Archive for year: 2011

Even Impressionist paintings have a subject, but this collection of vignettes about the New York Times went all over the place. Was this film about how the Times now covers the media? about the Times’s uneasy relationship with new media? about the troubling economics of print journalism? how a story – e.g., the rise of WikiLeaks or the fall of the Chicago Tribune – gets reported? or a profile of David Carr, with a sidebar on Tim Arango? As previously discussed (see Buck, below), a documentarian is at the mercy of events, and if nothing dramatic happens during your year of filming, the result can come out a little flat. If there were big events at the Times last year, the filmmakers missed them. The central points – the world of information is changing, traditional newspapers are struggling to make ends meet, and we need the Times’s reporting – are so well-worn and obvious that they can’t carry a movie without more focus and drama. The only surprise for me in the whole film was seeing our old friend Katherine Bouton leaving her job of many years. The only fun insight: seeing what the names familiar from bylines – like David Carr, David Remnick, Nicolas Lemann and Tim Arango – look and sound like.

When a documentary maker sets out to chronicle someone’s life, he or she never knows if something dramatic will occur that will make the finished documentary exciting, emotional, or at least interesting. In this case, the story of horse trainer Buck Branaman, nothing happened and the result is, frankly, boring. If watching horses in a ring was your turn-on, then maybe this would rise to a 7, but for me the only highlight came during the credits, when Buck’s adoptive mother told a joke.

A quintessential samurai movie (I forget the Japanese word for this genre), replete with the gathering of ronin, the revenge motive, the uncouth jester, and the bloody battle at the end. There is a hint, maybe more, of a larger message: what a waste this is, wouldn’t it be better if we devoted our energies to the good of the people instead of the petty politics of our nobles. But there is little else that wasn’t done in Seven Samurai, Kagemusha, and countless similar flicks. Still, the formula was followed faithfully, and it is a good one.

A vile movie. If the moviemakers’ idea of fun is mocking public school teachers as fat, naive and overly conscientious and contrasting them with a glib, irresponsible gold-digging character played by glamorous Cameron Diaz, then my audience didn’t get it. After fifteen minutes of buffoonery producing nary a laugh, I quit the theater, not wishing to waste my afternoon (see Super 8, below). If it turned out that after my departure, Miss Squirrel becomes the movie’s hero and is rewarded with Justin Timberlake, I admit I would have to reevaluate my score.

An impeccable documentary, if there is such a thing, telling the story of chess master Bobby Fischer from beginning to end. The interviews were just the right length: all contributed to the story’s momentum and came from people who seemed to know whereof they spoke. The climax of the Spassky match was folded neatly into the story arc in a way that didn’t diminish what followed. How amazing, when today hardly anyone can name a single chess master or heavyweight boxer, that there was a moment in recent history when the two most famous athletes, if not personalities, in the world were Muhammad Ali and Bobby Fischer. (And how great that the associate producer could get Nick Cage to play Bobby!)