documentaries

Fyre Fraud (2019)

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Right out of the gate, Fyre Fraud has a few marks against it. Technically premiering a few days before Fyre on Netflix, there are some issues that aren’t fair to hold against it (for instance, that it’s trapped on the currently inferior platform, although one doesn’t have to read tea leaves to know that Netflix’s shrinking catalog and decreasing quality control could render this statement out of date any day now) and some that definitely are (Fyre never stoops so low that it uses stock footage to fill time in voiceover, or worse, playing out an entire scene from an episode of Family Guy as a kind of shorthand to demonstrate that, hey, sometimes lawyers are real jerks). But there are marks in its favor as well, most notably that it features an interview with Fyre founder and con man Billy McFarland, alongside its indictment not only of McFarland but larger “influencer” culture (again, gag) and makes larger statements against the kind of unethical behavior (I’d say “antics” but don’t want to minimize the impact) in which McFarland et al engaged, and how that can track to larger political movements.

To say that Fyre Fraud is constructed around its interview with McFarland isn’t quite accurate. Whereas Fyre had a narrative throughline that was largely chronological and structured its thesis around demonstrating that McFarland and company were not only woefully unprepared but inextricably crooked, Fyre Fraud is a bit more unfocused; it explicitly takes aim not only at the festival’s creators but its attendees (to a greater extent than Netflix’s film) and the larger sociocultural movements that have, as a side effect, opened up new areas of anxiety and taught us all new ways to compare our normal lives against the cultivated and curated fantasy lives of the nouvea célébrité and find ourselves lacking. As a text, it reads more like a collegiate essay in comparison to Fyre‘s performatively journalistic approach, a reach for relevance that exceeds the grasp of its vocabulary, a fact that is underlined by its aforementioned stock footage use; as a result, it would be easy to dismiss Fyre Fraud in comparison, but this would be a mistake, as it functions as a perfect companion piece to Fyre.

There’s duplication of content between both docs, as you would expect. In its early minutes, Fyre features blurry footage from a local news broadcast about McFarland’s previous failure Magnises, and from which the “black card for millennials” verbiage is drawn. The resolution of this footage was so low that I assumed it was from a webcast, but Fyre Fraud has this same footage in crystal clarity. The video of Fyre Festival attendees walking out onto the dark gravel beach to find hundreds of geodesic tents, video which perfectly encapsulates the moment when panic started to grow as they begin sprinting to claim a tent to call their own, also appears in both. But what Fyre Fraud infamously has that Fyre didn’t is an interview with McFarland himself. As NPR (and others) point out, this is ethically dubious given that McFarland demanded payment for his appearance, and Hulu apparently obliged, although no accurate figure has yet been provided. However, as Hulu noted in their own documentary, it is equally morally questionable that Jerry Media, who were involved with the marketing stunts for Fyre Festival and are potentially culpable for their participation in the scam of it all (admitting on camera in Fyre that, at the request of McFarland and Fyre CMO Grant Margolin, they deleted comments on social media posts that demanded response to issues of lack of facilities, payment issues, and other concerns), were producers on Netflix’s documentary. There are even mirrors and echoes between the two that aren’t exact but which reflect the way that all of these individual actions add up to a larger whole: Fyre saw Justin Liao extolling the virtues of destroying adjacent property to forestall having neighbors (despite his insincere, mealymouthed apologies across social media, which you can seek out if you so desire), but he manages to be outdone by “influencer” Alyssa Lynch, who may be one of the worst human beings on the planet in addition to being one of the few people who got the kind of living accommodations that they were promised. We see her self-shot phone video of her describing economy class as if she were asked to sit in steerage on a doomed ocean liner (also in Fyre) followed by her disingenuously saying that she felt “really bad” for those who ended up in tents–followed by an immediate cut to her gleefully dancing around her villa. Meanwhile, fellow festival goers were wandering around incomplete stages and unopened transport trucks.

Like Fyre, there’s much mirth to be had at the expense of all those involved (other than the unpaid laborers, both at home and abroad). Many of the attendees recall being plied with copious amounts of liquor, and we also see this on screen. One interviewee remembers stacks of unused lumber alongside pallets of alcohol, which made me chuckle. Obviously, there was a mass of spirits; alcohol usually doesn’t require any assembly, and if it does, the most complicated step is muddling. Another interviewee, when discussing McFarland’s ticketing scam that he attempted to run while released on bail, made the comment that “When you’re out on bail, that’s the time when you should be doing the least amount of crime,” which is hilarious in and of itself, but may have been an insight that McFarland needed, although it came too late. Oren Aks, a former Jerry Media employee who opened up about his experience on the inside of the media circus and criticized the company’s decision to deflect criticism, pointedly notes that the tent area at the festival was situated directly next to a 20-30 foot drop into a shallow pool of water: “They didn’t even think, ‘We need a fence’,” he says. Once you stop giggling at the ineptitude, you realize how lucky McFarland et al are to be facing jail time only fraud and not wrongful death or criminal negligence charges. And though no story shared by any participant in this documentary can top the revelation of what McFarland asked Andy King to do (as revealed in Fyre; if you’ve managed to miss the memes, I won’t be the one to spoil it for you), one of the participants here notes that there was a bulleted list of solutions (as we know, “[they’re] not a problems-focused group, [they’re] a solutions-oriented group”) that included “robbing customs,” which is about as absurd a thing as you can imagine, next to one of the blandly attractive male influencers recounting the events of the festival and ending his statement with “#rescuemission” and a frat boy chortle.

While watching Fyre with a group of friends, there was a discussion of McFarland and who he might really be, as we only see him in archival footage. A few of them noted that his actions, vacant stares, and frequent adherence to repetitive language made him seem like someone who might be on the autism spectrum; in discussion, I didn’t find this evidence particularly convincing or compelling – I saw “Billy” as having an innate understanding of the intersection between the need for personal validation through online visibility and the psychosocial need for a space that reinforces ingroup/outgroup mentality along the lines of wealth and prestige. His apparent vacuousness was merely the cocktail that resulted from mixing his own internal urges for validation with his cunning ability to take advantage of this hunger in others. With Fyre Fraud, my roommate and I were again in conflict over our interpretations of McFarland (it should be noted that neither of us is really trained for this kind of diagnosis; my MA is in rhetoric and composition and he is a PhD candidate in pure mathematics, so in the interest of full disclosure I should note that our armchair psychoanalysis is utterly unscientific and bound by our independent horizons of knowledge and experience). We each saw confirmation of our hypotheses regarding McFarland’s behavior on display in McFarland’s silences and inability to properly respond to straightforward questions about his business practices. My roommate saw evidence of spectrum behavior: poor eye contact and a lack of facial expression, speaking with an abnormal rhythm, repetition of words and phrases verbatim without indication of understanding, failure to express emotion and apparent unawareness of others’ feelings, and even difficulty recognizing nonverbal cues. On the other hand, I saw a practiced deflection and proof of the codified narcissistic sociopathy of privilege: McFarland was controlling, disingenuous, dishonest, possessed of an exaggeratedly positive self-image and a sense of entitlement, manipulative, pathological lying (when confronted in a discrepancy, he just clams up like a child caught in a lie and lets the silence hang in the air as if waiting for the interviewer to forget they had asked anything), lack of remorse or shame (Michael Swaigen, the cinematographer who shot the initial promotional video, tells a story about Billy, “removed from it all by many layers of glass,” asking him to help him shoot a documentary that would reframe him as a recovering victim), and a need for stimulation (as evidenced not only in his methodology but also the anecdote from a Fyre planner about McFarland storming out of a business meeting in which the impossibility of their task was being discussed so that he could hop onto an ATV and speeding up and down the beach before returning and resuming).

One of the first things that we learn about McFarland comes in the form of a letter from his mother, read by a text-to-speech program, in which she extols young Billy’s entrepreneurship and early academic success. This is such a small moment, but it speaks volumes: when writing about her indicted criminal son, Mrs. McFarland talks about what a “special boy” he was, which is not unusual in and of itself as this is something that all parents do, but the fact that her apparent go-to piece of evidence to demonstrate his exceptionalism is how quickly he could complete his multiplication tables speaks to a certain kind of parental pathology that tells us a lot about the environment that created (and creates) Billy McFarlands. It really only gets worse from there, as young Billy’s first “business” was utterly different from what most of us had to for pocket cash: no manual labor like mowing lawns or raking leaves, no early demonstrations of responsibility like babysitting or fundraising; instead, he inserted himself as a middleman in some kind of crayon racket as when he was seven or eight. The devil really is in the details here: his first customer/victim was a girl he had a crush on, and all he did was help her with a broken crayon. So not only did he not respond the way that most children are socialized to in the U.S. (i.e., sharing), his first instinct when confronted with the opportunity to help someone in whom he had an emotional investment was to take advantage of her. Is that nature? Is that nurture? Either way, it’s fucked up and reveals a lot about the man who would grow up to perpetrate one of the most unsubtle but effective con jobs of the decade marketing what one participant called a “perfect generic fantasia” that, as another notes, “went into breach [of contract] on day one.”

One of the oddest things that crops up over and over again were the number of people who describe McFarland as charismatic, magnetic, handsome, attractive, or some combination of the above. He’s certainly not unattractive but it boggles the mind that so many people would buy into his brand of deception, both of others and, ultimately, of himself. Perhaps Fyre Fraud‘s most damning screed is not merely against Billy, but against the society that creates and encourages people like him. It’s not just what one talking head called a “tsunami of schadenfreude” that we can mock and laugh at, until you hear the influencers attempt to justify their shallow existence by talking about the importance of spreading their ideals. When asked what these ideals are, the best one can come up with is “Um … positivity. And, um … Yeah.” It’s impossible to take them seriously, and yet people do. Kendall Jenner apparently received a quarter of a million dollars just for posting the orange square that was used for Fyre’s promotional material to her Instagram. If that doesn’t make you want to burn down everything that humanity has built and salt the earth, I don’t know what will. I recently saw a post online (that I wish I could find again) which perfectly encapsulates my personal viewpoint on this: “everything I ever learned about the Kardashians I did so against my will.” It’s not 100% accurate (no one ever forced me to watch The Soup, I did that of my own free will and would do it again, every week until I die, if E! gave me the opportunity), and perhaps I’ve turned into a curmudgeonly old man against my will and without realizing it. I was certainly a part of the first generation of kids on whom this media saturation was foisted; I can still hear the Disney announcer’s voice saying “and featuring Brink‘s Erik von Detten!” in my dreams. I’ve also fallen into a spiral in dark times when looking at someone else’s social media and comparing my life to this cherry-picked, filtered snapshot of the existence of someone else, but I always managed to drag myself back with the realization that my independent thought was more important and that it was self-defeating to envy the lives of people that, at the end of the day, I wouldn’t want to be. But not everyone has those same mental defenses, especially when an online presence and the accompanying glut of monetized “self”-expression has been a part of their lives from birth. It’s a house of cards that deserves mockery, but also needs to be demolished. Otherwise we might end up with a Billy McFarland in the White House one day. Oh, wait. Shit.

Ultimately, Fyre Fraud‘s most chilling lesson comes not from anything explicit in the text, but in how it so thoroughly depicts the inherent dangers of contemporary capitalism, in which money is moved from here to there and back again as investors throw funding at one project and then another, fully formed companies appearing from the ether like Athena emerging from the head of Zeus and absorbing mountains of cashless capital from venture capitalists and employing dozens or hundreds or thousands of people under the promise of future compensation that often never materializes. Despite spending much of its runtime mocking a subset of “millennials,” Fyre Fraud fails to acknowledge that trends away from employment in fields of manual labor and toward what we loosely call “knowledge work,” and that this is a generational movement as much as it is a cultural shift. Even our language is having a difficult time keeping up: when searching for the correct terminology for the opposite of manual labor, lists of antonyms were largely words with negative connotations–laziness, indolence, sedentariness. (I won’t get into the way that language influences thought since this really isn’t the place to dig deep into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it bears mentioning that this linguistic antipathy toward work that yields less tangible results is probably not a separate phenomenon from intergenerational employment-oriented hostility.) That the Bahamanian laborers went unpaid despite the extensive labor they contributed to Fyre Festival, coupled with the way that Fyre Fraud makes explicit the fact that McFarland was constantly seeking money from his next venture to pay off his previous one in an endless 21st Century Ponzi ouroboros, reflects the terrifying reality that all our currency is fiat and we live our lives perched on a veeeeery thin membrane of shared belief in hypothetical capital that barely covers a deep, dark abyss. And that abyss just gets deeper and darker all the way down, sped along by the exultation of celebrity culture and rampant, unchecked greed; that the two so often function as two extensions of the same ideology, coupled with the current American political climate’s demonstration of how effective those two evils can be when they walk hand in hand, sent a shiver of existential dread down my spine, and it should scare you, too.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened (2019)

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Not since Queen of Versailles have I taken so much delight in watching rich people having a hard time. Watching a bunch of “influencers” (gag – Alice Sheldon tried to warn us and we just didn’t listen) who were willing and able to drop more than a middle class person’s annual salary just for the opportunity to party with models and Blink 182 forced to retrieve their luggage from huge trucks and rush in a panicked herd to try and claim disaster tents made me laugh for five minutes straight.

Ok, let’s back up. Fyre Festival was the brainchild of Billy McFarland, a twentysomething college dropout from an affluent unincorporated neighborhood in New Jersey who managed to accidentally pull off the greatest catalyst of schadenfreude of the new millennium through nothing other than sheer self-delusion.

Wait, let’s try again.

Ok. For those of you who missed the media blitz in 2017 and the follow up descriptions that accompanied the release of this documentary and its Hulu-hosted competitor, Fyre Festival was a planned luxury music festival to be held in late spring 2017 in the Bahamas, to promote the Fyre booking app, which was intended to function like Tinder or Uber for events and performers. So, if you were the kind of parent whose child might appear on My Super Sweet 16 and wanted to have Ja Rule or Kendall Jenner or Post Malone perform (that is, a parent who is obscenely wealthy and criminally negligent), Fyre would help you do that, and the world would get a little darker and more dreary. Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Festival that Never Happened, traces the beginning of the festival and the app back to its creator, Billy McFarland, and exposes McFarland and his cronies as the pathologically nouveau riche trendchasers that they are.

As far as this documentary is concerned, McFarland’s story begins with his creation of Magnises, identified in news archival footage in the film as “the black card for millennials” (and if you’re already sick of hearing the word “millennial” before your viewing, you should turn back now), a proxy credit card made of sheet metal that could be paired to another card and allow young go-getters to mimic their idols: money magnates with their black and platinum Amexes. This is actually the perfect place to start with the discussion of what went wrong with Fyre Festival, as it gets to the core of what allowed a group of inexperienced goofballs to defraud a willing (and deserving) vapid, wealthy public: image, artifice, performance, and prestige. Magnises’s Twitter account, which hasn’t posted anything since March 2017, boasts this description: “The community for the socially and professionally adventurous.” Essentially, it was a private club that, for $250 a year, gave members not only a “Just Like Daddy’s!” metal credit card and access to a work/playspace loft that also hosted private events. Per Forbes, “Members would gain entry to exclusive celebrity events, a concierge service to score hard-to-get concert tickets and restaurant reservations and access to a swanky, shared hangout pad. They’d also get to meet up with other wealthy young folk who like to party: entrepreneurs, businesspeople and entertainers.” So, you know, a cesspool of young money and unearned self-congratulation; I don’t think that you’ll be shocked to learn that the photos from these events are full of white faces.

From there, the documentary explores the friendship (?) between McFarland and Ja Rule, who the younger man met via Magnises events. McFarland came up with the idea for the Fyre app with Ja Rule, and the two of them leapt at the idea of using a music festival to promote the app. From the moment of inception, virtually everyone involved with the festival comes off as, if you’ll pardon my lapse into common speech, a supreme fucking douchenozzle. There’s McFarland, of course, who seems like a rich kid who just wanted to party every day of his life and got in way over his head and decided to dig further rather than admit his mistakes and come clean. There’s also the preposterously named Mdavid Low, Fyre’s Creative Director, whose Twitter laudably contains much anti-Trump, pro-Net Neutrality, pro-immigration rhetoric mixed in with the same kind of shallow “get shit done” motivational images that your former high school dudebro bully posts on his Facebook (example). There’s Samuel Krost, a twenty-three year old who seems to have somehow gotten involved because of a prior relationship with Selena Gomez and friendship with model Gigi Hadid, one of the models who was ultimately complicit in the misrepresentation of Fyre Festival on social media; his LinkedIn profile bears no mention of his involvement in the Fyre debacle, which seems both wise and deceptive. There’s Andy King, the head honcho of event production company Inward Point, a middle-aged businessman who invested time and energy into Fyre based on his belief that McFarland was a savvy businessman; he also has the best story in the entire doc, degrading though the memory may be. There’s Marc Weinstein, a music festival alum who aims to paint himself as a sympathetic whistle-blower but doesn’t quite hit the mark. There’s Grant Margolin, the Chief Marketing Officer of Fyre, who, aside from Billy, comes across as the most delusional person on the entire island. More than once, the doc shows Grant with a smartphone in each hand trying desperately to coordinate an event that was out of control from the word “go,” as his colleagues and co-workers chuckle while reminiscing about how woefully unprepared Margolin was for this kind of responsibility, painting him as McFarland’s toad. You almost feel sorry for him – a short, average looking dude surrounded by beautiful models, suitbros with expensive personal trainers, and even McFarland, who’s handsome in an I’ve-had-a-few-drinks-so-sure-I’ll-go-home-with-you kind of way, until you see the manic energy that he brings to every action and imagine how exhausting it must have been to work alongside him; there’s a scene where he’s trying to organize a bonfire for the promotional video shoot where he uses the word “big” eleven times in a row to describe what’s needed. And then there’s Ja Rule himself, acting as the imp who pushes McFarland to ludicrous extremes of reckless spending and gratuitous excess, as best expressed in his ridiculous toast to the crew: “To living like movie stars, partying like rock stars, and fucking like porn stars.” It’s a perfect storm of booze-fueled toxic immaturity coupled with the business acumen of childhood overachievers who sold the most wrapping paper at the fundraiser and now think they’re too big to fail.

McFarland, Ja Rule, and Margolin are ghosts in this documentary, appearing only in archival footage, of which there is a stunning wealth of material to supplement the talking heads provided by Weinstein, Krost, Low, and others. It’s never explicit in the text, but Fyre acts as a stunning indictment of what mainstream media likes to (inaccurately) call “millennial naivete” and (inarticulately) call “FOMO” by taking aim not only at McFarland and his cronies but also demonstrating how the need to obsessively self-document elements of daily life for the performative artifice of celebrity in exchange for the temporary but ultimately fleeting satisfaction of emoji reacts and comments from followers/subscribers. Some of the most fascinating parts of Fyre come not from the delineation of how the event was doomed to failure but from the completely shallow lack of self-reflection exhibited by the attendees of the festival when detailing their experiences, which for most of these privileged goons will be the most difficult experience of their charmed lives. Hulu’s documentary, Fyre Fraud, features a wider range of these than Fyre (stay tuned), but you’ll find yourself deeply hating almost every person who appears on screen. There’s Mark Crawford (who appears in this film exactly as he does in his LinkedIn profile, shitty haircut and all), who recounts first hearing about the festival and how he and his bros started hitting the gym in preparation for hanging out with models on Pablo Escobar’s private island (note that the promotional video was shot on Norman’s Cay, which was not the ultimate site of Fyre, nor did it go over well with the living family members of people who were killed as part of Escobar’s drug empire). There’s Justin Liao, a cryptocurrency dude who comes across as a stone cold sociopath as he smiles while recounting the fact that he and his buddies ransacked the tents next to theirs and intentionally made them even more uninhabitable on the first night so that they would not have neighbors, intercut with footage he shot himself using that most aggressively absurd of instruments, a selfie stick. Also using a selfie stick is James Ohliger of Jerry Media who, alongside Jerry Media CEO Mick Purzycki, is one of the more visually appealing participants, but other than their interviews all of the footage of them comes from self-shot phone video that is so saturated with unsubtle marketing language and envy-baiting rhetoric that it makes your libido curl up and die. Worst of all, nearly every single man in the documentary talks about the appeal of partying on a desert island with “hot,” “beautiful,” “gorgeous,” “breath-taking” women in a way that makes your brain short circuit because you’re not sure if you should vomit in disgust or just crawl out of your skin. These are certainly attractive ladies, but the undisguised piggishness that serves as the impetus to attend Fyre is so unexaminedly toxic and nakedly misogynistic, even from interviewees like Weinstein, whom I think we’re supposed to like, that it’s disgusting.

There are a few people involved for whom you can feel empathy, however. Shiyuan Deng, a developer for the Fyre app, expresses her frustration early and often, and you get a feel for what it must be like to be a cog in the development machine when the business for which you work ends up bursting their money bubble and leaving you out of a job and wasting all of the time that you put into coding and testing. Maryann Rolle, the proprietor of a restaurant that was intended to assist with the feeding of event attendees, ended up losing her entire nest egg as the result of hiring additional staff for Fyre-related business that failed to take form. The mononymous Columbo, a contractor working on the building of facilities for the festival, was unable to pay the construction staff he hired to assist him, many of whom worked for 20 hours a day in a desperate attempt to prepare for the festivities, and ended up having to flee the island to avoid reprisal from others. And then there’s Keith van der Linde, perhaps the only sane person involved with Fyre Fest, a pilot whose important questions (how are you going to move toilet facilities to an abandoned island?) were met with McFarland’s declarations that “We’re not a problems-focused group, we’re a solutions-oriented group,” which is (a) exactly the kind of startup wishy-washy language you would expect from him, and (b) not the only time that one of the involved parties recited this bit of McFarland wisdom in response to legitimate issues that needed attention while McFarland was busy jet skiing and feeding wild pigs. Notably, other than Keith, the laborers and unpaid workers were all people of color, implicitly noting the stratification of labor in the worlds of Fyre and Magnesis.

Overall, this is a pretty slick documentary, although the talking head segments notably look less professional/more VH1’s I Love the… than similar interviews in the Hulu doc, but it’s not terribly detrimental. I know that there were some concerns about the involvement of Jerry Media, who were tasked with managing the social media elements of the festival, as producers on the film, but I’m not sure it was as much of a detraction as it could have been; either they were willing to present the worst sides of themselves by sharing their own self-congratulatory footage and failing to disguise their desire to “fuck like porn stars,” or they didn’t realize how this footage made them appear, so it’s a toss up there. If you have Netflix, check this one out. Also, for further reading, take a look at Rolling Stone‘s “What Fyre Fest Docs Reveal About Tech’s Cult of Positivity”, and also revel in how prescient this decade-old Onion News Network video was in regards to this generation’s need to obsessively self-record.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)

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The microbudget documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening is the debut feature as a director for fine art photographer RaMell Ross. I doubt that was initially the film’s intended form. With the fractured, narrative-light meandering of a photojournal in motion, Hale County This Morning, This Evening plays more like a diary than a proper documentary. Ross appears to be gathering moving images to either calcify a concurrent photography project or to supplement those photographs with a curated installation piece. Either way, the experiment makes for rich raw material to pull from in the editing room when repurposed for a feature-length non-fiction piece, no matter how disjointed the result. Like all D.I.Y. art projects (especially ones this disinterested in narrative) there’s a hit or miss quality to Hale County on a minute to minute basis, but in its best moments it strikes the exact notes of beauty & nightmarish atmosphere you’d want to see in a microbudget, swing-for-the-fences debut. A lot of that artistry seems to be the result of editing-room tinkering in post-production, but it’s all built on the foundation of Ross’s already-established documentarian eye.

A large part of the reason RaMell Ross’s photography work lends itself so well to documentary filmmaking is that he already was documenting little-seen niches of life before he thought to set those images in motion. Ross’s latest project is portraits of black lives in the rural American South, finding eerie beauty & tragic calm in lives marginalized by poverty. More importantly, though, his work’s fine art formalism brings a distinct cinematic eye to his newfound medium so that these portraits don’t feel so much like matter-of-fact dispatches from lives on the fringe, but rather expressions of beauty and deep guttural moans of pain & frustration. The spaces he documents in Hale County, Alabama provide a very grounded, recognizable tapestry of black lives in the modern, rural American South: churches, dorm rooms, trailer parks, gymnasiums, bowling alleys, maternity wards. They don’t amount to much aesthetically, but Ross’s patience & detail-oriented eye allows them to develop into a larger tapestry that encompasses birth & death, time & the cosmos, real life & the world of our dreams. He asks abstract questions like “What is the orbit of our dreams?” and then “answers” them with small, candid moments of sweat dripping on a basketball court or the Sun vibrating across the sky in a time-elapsed road trip. It’s an eerie, disjointed gestalt — the kind of distinctly cinematic eye usually not afforded places like Hale County, Alabama.

As you might expect with a narratively disinterested, tonally experimental art project, Hale County‘s greatest strengths lie in the intensity & memorability of isolated images. Much of the film patiently documents the minor moments of toddlers’ playtime, stray kittens, wandering cattle, and video game “parties” in crowded living rooms. Yet, there are also spectacular moments of a one-of-a-kind novelty: intense Southern storms swarming in on tiny, unprepared human bodies; a mother’s eyes rolling around her skull on pain mediation during an intense birth; a prankster jokingly attempting to view a solar eclipse through a waffle fry. There’s an undeniable political weight to this style of portraiture as well, especially in the financial & physical conditions of the setting and the quiet presence of police lights that bathe & invade those spaces in regular intervals. I’m not convinced that Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a slam dunk (to borrow terminology from the film’s strong focus on local basketball culture), but it’s certainly a wonder to behold in its best moments and an emotionally harrowing experience even in its worst. The only question now is how much greater could RaMell Ross’s cinematic eye become if he set out to make a feature film on purpose at the start of a project, instead of finding one after the fact in the editing room?

-Brandon Ledet

Filmworker (2018)

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The Auteur Theory is an enticingly convenient way to talk about film, but it’s also a reductive one that dismisses the work of hundreds of collaborators on each picture discussed. Meticulous tyrants like Stanley Kubrick are often praised for the incredible depth of their genius & control in craft, but little attention is paid to the behind-the-scenes collaborators who make that genius achievable. The recent documentary Filmworker is especially illuminating when viewed in the context of The Auteur Theory’s shortcomings, with insight into Kubrick’s tyrannically selfish brand of genius in particular. The film profiles former actor Leon Vitali, who got his big break as the snotty Lord Bulingdon in Kubrick’s infamous production of Barry Lyndon, then immediately dropped everything in his life to follow the director around like a loyal, exhausted lapdog until his master died. Kubrick enthusiasts might find Filmworker of interest for its behind-the-scenes factoids about productions like Lyndon, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut, but they’ll also find a huge moral quandary at the center of the hero worship of that man’s unique genius. Vitali pushed the hagiography of Kubrick as the greatest artist of the 20th Century to the most bizarrely self-destructive extreme imaginable; he’s living proof of The Auteur Theory’s most glaring lie.

Upon seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey as a wide-eyed youth in the swinging-60s, Vitali knew he wanted to dedicate his life’s work to Kubrick’s genius. As he tells it, he decided not that he wanted to be an actor, but that he wanted to work for Kubrick, regardless of the capacity of that servitude. Landing a role in Barry Lyndon was all he meant to achieve with his acting work, despite establishing a very promising career onstage & BBC television productions to get there. Kubrick took note of his enthusiasm and made extensive use of him behind the camera as a jack-of-all-trades workhouse assistant for the rest of his career. Vitali was left just as little time for acting gigs as he had for eating, sleeping, and raising his children. Calling him a “personal assistant” is insultingly reductive, as he would switch roles form editor, casting director, acting coach, archivist, and so on as Kubrick’s whims & demands dictated. He was essentially an uncredited producer on multiple films that are widely considered to be some of the greatest achievements in cinema, yet Filmworker finds him lonely & sustained mostly by his children’s charity. It’s sad to see, but it’s also oddly sweet. Vitali seems totally content, if not immensely pleased with his life’s work of supporting a Genius Auteur who worked his mind & body into the ground with essentially no reward outside the collaborations they left behind.

As with other behind-the-scenes, low-budget documentaries like DOOMED!, Casting By, or Lost Soul, Filmworker relies heavily on the strength of the story it tells without focusing too much on the craft of telling it. The interviews are cheaply filmed through a sickly digital gauze, as if they were recorded in a supermarket staff breakroom. The editing is unfocused, drawing the story out into redundancy & exhaustion. Other shortcomings, like a lack of female interviewees & Kubrick’s own voice, could be considered reflections of the auteur’s current legacy, but they hurt the film’s entertainment value anyway. There’s a kind of poetic justice in knowing that Kubrick would have been driven insane by the film’s more glaring faults, however, a minor payback for all the stress he crushed Vitali with over decades of tyrannical demands. Regardless of the format’s merits, this is still a vital story that deserves to be heard, not only for the insight it provides into one of cinema’s great auteurs, but for its challenge to our lauding of great auteurs in the first place. Film is a collaborative medium and we can do much better by recognizing the efforts of its lesser known collaborators. No one should need to be as tireless of a martyr as Vitali to earn that recognition, but this is still as good of a place to start as any.

-Brandon Ledet

Three Identical Strangers (2018)

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One of the more unexpected developments in domestic box office numbers this summer has been the success of the small-scale documentary as a medium. In a way, this makes sense for our current political environment, where titles like RBG & Won’t You Be My Neighbor? feel like vital antidotes to the Trumpian dark times of the world outside. The success of the 2018 documentary has trickled down to less overtly political works as well, however, at least enough to muddle that reductive explanation. The most convincing theory I’ve heard so far for the medium’s current popularity was from critic Paul Matwychuk on the Trash, Art, and the Movies podcast. Matwychuk supposes that Netflix’s extensive documentary programming has softened wide audiences up to the idea of paying to see docs as big screen entertainment. I’d also extend that hypothesis to the recent increased popularity of ”true crime” narratives in podcasts, literature, and—of course—Netflix programming. The true crime effect would at least help explain the popularity of the recent documentary Three Identical Strangers, which doesn’t have the same value as a leftist political antidote as the Fred Rogers or Ruth Bader Ginsberg docs. This is a movie with very little entertainment value to offer mass audiences outside the basic pleasure of hearing an incredibly twisty, sinister story told directly with little embellishment. Even though that approach is more or less timeless, it likely wouldn’t have been nearly as much of a breakout success just a few years ago, for whatever reason you want to suppose.

Revealing too much of the story told in Three Identical Strangers to the uninitiated would risk zapping the film of its power. However, its inciting events are already public knowledge because of their value as a tabloid curio. Triplet brothers, unaware of each other’s existence until the absurdly late age of 19, discovered by chance that they were not alone in this world. The first act of Three Identical Strangers walks the audience through the implausibility of this real-life farce step by step. One brother attends a community college where he’s greeted with open arms as if he’d already been a student there for years, only to discover that he was mistaken for his in-the-flesh doppelgänger. Once the two brothers met their happenstance was odd enough to make the papers, which alerted their third duplicate to the uncanny truth that the three of them, total strangers, were long-lost triplets. There is a kind of sinister quality to the discovery that a person has an exact duplicate out in the world, one that has been explored in many notable psychological thrillers, including recent titles like The One I Love, Enemy, The Double, Double Lover, etc. The joy the brothers found in discovering each other’s existence outweighed any of that initial eeriness, however. They sold their story as a kind of novelty act, leveraging it for appearances at Studio 54, on Donahue, in Desperately Seeking Susan, and on the marquee of their own triplets-themed restaurant. It wasn’t until their parents began picking at the hows & whys of their separation that the sinister aspect of their story began to reveal itself, which is where the film transforms from a farcical human interest story into a true crime, conspiracy theory narrative.

The tactics Three Identical Strangers uses to dole out the insidious details of the brothers’ separation are immediately familiar to the documentary format, especially once you consider that the film is co-produced by CNN. Talking head interviewees appear before senior-portrait backdrops so generic they feel parodic. Photographs & cheap reenactments inform their direct-to-the-camera dialogue in the exact ways you’d expect, recalling more or less all post-Thin Blue Line true crime media, especially television series like Dateline & 20/20. Where Three Identical Strangers excels is in its willingness to revisit & pick apart earlier information with each twisty revelation. The audience is walked through each reveal & self-realization as the brothers lived it, which transforms earlier, uninformed statements that appeared to be fun anecdotes in the first act into something much eerier & more sinister. As the conspiracy that separated the triplets in the first place comes into sharper focus, interviewees make some very questionable accusations for tidy, last-minute closure to their story. Each hypothesis is allowed to hang with equal weight, unchallenged in its overlapping contradiction with the next (like in the editorial-free Rodney Ascher documentaries The Nightmare & Room 237). If the story, still in development, has taught us anything to date, it’s that the facts are so heavily guarded that any clear, tidy answers are impossible at this time (and will remain so until this film’s inevitable sequel in 2066). That continued mystery not only strengthens the film’s central Nature vs. Nurture binary debate, an age-old argument that can never be fully settled because each polarity informs & influences the other; it also makes for great post-screening theater lobby discussion, which is a large part of this twisty story’s appeal.

The story told in Three Identical Strangers may be factually bizarre, but there are plenty of other recent documentaries with equally twisty, unbelievable tales of true life menace that failed to produce anywhere near its box office numbers: Tickled, Weiner, The Act of Killing, etc. While I appreciate the film for what it is and the conversation it sparks, I’m even more fascinated by the larger boon it represents for its medium, which has never been especially popular outside an occasional outlier like Fahrenheit 9/11. I’m less emotionally invested in this individual film’s success than I am in the success of the documentary at large and I would be overjoyed to see this recent trend continue. I can’t think of a better medium to counterbalance the cinematic summer’s typical offerings of large-scale fantasy blockbusters (for the record, I do enjoy a healthy dose of both), no matter what cultural primer helped get us here – Netflix, S-Town, Serial, Trump, or otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet

Kedi (2017)

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In a lot of ways, cats are admirable role models. They roam the streets and live out their own ways of life no matter who’s judging. They go after what they want in the world and snatch it. They take naps whenever and often wherever they want to. Kedi is a celebration of cats—of their independence and embodiment of freedom. It follows seven cats as they roam through the streets of Istanbul just doing what cats do best: genuinely being themselves. Some of them are bullies. One of them is a total moocher. A couple are new mothers. All of them add meaning to and enhance the lives of the humans around them.

Kedi is also about cat people. All the interview subjects have unique relationships with the street cats around them. Some feed them, some go as far as to fund vet care, but they all have a connection with these strange little animals they love. In a lot of ways, Kedi restores my faith in humanity. All the people they talk to about these cats have a selfless understanding with them. They talk about them like old friends. When faced with the expansion and changing landscape of Istanbul, the people feel more concerned for their feline friends than for themselves.

It’s a super beautiful and vibrant movie. Istanbul is lovely as seen from a cat’s eye view. The camera follows them low to the ground as they prowl the streets looking for scraps and hiding spots. The camera also goes up to the rooftops to see the cats who have reached impossibly high perches. I’m not quite sure how they managed to really take on a cat like presence, but it is such an intimate portrait of such a foreign little world. I was amazed that they were able to follow a few of the same cats back and forth between their destinations. That also means, though, that the documentary has a cat-like sense of focus, meaning that it has a tendency to be a little meandering, shifting from subject to subject without many segues.

Kedi is a beautiful glimpse into feline world. It really puts you in the paws of these strange little creatures. You get to see the inner workings, their quirks, their street feuds, their hiding spots, the routines they stick to, and the kind-hearted people they choose. The world needed a documentary about cats. Kedi was a long time coming.

-Alli Hobbs

Into the Inferno (2016)

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fourhalfstar

When I heard that there were going to be two Herzog documentaries released this year, I was pumped. I knew one was going to be about the internet. You may remember my review about that and enthusiasm. Then I found out that the second one was about volcanoes, which, if you can think of the internet as very in our control and of our creation, volcanoes are a destructive force of nature, out of our hands, and very capable of shutting down mankind’s creations.

Lo and Behold was very theoretical, nebulous, and introspective for a movie about how the internet has connected us all and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Volcanoes, while not 100% predictable or understood, are still well studied and more predictable than the future of technology (look at any science fiction novel that tried to predict what the year 2000 was going to be like). The great irony is that Lo and Behold had an actual theatrical release, whereas Into the Inferno was distributed by Netflix, a service that is almost entirely streaming over the internet at this point.

For Into the Inferno, Herzog teamed up with vulcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, whom had he met on the set of Encounters at the End of the World. They made a good team. Oppenheimer is a lovable volcano nerd whose exuberance and enthusiasm make the technical descriptions engaging. Herzog is himself, which is to say that he’s very interested in the small, very human details. Every documentary he helms ends up being just as much an anthropological work as it is art. Together they vowed to explore aspects of how volcanoes effected human culture, no matter how weird it gets. The result is a portrait of how nature has helped build and destroy humanity from the very beginning. And it also gets very weird, as they explore volcano based cults, North Korean mythology, and sift for early hominid bones with paleo-anthropologists in the Awash Valley, Ethiopia.

This is also one of the most beautiful movies of this year. It is just full of astonishing shots of rolling mountains. There are amazing scenes of visible magma inside calderas, just popping and bubbling up. The only sounds are the dangerous grumbles and the splatters. It’s as inside the inferno as many of us will ever get, which is really, truly amazing. When the camera isn’t on the volcanoes, there’s incredible footage of unique cultural practices, dances, and villages.

Into the Inferno is vast and beautiful. We are blessed to live a year with two feature length Herzog documentaries. This is a nature documentary but more so a cultural one. It covers so many parts of the world in a way that many of us will never get to experience and we shouldn’t, lest we destroy them.

-Alli Hobbs

The Nightlife that Was (2004)

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threehalfstar

Like many kids who grew up without cable, PBS was my major television window into the weirdness abyss a milquetoast suburban life in St. Bernard sheltered me from. A lot of what I learned about the various subcultures of punks, painters, and poets as a kid started with hour-long documentaries on New Orleans’s local PBS affiliate WYES (in between daytime offerings of Old Hollywood standards), initial introductions I would later flesh out by hunting down something people used to call “books.” I have a lot less time for “books” now that I’m watching/reviewing so many goddamn movies every week (Seriously. I’ve been reading the same biography of pro wrestler Gorgeous George & the same Howard the Duck comics collection since early summer when I usually would have knocked them both out in a week), but I did recently bring home one of WYES’s made-for-TV documentaries about local New Orleans culture from a university library that brought me back to that Chalmette bedroom where I was forever rapt & eager to learn more. Maybe I’ll even pick up a “book” on the subject (though, more likely, I’ll click around on Wikipedia between theater showtimes like the increasingly uncultured heathen I’ve become).

The Nightlife that Was first aired on WYES in 2004, but it might as well have been 1994 given the fashions & sensibilities that drives its awe-struck history of local nightlife. The hour-long documentary is not only a glimpse into the legendary bars & clubs that made New Orleans one of the coolest cities on the planet in the 1950s & 60s; it’s also a glimpse at a much more recent time where pre-Katrina New Orleans was relaxed & content with falling behind on every current trend other major cities were chasing. It’s very difficult to believe this documentary was made as recently as the aughts, not because it’s corny or old fashioned, but because it reflects a very specific kind of untouched-by-time aspect the city’s lost in its modernization over the last decade. The Nightlife that Was is a really fun, informative look back at half a century old pop culture history in my favorite city, but it also made me miss The New Orleans that Was in much more recent memory in its own charming way.

As a history lesson, The Nightlife that Was plays like a slowed-down, actually-informative version of Mondo Topless set in New Orleans instead of San Francisco. In a wild, hedonistic time, before-they-were-famous musicians like Dr John & Clarence “Frogman” Henry played background tunes for barroom strippers & cops were very relaxed on enforcing age restrictions for patrons; New Orleans was the wildest party on the planet. As one interviewee puts it, “If you couldn’t find something to do, you were a hermit.” Names like Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and a babyfaced Bill Clinton traveled to the city in the search of “the naughty & the gawdy,” finding an endless wealth of jazz musicians, killer soul singers, drag queens, comedians, and larger than life personalities for their troubles. Local standards like “Bill Baley” & “Stacker Lee” blare through a barrage of rapidfire anecdotes about the city’s rich history of “colorful squalor”, eventually giving way to hippie dippy bullshit like The Grateful Dead & the more recent Fat City disco scene as the years roll on before your eyes. The film makes a couple larger statements about the importance of nightlife to the city’s culture like its (very much true) assertion that “The gay political scene came out of bars, much like how the black political movement came out of churches,” but mostly The Nightlife that Was plays like a best-of highlight reel of priceless vintage nightlife footage. It’s mostly a reminder that the music may have gotten shittier on Bourbon Street & the people may not dress up to go there like they used to, but the debauchery has remained largely unchanged.

As far as the objective quality & importance of The Nightlife that Was goes, it’s probably much more in line with the post-Katrina check-in of Max Cusimano’s recent New City doc than with the priceless documentation of works like Always for Pleasure or The Sons of Tennessee Williams. That is to say that it’s interesting & worthy of discussion, but maybe not a home run in terms of thoroughly covering every topic it unearths. For instance, I found myself wanting to know more, much more about the history of the infamous black nightlclub The Dew Drop Inn than what the film had time for, to the point where I’d sacrifice the rest of its runtime to just focus on that one club. Nostalgia-wise, though, there was something special about this WYES production that struck a very particular chord in my heart. Everything from host/narrator Peggy Scott Laborde’s shoulder padded blazer to local legend Irma Thomas’s mid-00s visage to the fact that the film’s official for-purchase print appears to be a DVD-R brought me back to a childhood place of warmth & fascinated curiosity. Even the fact that I wanted to learn more than what little the film provided on many of its subjects reminded me of the role WYES has filled for a long time in my life. It made me want to read “books.”

-Brandon Ledet

Drag Becomes Him (2015)

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One of my favorite aspects of the drag queen reality show competition RuPaul’s Drag Race is that the system works. A lot of viewers believe a (completely believable) conspiracy that the show’s winners are predetermined & cherry picked for success (yet another theory that supports my contention that drag & pro wrestling are essentially the same thing), but I don’t really care if that’s true. My favorite contestants on the show are generally the queens crowned America’s Next Drag Superstar (except maybe in the recent case of Kim Chi), which is good enough for me, no matter what mechanism produces that result. I was curious, then, when I discovered a documentary on Jinkx Monsoon, the winner of season 4, lurking on Amazon Prime, as they were my favorite contestant on their season of the show. Truth be told, Drag Becomes Him is an interesting doc whether or not you watch RuPaul’s Drag Race with any regularity. It’s essentially a portrait of an artist who happens to make it big in a crowded field of similar talents. Although ostensibly a vanity project, the film has very little vanity as it mostly shows drag performer Jinkx Monsoon in various stages of undress & overwhelming stress. It’s a low-key document of a significant time in the unglamorous life of a performer embedded in one of America’s most glamorous & most underappreciated art forms. And even as a standalone film divorced from Monsoon’s celebrity, Drag Becomes Him still commands an interesting, unique vision & narrative, a surprising feat for a film obviously crowdfunded & cheaply made.

Jinkx Monsoon states nakedly, both in a figurative & a literal sense, that they desire “to be known as an artist, not just a female impersonator”. A Seattle queen from a very artsy, performance-based scene (as opposed to the appearance-obsessed world of “pageant queens”), Monsoon has a kind of put-on, Old Hollywood demeanor that makes it difficult to differentiate between performer & character. A theater kid type who’s always “on”, Monsoon might be a bit much to have around as close friend, but they’re a joy to watch onscreen & seem to be very sweetly sincere in an art scene that seems prone to very jaded personalities. The film is structured around Jinkx explaining the basics of drag as an art form as they slowly apply makeup & accessories, making that awkward transition from looking like a Buffalo Bill-type psychopath while in half drag to becoming a larger than life persona. Simultaneously, a narrative emerges of both Monsoon’s personal life in a broken home & their professional career from performing at the age of 15 to cutting their teeth at local clubs to becoming an enterprise with several dedicated employees. Drag Becomes Him has the benefit of a wealth of footage from every stage of Monsoon’s career, but the way it juggles all of those narratives without seeming overburdened or reading like an A-B linear Wikipedia article points to a surprisingly adept team in terms of directing & editing. This is a small scale, low stakes documentary, but it’s one done exceedingly well.

One thing I did not expect form Drag Becomes Him was how wild Jinkx Monsoon would come across in their personal life. On RuPaul’s Drag Race they were kind of pigeonholed as a relatively tame personality in contrast with their competitors. Here, Jinkx does sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll as convincingly as any queen, getting stoned & partying in celebration in a newfound high point of their career (and deservedly so). The film has a completely different tone from Drag Race, skewing kinder & more gently sincere, but it does traffic in the same unapologetically gay headspace. The way it openly leers at masculine bodies is refreshing, since this kind of content can often be phonily de-sexed in order to put a wider audience at ease. Still, Monsoon’s life is far from one continuous, glamorous party and the film finds humor & fascination with the inconveniences of the logistics of drag: the indignity & discomfort of tucking, the machinations of taking a piss while buried under layers of clothing, typing while wearing cartoonishly long nails, etc. The only aspect of Monsoon’s life the film skips over is the narcolepsy revealed during their reign on television, which seems like a curious detail to avoid. Everything else is laid bare.

I don’t think you have to be a fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race to enjoy Drag Becomes Him. The film carves out its own space entirely separate from the show’s very particular camp aesthetic. I was especially surprised by how it establishes a sort of digital pastel look all of its own that both serves its subject’s personality & helps distinguish the film as a work of art. I do think, however, that you’d be hard pressed to finish the doc without being at least somewhat a fan of Monsoon. They bare so much of their vulnerabilities as a real-life personality & their artistic sensibilities as a drag performer that it’s difficult to leave the film without feeling intimately connected. I entered Drag Becomes Him as a previous convert to all things Monsoon & I left as an even bigger, more dedicated fan. Jinkx is a talented artist & Drag Becomes Him makes a convincing, intimate case for how significant their art form can be.

-Brandon Ledet