Docs, 11/5.

Robert Cashill: "A restless account, filmed with an eye toward the poetic, Iraq in Fragments is by turns discomfiting and moving - for as much as we have let these people down, inflaming distrust and disturbance, they go on. They are part of our story now. For their sake as much as our own, we need to send a clear signal on Tuesday. It's not the economy, stupid. It's Iraq."

More from Fernando F Croce: "Style in Iraq in Fragments comes occasionally close to taking precedence over its heartfelt humanistic intentions, yet the film's deep respect for human resilience and hope ultimately renders cynical accusations of touristy condescension moot." Also in Slant, Ed Gonzalez: "Though less artful than [Steven Okazaki's] The Mushroom Club, [Robert] Richter's [The Last Atomic Bomb] is more ambitious, pitched as it is as a wake-up call."

Daniel Nemet-Nejat talks with AJ Schnack about Kurt Cobain About a Son, in which Cobain "talks about where his story's going in ways that maybe he doesn't even realize. That's certainly not a light and jubilant idea, but I think that it's still hopeful, maybe because, I hope, it's a different and more complete understanding of him in some way." Meanwhile, AJ Schnack notes that the International Documentary Association has announced five finalists for its awards ceremony to be held December 8.

Melissa Silverstein at Alternet on Shut Up & Sing: "The least discussed piece of this story is how the continuing consolidation of media into the hands of a few large corporations created a situation that allowed the Dixie Chicks to be literally erased from the airwaves." Secondly, "The hate pouring onto these women was clearly sexist."

Joanne Laurier at WSWS: "Deliver Us from Evil underscores the deeply reactionary character of the Catholic Church as a social institution and its mega-wealthy officialdom, hypocritically preaching against sin and vice and forcing its believers to confess 'that I have sinned exceedingly, in thought, word and deed: through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.' Clearly, Church officials and priests like O'Grady, as 'God's representatives on earth,' feel empowered to abuse their inferior flock. After all, they are part of a feudal structure presided over by an infallible pope, a dictatorial quasi-deity."

"[T]he Mafia has been a movie subject at least since 1912's The Adventures of Lieutenant Petrosino." Dennis Harvey lists a few landmarks for SF360. Related: Mick LaSalle on Excellent Cadavers.

More docs reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle: Ruthe Stein on Doug Block's 51 Birch Street, a "hypnotic documentary, among the finest of the year" (more from Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com), and G Allen Johnson on Stanley Nelson's "riveting" Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple.

Stephen Holden on the founders of the Black Bear Ranch as depicted in Commune: "However weatherbeaten they appear, they still have a light in their eyes, and they exude the hardy spirit of pioneers who are older and wiser but unbowed." Also in the New York Times, Neil Genzlinger on Deeper Than Y: "For $600, it turns out, you can make a short documentary about aging recreational swimmers that has just enough winning moments in it to let viewers forgive that it’s little more than a glorified home video."

And Laura Kern: "The Great Warming, a straightforward, quietly persuasive primer on the climate-change crisis, provides both an abridged history and science lesson (delivered through the narration of Keanu Reeves and Alanis Morissette and some clunky computer graphics) and a vital briefing on where we stand today."

Nathan Schiff reviews Aleksandr Sokurov's "haunting and somber documentary" on Shostakovich, Sonata for Viola, for Flickhead.

Hunter Davies, who knew John Lennon, is surprised by the claims made for the singer-songwriter's political conscience in The US vs John Lennon, but writes nonetheless in the New Statesman: "The most extraordinary thing about this film, for me, is the evidence of how Lennon's influence has grown over time."

Chris Cagle: "[F]ake and hybrid documentary studies seem to have gained a new vitality now, driven from twin directions of documentary critique of the real and the proliferation of reflexive and mock documentary production itself. But I do worry that a critical circuitry between the two lapses into a facile critique of documentary as ideology and merely ideology."

Posted by dwhudson at November 5, 2006 12:14 PM