Eno (2024)

This odd documentary about Brian Eno is billed as “generative” (as opposed, they say, to AI), which means, according to the PR, there are some 52 quintillion distinct random versions—“no viewing is the same twice.” I don’t know how this technology works. Are there 52 quintillion possibilities in physical media or on streaming platforms? The Criterion Channel seems to have answered that for the moment: no. What they’re doing instead is posting a new version every month (for as long as it’s there and I don’t know how long that is). If you look carefully, there’s a credit in the picture for Criterion and the month. I looked at the June, July, and August versions, and it’s perfectly possible I will make a monthly habit of it for as long as I can. The three I saw, each running about 80 minutes, were indeed distinctly different. I’d guess less than half the scenes I saw in any one of them were in more than one. Roxy Music, for example, was severely underplayed in the July version. Eno’s love of Fela Kuti and a brief scene where he gives his full name (Brian Peter George St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle Eno) were in all three. Also discussions of the Oblique Strategies deck of cards, though they varied. Some recurring scenes occur at different points in the picture. Thus among other things it all seems to be unpredictable by design. It’s refreshing and obviously it fits with Eno’s cybernetic ambient aesthetic in a wry sort of way, but I do have some concerns. It’s clear there is a good more than 80 minutes’ worth of material it can plug in, likely much more. How much goes unseen? How many viewings are recommended for a fuller sense? What are they doing at the Criterion Channel—hitting the scramble button and taking the first version given, or screening more than one to help sort out the better from the good enough? I think it’s safe to say Eno is primarily for Eno fans who already know his work and biography. In fact, there’s a 2011 documentary, Brian Eno – 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell to Earth, that’s probably worth checking into first. While it only covers the ‘70s it is over two and half hours and full of great music and useful information. I suspect the more you know about Eno the more you are likely to enjoy this peculiar exercise—and seeing multiple versions is arguably important too. The interviews are great and so is the music but I found myself missing things I saw only once, such as an anecdote involving Joni Mitchell. Eno may be for fans only, but fans will likely be gratified, especially if they see more than one version. For me, it’s on to September.

Wick Is Pain (2025)

The John Wick franchise has been a boon for the careers of Keanu Reeves and director Chad Stahelski as well as a boon for the action movie genre itself. It’s one of the best. Fortunately for us they have also been documenting their story as they go—“they” meaning Jeffrey Doe, director of this documentary, and whoever was shooting interviews and asking questions along the way. Wick Is Pain is on the long side for a documentary, running over two hours, and more than half of it focuses on behind-the-scenes drama getting the first movie made. It’s a familiar pile of anecdotes about options, properties, getting funding, losing funding, drilling screenplays throughs rounds of revisions (“notes,” they say). Honestly, I don’t know how anyone survives these agonies, which can go on for years. It’s great fun to learn how the Wick principals met and how deeply steeped Stahelski and co-director David Leitch are in martial arts choreography and the culture surrounding it (after the first John Wick they parted ways and Leitch went on to direct Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, and others). It’s even more fun to relive the chutzpah of breaking one of Hollywood’s strictest rules: never kill the dog (which gave rise to one of my favorite quotes imputed to Wick: “Be kind to animals or I’ll kill you”) (although apparently the actual original source is Morrissey). I learned—no doubt Wick fans already knew—that Wick’s style of action is sometimes called “gun fu.” Reeves is universally beloved in the kind of way that Betty White was and he cuts an interesting figure here, a kind of enthusiastic stoner who is wholly committed to his art. It sometimes feels like he is saying John Wick saved his life. The title comes from the reality of making the movies. As with professional wrestling, it’s all mostly scripted and choreographed playacting, but that doesn’t mean the people involved don’t get hurt doing it. We’re told Reeves does 90% of Wick’s stunt work and you can see, say in the hall of mirrors sequence in Chapter 2, that he’s being brutalized, thrown around and into things. I know there are safety guardrails for stunts on the set, but there’s only so much that can be done to minimize the danger of getting the shots and scenes they get. And besides, Reeves is obviously stoked by it. Wick Is Pain is an essential addendum to the franchise.

My Mom Jayne (2025)

Until this documentary came along, I did not know that Mariska Hargitay, flinty star of the longest-running live-action TV series of all time, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, is a daughter of Jayne Mansfield. Jayne Mansfield, of course, relegated to sex kitten status, was one of the midcentury “Three M’s,” the so-called blonde bombshells of the ‘50s and ‘60s, with Marilyn Monroe and Mamie Van Doren. Hargitay directed this picture, a patient and loving unraveling of the many complexities associated with Mansfield, her career, and her family and loves. Mansfield had her first of five children at the age of 16. She had wanted to be a Hollywood star for most of her life by then. After winning a series of beauty pageants she finally made it there at the age of 21. Hargitay interviews her brothers and her older sisters, visits storage units that have been left untouched for decades, and peels back the layers of family secrets, eventually uncovering a major one that involves Hargitay herself, Mansfield’s fourth child. She was named Mariska but Mansfield insisted on calling her Maria for most of the few years left to her—it’s a clue to this labyrinthine past. Full disclosure, I’ve never been a fan of Law & Order: SVU, which I think largely just leans into outrage about sex crimes to the point of monotony. A lot of my problems there persisted here as Hargitay often feels like she’s performing in her seething Olivia Benson mode. There’s no doubt, however, about her bravely facing the headwinds of heartache and family agony, and in many ways her tough detective mode is a perfect fit for this investigation. As with Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield was no dumb blonde, but was frustrated by the limitations, long-term as well as immediate, of the sex dolly roles that amounted to most of her opportunities. I still love the 1956 movie The Girl Can’t Help It (more for Little Richard and the other rock ‘n’ rollers) but have always found Mansfield hard to watch, it’s such a parade of stereotypes and cliché, pious about her maternal instincts, openly bug-eyed about her boobs. Hargitay skillfully if somewhat ham-handedly restores Mansfield’s dignity here. She doesn’t dwell much on Mansfield’s worst roles or the grotesque details of her death. She reaches out to and includes all the children and extended family of Mansfield, including Hargitay’s stepmother Ellen Hargitay as well as Mansfield’s friends and husbands still alive and she drenches it all in a lot of love. I would say it’s better than any episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but that’s a low bar for me. Good one especially for fans of SVU and/or Jayne Mansfield.

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)

USA, 288 minutes

Director/writer/photography/editor: Jonas Mekas

Music: Auguste Varkalis

With: Jonas Mekas, Hollis Melton, Oona Mekas, Sebastian Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Allen Ginsberg, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Robert Breer

Jonas Mekas’s lengthy “diary film” from the turn of the century lasts nearly five hours, gathering up the home movies of his life from about the late ‘60s on and splicing them together with no obvious method or strategy, accompanied by bursts of voiceover. He explains at the beginning of the picture that even the thought of trying to organize all the material was overwhelming. He started out trying to do so but quickly gave it up. He managed to divide it into 12 chapters, but only Chapter Three, about his wedding, honeymoon, birth of Oona, his daughter ... and more, coheres his themes even remotely. He reports to us from his “little editing room,” usually late at night. All of it is amateurish—these are home movies, after all—even if Mekas was known as an experimental filmmaker (and poet, and artist). The sound, if it is even there, is often terrible, with inconsistent audio levels. The images are not much better than that. The camera shakes a lot and there are many, many cuts.

“You must, by now,” he says at the beginning of Chapter Five, 91 minutes in, speaking in his gravelly, measured Lithuanian accent, “come to a realization that what you are seeing is a sort of masterpiece of nothing. Nothing.” I was thinking that myself but at the same time it occurred to me that just previously he showed Oona’s first steps (to the accompaniment of the Velvet Underground’s “Run Run Run”). It’s arguable that first steps are profound in terms of human development. He captured that, even dwelt on it. It’s a beautiful moment. Then Mekas, at the beginning of Chapter Five, catches himself on the point. He speaks of the importance of those images of Oona’s first steps, emphasizing the word “importance.” He calls them “little moments of paradise.” It’s not the first or last time he will use the phrase—and, indeed, many others.

Brian Eno: 1971-1977 – The Man Who Fell to Earth (2011)

I went looking for last year’s documentary on Brian Eno, Eno, which reportedly has 52,000,000,000,000,000,000 versions (several billion each for everyone on the planet) and was a big Sundance hit. I’d like to know how it works and how you see it. Instead, on Prime, I stumbled across this useful little workup, which I missed in 2011. Word has it it’s the first documentary ever about Eno—hard to believe it took so long. The IMDb breakdown is unusually scanty. No director, for one thing, and no mention of lots of the folks interviewed, including Robert Christgau, Geeta Dayal, Simon Reynolds, and various biographers. It covers the main period I am interested in with Eno, his “rock era,” starting with his tenure with Roxy Music in the early ‘70s, and it is generously long, over two and a half hours. All of this documentary is enjoyable but the footage and songs of the early years of Roxy Music were particularly so for me. Lots of very good discussions, often followed by the specific songs talked about. I’m not sure of some sources of the visuals all throughout. There may have been video-like scenarios shot back then, or these filmmakers may just be obliging us with stuff to look at while the music plays. Opinions differ on the arc of Eno’s career, of course, but for me this is the high point, as it drifted after 1977 further into his ambient music exercises and an increasing role as a producer favored by a surprising number of high-profile rock bands (Toto, U2, Coldplay, Grace Jones, James, Ultravox). People in this documentary say that he was a calm and grounding presence in the studio, which I can believe as there is also a certain calm and grounding effect to his music, even the raucous stuff. What can I say? I vividly remember the ‘70s work of Eno and many in his orbit then, including David Bowie, Robert Fripp, and Talking Heads. I have some interest in his ambient work as well, notably the 1973 collaboration with Fripp, (No Pussyfooting). This documentary also covers his work with Cluster (Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius), which in many ways marks the origins of his ambient music ideas, born of an interest in cybernetics. From the crazy befeathered creature who constantly stole Bryan Ferry’s charisma out from under him in Roxy Music to the meditative student of the planet who created Another Green World to the rocker who might have invented Talking Heads in 1974 with “Third Uncle,” Brian Eno has put together a wonderfully unpredictable and wildly engaging career. Lots of details here and, for anyone with any regard for ‘70s Eno, it’s practically mandatory. You might know Eno in the ‘70s already but I can tell you this is worth the revisit. Remarkable creator. Now to track down Eno, hoping it’s more than just some Black Mirror: Bandersnatch stunt.

Nostalgia for the Light (2010)

Nostalgia de la luz, France / Germany / Chile / Spain, 90 minutes

Director/writer: Patricio Guzman

Photography: Katell Djian

Music: Miguel Miranda, Jose Miguel Tobar

Editors: Patricio Guzman, Emmanuelle Joly
With: Luis Henriquez, Gaspar Galaz, Lautaro Nunez, Miguel Lawner, Victor Gonzalez, Vicky Saaveda, Violeta Berrios

Nostalgia for the Light is a thoughtful documentary that teases us with wonders of the universe as seen from the sophisticated, internationally funded telescopes in Chile’s Atacama desert, conflating them with the atrocities of the Augusto Pinochet fascist regime. It attempts an elegiac exploration of the past on many levels, including explorations of exploration itself. Interviews with Chilean astronomers are included—perhaps because the conditions of the Atacama offer such opportunities, a fair number of Chileans take up the discipline. There’s a good deal of heady star-gaze cinematography too, suitable for dropping jaws. Then, later, there are also interviews with grieving relatives still looking for the remains of their disappeared loved ones. On the science side, archeologists and geologists are also heard from. A strong sense of the eerie, disquieting history of the desert grounds a sense of suspense.

But too often the two sides of this picture—the wonderful universe and the hideous humanity—struck me as strained, however sincere. The conceit is that everyone here, scientists and Pinochet victims alike, is looking into the past one way or another. Looking for the light, literal and metaphorical. And, indeed, the light from most of the stars we see at night is millions of years old by the time we see it. All those stars and galaxies might have burned out or got together and staged a musical before human beings even existed and we still wouldn’t know anything about it yet. One scientist here notes that, even between two people standing close the image they see of one another is in the past—millionths of a fraction of a second, but in the past. Moonlight takes a minute to reach us, sunlight eight minutes. So on so forth.

The Velvet Underground (2021)

This documentary on the legendary ‘60s rock band—source of Brian Eno’s jokey observation in 1982 that everyone who bought their poorly selling first album started a band—is refreshingly restrained and judicious, basically giving everyone from Andy Warhol to Doug Yule their fair share of the spotlight. It starts with John Cale and Lou Reed, as it must. Reed gets all the credit he deserves, though perhaps not as much as he asserted. Director Todd Haynes traces the Velvet Underground’s most profound roots to the New York world of art and avant-garde music, placing emigrant Welshman Cale in the welter that followed John Cage and La Monte Young. Reed, for his part, was an undergraduate at Syracuse studying under poet Delmore Schwartz. A brief snippet of a Schwartz reading is all we need to hear that influence. Reed and his doo-wop love then went on to house songwriting for Pickwick Records, exploiting the confusion of kids shopping for albums at Woolworth’s (anyone interested in my copy of The Mustang Plays the Beatles Song Book?). Later he would become a student of 2 guitars bass drums. Perhaps most sorely needed in this story, Warhol is given his due as the force behind making that first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico (also called the “banana album” for its famously peelable cover). Warhol sewed up the art bona fides and the aesthetic working ethos. He delivered the vision. He never stood near a soundboard, let alone twiddled a knob, but his producer credit was entirely warranted. Reed and Cale say so too. There’s a good argument, expressed here as well as I’ve seen it anywhere, that Warhol is almost solely responsible for producing the Velvet Underground.

There’s a lot of backstory to The Velvet Underground and it takes some time to get to the music proper, but when it does the picture is as generous as anyone could hope. I’ve always thought “Venus in Furs” and especially “Heroin” are more like overrated novelties, but they have their time and place and they may be best appreciated here. “Venus in Furs” and especially “Heroin” certainly appear to be Haynes’s favorites. But most of mine are in here too, such as “Sweet Jane” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” Further principals, from Moe Tucker to Sterling Morrison to Nico, are brought in to the documentary essentially as they were brought in to the band. The banana album gets the most attention, but the entire catalog is featured, including the “lost album” set (now the VU album). The only exception is the very last album, when Reed was gone and Yule was trying to bear the standard ... true confession, I’ve still never heard it. The band’s ever-shifting chemistry was amazing, and it was also amazingly unsuited to its commercial times, which is cringingly obvious on their ill-fated tour of the West Coast with the multimedia Exploding Plastic Inevitable extravaganza. West Coast pop aesthetics are unfairly derided here—too much hapless hippie hatred for me, but point taken. The Velvet Underground in many ways left them all eating their dust in the long haul. “Sunday Morning” is as good as anything by the Left Banke or the Mamas & the Papas, for example. This documentary is a good way in for novices (born every day, you know) and it’s a very apt summation for fans, particularly those who resent Reed’s hogging of the show for many decades. He was only part of something very big—an important part, but only part. In a very welcome way, this has made me rethink Warhol’s contribution, which I underestimated. It’s massive. All of it, the entire arc, is massive.

Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (2022)

Ethan Coen’s documentary about Jerry Lee Lewis does not add a lot to what we already know about the iconic rock ‘n’ roller, but it has the advantage of being posthumous. It was released shortly after Lewis’s death in October 2022, offering the most panoramic view yet of his entire career (much like the essential I Am Everything did for Little Richard). As the picture notes toward the end, Lewis outlived a good many of his peers, including Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. This documentary overall leans more toward hagiography, never really addressing the many scandals that swirled around and dogged Lewis. The good news here is that means more time for the music. Who cares whether he murdered anyone or if there really was a hound dog no one ever saw before or since howling outside the window the night he was born? The music ranges across his rock ‘n’ roll hits, then his country music chapter, and chases all the way down to his pentecostal gospel music roots in Ferriday, Louisiana. His cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart get their time here too, as does his sister, briefly, Linda Gail. They all agree Jerry Lee was the most talented of them all, and Lewis of course modestly allows they’re right. When the music and performances are all stacked up in such proximity his whole deal does have a certain sameness—but what sameness! He gets the rumbling boogie-woogie undertow going and layers practically anything he likes on top, his own stuff and covers of songs, rock ‘n’ roll, country, gospel, anything. There’s some great footage of Lewis with Tom Jones on an exuberant cover of “Tutti Frutti.” Lewis goes out of his way to bearhug Chuck Berry in an extended sequence and pays his respects to Little Richard too. But on the matter of Elvis Presley, he remained dubious to the end. He never exalts Elvis for anything and credits Colonel Tom Parker for all the success, which made him basically consistent to the end. Little Richard had a similar problem and I have to say I’m inclined to agree with them more than not. Jerry Lee Lewis was as original and dynamic a rock ‘n’ roll performer as anyone else and there’s approximately 70 minutes of proof in this tidy documentary, worth seeing for the musical performances alone.

In Vanda’s Room (2000)

No Quarto da Vanda, Portugal / Germany / Switzerland, 171 minutes

Director / photography: Pedro Casta

Editors: Dominique Auvray, Patricia Saramago

Cast: Vanda Duarte, Lena Duarte, Zita Duarte, Manuel Gomes Miranda, Diogo Pires Miranda, Evangeline Nelas, Miquelina Barros, Antonio Semedo Moreno, Paulo Nunes, Paulo Jorge Goncalves, Pedro Lanban

Vanda Duarte—a real person played by herself (everyone here plays themselves)—is a heroin addict who spends most of her time in her room smoking and coughing. Others inject the drug (and/or cocaine) but we don’t see much of that with Vanda. She runs a lighter under a piece of foil with the powder on it, sucking up the smoke through a glass tube. We see a lot of that. She also spends much of the movie intermittently rolling up a skein of yarn into a ball. Like many scenes in this movie it is relaxing and boring by seemingly random turns. The most unlikely scenes—such as ongoing demolition captured by director and cinematographer Pedro Costa wandering the slum streets filming what crosses his field of vision—reduce us to a kind of mesmerized, numb staring.

Vanda’s room is in Fontainhas, a slum district of Lisbon, Portugal. And, technically, it’s probably not her room. She and most of these people are squatting in buildings designated for demolition, in blocks and neighborhoods designated for urban revitalization projects. There didn’t seem to be as many scenes of demolition as there seemed to be the first time I looked at this. The movie casts a certain hypnotic pall as it wanders its desolations. The scenes of demolition can be whining, banging, and loud, as construction usually is, but they can also take on ASMR qualities somehow. They’re often long and there is something inherently soothing about watching a machine methodically carry out its appointed destruction. Other times the racket is unbearable and annoying, like the movie at large.

Lynch/Oz (2022)

Fans of filmmaker David Lynch and/or the most famous movie of all time are likely to get a kick out of this documentary project by director and writer Alexandre O. Philippe. He approached a half dozen or so other filmmakers and critics for their meditations on the connections between Lynch and The Wizard of Oz. In turn, Philippe has cut together montages of scenes from Oz and all of Lynch’s movies to accompany, highlight, emphasize, and make the ideas more concrete as they are discussed in voiceovers. The result is a series of fascinating video essay vignettes. The titles of these segments may give some sense of their flavors: Wind, Membranes, Kindred, Multitudes, Judy, Dig. The most famous of these contributors may be filmmaker John Waters (whose pencil mustache, remember, is an homage to Little Richard). Waters’s Kindred treats Lynch as a friend and peer, with warm memories. Not so famous, perhaps, is Rodney Ascher (Membranes), director and writer of the 2012 documentary Room 237, which throws a similar intense focus on the Stanley Kubrick movie The Shining. My favorite segment of Lynch/Oz was the first, Wind, “hosted” by film critic Amy Nicholson. One thing that’s not clear is who wrote these speaking parts. Because they seem uniquely personal, and more essay-like than the result of interviews, I assumed while I was watching that the person speaking wrote the words. But Philippe is the only writer given credit on IMDb, and the speakers are credited as hosts, whatever that means. Filmmakers David Lowery and, to a lesser extent, Karyn Kusama, speak of their own films specifically and the influences of both Lynch and Oz. I have often viewed Lynch through the lens of The Wizard of Oz myself, most notably Blue Velvet, which has always seemed to me very much a version of the journey down the yellow brick road. But one thing Lynch/Oz does, probably not by coincidence, is suggest how widely and deeply The Wizard of Oz has influenced so many movies, from Steven Spielberg to Kubrick and beyond, hardly just David Lynch. I happen to love people sitting around talking about movies, even more so when direct film clips are involved. I’m thinking of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema or Martin Scorsese’s Personal Journey Through American Movies. And I’m also thinking of Room 237. Lynch/Oz is probably closer to the latter—slightly insular, maybe not for everyone. But they are all along the same spectrum of film studies. If any of the constituent elements are your cup of tea, then I’d say go for it.

Little Richard: I Am Everything (2023)

This documentary about the self-proclaimed king of rock ‘n’ roll (“shut up!”) makes a solid case that Little Richard Penniman is the one and only, accept no substitutes, and at the same time keeps it well shy of adoring hagiography, as much as he deserves adoring. Director and coproducer Lisa Cortes (The Remix: Hip Hop X Fashion; All In: The Fight for Democracy) keeps the focus on Little Richard’s complex status as a Black, queer icon. She ropes in a handful of celebrities to provide sound bites (Nona Hendryx, Mick Jagger, Tom Jones, Nile Rodgers, John Waters who admits his pencil mustache is an homage), rounds up another handful of academics to offer insight and context, and lets the music play. The Todd Haynes movie Velvet Goldmine gave Little Richard his just deserts, but I Am Everything benefits from actually having a rich well of archival footage of Little Richard himself, often in superior form. It charts his career from his earliest work trying to break in in the early ‘50s until his death in 2020. He first rejected show business for the church in 1957 because of a vision. By 1962 he was running out of money and turned to rock ‘n’ roll again. From the footage, the ‘60s was the time to see him. Later he would return to the church again, and even marry in the ‘70s, before running low on money again. The pattern repeated for much of his life. The Specialty label recorded all his early hits but kept the royalties for themselves after 1957, because he broke their contract in his spasm of religion. The performance footage from all eras is often wonderful. He refers to himself as the king of rock ‘n’ roll a few times—I suspect Elvis getting the honors more widely may have vexed Little Richard nearly as much as it did Jerry Lee Lewis. In Little Richard’s case, however (and Chuck Berry’s, while I’m at it, and Jerry Lee Lewis too why not?), the claim has at least as much weight as the one for Elvis. Give Elvis his due, but one thing I Am Everything slyly does is show clearly how, on the ‘50s covers of Little Richard’s hits such as “Tutti Frutti,” Elvis is a lot closer to Pat Boone than Little Richard. Little Richard was the one and only, he was the original, and he felt rejected most of his life for being what he was, rejected most tragically perhaps by himself, who never really strayed long from piety (though he strayed very far). A moment here where he finally feels acknowledged and honored at a 1997 ceremony gives a rare moment of evident peace for him, when he was 64. All the rest was God. Worth seeing.

Rewind & Play (2022)

Two things I can say about this eccentric, arguably found-footage documentary: 1) I don’t know what the intent of director Alain Gomis is, and 2) it comes alive every time Thelonious Monk starts playing the piano, which is not often enough. Rewind & Play is composed of footage shot for a French TV show in 1969 while Monk was touring and playing a date in Paris. I have no idea how much of what was shot that afternoon was left out of this picture. It feels like we’re seeing all of it the way it unspooled when they found it, raw and bloopy, with botched shots and technical problems, multiple takes, an interviewer who is not sure how to approach Monk, and a subject who is having a hard time even understanding some of these questions, let alone why they are being asked. Some on the internet think Gomis is out to show Monk being treated demeaningly. Maybe so, but it looked more like a language barrier than racism to me. It’s true a lot of the questions the interviewer asks are inane and/or awkward—“why did you put your piano in the kitchen?” “do you think you are too avant-garde for Paris?” so forth. This poor guy, last seen stranded at a fondue party in the early ‘70s, is smug, pious, and shallow. But that’s true of most TV celebrities and hosts of talk shows. The guy wants to pretend he’s hip to Monk. Maybe he was. Meanwhile, the picture is at least as instructive on the frustrations of shooting a documentary as it is on Monk. But when they let the piano player rip, which adds up to maybe a third? maybe a half? of the movie, it’s truly a great Thelonious Monk time. No one played the piano like him. It feels childlike but sophisticated, like he’s just picking out random notes up and down the keyboard, but backing it with compelling rhythmic chording as he chops up and purees his melodies. It makes a kind of intuitive mathematical sense and it’s a kick for the duration of his jams. I hope Gomis didn’t leave any of the playing out of this already very short movie, because if he did that’s a shame. It’s the only thing that’s really enjoyable about Rewind & Play.

Disappeared (2009-2022)

I happened to remember this old Discovery true-crime show about missing person cases which I used to watch a lot. I found it online complete except for most of the first season and that was all she wrote for a week or 10 days. I didn’t get to all of it, but I sampled all the seasons and saw a couple of them complete. The initial run lasted six seasons, starting in 2009. Then there was a break and three more seasons, then another break and season 10 ran just last year. It turns out I hadn’t seen all the old episodes by a long shot. The comforting voice of Christopher Crutchfield Walker provides the voiceover in all seasons except 7 (nonetheless a pretty good season). The show is built out of interviews with various principals—not always all of them—accompanied by reenactments, which can be confusing or distracting but also helpful. It’s fair to say the shows are often padded out to fit a one-hour TV time slot. Compare the much more highly efficient Forensic Files, which can practically pack in three intriguing cases in the time Disappeared spends on one. But in many ways I appreciate the slower pace of Disappeared, which offers time to let the complexities settle in. They are essentially different shows despite all the police procedure: Forensic Files explicitly knows whereas Disappeared explicitly does not know. In general, I think the early seasons are better. The cases seem to be chosen more for their inherent interest, while the later seasons, especially 10, are focused more on urgent public service in the mold of America’s Most Wanted and To Catch a Predator, offering a platform to help solve cases. Since Gabby Petito there have been increasing cries for the media to focus on BIPOC missing person cases rather than solely on young white women, which is fair and reasonable. We hear more about gross police incompetence in these later seasons, and in turn police don’t always cooperate with interviews, which is unheard of in the early years. It’s easy to come away with a sense of outrage and urgency in the later seasons and it’s not out of place for these cases.

I found a Wikipedia article that traces ongoing results of the cases, another reason I favor the older episodes. Those cases simply have a better chance of being resolved by now. I ran into plenty of “still missing” notices there, but sometimes there are developments and sometimes they are as surprising as any twists and turns captured in the show. To be clear, these resolutions can also be something like learning how a stage magician’s tricks work. At first, curiosity is satisfied but then it starts to feel stupid that you ever wanted to know. For what it’s worth, my interest in these cases is apparently more about the mystery of them, how strange they can seem, rather than the horrors and sadness of human brutality and trafficking. Many of these vanished are victims of various crimes, or suicides, or even people trying to start over—and many times it’s fairly obvious what has happened to them. Once in a while they are found alive. Often their bodies are never found, or haven’t been yet. Among other things I am amazed how hard it can be to find a body—sometimes the follow-up casually mentions it was finally found in an area that was supposedly searched carefully. Once or twice the body has clearly been moved there later. The ones who likely died from exposure are often lost in unimaginably vast and harsh terrains. It’s actually disconcerting how many missing person cases there seem to be. The show is also useful that way, reminding us of it. What happens to these people? I feel for the families and those left behind, of course—their grief is often the hardest part to watch. See enough of these episodes and they start to fit patterns. Near the end of many someone is often seen saying, “Well, someone knows what happened here and I just wish they would come forward with what they know.” Check the Wikipedia page—sometimes they did.

Girl in the Picture (2022)

This may be the saddest and most wrenching true-crime story I have ever seen, vying with talhotblond and Dear Zachary in a competition where I don’t want to know the winner. One thing about true-crime stories is they are about things that more or less actually happened, squarely in the “you can’t make this up” category of things. Or you could make them up, but no one would believe you. This Netflix documentary delivers shocking twists and turns on the regular, launching the saga with the death of a 20-year-old woman on a lonesome highway in Arizona in 1990. The woman’s husband and kid hightail out of the region and so it all begins to unfold across years and decades. I will say I was annoyed with the style of the storytelling in the first third or so of this feature-length picture. It struck me as the “peekaboo” style of narrative, intimating it has things to tell us but not telling us, because too often it has little really to tell us. But no, this is actually an insanely complicated case and there were times I got a little lost in it, so in the end I appreciated getting the information one morsel at a time, carefully designed to clarify more than the obfuscations and delays of the peekaboo style. Girl in the Picture adds up to a story of great enormity and tremendous sadness. I don’t want to give much more than that away about it. Things are never quite what you think they are. It’s about the girl in the picture in the poster and her amazing indomitable spirit which is nonetheless trampled. It’s an elusive mystery and a terrible story of human depravity. It’s an indictment of the system and a cautionary tale about human predators—they are capable of more than you can even suspect, at least if you’re as naïve as I may be. It breaks your heart just to learn what they do. It’s not giving away too much to say it is heartening in the end but any feel-good was accompanied for me by a surprising amount of hard crying. I mean, maybe I was in the mood or something. Or maybe documentaries like this just do things to me and you.

The Scott Peterson Affair (2022)

I was intrigued to see Matt Orchard take up the Scott Peterson case on his Crime and Society youtube channel, because it was one I never got to and I was happy for the chance to see it laid out. Scott Peterson’s wife Laci, eight months pregnant, disappeared on Christmas Eve of 2002 while Scott spent the day fishing. Then news came he had been having an affair. Later Laci’s body was recovered from the San Francisco Bay. At the time the case broke, circa early 2003, I was too busy to wallow in the true-crime cable coverage (as I had with OJ Simpson, JonBenet Ramsey, and others). The coming of Nancy Grace was a turnoff, for one thing. She was and is an unpleasant presence on crime stories because her takes feel less like mama-bear instincts to protect victims (because she is one herself, etc., etc.) and more like bitter vindictiveness thirsty to punish miscreants. Partly because of that, and partly because all the evidence against Scott Peterson seemed circumstantial, and partly because I just wasn’t following it closely, something about the case seemed off to me. Aren’t there any number of spouse-on-spouse homicides in any given year? Why was this the one selected for the high profile treatment? Maybe because he seems like such a creep? OK, but it’s weak sauce. Orchard focuses on that—the visceral reaction Peterson provokes in so many (including me to some degree), which is almost uncanny—and then basically gives us the sequence of events and the theories and how they stack up. Then, with 15 or 20 minutes to go in the 70-minute video, he switches up and addresses the Scott Peterson truthers, those who believe he’s wrongly convicted based on public outrage and a rush to judgment. They have various evidence, including witness statements, to shore up their case. This had been my sense of it. But it’s all a red herring on Matt Orchard’s part as these theories quickly fall apart on close examination. A few key details of fact (via cell towers and such) make the circumstantial evidence of Peterson's guilt almost irrefutable. It’s a pretty neat trick—it might even be a spoiler for me to reveal it. But I feel like any doubt about the case is cleared away here with Orchard’s usual patient, straightforward explanations. And I think the notoriety of the case has less to do with Scott Peterson and more to do with the hungry maw of true-crime cable news coverage and Nancy Grace as its face. I still think she’s a shabby person to represent true-crime to the general public. Let’s make it Matt Orchard.

The People You're Paying to Be in Shorts (2022)

The latest from Dorktown focuses on the 2011-2012 season of the Charlotte Bobcats, the worst season in NBA basketball history, registering a 7-59 record in a lockout-shortened season for a winning percentage of .106. The story and the telling are complicated by the fact that the Bobcats were owned by superstar Michael Jordan, author of ridiculously high winning percentages and other feats. The Bobcats are now the Hornets—not the original Charlotte Hornets, but that whole story is covered here. Jordan still owns them, and they are still undistinguished, with no championships (or even conference-level play). More often than not they miss the playoffs altogether. It’s a perfect project for Dorktown in many ways, whose principals Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein may not yet have met an outrageous loser they don’t love (Seattle Mariners, Atlanta Falcons, Dave Stieb, etc.). They are joined by Seth Rosenthal and Kofie Yeboah as the stories unwind. It’s a very rich irony, of course, that this feat of mediocrity happened to Michael Jordan. Anyone who fell victim to Jordan’s domination of NBA basketball in the 1990s is sure to find some gratification and portions of good old schadenfreude here (for example, the best Seattle SuperSonics team I ever knew was entirely overshadowed by him, with one shot at the annual role of patsy for the Bulls). However, Bois is maybe not as good about hiding his gloating here as he could be. He addresses a recurring photo of Jordan as “Mike” and frequently asks mocking questions and takes a few jabs for good measure, which gets distracting in its unseemliness. Given Jordan’s dimming star as the greatest basketball player of all time—LeBron reminding us of Kareem suddenly starts making MJ look more like #3 GOAT around here—along with his embarrassing lack of graciousness about it, it’s an understandable impulse. Jordan may be petty and vindictive and too preoccupied with burnishing his own legend, but that’s on him. And he’s not doing himself any good. That’s obvious now. This longish documentary—two and a half hours, relatively short by Dorktown standards—lands on one of the best examples of Jordan’s various comeuppances since the glory. If they need to pile on further, maybe the next project could be about Jordan’s baseball career. The People You’re Paying really only needs to lay out the humiliations that ownership has brought to Jordan, whose retirement is not a happy one because the only thing that still appears to matter is that 7th championship even 25 years later. As a passion play of futility it is otherwise nearly flawless in the Dorktown mode, with scads of charts, graphs, and statistically based argument. The verdict is in. For losing, I’m not sure those Bobcats can ever be beat.

Colossal Youth (2006)

Juventude em Marcha, Portugal / France / Switzerland, 156 minutes

Director/writer: Pedro Costa

Photography: Pedro Costa, Leonardo Simoes

Music: Nuno Carvalho, Os Tubaroes

Editor: Pedro Filipe Marques

Cast: Ventura, Vanda Duarte, Beatriz Duarte, Cila Cardoso, Alberto “Lento” Barros

When it came time to look again at Colossal Youth, which I saw first maybe 10 years ago, I found I had virtually no memory of it. Alas this is not unusual. For a long time I had good habits of looking at movies most days—at least six days a week, and some of those occasions were double or even triple features. At some point, however, I realized I was not always retaining that much of them. But I kept blazing through anyway—second impressions often remain clarifying. So it was not entirely surprising not to have even a vague impression of Colossal Youth. But as soon as I put it on I saw the problem right away. There are very few helpful handholds in this long and very slow picture.

In fact, I’m not even sure now exactly what it’s about. Or maybe I should say, my main sense of what it’s about comes not from watching it (twice now at last count) but from reading about it on the internet. There you find it likened to documentary, chiefly I guess because most of the players are amateurs possibly playing themselves and the picture is focused on the fallout of a Portuguese coup in the ‘70s. It appears to be scripted rather than improvised. The best evidence may be that director Pedro Costa also takes a writing credit, but the action mostly feels performed. The picture consists largely of long takes, often shot in long and with darkness or light poured over like spilled paint. The dialogue is unfocused, oblique, and repetitive, but the talk revolves around poverty, drug use, attempts to salvage ghetto housing projects gone to ruin. Colossal Youth is another one that premiered at Cannes and saw a lot of people walking out.

The Coldest Case Ever Solved (2021)

My true-crime interests inevitably intersected with my youtube travels and led me to a type of video that is obviously low-budget and fairly called amateur. The ones I tend to prefer—channels such as Hailey Elizabeth, Stephanie Harlowe, or That Chapter—are basically run by natural storytellers. They do their research and present their findings in narrative fashion (Elizabeth while she is putting on makeup), fortified by available footage and audio that can apparently be found on the internet, some of very poor quality. Most of these videos run 30 to 60 minutes though some can go on for hours if the case is weird and/or complicated enough. Matt Orchard, an Australian (or possibly New Zealander), is one of the best. His channel, Matt Orchard – Crime and Society, has ideas about larger issues like coerced confessions, problems with lie detectors, and other troubled aspects of justice systems (mainly US). These issues make solving crimes tricky business and often exercises in whether we can ever know the truth about some things (and, by implication, anything). Orchard also takes on celebrity cases such as Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard, the JonBenet Ramsey mystery, or Anthony Wiener—probably looking for internet traffic, but his treatment of the Ramsey case is one of the best I’ve seen. As often as not, as in his latest, How Chandler Halderson Didn't Come Close to Getting Away With Murder, he’s riffing on bizarre cases simply for their own sake, and sometimes even indulging a little copaganda, an ongoing pitfall of the genre. Like many youtubers, Orchard has an accompanying Patreon account where even more information and early access can be had for something like $2 a month. The Coldest Case Ever Solved balances a lot of his favored crime elements in one of his best videos, a one-hour treatment. The details are there to be discovered. They aren't what you expect. The case involves a 7-year-old girl who was abducted and murdered in 1957 and the trial of a man accused of the crime 55 long years later, in 2012. A lot of what makes the video work is the case itself. But Orchard’s acerbic recounting has a lot to do with it too, taking us through all the twists and turns. His research feels clinically precise, always—one of my favorite things about Orchard’s videos is the feeling they are authoritative. In that way he separates himself from a lot of the hysterical internet sleuths populating forums and youtube. I like to think Orchard is better than most of them. At the very least, the entertainment value is high. If you like this, try five more.

Who Killed Garrett Phillips? (2019)

This two-part three-hour HBO documentary from producer/director Liz Garbus (The Farm: Angola, USA; I’ll Be Gone in the Dark; Love, Marilyn) presents a murder mystery wrapped in law enforcement mistakes and bad faith. The movie lets its subjects speak for themselves through their words and actions. It never has to say a word about racism because we see it unfolding in front of us. It involves the murder of a 12-year-old boy in a small town in upstate New York and the subsequent single-minded focus on the town’s Black high school soccer coach. In the year or so before the murder the coach had been involved with the mother of the boy, Garrett Phillips. She is a white woman and her previous boyfriend, a policeman, did not like the relationship. The coach and the woman had broken up so recently that it still wasn’t clear whether they might not be able to patch it up. There are lots of unexplained gaps in this picture. The relationship of the coach and the boy is one. There are only glancing allusions that they did not get along. The reasons for the breakup are also unclear, though it sounds like racist social pressure was part of it. The mother evidently never wanted to cooperate with these filmmakers, so we never hear her version of anything. We never learn where she or the other son were on the day of the murder. That day, in the afternoon, people heard unusual sounds coming from the second-story apartment where the murder took place, including a neighbor who shared a wall and called 911. At first a lot of people seemed to think it was other kids in some kind of incident that went out of control, but police quickly focused on the soccer coach. He is not a bad suspect as these things go, but the evidence is ambiguous, circumstantial, and often strained. No other lines of investigation were ever seriously followed. The closer the evidence is looked at the less likely it appears to be the coach, but that doesn’t stop police and an overzealous prosecutor (later sanctioned for abuses in this and other cases) from systematically destroying the coach’s life with harassment and innuendo. It’s an object lesson, a cautionary tale, for Black people thinking of moving to white towns even still in the 21st century, no matter how well liked they may seem to be. And it’s another story of raw white fear and aggression. Who Killed Garrett Phillips? details the murder and investigation and then follows along with the attempt to pin it on the coach in court. It’s intense, dramatic, and harrowing, hard to watch as any dispassionate depiction of injustice can be. Definitely worth a look if you don’t mind getting helplessly angry about law enforcement excesses.

Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021)

Director Questlove (of the Roots, Jimmy Fallon house band, and much more) has produced a documentary that is a kind of miracle, as was the festival it is about, a series of Harlem outdoor concerts in the summer of 1969 called the Harlem Cultural Festival. It was filmed in glorious color and promptly put away for 50 years. “Same year as Woodstock” seems to be a common refrain for why that is, but it’s more likely another example of old-fashioned American racism. The ‘60s were receding into the ‘70s, with Richard Nixon and his henchmen running the show, launching the War on Drugs, and generally working in the interests of white supremacy. Whatever the reasons, there has been little interest in the footage all this time. That’s another miracle of this—that someone shot it at all, let alone so thoughtfully, a wonderful document of its moment. The list of artists appearing in it is so impressive I jotted them down as it went: Stevie Wonder, the Chambers Brothers, B.B. King, Herbie Mann, the 5th Dimension, the Edwin Hawkins Singers, the Staple Singers, Professor Herman Stevens & the Voices of Faith, Mahalia Jackson, Jesse Jackson with Ben Branch, David Ruffin, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Sly & the Family Stone, Mongo Santamaria, Ray Barretto, Dinizulu & His African Dancers and Drummers, Sonny Sharrock, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Hugh Masekela, and Nina Simone. The amount of gospel surprised me, as did the appearance by Sonny Sharrock. Some of these artists did not play their signature songs, though a fair number did. Greg Tate is a welcome presence providing context and anecdotes. A lot of the people who attended have been rounded up to recount their memories of the shows and the times. There’s an interesting point where the moon landing has happened, and all the mixed feelings about it. Security was provided by the Black Panthers with no problems—I mean, it did make me think of the Hell’s Angels doing the same for Altamont, and the gritty black & white documentary that came of that, Gimme Shelter. This is already a better counterpart to that movie than Woodstock. The mood at these shows is peaceful, celebratory, joyful. The music is amazing—my only complaint is predictable. Why isn’t this five hours long or more? Must-see.