Reviews

Composed almost entirely of archival footage, this electrifying documentary walks us hour by hour through the horrific tragedy of Philadelphia's wanton destruction of the MOVE organization and its adherents. We watch firsthand as the police and fire department conspire to bomb MOVE's headquarters in a townhouse in a working class neighborhood, and as the bombing leads to a blazing fire which ultimately consumes most of that neighborhood, and we watch in horror as Philadelphia's government officials make the conscious decision to "let the fire burn" -- which leads to the deaths of 11 people including a number of children. The only small flaw in this film, at least in the edition I watched, was the sound mix, which is uneven, necessitating a fair amount of upping and lowering the sound level -- a small price to pay for an historic document of such importance. I cannot recommend this film highly enough. Truly eye-opening.

This four-episode snoozer follows the basic pattern of the vast majority of current streaming documentaries: stretch it out to as many episodes as possible even if you have to regurgitate the same unsurprising factoids over and over and over again. It's a familiar story: gigantic Aussie megachurch exports itself to New York City and fills thousands of seats with ecstatic parishioners enraptured by the miraculous words of a charismatic preacher who likes to dress in tight jeans and leather jackets. Fast forward to the end: the megachurch turns out to be run by child rapists, adulterers, serial abusers, and multiple sleazebag cover-uppers. There are hours of interviews with one of the key sociopaths - a guy who has now repented his evil ways and is bathed in the light of goodness and mercy (right). If it feels like you've seen this one already, it's because you have. The real question is how do they keep filling up these churches with mesmerized followers when the ultimate outcome is so predictable? I would think anyone of average intelligence would take one look at these creeps and run for the door. But sadly, not so.

If you can make it through five minutes of this steaming pile of twaddle, please contact me. My septic field recently exploded and I am in desperate need of someone with a truly strong stomach who can get out here and clean up the mess without collapsing from the stench. Folks, I am sorry for Ms. Smith's many misfortunes, and her untimely passing was very sad indeed - but in this documentary she comes across as a truly self-absorbed narcissist and self-aggrandizer who had but a single focus in life: herself. Add to that the fact that she seems to have a room-temperature IQ, a rather paltry vocabulary, and an unashamedly opportunistic outlook - and you've got the recipe for a literally unwatchable documentarian disaster. When will Netflix and the rest of our streaming services come to realize that not every flash-in-the-pan hard-luck "celebrity" merits a two-hour memorial, or even worse, a 10-part interminable "reality" series?

After watching 3-plus hours of video interviews with various snarky, weird, and self-aggrandizing characters of every conceivable description, and suffering through the endless commercials on Peacock, many of which must have cost twice or three or even four or five times what the actual production of the actual series cost, you will know absolutely nothing more - and I mean not one whit, not one speck, not one teeny-tiny bit more - than when you started out. You will not know who killed this sorry guy, or why they did, or even what he actually died of. No, friends, you will know absolutely nothing. The mystery will remain as mysterious as it was before you even knew it was a mystery. You will have wasted your time utterly and completely. The only thing I recommend this cheesy bit of fluff for is taking naps. For that, it can't be beat. (Minimum character limit met.)

I candidly admit I did not quite know what to make of this film until I learned the backstory from Ephraim Katz's highly esteemed Film Encyclopedia. Apparently, this documentary was actually conceived and created as a kind of cinematic "endurance test" for young inductees into the Serbian armed forces. While I found this a bit bizarre at first, a brief recap of the film more or less confirmed it. For instance, the opening scene in this documentary is a five-minute static shot of shrubs and trees on an otherwise barren hilltop, which is then followed by a second five-minute static shot of what appears to be a large rock pile. This is followed by a ten-minute sequence of an horrendously bad oompah band, tubas and all, playing squealing out-of-tune music at a bone-rattling volume, and after that, there is another ten-minute sequence of three men in work clothes walking slowly down an endless hallway in some sort of nondescript workplace as they mutter inaudibly to one another, and so on. I believe the title of the film, Good Luck, is further evidence of the endurance test nature of this documentary. And if, after reading this, you still have the temerity to embark upon a viewing of this film, I have only two final words for you: Good luck.

The question that today's streaming service documentarians never seem to ask themselves: Is this guy really worth a nearly two-hour documentary? In this case, the answer is a resounding NO. Brody, the subject of this turgid screed, is a combination of narcissist, moron, dope fiend, and BS artist - with not a single redeeming feature that I could detect. The storyline is that as the supposed heir to a fortune, he promised to give away his inheritance (variously proclaimed as 25 million dollars, 1 billion dollars, and 100 billion dollars) to the poor and needy. But the fact was, he was essentially broke, and lost what few brains he had inherited to his favorite smoke, PCP. None of this stopped gazillions of folks from sending this nincompoop letters begging for money. Those letters have sat in crates in storage units since the 1970s, and I guess some hustler had the bright idea of making a documentary where the letters are re-read, sometimes by mediocre actors, sometimes by the actual surviving letter writers or their descendants, in the vague hope of dragging some emotion out of what is essentially a monumentally boring subject, worth approximately a three-minute YouTube snoozer. In the end, Brody gets what he deserves, and if you choose to watch this prolonged waste of time, you will too.

This is the most stultifying 80 minutes of video I have ever experienced in my many decades of watching sheer crap. The essence of it is this: imagine yourself locked in a room with a colossal monotonous bore who is fixated on reliving his own glory days as an audience member and one-time contestant on The Price Is Right. He relives each hour of his heyday minute by mind-numbing minute. He shows you elaborate spreadsheets of every item EVER put up for bid on the show, and its price. He makes you play a cheesy digital Price Is Right game that he invented in the dark ages of amateur computing. He describes in cringey detail his crushes on the models who populated the show. This is interrupted only occasionally either by a snippet of the actual show from back in the day - or a cameo by one of the various hosts and producers who share not-so-fascinating backstage tidbits. I am thinking the CIA might want to get their hands on this as a more effective way of torturing terrorists than playing heavy metal music all night. If you insist on ignoring this review, just make sure your remote's batteries are fully charged, and keep it within arm's length. You've been warned.

You know those dopey things you see online all the time - memes? 99% of them seem to have been ineptly stitched together by people with room temperature IQs, right? Well, guess what? Those memes, according to the authors of this busload-of-twaddle documentary, are PURE MAGIC!!! That's right - they are the work of dark magicians operating on an astral plane, and they have the power to subvert the universe! Boy, was I surprised. Especially since this "documentary" is stitched together with found footage that has almost nothing to do with the subject matter, along with interviews with some of the goofiest humanoids I have ever seen captured on celluloid. If you have an overpowering urge to waste 90 minutes of your time on sheer idiocy, may I suggest that you go with Plan 9 from Outer Space instead? At least you'll get a couple of laughs out of that.

Fruitcake Fraud is an entirely glib and superficial documentary that illuminates nothing whatsoever, and when all is said and done, amounts to a glossy but overlong advertisement for the Collins Avenue Bakery's pricey fruitcakes. The essence of it is that a bakery employee and his wife managed to embezzle somewhere in the neighborhood of $17 million from the benighted management of the company, but since most of the film is endless shots of fruitcakes rolling down the assembly line interspersed with quickie interviews with employees, mostly played for laughs, we never get to learn anything about the perpetrator outside of the basic facts -- he stole a whole bunch of money and eventually went to the hoosegow. The interviews and the ad nauseam fruitcake factory footage pads the length of this film out from the 30 or so minutes that might have been interesting to a whopping hour and forty minutes of sheer boredom. The Collins Street Bakery does make a good fruitcake, but this glossy exercise in promotional banality is an utter failure as a film. 4 stars for a couple of chuckles here and there.

The reviewer who called this a puff piece got it exactly right. James is portrayed (mostly by family members and friends) as a master musical genius, a fantastic superstar, when in fact he was nothing more than a flash in the pan. After worshipping at James' altar for most of the film, the interviewees eventually pay very brief lip service to the fact that he was a "troubled soul," which I suppose relieves him of any responsibility for the multiple felonies - assault, rape, kidnapping, torture - he was convicted of. The only thing satisfying about this stultifying bore of a badly constructed and edited film is watching Mr. James turn into a bloated, hulking mess as he ages, the result of all that clean living over the years. The real question isn't whether James will be remembered as a great performer or as a serial predator and drug addict. The real question is whether he'll be remembered at all. I'm betting not.

This unremarkable slice-of-life documentary focuses on the relationship between a man who is possibly an alcoholic, and his considerably younger girlfriend, who is most assuredly a hardcore junkie. They have a small child together, a toddler. Throughout the repetitive film, the girl wanders off into the nightmare city of Camden, NJ in search of drugs, which she pays for with money earned from prostitution. The boyfriend is then seen searching the streets for her. Eventually, he finds her, begs her to give up her addict lifestyle - and winds up giving her money to buy more drugs. While she is turning tricks and shooting dope into her body, the boyfriend takes care of their child and somehow holds down a job, if the narrative is to be believed. Eventually, the addicted girlfriend agrees to go into treatment - but surprise, surprise, instead she wanders off into Camden again looking to score. This time her beau has had enough and takes a job elsewhere in the country, taking the child with him. There are a few other minor characters whose trajectories are equally exhilarating.

For its entire duration, there is not a single insight into the process of addiction, nor mention of a single solution to the problem. We are just watching the victims of addiction gradually implode. There's more than a hint of exploitation here, as the misery of addicted and degraded human beings is turned into an hour or so of entertainment for the more fortunate. Ordinarily, I would have given this film three stars - it is well shot and the viewer can't help becoming involved in the central narrative - but I feel compelled to provide a counterpoint to the 10-star reviews from the usual one-time reviewers who likely have some connection, financial or familial, to the filmmakers.

I'm posting this review mostly to temper all the 10-star raves. What this is, is a guy named Jonathan, standing on a stage, delivering his standard lecture about the benefits of a zero-carb diet for people who are overweight or have diabetes. (There are also some filler interviews by people who think Jonathan is the cat's pajamas, but basically, it is Jonathan's stage lecture.) It's not really a documentary in the sense of a balanced investigation into anything, yet I am sure people who are seriously overweight and/or suffering from diabetes will find much to ponder here. I have no quarrel with Jonathan's point of view, just writing to let filmgoers know that what you get for your money is essentially a stage lecture by a guy who is touting the benefits of a zero-carb diet.

This is nothing more than typical far-right extremist propaganda all wrapped up in tinsel and presented as a "fair and balanced" blueprint for reaching some sort of non-specific political detente. In this telling, only the left is "radical." The far right lunatic fringe that stormed the Capitol is composed of right-thinking patriots. My quick review of Better Left Unsaid is: Better Left Unwatched.