Weekend docs.

Ian Thomson, author of a biography of Primo Levi, recalls in the Guardian the many attempts to bring Levi's The Truce to the screen. Davide Ferrario, "the latest Italian director to take an interest," also seems to have been the most successful with his documentary, Primo Levi's Journey.

"Enthusiasm for 51 Birch Street by widely divergent viewers at festivals around the world may seem curious, but the explanation is simple: The gap it bridges is not really ethnic, religious or geographic. It is generational. Everyone has parents. Fewer can really claim to know who they are. Or were." John Anderson talks with Doug Block for the New York Times. So, too, does Anne S Lewis for the Austin Chronicle.

Slant's Ed Gonzalez: "51 Birch Street's compassion for generational divides is starling, and it blows the theory that ignorance is bliss, illustrating that knowing is living - a means of understanding where we've come from and correcting the wounds of the present."

Marina Zenovich is at work on a documentary "which promises to shed new light on one of modern Hollywood's more perplexing episodes," reports Charles Lyons in the New York Times. That episode: the Roman Polanski case, which went to court in 1977.

Also in the NYT, Neil Genzlinger on The Ritchie Boys, "an affecting group portrait," and Catsoulis again: "So Much So Fast coalesces into a perceptive portrait of an entire family in revolt against fate." In the Voice, Jim Ridley finds it "an absorbing account of fraternal love and obsession."

More Catsoulis: "Ron Mann's Tales of the Rat Fink, a paean to the custom-car designer Ed Roth, plays like a rambunctious merger of personal history and automobile pornography." More from Ian Sands in the Boston Phoenix.

"Just across the border from El Paso, Juárez holds countless secrets." In the Austin Chronicle, Toddy Burton recommends On the Edge: The Femicide in Ciudad Juárez: "A major center of drug trafficking and the scene of hundreds of unsolved femicides in the past 13 years, the industrial hub of northern Mexico is a nest of corruption. Producer/director Steev Hise takes an international perspective on this localized tragedy with his low-budget documentary."

"Why are all documentary filmmakers liberals?" wonders Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix, opening a conversation with David Leaf, co-director of The US vs John Lennon.

As An Inconvenient Truth opens in continental Europe, its message will undoubtedly be well-recieved. But as Patrick Goldstein points out in the Los Angeles Times, the film was primarily a hit in blue-state territory. Too bad, because environmentalists have allies in the red states as well. "[D]espite being against abortion and gay marriage, [Rev Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals] vehemently opposes the [Bush]administration's efforts to gut environmental protection laws, notably the ones that govern emissions that contribute to global warming." This is the constituency flocking to The Great Warming, made carbon neutral with green certificates from sponsor Krystal-Planet.

Anthony Kaufman in Slate on the spate of Iraq docs: "With the war in Iraq becoming an increasingly hot topic to Americans, why aren't these films finding an audience?" Theories are explored, and then, at his blog, he adds quotes from filmmakers who are "using grassroots ways" to work around the hurdles, "ranging from the sheer number of titles to the lack of major institutional support to the apathetic American populace."

The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy has a good long talk with director Paul Rachman and writer Steve Blush about American Hardcore.

David Schmader talks with Jesus Camp directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady for the Stranger. More on the doc from David Fellerath in the Independent Weekly.

Jim Ridley in the Nashville Scene: "Coffee runs second only to oil as the world's most commonly traded commodity; at times Black Gold could pass for a caffeine-fueled Syriana, its implication being that every consumer choice has a butterfly effect that raises or capsizes people on the other side of the earth."

Bilge Ebiri talks with Kirby Dick about This Film is Not Yet Rated.

Nick Schager in Slant: "Billy Corben's documentary Cocaine Cowboys is that rare film that truly warrants the designation 'guilty pleasure'—not because it's lousy yet likeable, but rather because its wanton glorification of Miami drug-running and murder during cocaine's 70s and 80s heyday elicits feelings of guilt over being so compulsively entertaining." Related online viewing: the trailer, via Movie City News.

Also: "A brief but haunting window into a tragic world, These Girls captures [homeless Egyptian] young women in all their persevering strength and marginalized wretchedness, with its abrupt ending devastatingly conveying the sense that for these discarded females, the struggle to survive remains an unfinished, ongoing undertaking."

Further into Slant, Ed Gonzalez on Exit and Keith Uhlich on The Bridge: "[S]omething is inherently rotten at the movie's core."

In the Guardian, Rick Moody talks with Neil Young and Jonathan Demme about Heart of Gold.

Online viewing tip #1. 8 BIT is "a documentary about art and video games" and the DVblog has the trailer.

Posted by dwhudson at October 14, 2006 4:41 PM