While it’s quite a dry affair, the film is likely to get Apple-nerds wet and sticky as it’s largely comprised of interviews with key players in the development of Apple Inc (such as Andy Hertzfeld, Guy Kawasaki and Leander Kahne). There’s the mandatory Woz-worship and characterisation of Steve Jobs as demi-god, but Welcome To Mac handles things with a judicious amount of obsequiousness, making it watchable for the casually interested, and necessary viewing for any flavour of Mac nerd.

http://www.welcometomacintosh.com

Titicut Rating: 2.5 / 5

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For me, the documentary dragged on and on, not helped by the extended talking head material of a rambling Tyson. The film is largely a vanity piece and lacks interviews with promoters, battered ex-girlfriends or his pugilistically defeated opponents.

No wonder, hey.

Titicut Rating: 1.5 / 5

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Filmed over a number of years, Bastardy is a film that suggests a close relationship between the director and his subject. We see Charles shooting up heroin in the film’s opening moments and as similar scenes repeat throughout the documentary, a sort of symbiosis between the filmmaker / character is implied. As a director, Courtin-Wilson has obvious respect for the aging actor and reciprocation from Charles, who candidly exposes himself (criminality and all) is what gives the film its legs.

In one irksome scene, the director confronts Charles from behind his lens about a robbery, which the actor-cum-thief admits to. Without fishing for audience sympathy, the two then embark upon returning the stolen goods in an effort to redeem Charles.

This is less your typical fall from grace story and more a chronicle of fallibility. Moments of tribulation are interspersed with elements from the poetic mode of documentary representation; pickups are captured with the aesthetic beauty afforded by 16mm film stock and rendered with subtle filmic effects.

The sum of these parts is a sincere and beautiful film which, despite the foibles of its central character, shows him in an endearing, humanist light. It is no wonder the film has taken out so many festival awards.

http://www.bastardydocumentary.com

Titicut Rating: 3.5 / 5

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IMDB

Title	Content
Movie:	Bastardy
Director:	Amiel Courtin-Wilson
Genre:	Documentary See  »
Tagline:	Addict. Homosexual. Cat burglar. Actor. Aboriginal. Jack Charles.
Runtime:	Australia:83
Cast:	Jack Charles, , , , …
Others:	Additional Details CloseMove Title Content MPAA: Country: Australia Language: English Color: Black and White | Color Aspect Ratio: 1.78 : 1 See  » Sound: Dolby (RCA Sound System) Company: Film Camp Pty. Ltd.See  » Certification: Australia:MA IMDB Tag: Powered by IMDB Tag & imdb.com
Photos:	N/A
Poster:	N/A
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To sex up the mental gymnastic ‘action’, thankfully, Wordplay contains some tasteful graphics and curt editing. Things only ever get faintly nail-biting, but it’s nonetheless entertaining. As things pace along, the competitors are revealed to be, well, not so competitive. Crossword enthusiasts are certainly not out for fame, nor the meagre prize money on offer. It’s all rather friendly and as such, Wordplay deals with community as much as competition.

It’s interesting to see crossword nerds come together over what is traditionally a solitary pastime, and they’ve got Will Shortz, crossword editor for the New York Times and competition organiser to thank for that. With an illustrious reputation in the community, Shortz’ humility is contrast with a host of celebrity solvers, including Jon Stewart and Bill Clinton. More interesting, though are some of the competitors, as you can see in the clip below, and while the film is largely not driven by such characters, the humble appeal of crosswords is somewhat ubiquitous amongst thinkers. As a dramatic subject though, Wordplay goes as far with crosswords as possible.

Titicut Rating: 3.5 / 5

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Related Documentaries:

Spellbound (2002)

Outside of filmmaking, Errol Morris had gained some experience in the field of private investigation and The Thin Blue Line is an exemplary exercise in – and for its time, a radical approach to – investigative documentary filmmaking. The film started life under different pretences as an assessment of the expert witness psychiatrist, Dr. James Grigson. Known as Dr. Death for his specialty in securing the death penalty for criminal defendants, he suggested Morris talk to some of his victims, one of whom was Randall Adams. Spurred by this personal motivation to expose systemic injustice, the story of Randall Adams ultimately became Morris’ focus, eventually becoming The Thin Blue Line.

Morris’ reason for making the film are clear; to free Adams from the wrongful sentence on death row which he’d endured for the last 11 years on unsubstantiated and corrupt charges of murder. Very recently Morris has become more upfront about this, stating:

“I was focused when I was making The Thin Blue Line on getting Randall Adams out of prison. For me, there had been a terrible miscarriage of justice and I wanted to set it right. So my focus – if you like – wasn’t on David Harris in the sense of understanding him, but my focus was on proving that he was the killer.”

Having met earlier in the day, Randall Adams and David Harris were pulled over by patrol officers for an inconsequential vehicle defect. Adams’ version of what happened next, the predominant truth portrayed in the film, is that Harris reached over and shot the approaching officer dead. After retiring to a motel Adams was charged with the murder and received a death sentence, commuted to life on a technicality.
The methods which Morris deftly employs to convey ‘his truth’ borrow slightly from elements of investigative journalism, whilst not being easily categorised in terms of any strict, structuralist film genre or style. Raw, monologue driven interview material with stylised lighting is cut alongside noir-ish reenactments, giving The Thin Blue Line an overall sense of genre irregularity. Diverging from the standard of the time, reenactments in the film don’t carry an on screen title to earmark them as dramatisations. Montage is also used to present evidence in ways that makes the audience reevaluate aspects of the case. When the dead officer’s partner recalls details about the killer’s vehicle that are hazy, a series of similar looking numberplates flash by so as to make the audience question the fallibility of their own problematic perception. The technique is used again to trivialise the officer’s weak recollection of the car’s tail light and model.

We are assailed with combinations which seem impossible to retain in memory, thus the officer’s evidence concerning the car model or headlight seem unlikely, and we come to doubt future assertions from her, which all favour Adams as the killer. As Errol Morris himself says:

“Memory is an elastic affair. We remember selectively, just as we perceive selectively. We have to go back over perceived and remembered events, in order to figure out what happened, what really happened.“

The subjective truths and recollections in The Thin Blue Line are usually murky, especially so for the police officer character’s in Morris’ narrative. As an audience, we want to find out which of the conflicting stories being presented is the truth. In this regard, the film assumes a formula more akin to a Hitchcock film rather than a documentary. Centering around Adams, who protests his innocence and is seemingly caught up in the wrong place, it engages us with the same anticipation and ‘need to know’ as any Hitchcockian masterpiece. Is Harris or Adams the killer? Morris presents their perspectives, along with numerous interviewees in a directorially constructed argument that is aimed at guiding the viewer to seeing Morris’ ultimate truths; that Adams is innocent and the justice system has greatly miscarried.

The central reenactment of the film depicts the various interviewees versions of the murder. It replays several times, each reiteration supplying additions of evidentiary detail. The film begs comparison to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, in which a central murder is also retold multiple times, each from a contrary perspective. The noir style of The Thin Blue Line’s reenactments is befitting the ‘plot’, events in which Randall Adams is embroiled but cannot alter; a life and death predicament he never started (a common plot device in noir films). In a departure from the prevailing cinema verite style of the time, the reenacted murder and other staged, storyboarded sequences, are certainly not intended as a faithful reconstruction of events. By repeating the reenactment from conflicting perspectives, notably Adams’ and Harris’, Morris skillfully incorporates the ambiguous authenticity of reenactments into his storytelling. Multiple accounts are visualised to either validate or discredit them. Despite the reenactments use as an evaluation mechanism for the audience, the film was rejected for an Academy Award for Best Documentary as it was deemed fictional, due to reenacted scenes and presumably its postmodern style. I believe however, that the reenactments make us question truth in a filmic amalgam of art and reality, even if they do flaunt documentary’s penchant for objectivity as the norm. In The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris has created a filmic truth which airs his obvious and well-founded bias toward Adams.

The order in which facts surrounding the case are revealed is also a clear directorial imprint signifying Adams’ innocence. Starting with prologue sequences telling us the facts in the case, Adams describes the proceedings and his treatment by police. Despite being described as a ‘drifter’, the accused murderer is portrayed as a pleasant, hardworking man.

Then we hear from Harris who we learn has prior criminal history. When the frame widens to include his orange prison clothes, we learn that he too is incarcerated. After Harris and the law enforcement officials are afforded their arguments, the director then edits in the accused man’s rebuttal, effectively restating his version of the events. This technique of giving Adams the ‘final word’ is employed in many other sequences of the film where conjecture arises from Harris’ and Adams’ accounts.

This randomised chronology bears Morris’ imprint as much as the stylistic choices found in the film’s reenactments. It was also fresh and original, at a time when documentary was largely associated with expository films that told their story in an essay-like format, guided by voice of god narration. In an effort to convey his perceived truth, Errol Morris interweaves the perspectives of all involved, yet expressionistic directorial touches in reenactments (or voice of god narration for that matter) don’t guarantee truths. Morris simply uses them filmic tools with which to build his case. As Adams speaks of the weary length of his interrogation, Morris embellishes our senses with an image of an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, also denoting Adams’ nervousness and resignation. The passing of time is also communicated by the many ticking clocks and timepieces shown throughout the film.

These elements become motifs which also focus our attention to small yet crucial details. The milkshake belonging to the dead officer’s partner spills in slow motion and lands in a spot contradicting the officer’s story. The slow motion, key-light motifs show us how doubt can be infused in memories.

However, Errol Morris never shows actors’ faces in reenactments. There is no suggestion imparted by facial expression, no incongruity with the faces of participants who are interviewed. Staged scenes are shot close-up, and like the motifs, the director withholds contextual information to keep us intent on finding out more. Unlike docudrama style films, there are no words spoken during the reenactments. A lot is left for us to infer.

In more light hearted moments, the testimonials of Mrs. Miller (who fancies herself as a sleuth) and the judge (who talks admirably of the police who brought down Dillinger) are comically paralleled with archival footage of Hollywood crime flicks, from which excerpts briefly appear. As David Bordwell states, “these sequences encourage us to see Adam’s adversaries as holding naïve, romanticised conception of crimefighting derived from popular movies”

A strong authorial trait found in most of Morris’ films, is the use of extended interview material. In place of narration, Adams states his 11 year old case with undiminished fervor. In much the same vein as Morris’ Gates of Heaven or Vernon, there is not a hint of condescension in his portrayal. No titles are used to identify interviewees, who are instead contextualised by the visual style of their framing; framing choices which promote curiosity about subject, We see the boyish features of the amiable sociopath ‘kid’, David Harris.
However, mitigating his bias for Adams, interviews are shot dispassionately enough for us to slant towards Morris’ view in our own time. Using his Interrotron technique, interviewees look directly down the camera’s lens, creating intimacy by appearing to address the audience directly. This also allows the viewer to gain a more believable impression of the talking head.

The film itself doesn’t dwell on the complexity of the facts it presents. They are but ancillary truths. It is concerned with larger philosophical questions of knowledge and truth, the arbitrariness of fate – how a hitchhike changed Adams’ life.

At the end of The Thin Blue Line, Adams is still on death row. However the director’s filmic critique of the justice system succeeded in exonerating the wrongfully convicted Adams who was eventually released. As Morris states, “I wanted to make a film about how truth was difficult to know, not impossible to know” (Bordwell & Thompson’s Film Art).

Titicut Rating: 4.5 / 5

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The guidance won’t help you much though, it remains nigh impossible to decipher what each contestant in the World Livestock Auctioneer Championship is actually saying. But it’s also largely irrelevant. What will strike you most about the competitors is not the content of their monologues, but rather their differing styles and methods of delivery and dare I say, ‘crowd control’. Things do get slightly repetitive as Werner inflicts performance after performance on us, however you do find yourself barracking for one contestant or another. Like many other documentaries, How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck thematically concerns itself with America’s obsession for such competitiveness.

Interestingly, in the commentary for Herzog’s Stroszek, he mentions he originally met two of the actors as auctioneers in How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck.

Titicut Rating: 3.5 / 5

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Huie’s uncut oratory about societal decay, war and economics eventually climaxes into rousing pentencostal song, chorused by the entirely black congregation who, at Huie’s charismatic behest, “step to Jesus”. It all gets a very Sexual Chocolate.

Huie’s message, while being somewhat progressive, also smacks of Christian conservatism as he sweats out moral guidelines denouncing everything from homosexuality to pollution.

While not exemplary of his usual style, Huie’s Sermon exhibits many traits of the classic old school Herzog style.

Titicut Rating: 3.5 / 5

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But then again, MacHEADS is not about the meaningless platform debate, or is it? I’m not sure first time filmmaker Kobi Shely even knows. It could be about the history of Apple Inc., but that story is so glossily condensed within the film that many crucial milestones are omitted or strategically avoided. Where is the bit about Apple pinching all its good ideas, like the Graphical User Interface, from Xerox’s pioneering Palo Alto Research Center? What about the fledgling Apple Computers early and unsuccessful court battle with The Beatles record label, Apple Records? For a company well-known for instigating a malignant copyright system in iTunes (read: DRM, which they have since dropped), such a flagrant trademark infringement is surely of interest. No?

Perhaps MacHEADS is just a fanboy doco rather than a doco about fanboys. However, the film’s sparse hints towards objectivity are made all the more confusing with the inclusion of self-evaluating and sometimes self-deprecating Apple die hards. Similarly the segments devoted to aggrandising CEO Steve Jobs’ already inflated ego are squeemish at best. Yes, they love you Steve.

What we do learn, is that the relevance of cultish Mac zealots has diminished, what with the success of non-Mac products such as the iPod and iPhone. We also learn that because of this, Apple couldn’t give a shit about MacHeads.

I could weigh into the debate with my own MacOS gripe list, but there’s more than enough bitching fodder to be found far and wide on the Interwebs. All I will say is that while Microsoft pushes little plastic discs of intellectual property known as software on us all, Apple is far more guilty of contributing to the global silicon imprint that is world’s e-waste. Why then, is there such a gulf in the disparity of the two companies respective public images? Apple markets to fanboys, and everyone else, a desire for the latest revisions of whatever gadgetry they will release next. Gadgets which are ultimately destined for landfill. You saw the crazies lining up for the first iPhones, right? Meanwhile, Bill Gates remains uncool and hated because he spends less on PR, it seems, than Mr. Jobs. And all he did was develop a computer operating system. Oh, and create the most generous philanthropic entity in the history of mankind.

Titicut Rating: 2 / 5

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I wonder what draws those people to documentaries.

For me, the feel good qualities of the film don’t weigh up against more enriching dividends paid by the sort of docos I’m into. You know, ones that smack you around a bit. I get Spellbound, I just don’t think I have to like it, just because it may have been a crossover hit with the family demographic. Sure, there’s some cute moments and even some distant emotional engagement, but I truly didn’t feel enlightened after the viewing experience. Perhaps my expectations were too high. After all, this film appears on many ‘Greatest Documentaries of All Time’ lists, including that of the International Documentary Association. Oh yeah, it was nominated for an Academy too.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s somewhat entertaining and the stronger first half of the film is devoted to the backstories of 8 Spelling Bee participants. There’s definitely some human interest in there, sure, but the remainder of the film hangs itself – in faux-climactic style – around a single national championship competition.

Hardly nail biting stuff… but that’s where editing comes into play.

Deficiencies in filmic suspense are countered by flipping back to expository elements – a technique which fed my sense of distraction rather than building anticipation. So one kid, Harry, is agonising over how to spell ‘banns’ (yeah, whatever that means) and rather then hit us with the correct spelling, we are treated to some more parental chat, or the film meanders to some point of historical interest that might have served the half of the film well. Even his twisted facial contortions (and he is surely a pinup child for A.D.D.) don’t make me care about who the winner may be. If anything, you just want the least annoying kid to pull through at the end.

At best, Spellbound is a statement about America’s obsession with competition, and while it’s not exactly a child beauty pageant, there is a good cross section of parents with contrasting degrees of ambitious intent. Some pressure their kids into success, others liken the competition to child abuse. Granted, all the kids are bright and you do find yourself rooting for the ones with natural talent and motivation (over the learn-by-rote’rs), but in my book, mass/fluff appeal doesn’t necessarily equate to documentary gold.

Titicut Rating: 3 / 5

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Related Documentaries:

Wordplay (2006)

There is an obvious vanity in the self-reflexivity of Skid Row. Various cumbersome and argumentative monologues show Pras cutting sick at his film ‘crew’ and it’s apparent he’s completely out of place on the streets. He appears to be more worried about protecting his own hide rather than conveying his blunt, undeveloped ideas. If you must watch a documentary that features a Fugee, Wyclef Jean’s appearance in Ghosts of Cité Soleil will surely suffice.

The film is a misguided, somewhat unintelligent exploration of one of the most horrific urban slums in the USA. Pras’ glamour shot on the cover of the DVD is a dire indicator which correctly implies that we’ll learn little about Skid Row.

There are many, well-conceived and touching documentaries about homelessness, unfortunately, Skid Row ain’t one of them.

Titicut Rating: 1.5 / 5

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