Antoine, which follows blind Quebecer Antoine throughout his daily routines at school and his playtime with his friends, falls short in most of its aspirations: a magical realist fantasy for children, an account of the experience of growing up or caring for the blind, or a character study of a bratty, overpriviledged adolescent. It likely would have succeeded had it focused on only one of these topics, but became a film without a goal or a purpose by cramming all of it in. Antoine is most memorable as a documentary of the fictions that children create, portraying Antoine and his friends’ hunt for a woman who turned into water as if it were a reality. It is a fun exercise that must have been a dream come true for these kids – getting a movie made about the movie world that they so clearly wish they inhabited – but it strays from the film’s focus on Antoine as a blind child. Nothing in the playtime is a product of Antoine’s disability; his imagination isn’t shown to be stronger or more/less diverse than those with vision, or really different at all from his friends. It has the same feeling as if any group of children were allowed to turn one of their imaginary games into a film, which is the same as a poorly shot fiction scripted by children: perhaps fun as a short, but not quality material to plaster a feature into.

Scenes of Antoine at school also had potential, especially when he starts telling his friends that he isn’t their friend anymore, and starts hitting some of them. This is never expounded upon by talking to the friends he wants to abandon, or Antoine’s parents to see if there are troubles at home, or even Antoine’s perspective on why he did this. We only see Antoine getting disciplined by his teacher for a couple of minutes while Antoine cries, and then the issue is never addressed again. In a film about an autistic or ADHD child, this might be acceptable, but it is too significant of a departure from Antoine’s projected behavior up to this point to let it slide under the rug. The parents also apparently wanted the documentary abandoned halfway through filming because of its effects on Antoine, but this is not detectable in the film, let alone addressed. It is yet another example of the truth being avoided for the filmmaker’s predetermined goals for the film, which is a rambling, only occassionally watchable misfire from a filmmaker who seems to only have talent for visual styling.

This film reminded me of Spurloch’s Super Size Me in that it is entertaining, has an important agenda, but takes the wrong approach to make an entirely successful documentary. It will draw crowds, it will please them, and it will probably at least get many people to stop ordering tuna at sushi restaurants, which, like Spurloch’s film getting me to nix fast food from my diet, is laudable. But this is essentially a heist film with a forced pay-off. Richard O’Barry, the protagonist, former trainer of Flipper, dolphin rights activist, wants to make Japanese fisherman out to be satanic demons of the sea, but ignores the film’s most interesting argument, which he vocally dismisses in the film: Why is killing dolphins for food in Japan any worse than killing cows, chickens, turkeys, lamb, and deer for meat everywhere else? It is very upsetting and emotionally traumatic to see the massacre of the dolphins at the end of this film, but so would it be to witness any of the inhumane ways that the aforementioned animals are killed. Psihoyos also must think that Japanese citizens (and the viewers of his film) are not very intelligent, as he shows interviews with 4 or 5 pedestrians in Tokyo who claim that they didn’t know that dolphins were killed for food, expects us to believe that this is a common ignorance. Give me a break. And then to whip out his iPhone to show them, standing on the sidewalk, footage of dolphins being slaughtered, and expect it to be telling or a revelation that these people watch the video in horror, is just manipulative filmmaking. O’Barry’s narcissism comes full circle as he blasts triumphant victory music when he walks into an International Whaling Comission meeting with a TV strapped to his body showing the footage of the dolphin slaughter, as if he has accomplished something despite all of the apathetic faces in the room who, literally, have bigger fish to fry. I like what this film wanted to say on animal rights, captivity, training, and what not, but the film blatantly ignores every other animal that is eaten (the filmmaker actually does think it is more unjust to eat a dolphin than a cow because dolphins have larger brains), as well as zoos, circuses, and what the Japanese really think about this.

Basically a real-life twist on Au Hasard Balthazar, the emotion emitting from every frame of this film was exponentially more affecting for me than Bresson’s film. Old Partner tracks the final months of an ox’s life and the owner(s) who are so dependent on him. The ox is owned by an elderly Korean couple, but mostly by the husband, who seems to be living his life for the sole purpose of caring for the ox. He farms and employs his wife to help him in order to feed the ox, much to his wife’s dismay. The relationship between the couple is cute and heartbreaking, as they exhibit the kind of crankiness and grumpiness toward each other that is stereotypical of the elderly, though they are constantly distraught that their time on Earth, and with each other, is reaching its end. Only the age of the ox is given in the film (approaching 40), but I’d have guessed that these people are nearing the century mark. The tragedy of seeing the ox eke out every last ounce of his life to pull these people around town, which it had undoubtedly done for every day of its 40 years, is so affecting because he is so loved by the owner; neglect and abuse would have made the film more about pity. The man is damn near deaf, missing/ignoring most of his wife’s rants, but is gripped and attentive when the ox makes a sound. He refuses to spray their crops with insecticides, which would make their farming a hell of a lot easier, and ease his and his wife’s lifestyles, because it would be unhealthy for the ox. As the film winds down, and the lives of the ox and his owners do the same, I had a lump in my throat that lasted through the rest of the night. The film is only diminished by a melodramatic score that is completely disposable – really, I would pay the filmmaker to take it out, it hurts some of the film’s best moments. Fables and timeless tales don’t come better written and more moving than this.

I haven’t seen Hustwit’s Helvetica, which sounds interesting, if trendy, but Objectified is just the sort of film I expected it to be given that film’s presence on Hustwit’s résumé. The film is clean, sleek, and polished, just like the Helvetica font, and has a similar commercial plasticity that he atrocious Art & Copy has, but at least it has the decency to stay on topic. While this film is well-organized, well-researched, and occasionally thought-provoking, it left me feeling like it had only scratched the surface. Like Art & Copy, Objectified is mainly interested in the big shots. The film’s first significant subject is Apple, which makes sense given all of the talk in the film about the simplicity, elegance, and intuition that is exhibited a ‘good’ design. The film goes on to feature Ikea and some important designers of cellphones, toys, and chairs. Halfway through, the film shifts gears to talk about longevity; specifically, the environmental harm of producing something that will end up in a landfill in only a few years time, if not much less. It was pleasant to see the film take the responsibility and put forth such close attention, to this facet of design.

There are two missing pieces in this film that I think make it suffer: the brief time spent with consumers, getting to know how satisfied they are with certain designs and how closely they feel a product function according to the designer’s intent; and the other is a perspective from bad designers, like makers of mass-produced junk ($.99 toothbrushes, cheap DVD players, modern turntables, and hazardous children’s toys). Not to mention that the film ignores Ikea’s reputation for producing short-term furniture that breaks and falls apart within a couple of years (Ikea is only praised in the film for their innovative design, pshh). The film is essentially a broad FAQ for modern industrial design, touching on important things, but skipping the intricate details which would ask more insightful questions. The measured pacing of the film makes it feel like it was crafted by a robot rather than a human, which comes off brilliantly given the subject matter.

I haven’t seen Greenaway’s Nightwatching, his other film on Rembrandt’s famous, potentially infamous, painting The Night Watch; nor have I seen any Greenaway films until now (embarrassing, I know; still waiting for that Criterion The Cook, The Thief…). Rembrandt’s JAccuse is, from what I understand, another incarnation of Greenaway’s obsession over solving The Night Watch; Nightwatching is a fictionalization of the process and aftermath of painting the piece, and J’Accuse is a handheld walk through the ’30 mysteries’ of The Night Watch, narrated and theorized by Greenaway himself. To say that I didn’t learn anything from this film would be a lie, same for saying that most of it wasn’t surprisingly entertaining; but, I still question the point of it. Most of the information in this film could just as easily have been conveyed in a well-organized and elegantly designed brochure (and much quicker, too). The film is literally divided into 30 chapters, each numbered and dedicated to one of the apparently well-known 30 mysteries. Much of the ‘solving’ of the mysteries in the film is done by showing clips from Nightwatching, with a picture-in-picture frontal view of Greenaway speaking to the audience (why this ugly box, placed just below the center of the frame, couldn’t have been eliminated in favor of a simple voiceover, I do not know). Over-dramatic music is pervasive, and evoked the decade’s other bizarre, painting-solving film, The Da Vinci Code. The picture-in-picture narration, as well as all kinds of clip art swipes, wipes, hops, zooms and scrolling texts gave the film a Powerpoint aesthetic that cheapened an otherwise well-produced assemblage. There are questionable things in the ‘clues’ that Greenaway relies on in the film (most obviously his claims that the man in the center of the painting is holding a right-handed glove, when it is clearly left-handed), but much of it is thought-provoking, if a bit Art History 101. The cumulative effect is likely to make someone more curious about the subtext and symbolism in 16th and 17th century paintings, which is commendable.

This is initially a pretty perplexing follow-up to Zweig’s ‘narcissism’ trilogy, of which I have only seen the first, Vinyl. As a filmmaker whose career seemed to be completely fixated on his own troubles, A Hard Name is refreshingly selfless, following 6 or 7 subjects who had recently been released from prison, and have spent a very large fraction of their lives in prison. The film is comprised almost entirely of interviews and talking heads, but my memory of it has so many variances to that structure, where much of the film, in retrospect, feels as if it takes place in either a prison or on the streets. Doing exactly what I love to see in interview documentaries, Zweig makes sure to keep his questions in the film, which helped to expand the film’s conversation to the viewer. And Zweig asks great questions, too. He is less confrontational and more respectful thank Michael Moore, and actually appears to be interested in his subjects aside from the meat they provide for his film; Zweig has all of Moore’s good qualities and then some. Zweig asks these ex-prisoners what we want to ask them ourselves, and these subjects trust him enough to open up completely. Words cannot aptly describe how potent this film is; it does full justice to big ideas like self-destruction, forgiveness, and environmental corruption.

This film is just as bad as Clubland, only it feels twice as worse because the material had so much more potential. This film is an offensive misfire that is the definition of how NOT to make a documentary. As a ‘study’ on modern advertising it is one-sided in its unquestioned praise of commercial ads, narrow in its look at, almost exclusively, television commercials made since the 1980s for major companies (Apple, Nike, Budweiser, etc.), boring in its narcissistic use of music, polished cinematography of things that have nothing to do at all with advertising (rockets going into outer space, satellites, industrial factories, etc), and maddening for being a ‘well’-produced enough documentary that another, unquestionably better one won’t come along in a long time, if ever. At least 15% of the film involves watching a commercial that everyone has already seen too many times (Mac’s 1984 commercial, Budweiser’s frog commercials, Got Milk commercials, Nike ‘Just Do It’ commercials, etc.) in their entireties, often as a lead up to nothing more than an inane interview with the guy that thought it up, in which he talks about how much of a genius he is. The rest of the film plays indie rock while revealing, in text, ‘critical’ facts about modern culture, like “Americans watch so-and-so hours of TV every day” Boo hoo.

I don’t know what it is about Best Worst Movie that makes me want to call it a guilty pleasure; perhaps it’s that it is based on one of the ultimate guilty pleasures of cinema history, Troll 2, or that it is destined to be the documentary of choice for geeks and fanboys across North America for the next year or more. It could also be that, while most definitely being the most entertaining and enjoyable documentary in Hot Docs this year, it doesn’t actually function in many of the ways a ‘good’ doc does. It is all of the above, of course, but mostly the latter. The film has at least half a dozen spectacular characters that really couldn’t have been scripted any better. George Hardy, the father in Troll 2, is an excessively amiable dentist, charming in his good intentions and naivete. Claudio Fragasso, the original film’s director, and his wife, the screenwriter, are completely oblivious to the cult following that their film has developed, and we get to witness their epiphany first-hand, in all of its bitterness and confusion. Don Packard, the drugstore owner, is every bit as mentally unstable and frightening as one could have hopes he would be. And then there is Margo Prey, the mother. Poor Margo – the revelation of what she has turned into is too good to be spoiled, and really has to be seen to be believed. I have never seen Troll 2, but I came away from Best Worst Movie with an appreciation for the film that is on par with Sleepaway Camp, Dead Alive, and The Re-Animator: the best of trashy, cult, camp horror. As a documentary that studies the impact of making/starring in a terrible film, and the trauma that the cast must have experienced, shifting over the years into hyperbolic worship and praise, is hit and miss. The film works best when the tragedy of fallen dreams is shown to have taken its toll on the cast and crew in its most heartbreaking form, and even more when that tragedy morphs into joy and euphoria after those years of suffering. The first half hour of the film, I thought it was in trouble. Many of the laughs and set-ups were satisfied simply by showing footage from Troll 2, a cheap and lame reliance on the source material instead of the substance and craft of the documentarian. The substance does get better (much, much better), but it still feels like a lot of luck, rather than talent. Nagging criticisms aside, though, fans and the un-converted (as I am) of Troll 2 are almost gauranteed satisfaction from this feel-so-bad-it-feels-good film. I laughed till I cried, it’s true.

Audition feels like it could have been made by an inexperienced Abbas Kiarostami, which is supposed to be a compliment. The filmmaker goes to Afghanistan to audition civilians for a role in a film that she is making, and she films the audition process and gathers interviews about the experience one goes through in Afghanistan after appearing in films, or even photographs. Predictably, the women have a tougher time with it than the men. Many women who are approached by Pazira for an interview immediately cover their mouths and decline, while others around often begin teasing. To have one’s image taken in this country is seen to be shameful, and somehow taints the image of those who are filmed’s entire families. One of the film’s two bravura moments occurs when Pazira asks a man if he would behead his sister if he found out that she had been filmed, and he easily said yes. He then asks her why she came to Afghanistan to shoot this film, and her answer is bold, eloquent, and ballsy; it caused gasps.

A amoxicillin dosage big decision was made to keep many of Pazira’s questions and replies in the film, which I think is essential, and something that most documentaries should be doing. How can I expect to appreciate and understand what a subject is answering if I do not know what was asked? To have the question, then the answer is to have the full, unabridged picture of the experience. The only moments of diegesis in the film are with intermittent voiceovers accompanied by superfluous , non-diegetic music where Pazira inexplicably tells the viewer what we will be seeing in the next scene. After the editor made such a good decision to leave the questions in with the interviews, it is nearly undone by this silly idea.

The film poses some fun, but pretty pointless comparisons of male auditions and female auditions. Basically, the men are goofy and terrible, while the women shown are sensitive, and serious. Such a limited sampling means pretty much nothing, but it did allow for a pretty great scene in which three male actors all perform terrible examples of crying, and then a young woman is asked to cry, and then she just starts to flat out weep on demand, one-upping the brilliant audition in Mulholland Dr.

Jackpot, a 50-minute documentary that tracks five regulars of Ontario’s Delta Bingo, is sweet, funny, melancholic, and nostalgic. Bingo halls, which have a small-town, vintage aesthetic that is similar to bowling alleys, feel like a homier incarnation of a casino. This makes for a film that really pops visually, with a minimal, but bright, palette of blues, purples, yellows, pinks and neon lights. The film’s charm comes from the superb selection of subjects, all of which wallow in the simple game as a way out, whether it’s from divorce, deceased companions, or a disability. Margaret, the elderly woman in the picture above, comes to bingo six days of the week, and spends her winnings on more bingo. A moment toward the end when she is shown descending a staircase in her home while saying that she would die without bingo, is cute at first, but grows more tragic when you realize that this is absolutely true. A divorced man who spent many years crying over the absence of his ex-wive and his children found solace in his trips to the bingo hall, and even met his new partner there. Another man, whose wife passed away ten years ago, says, clearly choked up, that his wife would never come to bingo when she was here, and that he just started coming regularly after she passed. Bingo, like slot machines, is pure luck, one of the few games that really is 0% skill, lending another degree of pity to these characters who find so much pride in winning a game that they have no control over. It’s a glimpse of lowered expectations, but also of the simple things that can bring someone happiness. The film could have benefited from looking a bit at the history of bingo, and a look at supposed strategies, as well as the game’s history and development in Canada.