June 2024 documentary review 10-pack: On January 6, a pioneering 1970s pornographer, a road trip through Oregon, and two looks at Israel/Palestine

Reviewing 'The Sixth,' 'Gasoline Rainbow,' 'The Blue Angels,' 'Queen of the Deuce,' 'How to Rob a Bank' and five other recent documentaries.

Last month, I wrote capsule reviews of ten new documentaries and decided to make that a monthly feature. So here are my reviews of ten documentaries (well, nine, plus one pseudo-doc) released in the last couple of weeks.

Without further ado… 

The Sixth 

I’m not sure how many different documentaries I’ve seen about the events of January 6 since they happened three and a half years ago, but I’m guessing that number is around ten. Most of them had nothing new to say and showed little or nothing that I didn’t know just from watching it on TV that day. 

The Sixth, though, is different and better than all the others. Directed by the duo of Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine, it’s built almost entirely from archival footage and the testimony of six people, including Rep. Jamie Raskin and photojournalist Mel D. Cole, about what happened that day. And the footage truly shows what violent, unhinged monsters those rioters were that day. 

As numerous reports have pointed out, the doc arrived with almost no hype, with A24 burying it on VOD channels. I watched it on Hoopla, the streaming service you can get with your library card. I don’t think there’s any political conspiracy afoot; I think A24 didn’t have faith in the box office potential of a January 6 movie this late, after all the others. But it’s the best doc of its kind and one of the best of the year. 

Gasoline Rainbow

One of my favorite films of the pandemic period was Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, which debuted at Sundance in 2020 and landed on VOD that spring. Directed by the brother duo of Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross, it purported to depict the final night in the life of a Vegas dive bar that was going out of business, and most of its running time consisted of barflies and waitresses just shooting the shit with each other. The whole thing was hypnotic and arrived at just the right time. 

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets was not, in fact, a documentary since it contained fictionalized elements, although it certainly looked like one. Now the Rosses are back with Gasoline Rainbow, which uses a similar conceit if a tick more fictionalized. 

The film, now streaming on Mubi, follows five teenagers on a road trip from their small town in Eastern Oregon to the West Coast, stopping in Portland and elsewhere. It’s not quite as exhilarating as Bloody Nose, but it’s still quite a ride, with amazing visuals and well-chosen subjects. 

The Blue Angels 

Is this documentary, directed by Paul Crowder, which tells the story of the U.S. Navy flight demonstration squadron, transparent military propaganda, and a recruitment tool? Yes, it is. Is it also very exciting and great-looking? Also yes. 

The film tells the personal stories of some members of the Blue Angels. But you’re here to see the flight footage, which the film has plenty of. It was all shot with IMAX cameras, and the film, before its recent arrival on Amazon Prime Video, got a release in IMAX cinemas, and I regret missing it there. 

Any resemblance to Top Gun is undoubtedly intentional, and one of the stars of Top Gun Maverick, the suddenly ubiquitous Glen Powell, is a producer.

Queen of the Deuce 

I’m a sucker for a documentary about an obscure colorful character from history, so I was all in on Valerie Kontakos’ documentary about Chelly Wilson, the woman who ran a series of porn theaters in 1970s New York City. 

Chelly checks off a long list of identity boxes, some of them contradictory: She was a Holocaust survivor from Greece, she was gay but married men, she was Jewish but celebrated Christmas. And like most in her business at the time, she ran afoul of obscenity laws. The film’s interview subjects include her children, who can’t seem to believe that these true stories of their mother happened. 

Fans of the David Simon HBO series The Deuce will recognize and appreciate this world, but I was reminded of Circus of Books, the incredible documentary a couple of years back about an unassuming middle-aged Jewish couple who ran a gay pornography bookstore in West Hollywood and were profiled by their documentarian daughter. Queen of the Deuce is on all VOD channels. 

How to Rob a Bank 

Seth Porges, who directed Class Action Park a couple of years ago, returns with this Netflix doc, which debuts there on Wednesday. It’s the story of Scott Scurlock, who, like grunge, Starbucks, and Amazon, was an unquestioned product of 1990s Seattle. 

Instead of music, coffee, or software, Scurlock’s game was bank robberies. Nicknamed “Hollywood,” thanks to his elaborate makeup and costumes, Scurlock successfully robbed 17 banks in the Seattle area before he shot himself while FBI agents closed in on him. 

It’s a fascinating story of a colorful and charismatic criminal, which I could easily see adapted into a feature film.

In the Company of Kings 

I interviewed Bernard Hopkins and the filmmakers for this film a couple of months ago. It represents two British filmmakers obsessed with American boxing who toured the United States and visited with their favorite boxing heroes. 

This journey takes them to Vegas, where they meet Don King’s stepson and Fighter’s Heaven, Muhammad Ali’s training camp in rural Pennsylvania. But the highlight is their time spent with Bernard Hopkins in Philadelphia, where the longtime middleweight champ visits the housing project where he grew up and holds court. 

Not all of these old boxers still have all their mental faculties intact, but Hopkins does, and he’s the unquestioned star of the show. The film is streaming on all VOD channels. 

H2: The Occupation Lab 

I enjoyed this look at Hebron, directed by Israeli filmmakers Idit Avrahami and Noam Sheizaf, who both have connections to that city. Hebron, if you’re not familiar, is a city in the West Bank with a Palestinian majority but also a small Jewish community- and an expansive history of massacres that both communities frequently remember. 

The film’s thesis is that Hebron is the “occupation lab” and that certain methods are often tried before being rolled out in other areas of the occupied territories. 

H2 is streaming now on Hoopla. While it’s set in the West Bank rather than Gaza, it provides a thought-provoking look at events that are very much in the news these days. 

Mourning in Lod 

Here’s another doc about Israel and Palestine, now streaming on Paramount+. Produced entirely before the current war, it tries to find a note of hope amid lots of death. Like most such attempts, it is only occasionally successful. 

The film is set in Lod, one of the handful of “mixed cities” in Israel, where a Palestinian citizen was killed by a Jewish settler. Later, in retaliation, a Jewish man is killed- and his organs are donated, with his kidney going to a Christian Arab woman. 

So it’s a happy ending that grew from tragedy, right? Not exactly- every aspect of this sets off mixed feelings. 

The Final: Attack on Wembley 

Remember the Euro League Final in July of 2021, when England took on Italy on their home turf of Wembley Stadium in London, but Italy won on penalty kicks? 

I remember that mainly due to the heartbreaking defeat by the English, as well as the death threats directed at the three Black players who missed penalty kicks for England. But somehow, I, a pretty big soccer fan, completely missed something else that happened that day- thousands of fans without tickets tried to push their way into the stadium, leading to a conflagration that looked surprisingly similar to January 6. 

This new documentary, now on Netflix, tells the story of all that, especially the charging of fans into the stadium. I had a few assumptions — that hooligan-style violence was a thing of the past in English soccer and that security at major sporting venues was strong enough to withstand such a thing — but as this fine doc makes clear, those were wrong. 

Battleground: Georgia 

There have been some outstanding documentaries about politics lately, but this one, which debuted on MSNBC last month, is sadly not among them. 

The story of how the longtime red state of Georgia went blue is fascinating, told exceptionally well in journalist Greg Bluestein’s book “Flipped: How Georgia Turned Purple and Broke the Monopoly on Republican Power.” The documentary is told in the most tiresome Resistance Lib fashion imaginable. 

The doc’s theory of the case? Democrats started winning in Georgia because there’s so damned awesome, and the Republicans are so damned awful. In other words, MSNBC is acting according to their biggest detractors’ stereotypes of them.