Subterms
HBO debuts a new docuseries about President Barack Obama. And a claustrophobic comedy blends sexual tension, small talk and brined fish.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Aug. 2-8. Details and times are subject to change. More
This intrepid, immersive documentary follows the men and women who rescue Yazidi girls kidnapped and held by Islamic State fighters in a Syrian refugee camp.In the black of night in northeastern Syria, two men drive their rickety jeep deep into Al Hol, a refugee camp for families of fighters for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. The men rifle through tents and argue with hostile residents before finding their target: a Yazidi teenage girl kidnapped years ago and held as a “sabaya” or sex slave. As the rescuers make their way out of the camp with her, they dodge speeding cars and bullets.All of this happens in the first 20-or-so minutes of Hogir Hirori’s “Sabaya.” Mahmud and Ziyad, volunteers at the Yazidi Home Center in Syria, will make several more such trips over the course of the film, and hundreds more after the cameras stop rolling. Their task is enormous, and it demands a stoicism that Hirori’s intrepid, immersive filmmaking mirrors.Shooting with a hand-held camera, Hirori (who also edited the film) stitches together glimpses of the men’s daily lives at the Center — smoke breaks, meals with family, endless phone calls with relatives of the captured girls — into a portrait of unsentimental routine. This is in part a protective tactic: To dwell on the tragedy of the 7-year-old rescued after six years in captivity, or the girl whose family refuses to accept her son because his father is an ISIS fighter, is to open up to debilitating horror.Which makes the courage of the former sabayas who embed themselves in the camp as informers all the more remarkable. As I watched them enter the camp in niqabs, Hirori following closely with his camera, my heart fluttered with both fear and hope. In a film about the light that breaks through the darkest of darknesses, these women shine the brightest.SabayaNot rated. In Kurdish and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More
This documentary on the strange case of Matt DeHart weaves uncertainty into its structure.Was Matt DeHart an Air National Guard veteran who, having spent time in hacktivist circles, stumbled on information so explosive that the F.B.I. had him physically tortured during an interrogation process? (That’s what he claimed when he fled to Canada after 2013.) Or was he a fugitive from justifiable charges of producing and transporting child pornography, a case he suggested had been concocted?Journalists who have covered the DeHart saga — and the summary above is only the tip of the iceberg — have tended to note when corroboration becomes impossible. The remarkable thing about “Enemies of the State,” a documentary directed by Sonia Kennebeck and executive produced by Errol Morris, no stranger to epistemological mysteries — is that it comes close to offering decisive yes and no answers, with evidence to back them up.It becomes a documentary about re-evaluating biases, a process that may well implicate the filmmakers. As Tor Ekeland, a lawyer who represented DeHart, says in the movie, “The only way to make the facts in this case make sense is to entertain some kind of wild conspiracy theory.” Kennebeck must have recognized the danger of doing just that. Matt’s parents, Paul and Leann, featured extensively, appear to have reached a point where no amount of paranoia would be unjustified, yet they seem utterly convinced of themselves. Even the third parties interviewed — the National Post journalist Adrian Humphreys, the McGill professor Gabriella Coleman — wind up confronting blind spots.Kennebeck weaves uncertainty into the formal design, staging re-enactments mingled with original audio, for instance. The movie is a spoiler deathtrap, but the questions it raises are fascinating.Enemies of the StateNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More
The film revisits Spain in 1992 from a less rosy vantage point than that year’s Olympics gave the world.Though it encompasses three hours and 20 minutes of concentrated sociopolitical discussion, “The Year of the Discovery,” an experimental film with documentary trappings, establishes its central idea in side-by-side opening title cards.They set up a contrast involving Spain in 1992, when the country hosted the Olympics in Barcelona and the Expo ’92 in Seville, projecting the image of a modern, post-Franco nation. But that same year, workers in Cartagena, a city in the Murcia region, protested a threat to industrial jobs. The demonstrations, the text says, led to an uprising against police and culminated in the throwing of bombs that burned the regional parliament.“The Year of the Discovery,” directed by Luis López Carrasco, recasts 1992 from the standpoint of Cartagena instead of Barcelona or Seville. But what the film is saying, and how, is complicated. It unfolds mainly in split screen, as rotating interviewees discuss labor conditions, European economic integration and the legacy of Francoism. López Carrasco shoots on camcorder-grade video, muddying the distinction between recent and vintage material.He shows a 1992 TV broadcast in one image, then continues its audio over two screens of what appear to be a cook and her family eating. The construction suggests they are hearing real-time news about the Maastricht Treaty, which formalized the European Union. But subsequent, jarring references to Facebook and an already-extant euro indicate that the movie was shot closer to the present. (López Carrasco filmed in a closed cafe in Cartagena and selected participants through a process he has called “casting.”)If the convoluted history and corresponding formal conceits are difficult to absorb, that is part of the point.The Year of the DiscoveryNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 3 hours 20 minutes. In theaters. More
A documentary tracks the extraordinary life of Valerie Taylor, spearfishing champion turned passionate conservationist on behalf of endangered sharks.Steven Spielberg needed a real shark. Before the young director began filming “Jaws” with his famously malfunctioning animatronic beast in Martha’s Vineyard, he hired two underwater cinematographers to film great white sharks off the coast of South Australia.Skilled divers and well-known in their home country, the Australian couple Ron and Valerie Taylor set off to capture the footage that would be used in the climactic 1975 scene in which Richard Dreyfuss’s Hooper, seemingly safe in a shark cage, confronts the monster terrorizing beachgoers.But, as Valerie Taylor, the subject of a new documentary, said in a recent video interview from her home in Sydney, “You might be able to direct a dog or a human or a horse, but you can’t direct a shark.”It quickly became clear that the Taylors were battling two unwilling parties: the shark and the professional stuntman, Carl Rizzo, who didn’t know how to dive and panicked at being lowered in the cage. As he waffled on the boat deck, the shark approached, became tangled in the wires supporting the cage and ultimately snapped the empty container loose from the winch, sending it plummeting into the depths.Ron filmed the whole thing underwater, while Valerie grabbed a camera on the ship and shot overhead. Spielberg was so enamored with the footage of the unexpected turn of events, he had the script rewritten to accommodate it, altering Hooper’s fate from shark bait to survivor as the animal thrashed overhead.Valerie’s work on “Jaws” is just one chapter in her incredible life, which saw her shift from lethal spearfisher to filmmaker and pioneering conservationist. “She was like a Marvel superhero to me,” the Australian producer Bettina Dalton said. “She influenced everything about my career and my passion for the natural world.”Taylor worked as an underwater cinematographer. Her mother told her, “Try what you like. It can’t hurt you and you’ll learn.”Ron and Valerie TaylorThat reverence led Dalton to team up with the director Sally Aitken for the National Geographic documentary “Playing With Sharks,” which follows Taylor’s career and is now available on Disney+.Born in Australia and raised mostly in New Zealand, Valerie, now 85, grew up poor. She was hospitalized with polio at age 12 and forced to drop out of school while she relearned how to walk. She began working as a comic strip artist then dabbled in theater acting, but hated being tied to the same place every day.“I had a good mother. She said, just do what you like. Try what you like. It can’t hurt you and you’ll learn,” Valerie, her statement earrings swinging under her silver hair, told me emphatically. When she began diving and spearfishing professionally, however, her mother was “horrified.” Valerie added, “I was supposed to get married and have children.”She did eventually marry Ron, a fellow spearfishing champion who was also skilled with an underwater camera, and they began making films documenting marine life together. Valerie, with her glamorous “Bond girl” looks, became the focal point since they could fetch more money if she appeared onscreen. They were together until Ron died of leukemia in 2012.“Here’s this incredible front-of-house character, and here’s an amazing technical wizard,” Aitken said. “Together, they realized that was a winning combination.”Not only did Valerie have a magnetic on-camera presence, she had a rare ability to connect with animals, including menacing sharks, which were then little understood.“They all have different personalities. Some are shy, some are bullies, some are brave,” Valerie said. “When you get to know a school of sharks, you get to know them as individuals.”After she killed a shark while shooting a film in the 1960s, the Taylors had an epiphany: sharks needed to be studied and understood, rather than slain. They quit spearfishing entirely, and Aitken likened their journey from hunters to conservationists to that of John James Audubon.Taylor on a dive in 1982. Many of the underwater scenes she witnessed in her early days no longer exist, she said.Ron and Valerie Taylor“I have that sort of personality that I don’t get afraid. I get angry,” Valerie said. “Even when I’ve been bitten, I’ve just stayed still and waited for it to let go — because they’ve made a mistake.”Still, she conceded, “I don’t expect other people to behave like I do.”Her signature look, a pink wet suit and brightly colored hair ribbon, could be seen as a defiant embrace of her femininity in a male-dominated industry, but it was also a simple way for her to stand out in underwater footage. “Ron wanted color in a blue world,” Valerie said. “He said, ‘Cousteau has a red beanie, you can have a red ribbon.’ That was that.”When asked, she shrugged at the idea that she faced additional challenges as the only woman on boats full of men for most of her life, especially in the ’50s and ’60s, when women were still largely expected to stick to traditional roles.“I was as good as they were, so there you go. No problem,” she said. “And, although I didn’t realize it, I was probably as tough.”The “Playing With Sharks” filmmakers, who pored over decades of media coverage and archival footage, described Valerie as someone who faced an uphill battle on multiple levels but who was also seen as an intriguing novelty.“Of course, she had to fight to be taken seriously,” Aitken said. “She was working class. She was someone who really had very little education. I think the culture saw her as extraordinary. That in itself can be a liberating path, precisely because you are singular.”When “Jaws” became an instant, unexpected blockbuster in 1975, the Taylors realized that the movie was doing harm that they’d never considered: Recreational shark hunting gained popularity and audiences feared legions of bloodthirsty sharks were stalking humans just below the surface. In reality, there are hundreds of species of sharks, and only a few have been known to bite humans. Those that do usually mistake people for their natural prey, like sea lions.“For some reason, filmgoers believed it. There’s no shark like that alive in the world today,” Valerie said. “Ron had a saying: ‘You don’t go to New York and expect to see King Kong on the Empire State Building. Neither should you go into the water expecting to see Jaws.’”Valerie and Ron Taylor worked together until his death in 2012. Ron and Valerie TaylorIn an attempt to quell public fears, Universal flew the Taylors to the United States for a talk-show tour educating the public about sharks, and Valerie said, “I’ve been fighting for the poor old, much maligned sharks and the marine world, in general, ever since.”In 1984, she helped campaign to make the grey nurse shark the first protected shark species in the world. Her nature photography has been featured in National Geographic. The same area where she and Ron filmed their “Jaws” sequence is now a marine park named in their honor. And she still publishes essays passionately defending animals.Yet, shark populations have been decimated around the world, primarily because of overfishing, and Valerie said many of the underwater scenes she witnessed in her early days no longer exist.“I hate being old, but at least it means I was in the ocean when it was pristine,” she said, adding that today, “it’s like going to where there was a rainforest and seeing a field of corn.”Despite all that’s covered in “Playing With Sharks,” Valerie said, “it’s not my whole life story, by any means.” There was the time she was left at sea and saved herself by anchoring her hair ribbons to a piece of coral until another boat happened upon her. Or the day she taught Mick Jagger how to scuba dive on a whim. (He was a quick study, despite the weight belt sliding right down his narrow hips.) She also survived breast cancer.Though she still dives, her arthritis makes being in the colder Australian waters difficult, and she’s eager to return to Fiji, where swimming feels like “taking a bath.”“I can’t jump anymore, not that I particularly want to jump,” she said. “But if I go into the ocean, I can fly.” More
This documentary follows the stunt performer Eddie Braun as he attempts to jump Idaho’s Snake River Canyon in a rocket.“I’m the face you never see,” Eddie Braun says, even though he’s racked up more than 250 film and TV credits. Braun’s hot rod greaser hairdo and battered jumpsuits signify that he’s either a “Stuntman,” hence the title of Kurt Mattila’s simplistic documentary, or an aging astronaut pressed into service for one last mission, which also turns out to be close to the truth. Now in his 50s, Braun is bored of barrel-rolling exploding cars, as are his wife and four kids whose ho-hum response to his latest fireball implies they think of their pops as indestructible.Yet, Braun seeks his own immortality — the chance to nail a stunt that eluded his idol Evel Knievel — and commits to jumping Idaho’s Snake River Canyon in a steam-powered rocket. And Mattila, a car commercial director itchy to shift gears in his own career, tracks the nearly four year process of getting Braun across a leviathan gorge with a boost from the son of the original rocket’s engineer who wants to prove that his dad’s design would have worked, if not for a pesky parachute malfunction.This is a documentary for kids, a point made in the introduction where Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson tells tykes not to try this at home. (“This” meaning fusing a steam whistle to a lawn dart and vaulting three and a half football fields.) Braun is in hero mode, repeatedly assuring the camera, and the guitar player Slash who’s agreed to record him an anthem, that he’ll be fine. Lacking deep emotions, the film cuts over and over to American flags. The only drama comes when the stunt’s TV sponsors back out — twice — forcing Braun to put his money where his life is. There’s something morbid about a world where a brave man is more scared of financial, than physical, risk. But that’s a leap this doc can’t take.StuntmanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More
An HBO documentary examines a music festival that went so far off the rails that it defined an era.It is mildly surprising that it took so long for a documentary about the 1999 edition of the Woodstock music festival to be made. After all, this was an epic, epoch-defining debacle that deserves more scrutiny than, say, the Fyre Festival, a preposterous fiasco from 2017 that crashed before actually happening yet has already prompted two films about it.Garret Price’s HBO doc “Woodstock 99” neatly captures a cultural moment, albeit a destructive one. The first in a documentary series created by Bill Simmons, the film may be subtitled “Peace, Love and Rage,” but the first two ingredients were in short supply on those scorching July days 22 years ago. The event quickly devolved into a hellscape of overflowing porta-potties, hungry and thirsty festivalgoers, horrific sexual assaults, arson and even deaths. Much of the footage is hair-raising, especially the women being groped and the mobs of young white men whipping themselves into a frenzy of aggressive stupidity, aimless anger and turbo-boosted misogyny. This is these dudes’ coming-of-age as an aggrieved demographic, and it’s frightening.Price attempts to put the festival in context, framing it against a period of economic growth tempered by malaise: Bill Clinton’s impeachment and the Columbine High School shootings happened earlier that year, for example, and Y2K angst was growing. Add testimonies from attendees and journalists, and (too short) excerpts from the live performances, and the proceedings often feel rushed. The film could easily have been longer.As with most post-mortems, “Woodstock 99” tries to figure out how it all went wrong, and comes up with a deadly combination of factors: a merciless environment, thoughtless programming (three female acts did not counterbalance seas of aggro headliners like Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, Korn and Metallica) and botched logistics. The issue of water bottles costing $4 comes up a lot. This was “somewhat on the high side,” says John Scher, one of the promoters, before coolly adding, “If you’re going to go to a festival, you bring money with you — this was not a poor man’s festival.”Later on, Scher, who emerges as the embodiment of cynical corporate villainy, argues that the women facing a barrage of verbal and physical abuse were “at least partially to blame for that” because they “were running around naked,” and accuses the media, notably MTV News, of making Woodstock 99 look bad. Even now, he just can’t give up on his delusion of the festival being a success.Woodstock 99: Peace, Love and RageNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More
This documentary plunges into the life of the diver and marine conservationist Valerie Taylor, but her compassion for sharks is muddied by the film’s insistence on a tense mood.The chipper documentary “Playing with Sharks” celebrates the life of the diver Valerie Taylor, who dedicated her career to marine photography and conservation. The film (on Disney+) plunges into Valerie’s work with sharks, which she and her husband Ron Taylor captured in a trove of close-range undersea footage.As a young woman, Valerie was a champion spearfisher in Australia. But she soon renounced the sport in favor of less disruptive underwater activities. Alongside Ron, Valerie began capturing remarkable ocean images: whack-a-mole eels, rippling squid, a shiver of sharks noshing on a whale carcass. The Taylors were the first to film great whites from the open water without the shelter of a cage, and the couple’s trust in the intimidating creatures (or maybe just their audacity) made them master ocean reef videographers.The documentary, directed by Sally Aitken, draws heavily from the underwater footage taken by Ron and others. Aitken intercuts these sequences with archival clips of Valerie’s chipper efforts as a shark advocate. Horrified by what she saw as a collective misunderstanding of a majestic animal, Valerie made it her mission to show that sharks — while requiring caution — have personalities and respond ably to training, like dogs.But while Valerie’s compassion for sharks is contagious, Aitken insists on a tense mood, with a suspenseful score and unnerving editing straight out of a man-versus-beast blockbuster. “Playing With Sharks” would like to position Valerie as both intrepid diver and valiant activist, but with its focus on thrills and gills, the film goes light on the context needed to reconcile these two identities. Are we meant to recoil from sharks or care for them? Likely some of both, but the documentary comes out looking unsure.Playing with SharksNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More
