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      in Movies

      ‘How to Rob a Bank’ and the Limits of a True-Crime Documentary

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      The story of a Seattle-area bandit is rife with big questions, but the movie doesn’t explore them. Not every podcast needs to be a film.There is a platitude, beloved of the documentary community, that truth is stranger than fiction. It’s often correct. But lately I’ve been worried that the glut of documentary content required to fill the yawning maw of streamers is putting this axiom to the test more frequently. Not all stories are worthy of the documentary treatment.Such, unfortunately, is the issue with “How to Rob a Bank” (on Netflix), yet another true-crime documentary. Its directors, Seth Porges and Stephen Robert Morse, have turned out great work in the past — Porges as co-director of the fascinating “Class Action Park”; Morse as producer of the influential “Amanda Knox.” This film feels more perfunctory, a strong example of the kind of documentary that could have just been a podcast. (Of course, it has been.)The film tells the true story of Scott Scurlock, a free-spirited fellow known to Washington State law enforcement agents as the Hollywood Bandit. (Sometimes they dropped the bandit part.) In the 1990s, he pulled off a whopping 19 confirmed bank robberies in the Seattle area, stealing more than $2.3 million, with the aid of a few friends and some elaborate disguises.“How to Rob a Bank” is filled with re-enactments of the robberies and interviews with friends and associates, who explain that Scurlock was a gentle soul who lived in an enormous treehouse that was a hub for his friends. He also cooked meth for a while, was an adrenaline junkie and journaled a lot about trying to find his purpose in life. Police officers and investigators are less sanguine about Scurlock, noting at one point that bank robbery is not a victimless crime, even if nobody gets hurt physically. It can be traumatic to anyone who was inside the bank, and to a teller facing a gun. Scurlock tried to paint his crimes as altruistic, and did give away some of his money to friends in need. But people were still hurt — including, ultimately, Scurlock himself.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      ‘Hitler and the Nazis’ Review: Building a Case for Alarm

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      Joe Berlinger’s six-part documentary for Netflix asks whether we should see our future in Germany’s past.Hitler’s project: “Making Germany great again.” The Nazis’ characterization of criticism from the media: “Fake news.” Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden: “It’s sort of like Hitler’s Mar-a-Lago, if you will.”Donald Trump’s name is not mentioned in the six episodes of “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial,” a new historical documentary series on Netflix. But it dances just beneath the surface, and occasionally, as in the examples above, the production’s cadre of scholars, popular historians and biographers can barely stop themselves from giving the game away.The series was directed by the veteran documentarian Joe Berlinger (“Paradise Lost,” “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster”), who has a production deal with Netflix and has given it popular true-crime shows like “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich” and the “Conversations With a Killer” series.In promotional material, Berlinger explains his decision to step up from true crime to total war and genocide: “This is the right time to retell this story for a younger generation as a cautionary tale,” he says, adding, “In America, we are in the midst of our own reckoning with democracy, with authoritarianism knocking at the door and a rise in antisemitism.” In other words, you can’t make a documentary about Germany in the 1930s and ’40s without holding the United States of the 2010s and ’20s in your mind.To that end, Berlinger has made a deluxe version of the sort of history of Hitler, the Third Reich and the Holocaust that for years has been a staple of American cable television. The information is not new, but the resources available to Berlinger are reflected in the abundance of material he deploys across nearly six and a half hours: archival film, most of it meticulously colorized for the series, and audio; staged recreations with a sprawling cast of actors; and the copious roster of interviewees.A new telling of an old story requires a twist, of course, and Berlinger has several. The American journalist William L. Shirer serves as the series’s unofficial narrator, despite having died in 1993 — an A.I. recreation of his voice recites passages from his many books about the period, and occasionally his actual voice is heard in excerpts from radio broadcasts. He is also represented onscreen by an actor in scenes recreating the series’s other primary framing device, the first Nuremberg trials in 1945.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Cyndi Lauper Could Only Ever Be Herself

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      One Friday afternoon in May, Cyndi Lauper stepped out of her Upper West Side apartment building and into the streets of New York City. She wore glitter-encrusted glasses, sneakers with rainbow soles and a stack of beaded bracelets on each arm. A rice-paper parasol swung in her hand. As she walked, she examined the crowds and remarked when glints of interest caught her eye.“Of course, up here it’s fashion hell,” she allowed of her tony neighborhood. And yet, every few blocks she rubbernecked at another woman’s look, her famous New Yawk accent lifting and tumbling in pleasure at what she saw:“Look at these dames, how cute are they?”“Did you love those pants? I kind of loved those pants.”“Look at this lady,” she said, stepping off the curb and clocking a passerby. The woman moved nimbly, tomato-red streak in her silver hair, body draped in shades of fuchsia and cherry as she pushed the gleaming metal frame of a walker. “Fabulous,” Lauper exclaimed. “Come on!”At 70, the pop icon and social justice activist isn’t just charging back into the streets. On Monday, Lauper announced her final tour, the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour, which will have her headlining arenas across North America from late October to early December. And “Let the Canary Sing,” a documentary about her life and career that premiered at the Tribeca Festival last year, is streaming on Paramount+.Lauper has not staged a major tour — “a proper tour, that’s mine” — in over a decade. But now her window of opportunity is closing, so she’s leaping through it. “I don’t think I can perform the way I want to in a couple of years,” she said. “I want to be strong.”Lauper photographed at the Scarlet Lounge on the Upper West Side, the Manhattan neighborhood where she lives with her husband and two pugs.Thea Traff for The New York TimesAnd until recently, when she finally agreed to sit for the director Alison Ellwood, she could not envision committing her life story to film. “I wasn’t going to do a documentary because I’m not dead,” she said. More to the point, she did not feel particularly misunderstood. From the moment she danced across the city in the 1983 video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” she felt that she had articulated precisely what she wanted to say.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Margot Benacerraf, Award-Winning Venezuelan Documentarian, Dies at 97

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      She made only two films, but her “Araya,” a rumination on the daily rituals of salt-mine laborers, became an enduring work of Latin American cinema.Margot Benacerraf, a critically acclaimed Venezuelan documentary filmmaker whose hypnotic “Araya,” a visual tone poem chronicling the daily lives of salt workers on an austere peninsula on her country’s coast, shared the critics’ prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, died on Wednesday in Caracas. She was 97.Her death was announced by the country’s culture minister.Hailed as a major figure of Latin American cinema, Ms. Benacerraf founded Venezuela’s national cinematheque and in 2018 was given the Order of Francisco de Miranda, honoring outstanding merit in the sciences and humanities, by the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.But although Ms. Benacerraf was celebrated, she was not prolific. She made only two films in her career: “Reverón” (1952), a 23-minute documentary short about the reclusive later years of the Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón, and “Araya,” her sole feature-length work.Influenced by the magic realism of novelists like Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier, Ms. Benacerraf captured, in 90 minutes, the sweat and toil of workers amid the towering salt pyramids on the centuries-old mining terrain of the Araya peninsula. “Araya” shared the International Federation of Film Critics award at Cannes in 1959 with Alain Resnais’s landmark New Wave film, “Hiroshima Mon Amour.”A scene from Ms. Benacerraf’s acclaimed 1959 documentary, “Araya,” which the director Steven Soderbergh called “a gift to cineastes.”Milestone FilmsIn 2019, the New Yorker film critic Richard Brody called “Araya” a “majestic documentary portrait” of salt producers and their families. “Benacerraf’s grand style,” he wrote, “captures the drama of subsistence in the face of nature,” adding that “the overwhelming beauty of the wide-open spaces contrasts with the workers’ burdened trudges through them.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      A Life, and Death, as a Mexican Journalist Shown in Documentary

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      The documentary “State of Silence,” premiering at the Tribeca Festival, uses personal stories to explain the bleak situation for journalists in Mexico.If you are going to make a documentary about danger, you have to take your camera to daring places. You have to point it at nefarious subjects, doing brazen things, and capture a level of authenticity essential for a credible film.That was the case for the crew on “State of Silence,” which explores the existential threats faced by journalists in Mexico. For the documentary’s tense opening segment, the team accompanied the reporter Jesús Medina on a nighttime search for illegal loggers cutting down trees in a remote forest in the state of Morelos. When Medina, with his camera in hand, encountered one, the unsuspecting transgressor was fully masked — and brandishing a thundering chainsaw.As Medina began his interview with the logger, the film crew was just a few steps behind, recording the scene while both men did their risky jobs, and as the journalist — no stranger to precarious assignments — de-escalated the situation into a businesslike conversation between two professionals.An illegal logger being interviewed for the film. The “State of Silence” crew accompanied the reporter Jesús Medina on a nighttime search for illegal loggers cutting down trees in a remote forest in the state of Morelos. La Corriente del GolfoThe reporter Jesús Medina.La Corriente del Golfo“Sometimes you have no other work option and you have to do this out of necessity,” the logger explained. Medina got the point, and his story gently morphed into a nuanced profile of a worker toiling to support his family, despite the hazards.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      Tribeca Festival: Liza Minnelli Documentary Includes Lost Footage

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      The director Bruce David Klein’s documentary, premiering at the Tribeca Festival, includes old footage found in Minnelli’s closet.A new documentary celebrates the life of the singer and actress Liza Minnelli. And it kicks off with the death of her mother, Judy Garland.“Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story” (which premieres at the Tribeca Festival on June 12) opens with the vision of Garland’s rose-covered coffin being carried past thousands of mourning fans in New York in 1969.With that somber start, the director Bruce David Klein is making a point. Rather than dwell on Minnelli’s childhood years in the orbit of her prodigiously gifted mother, he sets out to show that Minnelli, 78, shot to fame almost immediately after her mother’s passing — as if it were a catalyst of her success.Klein includes interviews with Minnelli’s artistic mentors, stage partners and close friends, including the actress Mia Farrow, who speaks of her with affection and insight.There are also glimpses of the media nastiness she faced throughout her career, such as the male journalist who asked, “They write about you that you are ugly?” Her reply: “I don’t really care. When I’m onstage, I just do my job.”Bruce David Klein, the director of the Liza Minnelli documentary. “Liza deserves it, because she has a level of artistry that many people have forgotten and need to be reminded of, that is really mind-blowing,” he said.Arin Sang-urai/Atlas Media CorpWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Jim Henson Idea Man’ on Disney+ Offers Lessons for Young Artists

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      This Ron Howard documentary doesn’t ignore the Muppet mastermind’s faults, but the tribute has a lot to teach creators everywhere.I don’t need to tell you that Jim Henson’s work is ubiquitous and beloved, foundational to childhood across several generations of “Sesame Street” watchers and stretching far beyond. It’s so important to us that when one of his creations, Elmo, “asked” an innocuous question about people’s mental state on social media this winter, the responses seemed … well, it was a lot.Clearly, his puppets and Muppets and stories and sense of humor do not lose their power with time. But to everyone other than Muppet obsessives, Henson the artist is still a bit shadowy. Good news: Now we have “Jim Henson Idea Man” (on Disney+), a tribute to the artist and a treasure trove of archival footage and interviews about his work and life. Though it borders on hagiography, it’s not blind to Henson’s faults, and it boasts a flair for the unexpected. The film, directed by Ron Howard, starts with Henson and two of his Muppet friends, Fozzie Bear and Kermit the Frog — Henson’s alter ego — being interviewed on TV by none other than Orson Welles. In his sonorous baritone, Welles calls Henson “Rasputin, as an Eagle Scout.” The movie sets out to show what he meant.A few years ago, Marilyn Agrelo’s documentary “Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street” (for rent on major platforms) — also very much worth watching — filled in some of the story, with digressions to illustrate the zany, hilariously violent sense of absurdist humor that Henson brought to his early commercial work. “Jim Henson Idea Man” spends longer in the same territory, while focusing on Henson’s life (he died in 1990 at 53), his creative collaborations (including those with his wife, Jane, and with Frank Oz) and his insatiable need to keep pushing his boundaries.There’s so much to love here: old, gut-splitting commercials; behind-the-scenes footage and stories from “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show”; and explorations of “The Dark Crystal,” “Labyrinth” and “The Muppet Movie.” But what struck me especially was that Howard has made a movie that every young artist should watch (and older ones, too), whether they’re making puppets, paintings, music, movies or anything that requires creative labor.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      ‘Ren Faire’ Is ‘Succession’ With Turkey Legs

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      An engrossing documentary debuting Sunday on HBO, it chronicles a Renaissance festival impresario’s effort to find a worthy heir.George Coulam, known as King George to his acolytes, in a scene from “Ren Faire.”HBO“Ren Faire,” an engrossing and inventive three-part documentary that debuts on HBO Sunday at 9 p.m., centers on George Coulam, founder of the Texas Renaissance Festival. King George, as everyone calls him, claims he wants to retire; he believes he’ll live for another nine years, and he has a vision for how he wants to spend this remaining time.“I wanna do art and chase ladies,” he says. If only he could find a worthy heir.Coulam comes across as part Logan Roy, part Joe Exotic — cruel, charismatic, driven and able to inspire fealty even as he dispenses bitter nastiness. (He has an assistant maintain his profiles on sugar-daddy websites and asks all dates, within moments of meeting them, if they have breast implants.)People on the show compare him to Willy Wonka and King Lear, and he says he followed Walt Disney’s playbook for land acquisition and political strategy. One employee weeps with glee upon meeting him, and others curtsy when he walks into their office. He’s not a king! you want to shout. He’s just some guy! But I guess someone wants to shout that about every king.George’s ambitious underlings strive for his intermittent approval and prostrate themselves, enduring petty humiliations only to crawl back and beg for more. The most debased and tragic is Jeff, who, with his wife, has worked at the fair for decades. He gets frustrated with her comparative lack of loyalty to the king, even as George pushes them both aside. “Just say that you serve George,” he insists, past the point of banter.Later, as Jeff schemes and stresses, she asks him earnestly, “Is it folly?”“Of course it’s folly!” he bellows, his voice shaking. Usually these kinds of lines are heard only in particularly farcical episodes of “Frasier,” but here they are both laughable and heartbreaking.There’s something ridiculous about renaissance fairs, and so there’s something ridiculous about “Ren Faire,” which blends hallucinatory nightmare sequences and fiery cinematic moments into its nonfiction. Those clever additions echo the agreed-upon dumb fantasy of renaissance fairs: Nay, my lord, this meager pub be all out of Red Bull.Directed by Lance Oppenheim and produced by Benny and Josh Safdie among others, “Ren Faire” depicts and embodies a Möbius strip of truth and grandiosity. The fair really is Jeff’s life’s work, as he says multiple times; it really is George’s gilded isolation chamber; it really is a business and a dream. Things can be silly and true and meaningful at the same time. Huzzah. More