A baffling politician gets a baffling documentary in Weiner, as camera crews follow the serial sexter through his campaign for mayor of New York City. Directors Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg get an extraordinary level of access to Anthony Weiner and his plainly uncomfortable wife Huma Abedin, longtime aide to Hillary Clinton. The film tracks Weiner from his resignation from Congress, due to humiliating Twitter blunders, through an initially successful mayoral campaign, before more revelations sink his career for a second time. Kriegman and Steinberg must have initially thought they had an inspiring second-chance story of a disgraced politician coming all the way back, silencing his puerile critics with reams of optimistic policy proposals and irrepressible charisma. Instead, they got a tragedy, in which a man lets down his loyal staffers, his potential constituents, and his family for a little titillation.
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I grew up in a small Indiana town, a community of 1500 or so people. There were basketball goals in every driveway, the church bells could be heard from all over, and on weekends or in the summer, my cousins and I would play hide and seek on our bikes across a square mile of the town. Buttressed by a thriving Toyota plant in one direction and a city in the other, my hometown has largely avoided the rot that has infected so many other small Indiana communities, maintaining a steady population and occupied storefronts. Medora, as depicted in a touching and nostalgic documentary by Andrew Cohn and Davy Rothbart, has not been as lucky. Isolated in central Indiana, the town remains focused on its losing high school basketball team, seemingly the one thing holding the town together. On the surface, Cohn and Rothbart make a standard sports doc, but it takes on a deeper significance when viewed against the state of the town itself, another struggling entity in need of a win.
Watchers of the Sky makes the case for the necessity of powerful international organizations while also demonstrating how difficult it is to corral so many national interests into a single directive. Edet Belzberg's documentary about the various genocides of the 20th and 21st century and the legal structures that had to be build around these atrocities by dedicated public servants is blood-boiling reportage that condemns nations for clinging to as much of their sovereignty as they can while ethnic or religious minorities are blotted out. The diplomatic and bureaucratic labyrinths that the various principles have to go through seem tailor-made to strangle idealism at its earliest manifestation, but somehow, the principals of the film persist in their mission.
A staple of movies set in Brooklyn's Bedord Stuyvesant neighborhood is playing chess in the park, and in Brooklyn Castle, the action goes inside I.S. 318, a public school where geeks are the athletes. Katie Dellamaggiore's documentary about a dominant team of aspiring grandmasters makes a tedious game thrilling and absorbing. It also depicts the downstream effects that the actions of a wealthier NYC borough have on this one, where the financial crisis puts a truly great program at risk due to budget constraints. Dellamaggiore locates an absolute good and then invests the viewer in not just the team's success, but also the daily frustration of wondering whether a beloved part of one's life is even going to exist in a month or a week.
Bryan: Jon, thanks for attending Ebertfest with me. I had a great time. We saw “Radical Grace” and “Blow Out” but before we discuss those movies, what were your thoughts on the venue? I thought the Virginia theater had a great atmosphere - the sight lines were good, the volunteers were helpful, and the audience was in it to win it. They laughed at semi-awkward times, but that probably comes with the territory when three-quarters of your audience has a Master’s degree or higher. Watching a movie in a full house isn’t typically my cup of tea, but I really enjoyed this experience. The biggest downfall was the incredibly lumpy, cramped seats. Jon: Hey, thanks for hosting me. This was my first film festival, and will certainly not be my last. On the venue itself, we’re pretty much on the same page, though I’d give butt comfort a higher grade than you might. We both agree that leg comfort was lacking, in that it was bad enough to keep me from sticking around to hear Nancy Allen discuss Blow Out after the credits rolled on that movie. We definitely picked good seats for both showings. On the audience, I was more mixed. While I thought they laughed at mostly appropriate times during Blow Out, the same couldn’t be said for Radical Grace, where deserved laughter occasionally morphed into political choir-preaching. We’re watching a movie, not attending a fundraiser, and the applause at hearing a liberal bromide, whether I agree with the sentiment or not, was a little annoying. On the movies themselves, let’s start with Radical Grace, Rebecca Parrish’s doc about nuns in conflict with the strictly male hierarchy of the Catholic church. I’m the lapsed (what’s a harsher term?) Catholic after a rigorous upbringing, so it was a film attuned to my inner wavelength. Not coming from that specific religious tradition, how did the movie resonate with you? |
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