It was shut out of the Oscar race for Best Documentary Feature, but Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, now playing in New York City, could easily inspire a Hollywood film about the life of its heroic subject. And that dramatic version could potentially garner multiple Academy Award nominations. It wouldn’t be the first time a figure documented in a nonfiction film was later portrayed in an Oscar-nominated movie. In fact, one of this year’s Best Picture contenders, Milk, is almost like a remake of the 1984 Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk.
Actual dramatic remakes of documentaries include Werner Herzogs’ Rescue Dawn, which revisits the subject of his earlier nonfiction film Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Michael Caton-Jones’ Memphis Belle, which fictionalizes the story of William Wyler’s doc The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress, and Martin Bell’s American Heart, which is loosely based on one of the subjects of his Oscar-nominated doc Streetwise. Also, the upcoming HBO dramatic film Grey Gardens was inspired by the Maysles brothers’ doc of the same name, and Hollywood has toyed with or announced remakes of the films The King of Kong, Murderball, Bra Boys and Sherman’s March.
To carry on the tradition, we’ve selected nine nonfiction films in addition to Blessed is the Match that would make great dramatic features.
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A remark made in Aaron Rose’s art-nerd documentary Beautiful Losers, about humor acting as a sledge hammer, got us thinking about the power of both the comic and the tragic. Not long ago, Karina reviewed a little known documentary called Dear Zachary: A letter to a son about his father. Then the film was played on MSNBC, and her analytical criticisms of the film set off a firestorm of angry comments. We chat about tragedy, context, and the dangers of critiquing non-fiction films as works of art.
Another type of movie that often avoids critical attention is comedy. A new PBS mini-series seeks to correct this. Make ‘Em Laugh explores the evolution of American comedy, revealing its power as a cultural force.
FilmCouch 103 [35:22m]:
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(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)
0:00 - Intro, Che giveaway
4:45 - Listener e-mail
9:40 - The Dear Zachary dust-up
19:31 - Make ‘Em Laugh
filmcouch-103
Every time Kurt Kuenne’s Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, my review of the film gets a new flood of angry comments. Since my analytical response to the documentary seems to be so thoroughly out of tune with the emotional responses of MSNBC viewers, I thought I’d excerpt from a few of these comments in order present the argument of the other side:
“Katrina ,
Your pure uttering of nonsense assures me that you yourself suffer of some form of illness. And I am not saying this as an insult. I truly believe you must be scarred or simply looking to rile up attention by being simple.” — michelle
“Can’t you see that Karina wrote an amateur minded article with the purpose of stirring up emotions? … Move on to a quality review, secure in your own ideas and inspirations.” — John
“I’m stunned at reading the the above “review”, - or that this film was even ‘reviewed’ at all by anyone…The basis for this film are horrid, the final outcome is unthinkable, and for YOU to criticize “how” it was made is beyond me. Just how many devoted friends to you have Karina?” — Judy
“I’m writing to Karina and I just want to say that people like you are what makes up the crazy in this world. I will say a prayer for you.” — tammy
Lessons learned: Documentaries shouldn’t be reviewed; film reviews shouldn’t ask you to question “your own ideas and inspirations”; my name is Katrina, and I am sick and mad because I tried to do my job, which I’ve always thought is not to assess a film’s merits based on how it made me feel, but on the choices made by the filmmaker, his/her degree of craft, and the quality of the finished product divorced of the maker’s noble intentions. I guess I was wrong!
At the Kansas City Star’s TV Barn blog, Aaron Barnhart examines MSNBC’s strategy of devoting as much as a third of their schedule to “documentary” programming. Barnhart takes issue with the channel’s use of the word “documentary” to encompass content as disparate as, on one hand, Witness to Jonestown (an original production of the newish MSNBC Films combining new interviews with ample footage from NBC’s archives) and Dear Zachary (which MSNBC Films acquired in partnership with Oscilloscope straight from the festival circuit); and on the other, the schlocky stuff that makes up the bulk of their “Doc Blocks,” like the Lockup series of Dateline-style exposes set inside various North American prisons, and the COPS knock-off Caught on Camera.
Amazingly, when Barnhart went to Michael Rubin, who programs all of this stuff for the network, and asked, “What’s the deal?” Rubin basically went on the defensive. Not only did he call Lockup specifically “a jewel,” but he insisted that MSNBC’s viewers make no distinctions between high-brow and low-blow non-fiction content. As he puts it:
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The most talked about film at Slamdance this year was Kurt Kuenne’s Dear Zachary, a devastating account of the filmmakers’ admiration and grief for his murdered friend Andrew Bagby, who was almost certainly murdered by his girlfriend Dr. Shirley Turner, who later fled to Newfoundland before she could be brought to trial and remains in custody of their child, born months after Andrew was slain. In a Sunday Los Angeles Times article Kuenne, formerly a Filmmaker Magazine “25 New Face in Independent Film” and currently doing the festival rounds with his short Slow, expressed his hopes that the film, which opens in New York this Friday, can influence Canadians (who recently elected a new parliament) to change their extradition laws in hopes of catching Turner.
We caught up with Kuenne to discuss more trivial matters: his great affection for Wall-E, feeling over analysis as a guide to filmmaking and finding inspiration in children’s books.
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