rock and honky-tonk fivesome that self-confident?

In 2004, their live concert at the Brighton Dome was recorded for their first DVD, We Are Scissor Sisters ... And So Are You. It also included a bio-documentary, Return to Oz. Both were directed by Julien Temple. Three years later in London, an O2 live show was captured in A Year of Ta-Dah, a debut direction for an unknown Benjamin Hoffman (the same family name as one of the group's founding members, NY-born Scot Hoffman aka Babydaddy).

He's the somewhat Teddy Bear-ish bearded guitarist whose stage persona is Nervousness. His be-suited lead guitar counterpoint, "Del Marquis", personifies Aloofness. There's a non-gay drummer in between them (originally "Paddy Boom"), personifying nothing special, while the group's primary foci are slim ultra-exhibitionist Jake Shears and plumpish butchy Ana "Matronic". Her to-camera remarks provide the thread for Temple's neatly-edited 26-minute documentary, showing how the group formed, starting with Hoffman and Shears sharing a bed.

Letter to Elia

Martin Scorsese teamed up with Kent Jones in 2010 to write and direct an hour-long Elia Kazan retrospective and documentary essay for a packaged collection of the director's work. Its title, A Letter to Elia, hints at the loving respect, virtual hero-worship, Scorsese feels for the man whose movies inspired him as an avid pre-teen movie-goer.

Scorsese often reviews movie history, gives lectures, and is as confident in front of the screen as behind the cameras. The one-sided partnership with Jones is presumably based on friendship, as Jones had no other movie industry experience and is a former writer (1996-2001) for The Daily Show on Comedy Channel. He'd worked with Scorsese before on a documentary study of the Statue of Liberty, The Lady by the Sea (2004, for the History Channel, marking the statue's post-911 re-opening).

In 2007, Scorsese narrated Jones's documentary about Val Lewton, Man in the Shadows, a producer of low-budget horror movies (Cat People, Body Snatcher etc) for RKO. That was a 77-minute promotional commission for the Turner Classic Movies channel. It employed Montreal-born Greek-ethnic actor Elias Koteas to provide Newton's voice, and he took the same off-screen role for the Kazan essay, reading extracts from the controversial auteur's autobiography and lecture notes. The Actors Studio graduate later took an on-screen role for Scorsese's Shutter Island.

Scorsese is an unashamed propagandist for cinema as a work of art, a higher-brow publicist than Ebert or Maltin, and an auteur whose own creations' quality justifies his pontification and enthusiasm. Most of the praise, and movie clips, in this essay highlights the classic scenes Kazan composed for East of Eden, On the Waterfront and his semi-autobiographical America, America.

Key factors accounting for Scorsese's admiration for Kazan included the director's ability to evoke the reality, through location environments that movie-goers would recognise or feel they knew. Kazan also elicited exceptional performances from his actors, Scorsese feels, and created characters and scenes with which audiences could also identify. Kazan was part of a global mood change in cinema, alongside France's New Wave and other countries' development of Italy's neo-realism genre. More interestingly, Scorsese reveals how much he identified with Kazan's family life and his films' tormented characters. What isn't so easy to accept is Scorsese's perfunctory acknowledgments to the kills of other artists without whom Kazan could not have succeeded: writers, actors, cinematographers, editors, lighting and sound directors.

Clips from a Kazan interview in later life confirm his transformation from a grinning, cocky young Armenian immigrant into a gloomy soul despised by many Hollywood colleagues. He'd provided the names of eight former fellow Communists to McCarthy's UnAmerican Activities committee. Scorsese cannot ignore the controversy but he slides past it, and lets Kazan repeat the excuse that he'd been forced to choose what was the lesser of two evils for himself (and his career). Others didn't, and fled to Europe or used pseudonyms.

It sounds like special pleading for Scorsese to claim that Kazan's work gained an independent character and superior qualities after his act of self-serving betrayal. It's irritating to be given hints, not facts, about Kazan's ruthlessness in his native Armenia and as a refugee actor in New York. In the end, this is a promotional piece that feels an unworthy, unnecessary effort from Scorsese.

Out in the silence

The Sundance Institute helped fund Out In The Silence, a 2009 one-hour documentary report of a gay man's return to his small-town home-town of Oil City, Pennsylvania. Provocatively, Washington-resident Joe Wilson had announced his homosexual marriage in the local paper, triggering angry letters and an appeal for help from the mother of a bullied gay student.

Back "home" 25 years after fleeing the town, with his partner (Dean Hamer) holding the camera, he meets with townsfolk and homophobic bigots, wondering whether life is any easier for minorities in the US hinterland.

Hamer is credited with a couple of other gay short films and it can be assumed he encouraged his partner's documentary project. Three years earlier, Hamer had made We Belong, focusing on the efforts of a young schoolboy, Charles Bills playing himself, to come out. The same student in 2009 is called CJ Bills, who's also credited with additional camerawork.

It's suspiciously convenient for the movie-makers' narrative that Wills's mother "wrote", presumably unsolicited, to Wilson: it's clear that the teenager is a tough kid who can fight for himself. He needed help in the school board meetings, though, where school discrimination and abuse were being wilfully ignored in a community nourished on Christian and family "values".

Another dramatically convenient local connection is the lesbian whose house lies two doors away from Wilson's old Catholic family home. She and her new girlfriend had bought and renovated a long-closed downtown Art Deco theatre with a stupendous period chandelier. The building's revival is a convenient symbol of a backwoods Rust Belt town's struggle to find a new role and personality for itself. One of the DVD extras notes the toughness of the struggle: the state is 50th in rankings for mobility, 48th for economic growth.

By covering a variety of local angles, the documentary lacks a focal point and a clear storyboard. Its producer-directors stirred up a hornet's nest, upset the local American Family Values flag-wavers, exposed small-town prejudices and pettiness, and went back to Washington without indicating whether Oil City deserved to learn and grow or fester and die.

*****

Hamer subsequently made two documentary shorts about twins described as "developmentally disabled" (in the 2010 short) and "differently abled" (in the 2011 follow-up report).

Two in the wave

Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut are the focal points of Two in the Wave, "the story of the friendship that changed cinema forever". In French, the 2010 documentary is entitled Deux de la vague, and only a film buff could have made such a Francocentric assertion about a pair of French directors.

Prolific Cahiers de Cinema writer Antoine de Baecque reviews the early collaboration and later fallout of two of his magazine's famed former staff, their key early movies, and their shared leading actor Jean-Pierre Leaud. The screenplay was written and narrated by de Baecque, directed by Emmanuel Laurent.

It is an unforgivably verbose and messy collage that takes almost half-an-hour to provide basic data about the two directors' family backgrounds and cinematic influences. The script, which seems to have set the aimless tone for the whole documentary, jumps around confusingly and purposelessly.

A dead-pan young French actress flips through clippings albums, a shadowy writer (possible de Baecque) looks at his computer, various faces make comments in archived material, and brief clips from some of the directors' movies pop up, rarely illustrating anything narrated in the commentary. That contains far too many irrelevant dates (of meetings) and passing names (producers, other directors) fails to note Truffaut's early death, and lurches into a very incomplete study of Leaud's work and feelings for the two feuding father-figures in his career.

There are frequent moments when a viewer is shown a factual or cinematic gem worth studying in more detail, only to have it trampled in the rush to the next non-consequentiality. So many promising documentary topics await focused attention: Andre Malraux's dominance in the Gaullist cultural machinery, his dismissal (and forced reinstatement) of the Cinematheque director Henri Langlois, ways in which the Nouvelle Vague presaged the May 1968 riots, the persona of Antoine Doinel (the semi-autobiographical boy in Truffaut's debut 400 Blows and a life-long role for Leaud), Marxism in movie-making, the then and now of other Young Turks in French cinema, the risk-taking independent producers.

Other possible topics could or should have been noted en passant, notably the love-hate complex that drives French auteurs to adore parts of Hollywood (from Welles and Hitchcock to Woody Allen) while despising its commercialism and insincerity. The narcissism of the two leading French directors and others, a form of cinematic nationalism and incest, is noted only briefly but uncritically, as is their snobbish intellectualism. Clearly, the subjects were too close to the hearts and archives of the writer and director for them to do justice to the medium or its pair of message maestros.

Gasland

There is a fast-growing market in the USA for documentary features? There must be, because they are being turned out by an ever-expanding army of well-funded and/or profit-seeking film-makers. Assuming that very few of them will get commercial distribution, and that TV channels likely to screen them will pay pittances for the right to do so, could it be that many documentaries are a cinematic equivalent of vanity books? Convenient tax write-offs for finely-motivated backers or cash-laundering outfits? Or simply, as with 3D animated comedies, unwise investments in an overloaded bandwagon?

Gasland is a one-man show that cannot be scorned. It won a top award at Sundance 2010 (its production having been supported by Robert Redford's organisation), premiered on HBO, and was a nominee for the 2011 Oscar. Writer-director Josh Fox was his own producer, narrator and cinematographer, and he opens the movie by noting that the whole project began in his back yard when a natural gas company wanted to lease his land.

Fox's artfully amateur project accuses American power companies of inflicting a plague of natural-gas drilling sites, and creating unnatural disasters for the country's water supplies and environment. Their "fracking" (derived from hydraulic fracturing) involves the injection of complex chemicals into wells to tap shale rock. The exploitation rights are purchased for a few thousand dollars per acre, and clearly result in very profitable ventures that are pock-marking much of the country with eyesores and diseases, including national parklands.

Gasland begins with a wistful desire to interview Dick Cheney, the former Halliburton chief executive and US Vice-President. The two names are liberals' favourite betes noirs, so it wasn't too surprising to discover that Fox's previous, debut feature was a critically slammed amalgamation of a fictional Memorial Day bloodfest and real Abu Ghraib torture camp footage. Cheney was, and still is, a prime neo-con bogeyman, and his role in spurring the collapse of US prestige globally and democratic rights everywhere during the Bush-baby presidencies may well pre-occupy film school graduates for generations. In this example, Halliburton, the oil services giant (among other sins), is again linked to Cheney, the man who spearheaded the Energy Bill that freed Halliburton et al from government supervisions and legal liabilities.

Fox covers his own legal ass well, with captions identifying the names and locations of the ordinary US citizens whose tap-water can be ignited, whose health and livelihoods have been damaged, and whose willingness to tolerate official and corporate lies is bitterly exhausted. Reading his own script without histrionics, Fox cuts between shots of his amateur camera-work, car-rides and many interviewees, accompanying himself much of the time with aptly rustic bluegrass banjo music.

If he hadn't made Memorial Day, and previously been a member of a soap-opera-makers' cooperative, I'd have accepted his interviewees as they were described (including a convenient EPA "whistle-blower"). After The Blair Witch Project, other mockumentaries such as Joaquin Phoenix's I'm Still Here and Banksy's graffiti promo, and recent stream of promotional and celebrity biopics, it's impossible to take a documentary at its face value.

The genre has become tarnished, as an entertainment first, a personal statement second, and very latterly as a dossier of filmed facts. In the end, though, it's impossible to dismiss Fox's reportage. Corporate America stinks, and so will a fracked world. In its effort to reduce its dependency on Middle East oil, the USA developed an uncontrolled technological monster. Cheney did his job; Congress closed its eyes and everyone opened their wallets.

Client 9

Writer-director Alex Gibney's 2010 documentary, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer outlines the circumstances resulting in the forced resignation of an exceptional New York State Governor in 2008 after one year in office.

It's a natural topic for Gibney, who's covered Casino Jack Abramoff, Enron, Jimi Hendrix, sumo wrestling and the dead Afghan driver of the 2007 Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side. Gibney thrives on controversial characters (next up, reportedly, is Julien Assange) and is the right man to ask how far Spitzer fell or whether he was pushed?

Was the pugnacious politico and successful graft-tackling NY Attorney-General (for eight years) a modern anti-hero, a classic case of hubris before the fall, or the target of his enemies? Spitzer himself compares his case to that of Icarus during his interviews with Gibney's team.

During its first half, with Spitzer sat calmly on a sofa and former colleagues praising his work, the documentary feels like an apologia that could have been commissioned. Spitzer clearly had been a ruthlessly effective campaigning "Sheriff of Wall Street" who'd tackled issues of dishonesty and corruption, such as overpaid CEOs and hedge fund abuses, that later re-magnified and led to system-shaking massive government bailouts.

In the second hour, when Spitzer's initial work as Governor in Albany is covered, Gibney illustrates the man's foolhardiness in simultaneously using prostitutes, declaring war on old-time Republican politicos, and trying to change by fiat and force a state's traditionally corrupt system of non-governance. The Democrat who'd won a record high percentage of voters and was identified as the future "first Jewish US president" was probably the victim of a conspiracy by the heads of AIG, New York State's Republican caucus, and other foes.

Many of them agreed to be interviewed and state their abhorrence of Spitzer, and they provide fascinating facets of the diabolical NY political, economic and social systems. It is a parade of nastiness, in which Spitzer's own belligerent style (behind a facade of intelligent charm) fitted so well.

Most of the names are key footnotes in modern US history: Blodget and Grubman (fraudulent stock analysts), Hulbert and Brener (escort agency pimps), Greenberg (AIG), Grasso (NYSE), Eddie Stern (Canary Fund), Langone (Home Depot boss and Republican big-shot), Joe Bruno (NY Senator, "the turd in Eliot's punchbowl"), Roger Stone (political operative sporting a Nixon tattoo on his back), and a vindictive NY radio host. Other characters are only noted in passing, as potential juicy acting cameos in a dramatisation of the events, from the Republican federal attorney-general (Michael Garcia) to the FBI agent (Katzman) who collected the data that blackened Spitzer's reputation.

By comparison, the bright young women who ran the escort agencies are delightfully open and well-balanced interviewees. They happily admit that they were profiting from Wall Street's bonanza of bonuses in a city that Gibney's narrative says is built on greed. Understandably, Spitzer's wife and three daughters did not participate in what might be a rehab exercise for Spitzer. By the end of the film, though, it's clear he committed the fatal crime for a well-meaning politician: he made too many enemies in the NY jungle. A rich-born member of "the lucky-sperm club", he lost his sense of perspective politically and personally, like so many other leaders with the folie de grandeur.

Catfish

"Reality" is reviewed with dramatic cunning by the documentary team that made Catfish, a movie that some might see as a scripted mockumentary, a Blair Witch project for the age of Facebook. It belongs in a fast-growing genre which might be called Faction Documentary, alongside Exit Through the Gift Shop and Joaquin Phoenix's I'm Still Here.

Once upon a movie-making time, NYC-based Ariel Schulman and his friend Henry Joost decided to keep a film record of the long-distance love story that was developing between Ariel's brother, Yaniv (Nev), and an amateur songwriter, Megan. He'd "met" her though his online friendship with her eight-year-old half-sister, child prodigy artist Melanie. She, via her mother Angela Wesselman, had sent Nev her painting of a photograph of his published in the NY Times.

The seemingly talented family lived in rural Michigan. Then the New Yorkers realised that the women had spun online lies, and they next decided to make a side-trip to confront the liars.

It's a clever storyline, involving online detective work, three handsome young men, a lovely young woman, and a precocious child. It develops into a wry tale of sad people, a social-networking tragi-comedy, that is so bizarre, so far beyond the imagination of the freakiest fantasist, that one feels obliges to accept that some of, perhaps most of it, was a really true story which the Schulman brothers (also occasional short-movie actors) re-constructed.

Their project could only succeed with the cooperation of mildly manic middle-aged Angela, and she's a good natural actress and mediocre amateur painter. Her reality is revealed to be harsh, her online escapism system intricate.

No one, even New York movie-makers, would dare to graft truly retarded teenage twin boys onto the story, so they are almost certainly real (and the subsequent death of one is noted in the end credits). All the charades, the film-makers' as well as Angela's, could only exist in the new world of social networking, the world of TwoFaceBook. Inevitably, in a land where many crave online friends and fantasies, and tote multiple cellphones for different aspects of their personalities, the Faction Documentary genre will expand. It's cheap to make and as entertaining as the best of reality TV.

Armadillo

Anyone who watches Restropo, the documentary chronicling the lives and work of US troops stuck in an Afghan outpost, needs to give themselves a double-feature DVD session, also viewing its contemporary Danish equivalent, Armadillo.

Both movies, composed of embedded cameramen's recordings, took the name of their unit's home base. Both focused on the grunts, not the generals. And each ended up confirming the obvious question: what are professional Western soldiers doing in the unwelcoming countryside of impoverished, undeveloped Afghanistan?

Each also helps to explain why soldiers stay with their chosen profession, and choose in many cases to accept re-postings to military arenas. Their daily lives in their bases are tedious; only in action and facing the threat of death do they find the "adventure", camaraderie and purpose they signed up for.

The Danish documentary crew landed up in a much more adventurous situation than Restropo's. Armadillo lay closer to Taliban guerrillas, under frequent attack in the small area of Helmand province they patrolled. The cameras capture a sweeping panorama of military life, including the mundane (cleaning weaponry), the hierarchical (briefings) and the deadly (close combat in farmland).

No commentary is needed: the passing time in the young men's 6-month tour of duty (their first in Afghanistan) is captioned, from their home farewells (the injured platoon commander temporarily returning to Copenhagen for surgery and rehab). Usage of telecoms messages, drone viewpoints and off-duty asides depicts the soldiers' harsh reality of invisible foes and crippling IEDs. One mesmerising battle scene is a war journalist's unwanted masterpiece: a soldier, shot in the shoulder during an action, his face and eyes a study in shock and dread.

The debut feature-length work from director Janus Metz Pedersen employed an experienced documentary cinematographer, editor, and composer of suitably modish mood music. The soundtrack of reality (gunfire, explosions, soldiers' curses and shouts, village noises) is striking (and confirms the audio-visual veracity of The Hurt Locker).

Most effectively, the film illustrates the futility of the occupying forces' efforts to win hearts and minds. They hand out snacks to the village children, and are subsequently hounded for goodies. They try to be friendly with village men, and are told they dare not cooperate. They bombard Taliban snipers and end up killing cows, ruining crops and destroying the homes of the villagers they supposedly defend. When they survive a skirmish and kill guerrillas, and a soldier later speaks unwisely to his mother on the phone, they are pilloried by the media.

What have their politicians got them into, and why? Movies made by embedded film-makers are no longer morale-boosting PR exercises; they are counter-productive, damning historical documents. When they are great cinema too, they are doubly admirable.

8: the Mormon proposition

Reed Cowan, like many Mormons, had been a missionary. His documentary 8: The Mormon Proposition shows a similar zeal in its effort to charge the Mormon church with providing funds and organisation for a California state initiative to ban gay marriage. Disappointingly, Cowan's propaganda contains counter-productive bias, sentiment and self-defeating lack of perspective.

The writer-director's attack on the tax-exempt Utah-based church's US$22 million involvement in politics depends largely on one set of leaked Mormon documents obtained by a researcher, to prove that the church deliberately camouflaged its key role in the anti-gay campaign. The human repercussions of the fight to de-legitimise the California court's acceptance of same-sex marriage are largely illustrated through the words and actions of a photogenic, tearful couple of outcast gay Mormons.

One of them has a family tree sown by a Mormon pioneer, and his parents, very unusually, also abandoned the church in order to support their son (and gay daughter, whose story isn't included). The mother is a delightful real-life spitten image of the features and forthright goodness of the fictional Queer as Folk U.S. mum played so sympathetically by Sharon Gless.

The young couple are followed throughout the story, from their wedding day (on the first day of new and short-lived legality) and through the campaign. Their desire for exactly the same legal and civil rights as a heterosexual couple is expressed but not adequately justified.

Neither does Cowan give enough discredit to other churches and campaign backers: his whole beef is with the Mormon's underhanded spitefulness. That may be true, but doubters will not be convinced by a story that gives no details about the pro-gay organisations and individuals backing the counter campaign. What were they doing to beat the Mormon assault?

Where were the liberal voices in California? Why hadn't they realised that the Mormons' earlier successful anti-gay-marriage fight in Hawaii could be replicated? Where were all the gay community's supposed allies in Hollywood? If there wasn't an organised response, a why-not documentary is also worth making?

Too many questions aren't asked. Where did Romney, Huntsman and other mainstream Mormon politicians stand on the issue? What role did California's non-Mormon politicians and religious leaders play? Was the Catholic church knowingly duped by the Mormons? Why did San Francisco allow itself to be dominated by Utah?

There's even a positive angle that Cowan ignores. After all that multi-million-dollar TV advertising, misinformation and emotional blackmail, why did Prop 8 only gain 52% of the vote? Which constituencies do gay-marriage advocates have to woo better next time? Because a base of 48% is a very strong starting point for a counter-proposition. I hope Cowan's working on the topic, and paying less attention to his former religion.

Men for sale

Hommes a louer, a 2009 French-Canadian documentary movie, comprises over two hours of edited interviews with 11 male prostitutes in Montreal. Its English translation of Men For Sale is doubly erroneous; better, both linguistically and conceptually, is Men For Rent: the interviews clearly indicate that none of the sex workers have sold themselves to sugar daddies. Instead, they rent out their bodies to satisfy their primary love: drug addiction, usually crack.

That depiction is inevitable: the documentary-maker, Rodrigue Jean, found his subjects at an addiction treatment and HIV awareness centre. They are hustlers on the homosexual sidewalk because that's the easiest place to earn the bucks needed to buy drugs. None of them need gay love or sexual release, some have girlfriends (some also on the game); all of them have troubled family backgrounds.

At the end of the movie, when Jean revisits some of the interviewees "few months later", one of them has found love and given up drugs, and it would have been a more positive footnote if his escape path had been described. The other subjects seemed to have wasted away even further, getting uglier and spottier, more addicted, less mentally balanced, doomed, providing a depressing conclusion to a disturbing report.

Technically, it's a competent set of head-shots, mostly filmed in the one of the clinic's sparse rooms. Maybe intending to demonstrate that all the subjects were voluntary and not actors, each was shown getting microphones (or medical gauges?) fixed to their chests. That used up screen time unnecessarily, as did night-time film of wintry Montreal streetscapes.

Sociologists and social workers may find interesting research data regarding the mores, incentives and tariffs for male prostitution. Few other people would see or hear anything worth remembering, and would be better recommended to re-watch Gus van Sant's My Own Private Idaho.

Jean had previously written and directed a pair of French-Canadian feature films, and a documentary about his native Acadia. This documentary (conducted in monthly interview sessions during almost a year) feels as if it was a personal investigation, and it may not be a coincidence that one of the interviewees proudly declares himself an easygoing Acadian.

Inside job

Director Charles (No End in Sight Oscar nominee) Ferguson uttered a bitter "Firstly" head-note before accepting his 2011 Best Documentary Oscar for Inside Job. Three years after the worst financial crisis in 70 years and the biggest set of frauds in its history, he stated, the US finance industry has not seen a single member go to jail.

Ferguson's angry documentary report is a damning brief for America's prosecutors. The chances of them acting on its expose of systemic corruption are as slim as a threadbare dollar bill. So-called victimless crime is part of the American social fabric and a keystone of its economy, which lost US$20 trillion because of it in 2008, losses (in savings, jobs and homes) borne by few in the upper ranks of the financial industry itself.

Matt Damon lent (or rented, at union rates, probably) his liberal voice to the documentary as its narrator, and a pair of young documentary editors, Chad Beck (No End in Sight) and Adam Bolt (The Recruiter), joined Ferguson in the writing of the well-researched script (whose filming locations included Iceland, Paris and China).

Many of the guilty parties can be identified from the many captions noting that they refused to be interviewed. They will be glad they didn't when they see the mess a pair of top US economics professors get into when they try to skate past their well-paid PR work for the finance industry.

As Ferguson illustrates, the Obama administration is as much a Wall Street puppet as any of the preceding administrations since Donald Regan initiated Ronald Reagan's unleashing of the deregulation demons. Ferguson also goads defenders of the status quo by comparing bonus-addicted financiers to coke addicts and users of another service industry, prostitution. He points out that US government lawyers were happy to use personal failings to strip power from fraud-fighting Eliot Spitzer, but not from any criminal merchant banker, hedge fund manager, industry regulator, credit ratings agency or Washington politico.

Iceland's microcosmic case study is an opening blast that reveals the absurd dimensions of post-Reaganomics financial and governance delusions. As the French finance minister comments pithily about the Lehman collapse, "Holy cow". Forcing Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy sparked recognition of the so-called Financial Crisis, and the ritual slaughter of Wall Street's least-loved villain is a detective thriller awaiting another documentary feature. The media's gorging on lobbyists' lies, advertising revenue and bribes is another area not covered by Ferguson in this indictment of a cabal of financial, academic and political fraudsters who've controlled the US for more than three decades for the benefit of only themselves and their clans.

A frightening horror movie, Inside Job reminds its viewers that another crisis is inevitable, but it's preaching to a small choir, even with an Oscar to give it a little extra light.

Howl

Movie-makers can adapt novels and biographies into their audio-visual medium; can they do similar reincarnations for poetry? Ron Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman tried in 2010, taking Allen Ginsberg's Howl, a seminal Beat Generation poetic outburst, as the heart and soul of an unusual biopic. It was a drop-out's streams of mildly manic consciousness, a Whitmanesque statement for a modern jazz age.

Ginsberg was a natural topic for the noted indie writer-directors. Epstein (born 1955) was one of the documentary team which collated the 1977 G&L study, Word is Out. He's shared Oscars for other gay documentary features: Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), on which Friedman worked, and The Times of Harvey Milk (1984). In 2000, he and Friedman dug up gay historical threads in Nazi Germany, Paragraph 175, which won them a Teddy at Berlin, where they'd won the same award for their 1995 examination of hidden homosexuality in Hollywood, The Celluloid Closet.

It can be safely assumed that New Jersey-born Ginsberg, like Milk, was a subject who appealed to their personal sensibilities: he (1926-1997) was another politically committed Jewish homosexual. His generation included William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and two bi-sexual writers who infatuated Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. Radical in politics and a liberal drug-user, Ginsberg also dabbled in heterosexuality prior to meeting his life-long love, Peter Orlovsky, the New York-born child of non-Jewish Russian immigrants. Ginsberg's fame, and notoriety, sprang from Howl, his largely autobiographical free-form commentary on US youth. Its major affront to contemporary society lay in its usage of coarse words and acknowledgement of gay sex, prompting the 1957 prosecution of Ginsberg's publisher for obscenity.

The biopic film takes the trial as its focal point, employing animations (to illustrate extracts from the poem), archive footage and an exceptional cast to recreate scenes from the trial and the poet's life. James Franco, as Ginsberg, is the movie's linchpin, appearing clean-shaven in B&W for the initial reading of the poem at an adulatory writer's gathering in San Francisco in 1955, and in bearded colour to cite passages from a lengthy taped interview conducted at the time of the trial. Franco is surely more handsome and socially attractive than Ginsberg, who probably turned in glee in his grave.

The film project attracted other top talents. David Strathairn is the dutiful public prosecutor, Jon Hamm the straightforward defence attorney, Jeff Daniels a dismissive English professor, Bob Balaban the calm judge acquitting the publisher. Their statements are all taken verbatim from the official records, ensuring that the movie ends up looking and feeling like a documentary with recreations, as it is, rather than a less reliable docudrama.

Perhaps unfortunately, the directors' reputation for documentary integrity resulted in stilted courtroom scenes featuring a host of extras pretending to be rapt attendees, as artificially focused as the audience at the poem's reading. Similarly, the intellectual clarity and earnest tone employed for Franco's recreation of the interview are too good to be totally credible.

The prosecutor suggested that ordinary readers like him might think the poem was "sensitive bullshit". The documentary's audience might think the same. Howl was over-ambitious, a ponderous attempt by the pair of film-makers to do something more challenging and mainstream in their documentary work.

It had only a few festival nominations, and a couple of wins (one for Franco). Their next co-direction (2011) has a key change of emphasis: a biopic of porn star Linda (Deep Throat) Lovelace, who became a feminist anti-porn campaigner. They hoped to cast Franco as her exploitative photographer husband.

College boys live

College Boys Live, known as CBL to its voyeuristic members, was and probably still is a gay webcam site set up in Orlando, Florida by Zac Adams, a computer geek with an English-accented voice. In 2003, he either commissioned or approved the embedding of a film crew in his many-bedroomed suburban property with a pool and master computer ("CLAIR").

Six years later, a crew re-visited CBL in order to update its history, the previous material having been edited into a surprisingly engaging "reality" documentary-drama. As on real websites of that ilk, the nudity is minimal (with carefully framed non-genital exposure for the documentary's US movie audiences). The rare moments of sexual "action" are self-conscious pretence; the supposedly true shocks arise from the inhabitants' interactions and memoirs, as in mainstream reality TV shows.

Credit goes mainly to George O'Donnell, a documentary film editor since 1998: CBL was his debut as a producer and director. For the first half-hour, his movie lets the site's inhabitants speak for themselves: Adams and his live-in partner since 1901, Jonathan Greer, and the three young men (between 18 and 21) who have begun their six-month residence in the house as the new guests whom CBL members can watch, chat to and request specific actions from, 24-7.

There are 500 active viewers, affable Adams says, among the 2,000 members. They produce a monthly income for CBL of around US$20,000, enough to pay the mortgage and running expenses of the house and site. The resident "boys" don't get wages, just free bed and board in return for a few hours' chat-time a week and an almost constant lack of privacy from the house's 32 CCTV cameras. Adams also claims that he's enabling drop-out kids to find themselves, learning to live with their gayness while they establish regular lives as workers or students.

After six months, they're supposedly better equipped to fend for themselves in the real world, and the documentary notes in 2009 that 94 of them had stayed in the site since its launch. We are told, very briefly, what happened to the three residents filmed in 2003, but no attempt is made to research the post-CBL experiences of all the 94 young men. How many adjusted to reality? How many merely moved onto porn films or websites? How many found normal jobs or attended a "college"? (None of the showcased three did either while the documentary was being made, indicating why they were observed illicitly seeking funds from members and friends.)

Such idle curiosity is provoked by the movie's overview of what was/is apparently a "good" site in terms of exploitation of needy young gays. Judging by the three chosen in 2003, Adams and Greer (and their site's members) preferred feminine types. "JC" is a hyper, acned young man with mischievous and mean looks; "Chuck", large-toothed and camp; "Tim", possibly the best-looking and also the shyest. Their house-parents are gently avuncular (Adams) and handsomely fraternal (Greer).

Then drama starts, and never ends. The neighbours' owners association decides to force them out (using the nimby no-no of running a business in the residential area, and stirring the plot on local TV news). A new house is found and redecorated, and then proves not to belong to the cooperative woman who rents it to them. Meanwhile, Tim is short-changing a loving member emotionally, Chuck visits his loving sisters to reminisce about their drug-addicted dead mother, and JC reverts to lying, drinking and manic behaviour, visits his family vainly, and assaults his live-in lover (who accepts the site's offer to take JC's place and bedroom).

Inevitably, there are points when a viewer wonders how much is "real", re-enacted, scripted or fictional. The dramatic ironies and melodramatic moments pile up with increasing intensity, and the viewer can only accept the story as one that rings very true, and sad, providing unusual entertainment that's eye-openingly informative. Real or fake, the performers are fascinating.

Freakonomics

University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt reportedly "accepts the standard neoclassical micro-economic model of rational utility-maximization". He should: his collection of sociologically interesting chapters on pop economics, Freakonomics, was a best-seller in 2005 (shifting over 4 million sales units). Co-written by New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner, and developed from articles they'd published in the newspaper, the book considered economics to be a study of incentives. Aptly, it spawned its own money-earning mini-industry of business consultancy.

In 2010, a movie version appeared, collating the efforts of six indie documentary-makers to dramatise and visualise some of the book's contents. My copy of the book had sat unread on the shelf for years, and the film has given me a strong incentive to read it and see if it's useful. The movie isn't.

The fact of it being co-produced by the two authors, who appear as a scripted pair of layman-friendly experts introducing and linking the segments, suggests they had their own incentive for making it. It's surely designed to be a sales tool for their consultancy business.

"If you have a good idea what a person's incentives are, you have a good idea how they're going to behave", one of them says. They say that economics (i.e. human life) is all a matter of "causality", "correlation" and challenging convention. Prior to their book's publication, such an attitude used to be called "thinking outside the box", so they haven't invented a wheel.

Only one of the segments was worth seeing on the two levels that matter for a documentary: content and style. Veteran documentary-maker Alex Gibney delivered a handsomely-filmed and glossily-edited review of cheating, corruption and crime in Japan's supposedly sacrosanct sumo wrestling set-up. The American authors didn't seem to have done any research themselves; they'd collected harsh facts revealed by whistle-blowers and journalists in Japan.

Elsewhere, there were few of the Eureka! moments that publishers' PR for the Freakonomics volume had led me to expect, and some of the authors' conclusions have been challenged. One of them is so simplistically wonderful that one wants it to be true: legalised abortion in the USA drastically reduced crime rates a generation later, just as enforced pregnancy in Romania led to a future crime wave and revolution (both government moves confirming that wanted children get better care). Although "cause and effect" is an ancient correlation, it's cheering to be shown such modern "proofs" that do-gooders may well do bad.

"Incentives", as illustrated in the movie, is an academic word for bribery. The documentary's segment reporting a project (at the University of Chicago of course) to improve high school students' grades by means of monthly incentive payments only proves another ancient adage: a horse can be taken to water, but it can't be forced to drink it. The two male students chosen as Grade C and E models were clear examples of documentary-makers' incentivisation too: they'd chosen to track a pair of theatrical personalities (one black, one white) with equally talkative single moms in order to make their segment audience-pleasing.

"Causality" etc is common sense dressed up in pop economic verbiage. As Dubner jokes in an aside to his co-writer at the end, after a bit of hyperbole, "That was total bullshit, wasn't it?!" Much of their movie really was.