Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter (dir.Deborah Hoffmann)

I watched this film at Lasse and Andrea's house tonight with Lasse's lovely pasta and my lovely chocolate cake. Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter is a documentary about an elderly mother's deteriorating memory through Alzheimer's disease directed by her daughter and filmed by her daughters girlfriend. The film is a really intimate portrait of the mother trying to comprehend the world around her, grasping at the few details she can understand, which a moment later are gone, and the intellectual and emotional adjustments her daughter goes through during the progress of the disease. There are some very funny and touching moments in the film and it's not in the slightest bit depressing. It shows the honest frustration of the daughter but mainly it's about how to still find joy by adapting to the limitations of this disease and not fighting against it. The care home the mother was put in could, at first glance, seem like a depressing hell as the patients sit around in matching blue tracksuits but it's a home specifically for people with Alzheimer's where they are allowed to exist with their disease and are not sedated to the eyeballs. With no mementoes around her, half-familiar and causing anxiety through not being able to remember why these things are familiar, the mother lives totally in the present. She throws her arms out and says, 'Oh, the joy of me!' I like that the daughter includes herself in the film so it wasn't just a chronicle of her mother's Alzheimer's but an honest, articulate an insightful understanding of her parallel journey with this disease.

Bob Dylan - Don't Look Back (dir. D.A. Pennebaker)

I love Dylan and don't know why it took me all these years to finally get round to watching this documentary. I saw it last week and was thoroughly surprised by how brilliant it was. It consists mainly of a UK tour Dylan did in 1965 so some great moments of him on stage but it's all the back stage stuff that goes into a tour which was a joy to watch. There are fantastic moments when he's being interviewed by journalists, the dirty world of fee negotiations with Dylan's hard-nosed manager, groupies and wannabes hanging around, Dylan writing lyrics and milling out with pals in hotel rooms and his gently deteriorating relationship with Joan Baez. All these kind of scenes in some film makers hands could be really boring but everything in this film is utterly absorbing. I loved all the scenes with the journalists and their agenda driven questions, flustered by Dylan's easy resistance. This sort of antagonism contrasted so well with the intimate scenes with his friends who are not asking him things like, "What is your real message?" and "Are you Folk?"
Beautiful film. An absolute gem.

Joy Division - Under Review (dir. Christian Davies)

I spent the evening trying to make my website (and not getting very far) and and watching this documentary about Joy Division. It was very bad. It was like one of those cheap TV countdown programmes where they get a bunch of media journalists yacking on well past the point of saying anything interesting cause it's the least expensive programme filler. This film was such poor quality but even without a big budget they could have been creative with the content they had. It was one of the most bland things I've seen. There was a handful of talking heads, who were to be fair Joy Division fans, but said nothing notable, a miniscule amount of 'rare' footage, an excessive amount of footage from the film 24hour Party People, a very dull narration and some still shots of the band and their two album covers. There was mention of a J.G.Ballard book that became the title of a Joy Division song, so they showed the cover of this book while the narrator droned on, but weirdly they also floated up on the screen all the covers of Ballards novels! There was no interviews with the band members or his family. I would have been just as well to look up the Wikipedia entry. The film Control directed by Anton Corbijn, about Ian Curtis, the band, his relationships and his suicide, was so much more intense and insightful. Anyway, below is a short clip from Control.

Her Name is Sabine (dir. Sandrine Bonnaire)

I watched Her Name is Sabine fairly recently and was reminded of it again when I saw The Devil And Daniel Johnston. Sabine is autistic and her sister (a famous French actress) decided to make a documentary about her using old family Super 8 footage of life at home and on holidays and new footage of her in an institution where she now resides. Like the footage of Daniel when he was young, Sabine seems full of life and creativity but through being institutionalised and on heavy quantities of medication, both are now really overweight , slack-jawed and vacant looking. Both documentaries are careful to explain that because they each became increasingly violent and delusional, there was no other option than these treatments at the time. However, knowing that your sister has been isolated and in a straightjacket must have caused some feelings of guilt. Sabine is now in a much better care home but the damage caused by the years in the institution and the drugs have caused irreparable damage. Her sister, who made the film, is lobbying politicians to provide a different and better kind of care for people with conditions such as autism. For a first-time documentary maker, it was a good, well-structured film. It had some great moments of humour which for an emotional and troubling film like this, especially when the maker is so close to the subject, is a difficult thing to achieve. I like that it focused so closely on Sabine and her immediate surroundings and day to day life, of those who care for her and the other people in the home and, at least within the film, they are not used as fodder for a national debate.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston (dir. Jeff Feuerzeig) and Sympathy For The Devil (dir. Jean Luc Godard)

A few days ago I got two films out from the Filmshop. Sympathy For The Devil (incl. the directors version One Plus One) and The Devil and Daniel Johnston. I watched the documentary about the songwriter and musician Daniel Johnson first. I had never heard any of his music before and this film showed his progression as a musician and the decay of his mental health. It was a really interesting story, his music is fantastic and he was quite a character (he is still alive but heavily medicated so isn't the live-wire he once was). There was great archive footage and audio recordings, not just of his music but recorded diary entries and conversations, but I felt the film relied too heavily on talking-head interviews, mainly revering his talents, though his parents showed obvious distress talking about looking after a son with a Bipolar disorder. However, it's a warm portrait, obviously made by someone who loves and respects him and it's turned me on to the cult of Daniel Johnston (see fantastic clip below). Sympathy for the Devil had the opposite effect and turned me off what I one thought of as a to-be-revered film maker, Godard. I don't want to see anything by him again (well, maybe just Alphaville and Une Femme Est Une Femme). I really disliked this film. I thought it was a documentary about the Rolling Stones recording the track Sympathy for the Devil. It has nothing to do with them, they seem merely a backdrop for Godard's political views. I found it tedious and arrogant and fast-forwarded many of the political vignettes interspersing the slow pans of the Stones in the recording studio. I didn't make it to the end of this film but strangely what I did see has stayed with me.

Metallica - Some Kind of Monster (dir. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky)

Christmas day was  7 hours in the kitchen with a hangover, an hour of scoffing down boring turkey (I'm not going to bother cooking that again), a drunken argument (I just watched) and finally, at about midnight, a DVD of Metallica's documentary Some Kind of Monster. I've been watching a few rockumentaries, not because I'm particularly interested in the bands but to look at types of film making. I'm not into Metal at all but I liked this documentary as it flitted between macho guys trying to out-power each other and the emotional outbursts as the band attend group therapy. It's not really group therapy, the band's manager (a grey-haired hippie) hires in a performance-enhancing coach but the sessions with him slip into a parody of group therapy as the band act-out what they think opening-up is. The therapist becomes more and more like a day-dreaming groupie trying to 'get with' the band. When eventually they try to tell him his services are no longer required, he says there are still Trust Issues they need to work on, desperate to go on tour with them. Anyway, the filming wasn't intrusive, nice long patient shots, no heavy-handed interviewing or crazy editing or After Effects. I think it's pretty sensitive and showed quite a vulnerable side to the components that make up the force of Metallica.