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      ‘Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV’ Review: Art Onscreen

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      A new documentary follows the ceaseless innovations of a man who made art out of television sets and found inspiration in disruption.Nam June Paik died in 2006, one year before the first iPhone was released. Now that hand-held glowing screens have become as dominant as television once was, one misses that influential artist’s subversive spirit. But it’s on ample display in Amanda Kim’s new film “Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV,” which shows how Paik forged novel avenues of expression and communication in the televisual era.Born into privilege in Korea in 1932, during the Japanese occupation, Paik studied unhappily to be a composer in Germany until he was electrified by a bold and divisive John Cage performance in 1957. Over the next 10 years, he was off like a rocket: staging outré musical performances with the cellist Charlotte Moorman, joining the raucous Fluxus avant-garde collective in New York, building a robot and pioneering the use of TV sets in gallery art.Paik found many ways to mess with the banal monitors, which were stacked, worn, and, famously, plunked opposite a contemplating Buddha. But an art documentary like Kim’s also questions first principles generally, to underline the beauty and power built into objects around us. Beyond eliciting truly lovely halos of eerie color from video, Paik sought to democratize technology through innovations in video production and live global broadcast. (Paik’s aphoristic writings are read in voice-over by the actor Steven Yeun.)Despite the interviews with graying contemporaries that bubble up in the stew of imagery, the film’s sense of art history is somewhat blinkered by lack of context. But Paik is undeniable, creating despite lean times (and slowing after a 1996 stroke). His dragging of a violin on a string — shown in a recurring performance — evokes an almost mystical dedication to disruption.Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TVNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Ithaka’ Review: In Julian Assange They Trust

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      A frustrating new advocacy documentary about the WikiLeaks founder, with appearances by his father and wife, loses its footing on weak assertions and reporting.Julian Assange’s legal travails began in 2010, when Swedish prosecutors ordered his detention on suspicion of rape and sexual coercion. To avoid being extradited to Stockholm, Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, jumped bail and took refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London; today he’s in London’s Belmarsh Prison, fighting extradition to the United States on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act. Yet “Ithaka,” a frustrating advocacy documentary directed by Ben Lawrence and produced by Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton, argues that Assange’s most crucial trial is in the court of public opinion.The documentary insists that the computer hacker, who’s accused of publishing classified government documents, is the victim of a smear campaign. What exactly those smears are, the film declines to specify or debunk. On your own, you may recall that viral stories about Assange have ranged from criminal to embarrassing — like when Ecuador said its increasingly unwelcome guest needed to tidy up after his cat.Free speech advocates looking to hear a strong argument defending Assange against those espionage charges will not find one here — only vague calls to protect the First Amendment. We’re told the case is unjust but never told why, or even what exactly the case is. Instead, the documentary repeats three monotonous points: Journalists lie. Regardless, Assange is a journalist who deserves protection. Also, his family misses him a heck of a lot.The film’s weak assertions hurt more than they help. Even those inclined to support Assange — like those who agree that releasing footage of a U.S. helicopter attack on unarmed Iraqi civilians is a moral good — will probably come to the documentary knowing enough to be rankled when it seeks to combat news media deception with evasions, half-truths and speculative accusations (the very weapons with which it suggests that Assange has been attacked).A sampler platter of its flimsy reporting: While Stella Moris, Assange’s wife and a member of his legal team, maintains that her husband was never charged with sexual assault, both she and Lawrence neglect to add that the statute of limitations on such a charge had expired during his seven-year embassy stay. Moris also shows the faces of several men in a parked van and declares them government assassins. Lawrence accepts this with no follow-up questions. By the time “Ithaka” makes the claim that WikiLeaks published only redacted versions of sensitive documents — yes, but only after earlier unredacted postings were met with significant outrage — the continual thumbing of its nose to the facts may make you want to issue a few unredacted words of your own.The doc is on stronger footing when it tracks the efforts of Moris and her father-in-law, John Shipton, to get their loved one home. With Assange unavailable, Shipton takes center stage as his onscreen avatar. (Father and son, Moris tells us, are “very similar.”) Bashful and soft-spoken when the film begins, Shipton strikes later as stubborn, secretive and messianic, likening his son to everything from Prometheus to a pod of hunted whales. Shipton is the kind of complex and contradictory figure who would have been fascinating under the lens of a filmmaker actually interested in unbiased journalism — one willing to press him on why he’s re-emerged in his son’s life after several decades of absence. Here, however, Shipton waves off any personal questions about their relationship as “an invasion of privacy.”IthakaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?’ Review: What Goes Up

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      The rise and fall of a classic-rock band is chronicled (shakily) in this documentary.What happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears, judging by this spurious, somewhat cranky documentary by John Scheinfeld, is that the band faced the unforeseen consequences of its own bad decisions.In 1970, Blood, Sweat & Tears, the enormously popular nine-piece jazz-rock group, undertook a tour of Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland under the aegis of the U.S. State Department, inadvertently outraging the progressive, college-age fans whose enthusiasm had made the group such a stratospheric counterculture success. To make matters worse, upon their return, the members of the band — who had headlined Woodstock and spoken out against the war in Vietnam — now decried communism as “scary,” professing gratitude for freedoms they’d previously taken for granted — quite the about-face. As David Felton wrote acidly in a 1970 issue of Rolling Stone, it sure sounded like “the State Department got its money’s worth.”The backlash was swift and, the documentary argues, effectively career-ending. “I felt canceled,” Steve Katz, the band’s guitarist, confesses dolefully, and indeed the movie is a pharisaical effort to paint the musicians as victims of what we now call cancel culture: misunderstood, unreasonably maligned and never afforded a chance to explain themselves, until now. But like many laments of the self-identified canceled, what’s being complained about is really just a form of accountability — of having to stand by and answer for actions they evidently didn’t think much about. (“We were just musicians, man,” is the lead singer David Clayton-Thomas’s lame justification.) The film frames them as having been somehow embroiled in a political situation, rather than actively, knowingly engaged in it — and its attempts to remain apolitical and focus on the music are as naïve as the band’s.What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Kubrick by Kubrick’ Review: Stanley Plays Himself

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      A primer on the filmmaker’s career and interests won’t offer much that will surprise even mild obsessives, but it does pierce some of the mystique.The director Stanley Kubrick gave so few interviews that hearing his voice is always a little jarring. It’s less deep than you might imagine from late-career photographs, which make him look like a woolly elder statesman of the cinema, or from seeing his movies, which raise dark questions about human nature. Kubrick’s accent contains traces of his Bronx upbringing, even though he lived in Britain for more than 30 years. And his conversational manner is much more casual, more affable, than his reputation as a hermetic perfectionist would suggest.What that voice has to say, and how it says it, is the main point of interest in “Kubrick by Kubrick,” a primer on the filmmaker’s career and interests built around interviews that he gave over many years to the critic Michel Ciment, who is credited as an artistic adviser on the documentary. The director, Gregory Monro, interweaves excerpts from the men’s conversations with scenes from Kubrick’s movies and archival commentary from actors and critics.Monro also riffs on Kubrick’s own imagery, making it appear that an old clip of Ciment on a talk show, for instance, is showing on the plugless TV from “The Shining,” and that the TV set is sitting in the bedroom from the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Most of Kubrick’s 13 features have been analyzed exhaustively already, and “Kubrick by Kubrick” doesn’t offer much that will surprise even mild obsessives. Still, it is interesting to hear Kubrick express ideas that run counter to conventional wisdom. He doesn’t sound all that terrified of a computer like HAL 9000. “I can’t think of any reason why it’s a frightening prospect, because intelligence seems to me to be something which is good,” Kubrick is heard saying in the documentary. “And so I can’t see how your ultra-intelligent machine is going to be any worse than a man.”Other choice tidbits include Kubrick’s comparison of the work of a film director to the precision Napoleon applied to military strategy. (Kubrick had famously labored to make a Napoleon biopic, and elements of his preparation found their way into “Barry Lyndon.”) According to Kubrick, the great cinematographer Russell Metty, with whom he worked on “Spartacus,” could not understand why Kubrick, who started as a photographer for Look magazine, spent so much time composing shots, as opposed to leaving that task to the cameraman.Some of Kubrick’s insights echo differently today, as when he says, apropos of “Full Metal Jacket” and the Vietnam War, “I don’t think you’re going to get Americans to fight a war again unless they think it really means something to them.” (The director died in 1999.) Leonard Rosenman, who conducted the music on “Barry Lyndon,” remembers how demanding Kubrick could be, and wanting “to throw him through the window” for making him do 105 takes at one point even though “take two was perfect.”While no great contribution to the vast library of Kubrickiana, this documentary pierces some of the mystique behind the man. For fans, that will be enough.Kubrick by KubrickNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      In ‘Songs of Surrender’, U2 Revisits Its Past

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      With “Songs of Surrender,” an album of 40 reimagined songs, and “A Sort of Homecoming,” a documentary on Disney+, the Irish band pauses to reflect.For decades, U2 refused to rest on its catalog. A rarity among bands for having kept the same lineup since its formation in 1976 — Bono on lead vocals, the Edge on guitar and keyboards, Adam Clayton on bass and Larry Mullen Jr. on drums — U2 has headlined arenas since the early 1980s. It determinedly brought new songs to huge audiences as recently as 2018, when it mounted its Experience + Innocence Tour.The band did allow itself a 30th anniversary stadium tour to reprise its biggest release, the 1987 album “The Joshua Tree,” in 2017 and 2019. And now, in the pandemic era, U2 is looking back even further.Its new album, “Songs of Surrender,” remakes 40 U2 songs with largely acoustic arrangements. U2 has also booked a Las Vegas residency for the fall, when it will revisit its 1991 masterpiece, “Achtung Baby,” in a newly built arena, the MSG Sphere. In a startling change, the band will have a substitute drummer, Bram van den Berg, rather than Mullen, who has been dealing with injuries to his elbows, knees and neck.Bono, 62, published his memoir, “Surrender,” in fall of 2022, using 40 U2 songs as chapter headings. On St. Patrick’s Day, the (Irish) band is releasing a Disney+ documentary, “Bono & the Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, With Dave Letterman,” alongside “Songs of Surrender.”U2’s career has been one of triumphs, misfires and moving on. In the 1980s, the group was earnest and expansive, creating a chiming, marching, larger-than-life rock sound that countless bands would emulate. In the 1990s, leery of its own pretensions, U2 remade itself with electronic beats and artifice until it came to a dead end with its 1997 album, “Pop.” In the 2000s, it circled back to rock beats and sincerity, but its music was pervasively infused with the latest technology.From the beginning, U2 has worked on the largest scale: sometimes to magnificent effect, like its 2002 Super Bowl halftime show that memorialized Sept. 11, and sometimes badly backfiring, like the giveaway of its 2014 album, “Songs of Innocence,” that forced the album into iTunes libraries worldwide, often unwanted. “Songs of Surrender” is an act of renunciation, drastically scaling down songs that once strove to shake entire stadiums.Remake albums are always fraught. They offer second thoughts rather than discoveries, revisions rather than inspirations. They also remind listeners, and no doubt performers, of time slipping away.In recent years, extraordinary songwriters like Paul Simon and Natalie Merchant have made albums that revisit their old songs with decidedly different arrangements; they’re thoughtful and musicianly, but wan. Even Taylor Swift’s ongoing series of “Taylor’s Version” remakes — reclaiming her old albums by making every effort to replicate them note for note — can’t quite match her more youthful voice or the precise overtones of every mix.Among U2’s three retrospective projects, Bono’s book is by far the most vivid. “Surrender” leapfrogs through Bono’s and U2’s improbable story in vignettes that zigzag between poetic and prosaic, devout and skeptical, privileged and conscientious, mystical and political.The book’s messages about faith, friendship and family are reprised — sometimes in near-literal quotes — in “A Sort of Homecoming.” It’s an awkward project that skims through U2’s career while David Letterman serves as both modest interlocutor and celebrity star-tripper.The documentary mixes biographical interviews and bits of Ireland’s history, and it stages two performances: a concert by Bono and the Edge with a choir and strings at Dublin’s Ambassador Theater, and a singalong at a pub that’s not exactly impromptu. It just happens to include U2-influenced Irish musicians like Glen Hansard, Imelda May and Dermot Kennedy. “A Sort of Homecoming” also digresses, pointlessly, with attempts at comedy recalling Letterman’s “Late Show” shticks. A new Bono-Edge song, dedicated to Letterman, isn’t exactly prime U2.“Songs of Surrender” is the weightier project. Like all of U2’s albums, it’s anything but casual; the songs have been minutely reconsidered. Some get different lyrics: changing present tense to past tense in “Red Hill Mining Town,” clarifying that “Bad” is about drug addiction, swapping in new verses in “Beautiful Day” and “Get Out of Your Own Way,” rewriting “Walk On” to allude to the war in Ukraine.The album sets out to recast U2’s arena anthems as private conversations. Bono croons as if he’s singing quietly into your ear, and most of the arrangements rely on acoustic guitar or piano — like MTV’s old “Unplugged” shows, but by no means devoid of studio enhancements.“Unplugged” was MTV’s tribute to the recording-business cliché that a great song only needs chords and a voice to reveal its quality, as if everything else is embellishment. Yes and no. Melody, harmony and lyrics say a lot, but production can be transformative. Songs engrave themselves in fans’ memories — and lives — not just for their words and music, but for their sheer sound. We can recognize a favorite oldie from an opening guitar tone or a drumbeat. And the more we’ve taken a song to heart, the more its sonic details resonate.U2 got together in the era when punk insisted that anyone, trained or not, could make vital music. But even during that movement, musicians and producers understood how much texture matters. Recording in the analog era was a costly, intentional effort, and low-budget, lo-fi recordings could still create high intensity.One of U2’s enduring strengths has been the way its songs ennoble yearning and turbulence. Bono sings about self-questioning and contradictions with a voice that might scratch or falter but pushes ahead, unabashedly working itself up to shouts and howls. And the band’s martial drums, chiming guitars and inexorable crescendos create arena-size superstructures filled with rhythmic — and emotional — crosscurrents.The remakes on “Songs of Surrender” often strip away too much. In the original 1983 “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” a song about a terrorist bombing during Ireland’s “troubles,” the track evokes sirens and gunshots while Bono sounds both desperate and furious, right in the middle of the strife. The remake, with a lone acoustic guitar, recasts the song as something between a lullaby and lament, crooned as if it’s a learned memory.“Out of Control,” which in 1979 had jabbing, buttonholing electric guitar and bass lines, has become a cozy, cheerfully strummed self-affirmation, very much in control. And the surging, cathartic peaks of songs like “With or Without You,” “Vertigo,” and “Pride (in the Name of Love)” are far too muted in the remakes.“Songs of Surrender” does have a few clever second thoughts about U2’s catalog. A brass band lends historical gravity to “Red Hill Mining Town,” while “Two Hearts Beat as One” — with lyrics that insist, “Can’t stop to dance” — gets a wry disco makeover. The album’s subdued arrangements and upfront vocals offer a chance to focus on lyrics that were obscured in the onrush of U2’s original versions.But for most of “Songs of Surrender,” less is simply less. What comes across throughout the 40 songs is not intimacy, but distance: the inescapable fact that these songs are being rethought and revived years later, not created anew. Wild original impulses have been replaced by latter-day self-consciousness. And U2, like most artists, is better off looking ahead than looking back. More

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      ‘The Spirit of ’45’ Review: Here Comes Nationalization

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      A documentary from Ken Loach sees the end of World War II as a brief moment of possibility for socialism in Britain.“The Spirit of ’45” is, atypically, a documentary from Ken Loach, whose tireless chronicles of Britain’s working class (“Kes,” “Sorry We Missed You”) have generally been dramas.It is also not new. The documentary had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2013 and opened in Britain shortly after that. Released for the first time in the United States, it is relevant in a perennial sense but somewhat dated. The people interviewed in this movie could not know that their despised Tories would still hold power today. (The 2016 Brexit vote — indeed, any mention of the European Union — is also conspicuous by its absence.)The film’s central idea is that Britain had reached a rare moment of possibility after World War II and the general election of 1945, when the Labour leader Clement Attlee became prime minister with an avowedly socialist agenda. Loach charts the nationalization of Britain’s health service, transportation sectors and coal mines. Britons who remember the changes share stories of how those shifts and new plans for quality housing almost universally improved their lives (although there is mention of some missed opportunities with the mines). “The Spirit of ’45” then flashes forward to show how the conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her successors rolled those policies back.As in much of his recent fiction work (including the Palme d’Or-winning “I, Daniel Blake”), Loach largely ignores counterarguments. Even viewers sympathetic to his politics may roll their eyes at how infrequently the film acknowledges trade-offs and price tags, except when the costs relate to the inefficiencies of privatization. There is a powerful historical case to be made here, but it requires engaging with nuance, not merely expressing conviction.The Spirit of ’45Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Money Shot: The Pornhub Story’ Review: A Clear Eye on an Industry

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      This documentary looks at the offenses of the pornography industry through interviews with performers and activists.In December 2020, the journalist Nicholas Kristof wrote a column in the Opinion section of The New York Times detailing the stories of young survivors whose sexual abuse was posted on the website Pornhub. The piece, which urged the site to make changes, led to Pornhub’s banning of uploads from unverified users, and to Visa and Mastercard’s prohibiting the use of their cards on the website. Kristof’s article plays a complicated role in “Money Shot: The Pornhub Story,” a documentary on Netflix that shrewdly puts center stage some of the professional porn performers seeking autonomy in the industry.Through interviews with workers and their advocates (and with Kristof), the documentary filmmaker Suzanne Hillinger (who also produced and directed episodes of The Times’s “The Weekly,” a television show on FX, in 2019) persuasively argues that campaigns including Traffickinghub are aimed at curtailing abuse and helping victims but end up hurting another marginalized group: the sex workers and porn actors who thrive on these platforms, which enable them to work independently. Hillinger also spotlights the fact that some of the loudest anti-Pornhub voices have ties to the extreme political right‌.Recent years have seen a slew of streaming documentaries about tech-world horrors, from dating hoaxes to crypto schemes. “Money Shot” includes some clichés from this subgenre — if I see one more tweet pop up onscreen with the chirp sound effect, I will fly away myself — but it mostly pushes against tropes. Hillinger steers clear of re-enactments, and instead favors relaxed scenes with porn professionals. Here is a documentary that casts a clear eye on the offenses of an industry driven by capitalism while never losing sight of the workers whose safety and success should be that profession’s number one priority.Money Shot: The Pornhub StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Rewind & Play’ Review: Thelonious Monk Dazzles Even When an Interview Falls Flat

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      Alain Gomis’s documentary uses rushes from a 1969 French TV interview to make a smart indictment of music industry bias and offer viewers a subtle tribute to Monk.The documentary “Rewind & Play” makes damning use of a 1969 interview Thelonious Monk did with Henri Renaud for the French television program “Jazz Portrait.” Monk’s European tour was set to end in Paris and the show was recorded shortly before. The interview took place nearly six years after Monk was featured on a Time magazine cover under the banner “Jazz: Bebop and Beyond” and one year before he stopped making music.Directed by the French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis, this 65-minute, freighted documentary creates a portrait — or two — out of rushes and outtakes Gomis received from the National Audiovisual Institute while researching a fiction film about Monk. One is a study of an interview turned wincing for reasons of glib arrogance — racial but perhaps personal, too. The other is a more gleaming portrait of Monk at work.More film essay with critical chaser than straight-up documentary, the film suggests that Renaud — a jazz pianist turned record producer and later music executive — aimed for something revelatory, but also something that shined a spotlight on his own insightfulness. But Renaud is continuously dissatisfied with Monk’s answers to his questions: about not being understood by French audiences in the 1950s, about his wife Nellie’s role in his life, about being avant-garde. Renaud asks for take after take, unable to improvise when seemingly thwarted by Monk’s responses. (In the actual 30-minute show, Monk speaks eight words, according to Gomis.)The film is not merely playback or payback on behalf of one Black artist by another. “Rewind & Play” dazzles because it is and will remain a wonder to witness Monk seemingly discovering his compositions again and again, his fingers conjuring, his right foot etching rhythms.Rewind & PlayNot rated. In English and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. In theaters. More