Hot Docs 2011 Film Reviews

HOT DOCS 2011

Hot Docs in Toronto is arguable the largest documentary festival in North America.  It is impossible to see all the films screened, so the capsule reviews on selected films below will aid you in your choice picks.

The festival runs from April 28th to May 8th 2011.

For the complete listing and program of the films, check the hot docs website at:
http://www.hotdocs.ca/

The spotlight this year is Italy in the made in Italy series.
The other subjects include:
• Women & Women’s Issues
• Art & Artists
• Big Business & Capitalism
• Central and South Asian Cultures & Issues
• Drugs & Addiction
• Fame & Celebrity
• Health & Mental Health
• Jewish Interest
• Middle Eastern Cultures & Issues
• Russian Culture & Issues
• Terrorism & The War on Terror
• Urban Cultures & Issues
• War & Conflict
• Writers
Capsule reviews on Selected Films:

FIGHTVILLE (USA 2011) ****
Directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein

Brutal. Bloody. Beautiful. FIGHTVILLE throws you into the cage with some of the Ultimate Fighting Championship competitors to reveal the raw power and focused determination it takes to emerge a champion.  Directors Tucker and Epperlein focuses on the training and fights of two talented boxers, one who makes it, Dustin and the other, Albert distracted by his troubled life.  Both have troubled backgrounds and fighting appears the best option to release their anger.  But winning involves dedication, training, discipline and bloody beatings.  Their trainer takes no nonsense and the film reveals the trials each of the men involved in caged fighting have to go through.  The directors succeed remarkably in drawing the audience to their subject.  The film works like a ROCKY type film, complete with a climax where Dustin takes to the ring in a championship match.  Exciting and insightful, FIGHTVILLE is the real FIGHT CLUB!

GRAVITY WAS EVERYWHERE BACK THEN (USA 2011) *
Directed by Brent Green

A Louisville man builds his home into a kind of healing machine to try to save his wife diagnose with cancer; years later, a filmmaker reconstructs the house and its deeply romantic story with striking creativity and passion.  But the wife did die and the title of the film is so called because the man died falling off the roof.  Once the wife died, the man hoped the house would bring the wife back or at least have her give some visible sign to him.  The trouble with Green’s film is his subject.  No audience would like to root for losers or loners and Green does not make any attempt to connect the audience to him.  Green also shoots his film in short stops with images flickering giving his film an experimental feel.  The images are often blurry and parts of the house can hardly be distinguished.  Green does not give a reason for why a particular room or construction was built a certain way except his own musings, which are unconvincing.  After 10 minutes or so into the film, Green loses his audience.  The film is not really a documentary either with actors re-enacting all the scenes of the film.  I would have walked out of this one except that I fell asleep.

GRINDERS (Canada 2011) ***
Directed by Matt Gallagher

As described in the documentary on GRINDERS, grinders are poker players that rely totally on the winnings of poker gambling for a living.  They have no other job and make maybe about $500 a day average to survive.  Director Gallagher, an out of job moviemaker is a grinder.  His film documents the lives of several grinders such as Andre (loud, overconfident and a little obnoxious), Daniel (with a wife and daughters who make it with a backer to Vegas for the world tournament) and a poor soul, Lawrence who operates a grinder house.  For a subject of poker which is not so popular with mass audiences, Gallagher achieves the feat of slowly drawing ones interest to the subject and the colourful characters.  The picture of the grinders lifestyle is not a pretty one but the film is fascinating as a poker win.

MAGIC TRIP (USA 2011) ***
Directed by Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney

MAGIC TRIP is the LSD documentary about a group of friends that travel the US on a bus high on the drug.  The group leader is well renowned author Ken Kesey of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST and SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION, both of which were made into films.  They filmed the trip but after all these years, they have not been able to put their film together.  Problems like dialogue synchronization and blurred images are some of them.  Until directors Ellwood and Gibney come along and construct together their road trip film with additional footage.  The additional footage is the only informative bit of the doc informing on the origin of the drug as well as the misuse and misinformation by the government.  The trip just shows the friends doing the stuff of the 60’s like free loving and tripping out.  MAGIC TRIP is quite disjointed but one cannot argue that the film captures the spirit of the group as well as bring back memories of what it was like tripping on acid.

PROJECT NIM (USA 2010) ***
Directed by James Marsh

Acclaimed director, James Marsh of MAN ON WIRE tackles a total different subject in PROJECT NIM.  Marsh tells the tale of a chimp that was taken from its mother and raised in a human family just like a human baby; the experimenters were attempting to show that language is not unique to our species. The question of success of the project depends on the definition of the term language.  If language be just the communication of intention or the ability to form a sentence from words or phrases, then the degree of success of failure would be different.  Director Marsh identifies the issue but his documentary is not concerned on the project but rather on the inhumanities performed on NIM, the chimp.  This is one film that depicts (almost) all the human beings as bad and that the human race is basically quite f***ed up.