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      Ken Bode, Erudite ‘Washington Week’ Host on PBS, Dies at 83

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      Beginning in 1994, he brought to the moderator’s role credentials as a political activist, an academic and a national correspondent for NBC News.Ken Bode, a bearded, bearish former political operative and television correspondent who, armed with a Ph.D. in politics, moderated the popular PBS program “Washington Week in Review” in the 1990s, died on Thursday in Charlotte, N.C. He was 83.His death, in a care center, was confirmed by his daughters, Matilda and Josie Bode, who said the cause had not been identified.Beginning in 1994, Mr. Bode (pronounced BO-dee) coupled congeniality and knowledgeability in steering a Friday night discussion among a rotating panel of reporters about the issues of the day coming out of Washington. His role, as he saw it, was to “bring in people who are really covering the news to empty their notebooks and provide perspective, not to argue with each other,” he told The Washington Post in 1999.As host of the program, now called “Washington Week,” he succeeded Paul Duke, who had helmed that roundtable of polite talking heads for two decades, and preceded Gwen Ifill, a former NBC News correspondent who died in 2016 at 61. The program, which debuted in 1967, is billed as TV’s longest-running prime time news and public affairs program. The current host is Yamiche Alcindor.The program’s loyal and generally older viewers were so brass-bound in the 1990s that when Mr. Bode took over, even his beard proved controversial. He proceeded to introduce videotaped segments and remote interviews with correspondents and bring more diversity to his panel of reporters.He also took more liberties with language than his predecessor.Mr. Bode moderating an episode of “Washington Week in Review.” He hosted the program from 1994 to 1999 while teaching politics at DePauw University in Indiana. PBSEnding an interview with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post about President Bill Clinton’s economic policies, Mr. Bode quoted a British newspaper’s snarky prediction that the president’s impending visit to Oxford, England, would present people with an opportunity to “focus on one of the president’s less well-publicized organs: his brain.” He described a vacancy on the Supreme Court as constituting “one-ninth of one-third of the government.”Still, Dalton Delan, then the newly-minted executive vice president of WETA in Washington, which continues to produce the program, wanted to invigorate the format. He proposed including college journalists, surprise guests and people-on-the-street interviews and replacing Mr. Bode with Ms. Ifill (she said she initially turned down the offer) — changes that prompted Mr. Bode to jump, or to be not so gently pushed, from the host’s chair in 1999.Kenneth Adlam Bode was born on March 30, 1939, in Chicago and raised in Hawarden, Iowa. His father, George, owned a dairy farm and then a dry cleaning business. His mother, June (Adlam) Bode, kept the books.Mr. Bode in his office in 1972, when he was involved in Democratic politics.George Tames/The New York TimesThe first member of his family to attend college, Mr. Bode majored in philosophy and government at the University of South Dakota, graduating in 1961. He went on to earn a doctorate in political science at the University of North Carolina, where he was active in the civil rights movement.He taught briefly at Michigan State University and the State University of New York at Binghamton, and then gravitated toward liberal politics.In 1968, Mr. Bode worked in the presidential campaigns of Senators Eugene McCarthy and George S. McGovern. He became research director for a Democratic Party commission, led by Mr. McGovern and Representative Donald M. Fraser of Minnesota, that advocated for reforms in the selection process for delegates to the 1972 Democratic National Convention. He later headed a liberal-leaning organization called the Center for Political Reform.His marriage to Linda Yarrow ended in divorce. In 1975, he married Margo Hauff, a high school social studies teacher who wrote and designed educational materials for learning-disabled children. He is survived by her, in addition to their daughters, as well as by a brother and two grandsons.After working in politics, Mr. Bode began writing for The New Republic in the early 1970s and became its politics editor. He moved to NBC News in 1979, encouraged by the network’s newsman Tom Brokaw, a friend from college, and eventually became the network’s national political correspondent. In that role he hosted “Bode’s Journal,” a weekly segment of the “Today” show, on which he explored, among other issues, voting rights violations, racial discrimination and patronage abuses, as his longtime producer Jim Connor recalled in an interview.Mr. Bode left the network a decade later to teach at DePauw University in Indiana, where he founded the Center for Contemporary Media. While at DePauw, from 1989 to 1998, he commuted to Washington to host “Washington Week in Review” and wrote an Emmy-winning CNN documentary, “The Public Mind of George Bush” (1992).Beginning in 1998, he was dean of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism for three years and remained a professor there until 2004.Mr. Bode said he retired from broadcast journalism for family reasons. “I was raising my kids from 100 airports a year,” he said. As he told The New York Times in 1999, “I knew then that my problem was, I’ve got the best job, but I’ve also got one chance to be a father, and I’m losing it.” More

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      ‘A Sexplanation’ Review: Sex Education Fit for a Classroom

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      The director Alex Liu explores the politics and culture of sex ed in the United States while confronting his own shame around sexuality.The debate around American sex education doesn’t get much more personal than “A Sexplanation,” an insightful documentary in which the director Alex Liu explores the politics and culture of sex ed in the United States while confronting his own shame around sexuality that stems back to his adolescence.As far as its approach to the topic, “A Sexplanation,” available on demand, is hardly reinventing the wheel. Liu, who identifies as gay and previously wrote for the PBS educational program “Nova ScienceNow,” is not shy in expressing his preference for comprehensive sex education over abstinence-only curriculums. He travels around the country and to Canada to interview a variety of sexual health experts, researchers and educators who dish out common talking points on the topic of reform: Shame-based programming doesn’t work; lessons should incorporate discussion about consent and cover L.G.B.T.Q.-inclusive experiences; conversations about pornography can help teenagers decipher between reality and fantasy and gain more realistic ideas about sex and relationships. On the other side of the debate, Liu interviews Todd Weiler, a Republican member of the Utah State Senate who has lobbied to mandate pornography filters on the internet, and speaks with several anti-abortion campaigners outside the San Francisco Women’s March.Liu’s cheekiness occasionally leads him to some “Supersize Me”-esque stunts, like when he masturbates in an M.R.I. machine as part of a comprehensive scientific study on how orgasms affect brain activity. But he’s equally willing to bare his whole emotional self, like when he speaks to a particularly open-minded Catholic priest on the nature of sex and intimacy or has an awkward yet sweet heart-to-heart with his own parents about sex. Liu lends a frankness and sensitivity to the topic that would make “A Sexplanation” suitable to be shown in a classroom, which was perhaps his intention all along.A SexplanationNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Being BeBe’ Review: Reaching for Drag Superstardom

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      Observing its subject with a clear eye, this profile of Marshall Ngwa, who performs as BeBe Zahara Benet, is a breath of fresh air.In the perspicacious documentary “Being BeBe,” the director Emily Branham seems to have taken a page from Janet Malcolm. Within her profile of Marshall Ngwa, who performs drag as BeBe Zahara Benet, Branham tucks lucid insights about the codes, ethics and art of cinematic biography.Branham, who gathered footage of Ngwa over 15 years and became his dear friend, frames the movie as a reminiscence. It opens in 2020 in Ngwa’s Minneapolis home, where he watches clips that Branham captured years earlier and reacts to the scenes in real time. These segments intermix with an overview of Ngwa’s life and his campaign for drag superstardom. Special attention is paid to his affection for his family, and the grace with which he navigated their shifting feelings about his embodying BeBe.
      In a sea of glossy celebrity bio-docs, “Being BeBe” is a breath of fresh air. It observes its subject with a clear eye, and does not shy away from positioning Ngwa’s triumphs, such as his exciting win on the first season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” within a context of artistic, financial and social struggle.Perhaps most powerful of all is Branham’s intermittent presence in the film. Sometimes she queries Ngwa from behind her grainy video camera, or he addresses her. In other moments, she interrupts her representation of Ngwa to stage a broader survey of homophobia in Cameroon. With her feature debut, Branham exposes her hand as filmmaker, and reminds us that “Being BeBe” is only a snapshot of Ngwa’s persona; the real thing is so much richer.Being BeBeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Freakscene: The Story of Dinosaur Jr.’ Review: A Volatile Band

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      This alt-rock trio is made up of three soft-spoken guys who generated a big noise, learned to hate one another and then made peace.This documentary opens with a credit sequence that will immediately bring nostalgia to its intended audience of alt-rock hounds: titles in a prefab type style in garish purple against a bright green background. The effects are redolent of the D.I.Y. videos of the late 1980s. The title song is an emblematic one for Dinosaur Jr., the movie’s subject. The band’s pre-grunge specialty was infectious tunes sung in a nasal drawl, nearly submerged in fuzzy guitars squalling and squealing.Directed by Philipp Reichenheim, the brother-in-law of the band member J. Mascis, the movie delivers exactly what the second half of its title promises: The story of the band. Mascis, Lou Barlow and Murph, three punk-rock-besotted teenagers from Western Massachusetts, wend their way through various post-punk combos, until hitting on a distinct and ultimately influential sound. In interviews, luminaries from the era, such as Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth) and Bob Mould (Hüsker Dü, Sugar), contemplate the band’s talents and its members’ quirky personalities.In keeping with their time and its mien, these fellows were very anti-rock star. Describing the style of a similarly inclined musician, Donald Fagen, back in the 1970s, the critic Robert Christgau said Fagen looked “like he just got dressed to go out for the paper.” For Barlow in particular, going out for the paper seems Napoleon-level ambitious.For all that, the trio’s volatile history is the stuff of alt-rock lore. Stranded in a motel in Idaho on a tour, their fellowship melts down; the group loses Barlow, then Murph, and years later, in 2005, the guys all mend fences for a productive and still ongoing reunion.There’s nothing here about the later soundtrack work Mascis embarks on with the director Allison Anders, or about his side project Sweet Apple; Barlow’s own highly regarded band Sebadoh is barely mentioned. The movie is nothing if not relentlessly focused on Dinosaur Jr. itself. The band is a noteworthy one. But this treatment feels skimpy.Freakscene: The Story of Dinosaur Jr.Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Heddy Honigmann, Whose Films Told of Loss and Love, Dies at 70

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      A documentarian, she liked to engage her subjects — Parisian subway buskers, Peruvian taxi drivers, survivors of genocide — in conversations.Heddy Honigmann, the Peruvian-born Dutch filmmaker whose humane and gently paced documentaries of Parisian subway buskers, Peruvian taxi drivers, disabled people and their service dogs, Dutch peacekeepers and the widows of men who had been murdered in a tiny village near Sarajevo, were stories of loss, trauma and exile — and the sustaining forces of art and love — died on May 21 at her home in Amsterdam. She was 70.Jannet Honigmann, her sister, confirmed the death. She said Ms. Honigmann had been ill with cancer and multiple sclerosis.In the economic chaos of Peru in the 1990s, when the government nearly bankrupted the country and inflation soared, many middle-class people began moonlighting as taxi drivers, slapping a “Taxi” sticker on their Volkswagen Beetles or battered Nissans to signal that they were on call.Ms. Honigmann collected their histories in the 1995 film “Metal and Melancholy,” riding in the back seat of more than a dozen cabs whose drivers included a teacher, a police officer, an actor and an employee at the Ministry of Justice. (She took more than 120 taxi rides to find her subjects.)The stories that unspooled included a devastating tale from a man whose 5-year-old daughter had leukemia and who was driving to pay for her costly medical care. When he tells Ms. Honigmann that he encourages his daughter, whom he describes as a fighter, by saying “Life is hard, but beautiful,” it’s a maxim not just for this film but for all of Ms. Honigmann’s work.In “The Underground Orchestra” (1999), musicians busking in the Paris metro — including a disc jockey from Zaire who has escaped a forced labor camp and an Argentine pianist whose torture at the hands of his government nearly destroyed his hands — describe the refugee odysseys that have brought them there. Stephen Holden of The New York Times called it “an open-ended celebration of human tenacity and life force that builds up a compelling personal vision in an offhanded, roundabout way.”Ms. Honigmann rode in the back seat of more than a dozen cabs to collect the stories of cabdrivers in Lima, Peru, for her film “Metal and Melancholy” (1995).Icarus FilmsDespite stories of terrible trauma, the movie is also a celebration of the culture these artists have left behind — a “world-music primer,” as Mr. Holden put it, “featuring some astonishingly beautiful sounds.”The cultural critic Wesley Morris, in his Times review of “Buddy,” Ms. Honigmann’s 2019 film about people with disabilities and their service dogs, called Ms. Honigmann a humanist who “listens to the ignored, sympathizes with the lonely and can ask questions so leading that when her subjects give her a skeptical look before trying to answer, she has to laugh, almost out of embarrassment.”But she was more of a gentle interlocutor than an insistent interrogator. There were no narrators in her films, no propulsive music or quick cuts to tell viewers how to experience what they were seeing. Her pacing was almost languid; she allowed her subjects to tell their stories in their own way and in their own time. And she hated the word “interview.”“‘Interviews were for subjects,’ she would say,” said Ester Gould, who was a co-writer, researcher and assistant producer on many of Ms. Honigmann’s films. “‘I have conversations with people.’”In an interview at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2002, Ms. Honigmann said: “I think the only rule for me is that when I hear the stories, if they keep my attention, they will also keep the attention of the spectators.” She added: “I lost myself in conversations. And conversations, if they are interesting, they are never boring.”Ms. Honigmann was primarily a documentarian, but she also made narrative films — notably “Goodbye” (1995), about the doomed, highly charged affair between a young preschool teacher and a married man.In “O Amor Natural” (1997), Ms Honigmann invited older Brazilians to read aloud the erotic poetry of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, all of which had been published after his death in 1987 because he worried that they would be seen as pornographic. Ms. Honigmann’s readers took to their roles with gusto and often confided their own erotic histories. Graphic, sensual, tender and at times very funny, the film is a rumination on desire, memory and age.In “O Amor Natural” (1997), Ms Honigmann invited older Brazilians to read aloud the erotic poetry of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.Film ForumMs. Honigmann’s films have won awards at film festivals all over the world and been shown in retrospectives at the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Paris Film Festival, among other venues.In 2013 she was given the Living Legend Award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Yet she may be the most famous filmmaker Americans have never heard of, according to Karen Cooper, the longtime director of Film Forum in New York, which has presented the premieres of many of Ms. Honigmann’s movies.“As Americans, we live in a bubble in terms of film, because Hollywood is so dominant that documentary filmmakers don’t get the same kind of attention that narrative fiction film receives,” Ms. Cooper said in an interview. “In this country, among documentary filmmakers, Heddy was a star. In Europe, she was a superstar. In the Netherlands, she’s a national treasure.”Heddy Ena Honigmann Pach was born on Oct. 1, 1951, in Lima, Peru. Her parents were European Jewish refugees.Her father, Witold Honigmann Weiss, an artist and illustrator who created a popular comic strip, was born in Vienna and had been interned at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria before he escaped in 1942, making his way to Peru by way of Russia and Italy. Her mother, Sarah Pach Miller, an actress and homemaker, had left Poland with her family for Peru in 1939. (In Peru, it is the custom to use the surnames of both parents. Heddy dropped the name Pach as a filmmaker.)Heddy studied biology and literature at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima. Her father wanted her to be a doctor. She first wanted to be a poet — she loved Emily Dickinson — but decided filmmaking was a better medium for her. She left Peru to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and she did not return to her home country for nearly two decades.An early marriage in Lima to Gustavo Riofrio ended in divorce. In the 1970s she married Frans van de Staak, a Dutch filmmaker she met in Rome, and the couple moved to Amsterdam; she became a Dutch citizen in 1978. Their marriage also ended in divorce.In addition to her sister, she is survived by her son, Stefan van de Staak; her husband, Henk Timmermans; and her stepson, Jaap Timmermans.Ms. Honigmann’s film “Good Husband, Dear Son” (2001), told of the women left behind in the village of Ahatovici, just outside Sarajevo, after Bosnian Serb forces killed the men there. Pieter Van Huystee FilmOne of Ms. Honigmann’s most harrowing films was “Good Husband, Dear Son” (2001), about the women left behind in the village of Ahatovici, just outside Sarajevo, after Bosnian Serb forces had murdered the men and burned the place to the ground in 1992. Ms. Honigmann captured the women’s loss by drawing out their memories of their loved ones, and by showing the photographs and belongings the women had saved as mementos.She said she tried to show that the most terrible thing about war is not the numbers of the dead, which she called an abstraction: “The catastrophe is, for instance, seeing that a whole town has lost all the craftsmen, that people who were in love were separated forever, that children who loved to play football and loved music cannot hear it anymore.”“When you are born from immigrants you are educated in melancholy,” Ms. Honigmann said in her 2002 talk at the Walker Center. “You hear all the time of stories of people leaving. That’s in my films. People are left, or they are leaving, or losing their memory.”When Michael Tortorello, her interviewer, asked her what her life might have been like if she had stayed in Peru, she answered promptly: “I would have a been a taxi driver.” More

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      ‘Look at Me: XXXTentacion’ Review: A Life Cut Short

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      A documentary about a rap sensation who was a troubled and incendiary figure.About a half-hour into this documentary, Cleopatra Bernard, the mother of the rapper XXXTentacion, lists the occasions on which her son got a beating from his father. They are numerous. “But,” Bernard concludes, the father “wasn’t abusive.”Such moments make watching “Look at Me: XXXTentacion” — directed by Sabaah Folayan and executive-produced by Bernard — both fascinating and exasperating.XXXTentacion, born Jahseh Onfroy, was a Florida rapper whose brief life and career were ended in a 2018 shooting. Before that, his emotive music, incendiary persona and criminal notoriety earned him a fan base of America’s most disaffected children — and multiplatinum record sales.He learned he had bipolar disorder in his early adolescence, and he was making rap recordings before he turned 15. One such track in the film sounds like a cry for help that went unanswered.A frenetic and sometimes proudly violent person whose brutal beatings of his girlfriend Geneva Ayala are here chronicled in harrowing detail, XXXTentacion used one of his mug shots as the cover for his breakthrough single “Look at Me.”The film features home video footage of a celebration of his release from jail, at which he accepts platitudes offered by family and management (“do the right thing,” “one day at a time”). After which he flat-out lies about his abusive actions. “She was bruised already,” he says of Ayala.The musician’s life — and those of many around him — became a terrifying and toxic mix of street culture, mental illness and social media. Speaking of the world outside his circle, Bass Santana, a member of XXXTentacion’s crew, observes, “All these people want to see is us destroy each other.” He seems not wholly cognizant of the larger truth of what he’s saying, and that’s heartbreaking.Look at Me: XXXTentacionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Fanny: The Right to Rock’ Review: Still Kicking

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      Started by two Filipino American sisters in California, the influential band is claiming its rightful rank in rock ’n’ roll history.Jean and June Millington, Filipino American sisters and lifelong bandmates best known for their 1970s rock band Fanny, have over 50 years of history in the music industry to reflect on in the documentary “Fanny: The Right To Rock.”When Fanny was signed to a recording contract in 1970, there was no one in rock music quite like them. Though the group’s lineup has had several iterations, all its members have been women, and two — June Millington and the drummer Alice de Buhr — are lesbians. Their musical chops earned them gigs at venues like Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, where they won the respect of musicians like David Bowie, Bonnie Raitt, Alice Bag and Cherie Currie of the Runaways.The group disbanded in 1975, but three original members — the sisters June and Jean (Millington) Adamian, and Brie Darling — reunited for an album, “Fanny Walked the Earth,” released in 2018. The thought of the group’s struggles brings a smile to Jean’s face in the movie. “We dealt with the prejudice against girls and feminism, and June says, now we’re bucking ageism!”The director Bobbi Jo Hart decided to show the group’s story through a combination of archival footage and present-day interviews with band members and their famous fans. The film’s most novel sequences come when Hart joins the band for recording sessions for their 2018 album, and finds that even if the voices warble a bit more than they did in the screaming days of youth, Fanny’s sound remains heavy. But the conventional vérité footage doesn’t add new depth to the guitar licks and improvisations, the signals of musicianship that make Fanny feel artistically vital as white-haired rockers. What the movie showcases best from its subjects, then, is the humor and ease of women who have survived a lifetime of setbacks and strife. Fanny has already proven itself — what’s left is for us to enjoy its growing catalog.Fanny: The Right to RockNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Taste of Whale’ Review: Blood in the Water

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      This documentary offers a refreshingly multidimensional take on the practice of whale hunting in the Faroe Islands.The documentary filmmaker Vincent Kelner’s latest project “A Taste of Whale” opens in darkness, broken by the sounds of loud splashes, men yelling and the high-pitched clicks and whistles of an aquatic mammal in distress. A prodding quote attributed to Paul McCartney appears onscreen: “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.”Provocative as it may be at first glance, “A Taste of Whale,” in theaters and on demand, offers a refreshingly multidimensional take on the controversy around whale hunting in the Faroe Islands, a tradition that dates back to the 9th century. Central to it is the hunting season that is referred to as the grind, in which large pods of pilot whales are herded into shallow bays by Faroese whalers and slaughtered en masse for food. (Any meat not eaten immediately by the islanders is preserved through salt-curing.) While pilot whales are not considered to be a threatened species, the hunts have drawn international criticism from animal welfare groups such as the Sea Shepherd, who liken the grind to murder and argue that the practice is unnecessarily cruel.Kelner clearly harbors his own reservations about the hunt, or at least its optics; if there’s any explicit messaging to be found here, it’s that the Faroese killing of whales is no more gruesome than what one may find by peeking inside any slaughterhouse around the world. Indeed, the Faroese villagers interviewed for the film say just as much. Kelner highlights the locals fishing in the bay and dispatching shorebirds with their bare hands, showcasing a desire to play a direct role in where their meat comes from rather than leave it up to an opaque global food system. Yet he’s equally sympathetic to the Sea Shepherd leaders who argue that meat shouldn’t be eaten at all, and not just out of compassion for the animals. By the third act, Kelner throws a whole new wrench into the debate with the appearance of a local environmentalist, who explains how there are more sinister things polluting the Faroese waters than whale’s blood.A Taste of WhaleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More