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"I took performance enhancing drugs, and I lied about it." How many modern athletes have been too cowardly to utter those 10 simple words, even when confronted with evidence of their sins? Marion Jones says them with poise and confidence, her eyes looking directly into the camera. This clip from a 2010 public service announcement is the opening salvo in a barrage of admission and contrition that opens John Singleton's documentary about the disgraced sprinter. From here we cut to the steps of a federal courthouse in 2007 where Jones stands before assembled cameras and microphones and says, "I have betrayed your trust," "I am responsible fully for my actions," "I have no one to blame but myself" and "I have been dishonest, and you have the right to be angry with me." Her words sound premeditated but not rehearsed. She speaks not from a page and thus seemingly her heart. She allows a few tears to roll down her face, but she maintains her composure. In that moment and in several others this film, Marion Jones is everything we wish Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa would be: accountable. Too bad she couldn't be honest, too.
In Marion Jones: Press Pause, Jones is forthcoming about her mistakes in the way that Michael Vick has been forthcoming about dog fighting, and Tiger Woods has been forthcoming about his extramarital sex and Brett Favre has been forthcoming about his extramarital voice messages: only as required. Did Jones lie to federal investigators? Yes. Did she deliberately mislead the public? Yes. Did she use performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs)? Yes. Those are things Jones willingly admits, because at this point she has no other choice than to do so; a federal investigation forced the truth out of her. But when it comes to how, when and why the five-time Olympic medalist took PEDs, Jones is glaringly mum, which makes all of her other admissions incomplete at best and misleading at worst. In this documentary, the latest installment in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" series, Jones carries herself with the air of someone who is holding nothing back, but if you watch carefully you'll notice that she admits to what she's been found guilty of and absolutely nothing more. Expecting the whole truth and nothing but the truth from a serial liar, whose repeated public denials were so emphatic that Attitcus Finch would have gladly volunteered to represent her pro bono, is as foolish as expecting Olympic athletes to turn down the opportunity for multi-million-dollar success by just saying no to PEDs. (The system is broken.) But expecting a filmmaker profiling the rise and fall of Marion Jones to at least broach the subject of how she got mixed up in PEDs in the first place? That doesn't seem unreasonable.
To read the rest of the review at The Cooler, click here.
Tags: 30 for 30, ESPN Films, John Singleton, Marion Jones, Marion Jones: Press Pause, PEDs
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[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a House feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]
Jason Bellamy: For one of my younger brothers, 2010 was the summer of music. Approaching his junior year at the University of Oregon, he spent the past few months attending about every concert that came his way in the Pacific Northwest. The criteria seemed to be this: If the concert was within driving distance and featured loud (preferably metal) bands that hadn't had a big hit since before he was born, he was going. And so he rocked to Iron Maiden, Cinderella, the Scorpions, Billy Idol, and more. He rocked at large arenas and relatively intimate county fairs, sneaking up to the front of the stage when he could to snap pictures that he would eventually file along with similar snapshots of bands like AC/DC and KISS.
My brother loves music—if he's partial to rock and metal, he's rather indiscriminate within that genre (if you couldn't tell). But I think the biggest reason my brother attends concerts is because he loves the energy of the live events, where he doesn't just hear the music but feels it, too. Even when you're pressed shoulder to shoulder with other attendees, and even when the musicians are so far away that you need to rely on the video screens to see the musicians' expressions, there's something very intimate and magically visceral about concerts. You can know every note and lyric of a band's work from listening to their albums, but somehow seeing them live makes us feel as if we know them better, or know them for the first time.
Maybe that phenomenon is what inspires filmmakers to make concert documentaries in the first place: the challenge of simulating the feeling of being there. There are numerous films about musical artists—from A Hard Day's Night (1964) to Elvis: That's the Way It Is (1970) to Bob Dylan: No Direction Home (2005) to This Is It (2009)—some of which go backstage, some of which play historian, some of which are hardly about music at all, and so there's no way we could have an all-encompassing discussion about that larger cinematic genre and its many sub-genres. Still, it's a genre worth tackling, and so in this discussion we're going to focus on five films—Woodstock (1970), Gimme Shelter (1970), Stop Making Sense (1984), Rattle and Hum (1988) and Instrument (2001)—that despite their incredible diversity have one thing in common: their chief aim seems to be to replicate the sensation of being there. And in the case of the first film, Woodstock, the music might be the least interesting part of that experience, am I right? Continue Reading »
Tags: Fugazi, Gimme Shelter, Instrument, Rattle and Hum, Stop Making Sense, The Conversations, The Rolling Stones, The Talking Heads, U2, Woodstock
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There's a sports melodrama unfolding in Los Angeles right now that's so epically sordid, so potentially monumental that I'm half surprised ESPN hasn't already rebranded its "30 for 30" series as "Thirtysomething for Thirtysomething" just to have the chance to chronicle it with a feature-length documentary. It's a story of greed, selfishness, corruption and the downfall of a once dominant superpower—the kind of thing that could be directed by Charles Ferguson and aptly titled Inside Job or No End In Sight. It's the story of the "Dodger Divorce"—the dissolution of the marriage between Frank and Jamie McCourt, for now the co-owners of the Dodgers, whose custody battle for the team has resulted in the public disclosure of their lavish spending at a time when they are also raising the ticket prices of lower-income fans. Fernando Nation, the latest actual entry in the ESPN Films documentary series, isn't about the "Dodger Divorce" in any specific respect, but in a way it's an unintentional prologue to it. Because in Cruz Angeles' profile of the influential career of Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, we witness the birth of the very fan base that might not survive the monetary demands of the current regime. To understand what might be lost in the decade ahead, you must understand what came to be three decades ago. You must understand "Fernandomania."
To read the rest of the review at The Coolerhere.
Tags: 30 for 30, Cruz Angeles, ESPN Films, Fernando Nation, Fernando Valenzuela, Fernandomania, Los Angeles Dodgers
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"I'm more afraid of being nothing than I am of being hurt." Officially, those are the words of Cole Trickle, as written by Robert Towne and as delivered by Tom Cruise in the auto racing flick Days of Thunder. In spirit, though, they are the words of Tim Richmond. A fearless driver who became one of the best racers on the NASCAR circuit under the guidance of a crusty crew chief, Richmond was the flamboyant real-life character upon which Cruise's Trickle was loosely based. But Days of Thunder isn't Richmond's story. Not by a long shot. Richmond was confident, talented and brash, and, appropriately enough, he had a Hollywood icon's sense of the spotlight, but his life wasn't blessed with the stereotypical Hollywood ending. Just when Richmond was beginning to show his potential for legendary greatness, he died at the age of 34. What killed him wasn't overconfidence on the racetrack but ignorance off of it. Richmond fell victim to something he didn't think he needed to fear: sex.
Tim Richmond died of AIDS. And in the impressive documentary Tim Richmond: To the Limit, the latest release in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" series, we see the way Richmond lived, the way he died and, most important of all, the way he lived en route to dying. Because what's really notable about Tim Richmond isn't that he died of AIDS but when he died of AIDS: 1989. That's five years pre-Real World: San Francisco, four years pre-Philadelphia, three years pre-Arthur Ashe and two years pre-Magic Johnson. For most of America, 1989 was the dark age of HIV/AIDS awareness—a time when there was just enough light to spot something to fear and not enough light to understand what we should really be afraid of. In the late '80s, AIDS was widely considered to be a "gay cancer," and the great hypocrisy was that some of the same folks who thought only homosexuals got AIDS were also the ones who feared they could contract the disease through casual contact with someone who had it. It wasn't an environment in which most anyone would feel comfortable living with HIV/AIDS, least of all a NASCAR racer who had already been held at arm's length by the sport's "good ol' boy" establishment just for having an apartment in New York, just for not being one of them.
To read the rest of the review at The Cooler, click here.
Tags: 30 for 30, AIDS, ESPN Films, NASCAR, Rory Karpf, Tim Richmond, To the Limit
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Sports uniforms are powerful things. They take people of different races, nationalities, religions, economic backgrounds and political viewpoints and unify them as if members of one harmonious family. They convince fans to cheer for despicable people (Michael Vick in Philadelphia, Barry Bonds in San Francisco, etc) and to embrace athletes they once despised (Brett Favre in Minnesota). They let Americans know who to care about every Olympics or World Cup. They even create a genuine camaraderie among otherwise dissimilar fans who root for the same set of laundry. But for all the times that uniforms bring people together in previously unthinkable ways (think: Jackie Robinson and the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers), there's a limit to a uniform's bond. Once Brothers, the latest installment in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" documentary series, is the story of men who were first united by the blue and white jerseys of Yugoslavia's national basketball team, only to be torn apart by that country's civil war.
More specifically, the film is about Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic, who were strangers, who became teammates, who became roommates, who became friends, who became standout NBA players, who became estranged. Once brothers, then enemies—their unity through the Yugoslavian national team and their immigrant experiences in America shattered by a war that redefined them according to their Serbian and Croatian roots. It's a heartbreaking story, one that feels as if it should have been preventable at the same time that it seems utterly unavoidable, and it's a credit to the filmmaker that we leave the documentary understanding and respecting the emotions and actions of both men. Once Brothers is directed by Michael Tolajian, but it comes from the heart of Divac, who narrates the film while retracing his steps from the quiet Serbian town where he was born, to the gym where the Yugoslavian national team trained, to the hotel in Los Angeles that was his first American home, to the streets of downtown Zagreb in Croatia, where Divac hadn't set foot since before war broke out in 1991. Other documentaries in the "30 for 30" series have felt deeply personal to the people making them (perhaps most notably The Band That Wouldn't Die and No Crossover), but no "30 for 30" film does a better job of personalizing the story from the perspective of one of its principal subjects. We don't just understand Divac's story, we experience it through him.
To read the rest of the review at The Cooler, click here.
Tags: 30 for 30, Basketball, Drazen Petrovic, ESPN Films, Michael Tolajian, Once Brothers, Vlade Divac, Yugoslavia
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One frame. While watching Four Days in October, the latest entry in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" documentary series, that's how far I got before I rolled my eyes. The trigger for my annoyance was a pair of words that flashed up on the screen in blood red: "The Curse." No, this isn't a film about menstruation. It's about the 2004 American League Championship Series. Which of course means that "The Curse" refers to "The Curse of the Bambino," which of course refers to the sale of Babe Ruth by the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees prior to the 1920 season, the sacrilege of which was so great that it haunted the Red Sox for decades as they went in doomed pursuit of their first World Series title since 1918. Or so the lore goes. The problem with "The Curse," and the reason it irritates me, is that it's utter bullshit—less because it fails to accurately explain why the Red Sox went 86 years without a World Series title than because it creates the illusion that Red Sox fans are an especially tortured lot. Hardly. Yes, in a spring-to-autumn race that produces only one big winner each year, the Red Sox were losers for almost nine decades. But in the meantime they did a hell of a lot of winning. Since 1936, for example, the Red Sox have had only 18 losing seasons. In contrast, last Sunday the Pittsburgh Pirates wrapped up their 18th losing season of the past 18 years. That, sports fans, is the kind of suckitude that truly tortured fan bases are made of.
Having said that, there's no denying that misery and despair were integral components of a Sawks' fan's identity circa 2004, back before the Red Sox vanquished their Yankee rivals en route to becoming the very kind of cocky, big-spending franchise that their fans had so long despised. And so it only makes sense that "The Curse" is mentioned as part of the backdrop of the 2004 ALCS, because if any group of sports fans expected to have their hearts broken in the most excruciating fashion possible, it was the one in Boston (and in many other parts of the country where Red Sox fandom was suddenly chic). In baseball's long history, only one team has ever come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a seven-game playoff series, and thus Boston's four straight wins were an incredible feat all on their own. But part of what made the unprecedented comeback such magical theater was its larger context: 86 years without a title; Red Sox vs. Yankees; Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium; the franchise that always lost and the one that always seemed to win. Director Gary Waksman clearly understands the importance of that context, or else he wouldn't have opened his film with those two annoying words, but because a 50-minute film provides scant opportunity for prologue, that's about the extent of Waksman's ability to set the stage, and so he takes it on faith that these teams and their rivalry need no introduction. Furthermore, he takes it for granted that we've heard this story before.
To read the rest of the review at The Cooler, click here.
Tags: 2004 ALCS, 30 for 30, Baseball, Boston Red Sox, ESPN Films, Four Days in October, Gary Waksman, New York Yankees
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As if sports weren't inherently dramatic enough, the language we use when discussing them is often bloody with consequence. Teams facing elimination from the playoffs are said to be in "do or die" situations. NFL games that are tied after four quarters go into "sudden death" overtime. And fans who allow their happiness be dictated by the success of their favorite team are said to be "diehards." It's all overstatement, provided that no one has made a bet they can't afford to lose, but it's harmless. (Working in the NFL when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, I was puzzled by the insistence of some writers that it was now inappropriate to refer to a team's draft-day strategy room as the "war room." Were these people similarly uncomfortable with the football terms "blitz" and "gunner"? And, in our post-9/11 climate, where was the objection to the baseball terms "sacrifice fly" and "suicide squeeze"? But I digress.) Poetic enhancement is a sports tradition. Still, every now and then something comes along and reminds us of just how foolish these inflated terms really are, and of just how dramatic sports can be on their own. Into the Wind is that kind of reality check.
The first must-see entry in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" documentary series since The Two Escobars debuted in June, Into the Windtells the story of Terry Fox, who in 1980 set out to do the unthinkable: run all the way across his native Canada at a rate of approximately 26 miles (one marathon) each day. A formidable task in its own right, Fox's expedition was made all the more challenging because he was without the better part of his right leg, which had been amputated six inches above the knee three years earlier, after Fox had been diagnosed with bone cancer. Fox's goal wasn't just to cover the distance but to raise money for cancer research and to raise the spirits of cancer patients at the same time. He called his run the "Marathon of Hope," and in doing so he not only grossly undersold the length of his journey but also the emotions it would stir in those who witnessed it. Directed by NBA guard (and fellow Canadian) Steve Nash and Ezra Holland, Into the Wind gracefully combines modern interviews, archival footage and narrated excerpts from Fox's journal to bring to life the heroic quest of a 21-year-old man who in the true spirit of sports wanted to test himself, and who in the true spirit of life wanted to do before he died.
To read the rest of the review at The Cooler, click here.
Tags: 30 for 30, ESPN Films, Ezra Holland, Into the Wind, Marathon of Hope, Running, Steve Nash, Terry Fox
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Most owners of professional sports franchises are fairly anonymous figures. They sign checks, they raise ticket prices and, if they're lucky, at some point they raise a championship trophy just long enough to hand it over to their team's coach or star player. George Steinbrenner was an exception. Like Jerry Jones of the NFL and Mark Cuban of the NBA after him, Steinbrenner wasn't just a Major League Baseball team owner, he was a team icon, as intrinsic to the New York Yankees' identity as the team's famous pinstripe uniforms. From 1973 until roughly 2005, when he faded from view, people were free to loathe Steinbrenner or to romanticize him, but they couldn't ignore him. He was the face of the franchise—and happily so. Steinbrenner didn't just own his team, he ruled over it, which is why when a deteriorating Steinbrenner handed over primary control to his son Hal, in 2008, it felt less like a business transaction than a political regime change. Sure, the Yankees stayed in the Steinbrenner family, just like Cuba is still under the direction of a Castro. But for all that might remain the same, the ceding of power by a notoriously impulsive, ironfisted overseer would leave the empire he built forever changed. Just like there can only be one Comandante, there could only be one Boss.
In The House of Steinbrenner, Barbara Kopple captures this familial transfer of sports authority with a historian's sense of scope and a prophet's sense of consequence. Two months removed from Steinbrenner's death and less than two years since the Boss officially handed over the reins to his son Hal, these events might be too timely to fully appreciate in the present, but Kopple documents them as if anticipating their future significance, aware that whatever successes or failures the Yankees have over the next 30 years will be traced back to this point. The latest in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" series, The House of Steinbrenner is about the end of an era. In a less than two-year span, George yielded to his children, the "original" Yankee Stadium was replaced by "new" Yankee Stadium, hot dogs were joined by sushi in the Bronx and, across the street, one generation of construction workers tore down their fathers' installations. Sports, with their seasonal schedules, are naturally full of beginnings and endings, but this was something different, something greater. At its best, Kopple's film captures an organization and its fans in the midst of moving forward while consumed by all that they're leaving behind.
To read the rest of the review at The Cooler, click here.
Tags: Barbara Kopple, Baseball, George Steinbrenner, Hal Steinbrenner, New York Yankees, The House of Steinbrenner, Yankee Stadium
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It took 21 films for the "30 for 30" series to recognize the existence of females in sports, and now it's as if Unmatched is trying to make up for lost time. Directed by Lisa Lax and Nancy Stern Winters, and produced by Hannah Storm, this documentary isn't just by women or about women, it seems targeted for them, too. Unmatched mentions but isn't really invested in the fierce on-court battles between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, just like it references but never evokes their incredible athletic dominance. Unmatched isn't really interested in tennis, you see, it's interested in Evert and Navratilova's rivalry. And it's interested in their rivalry because it's fascinated by their friendship. Eschewing traditional talking heads and similar outsider analysis, Unmatched lets Evert and Navratilova tell their own story, in their own words, all from the confines of a picturesque New York beach house that's right out of a Nancy Meyers movie. Whereas other filmmakers would have felt compelled to turn back the clock in order to delight in the exquisite precision of Evert and Navratilova's volleys, Unmatched settles into a comfy chair in the here-and-now so that we can watch two of the best tennis players of all time trading memories.
The film isn't without it's charms, but it is decidedly low on testosterone. Catch this documentary while flipping through the channels and you'll be forgiven for thinking you've landed on Lifetime, not ESPN. After all, when's the last time "The Worldwide Leader in Sports" found occasion to play any Natalie Merchant song, never mind the same song, "Kind and Generous," three times in less than an hour? With scenes that capture Evert and Navratilova reclining on big white deck chairs, or walking down the beach wearing complementary sweater-and-scarf outfits, Unmatched looks straight out of a Nicholas Sparks movie. And if you told me that these shots were conceived for a CBS special romanticizing the friendship of Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King, it would be tough to argue otherwise. (All that's missing are dogs running up and down the surf.) The movie is so determined to convey Evert and Navratilova's spiritual sisterhood that when the documentary ends with a shot of them driving off into the distance in a convertible, I breathed a sigh of relief that no canyon was in sight on the horizon.
To read the rest of the review at The Cooler, click here.
Tags: 30 for 30, Chris Evert, ESPN Films, Hannah Storm, Lisa Lax, Martina Navratilova, Nancy Stern Winters, Tennis, Unmatched
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Perhaps never before has such an eclectic group of talking heads been assembled as the one we find in One Night in Vegas, the latest entry in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" series, which features interviews with the likes of Mike Tyson, Mickey Rourke, Suge Knight and Maya Angelou. Put another way, this documentary brings together a former heavyweight champion who served time in prison for rape and once bit off the ear of an opponent, an actor turned boxer turned actor with a history of substance abuse, a record producer who is widely rumored to be linked to the murder of Notorious B.I.G. (and myriad other crimes) and, last but not least, a Pulitzer Prize nominated writer who recited a poem at the inauguration of President Clinton. Wrap your head around that for a second. These seemingly unconnected individuals are brought together here because of the events of September 7, 1996, the titular subject of the film, when two things occurred that, likewise, might not seem to be related at first glance: Mike Tyson defeated Bruce Seldon to win the WBA title and then, after getting into a brawl of his own, rapper Tupac Shakur was assassinated on his way to a post-fight party. One Night in Vegas suggests that the proximity of these events might not be entirely coincidental. Of course if you've watched previous "30 for 30" pictures The U and Straight Outta L.A. and witnessed the strong cultural bond between sports and rap, you suspected that already.
To read the rest of the review at The Cooler, click here.
Tags: 30 for 30, Boxing, ESPN Films, Mike Tyson, One Night in Vegas, Rap, Reggie Rock Bythewood, Tupac Shakur
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Cody Webster stares into the camera like a man looking across an abyss of time for the soul he left behind. His shirt is as blue as the Atlantic Ocean. His eyes are as deep as the Pacific. His expression is mournful, like a Labrador retriever that's been whipped with a fireplace poker by an intolerant master. As Webster speaks, the salt-and-pepper bristles of his goatee pierce the air like a thousand needles scraping at the skin of a balloon. All the while, Webster's shoulders sag as if he spent his youth hunched over beneath the weight of enormous expectations, like Atlas holding up the world, and with good reason: Twenty-eight years ago, when he was 12, Webster was the star of a baseball team trying to win the Little League World Series and rescue the United States from a universal depression that wrapped around this country like a sticky vine. Today, at 40, Webster reminisces about those experiences in Little Big Men, a documentary that's rife with the kind of overstatement and overwriting that you've been subjected to in this paragraph. My apologies.
Through 18 installments, ESPN Films' "30 for 30" series has ranged from engrossing and artful to interesting yet unremarkable, but it never delivered an outright flop until now. At its best, like when we look into the eyes of a thoughtful Webster, Little Big Men is casually engaging. Alas, at its worst it's tragic, and in this case that's the norm. The film is overlong and underfed; it has the skeleton of a story but no meat on its bones. Journalistically speaking, it either buries the lead or fails to detect it. Dramatically speaking, it makes the mistake of trying to be profound when it could have succeeded just by being personal. Cinematically speaking, it's a crime, which is to say that it isn't cinematic in the least. Although the straight-ahead, eyes-into-the-camera testimonials of Webster and some of his teammates from Kirkland, Washington's 1982 Little League team recall the work of Errol Morris, the rest of the film is more akin to Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion. It's radio, and overly poetic radio at that, with enough pregnant pauses to make William Shatner impatient.
To read the rest of the review at The Cooler, click here.
Tags: 30 for 30, Al Szymanski, Baseball, Cody Webster, ESPN Films, Little Big Men, Little League, Peter Franchella
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When the greatest player of a sport retires, it's memorable. When the greatest player of a sport retires at the height of his athletic abilities so that he can take a stab at another sport he hasn't played since high school, it's momentous. And yet somehow Michael Jordan's one-year fling with professional baseball is practically forgotten, regarded 16 years later like some trivial footnote, like the deleted scene of a classic film, as if it didn't count. But it did. So, in Jordan Rides the Bus, the latest entry in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" series, Ron Shelton chronicles the impact of Jordan's sudden and brief career switch on the NBA, on Nike, on the Birmingham Barons minor league baseball team, on a bus driver, on a real estate agent and on a bar owner. Meanwhile, Shelton charts the evolution of Jordan's baseball skills, explores theories about the motivations for Jordan's dalliance with the sport and brings in media talking-heads to reevaluate not just Jordan's baseball skills but also their own coverage of his brief career. At 50 minutes, Jordan Rides the Bus is a thorough documentary. Alas, it's as emotionless as a Wikipedia page. Because the one thing Shelton's documentary doesn't convey is what all of the above meant to Michael Jordan.
To read the rest of the review at The Cooler, click here.
Tags: 30 for 30, Baseball, ESPN Films, Jordan Rides the Bus, Michael Jordan, Ron Shelton
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[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]
Ed Howard: In all of his films, Todd Haynes takes elements of gaudy tabloid culture and warps them to his own purposes, because he sees—in the lurid stories about sexuality and decadence and violence that we like to tell ourselves, in the celebrity gossip rags and TV news and hyped-up movies—deeper truths about identity, gender, politics, entertainment and sexuality. Haynes finds, within the sensationalist and the melodramatic, a culture's vision of itself, distorted by a funhouse mirror but nevertheless evocative of the unvarnished truth. Or maybe the truth really is as strange as the mirror suggests: entertainers as plastic action figures, made to be manipulated and posed; sexuality as a plague, terrifying and mysterious; suburbia as a deadening cage for the emotions; the past as a manufactured façade, rendered superficially safe by the suppression (or ignorance) of all those impulses that go unchecked in the present; identity as malleable and fluid, the true self supplanted by endless masks and games. Haynes' appropriation of the language of media—the docudrama, the genre film, the educational documentary, all eras and styles collaged together in his cinematic blender—is an examination of the ways in which culture both disguises and probes the truths about individuals, their secret desires and fears and fantasies. Continue Reading »
Tags: Dottie Gets Spanked, Far From Heaven, I'm Not There, Poison, Safe, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, The Conversations, Todd Haynes, Velvet Goldmine
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As irritating as David Blaine has become in recent years due to his tedious, surprisingly lusterless stunt (un)spectaculars, whenever I'm flipping through the channels and stumble upon the 1996 documercial David Blaine: Street Magic, I put down the remote control. By now I've seen the Leonardo DiCaprio-hosted special enough times to know all the tricks, even if I can't explain how they're pulled off. And although I'm still impressed by Blaine's skill (I've always loved magic), the pure excitement I get from watching him turn an Ace of Diamonds into a 6 of Spades has long since passed. Meanwhile, Blaine's undoubtedly effective stage presence, from his monotone monologues to his dramatic exhaustion shtick, has become downright tiresome. Yet still I watch. The difference is that I no longer watch Blaine. The genius of Street Magic is that in addition to allowing us to observe Blaine's sleight of hand, the film also—and sometimes exclusively—allows us to watch the awed faces of Blaine's marks. No matter how many times I encounter Street Magic, the sight of people staring in absolute amazement as they try to process the apparent reality of the seemingly impossible is nothing short of thrilling.
Incredibly enough, that leads us to the latest documentary in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" series, The Birth of Big Air, which has nothing whatsoever to do with street magic but nonetheless has similar charms. Profiling a BMX daredevil named Mat Hoffman, the 50-minute film is peppered with moments in which Jeff Tremaine's camera stares into the dumbstruck faces of people trying to process stunts so incredible that they might as well be illusions. That some of the stunts happened as many as 24 years ago, and that many of the guys shaking their heads in amazement have performed numerous gravity-defying feats of their own, makes their present-day wonderment, captured in talking-head interviews, all the more poignant. It's one thing for a stuntman to dazzle in the moment. It's another thing to pull off tricks so incredible that a decade or two later people still get goosebumps remembering what it was like to discover photographs of the tricks in trade magazines. Mat Hoffman earned his fame, and served as a trailblazer for his sport, by doing things on a bike that no one else could. Hoffman earned his legend, however, by nailing tricks no one else even imagined.
To read the rest of the review at The Cooler, click here.
Tags: 30 for 30, BMX, ESPN Films, Jeff Tremaine, Mat Hoffman, The Birth of Big Air
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If one of the things that June 17, 1994 reminded us is that we can't watch professional athletes on the playing field and know what kind of people they are, The Two Escobars offers the equally important reminder that no amount of media coverage can provide us with a clear understanding of what these athletes are going through. The latest release in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" series opens with shots of the Colombian soccer team looking less than enthusiastic as they walk onto the pitch in front of a passionate capacity crowd at the Rose Bowl for a crucial match against the United States in the 1994 World Cup. To most, the Colombians look as if they're feeling the pressure of having been upset by Romania in their opening game, and they are. They also look as if they're suffering an unfamiliar lack of confidence, and that's probably right, too. But there's something else there, something that's more difficult to detect because it's not something most of us expect to find at a soccer game. That something else is fear, real fear—the fear of losing something much more significant than a game. To spot that fear, you have to be able to crawl inside the minds of the Colombian players, to understand where they come from, what they're playing for and what they stand to lose. To see that fear, you have to see beyond sports. That's what The Two Escobars does so well.
To read the rest of the review at The Cooler, click here.
Tags: 30 for 30, Andrés Escobar, Colombia, ESPN Films, Jeff Zimbalist, Michael Zimbalist, Pablo Escobar, Soccer, The Two Escobars
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