Doesn’t the summer movie season usually start in late May? Didn’t Captain America already kick it off almost a month ago and is Spider-Man giving it another kickstart now? One thing is for sure, hardly any film wants to go up against him so the documentaries at DOXA get some extra and deserved attention.
Here’s the list:
The Amazing Spider-Man 2: 3 stars
Joe: 3 ½
DOXA documentary film festival: various
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2: Good to see they’ve avoided some of the problems I had with #1. There’s a better balance this time between the action scenes and the romantic story. The 3-D looks better and brighter. There’s more humor and the film is generally more fun. However, that only elevates it to slightly better. Among the problems: it’s too long; there’s one too many super villains and the story often feels disjointed and overcrowded, thereby impeding any emotional involvement. Fanboys will probably enjoy it; others will feel like outsiders looking in.
Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are back as Peter Parker (Spider-Man when dressed right) and his girlfriend Gwen Stacey. They’re a sweet couple but don’t generate any heat. His search for answers about his father who disappeared is back too and generates a fairly involving mystery. And there’s a parallel father-son story around an old friend he hasn’t seen in 10 years, the heir to the OsCorp industrial empire. Played with upstaging vigor and petulance by Dane DeHaan, he turns into the Green Goblin when Spider-Man refuses to share his atomically-mutated blood. Meanwhile, a worker (Jaime Foxx) falls into a vat of genetically-altered eels and comes out as Electro and causes chaos in Times Square. Paul Giamatti plays a third villain, also a menace in the streets of New York. Canadian Colm Feore plays a relatively-normal sinister executive scheming away in the OsCorp board meetings.
There are great special effects here, created in L.A. and Vancouver. Spidey swoops joyously among the high-ride buildings. Holograms welcome us into one building. There’s a terrific information search on a desktop that works like the screen of a smart phone. And, of course, the usual bashing about the streets by trucks, buses and at one point about a dozen cop cars crashing into a pile. This is the second Marvel Comics movie this year; there are two more coming and judging by the hints in this one, more Spider-Man films already planned. (Scotiabank, The Dolphin, The Dunbar and pretty well everywhere in the suburbs) 3 out of 5
JOE: Here’s another Southern gothic; even stronger than Blue Ruin from last week because these people are mired in a bog of hopelessness and don’t know how to pull themselves out. Most of what they try just makes their situation worse. And yet, for us, it’s compelling to watch. Their lives in rural Texas are vividly depicted and Nicolas Cage reminds us how good an actor he can be.
He’s Joe, an ex-con (unjustly he claims), client of the local brothel and now the boss of a crew that poisons trees. (Lumber companies can’t cut them unless they’re dead.) He becomes a sort of surrogate father to a teenager (Tye Sheridan, as natural as when he befriended Matthew McConaughey in Mud) who comes around looking for work. Joe explains for instance how a cigarette lighter can lure girls and even lets the boy’s perpetually-drunk father work there. He’s got control issues though. “What keeps me alive is restraint,“ he says. “It keeps me from hurtin’ people.” Well, you know where that’s going to go. The film is gritty, completely unsentimental and not at all judging as it explores the everyday struggles of these white trash. The characters make it work. There is restraint in Cage’s performance. Also notable is a local homeless man who plays the drunk. He comes off as real because he was. He died not long after. (Abbotsford Town Centre and video on demand) 3 ½ out of 5
DOXA: The annual festival of documentary films has, judging by my read of the catalogue, a superb and wide selection screening now until May 11. I’ve seen a few already and recommend some today, and more next week, including the one that’s gotten a great deal of publicity already, A Brony Tale. It’s about men (and a few women) who’ve made a cult out of TV’s My Little Pony. It screens twice on the festival’s last day but you might want to get tickets early because it’s definitely 20% cooler.
These choices are all from the first week but check out more yourself in the attractive catalogue or at the website: www.doxafestival.ca
1971: This might be my favorite so far. It presents a piece of history like a movie, a heist thriller perhaps or, as one speaker says, like a spy novel.
At the height of the Viet Nam war a group of activists in a suburb of Philadelphia broke into an FBI office, stole files and sent copies to the Washington Post and other newspapers. Shades of Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning. What was revealed was proof of an illegal program by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to spy on protesters, students, even a Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The activists were never caught and in this film speak publicly for the first time, explaining why they did it and how. The film illustrates with tense re-creations and great news clips from the time.
DAMNATION: This is intensely relevant in BC as we’re debating Site C and looking ahead to renegotiating the Columbia River treaty with the US. It looks at the damage done by dams to the rivers they’re on and to the fish in them. Since the advent of a dam building mania that started over 100 years ago, more the 75,000 have been erected, many are now obsolete and a few have been taken down. The film documents a movement that has grown to decommission more. One politician calls them “a lunatic fringe” but the film states their case clearly and logically. It concentrates on salmon and steelhead and leaves that other problem, silt accumulation, to almost an afterthought. But as an exposé of environmental destruction and sometimes “cultural genocide,” it is extremely well-researched.
CRAZYWATER is a new NFB production that looks at the effect of alcohol among aboriginals in Canada. It’s the most intimate study I’ve seen outside of a few fictional films. There are stories of hairspray and solvent drinking in Inuvik. A woman in Vancouver tells how her children saw her “turning tricks” to support her habit. Many of the most moving stories are from right here, in Oppenheimer Park, at Cordova and Heatley and at the Union Gospel Mission. A man recalls, at age six, searching for his dad to ask him to come home. The film starts with grim stories, tries to explain why they happen (lingering effects of residential schools and loss of culture are prominent) and builds to a hopeful ending.
THIS AIN’T NO MOUSE MUSIC: Definition: bland music that’s “cheap, not real.” It’s the term you’ll hear from Chris Strachwitz, the German immigrant who fell in love with American roots music and for over 50 years has been promoting it on Arhoolie, the record company he started in California.
He discovered blues great Mance Lipscomb, explored Cajun, Appalachian and Mexican music and was the first to record Country Joe and his Fixin’ To Die Rag. He also made films to showcase the artists and there are generous examples here including a wonderful zydeco toe-tapper from the Savoy Family. Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt, others and, of course, Chris himself talk about his influence and stories behind the music you hear.
PETE SEEGER: A SONG AND A STONE: In honor of the legendary folk singer and activist who died just recently, DOXA has dusted off this 1972 documentary. Seeger was at his prime, as you’ll see from many concert clips, protest rallies and just being himself. In whole or in part, there are some 30 songs, including a stirring We Shall Overcome at a march in Washington. A highlight is his backstage jamming with Johnny Cash who fought to have him on his TV show despite the blacklist he was under. Seeger seems ever optimistic in this film, never getting angry and slipping in his political thoughts very gently.
NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT: Also out of the archives, this 2011 film takes us to the driest place on earth, the Atacama Desert in Chile.
Astronomers watch the heavens from there. Archeologists find 3,000-year old rock drawings from ancient caravans. And women search for human remains. In the 1970s, the Pinochet regime turned an abandoned mining complex into a concentration camp for political prisoners. Many were never seen again. The film is a dissertation on memory and the past. It’s lovely both in its pictures and its intelligence.