The worst thing about almost all of polemicist-documentarian Michael Moore’s movies is when Michael Moore appears in them. Which bodes poorly for Michael Moore in TrumpLand, a film that includes virtually nothing else but Michael Moore. In TrumpLand. Specifically, it follows Moore to Wilmington, Ohio, the county seat of Clinton County. Here, over two nights in the first week of October 2016, Moore presented a rousing speech to a polyglot […]
Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. Today we’re looking at the magnum opus of Professional Oppressed Persecuted Truth-Teller Dinesh D’Souza, a documentary (maybe?) from everyone’s favorite election year. It’s time for Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, nominee for five Razzies, winner of four, […]
Michael Moore is soon to be diving headlong back into politics with his next politically-charged documentary since 2016. Fahrenheit 11/9 (not to be confused with Fahrenheit 9/11 from 2004) tackles the Trump era in his usual comedy-meets-doomsday fashion. No matter what you might think of his documentary content or his politics, there’s no denying that films (and broadly, media) have ripple effects on politics through the effect they have on […]
We’ve hit the end of what been, I think, one of the best summers in a good while, on the threshold of what’s looking to be a pretty solid Oscarbait season. But first comes September, the liminal month, the month of movies not boisterous enough to be summer releases, not aesthetically accomplished enough to be fall releases, and not financially promising enough to bother releasing in a competitive marketplace. And […]
The biggest problem with Strong Island – but oof, what a terrible way to frame it. The movie has problems, of course; very few movies have absolutely no problems. But not so many movies are good at sympathetically displaying a range of human despair in a tight, intimate way that makes you feel like weeping the whole length of the running time, without ever getting away from a profound, noxious […]
Ironically, given that it is a movie expressly and entirely about the communicative power of the moving image, Cameraperson gives us the answer key to understanding everything about it in the form of a title card that precedes any other footage: “For the past 25 years I’ve worked as a documentary cinematographer. I originally shot the following footage for other films, but here I ask you to see it as […]
A review requested by M.C., with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There once was a time when political commentator Ben Stein was… not cool. He was always a bit of a droning blowhard. But he was the droning blowhard you rooted for. He was that square, smug relative who had such a good sense of humor about himself that you still looked forward […]
One of the acknowledged early masterpieces of the American documentary, 1938’s The River isn’t without its limitations on that front, among them being that it demonstrates that the heavy-handed advocacy essay quietly wandering by and pretending like it’s for real totally an unbiased work of non-fiction was with us long before Michael Moore or his various flailing idiot right-wing analogues were even a daydream. Certainly, the part of the film […]
A review requested by a compassionate fellow, brimming with love for his fellow man, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Revisiting a political advocacy documentary whose stated intent was to influence a presidential election years after it failed to do so probably isn’t sporting, regardless of one’s opinion about the politics involved. On the other hand, the 2012 essay film 2016: Obama’s America […]
There was, to begin with, Braveheart. That film’s depiction of violent, manly battles in an undifferentiated Olden Days setting begat Gladiator, and between the two of them, the five Oscars each of them won (overlapping only on Best Picture – they didn’t even win the same Sound award), and the huge amount of money Gladiator made along the way, the pair managed to resurrect the old-fashioned historical action epic for […]
I will confess right off that I was planning to dislike Dirty Wars, and in all honesty, on a strictly intellectual level, there’s a hell of a lot about it that’s dubious. Though directed by Rick Rowley, it is told exclusively from the perspective of co-writer and narrator Jeremy Scahill, correspondent for The Nation magazine, and it’s pretty damn hard not to see all the ways that it’s a particularly […]
On Thursday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces it nominees for the best achievements in the 2012 film year, and for the first time in an age, it’s genuinely unclear what they’re going to pick in many of the categories. Which makes the guessing game part of the season more fun than usual. For the record: last year I went a reasonable but not legendary 83/118 overall, […]
