Documentary Films and Programs

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Taking’ Review: This Land Is Not Your Land

      by

      Monument Valley embodies the Old West. But the fantasies presented in Westerns obscure its darker history and the lives of the Navajo people who inhabit it.Whether it’s John Wayne films or Chevrolet ads, Monument Valley has been immortalized in the American imagination as a symbol of this nation’s vast potential. “The Taking,” a new documentary directed by Alexandre O. Philippe, examines the site’s complicated position as a representation of the Old West despite being located on Navajo land.In the film, images and clips of movies, TV shows and advertising campaigns that have traditionally featured Monument Valley are accompanied by voice-overs that explain how white cowboys have been viewed as heroes and Native Americans as aggressors, obscuring a history of genocide and oppression.The film argues that perhaps no one has been more central to this effort than the director John Ford, who used the region as the backdrop for his western movies, with the dramatic landscape evoking and perpetuating ideals of freedom and liberation central to his stories of rugged cowboys and villainous “Indians.”Obscured in this myth making is the reality of the Navajo people, many of whom still live in the region without running water or access to stable incomes. “The Taking” is successful in demonstrating the way in which Monument Valley has become a canvas onto which the public can superimpose their own ideas and myths. But had it included more current images of the region and the realities of the Navajo people, it may have been more effective in replacing these myths, going beyond film analysis to altering imagination.The TakingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me’ Review: Mistreated

      by

      The tumultuous life and death of the model, actress and tabloid superstar is related with little insight in this facile Netflix documentary.“Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me,” a new documentary about the model, actress and ’90s tabloid sensation, follows a trend established by other nonfiction portraits of démodé stars released in recent years, such as “Britney vs Spears” and “Pamela, a Love Story.” Half biography, half supercilious media studies essay, these films are intended to be sort of pop-cultural correctives, ones which deconstruct the popular image of celebrity by demonstrating (not unfairly) that their subjects were vilified and callously misjudged in their times.This movie’s director, Ursula Macfarlane, tries to show the real Smith — who was born Vickie Lynn Hogan and raised in Texas — through a combination of cruel archival news clips (The National Enquirer calls her “dumb,” Howard Stern mocks her weight); moody, true-crime-esque B-roll; and interviews with Smith’s uncle, her brother and her former bodyguard, plus a number of tabloid journalists, reality-TV producers and members of the paparazzi.The interviews are short on insights. We hear both that Smith “craved attention” and “always liked being the center of attention.” We learn that she sometimes acquired that attention in savvy ways, willing herself to superstardom through a public image she meticulously styled, and later attracted attention despite efforts to escape it, at great cost to her privacy and mental health. But the solemn excavation of Smith’s life and death — she died at 39 of a drug overdose, in 2007 — ultimately brings the movie, despite Macfarlane’s well-meaning efforts, squarely into the territory of what it’s attempting to condemn: lurid voyeurism. Smith’s contentious inheritance case, the disputed paternity of her daughter, the tragic death of her son: The movie cannot help but sensationalize these events, even though it relates them in a self-consciously plaintive register rather than a gawking one. Smith deserved better than how she was treated. And she deserves better than this.Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know MeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Making a Michael J. Fox Movie With Michael J. Fox’s Movies

      by

      How the documentary “Still” uses footage from its subject’s films and TV shows to tell its story.When Davis Guggenheim approached Michael J. Fox three years ago in the hopes of making a film about his life, the director had a few things going for him, besides his previous success with documentaries about other luminaries including Al Gore (the Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth”) and the Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai (“He Named Me Malala”). Guggenheim’s wife, the actress Elisabeth Shue, had worked with Fox before, starring as his girlfriend in the second and third installments of the “Back to the Future” series. And Guggenheim had directed “It Might Get Loud,” a documentary about Jimmy Page, Jack White and The Edge, a fact that endeared him to Fox, a longtime electric guitar player.Even so, Fox initially balked at the idea of a movie, particularly one centered on tales he had already written about in four best-selling memoirs. “I told him, my story’s pretty self-explanatory,” Fox recalled. “I don’t know how many times you can tell it.”But Guggenheim persevered. He didn’t want to do a film version of Fox’s own memoirs, which detail the actor’s life and career and struggles with Parkinson’s, as good as he thought they were. And he didn’t want to make your standard documentary, the sort with talking heads and somber narration. Guggenheim wanted to make a movie with as much life and humor as its subject, a fun, fast-paced effort not unlike, say, a movie starring Michael J. Fox.“I wanted to take the audience on a wild ride,” Guggenheim said.In the end, Fox relented, albeit with one request: no violins. “No maudlin treatment of a guy with a terrible diagnosis,” Guggenheim said.“Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” (streaming on Apple TV+) interweaves scripted re-enactments, archival behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with Fox, and copious clips from Fox’s four-decade-long career, including his breakthrough roles in “Back to the Future” and on “Family Ties,” which established Fox as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.The result is a genre-defying hybrid that uses Fox’s own film and TV work to creatively illustrate key moments of his life (more on that later), and even reveal long-held secrets — for example, how Fox managed to hide his Parkinson’s for years, even while starring on the ABC comedy series “Spin City.”The film explores Fox’s career from its earliest beginnings, when the actor was 16, but playing 12, in the Canadian sitcom “Leo and Me.” In a video interview from his office in New York, Fox criticized his work in those early gigs. “I eventually figured out how to act,” he said, “but early on, I had no clue.”Davis Guggenheim, right, directing on the set of “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie.”Apple TVInitially, Guggenheim wanted to tell Fox’s story largely through re-enactments, with actors playing Fox at various stages of his life. The film’s editor, Michael Harte (“Three Identical Strangers”), was against the idea. “The problem is, you can’t show the actor’s face,” he said. “What’s brilliant about Michael is he’s so engaging, he’s got this superstar quality.” Using a double of someone as immediately recognizable as Fox, he thought, “would push the audience out of the movie.”Instead, Harte thought they could use movie and TV clips of the actor to tell Fox’s story, which set up a “battle” (Guggenheim’s word) of creative wills between the director and the editor.One day, on a whim, Harte combined a scene from “Bright Lights, Big City,” in which Fox flips through an article he’s been assigned to fact-check, with an audio clip of Fox describing the first time he read the script for “Back to the Future.” Guggenheim loved the mash-up, and encouraged Harte to find more. It wasn’t difficult. As Guggenheim noted, there were a lot of movies and episodes to pull from.In the end, the two settled on an imaginative compromise, mixing scripted shots of Fox’s double, shot from behind so his face couldn’t be seen, and shots of the real Fox, either from the actor’s films and shows, or in behind-the-scenes clips culled from 92 VHS cassettes of “Family Ties” footage.To find all those scenes, Harte spent eight weeks watching every film and TV show Fox had ever been in. “The TV shows were the Everest,” Harte said. He painstakingly flagged every scene he thought might be useful: Michael drinks coffee. Michael walks down a hallway.It helped that Harte has been a mad Fox fan from childhood. The first movie he saw in a theater as a young boy growing up in Ireland was “Back to the Future Part II” (“a game changer”); his all-time favorite film, even now, is “Back to the Future.”Guggenheim, on the other hand, wasn’t as huge a fan of Fox or his films growing up.“I don’t think Davis had seen the ‘Back to the Future’ films before this,” Harte said, “and his wife is in them.”“I was watching different things,” Guggenheim said.The filmmakers also pored through hours of “Spin City” episodes to find footage of how Fox had kept his Parkinson’s hidden from the show’s cast, crew and audience, a fact Fox wrote about in his first memoir, “Lucky Man.” In one montage, we see Fox twiddling pens, holding phones, checking his watch, rolling up his sleeves, anything to mask the shaking in his left hand. “We were taking stuff that was scripted and using it as archive,” Guggenheim said.As Harte was sifting through the thousands of clips for material, Guggenheim set about casting actors for the re-enactments, which included stand-ins for Woody Harrelson, a longtime friend and one-time co-star; Fox’s no-nonsense but ultimately supportive dad; and, of course, Fox himself. To find someone who could match Fox’s lithe physicality, the creators had actors jump up and slide across a car hood — or try to. The one actor who could do it, Danny Irizarry, got the job. “I loved the actors that played me,” Fox said.When the first rough cut was complete, the filmmakers screened it for Fox. “It was utterly terrifying,” Harte said. “Here’s someone I grew up watching and adoring, and the first time I meet him, we’re not having a few drinks in a bar, I’m presenting what I see is 90 minutes of his life. Here’s what I think is relevant, and here’s what I think isn’t relevant, so I cut that out.”Fox was pleased with the finished project. “I think they did a beautiful job,” he said.Fox with his wife, Tracy Pollan.Apple TV+Not that moments from his life story weren’t painful to watch, particularly many moments about Tracy Pollan, Fox’s wife of 35 years, whom he first met on the set of “Family Ties.” “I married this girl who had a nascent career, doing well, and then she married me and was like this single mother,” he said. “I was off doing movies and she was home with a baby, and I made jokes about it on talk shows.” Using colorful language, Fox bemoaned the horrible thing he did to her.“And she came through for me when she could have slipped out,” he continued. “She could have said, ‘Parkinson’s, that’s not for me.’ But she didn’t, she stuck around. Getting to see that in the film was such a privilege.” More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘It Ain’t Over’ Review: When Yogi Berra Saw a Strike, He Hit It

      by

      The baseball player, known for his quirky malapropisms, was perpetually underestimated. But a new documentary proves he was a phenomenal talent.The main brief of “It Ain’t Over,” a lively, engaging and moving documentary is more or less stated upfront by a friendly but mildly indignant Lindsay Berra, the granddaughter of its subject, the baseball player Yogi Berra.She recollects watching the 2015 All Star Game with her granddad. That day at the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati were four special guests deemed the greatest living players: Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays. All legends, to be sure. But Berra, in crucial respects a humble man, felt snubbed, as did Lindsay. Because the movie makes a very credible case that Berra was as great a player as any of them.The reason he didn’t make this cut, Lindsay believes, is that Yogi’s boyish, generous personality had come to overshadow his prodigious skill. As Sean Mullin’s documentary points out: As a catcher for the New York Yankees, Berra was awarded Most Valuable Player three times during that team’s remarkable dominance of the game in the 1950s. He was an All-Star for 15 consecutive seasons, and he collected 10 World Series rings.But Berra cut a different figure from baseball heroes of the day. He had an easy grin and read comic books in the locker room. Only five foot seven, he wasn’t big and strapping like Joe DiMaggio. “Everything about him was round,” Roger Angell, one of several sportswriters interviewed here, says of Berra. (Plenty of players chime in, including Derek Jeter, who reflects on Berra’s deceptively simple advice: “When you see a strike, hit it.”)And for all that, he was a phenomenal player. While he didn’t become a catcher until he joined the Yankees, his mental acuity, discipline and intense training from the coach Bill Dickey, plus his own relatively low center of gravity, made him ideal in the position. Yes, you read “mental acuity” correctly. A good catcher has to carry the whole equation of the game in his head. The movie’s account of Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, in which Berra caught the pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game — the only no-hitter in World Series history until last year, and the more recent accomplishment took three different pitchers — is a thrilling demonstration of Berra’s baseball genius.He was also a devoted family man, married for 65 years to Carmen Berra; his extravagantly affectionate and charmingly repetitive love letters to her are read aloud here. And he was a war hero — he was on a rocket boat off Normandy on D-Day in World War II, and while he was wounded, he didn’t apply for a Purple Heart because he didn’t want to worry his mother.Berra’s exemplary life is animated by the inevitable trotting out of his folksy malapropisms known as Yogi-isms. The movie’s title comes from one, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” which nobody, apparently, is sure Berra ever uttered. But the best of them, when you really turn them over, are as profound as Zen koans: “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.” Only an original like Berra could come up with that.It Ain’t OverRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie’ Review: Hiding in Plain Sight

      by

      The “Back to the Future” star time-travels through his career in this documentary, charting his experiences learning to live with Parkinson’s disease.With apologies to Dr. Emmett Brown, you don’t need a flux capacitor to build a time machine. All you need to do is make a film. “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” a new biographical documentary from Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”), zips through the “Back to the Future” actor’s career with humor and style; it gives the impression that its subject is willing to answer any question. Fox appears, head-on, in contemporary interviews with an off-camera Guggenheim. None of the charisma and charm that made him a star have diminished.But much of what distinguishes “Still” — as it’s simply titled onscreen, sans marketing hook — is how cleverly it has been edited. While this documentary draws on a standard tool kit of re-enactments and archival material, its best device is to use clips of Fox’s own movies as a counterpoint to his words, as if Fox weren’t playing fictional characters, but himself.In a way, he was. “Still” charts his experiences learning to live with Parkinson’s disease, a diagnosis he kept private for years before going public in 1998. One montage — tackily but irresistibly set to INXS’s “New Sensation” — illustrates how he managed to hide his illness in plain sight. Movies like “For Love or Money” (1993) and “Life With Mikey” (1993) reveal his practice of putting an object in his left hand to mask its trembling. What looked like nimble character work was, even then, documentary evidence.Guggenheim presents this sequence as if it were depicting an illicit drug binge, in part because Fox discusses his habit of popping Sinemet pills to keep up his level of dopamine, which is deficient in Parkinson’s patients. The segment ends by cutting to the present-day Fox, who says he needs more pills and asks Guggenheim for a couple of minutes so that the meds can kick in, to make him less “mumble-mouthed.”“Still” certainly doesn’t sugarcoat Fox’s life with Parkinson’s. An early scene shows him taking a spill across the street from Central Park. At another point, a makeup artist gives him a touch-up because a fall has broken bones in his face. But such moments are reminders of just how much any movie would necessarily leave unseen.The film establishes a brisk, appealing pace early on, as Fox, the only formal talking head (although we see him with his family), recalls how he came to acting. The title comes from one of Guggenheim’s queries: “Before Parkinson’s, what would it mean to be still?” Fox answers, “I wouldn’t know.”After moving from his native Canada to Hollywood, he says, he lived in an apartment so cramped that he washed his hair with Palmolive and his dishes with Head & Shoulders. Marty McFly emerges as an almost autobiographical creation, because the making of “Back to the Future” (1985) required Fox to engage in a bit of temporal dislocation himself. To fulfill his obligations to the sitcom “Family Ties” while making the movie, he had to shuttle between sets, with little sleep in between. In another toe-tapping montage — this time scored to Alan Silvestri’s “Back to the Future” theme — “Still” conveys the sheer whirlwind of what Fox’s life was like as drivers chauffeured him from one place to another and he could barely keep straight which role he was playing.Fox’s wife, Tracy Pollan, who appeared with him as a love interest in “Family Ties” and as a possible salvation for the cocaine-addled magazine employee he played in “Bright Lights, Big City” (1988), is held up as a rare person who could stand up to his arrogance during his peak period of stardom. “Still” becomes something of a love story, of how Pollan stayed with Fox not just through his sickness but during long gig-related absences and what he characterizes as a period of alcoholism.But the documentary is, perhaps improbably, not a downer in the least. It isn’t oriented primarily around illness, even as it shows Fox working with doctors and aides throughout. It’s a character study in which Fox reflects on his life with quick wit and self-deprecation. “If I’m here 20 years from now, I’ll either be cured or like a pickle,” he says. The real-life Marty McFly may not have a time machine. But he now has this crowd-pleaser of a movie.Still: A Michael J. Fox MovieRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Unfinished Business’ Review: Skimming the Surface of Women’s Basketball

      by

      Unfortunately, this documentary about the W.N.B.A. and the New York Liberty hits the rim and then bounces out — it’s only close to good.This documentary about professional women’s basketball keeps toggling between two subjects so big, each could easily fill an entire series: the W.N.B.A. and one of its founding teams, the New York Liberty. The title refers both to the league’s constant battle for recognition since its creation in 1996 and the Liberty’s fruitless (so far) quest for a title. But “unfinished business” also describes this scattershot film, which is directed by Alison Klayman (“The Brink,” “Jagged”).The biggest asset here, as with the W.N.B.A., is the roster of formidable women. Most of the talking heads are effortlessly charismatic, especially the guard Teresa Weatherspoon, who led the Liberty’s early years, and the 2021 rookie DiDi Richards. The first anchors reminiscences about the 1990s and the second is part of the effort to recover from an abysmal 2-20 season in 2020. (The Liberty’s governor and co-owner Clara Wu Tsai is one of the documentary’s executive producers.)Aside from nail-biters from classic games, the film is hampered by elusions and little sense of drama — Klayman could have mined the Liberty’s rivalry with the Houston Comets much more effectively, for example. And for all the talk about the obstacles women face in professional sports, including sexism and homophobia, there is no mention of the contentious appointment of Isiah Thomas, who had been sued for sexual harassment when he worked for the Knicks, as Liberty team president in 2015.It’s hard to begrudge “Unfinished Business” for emphasizing empowerment and sisterhood, but these women deserved more. They can take it.Unfinished BusinessNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters and available on Amazon Prime Video. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Yogi Berra on the Field: The Case for Baseball Greatness

      by

      A new documentary argues that the Yankee catcher was not just a malaprop-prone, beloved celebrity but also a legend of the game.In the latest edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, there’s a sports figure who towers over the competition.Among the nine sayings attributed to one Lawrence Peter Berra, the New York Yankees catcher better known as Yogi, are phrases that may seem nonsensical at first, but on further reflection offer wisdom for the ages.“You can observe a lot by watching.”“It was déjà vu all over again.”And of course, there’s “It ain’t over till it’s over,” which provides the title for a new documentary about Yogi’s life.“It Ain’t Over” aims to be a corrective to the caricature implanted in the cultural consciousness of Yogi as an amiable clown, a malaprop-prone catcher who looked as if he were put together with spare parts. But Yogi was not only a cuddly pitchman for insurance, beer and chocolate milk, an inspiration for a certain cartoon bear, and a stand-up guy beloved by teammates; he was, the film argues, one of the best baseball players who ever lived.“This guy was criminally overlooked his whole life, at every stage,” said Sean Mullin, the film’s director.The documentary, which opens Friday, is intensely personal, tapping the eldest of Yogi’s 11 grandchildren to serve as a narrator with no pretense to objectivity in fighting for her grandfather’s legacy.It was a relatively recent slight that encapsulates the film’s defining thesis and yields the opening scene. During the All-Star Game in 2015, Major League Baseball honored the four players voted by fans as the greatest living legends. Watching that night with her grandfather, Lindsay Berra remembers becoming infuriated that Yogi had not made the cut. The director Sean Mullin and Lindsay Berra, Yogi’s granddaughter, say the Yankee’s prowess has been “criminally overlooked.” Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesMullin and Lindsay Berra, in separate interviews, emphasized that they meant no offense to the four greats honored that night — Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax and Johnny Bench. They just fervently believe that Yogi should have been the fifth man walking on the field that night in Cincinnati.“I always thought from the beginning that I figuratively wanted to put Grandpa back in the picture with the documentary,” said Lindsay Berra, who is an executive producer on the film.The filmmakers marshal the statistics and an impressive array of former players and other baseball experts to back up their claim. Yogi — who died in 2015 at 90 — was a core part of 10 World Series championship teams as a player, more than anyone else. He won three Most Valuable Player awards, played in All-Star games in 15 straight years and in 1956 caught the only perfect game in World Series history. And only two major leaguers have ever hit more than 350 home runs while striking out fewer than 450 times: Joe DiMaggio and Yogi.The statistic that most impresses Lindsay Berra comes from 1950. That season, Yogi went to the plate 656 times and struck out just 12 times: “That to me will always be astonishing, because guys today strike out 12 times in a weekend.”Yogi Berra leaping into the arms of pitcher Don Larsen after the only perfect game in a World Series, in 1956.Associated PressAll this passionate lobbying is not mere special familial pleading. Jon Pessah, who wrote the 2020 biography “Yogi: A Life Behind the Mask” (and is not in the film), said the idea that Yogi’s baseball prowess has been overlooked “is 100 percent true.”Besides the hitting feats, Yogi willed himself into becoming a terrific defensive catcher and was expert at guiding his temperamental pitchers. (During Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, he did not shake off one of the 97 pitches Yogi called.)“After studying his career, you say, wow, this guy carried the Yankees in the ’50s,” a decade that bridged DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, Pessah said. “You look at what he meant on the field and at the plate, he was a force.”The unfair, and incomplete, perception of Yogi has much to do with his stubby stature and comparisons with his famous teammates. DiMaggio was slick and polished, and married to Marilyn Monroe; Mantle was the blue-eyed, golden-haired, all-American boy from Oklahoma. Yogi — well, no demeaning or belittling description seemed off-limits to the writers who covered him. Early in his career, a Life magazine article referred to him as “knock-kneed” and “barrel-shaped,” and likened his running style to that of “a fat girl in a tight skirt.” That was all in one sentence.His first manager called him an ape. In newspaper and magazine articles, Yogi’s looks were compared to those of a gargoyle, a gorilla and an orangutan.“Can you imagine reporters writing today that someone looked like a gorilla and was too ugly to be a Yankee?” Lindsay Berra said. But Yogi ultimately didn’t mind playing the butt of jokes, sloughing them off as just another test of character. “I think he knew inside who he was,” Mullin said. “There was a real confidence at a very base level.”Growing up the fourth child of Italian immigrants in St. Louis, Yogi quit school after eighth grade to help support his family, although he pretty much just wanted to play baseball. Constantly underestimated, he ultimately signed with the Yankees. He was drafted during World War II and was in a rocket boat at Omaha Beach on D-Day.Back from the war, he played on a Yankees farm team for a year before being called up late in the 1946 season. He was in the majors for good.As seen in the documentary, from left: Larry, Tim and Dale Berra, sons of the Yankee great. Dale said it was stern words from his father that helped him kick a cocaine addiction.Daniel Vecchione/Sony Picture ClassicsWhile proving naysayers wrong with his hitting prowess and improving defense, he also displayed deep-seated integrity. At a time when racism still thrived in Major League Baseball despite Jackie Robinson integrating the game in 1947, Yogi showed respect to Robinson and other Black players; he later became very good friends with Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League.But a charmed life — he also had a storybook marriage to his hometown sweetheart, Carmen — does not make for the most dramatic of films.To add some texture to his portrait, Mullin examined both Yogi’s larger cultural significance and his personal pain.Yogi became one of the first celebrity endorsers, hawking the chocolate milk drink Yoo Hoo, Doodle fish oil, Camel cigarettes and, really leaning into the persona later in life, Miller Lite and Aflac insurance. “He never resented the way he was viewed but he was savvy enough to know it made business sense,” Pessah said.Yogi’s son Dale followed him into the majors, but a promising career was derailed by a cocaine addiction. Rehab didn’t help, and neither did encouragement from his family. It took an ultimatum, delivered by Yogi, at an intervention in 1992.“You’re not going to be my son anymore unless you make a decision to not do drugs again,” Dale Berra said his father told him. He has been clean since.The other deep wound in Yogi’s life came in 1985, inflicted by the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Serving as manager for Steinbrenner was a decidedly unsafe proposition, and 16 games into Yogi’s second season, he was fired. What angered Yogi most wasn’t the firing, it was that Steinbrenner didn’t have the guts (or decency) to deliver the blow himself. Yogi, always a man of his word, vowed never to return to Yankee Stadium until Steinbrenner apologized.It took nearly 14 years before a rapprochement was brokered, leading to Yogi Berra Day at the stadium in July 1999. Forty-three years after the World Series perfect game, Don Larsen was reunited with his former battery mate to throw out the ceremonial first pitch.Yogi didn’t have a glove with him, so he borrowed one from Joe Girardi, a Yankees catcher at the time. Those there that day still marvel at what they then witnessed. David Cone proceeded to pitch another perfect game for the Yankees. A life well lived had its magical coda. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons’ Review

      by

      A new documentary explores the artist’s sly conceptual works, and what it means when white people try to own something Black.The title of this new documentary about the artist David Hammons is a mouthful: “The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons.” It’s playing at Film Forum, and I don’t envy whoever has to make it fit the marquee. But they should figure that out because the title feels crucial to the aim of this movie, a sly, toasty, piquant consideration of Hammons’s conceptual art, the way it mocks and eludes easy ownership. Which is to say: the way his art is aware of — the way it’s often about — the stakes for Black people navigating the straits of the market.The movie has all the trappings of a serious nonfiction assessment: scholars, critics, curators and luminous comrades speaking to the humor, funk, atmosphere and texture of the Hammons experience, the acid and ingenuity, the bang of it. The way only he, seemingly, could tile whole telephone poles with bottle caps and affix a backboard and a basketball hoop atop each one, and then plant them, as he did in 1986 with “Higher Goals,” outside a courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, where they took on a tribal, sky-scraping, palm-tree majesty that winked at the long odds of reaching the N.B.A.’s summit. That piece is like a lot of Hammons’s work: tragicomic. A small forward would need to pole-vault up to those baskets.Maybe it would’ve been enough for this film, which Harold Crooks directed with the critic and journalist Judd Tully, to get into Hammons’s gift for withering, radiant transfiguration of everyday materials (Black hair, chicken bones, liquor bottles, those caps, fur coats, jelly beans, a hoodie’s hood), of the public’s opinion of art, of status. (In 2017, at the Museum of Modern Art, he hung a drawing by one of his mentors, the crucial, visionary Charles White, across from one Leonardo da Vinci made, which the British royal family owns.) It would have been enough to behold the assortment of thrilling footage of Hammons at work, in conversation and, in one contentious encounter, under interrogation by a group of students. And, for a long, satisfying stretch, that happens here. This is a substantial, patiently made, entertaining portrait, with a percussive, rhythmic jazz score by Ramachandra Borcar and some emphatic spoken word courtesy of Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets.But eventually, the rich interpretive consideration of Hammons’s essence, philosophy and process starts to vanish. Most of the critics, scholars and fellow artists go bye-bye, which means so long to the bulk of its Black participants. In come the gallerists, collectors and dealers. The money. This is where “The Melt Goes On Forever” seems like it wants to play Hammons’s game. It’s up to something that has to do with whether a Hammons can ever be owned and what it means for work whose foremost concerns are a kind of in-the-wild presentation to be for sale. Suddenly, it feels like Crooks and Tully have stopped making a straight-ahead documentary and started making … a piece.This was probably the case from the film’s outset. In 1983, Hammons created several dozen snowballs (out of real snow, big as a softball, small as a melon ball). He put them on a rug and sold them in the cold, near the corner of Cooper Square and Astor Place. Bliz-aard balls, he called them. The movie opens with a moony story from a woman who remembers, as a girl, buying one of the snowballs for about a dollar. (Hammons — in a roomy overcoat, kempt beard, ascot and winter fedora — seemed homeless to her.) She turns out to be a gallerist, and her story is a prelude of the movie’s big market-bound dismount, at the end of which is a separate childhood memory, from the dealer Adam Sheffer, of encountering Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale and the impact it had on him. (He remembers being afraid at the sight of Hammons out there that day.)Sheffer tells the filmmakers that, as an adult, he wound up working with and befriending Hammons’s daughter Carmen. To her bewilderment, Sheffer wanted to purchase a snowball for $1 million (a commission, presumably; the movie doesn’t ask him to clarify) and tried, tried, tried to line up an insurer first — but alas. Thwarted, he whips up an email to Carmen (“if you come across any other interesting Hammons …”) that her mischievous father prints, frames and displays alongside a permanent snowball for a rare retrospective at the Mnuchin Gallery on the Upper East Side, seven years ago. Sheffer says he tried to buy that, too.Someone else — someone who collects Hammons’s work, we’re told — makes a substantial offer on the same piece. And Hammons decides to — well, this movie really is worth seeing; and if you’re unfamiliar with his witty solution, you deserve to hear it from the film itself.But tales like these are where the movie gets that title. It comes from the artist Halsey Rodman, who, in an interview, is clever about the inherent conundrum of Hammons’s snowy ephemera. The work is incomplete, he surmises, because, in memory as much as in one’s hands, the melt goes on forever. A proverb that does the work of parody.An animated scene from the documentary shows Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale from 1983, when he offered snowballs for purchase near the corner of Cooper Square and Astor Place.Tynesha Foreman/Greenwich EntertainmentThis feels especially true once the movie ends in that blitz of auctions, acquisitions and shows: the sale of Hammons’s “African American Flag”; the Mnuchin event; the eviction of the late writer and assembler of interesting people Steve Cannon from his gathering spot and home. It’s a home one otherwise supportive gallerist calls “pretty cruddy,” a home where, on one of its walls, Hammons painted what he called “Flight Fantasy.”The film’s emphasis on possession and dispossession (Cannon’s story needs its own proper telling) becomes so strong that it kind of topples over the movie’s sense of scholarship. And without the intellectual rigor of a Bridget R. Cooks or Kellie Jones or Betye Saar or Suzanne Jackson or Robert Farris Thompson or Henry Taylor to continue guiding us (and the filmmakers, honestly), things get murky.With each alacritous tale of somebody trying to tame or take a Hammons, a kind of pungency set in. And all I wanted was to be in a clearer, cleaner, happier movie about white people trying to own something Black. I wanted to be in the movie about the time Nike wooed Michael Jordan. I wanted to be in “Air.” Both that and “The Melt Goes On Forever” are honest, in their ways, about the stakes of ownership and the racial eternity of this dilemma. I just think the people who made the Jordan movie are better storytellers. I left that movie high. It knows capitalism is an emotion. It knows the thorny racial transaction that makes this country run. And I know Nike doesn’t own Jordan or even his skill, just a symbol of them, his silhouette. Indeed, he’s never depicted in “Air” as more than a back of the head. And Hammons, here, never sits for an interview. (He’ll be 80 this year.)This movie’s homestretch should make me just as happy. Hammons seems like the victor in his attempt to satirize not so much the transaction of art for dollars but the covetous, oblivious, entitled nature of certain transactors. In “Air,” Jordan knows his worth — well, his mother does. When the white folks at Nike meet her demands, corporate justice is served. But that’s a fantasy that “The Melt Goes On Forever” scrubs raw.Maybe Crooks and Tully are actually better than I think at doing what Hammons’s art does and letting the gallerists’ and dealers’ values speak for themselves. Their movie’s not telling me what to feel at all. I’m just feeling it, feeling baffled, dismayed, leveled with, winked at. But I’d also like to know if these gallery folks know how anti-Hammons their aims are, how they’re losing at his game while excelling at their own. (What does Carmen Hammons think?!) The movie’s right. It’s a grand folly. The melt really does go on forever. But do these people get it? That’s not how the game works, of course. Obviously, Hammons knows that. And so, I suppose, do the people who keep trying to beat him at it.The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David HammonsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More