Evans Above

The Game Changers, from director Louis Psihoyos, examines the benefits of a plant-based diet and uses examples from several elite athletes to turn the notion that a vegan can’t be strong on its head.

Our guide through this doc is James Wilks, a UFC fighter and special forces martial arts trainer, who turned to a plant-based diet after an injury. His experience showed a faster recovery time and he sets out to talk with other elite athletes who have made the jump. There’s ultra-marathoner Scott Jurek, heavyweight boxer, Bryant Jennings, strongman Patrik Baboumian, cycling champion Dotsie Bausch and weightlifter Kendrick Farris all of whom showed improvements in their strength, endurance and recovery when they switched to a plant-based diet. They tackle the myths and marketing of the meat industry head on. When strongman Baboumian’s friends asked how a man could be as strong as an ox without eating animals, Baboumian shot back, “When was the last time you saw an ox eat meat?”

A trio of football players are led through a series of tests by a doctor who shows them evidence that the pre-game ritual of eating platefuls of meat protein may in fact be hurting their game. Meanwhile, body building and entertainment icon Arnold Schwarzenegger suggests that those wary of going vegan try a meatless Monday and points out that the move has environmental impacts too. If you’re dead set against being vegan or vegetarian, you might not switch, but those who enter The Game Changers with an open mind will at least leave the cinema planning to give it a try.

We’ve all heard the odd news report or story passed from friend to friend about beloved actor Bill Murray suddenly joining a touch football game or appearing at someone’s house party. Is it true? Is it a myth? In The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned from a Mythical Man, director Tommy Avallone sets out to document sightings of this comedic Bigfoot.

Avallone tracks down several people who have been part of these encounters. There’s the wedding photographer whose engagement shots were added to by a surprise Murray appearance. The bartender who served Murray only to have him hop behind the bar and serve shots all night. Reporters and colleagues suggest that this is equal parts Murray’s improv training – you say yes to every situation presented – and his life philosophy. In an age where everyone walks around glued to their phones, perhaps Murray’s gift to us is to remind us to always be present and in the moment.

The doc meanders at times, but it is otherwise a sweet look at Bill Murray’s delightful traits.

For more information on the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and for tickets and showtimes visit hotdocs.ca.

Today was a heavy day of documentaries, ranging from white nationalists and the alt-right, race-driven police arrest quotas, to the money and mob links in the Trump campaign.

Alt-Right: Age of Rage, from director Adam Bhala Lough, opens with archival footage of a Nazi rally from the 1930s. Except that the rally wasn’t in Hitler’s Germany but rather in New York City’s Madison Square Gardens. Fast forward to Charlottesville, Virginia, where the Unite the Right rally during Trump’s first year gives racist tools like Richard Spencer a chance to spew their hate. They may appear to be idiotic caricatures of basement-dwelling Nazis, marching with garden party tiki torches and practicing security detail stances in their Office Depot khakis, but their internet-fueled white supremacy march lead to the tragic death of Heather Heyer. Heyer died when a alt-right sympathizer drove his vehicle into a crowd of counter-protesters. The footage of that event here is much more grisly on the big screen than what we saw repeated on cable news.

Spencer, who appears to be the offspring of a Twitter troll and Tucker Carlson, is supported by the equally toxic views of Jared Taylor, who self-publishes books on hate and holds weekend seminars for like-minded supporters who hate but don’t have time for rallies. These two are confronted by Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder of the One People’s Project, who has made it his life’s mission to shine a light and out these racist cockroaches, alerting the media and employers to the hatred in their midst. The alt-right try to paint him and Antifa as the bad guys in this situation, which of course leads Donald Trump to put the anti-Nazi protesters on the same level as the actual white supremacists. We also get to hear from Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups in America.

As Trump makes his comments, the doc leaves us wondering whether he’s as completely toxic as Spencer or just a shallow political opportunist throwing red meat to a hateful group to achieve his goals.

Crime + Punishment, from Stephen Maing, follows the story of the NYPD 12, a group of minority police officer who blew the whistle on discriminatory arrest quotas and faced internal retaliation. The doc is made all the more gripping by hidden microphone recordings of police superiors threatening the whistle-blowers and the warning to be careful because, ominously, “things happen.”

The practice of having quotas for arrests and summonses, which disproportionately hit minority communities, was outlawed in 2010. Many of these charges were later dropped, but they had the impact of putting people into the system who shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The NYPD 12, Black and Latino officers, knew firsthand the outlawed practice was still ongoing. They were pressured by their superiors, given bad shifts, and told promotions would be withheld if they did not meet a revenue-generating quota of police interactions within poorer communities. These officers often felt a calling to enter the force and now they were being faced with corruption within the very profession they were proud to be members of. The doc also traces a private eye who is seeking to prove the quota system still exists and exonerate his client, whose false arrest could follow him for the rest of his life, affecting school and employment. Crime + Punishment is one of those chilling tales that shakes the public’s view of an organization that they are meant to trust.

I ended the day with Active Measures, director Jack Bryan’s look at Russia’s efforts to undermine democracy in the United States and beyond. Russia’s economy isn’t much of a powerhouse these days and in order to punch above its weight, it uses low-cost but effective means to destabilize its neighbours and adversaries using misinformation campaigns on the internet, staged protests, etc. Bryan interviews everyone from Hillary Clinton and John McCain to former ambassadors, CIA agents and security consultants to expose how Putin and his oligarch and crime friends channel money into these efforts.

Active Measures details Russia’s involvement in campaigns in Ukraine, Georgia and Estonia. Some of these cases involve a familiar name, Paul Manafort, who worked on behalf of pro-Russian forces and this leads us to the guy the Kremlin viewed as a “useful idiot”: Donald Trump. The doc outlines how they began suggesting he run as early as 1999. It details how he was the perfect person to go after, as he needed money and was susceptible to flattery. Most importantly, Trump was involved in real estate, the perfect business to launder money through. The doc details how many of the units in Trump Tower and his properties in Miami were owned by either Russian oligarchs or mob and even mentions that when the Secret Service moved into Trump Tower they had to coordinate with the FBI that were keeping tabs on so many of Trump’s tenants. Even his cabinet are shown to have had done deals or favours for people that could be traced back to Putin. You’ll leave the theatre overwhelmed with the amount of detail presented.

For more information on the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and for tickets and showtimes visit hotdocs.ca.

Maxim Pozdorovkin’s Our New President looks at the 2016 U.S. Presidential election campaign from the viewpoint of Russia. Using both news clips from state news outlet RT and videos made by Russian citizens, we get to see what the election looked like from the vantage point of America’s Cold War adversary. The citizens see a populist who’ll improve relations with their country, while RT runs a constant stream of stories in support of Trump. They also attack Hillary Clinton endlessly, suggesting she was gravely ill or suffering from mental illness. While the big orange one denies there was any collusion with Russia, both late night comedians and private citizens openly make statements that they own this president. It’s a very interesting look at the election from another country.

I’ve always been a fan of Bachman Turner Overdrive and The Guess Who, so I was looking forward to seeing John Barnard’s Bachman, which looks at the life and career of songwriting and guitar legend Randy Bachman. Unfortunately, given the contributions he’s made to music and the interpersonal turmoil that ended both bands, we’re given a rather pedestrian documentary. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to see Bachman playing and hear how great he is from Neil Young, Paul Shaffer and Peter Frampton, but his tumultuous relationship with songwriting partner and Guess Who bandmate Burton Cummings makes Cummings’ absence from the project a gaping hole in the project. Bachman has stated he feels betrayed by Cummings over ownership of their publishing, but I know that from newspaper articles, not this doc. Sadly, Bachman is not the definitive historical look at such an important musical icon.

For more information on the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and for tickets and showtimes visit hotdocs.ca.

The Oslo Diaries, from directors Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, looks at the tense negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians that led to the 1993 Oslo Accord. The meetings between the two sides in Norway were top secret and the level of distrust between the negotiators was high. With all the secrecy, Loushy and Sivan don’t have footage from those meetings, but between contemporary videos and recent interviews with the principals (including Shimon Peres’ final interview) the filmmakers are able to put together a picture of that moment in time.

The negotiations continued and the men involved began to see the common humanity between them. Perhaps there was a way to end the conflict between the two peoples. When they finally came up with an agreement and their work was seen in the daylight, extremist forces on both sides began their campaign to see that it didn’t succeed. The road to the signing of the accord had potholes. The road to the accord’s implementation had land mines. One of then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s biggest opponents was Benjamin Netanyahu and after Rabin’s 1995 assassination his political star only rose. Twenty-five years later and Netanyahu is the current prime minister and the work of the negotiators is no closer to being implemented. It’s a sad resolution to be reminded that peace is harder to wage than war.

Directors Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting explore artificial intelligence in the doc More Human Than Human. The film looks at various stories involving AI while the film’s through line is Pallotta’s work with a team building a robot documentarian that will not only interview Pallotta but frame the shots as well. One story involves an autistic boy whose use of Siri helps his mother get a reprieve from a barrage of daily questions. Another shows a woman who keeps her dead fiance “alive” by interacting with a collection of his text messages and photos that she collected and compiled into a program. A psychologist realizes that the woman he’s been chatting with on a dating site is actually a chatbot and even his educated mind was fooled, while Pallotta’s pals Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke drop by to see if a robot is ready to replace Scorsese.

Though it’s not a gem of a doc and flits quickly from thought to thought, More Human Than Human does leave us with an important question. As we hand more decisions over to AI, what stops that AI from deciding that we might be the biggest threat?

I had a chance to screen Chuck Smith’s Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground prior to the festival. It opens tonight at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema and is a fascinating look at a woman who was a huge connector between people in the early Sixties arts scene in New York and an artist in her own right.

Rubin was teen when she hit the scene and worked with experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas. She was everywhere, working with many, influencing many and shooting her own graphic art film, Christmas on Earth. She met Andy Warhol, introduced him to Lou Reed, got Bob Dylan interested in Jewish mysticism and inspired Alan Ginsberg, who began a relationship with her after seeing the controversial Christmas on Earth. She organized arts events. She was the ultimate muse and connector. Then, just as suddenly as she entered the scene, she left, stepping out of a car as she was passing a Jewish orphanage. She married an Orthodox Jewish man, soon divorced him and married another, moving to live in a religious community in France, where she died giving birth to her fifth child at age 35.

The people being interviewed don’t seem to have any insights into Rubin’s sudden exit, her mental illness and drug use perhaps seen as a catalyst for her art as opposed to an explanation for events in her life. While we may not get all the answers from this doc, it does give us a glimpse into a brief but vibrant period of an important arts scene.

For more information on the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and for tickets and showtimes visit hotdocs.ca.

I had a chance to preview Dava Whisenant’s Bathtubs Over Broadway just before Hot Docs and the film premieres tonight at the Hart House Theatre. While doing research for a musical bit on The Late Show with David Letterman, writer Steve Young comes across a record of an industrial musical. What’s that you say? It turns out that for decades, companies would wine and dine their top salespeople from across the U.S. and then entertain them with elaborate song-and-dance numbers that sometimes had bigger budgets than Tony-winning Broadway musicals. Except instead of singing about a girl named Maria, or life being a cabaret, these show tunes extolled the virtues of sliced bread, toilets, ball bearings and industrial lubricants.

This is the sort of oddity Letterman loved and Young quickly became an avid collector of these recordings, which were not for public sale but rather given out as reminders of the conferences and conventions. Young discovers that talents like Martin Short and Chita Rivera performed in these shows and artists like choreographer Susan Stroman depended on the work to keep them afloat between Broadway shows. He seeks out the lesser known names that consistently wrote or performed in these shows and Bathtubs over Broadway gives them a chance to shine again. Young develops an affection for these shows that reflect a golden age of American manufacturing and a lost time when sales required working the feet or the phone to get the job done. Utterly charming, Bathtubs Over Broadway is a must-see.

For more information on the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and for tickets and showtimes visit hotdocs.ca.

Laura Nix’s Inventing Tomorrow is an inspiring look at science-minded high school students from around the world who have assembled in Los Angeles for the 2017 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Unlike the adult politicians, these young minds believe in science and facts and have the optimism that their ideas can solve problems facing their countries.

A pair of Taylor Swift-quoting Indonesian girls devise a method to filter dangerous by-products from the country’s offshore tin mining. Another girl from India lives near a lake that occasionally catches on fire, while excessive detergents in the water lead to clouds of bubbles floating across roads. She devises a water testing system where data entry can be easily crowd-sourced. A group from Mexico devise a building paint that absorbs air pollutants, while a 15-year-old from Hawaii tracks arsenic levels in a pond in his town deposited by the debris of multiple tsunamis.

Nix takes us into their homes as they nervously prepare for the science fair, supported by proud families. We see the awe of visiting LA, their pop culture mecca, and the sweet interactions with students of the opposite sex from around the world. They defend their projects in front of tough questions from the judges and you’ll come away wondering why this group of intrepid thinkers couldn’t be in charge instead of the science-phobic fools many countries seem to be stuck with.

The saddest thing about Alison McAlpine’s exploration of the night sky, Cielo, is knowing that, if you’re a city dweller, there’s too much light pollution to see the same thing that you see above the Chilean desert. Whether interviewing the scientists at the Las Campanas observatory or local residents who debate how the solar system works, McAlpine gives us a look at how the vast amount of stars above them leads to so many questions. She gives us space (pardon the pun) to experience this ourselves, with stretches of silence that just allow us to take in the beautiful stellar cinematography. Cielo is the type of doc you have to see in a darkened theatre on a big screen. Watching this on a phone or tablet just will not cut it.

I ended my day with the first episode of Liz Garbus’ Showtime series The Fourth Estate, which takes us behind the scenes of the New York Times’ coverage of the circus sideshow known as the Trump presidency. This first episode takes us through the administration’s first one hundred days, a time that saw the resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and saw a country coming to terms with a president who tossed all norms aside. That’s a big question in this episode. How does The Grey Lady, as the Times is called, deal with an administration that is the political equivalent of an Ed Hardy shirt?

The Fourth Estate doesn’t answer big journalistic questions – at 100 days nobody’s even sure what the big questions are yet – but for news junkies it shows us how the sausage is made. We see the New York and Washington editors battle over the wording of a headline and reporters working their sources as another story breaks while the current one is still unfinished. For people who think this is all a show for Trump, one telling scene with Maggie Haberman lends credibility to that opinion. A constant target of his Twitter tirades, Haberman and Trump go way back to her New York Post days and he has an amiable conversation with her on the phone as the repeal of the Affordable Care Act falls apart. Trump seems glad to have it behind him, like a storyline on a show that was experimented with and then tossed aside. Talking to Haberman on the phone, it’s a different Trump than the one we see railing against the media at rallies. If the news cycle hasn’t worn you out already, then The Fourth Estate will be worth watching.

For more information on the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and for tickets and showtimes visit hotdocs.ca.

After yesterday’s look at Harvey Weinstein, a stain on Hollywood, it was a good moment to spend some quality time with a beloved comic figure, Gilda Radner. Love, Gilda is both heart-warming and heart-breaking, as we see the background and early work of the SNL original as well as being reminded that cancer took her away from her loved ones and fans too early. Director Lisa D’Apolito has the best narrator for the project, Radner herself, as she uses the audiobook from Radner’s autobiography It’s Always Something. Hearing the story in her own words is amazing, even when it comes from readings of her notes and letters by SNL successors Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler and Bill Hader. The common thread woven through interviews with friends and co-workers like Martin Short is that they were in awe of her talent and in love with her being. Well worth your time to seek this one out.

I then had a chance to catch a doc that I have wanted to see for a long time. Like the Hot Docs Festival itself, Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker’s The War Room is also celebrating its 25th anniversary. Following the presidential campaign of Bill Clinton in 1992, the candidate is not the star of this doc. That goes to chief strategist James “It’s the economy, stupid” Carville and media director George Stephanopoulos, the yin and yang of the campaign who steered the Arkansas governor to victory.

Compared to how fast political scandals break and explode on social media today, the pacing back then seems almost quaint. Carville and Stephanopoulos almost have time to breathe as their candidate faces a popular incumbent, an upstart outsider (Ross Perot), and allegations of an affair with Gennifer Flowers. They parse words in response to reporters and debate phrasing for radio ads. The camera is able to get into the intimate space of the campaign and the viewer feels like they have a seat at the table during discussions. You become a part of it and almost feel like you’ve earned a slice of cold pizza on the long nights of the campaign. It’s a fascinating look at how a president gets elected. Even if you’re not a complete political junkie, The War Room should be on your documentary bucket list.

Stephanie Soechtig’s The Devil We Know is one of those documentaries that makes you want to take action immediately upon leaving the theatre. It follows the town of Parkersburg, West Virginia, where chemical giant DuPont started manufacturing C8, a component of the ubiquitous Teflon that was coating cookware, microwave popcorn bags and even carpets and couches in the form of ScotchGard, When DuPont supplier 3M decided C8 was too dangerous to make, DuPont decided to make it in-house. Some female workers started giving birth to horribly disfigured children. Farmers near containment ponds had livestock dying off, while other residents downstream began noticing new ailments.

The doc shows how the EPA mostly turned a blind eye to the events as the agency’s top brass seemed to have been populated by an awful lot of people with ties to the company. It shows the depositions of DuPont execs who had barely a care for what they were causing. The most mind-numbing figure was learning that the chemical was found in the blood of 99% of Americans, so pervasive was the use of Teflon. And while the doc has a bit of a happy ending in terms of civil activism, it also hits you with the despair that nothing has really changed,

For more information on the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and for tickets and showtimes visit hotdocs.ca.

I had one film on my 2018 Hot Docs schedule today, The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret, which traces the allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein and the rise of the #MeToo movement. Director Barry Avrich has covered big entertainment figures before, looking at Lew Wasserman in The Last Mogul and Garth Drabinsky in Show Stopper. In fact, this isn’t Avrich’s first kick at the Weinstein can. 2010’s Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Story looked at the producing powerhouse but didn’t amplify the well-known whispers about his behaviour as he was at the height of his power and no one wanted to talk.

This look at Weinstein acts more like a primer to the situation rather than the ultimate expose of his alleged activities. It feels like the documentary you’d be pointed to if you asked Google to quickly explain the Weinstein scandal. Avrich does manage to get interviews with journalist Lauren Sivan, who recounted a story of Weinstein masturbating in front of her in a restaurant and with actress Melissa Sagemiller, who details his aggressive sexual behaviour during the shooting of 2001’s Get Over It. He manages to get insights from former Weinstein assistant Zelda Perkins, who details the atmosphere in his company and his constant use of non-disclosure agreements to silence women. Coming out while the story is still unfolding, he doesn’t get to talk to some of the biggest voices in the story, like Rose McGowan, Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow and Mira Sorvino.

Considering there are dozens of accusers against Weinstein, a doc on him could be a limited series. Avrich uses time in this doc to also look at the #MeToo worthy actions of Bill O’Reilly, James Toback, Donald Trump and others. With enough material for both the Weinstein and larger #MeToo movement issues, it can be argued that these should be two separate documentaries.

For more information on the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and for tickets and showtimes visit hotdocs.ca.

It’s the first full day of the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and I have a couple of screenings lined up today.

First up is Tim Wardle’s Three Identical Strangers, which tells the tale of separated-at-birth 19-year-old adopted triplets Robert, Eddy and David, who by chance discover each other and the fact that they were raised within a 100-mile radius. Reunited, the triplets are inseparable buddies who take the media world by storm, hitting all the morning shows, the papers and daytime staple Donahue. The media latches on to the superficial similarities and the guys not only become media darlings but also celebrities in the New York City social scene. They open a restaurant, they settle down, all seems good.

Then their story takes a darker turn. I don’t want to give too much away because the reaction in the audience is palpable, but the rest of the film will have you question nature versus nurture and research ethics in a way that will leave you a little shaken. Seek this one out when you can.

Ubiquity, from Bregtje van der Haak, examines electromagnetic hypersensitivity, through the lives of three people: a telecom engineer who lives off the grid and demands to be filmed with analog equipment, a young Japanese woman who fights against digital power meters, and a Dutch mother obsessed with cell towers, who takes the fight to her local government. All three claim that the omnipresent cellphone and Wi-Fi signals that surround us are causing them major health issues and van der Haak underscores their anxiety by occasionally blasting the audience with unsettling high-pitched sounds. Currently, electromagnetic hypersensitivity is not a recognized medical diagnosis and some in the medical field believe it is a psychological condition that can be treated with behavioural therapy. The audience’s own biases will determine if the doc’s subjects are canaries in the coal mine or something else altogether.

For more information on the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and for tickets and showtimes visit hotdocs.ca.

Molly’s Game, the directorial debut of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, tells the true story of Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain), a skier who seemed to be headed for the Olympics until a freak accident ended that dream. After getting employment at a club, she found herself hosting high-stakes poker games that attracted high-rollers and A-listers until an FBI investigation becomes more than a hiccup. Molly’s Game is now available in a Blu-ray combo pack.

The AVC-encoded 1080p disc is presented in the movie’s original 2.39:1 aspect ratio. Though the video presentation does have a few issues with banding near the beginning, it is otherwise a very good transfer of a digitally shot production. Details, whether they be clothing, surfaces or skin textures, are crisp. The color palette is pleasing, and hair, skin tones, cards and those all important poker chips look great. Black levels are very good too, except for some issues at the beginning. All in all, the issues are nothing to write home about and this is a well-done video presentation.

On the audio side, we get an English DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 soundtrack as well as a Spanish DTS 5.1 soundtrack. Subtitles are available in English SDH and Spanish. Please note that I was reviewing a Blu-ray meant for the U.S. market. The Canadian bilingual version does contain a French soundtrack and subtitles. I’m assuming it would be DTS 5.1 as well, but will update this when I can confirm. The surround tracks put us into the scenes with natural ambient effects. The score has great fidelity and though this isn’t a super kinetic action film, the low end is effective when used. Aaron Sorkin is known for his all-important dialogue and it’s presented crisply, cleanly and properly centered.

Usually after video and audio presentations, I talk about the extras, but on this disc it’s just an “extra” called Building an Empire, in which Chastain and Sorkin talk about Molly Bloom and her story. Considering this is based on a true story, I would like to have seen some extra featurettes looking more into the story’s background and talking to Bloom herself. The combo pack also comes with a DVD copy and a digital download code.

The issue with the bonus feature is just a quibble. With great performances from Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba, as well as excellent audio and video presentations, Molly’s Game is a good addition to you home entertainment library.

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