Photo by Harold Chapman.

RECOMMENDED

I know some places in Chicago writers go—not the hatch or the dole—but chill-beer saloons and cafes where coffees are knocked back. (Tea when the weather’s changed or after all those cigarettes or too much shouting in agreement about the bad and the baddies in the world.) And they will write sometimes, unshielded from public view, often a glow dancing from laptops below onto their since-fourteen-years-of-age specs. It’s a commonplace. (I’m thinking of sleeves-up writers, published and publishing, not students, not grad students.) Still, no matter how you’d fantasize, it’s no Paris in the twenties, it’s not Tangiers or Marrakech in the 1950s and it’s not the nameless “Beat Hotel” on side street rue Git le Coeur in Paris’ Latin Quarter where any number of numinous word-pushers of note washed up until the sixties. In Alan Govenar’s diverting feature, a documentary rich with contemporary photography about the figures including Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, Gysin and Burroughs, strong claims are made: “The Beat Hotel was a temple of the mind…” “The cheapest and most dirty hotel in Paris….” “One of the last of the great Bohemian hotels.” Read the rest of this entry »

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A documentary with reenactments, Susan Morgan Cooper’s “Mulberry Child” traces the complicated lives of China-born Jian Ping and her daughter Lisa Xia, who has lived in America since the age of three. There are indelible moments through, from the bold tapestry of decades of history to the expressions on the faces of interviewees. This one story about the effects of the tumult of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976 suggests the millions of others still untold. Read the rest of this entry »

In “Dracula,” the 1897 vampire tale by Bram Stoker—before “Twilight” and “True Blood”—Jonathan Harker and Van Helsing faced Dracula in order to save London and the life of Mina Harker. The Irishman has been credited with creating one of the best pieces of literary horror, a powerful invasion novel and the most iconic vampire novels of all time.

“Bram Stoker agus Dracula,” a documentary by director Keith O’Grady, is playing this Saturday at the Irish Film Festival. The film, which has been released close to the centenary anniversary of Stoker’s death on April 20, 1912, delves into the history of “Dracula” as an Irish novel and the entry of the vampire into the mass public. Read the rest of this entry »

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A football season at an inner-city prep school in a down-on-its-luck Tennessee town: the potential site of an utter documentary catastrophe. Despite all the scouting such an enterprise involves, what if nothing happened? In Dan Lindsay and T. J. Martin’s  “Undefeated,” luck struck. Dramatic things happened in 2009; documentary kismet was had. (Reportedly, 500 hours of footage was shot as the filmmakers lived among their subjects.) “The Reality Blind Side” it is not. “If you think football builds character, it does not. It reveals character,” the white coach emanates to his African-American charges. Go team America! Would the film be more interesting to someone who is crazy-mad about high school sports or football or the notion that athletic competition is the great social leveler? Yes. Still, to “Undefeated”‘s credit, and to its tear-jerking benefit, Lindsay and Martin craft their narrative as if sports were a valid larger metaphor for some all-American whatsit or something or other that could be mangled confidently in the confines of a presidential debate or an overreaching freelance op-ed column. Read the rest of this entry »

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Photojournalist-filmmaker Danfung Dennis’ Oscar-nominated documentary, “Hell And Back Again” is a bracing astonishment, even if it were not opening in a week that’s seen the deaths of three major international correspondents in Syria. (The New York Times’ Anthony Shadid; the Times of London’s Marie Colvin; French photographer Remi Ochlik.) War has consequences, to each and every single participant. It’s not just a battle for hearts and minds. Embedding with a Marine battalion, Dennis follows a single Marine sergeant, from the start of a 2009 tour in Afghanistan to his recovery back home in North Carolina after a sniper “blows half my ass off.” Read the rest of this entry »

As scandalous or scurrilous as an NPR tote bag, eighty-two-year-old observational documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s “Crazy Horse” manages to make acreage of exposed young female flesh dull. In recent work like “Boxing Gym” (2010), and “La danse: le ballet de L’opera de Paris” (2009), Wiseman’s focused on the human figure rather than the institutions’ bureaucratic processes that fascinated him in so much of his earlier output—”Hospital,” “Welfare,” “Public Housing”—but “Crazy Horse,” despite its attentive gaze at the processes of creating a tony, upscale burlesque review at a sixty-year-old cabaret with lithe, leggy young Frenchwomen, lacks lyrical lift. (Although there are scattered offhand moments that seem revealing, as well as a few observations like, “You don’t take chances with a naked girl.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Menelik Shabazz’s “The Story of Lover’s Rock” is a doc heavy on talking heads, but also on tantalizing story strands, telling the story of the makers of a 1970s-80s form of underground south London reggae performance (which included comedy) meant to encourage late-night close dancing. “Lover’s Rock” is heavy on the love, for the scene and for the sound. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Of the fifteen short films nominated for Oscar this year, Lucy Walker’s “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom” is as staggering as anything in feature competition. It begins on March 11, 2011, as the waters approach that left 15,372 dead and 7762 missing, as a cataclysm of “found” footage of onrushing waters, bursting fires, the moving houses, off-camera shrieks. Civilization converted to debris in the slow-fast relentless rush of the wall of water. And words like “Houses riding toward me on a black wave…” “I ran away in my slippers.” But in the foreground in the frame from the primary camera, high on a hill? A branch with fresh cherry buds, silent. The camera pans: a world of destruction. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Ian Palmer’s rough, ragged “Knuckle,” a Sundance 2011 entry, follows over a decade in the brawling, battering life of the warring Irish Traveler Quinn McDonagh and Joyce families, who specialize in bare-knuckle-boxing street fights. The blood and bruises will likely seem excessive in the mooted HBO fictionalization, but in its real-life endless grudge match, the “Knuckle” manages to make “Fight Club” look like a model of restraint. Read the rest of this entry »