For those in doubt, this documentary is evidence that Robin Williams was a genious at improv

The 2-hour Marina Zenovich adulatory HBO biopic about the life and work of Robin Williams - Come Inside My Mind - is a must-watch for serious RW fans and probably also worthwhile for anyone curious about his work, his development as an artist and actor, and about comedy and comic acting as well - although this latter group, me included, would be happier w/ a 90-minute show. Of course it's hard, nearly impossible, to kill your darlings - and to a fan every minute of RW's stage presence is worth preservation - and that may be true, though outtakes and supplements for the hard core can be provided generously these days of course. Nevertheless, the film has some amazing footage of RW's early days in LA comedy, alongside many who have also gone on to great fame and success - e.g., Steve Martin, Billy Crystal - and terrific pieces going back over his whole life showing his extraordinary ability to invent material on the spot, to improvise from a theme, and to mesmerize any audience through the sheer force of his energy - and you have to wonder how anyone could maintain that level of manic intensity, on and off stage, for so many years (most can't, and the early death of John Belushi shows what might have happened to Williams had he not, at least for periods of his life, gone clear and pulled back from the fray). Among the highlights are clips from his solo, 2-hour, largely improvised show at Lincoln Center (he wonders aloud if Pavarotti that night was at the ImProv doing "Two Jews went into a bar ... "), many outtakes for Mork & Mindy and from several films, and his performance with S Martin in Waiting for Godot - a surprising and successful side journey from comedy and film. We also get a fair amount of info about his early life, and more than one would expect info from his first wife (nothing from his 2nd). Overall, I wish it were two one-hour episodes (have to admit I ditched on the last 15 minutes, most of which concerned his suicide), but there's so much in this film that will win over fans or even further impress that in the camp that it's worth seeing one way or another.

Powerful documentary on the death of 43 Mexican students - though a little rough going for most US viewers

The two episode documentary series The 43, on Netflix, presents a vivid account of the horrendous, criminal slaughter of 43 Mexican students that took place in 2014 in a central Mexican city unfamiliar to me. The documentary re-creates as best as possible the scene of the slaughter and follows through with an account of the tepid official investigation, the more detailed investigation, far too late, by an international forensic team, and the ongoing protests and memorial services for the students. As the documentary shows, the students were no angels - they literally hijacked several inter-city buses for transportation to a demonstration (where or what about I'm not sure), but the police reaction to these hijackings went so far beyond the pale as to be not only horrific but also puzzling; the police could easily have taken control of the buses, arrested the students, and sent them on their way - there was no apparent reason to kill dozens of students, incinerate the bodies (as we later learn), and dump the ashes on a landfill. So the series follows up on several theories, none proven, about the involvement of the government at the highest level and of course international drug dealers. Overall, the series is powerful and graphic, but it certainly gets repetitive and could have been stronger if more concise. Most US viewers will probably, like me, be puzzled by many of the topical references, and for non-Spanish speakers this show is a little difficult, as so much is told through interviews that require lots of subtitle reading.

A must-see film for all Dylan fans: Rolling Thunder Revue

Martin Scorsese's Netflix documentary, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019), will probably be a little interest to everyone except Dylan fans - yet who isn't a Dylan fan? For those, like me, who hold that he is the world's greatest living artist, this film, even at 2+ hours, is a must-see. Using archival footage - in particular, lots of footage from a tour video shot by Martin von Haselberg - Scorcese re-creates the mood and feeling of what it was like to be part of this monumental 1975 tour with Dylan and a large and ever-evolving entourage, including notably Baez, Ginsberg, Joni Mitchell, and the violinist Scarlet Rivera, whose sound contributed so much to these mid-career works (Desire) when Dylan was at one of the peaks in his creativity. The captures from live performance are great of course - a lot of time given to the beautiful Oh Sister and One More Cup of Coffee - and we also see how Dylan was continually reworking his early material, bringing it to new life: a fine performance, for ex., of Hattie Carroll. Most of all we get a little bit of clue as to what Dylan was like in private moments: man jam sessions, a few after-concert parties, some rehearsal time, some fooling-around singing while on the bus, and in particular a few "episodes" on the tour that were little known: A visit to a Native American community in upstate NY, where D sand "Ira Hayes"; a visit to Clinton Correctional, where D sang Hurricane; time in Gordon Lightfoot's apt., where Mitchell sand a newly composed song. Plus, material from a contemporary interview w/ Dylan, in which he proves ever-enigmatic but strangely insightful as well. This doc. of course makes a good bookend w/ Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, about a much-younger Dylan struggling w/ his breakthrough into rock music, which changed music forever; here, D is much less the troubled adolescent, but clearly the center of attention, clearly a star, clearly completely committed to his music, but still strangely ill at ease and laconic. A surprise: I was amazed to see that D actually drove the tour bus. Who knew? All told, this doc breaks no new ground in cinema, and sure it could have been a half-hour shorter w/ judicious cuts of talking-heads footage and of the tour crew talking w/ young fans at the various venues - but for the unique and unexpected window onto Dylan's work and creative intelligence it's worth every minute.

An under-appreciated work of Italian neo-realistm, Il Posto

The 1961 Italian (Milanese) film Il Posto, written/directed by Ermanno Olmi, is another one of the great and somewhat unappreciated neo-realist works (this one made w/ no professional actors) that made Italian postwar cinema so great - possibly overlooked because it stands alone among Olmi's works (it was his first film, completely self-produced). The simple story line tells of a teenage boy in a working-class family in a rather dismal suburban housing project - it looks like and was an apartment complex developed from an abandoned set of farm buildings (terrific inside look at Italian working-class domestic life, particularly the kitchen setting, of the era) - who has the opportunity to apply for a job a an unnamed large company. As his gruff father says many times, if you get this job you're set for life. We follow the young man- Domenico - as he applies for and gets the position, as he meets a young woman who applies for and gets another spot at the company, and whom he pursues, but is too shy (and young) to keep her interest: She's obviously going to be popular and successful at the company. But Domenico - we're never quite sure. The depiction of the company (it was actually filmed at the offices where Olmi worked, for the Edison co., which provided all of the electricity to Italy at the time - huge props to the company for allowing this, unimaginable today) is one of the great feats of Italian cinema: the stultifying bureaucracy, the immature and bullying behavior and petty jealousy of the long-time employees, the sense that everything must proceed at the slowest possible pace, the extraordinary boredom the tedium of the job of a clerk, the toadying and deference to the bosses, the long hallways, the vast interior public spaces, the crowded offices, the uncomfortable and childish uniforms of the messengers - all of it almost Kafkaesque in its horror, and w/ the sense - Domenico feels this for sure - that it may be a lifetime job, but it will also be a killing, lifetime sentence - as we see it crush the life and spirit of a sensitive man who is secretly working on a novel, as we see the tiny little breaks in the tedium - a post-card received from a man on his annual vacation, a retiree who comes back every day to "visit" - sad and dreadful lives of peaceful boredom, and we wonder how anything ever gets accomplished. There's a great montage that unepectedly shows us a moment in the domestic life of each of the office clerks and a great scene toward the end at the company New Year's celebration, with Domenico sad and alone yet slowly joining in on the dancing and drinking - and a final moment of Domenico, at last at his desk as a clerk, looking around the room at the old men all around him, rolling his eyes - does he go or will he stay and be buried like the rest?

Note: Have just checked Olmi's bio and see that later in life he did the great film Tree of Wooden Clogs. 

Excellent HBO documentary on the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes

The Alex Gibney HBO documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019) is a no-holds-barred, chilling account of the extremely strange founder of the defunct health-care start-up, Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes apparently dropped out of Stanford and with the backing of an extremely powerful board of directors (and stockholders), including the likes of Henry Kissinger, General Mattis, David Boice, and George Schulz (i.e., hugely powerful older white men seemingly enthralled by this charming, well-spoken 20something) started a company that promised "empower" consumers by making blood tests far simpler (finger prick rather than needle drawn into a tube) and significant (providing far more info at much lower price). Extremely articulate, with a great stage and public presence and a carefully tended, striking image, she talked her way into a cover story in Fortune, a NYer profile, and many, many speaking engagements and awards - yet the company was a complete and total fraud, never coming close to building a product that could even remotely accomplish the basic marketplace goals let alone transform health care across the world, as Holmes so grandly claimed. How were so many people swindled by this charlatan? That's never directly answered, but the sense is that she played into and up to a narrative that the media and the public were eager to buy: A successful, brilliant, young, female, entrepreneur who had a passion for an idea (she was born for the age of Ted Talks); she compared herself with Edison (hence, the title of the documentary) and Steve Jobs, and she shrugged off the many failures as the obstacles that true visionaries must face and overcome.  Gibney got access to many videos of company staff meetings, which she ran like music videos/pep rallies, plus interviews with many duped company employees, stockholders ("worth" $400M at one point, co went bankrupt), and journalists all make the movie; there are plenty of clips of the media hungry Holmes, though - currently under indictment - she obviously did not cooperate with Gibney. The one flaw in the documentary, in my view, is that there is virtually nothing about her childhood, education, and family background - a big gap. Also it's worth noting that this doc covers much the same ground as the recent pod cast The Dropout, and both must draw on Bad Blood, by WSJ reporter John Carreyrou, who broke the story of this fraud.

A fine hisorical drama about teh catastrophe at Chernobyl

Most of us have probably forgotten the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in the 1980s, and most of us probably have no idea of the magnitude of the catastrophe nor of how it could have been even more serious and disastrous but for the brave actions of a few scientists and many other workers at or near the plant - particularly the firefighters, the miners who worked day and night to dig a tunnel to bring in a flow of cooling water, and the men who plunged into the contaminated network of piping to turn of key valves. Thousands of these people - plus thousands more from nearby towns that housed most of the workers at the plant - died quickly of radiation poisoning or later from various related cancers. Incredible story - and the Craig Mazin + Johan Renck production on HBO does a great job bringing the tension of these days to light. The focus is on two scientists (in particular one played by Jarred Harris, who seems to specialized in troubled middle age men who kill themselves) and a Soviet Comm Part hack charted with investigating the accident and effecting the clean-up. Lots of great, tense scenes as they confront obtuse  party leaders - who argue that there could not be an accident and any discussion of any such accident is anti-Lenin and anti-Soviet; we watch the party hack over time recognize the futility of his mission and the wreckage of his life - and we see the bravery of the scientists who risk everything by bringing the truth of the accident - a complete screw-up by the plant operators, under pressure from the government. The final episode, which is abased on the attempt to have a white-wash show trial but in which the scientists speak truth to power, is a little stagey and staid, but aside from that the series is an excellent historical drama that makes us wonder about the safety of nuclear plants today, despite all the assurances and palliatives.

A potentially criminal act or a an act of mercy: Alice in the Cities

Wim Wenders's 1974 film, Alice in the Cities, is a fine travel movie in a mode that feels familiar in some ways - in fact, it was so much like another 1974 film, Paper Moon, that Wenders almost abandoned the project - but has a style of its own. The plot, such as is, involves a 31-year-old freelance journalist from Germany traveling in the U.S. to write a travel essay commissioned by a mag.; his research is getting him nowhere, although he's taking many Polaroid photos that he hopes to use in his writing (scribbling in a notebook, as one character notes). His agent/editor pretty much dumps him because he's oblivious to his deadline, and he prepares to fly home from NYC, but the flight is canceled. He provides some help (which leads to a one-night stand) to a German woman he meets at the terminal: She speaks little English, and is traveling w/ her 10-year-old daughter (Alice). Long and short, when he prepares to fly home the next day, the woman has left him a note asking him to be responsible for Alice - the mom has some relationship business to resolve w/ her ex. - on the flight and until she can get to Europe. So the man takes Alice to Amsterdam, rents a hotel room near the airport - of course the mother never arrives, which leads to an odyssey in Holland and then in Germany as they try in vain to find Alice's grandmother (all they have to go on is a photo of the grandmother's house). The plot feels not only improbable - who would leave a child to a stranger like that? Why would he take this young girl on an odyssey across Germany, how could he not perceive that he is likely to be arrested for kidnapping or even on a morals charge? And of course his  behavior seems even creepier today: What 45 years ago may have seemed like an amusing jaunt during which Alice and the man bond, today seems even creepier: Who won't cringe at the scene of him in the bathtub while Alice sits on the toilet seat, conversing w/ him? And other such moments. All that said, we do feel an attachment to Alice and even a sympathy for the poor man and his tender, protective relationship w/ this child. All his mistakes seem to be out of clumsiness and obliviousness, and what appears from the outside to be a potentially criminal act we see, from the inside, as an act of goodness and mercy, even if misguided. The end is puzzling in many ways, which I won't discuss here or give away, but will lead to much head-scratching I'd think. This film is like a prelude to WW's next, Wrong Move, with the same lead actor, once again an aspiring writer on a journey of discovery - although Alice, in which the dialog was created on the scene (Wrong Move held tightly to the Handke script), feels much more free and open and less pretentious. (Careful viewers will see WW appear in the film and to have his name come up in an amusing manner.)