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An error has ocurred. Please try againMusic documentaries that don't appear to be listed on IMDb:
- Ten Years In An Open Neck Shirt (1982) about John Cooper Clarke (https://vimeo.com/36271767)
- Inside Bjork (2002) (https://youtu.be/qbJCqnITC7s)
- Carl Cox 24/7 (2009) (see http://carlcox247.com)
- Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Eyeballs (2005)(https://youtu.be/V6OberRtI6Q)
- Red Hot Chili Peppers, A Dutch Connection (2010) (http://joflo.ws/2bptcAf / http://joflo.ws/2bpt0ku) (online searches may reveal more of the old footage from the 1980s and 1990s TV documentaries Bram van Splunteren made about the band)
- Triggerfinger: Altijd Alles Geven (2012) (see https://vimeo.com/30985953 for 10min preview)
- Buying The Band (2017?) (3voor12.vpro.nl/buyingtheband / https://letterboxd.com/film/buying-the-band / https://youtu.be/odp7Do-_qsc)
- The Show’s The Thing: The Legendary Promoters of Rock (2018) (http://www.docnyc.net/film/the-shows-the-thing-the-legendary-promoters-of-rock/)
- Marvin Gaye: What's Going On (http://joflo.ws/2cgodlq)
Reviews
Imperium (2016)
Just not credible enough to make for compelling viewing
(previously published on joflo.ws/imper1um)
British actor Daniel Radcliffe plays an FBI agent who goes undercover with white supremacists and for the most part he does a good job. It's just that his American accent occasionally slips and his short stature affects his credibility as his character's undercover alter ego. Clearly, this lack of credibility is only obvious to the viewer, because on screen, Radcliffe's character Nate has no trouble fitting in with various groups of neo-Nazis and appears to infiltrate with comfortable ease and at remarkable speed, deflecting any tension with wit and intelligence. Hopping from one racist clique to the next, Nate is always the smartest in a room full of white guys; he has an answer to every question and an explanation in response to any doubt raised. If it wasn't for all the other white blokes being so thick, no doubt his cover would have been blown faster than you can shout 'White Power.'
Meanwhile, Radcliffe's Australian co-star Toni Collette's American accent is better than his, but her problem in this film is that she seems to parody rather than just play an FBI supervisor. In Wittertainment parlance, it's a performance turned up to eleventy stupid. The less said about it, the better.
The most believable acting performance in Imperium comes courtesy of Tracy Letts. By the time we learn the truth about the radio presenter he plays in this film, I sincerely wonder how many broadcasters, columnists and other professional opinion-givers in the real world have built their careers on a similar earning model to that of the fictional Dallas Wolf. It makes sense. He makes sense. Letts' convincing performance is let down, however, by how poorly his part has been written into the plot; it's a storyline that might have worked better before internet radio and podcasting blurred state lines and country borders, but I'm not sure it stands up in 2016.
Taking cues from American History X and The Firm —the one with Gary Oldman, not the one with Tom Cruise— only illustrates how good those films were and how not-very-good Imperium is. Moreover, unless my memory is deceiving me, there's one specific scene early on that I feel I've seen before, at the end of I.D.
Daniel Radcliffe in Imperium (2016) Reece Dinsdale in I.D. (1995) What, if anything, did I learn from this film? Two things. Firstly, that going undercover doesn't require FBI training or experience; reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People should suffice. Secondly, once you pretend to be a white supremacist, you will no longer need your glasses; then, when you stop pretending to be a white supremacist, you will need your glasses again. (Mind you, with a frame as ill-fitting as Nate Foster's, I doubt glasses are of much use in the first place — he must have been peering at the rim more than through the actual lenses.)
Deprogrammed (2015)
Not quite cutting it in terms of its own subject
This documentary covers the topic of 'deprogramming', the process of (at times forcefully) rehabilitating religious cult members, and the man who could be considered its originator, Ted Patrick. It's a subject matter that fascinates me, but sadly this documentary doesn't make the best of it.
It starts with what led the documentary maker to make this film, and that's her stepbrother who had at some point been the subject of a 'deprogramming' by Ted Patrick. Except the stepbrother — who strikes an imposing and perhaps somewhat intimidating figure, which may explain why no one asked him to speak up a little so viewers get to hear more than his grating vocal fry — didn't appear to actually have been in any organised religious cult as such, which is where both Ted Patrick went wrong in attempting to deprogram him, and the documentary maker in making him a subject of her documentary about deprogramming people from organised religious cults.
Moreover, the way in which both cults and deprogramming are depicted seems shallow, over-simplified and perhaps even misleading. I soon tired of the archive footage of groups of people in apparent (perpetual) trance-like states dubbed with seemingly unrelated sounds of religious chanting, which seems to have been used as fillers to stretch this to full documentary feature film length and/or as to avoid any real investigative depth.
The subject matter could and should have made for a really interesting and insightful documentary, but I felt what I got was some really interesting bits and pieces (that stop me from rating this with only one or two stars) interspersed with too much tonal fluff (that stop me from rating it with four or five stars).