YOU HAD TO BE THERE: HOW THE TORONTO GODSPELL IGNITED A COMEDY REVOLUTION, SPREAD LOVE & OVERALLS, AND CREATED A COMMUNITY THAT CHANGED THE WORLD (IN A CANADIAN KIND OF WAY)

Directing: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Between The Cycle of Love and You Had to Be There, I’m not sure I have ever experienced such heartwarming uplift strictly from documentary filmmaking—particularly within the space of just a couple of weeks. People expect “feel-good movies” to be fictional narratives, but this are easily the most “feel-good” of movies I’ve seen all year. It’s too bad so few people will actually see them. This is exactly the kind of uncynical storytelling the world needs.

It’s all about sharing love—and in the case of You Had to Be There, it’s love in many directions: cast mates in a 1972 original production of Godspell in Toronto quickly developing deep love and affection for each other, and individually blossoming over ensuing decades to become truly beloved figures in the entertainment industry. To be fair, there are varying levels of beloved-ness, perhaps sitting at the top including Martin Short; Eugene Levy; and Gilda Radner, who remains a mythical figure in comedy circles nearly forty years after her passing. But this original-run cast of Godspell also included Paul Shaffer; Andrea Martin; and Victor Garber (who is now perhaps best known as the ship designer Thomas Andrews in the 1997 Titanic). Also included in that cast—and all of them giving contemporary intervies for You Had to Be There—are Second City veteran Dave Thomas; Jayne Eastwood; local Toronto performer Rudy Webb (the only Black person in the cast, something not discussed here); Valda Aviks; and Avril Chown.

Chown, as it happens, represents the one moment of darkness in You Had to Be There, revealing apparently for the first time, on camera. the reason she did not stay in the entertainment industry for very long. After Godspell, she was cast as the sole woman on a children’s show with five men, and she was repeatedly sexually assaulted. This turned her off of the industry, but she still keeps in touch with that cast—You Had to Be There ends with what appears to be one of a regular reunion between all of them, still close friends, more than fifty years later. What happened to Chown is clearly an important detail to note, but it does not fit very comfortably within the narrative of this story. That’s not to say it needs to be comfortable, far from it—but, director Nick Davis transitions a bit abruptly from that anecdote, straight into how beloved Gilda Radner was.

Given that the Toronto run of Godspell was in 1972—not the first run of the show, but after only the Off-Broadway debut and a London run, both in 1971—it’s not a huge surprise that all the subjects are now in their seventies or older. I found myself thinking about how much longer these wonderful reunions will be able to continue. You Had to Be There is itself thus a deeply appreciated record of this particular history, of a group of actors who went on to do great things from Second City to Saturday Night Live to SCTV to great film roles and much more. Nick Davis is rather playful with the documentary production, starting with the official, full title: You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (in a Canadian Kind of Way). That’s thirty words.

Plenty more people are interviewed for the film, from directors and writers who worked on the play, to a smattering of contemporary, younger artists who speak reverently about the people from the Toronto Godspell. It’s not always clear what connection they have or why they would be especially relevant for inclusion; among the most prominently featured are Lin-Manuel Miranda; Janeane Garofalo; and SNL cast member Heidi Gardner. This rounds out all the interviews a bit, but the clips with present-day interviews with Godspell cast members are by far the most compelling, especially when they are surprised with a video clip of one rehearsal that most of them appear to have no idea ever existed. The emotions and delight it elicits is very touching.

Other than that, and one illegally captured tape recording Martin Short made of a single performance, no footage of this prodiction of Godspell exists. This means a lot of recreation has to happen to break up the talking heads, much of which is rendered in animation flourishes in a very old-school style, kind of like 1970s episodes of Scooby-Doo. Sometimes this is synced to Short’s taped audio, and sometimes it's just matching interview anecdotes. It works fine, if also somewhat transparently a trick for visual filler.

By far more than anything, what makes You Had to Be There work is the chemistry among this cast, how fondly they all remember not just launching their careers with Godspell but decades of resulting friendship. The reunion sequence is the perfect way to conclude this story, as it illustrates a group love that has endured for decades and will live on. I left the theater feeling buoyed by it.

I wish I had been there—disciple clowns and all!

Overall: B+

THE CYCLE OF LOVE

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

If The Cycle of Love isn’t the most earnestly romantic documentary ever made, then it must be close. Director Orlando von Einsiedel does fill about half of the film with narrative recreations of the two lead characters’ pasts, using very pretty young actors and blurring the line between documentary and narrative feature—but, in so doing, he actually intensifies the romance. Much of the literal narration comes from present-day interviews with PK Mahanandia and Lotta von Schedvin, who are also the subjects of the film.

This is the true story of a young man who traveled, in 1977, nearly 7,000 kilometers from Delhi, India to reunite with the traveling Swedish woman he’d fallen in love with in in India at her home in Borås, Sweden. The road distance between these two points is 7,355 km (4,570 miles), but PK was not able to make this trip as a straight shot—he had to bypass Pakistan altogether due to not having a passport, and endured a number of setbacks along the way. He was also offered very moving assistance from kind strangers along the way, allowing him to travel by train in certain segments. What makes his story so distinctive and unique is that he traveled more than half that distance by bicycle.

This couple’s relationship is a matter of public record, but Orlando von Einsiedel’s edit of their story is decidedly coy about their fates. We get present-day interviews with both of them, but we do not see them together. PK is seen in India, and Lotta is seen in a home presumably in Sweden. We see her reading some of the letters PK wrote her while making his journey that took him over four months, and she even comments, through tears, that she hasn’t read them since shortly after receiving them. You spend much of the film wondering if PK didn’t make it all the way there, or maybe he took so long that Lotta was forced to move on and wound up with someone else. It feels very much as though von Einsiedel intended this. The story of this guy riding a bike from India to Europe would be extraordinary no matter what, but amping the intrigue and raising the stakes is what great filmmaking is all about.

Now, is this movie great? I must admit to some ambivalence about it. There is a sort of plaintive tone to much of it, with a pacing that can generously be described as reserved. The Cycle of Love has a 98-minute runtime and it kind of feels like two and a half hours. And yet, by the end it had completely won me over, I was so moved by its purity of heart and uplifting sincerity. It’s extraordinarily rare to see something so completely uncynical.

We do get to see a smattering of film clips and photos from PK’s and Lotta’s youth, but mostly we see flashbacks recreated by actors, who are both decidedly prettier than the real people they are playing: Chirag Lobo as PK; and 24-year-old Norwegian actor Mina Dale as Lotta. We see them meet when Lotta is visiting Delhi after having traveled the so-called “Hippie Trail” for 22 days from Sweden, and she sits for one of PK’s portrait drawings. When Lotta returns to Sweden and PK eventually follows after her on his second-hand bicycle, these very impressive drawn portraits are largely how he supports himself along the way.

Orlando von Einsiedel takes yet another fascinating approach in the construction of this film: Chirag Lobo and Mina Dale are actors, but as we see depictions of PK in the flashback scenes encountering many people along his travels, who are clearly real people and not actors. This raises a lot of questions. Did these people know they were part of a recreation? Did they know Lobo was an actor and not really a guy traveling to Europe to be reunited with the woman he loves? I haven’t found answers yet with the specificity I desire, but it sounds like they simply took a camera crew on a road trip and had conversations with people met along the way, and then creatively and cleverly edited the ineractions into the film’s narrative. Von Einsiedel told The Movable Feast that the real PK traveled along with them, and was moved by experiences not exactly like this own but evidently similar enough.

These sorts of details leave me more impressed with The Cycle of Love as a cinematic accomplishment the more I consider it after the fact. This is a truly unique endeavor, using mostly real people even in recreations made with an actor for a documentary. There may be a solid helping of genuine performance in this film, but its sentiments are entirely genuine. There is even a brief moment of Lobo-as-PK chatting with a diverse array of young people going through letters at a post office, and one of them explains a tattoo to him, which turns out to be in solidarity with a queer friend struggling with the possibility of being disowned by his family. In plenty of other hands, this would come off as corny tokenism, but this is a film of such sincerity that I deeply appreciated it.

There is a quality to The Cycle of Love that might be best described as “you have to be in right mood for it.” And I don’t mean its jarring lack of cynicism and its unapologetic hope for humanity—I mean the somewhat labored way in which the story unfolds. An action movie, this is not; this is the kind of movie you want to quietly marinate in, should that be the vibe that you’re looking for. I must admit that, on this level, I wasn’t quite feeling it for a while. But again, that ending—truly contrived as it was—perfectly landed the plane. If you’ll pardon the discordant metaphor for a movie about a guy on a bike. I left misty-eyed in the best way, and any of the hopeless romantics out there are bound to be moved by PK and Lotta’s incredible story.

You might be taken aback by how charmed you are in the end.

Overall: B+

ARE WE GOOD?

Directing: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

To some people, Marc Maron is endearingly aggravated. To other people, he isn’t. It’s pretty safe to say the former camp will enjoy the documentary Are We Good? It’s probably even safe to say the late director Lynn Shelton would have enjoyed this film, although it likely never would have been made without her, and it certainly would have been a completely different movie had she not died suddenly of acute myeloid leukemia all of two months into the pandemic.

And herein lies the key difference between fans of Marc Maron and people who don’t know him, and how Are We Good? is likely to hit. I was barely familiar with Maron as a standup comic before he started his podcast WTF with Marc Maron in 2009, and I didn’t even learn about the podcast until maybe around 2013. But I had certainly been listening to his twice-weekly podcast for several years by the time Maron was still recording the regular solo intro to his scheduled podcast episode, only days after Shelton’s death. It was heartbreaking to listen to, but in keeping with Maron’s penchant for holding his heart on his sleeve, in ways that ran the gamut of emotions.

The kind of cool trick that director Steven Feinartz does with Are We Good? is show us how Shelton and Maron fell for each other to begin with. An actor friend, as one of several talking heads in this film, refers to Maron as “endearingly fussy,” and says that the more aggravated Maron got, the more it made Shelton laugh. It’s difficult to watch this film and not think about what could have been for these two, who were friends for several years, and then finally allowed themselves to fall into each other. Fans of Marc Maron know well the kind of relationship history he has, and this is one that felt like it could have been the one that truly stuck.

As such, Are We Good? follows two narrative tracks: Maron’s relationship with Lynn Shelton, and particularly how he navigated the grief in the wake of losing her—often in real time, on-camera, and much of it being worked out onstage—and the overall arc of Maron’s career as both a comedian and a podcast host. If you know anything about Maron you know how the podcast was borne of desperation when his comedy career was stalled, and how over just a few short years it both reinvented and reignited his career.

On the other hand, if you know Marc Maron, there’s really nothing to learn from Are We Good? that you didn’t already know. It’s just a pleasant, fun hang with a guy who feel like you know because of this 21st-century concept called parasocial relationships. So what if you don’t know Marc Maron? In that case, this film isn’t really made with you as its target audience. I suppose it’s just as well; the film got special one-night screenings across the country on only October 5 and October 8. I have no idea where it will be found going forward, though presumably it will stream somewhere,

I will say this: Are We Good? is a unique and engaging exploration of grief, how there’s no wrong way to deal with it, and how it affected one of the most lovable straight men who ever existed. That could be the entry point for people unfamiliar with his work. This is a movie squarely aimed at the familiar, however, and while it’s by turns moving and entertaining (and occasionally genuinely funny), it’s fairly short on insight. You’ll get much more out of watching Maron’s own comedy specials, particularly the most recent couple of them (which can be streamed on HBO Max).

I had a good time. I’m glad I went out to see it. But it also left me eager to re-watch the comedy specials, which are far more rightly constructed and have a more clearly defined narrative arc. This illustrates the difference between a comic who has truly honed the skill of his craft, and a documentary filmmaker who is just pretty good at it.

I guess the answer is: yeah, pretty good.

Overall: B

PIECE BY PIECE

Directing: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Animation: B+

Pharrell Williams really wants you to know how pleased with himself he is that he wants the documentary about him and his music career to be a LEGO movie. Lego Pharrell comments on it multiple times, on camera.

It’s cute. And undeniably entertaining. It’s also a transparent tactic, a way for Williams to put up a wall between him and his viewers, so we never really get to know him. Piece by Piece is little more than a broad overview of his three-decade career in hip hop and pop, touching on all of the key beats, tracks and singles Williams worked on or released. Quite the parade of superstars he’s worked with appears onscreen as LEGO talking heads (Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Busta Rhymes, Timbaland, Jay-Z, and countless more, including Chad Hugo, Williams’s other half in The Neptunes), none of them given enough screen time to offer anything in the way of real insight.

I went to this movie already knowing to expect this. But director and co-writer Morgan Neville really won me over in the first half of the 93-minute runtime, employing clever visual flourishes that can only be possible by animating the stories being told. Some great visual gags get sprinkled into the narrative, some of them LEGO-specific: a young Pharrell watching Star Trek attempts the Vulcan salute, only to discover it’s not possible with his cylindrical LEGO hands. Plenty of other whimsical delights pass across the screen, particularly when talking heads throw out a hypothetical aside, such as E.T. freaking everyone out at the mall.

So, for a good while, I was thinking Piece by Piece was actually much more fun than I had been led to believe. The LEGO animation is very colorful and imaginative, making this a singular moviegoing experience, even among documentaries that play with form and genre.

But later, things get genuinely weird, and not necessarily in a good way. Making a big deal out of the fact that Williams’s wife, Helen Lasichanh, is giving her first-ever on-camera interview doesn’t quite mean as much when we only ever see her as a Lego Lady. And when the content turns serious, it’s easy to become ambiguous about the use of LEGO to tell this story. There’s a moment when Pharrell breaks down crying, in gratitude for all the friends and family that stood by him over the years. A LEGO version of Morgan Neville—who gets a surprising lot of screen time—offers him a box of tissue. Seeing this scene play out among LEGO pieces is fundamentally ridiculous and undermines the impact.

And I haven’t even mentioned the LEGO representations of moments of historic import, including the Martin Luther King rally on the National Mall, and even the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. I saw these scenes flash onscreen and thought: okay, this is bonkers. Outside of these visual references, the vast majority of Piece by Piece renders its subjects with the same childlike joy that we’ve seen in nearly all the characters in previous LEGO movies. Their vocal delivery, as sitting interview subjects, indicates their expressions are much more neutral most of the time, and yet their LEGO selves typically speak with some manner of smiles on their faces.

After a while, this stuff creates a unique sort of cognitive dissonance, even more pronounced by the use of this gimmick to create some distance between Pharrell Williams and those who are interested in him. Certainly nothing in Piece by Piece reveals what makes him tick, or even gives much of a sense of who he truly is as a person. The whole exercise feels like an attempt at having his cake and eating it too: he let someone make a movie about him, but he didn’t have to reveal anything genuine about himself. I’d have settled for some insight into how becoming one of the first superstar producers ever to exist really affected him on a deep level, but, no such luck.

In the end, we’ll just have to let Pharrell Williams’s work speak for itself, which it does plenty well with or without Piece by Piece. As I write this, I am listening to the soundtrack, packed with all the biggest hits he produced along with five new tracks, and that is a spectacular experience, highly recommend. This is a man with jaw dropping talent, in a movie animated by people with incredible talent, and the two just don’t much inform each other. At least we get clever gags like “PG Spray” used in the room where Snoop Dogg is interviewed, keeping things family-friendly in a story about a guy your young children don’t likely know or care about.

Clap along if you feel like LEGO’s what you want to do,

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: MERCHANT IVORY

Directing: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

How could I have gone this long, literally decades, without fully registering that Ismail Merchant, the producer half of the legendary filmmaking duo (and production company) Merchant Ivory, was an Indian man? I need to start paying attention! At this rate, I’ll never become a bona fide elegant gay elder of refined taste.

There was sure a lot of those at the SIFF screening of this film I just attended. This, I suppose, is one of the pitfalls of a documentary portrait of towering figures late in their lives: who else is left around to remember them? Or, at least, to remember their early days?

Ismail Merchant has been dead now for 19 years, having died in 2005, at age 68, after surgery for abdominal ulcers. Thus ended a personal and professional partnership with James Ivory—an American man born in 1928 who grew up in small-town Oregon—that lasted more than forty years. With Merchant producing and Ivory directing, much of the time also working with longtime collaborators writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and composer Richard Robbins, they made 44 films together.

A large number of them, of course, were British period films—the very thing they became most well known for, although they did make some films with contemporary settings. The most enduringly famous, however, included A Room with a View (1985); Maurice (1987); Howard’s End (1992); and The Remains of the Day (1993). Many years later, in 2018 James Ivory became the oldest person ever, at age 89, to win an Oscar, for his Adapted Screenplay for Call Me By Your Name, a film that really fits into the Merchant Ivory pantheon, particularly as an updated gay love story.

The gayness of it all is largely explored in this new documentary feature film, Merchant Ivory, directed and co-written by Stephen Soucy. He interviews Ivory himself extensively, inserts many clips of archival interviews with Merchant, and features a star studded array of other subjects from the duo’s storied film history: Hugh Grant, Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson, a characteristically spitfire Vanessa Redgrave, as well as some of the writers and costume designers of the films, among others. There are also some notable absences, including Daniel Day-Lewis (hardly a surprise; he hasn’t given an interview to anyone in years), and Anthony Hopkins, who sued Merchant Ivory for unpaid wages after his performance in the 2009 film The City of Your Final Destination. It was the last of four Merchant Ivory films he was in.

Anyway, Maurice was a groundbreaking film in mainstream gay cinema, especially having come right after the success of A Room with a View. Many of the interview subjects discuss how rightly impressed they are by that accomplishment. Conversely, James Ivory himself is relatively cagey about questions regarding his sexuality—fairly frank in answering some questions, but somewhat evasive in others. Merchant Ivory is, at least in part, a fascinating portrait of a privileged sort of existence among gay men who once lived not exactly closeted, but as an open secret. Ivory and Merchant might as well have been a longtime married couple, but their relationship was not without volatility, with both of them (but evidently, especially Merchant) taking on other temporary lovers as time went on.

The thing about this documentary in particular, is it would qualify as a pretty niche interest. It’s for lovers of sophisticated period dramas, and for anyone interested in the subtle history of queerness in cinema. That does make for a Venn diagram with significant overlap. But outside of that, I’m not sure how much interest this film will hold, especially among younger audiences (and by “younger” I mean, say, younger than 50). Overall cinephiles may find it interesting.

I certainly did, and it compelled me to make a list of Merchant Ivory films I want to revisit, or see for the first time. I have only seen a handful, but of course only a select few would be considered essential in the oeuvre. That said, Merchant Ivory the documentary is fairly simple and straightforward, a compelling document but also mostly something to serve as a jumping-off point. The films they made have a sumptuousness that inherently makes them more interesting than the filmmakers themselves.

The powerhouse Hollywood couple you knew little about.

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: THE RIDE AHEAD

Directing: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B
Editing: A

There’s a moment in The Ride Ahead, about a wheelchair user who in his early twenties uses a communication device to interview other high-profile disability activists and personalities for life advice, when its primary subject, Samuel Habib, is seen observing as a woman at an airport speaks to him off camera. By this point in the film, we’ve gotten to know Samuel well enough that we quickly pick up his irritation, even before his father speaks up for him. The woman off camera is speaking to him is blatantly ignorant of her own deep condescention, to the point that his dad, Dan, pointedly asks her to speak to Samuel like the 21-year-old young man that he is, rather than like he’s five years old.

One can only hope that some people will see a The Ride Ahead and then think twice about how they speak to people with disabilities, and gain some understanding that speech impairment has no correlation with intelligence or maturity. It certainly made me think about how I have related to people with disabilities in the past. A similar moment in the film involves Samuel managing to get in front of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden at a campaign stop in Samuel’s home state of New Hampshire in 2020. Biden speaks to Samuel with relative respect—which is undermined by his decision to stroke Samuel’s cheek. In Samuel’s voiceover narration, entirely spoken through his communication device, he observes: “Why did Joe Biden stroke my face? Weird.”

How many non-disabled people have seen The Ride Ahead and wondered whether they were more impressed with it than they should be, just because it was made in part by a disabled person? This is me, raising my hand. Such things can be difficult to gauge, when you’re aware of internal biases but can’t view yourself objectively. I can only speak to the genuine experience I had with this movie, which is something easily recommended highly to anyone. I also had what I can only assume to be an unusual experience, having also gone to see it with a friend who is a wheelchair user, and observing her reactions, quite clearly feeling validated at a regular cadence.

But here is one of the salient points of The Ride Ahead: people with disabilities have life experiences as diverse as people without disabilities, while facing common challenges in a world that resists fully integrating them, and subject to universalities of human feelings, emotions and ambitions. To get more specific, if you set aside Samuel’s mobility issues and speech impairment, he’s just like any typical American 21-year-old man (well, a straight one, anyway): he wants to go to school, he wants to live independently, he wants to find a girlfriend, he wants to get laid, he wants to watch baseball games.

He also wants to talk to other people with disabilities about how they manage to navigate their own challenges, both different from and similar to his. Samuel mounts two cameras on his 350-pound wheelchair, one facing outward to represent his point of view, and one turned inward to face him. This yields a lot of interesting footage (including, pointedly, the people who condescend to him off camera), but The Ride Ahead also includes cameras held by separate crew, a detail the film never directly addresses.

Samuel is credited as co-director of this film, alongside his father Dan Habib, who is already an established documentary filmmaker. Something that can be easy to lose sight of, because of Samuel being a genuinely impressive young man, is the amount of privilege has also has. How many other kids in their early twenties with the same or a similar condition would have the resources to create a movie like this? That said, sometimes you can use your privilege for good, and I would argue this film is an example of that.

Samuel isn’t exactly a genius—he notes that he gets a 3.0 grade point average, which is fine. But this is largely the point: he’s also not an idiot, and one of the problems is that people treat him like one. One of the people he interviews, Broadway actor Ali Stroker, talks to him about having “ninja patience,” a phrase that clearly struck him, as he repeats it again later. It’s something we all could learn, including when conversing with someone who uses a communication device.

Other people Samuel speaks to, some virtually and some in person, include Maysoon Zayid, a Muslim woman comedian with cerebral palsy; Bob Williams, a principal advisor on the Americans with Disabilities Act along with many other disability activism credits; Andrew Peterson, a marathon runner with slow speech due to fetal alcohol syndrome; and the late, legendary disability rights advocate and wheelchair user Judy Heumann (also featured prominently in the 2020 Netflix documentary Crip Camp), among others. The common thread among all of them is being regularly underestimated, and they all offer their own, varying takes on rising above it.

People with disabilities generally bristle at being pitied, and Samuel Habib has made a film in which he is emblematic of the ambition, drive and defiance of someone who simply redefines what a “normal” life is (“What the hell is ‘normal,’ anyway?”). No one with even a minor inkling of who Samuel is would ever reasonably pity him. It’s tempting to paint him as just a “regular guy,” but regular guys don’t get films made and released. This movie alone stands as an accomplishment, Samuel arguably also being a “nepo baby” notwithstanding. We see his slow but clearly locked-in engagement with the making of this film onscreen, from his education to how he dictates his interview questions for his dad to program into his communication device.

The Ride Ahead clocks in at a tight 93 minutes, including several brief animated interludes that help keep things lively. It’s as entertaining as it is illuminating, and I can think of few better uses of an hour and a half of anyone’s time.

If a rising tide lifts all boats, Samuel is one of the ones making the waves.

Overall: A-

BAD RIVER

Directing: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B

When you hear the name “Bad River Band,” if you have no association or history with Native Americans (like me), you might easily mistake it for a classic rock band. Except this is Bad, not Little River Band, and it’s “Bad River” as in Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Today I learned that a “band” is a smaller group, of varying size, within a tribe—and, there seems to be a whole lot of nuance to this, and how it is defined, that requires a breadth of understanding that certainly surpasses the parameters of a movie review.

Suffice it to say that Bad River Band is a very organized group in Wisconsin, with their own U.S. government website, detailing both their status as a federally recognized tribe of the Ojibwe (as they are mostly known in Canada) or Chippewa (as they are mostly known in the U.S.), and their long fight against “Line 5,” an oil pipeline by Canadian company Enbridge, which runs oil through much of the U.S. around the Great Lakes. This includes Minnesota, both the Lower and Upper Peninsulas of Michigan, and Wisconsin, although “Line 5” specifically refers to its route from Superior, Wisconsin (at the westernmost point of Lake Superior), under the Straits of Mackinac (the narrow waterway separating Lake Michigan and Lake Huron), then through Michigan’s Lower Peninsula to oil refineries in Sarnia, Ontario. Specifically for the purposes of this documentary feature film, Bad River, it runs straight through the Bad River Reservation, which is located in Northern Wisconsin on the southwestern shores of Lake Superior.

There is indeed a literal river of the same name in this location, through which Line 5 runs, threatening an inevitable oil spill, the alteration of the river’s route, and then spilling its contamination into Lake Superior. You can read a three-page handout online about Bad River’s lawsuit against Enbridge over Line 5, which, honestly, might do a better job at spreading awareness of this clearly vital issue, than this serviceable documentary feature about it will. It can be argued that documentaries have greater reach than, say, printed materials, but how many of you have even heard of this film? Well, all of you reading this have now, but that’s not going to put much of a bump in the number of people who watch the movie. It helps spread awareness, at least.

And sometimes there’s just an unfortunate difference in the presentation of urgent information in print versus a visual medium. For much of Bad River the film, I failed to connect, not because of the content but because of its presentation: rapid-fire editing meant to seem “snappy” but coming across as rushed; drone shots of Bad River with quick fast-forward zooms. It felt a little too much like I was watching a standard-issue reality show like The Bachelor or Below Deck, which felt a little incongruous.

Much of Bad River quite rightly focuses on centuries of Native American resistance, but specifically contextualized in the history of Bad River Band, including the all-too common stories of genocide and forced assimilation into Christian culture, including literally stealing children and placing them into Catholic schools, where they were often horribly abused. I’m not proud to admit that I found myself thinking: we know this history already, have been told about it many times, what’s different about this story? But, then I caught myself: the fact that these shameful histories bear repeating never diminishes, and serves as a reminder of the generational trauma that undergirds their resistance today. Side note: this is a great example of how Canada, often lionized as the country with a greater moral compass than the U.S., has a history no better than ours when it comes to this stuff—and they are just a callous in their treatment of Indigenous peoples today, if it serves such interests as a corporation’s bottom line.

A very large number of Bad River Band people are interviewed for this film, which greatly personalizes it, on both a collective and individual level. By the end, I did find myself deeply moved, with this film’s novel approach to closing scenes: we see each person’s answer to the question of what they would say to their descendants, many generations from now. The answers vary greatly but have a common through line of love and hope, and if you look at it from the point of view of those descendants they’re speaking to, it’s a literalization of being spoken to by your ancestors. I can’t deny a pretty cynical outlook, myself—both the U.S. and Canada’s histories of relations with Indigenous people, clear to the present day, doesn’t exactly bode well. But that doesn’t lessen the need for resistance, and if nothing else, this film is but one example of a multi-pronged, years-long strategy.

There’s a lot here worth protecting.

Overall: B

ANSELM

Directing: C+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C+
Music: B

It’s not often that the experience of a film so closely resembles getting a dose of chloroform. I suppose that’s hyperbole, but I was certainly sedated. I truly could not keep myself awake during Anselm.

Art is subjective, right? I hesitate to say this makes Anselm a bad movie. And there were moments, when I managed to stay awake, that I was genuinely astonished and amazed. Anselm Kiefer, a German painter and sculptor who is now 79 years old, is seen in this film working on many of his countless works of art—this guy is incredibly prolific. And makes tactile, three-dimensional pieces on canvases so huge, often twice his height and double again the width, that countless of his pieces are seen, both stored and in progress, in a gigantic warehouse. He gets around the space riding on a bicycle.

In one sequence, Kiefer is seen melting metals down into liquids, then pouring it from a bucket—using a pulley system operated from a safe distance—directly onto a canvas lying flat on the floor. It’s genuinely fascinating, and makes you yearn to find the finished piece, wherever it is now, and touch it. In fact, Kiefer evidently has so many pieces in a quasi-abstract style that is very much my jam, I would be first in line to an exhibit were I to find out there was one near me. Seeing the art in person, I am sure, would be very stimulating indeed, on both visual and tactile levels.

Which is all to say, I don’t think my response to the film Ansel has anything to do with Ansel Kiefer at all. Rather, it has to do with the film’s director Wim Wenders, who once made a name for himself with eighties films like Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire. And, to be fair, the critical consensus with Anselm is very high praise indeed—and I don’t begrudge anyone responding to this film in such a way. Still, I have to speak my truth, and my truth is that this movie literally sedated me.

It’s not like I was operating on lack of sleep or anything. I was perfectly alert before going into the theater, and woke right up when the movie ended (when I was also relieved it was over). There’s something about the smooth, gliding movements of the camera as it passes through Kiefer’s works of art, alternating between a soothing, quiet score, and much longer shots of total silence. It’s the visual equivalent of being rocked to sleep.

The theater where I saw this movie, at 7:30 on a Friday night, was surprisingly full, and I found myself looking around to see if I could get any sense of how the rest of the audience was reacting to it. I couldn’t tell if anyone else was nodding off, but it did strike me that I could not hear anyone eating popcorn. It did feel like, in one way or another, the rest of the audience was also being put under some kind of spell.

It should be noted, also, that Anselm is being presented in 3D. I feel compelled to mention the 2012 documentary Pina, featuring dance tributes to German choreographer Pina Bausch. That film was also presented in 3D, the first documentary feature I had ever seen in that format, and I was truly blown away by it, completely held in its thrall. I actually came to Anselm with Pina very much in mind, thinking: if a documentary must be presented in 3D, an examination of art is the way to do it. How much closer can you get to feeling like you’re in the same room with it, without actually being there?

The stark difference really comes down to tone. Pina was a film of action, a kind of documented series of interpretive dances. Anselm, by contrast, is a visual catalog of stationery objects. I don’t dislike museums, but they do have a tendency to tire me out surprisingly quickly; I get fatigued, as though all that art has tested the limits of my brain function. This was essentially my response to Anselm, just much more severe. I hadn’t been this powerless to sleep since I was anesthetized for a colonoscopy.

My best theory is that it simply had to do with the environmental context: a movie that lulled me to sleep, the 3D format giving it a heightened realism, in a very dark movie theater. I suspect this film, ironically, might be more effective seen in 2D at home. If nothing else, it introduced me to an artist I had never heard of, whose art itself I actually love.

I didn’t actually want to take a nap, I swear!

Overall, what I actually saw: B-

ORLANDO: MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY

Directing: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Within the first few minutes of Orlando: My Political Biography, one of the young people sitting in the row behind my said, “This movie is so French.” Indeed,

The person who said it seemed mildly amused, not particularly irritated. I’ll say that this film reached me a bit more successfully as it went on, but also that it regularly lost me, then pulled me back in, then lost me again, then pulled me back in again. Some of this was, perhaps, indeed its very French-ness. I suspect some of it was that I was almost certainly the oldest person in that audience, a gender-nonconforming elder receiving an interpretive lesson on how today’s trans and nonbinary youth approach gender identity.

To call Orlando: My Political Biography “high concept” would be an understatement. Writer-director Paul B. Preciado, who is himself 53 years old (and, importantly, a trans man) assembled 26 trans and nonbinary people to introduce themselves by name on camera, declare that they are “playing Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” and wear a ruffled collar while doing so. This is all a riff on Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography, which might work better should you have read the novel recently, or at all. I have never read it, but the film makes many references to how the novel’s namesake protagonist famously suddenly switches genders midway through the story. It does not, however, make any reference to Tilda Swinton playing the role in a 1992 film adaptation.

It should be noted that the 26 subjects featured in the film range from 8 to 70 years old, which would suggest a broad range of ages, but there are only a group of three kids, and one 70-year-old. There’s a couple of clearly middle-aged people, but the majority of them are clearly young, ranging from their teens to their twenties. But there is intention to this as well: the subjects on the edges of this spectrum serve as both contrasts and anchors for the others, who become a collective portrait of contemporary trans and nonbinary experience, of a kind of defiant joy, in the face of persistent societal pressures.

In a sort of parallel to blurring gender lines, Preciado blurs the line between subject and performer, having his subjects recite lines—sometimes directly from the novel; sometimes other written material—as well as having his subjects simply share their thoughts and experiences. The early scenes are perhaps the most avant-garde, which unfortunately makes them the least inviting. At one point, a subject essentially makes out with the trunk of a tree.

This film is garnering rave reviews, but I can’t help but wonder who will be that into it, outside those who are both extensively literate and academically interested in gender. This Orlando features a few funny moments for levity, but is for the most part a very highbrow exercise. I find myself imagining college students in a Gender Studies class patting themselves on the back for how brilliant they think it is, while neglecting more effectively straightforward documentaries about trans history, like Disclosure (2020) or Paris Is Burning (1990).

Don’t get me wrong: I can easily see why some people love Orlando: My Political Biograph, which is genuinely unusual in what it captures in trans pride and trans joy, as well as its cross section of individuals whose very existence transcends the binary, the assumption of shame regarding certain body parts, or the historic insistence that transness necessitates surgery. For all I know, this film is something for contemporary trans and nonbinary people to connect to; I cannot speak for them. All I can say is whether I managed to connect with it, and at its most experimental, I could not.

The film does feature some clips of the earliest post-operation transgender women to speak to the media, and when Orlando connects that history to the present day, and then features a few young trans and nonbinary children as beacons of the future, then it connects with me. For viewers with just the right amount of patience, this film does have its rewards.

A bit esoteric on the approach.

Overall: B

STOP MAKING SENSE 40th Anniversary Rerelease

Directing: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Music: A

Several times while watching Stop Making Semse, the now-classic, cult favorite Talking Heads concert film, I almost thought I was looking at Cillian Murphy. David Byrne, the lead singer of the Talking Heads—which have not released an album of original music as a band in 35 years—was 32 years old at the time of this concert’s filming, in December 1983. (Hence the “40th anniversary” moniker, I guess, even though the film was originally released in October 1984). Cillian Murphy is 47 now. He’d better get on it if he’s ever going to star in a biopic. I’d be there in a flash, anyway.

I have a curious personal history with this band. In spite of collecting the entire discography of many singers and bands from the seventies and eighties, I have never owned any album by the Talking Heads. And yet, as a lover of film, I have genuinely loved both concert films with David Byrne as lead performer. David Byrne’s American Utopia was my 8th-favorite movie of 2020. Having now seen Stop Making Sense in a theater, I think I am just slightly partial to American Utopia, which is, as a recording of a Broadway performance, is much more of a choreographed stage production.

They do make great companion pieces, I think. In 2020, I marveled at David Byrne as an exceptional live vocalist, particularly at the age of 67. Turns out, this was nothing new. To say Byrne is an odd man is an understatement, but his stage presence is undeniable, and his unique singing style still manages to blend perfectly well with backup singer harmonies.

There must be something to the quality of The Talking Heads’s back catalogue, as well as their power over an audience, considering how much I love watching them perform, in spite of having only cursory familiarity with the material. I know the tunes to “Psycho Killer” and “Burning Down the House” and “Once In a Lifetime,” of course, but Stop Making Sense is full of songs I am unaware of having heard anywhere else, and still I am just as into the next one as I am the last.

The presentation of Stop Making Sense is a simple conceit, but a very effective one. It opens with Byrne alone, performing “Psycho Killer” with nothing but a boom box and an acoustic guitar. For the next song, “Heaven,” he sings only with Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth. And so it goes with the following songs, each with a new instrument added: drums by Chris Frantz; guitar (and later keyboards) by Jerry Harrison; and an expanding number of supporting instrumentalists. Stagehands either carry or roll out their equipment ahead of time, while Byrne continues performing in front of them.

Even at the age of 32, Byrne’s energy and stamina are stunning. Like all the band members, he sweats a good amount, but never shows any signs of tiring, particularly when it comes to his vocals. He sounds incredible from start to finish.

So: is it “the best concert film of all time,” as considered by many critics? Who am I to argue? Granted, this strikes me as wildly objective. If the Talking Heads’s music doesn’t speak to you, would you still align with this perspective? Granted, this film is also known for some technical innovations, as in its digital audio techniques. I suppose that means this could be called “the Citizen Kane of concert films.” Does that make it the best? Well, it’s excellent, anyway.

If nothing else, it certainly holds up, incredibly well. I find myself wondering what it might be like to watch in a house theater full of fans. I watched this at a 4:20 p.m. screening, with one single other person in the theater. I was super into the music, moving a bit to it, in my sleep. The young woman two seats down from me was not so much as tapping her foot.

I’m glad I got to see it in a theater. There’s no question that, nearly empty theater notwithstanding, it was a far more absorbing experience than it would have been watching at home. I had a blast.

You don’t have to be a Talking Heads fan, but it helps.

Overall: A-