Reviewing 10 documentaries: From a composer's coda to reality show chaos to eccentrics seeking the White House- and rappers visiting it
Reviews of 'Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus,' 'The Contestant,' 'Reform!,' 'Hip-Hop and the White House,' 'Kiss the Future', 'MisInfonation,' 'High & Low: John Galliano, and more
When I launched this newsletter last September, I committed to reviewing at least one new documentary every week. I’ve done that without difficulty finding things to write about.
This week, instead of reviewing one new documentary, I will review TEN new documentaries. I have just happened to encounter many interesting nonfiction films in various media over the last couple of weeks. And that’s even before we get to The Jinx: Part 2, which I’ll likely have something to say about once it wraps up.
Here we go:
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus
This is a new documentary/concert film featuring the famed composer and actor performing some of his best-known work before his passing last March.
The film, which I caught last week in a one-time showing at Philadelphia’s Lightbox Film Center, was directed by Neo Sora and features about 100 minutes of Sakamoto simply sitting at a piano and playing. There isn’t much to it besides the master occasionally pausing, presumably because his illness is causing him pain.
The sparse format will test the patience of some; there were some early walkouts, and I’ve also heard about other showings of the film. Overall, Opus is a fine companion to the more traditional retrospective documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, released in 2018.
The Contestant
Here’s a very different nonfiction film about Japan but different in just about every other way. Claire Titley’s documentary, which hit Netflix last week, explores quite possibly the cruelest reality show in the medium's history.
In the late 1990s, Tomoaki Hamatsu was the subject of a particularly evil “prank”- he was challenged to stay alone in an apartment, living off only what he could win from online sweepstakes. He didn’t know, however, that he was being filmed for a reality show that was watched by millions of people. This continued, somehow, for 15 months.
It was a real-life The Truman Show, or Oldboy, although somehow even meaner (well, maybe not meaner than Oldboy.) It’s a riveting documentary, including interviews with the contestant, who goes by the name Nasubi.
Reform!
Over several years, the online collective known as Secret Base has produced a series of long-form online documentaries about sports, usually multi-part histories of struggling sports franchises like the Seattle Mariners, Atlanta Falcons, and Minnesota Vikings. Their style features limited live footage and utilizes a unique data visualization approach.
It was natural for Secret Base’s style to pivot to politics, and now they have, with a new three-part documentary about the 1990s third party known as Reform Party. The first part focuses on Ross Perot’s presidential runs in 1992 and 1996, diving firmly into the absurdity of that whole affair. The other parts will deal with Jesse Ventura’s election to the Minnesota governorship, Donald Trump’s brief flirtation with a 2000 run, and Pat Buchanan and the butterfly ballot.
I have only seen the first part; the others have been released to Secret Base’s Patreon.
Hip Hop & the White House
This doc, directed by Jesse Washington and produced by the ESPN subsite Andscape, is one of those docs about precisely what it sounds like from the title: The various intersections of hip-hop music and the White House between the Reagan era and today. The doc landed on Hulu last week.
The hits are all here: Bill Clinton’s “Sister Souljah Moment,” “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People,” the “hip-hop barbecue” hosted by Barack Obama, and Donald Trump’s attempts, despite it all, to reach out to the hip-hop community, often by issuing pardons to rappers accused of crimes.
At just 60 minutes, the film could go into more depth than it did. But it’s still entertaining, leading up to rapper Waka Flocka Flame having trouble answering questions about whether he has endorsed Trump.
Misinfonation: The Trump Faithful
Some political documentaries have a unique and fresh take. And then there’s Misinfonation: A Trump Faithful, a documentary aired on CNN late last month. The title — a portmanteau of “misinformation” and “nation” — is bad, and the documentary itself is not much better.
Isn’t it about time someone thought to film a bunch of conversations between a CNN reporter and a person decked out in full Trump costume, spouting a bunch of nonsense that isn’t true? If you’re like me, you probably thought “I have seen this exact thing literally hundreds of times since 2015, and I really don’t need to see it one more time.”
It’s tiresome enough when Jordan Klepper does this exact bit, over and over again, on The Daily Show, and not much better when Donie O’Sullivan, a reporter I normally like quite a bit, does it on CNN.
Kiss the Future
Kiss the Future, which had a theatrical release earlier this year and has now landed on Paramount+, looks back at the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s and U2’s involvement in raising awareness of it. This included live look-ins to people in Sarajevo during the band’s Zoo TV tour and, eventually, a concert in Sarajevo during the later Pop Mart tour.
Celebrity activism these days has a bad name, mostly because so many celebrities are so bad at it. Chuck Klosterman wrote back in 2004 that “there is only one question about U2 that actually matters… Is Bono for real, or is Bono full of shit?”
To answer Klosterman’s question, whether from the old footage or contemporary interviews, there’s little doubting Bono’s sincerity- and the film really does capture that moment quite well. That said, the parts of the documentary about the Balkan wars are much more interesting than the U2 parts- and what exactly was the “Zoo TV” tour trying to say, anyway? “There’s sure a lot of stuff on TV these days, huh?”
High & Low: John Galliano
If you’re not part of the fashion world — and I’m decidedly not — John Galliano is a major fashion designer and creative director famous for that and for one other thing. In 2010, Galliano drunkenly yelled antisemitic slurs at a group of women, costing him his career for a time.
High & Low, which hit theaters earlier this year and landed this week on the streaming service Mubi, is a fascinating documentary that explores both Galliano’s entire life and career, and the antisemitic incident and how he rebuilt his career after it. The keys: Sobriety, and also remorse.
Because the incident happened away from the United States and its First Amendment, it led to actual criminal charges in France. Overall, High & Low is valuable as an examination of what successfully coming back from “cancellation” looks like.
Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind
Earlier this year, Ethan Coen directed Drive-Away Dolls, one of my favorite movies of the year. It was not, however, Ethan’s solo directorial debut. That would be this archival documentary about the mid-century rock star, which was completed prior to Lewis’ death in late 2022.
Finished that year and made in association with A24, Trouble in Mind debuted at Cannes in 2022 but never got a proper theatrical release. It didn’t surface publicly until it landed earlier this spring on Prime Video. However, it’s since switched to Netflix.
While the doc is valuable as an examination of early rock history, Lewis was a reprehensible figure — marrying his 13-year-old cousin was only the start of it — so your mileage may vary when it comes to spending a couple of hours with someone like that.
Space: The Longest Goodbye
It’s lonely out in space, indeed.
A Sundance debut all the way back in January 2023, director Ido Mizrahy’s film landed earlier this week on PBS, through the Independent Lens series.
The thought-provoking film looks at an often-ignored aspect of the astronaut experience: How difficult it is for space travelers to be away from their families for long periods- something that’s going to be even harder once astronauts start traveling to Mars, a mission expected to take about three years.
A Disturbance in the Force
I’ve never seen the Star Wars Holiday Special all the way through, but I’ve been hearing about it for so long that I almost feel like I have. That famous 1978 TV broadcast, which was passed around as a bootleg for years, was the first piece of Star Wars media that the fandom turned against- and far from the last.
A Disturbance in the Force is a documentary about the history of the Star Wars Holiday Special, which utilizes various figures involved in its production, including the writer Bruce Vilanch. We also hear from lots of fans, led, of course by Kevin Smith, watch some hilarious footage of George Lucas and Harrison Ford talking about the special on talk shows, and we even see some footage of Life Day, Bea Arthur, and other oddities.
A festival debut last year, A Disturbance in the Force aired on the Vice channel on Star Wars Day (May the 4th.)