Docs and hybrids.

Sara Schieron in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Building on the ideas explored in Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media and Why We Fight, Tonje Hessen Schei's documentary Independent Intervention is the single most staggering doc yet made about the unholy matrimony of the military-industrial complex and the media."

Jonny Leahan at indieWIRE: "With the midterm elections less than two weeks away, a crop of documentaries are collectively trying to get a message across that has largely been passed over by the mainstream media - your vote might not actually be counted. Or it could be counted several times over, depending on which county you're registered in, and which type of electronic machine you'll be using to cast that vote." Among the docs discussed: Stealing America, Vote by Vote, So Goes the Nation, Hacking Democracy, Eternal Vigilance: The Fight to Save Our Election System and American Blackout.

"Mark Becker's Romántico may be the documentary of the year," declares Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "This sensitively detailed surveillance of one man's personal misfortune illuminates a national crisis, complementing Carlos Reygadas's Battle in Heaven; though both films share the same social setting, it's their vigilant aesthetic that most unites them."

Also in Slant: "[D]espite an uplifting coda, the tragedy of God Grew Tired of Us comes from the sense, conveyed by the determined yet still haunted eyes of its admirable survivors, that the horrors of their tragic past may never be fully overcome," writes Nick Schager. And: "Fuck mainly serves as the latest example of the atrocious devolution of mainstream documentary filmmaking into hollow aesthetic flash and superficial sensationalism."

It's nearly all docs this week for Andrew O'Hehir's "Beyond the Multiplex" column in Salon: Death of a President, Absolute Wilson and Cocaine Cowboys, with a few quick words for The Wild Blue Yonder.

Though it isn't exactly, Armond White, writing in the New York Press, claims that Blue Yonder is "[e]ssentially a documentary - comprised of mostly factual, almost reportorial footage - [and] it comes at the right time, when the documentary feature is in disarray." What's more, "Werner Herzog's self-proclaimed 'science fiction fantasy' is one of his very best films." Manohla Dargis, writing in the New York Times, finds that it "works better as an experience than it does conceptually." Even so: "There is pleasure in such useless beauty, of course, and pleasure too in drifting with the jellyfish amid the wild blue yonder of a great filmmaker's imagination." More from Nick Schager in Slant and Noel Murray at the AV Club.

Also in the NYT:

• Stephen Holden finds watchnig the "somber" Exit: The Right to Die "like visiting a funeral home and being bombarded with the soothing voices of salesmen spouting euphemisms that obscure the fact of death as surely as the scent of lilies obscures its smell." More from Rob Nelson in the Voice.

• Again, Stephen Holden: "The Bridge an eerie and indelible documentary about suicide, juxtaposes transcendent beauty and personal tragedy as starkly as any film I can recall." More from Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle and Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com. Cheryl Eddy interviews director Eric Steel for the SFBG.

• AO Scott on Absolute Wilson: "It is curious, but perhaps also inevitable, that someone who is so willing to dispense with conventions of realism and narrative continuity in his art should inspire such a conventional film." More from Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Overlong, overexcited and over the top, Billy Corben's bottom-feeding documentary, Cocaine Cowboys, would be more enjoyable if it weren't so impressed with its subject matter and so devoted to pictures of dead bodies." The AV Club's Noel Murray disagrees.

Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly on Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple: "In the photos and footage of clapping, singing members, you can see an epitaph being written for the brief utopia of the 60s counterculture... But the larger lesson of Jonestown is that its leader, who billed himself as a socialist, stepped into a breach left by an American antipathy to socialism so profound and generalized, it readied a space for that ideology's most perverted expression." More from Kenneth Turan in the LAT.

Clare Hurley at the WSWS: "Primarily made up of interviews with returned Iraqi veterans, Patricia Foulkrod's documentary, The Ground Truth: After the Killing Fields, unflinchingly exposes one of the human costs of the US occupation of Iraq."

For the Guardian, Helene A Aasen asks a human rights campaigner, an academic, a Jewish writer, a donkey expert, a Kazakh and a black journalists for their thoughts on Borat. Critic Peter Bradshaw finds it "so funny, so breathtakingly offensive, so suicidally discourteous, that strictly speaking it shouldn't be legal at all." More from Alf Garnett and Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph and Nick Schager at Slant.

Posted by dwhudson at October 27, 2006 3:55 PM