02

Sep

What would happen if you recorded your “Life in A Day?”

“Life in A Day” is a documentary directed by Kevin MacDonald.  Video cameras were given to more than 80,000 people and families from more than 190 countries.  Each recorded their lives for a single day, July 24, 2010.  Doing a chronicle like this is a production gauntlet.  A thankless one.

The film begins slowly.  How many people are patient enough to watch the waking moments of a dozen people from across the planet?  It’s not bad, but best bits follow the waking opening.

A teenager shaves for his first time with his dad on-hand

This opens at the Film Society of Mpls./St. Paul on September 2nd.

As happens with the occasional film, this has no plot, nor story, but has characters.  The storytelling method reveals character and characters in ways no other films do. There are people, whose points of view or sections stand out.  The randomness might remind you of the “Visions of Light,” the American Film Institute’s documentary, from 1992, about movie lighting.

A great moment: something is giving birth, but you can’t tell if she’s a mammal or not.  And then the point of view starts to teeter and slumps to the floor.  A man has fainted.  He’s now a father!

The magic comes when the subjects answer any one of four questions like “who do you love?,” “what do you love?” “what do you fear?”  On the part of fear, one woman flaunts her fat boy.  Another mentions loneliness.

“Life in A Day” is worth watching.

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29

Jul

“Crime After Crime” is a moving documentary about a woman’s perseverence, and the sausage-making in “justice”

“Crime After Crime,” a feature-length documentary by Yoav Potash, about a troubled young woman, Deborah Peagler, who was convicted of homicide more than 25 years ago.  This, after having asked neighborhood gangsters to make her abusive lover stop beating and terrorizing her.  While a 2003 California law would only demand six years of her life in prison, her 1983 sentence took more than 25.  This is her story.

This suspenseful true story will show at the Film Society of Minneapolis/St. Paul starting on July 29th.

Ms. Deborah Peagler awaits justice and freedom (courtesy Sundance)

Two lawyers, Nadia Costa and Joshua Safran, stepped up to take her case, pro bono, after a 2003 California law was passed that changed the game for victim/survivors of domestic abuse who are convicted of homicide, and free her.  In doing so they found a sympathetic client, and a District Attorney’s office, run by Steve Cooley, that has committed and is committing “Crime After Crime,” as Mr. Safran described their conduct, to save face and keep careers.

When you picture justice, this isn’t it: not “Crime After Crime.”  It’s a spectacular story, where the themes and stakes will remind some of you of the activist 1970s movie trend with such titles as 1980′s “Brubaker,” 1979′s “…And Justice for All,” and 1975′s “Dog Day Afternoon,” of the underdog.

Winston Churchill, an extraordinary political icon of the United Kingdom, once said that “Democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms…”  As it goes with that, so this seems to with justice: she was denied parole at least thrice.  At one point Safran describes how the parole and appellate process work in ways, which ignore or preclude the convict’s promise for doing good.  Ms. Deagler had been an ideal inmate, had earned a two-year degree, become a mentor to junior inmates and served far more time than 2000s laws demanded.  So the case requires Herculean efforts even when the law, precedent and rhetorical are on their side.

Lawyers Josh Safran and Nadia Costa guide Ms. Peagler toward freedom, if not justice (courtesy Berkeley Side)

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office does so many things that clash with the public’s interests or Ms. Peagler’s.  It makes you wretch and doubt America’s commitment to justice, or equal justice.  Originally she was sentenced via a legal perspective that lumped women, who lash out is desperation at their abusive husbands or lovers, with those women who kill in cold blood.

The stakes, offenses and perversions of justice, and morals in this story make it a crackerjack whodunit.  What makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand is that “Crime After Crime” trains its crosshairs, more and more, on the prosecutors misconduct.  The DA’s office conceals a pivotal document, uses unreliable and impotent witness testimony and reneges on compassionate agreements.

California's masses support Peagler's cause (courtesy LATimes.com)

“Crime After Crime” boasts as many plot twists and is as fast-paced as a sweeps week episode of “Law & Order.”  In some ways this is similar to 1993′s “In the Name of the Father,” even though that drama, which was based on a true story, exonerates justice in the United Kingdom.  In both stories, convicts languish in prison for crimes, and with sentences, more heinous than the evidence warranted.

Ms, Peagler’s odyssey is even more trying and dramatic than another documentary, POV’s “Presumed Guilty,” from 2010.  That  indicts the Mexican version of justice – and a very non-Western.  That candid and uncomfortable exposé provides excellent and telling comparison to Ms. Peager’s story.

Alongside being a splendid true crime drama, this documentary pushes us to consider several uncomfortable questions: what is justice?  what color is it?  why must it not only have a price, but one that makes our noses bleed?  Finally, what do we expect from it vs. what America’s founders wanted us to expect from it.

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29

Jul

“How to Live Forever,” a baby boomer’s light-hearted documentary on aging, which offers sparse chuckles

America isn’t obsessed with youth, living longer or forever, but it probably seems so.  As fashion expert Tim Gunn has lamented, models aren’t yet fully developed women, and still the masses look to them as a standard of beauty.  In the public’s imagination youth rules.  Young beauty, that is.

101 year-old Buster mugs for the movie

A documentary feature, “How to Live Forever” from middle-aged filmmaker, Mark Wexler, is coming to the Lagoon Cinema on Friday July 29th.  His effort is a look at how we consider age and what do to about it, avoid death and in general try to beat the odds.

The story is peculiar in that Mr. Wexler starts off with funeral director’s convention in Las Vegas; this opening bodes poorly.

“How to Live Forever” almost seems to last that long.  It’s interesting and amusing, but only entertains, amuses or informs once in a while; when you find yourself sitting back in a recliner, nodding off for a bit, and feeling sure that, when you open your eyes, you missed nothing, something wrong.

Mid-20th-Century fitness icon Jack Lalanne is one of the highlights.  Others include a 70-something Japanese male porn star, a beauty competition for women over age 60 and a high school class that visits a retirement home.  That final one is remarkable: the youths confront their own preconceived ideas about how depressing, off-putting or gross old people might be.  But Mr. Wexler also speaks to more than a few 100+ year-old women.  Strangely he doesn’t mix men among them.  When’s the last time you asked yourself what 100 years looks like?  105 yrs?  110 yrs?  Or 114?

What does longevity look like? (courtesy Flickr)

“How to Live Forever” is interesting and sweet, but is also clearly an amateur’s work; it’s long and even indulgent.  It has two vital problems:  Wexler has made an incoherent narrative from his footage.  The point of his story, and what he wants us to find in it, are vague.  If he’s disinterested in a clear narrative, then so be it, but that’ll chafe viewers who expect more.  The lack of organization harkens somewhat to the way the vignette format that Spike Lee used in his autobiographical “Crooklyn;” but that choice worked because the sequences were connected in a nearly explicit way.

Also Mr. Wexler rarely engages or excites as a host; he looks and acts tired and run-down, which seems to be one of his motivations for examining “How to Live Forever.”  He isn’t having much fun throughout the story; that tone, which he set, rubs off on viewers.

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22

Jul

“If a Tree Falls” preaches to the leftist choir as it tells us about a group of “environmental terrorists”

“If a Tree Falls” is a feature-length documentary, by Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman, about a group of environmental activists who go way beyond the call of duty – to a violent edge of it.  They are the Earth Liberation Front. “If a Tree Falls” clearly sympathizes with this group, which the FBI calls “domestic terrorists.”

The Environmental Liberation Front acts (courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories)

This film doesn’t run down a history of the movement, or even the psychology behind that.  It describes some incidents that led to the domino-effect arrests of a cell.  The film concentrates on the cell’s principal personalities: Dan McGowan, Suzanne Savoie, Jake Ferguson, and one or two other outstanding ones.  This story tells of the offenders on the extreme left, and not the offended.  Those offenders may feel that the mainstream media had taken their foes’ side.  The question of who’s the offended may be disputable.  But those whom the ELF attacked are barely heard.

“If a Tree Falls” may be righteous.  But also self-righteous.  This film shows at Minneapolis’ Lagoon Cinema for a week starting on July 22nd.

A clear bias toward the extreme leaves the film’s point-of-view weak. The bias is about 60-40 or even 70-30 in voices in favor of the extremists or terrorists.  The centrist viewers, who are against violence with this cause, are left with valid, yet open questions. Those centrists won’t be convinced by a tale of how a docile McGowan slipped into this conviction.  Objective, non-partisan voices would keep viewers’ attention.  How will they respond when they find that in fact, with one battle, McGowan, Savoie and their compatriots torched a lumber location based on false information?

Mr. McGowan describes a few cracks in his reasoning and decision-making.  Several voices, including his, explain why he, the focal character, decided that confrontation was a superior, more potent path to waking-up the offenders than mid-20th-Century tactics: marching, singing, chanting, picketing and the like.

Poster image (courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories)

Only a few voices discuss the innocents who are bunched in with the worst violators, and hurt.  Only a couple of voices consider the lumber industry’s efforts to do good.  Some of the best documentaries may not carry an agenda, but instead a reportorial, objective point of view.  This one informs, entertains and might enlighten viewers, especially in terms of “preaching to the choir.”  The want for a moderate and balanced voice is disappointing.

With the film’s faults, it’s a good, clear, almost well told story of this sect’s work.  This film is worth watching, but DVD will suffice.

It’s easy to sympathize with the zealots’ desire for faster, more satisfying results: those, which are more progressive and aggressive than typical 20th-Century tactics.  Faster than diplomacy.  But it takes a certain gut and heart to move from the fantasy of revenge to urban or guerilla combat.  I doubt that many or even most viewers share that one with these former ELF members.

“If a Tree Falls” uses interview footage with the characters almost exclusively.  It’s a late 20th-Century story of violent protestors; other than news clips, there isn’t archival or behind-the-scenes footage.  It provides reenactments of specific details shots; it uses animation, in lieu of banal, traditional live-action reenactments of some criminal scenes, in an amusing, playful, refreshing way.

This film poses large ideological, legal and moral questions: who is a terrorist?  What is terrorism?  Does each form of terrorism pose an equal threat.

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08

Jul

“Rejoice and Shout” spreads the good news – Gospel’s history

“Rejoice and Shout” is a feature-length documentary, from director Don McGlynn, about the history of Gospel music.  It’s described as a rhythmic, ancestral pillar that African-Americans used to sustain themselves and to keep sane during their centuries in slavery.  It told the audience that, at least at church, beyond the anglo gaze, “I am Somebody!”

One of the Blind Boys groups (courtesy Magnolia Pictures)

A staple of the documentary genre is cutting between archival and interview footage.  This film does that.  It tells an interesting, surprising and entertaining story, omitting any dogma that you might expect.  It runs down the time-line of the genre and its innovations, some typical, others “unholy.”

It shows at the Edina Cinema for a week starting on July 8.  This documentary provides a who’s who of the indelible and most potent Gospel artists, also dredging up memories of folks who time might have forgotten.  “Rejoice and Shout” makes clear that as long as the music is understood as honoring God, then it should please Him and in-turn his followers.

It tells about Gospel music’s pivotal personalities, trends and game-changing innovations, it tells about clashing sensibilities of faith and styles of music.  At the heart of some innovations  is a question:  isn’t it unholy marry rap with gospel, or blues with gospel, or any popular music with that pious one?

Mavis Staples (courtesy Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

This story tells us how Thomas A. Dorsey, while ultimately revered, caught hell for having mixed the blues with Gospel, making what some considered heretical.  (Ray Charles had similar clashes when he took those chances.)  It tells us how Rosetta Tharpe, who may be less known than Mavis Staples, inspired the latter to take up the guitar; before Ms. Tharpe did it, Ms. Staples hadn’t known that it was possible.  And without the Dixie Hummingbirds, The Temptations might not’ve been.

Many documentaries are more creative, with editing, location and other choices, and take chances with their storytelling.  “Rejoice and Shout” is a strong, competent film.

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20

May

“Circo” is a family drama that boils within a tiny Mexican circus

“Circo” is a 75-min documentary, by Aaron Schock, about a family-run Mexican Circus.  This is a very interesting tale of a job on the margins, in a country, Mexico, that’s on the margins of the Western world’s media radar.  In “Circo,” a family, the Ponces, is born into, grows up in and lives and works in its own small, struggling family-run circus.  Compromises, troubles and strained & clashing loyalties make the circus that is the family and its work.

A grand entrance (courtesy Hecho a Mano Films)

The Mexican economy isn’t kind or gentle to this family.  Too many small-scale circuses compete among one another for dwindling and poor audiences.  Ironically the Ponces are among them.

This opens at Minneapolis’ Lagoon Cinema for a week on May 20th.

The circus is surviving, squeezing out enough money for the Ponces to subsist. Theirs is a nomadic lifestyle.  They’re nomadic entertainers in a world that has little use for that entertainment; their story is special, maybe unique.

The mom, Ivonne Ponce, wants her children go to school, to prepare to have choices and careers away from the circus.  Instead the dad, Tino Ponce, was raised holding his loyalty to parents above all (where his dad relies on and expects him to keep the one successful family circus afloat).  His father has three other sons, each of whom is struggling with his own circus.

Ponce daughters preened to promote Circo Mexico (courtesy Hecho a Mano Films)

The children want for a 20th-Century childhood, with playtime, school and neighborhood playmates.  This brand of childhood, before labor laws and longer life expectancies, takes us back the eras when people toiled until their 30s, and didn’t know a playful youth.  There’s a scene, just beside the entry to a trailer, where grandpa trains his youngest grand daughter in contortion; as she cries and wails it brings back images from the abusive training that made parts of Jet Li and Jackie Chan’s training infamous.

This documentary raises several interesting topics about family loyalty, zeal for “old-time” or “by-gone” values, work ethic and child rearing; unto themselves these are worthy of an essay, but not here.  Very few movies deal with any of these in smart or interesting ways, much less all in one story.

“Circo” gives us a gander at a way of living, of working, of loving and is foreign to the U.S.  It’s a well-told tale that deserves to be scene.  Even though the final act is confused about its purpose or how it wants to leave us; it should be trimmed by 15-minutes – it drags.

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28

Apr

POM’s “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” is an irreverent way to scratch at some truths

“The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” shows us the sausage making involved in product placement in movies.  As Morgan Spurlock peeled back the onion of Mickey D’s in 2004′s “Supersize Me,” this year’s documentary comedy shows us, and him, in the process of wooing companies to pay for his movie, and in-turn being cast in it as the lead and supporting characters or topics.   Along the way they are examples of how those companies or brands have changed movies.

In Mr. Spurlock’s routine, nearly inimitable style, “The Best Movie Ever Sold” starts with him just now considering how well his crazy idea will fly with the American Nasdaq-type brands, whose concern about brand management and protective public relations flirts with paranoia.

(courtesy Sony Classics)

Landmark Theatre’s Uptown Theater plays this for a week starting on April 29th.

A bunch of mid-level brands stakes their claims to Mr. Spurlock’s viewers: POM Wonderful, a healthy pomegranate drink, Sheets (a gas station & eatery), Ban, Mini-Cooper, Hyatt hotels, Jet Blue and Mane & Tail among mid-length list of others.  That last one beats it all; it’s a shampoo for the horse and human markets, both!  Wow.

It must’ve been awkward and embarrassing when Morgan asks the Ban Roll-on  folks what words or phrases describe or typify their product: the marketing execs were struck dumb!  Hmm, no need to wonder why they called their company a small, scrappy company that could.

This is an amusing, witty exposé of brand placement or brand integrated movies.  Mr. Spurlock includes a few ads within the movie, sweetening the pot for his highest paying sponsors.  That’s an irony for those viewers who resent the Generation-Y norm of seeing TV commercials slapped onto a 70-foot screen, before or among the trailers.

All Spurlock family, Morgan and son, praise to Jet Blue? (courtesy Sony Classics)

Mr. Spurlock’s bottom-line is one that often lays on the track between money and art.   The question of artistic independence is big for the filmmaker.  That question: how much to sell-out?  One of the many artistic and financial questions: how much artistic control does he cede to his sponsors; how much of a whore is he willing to become?

A score?  See it.  Enjoy it.  Consider the meat inside the loony package.

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17

Apr

“Cameraman: the Life and Work of Jack Cardiff” is a fun, witty treat for movie nerds (and their friends)

A cinematographer, Jack Cardiff, of England, waited until age 95 to leave us.  He had a story of 70 years of defining and designing how the light looks in movies – chiefly British ones.  His reputation across the pond was so eminent that independent filmmaker Craig McCall (not a household name in American movies) just had to make a film about his talents, his contributions and ambitious & zealous artistry.  That’s “Cameraman: the Life and Work of Jack Cardiff.”

When was the last time you went to a movie and considered who was in-charge of its look or visual attitude?  Cardiff and others talk about how he was inspired by painters, particularly impressionists, such as Vincent Van Gogh and Johannes Vermeer, to light for drama and emphasis.  In fact Christopher Callis, one Mr. Cardiff’s peers, said that he helped to found the British movie look.

In the late 1940s his work founded his reputation as a go-to cameraman, and as a man who was game for artistic risks.  His big break came with 1946′s “Matter of Life and Death” aka “Stairway to Heaven” in America.  His work on 1947′s “Black Narcissus” helped to forge his reputation; the lighting and look of it are extraordinary, bold and evocative.  It showed new ways to see and understand how artistic a film could be.  In addition, he worked on the first ever documentary that wasn’t a travelogue:  1945′s “Western Approaches.”

Martin Scorsese, a renowned American movie icon, whose voice seems to out weigh several of the others in this film, described Mr Cardiff’s work as “painting in-motion.”  To that point, Orson Welles once called movies “an enormously expensive paint box,” which is another way to say just how Cardiff expressed his talents when directors gave him the led-way.

In a couple of books about Mr. Scorsese, he describes how he reveres English filmmakers, especially Michael Powell, and the degree to which they inspired his own work.  “Cameraman” uses a brilliant split screen that briefly illustrates point-by-point, on how Mr. Powell’s “The Red Shoes,” from 1948, showed a daring new way to show point of view: from the mind’s eye of a performer.  Rewatch in boxing scenes in 1980′s “Raging Bull” after watching “Red Shoes’” dance scenes – you’ll get it.

This is a niche movie; there aren’t a lot of people who watch documentaries.  And this isn’t the first documentary about a director of photography, or a group of them.

During an audience Q & A with the filmmaker, Craig McCall, after the first screening, at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, he said that this, which he spent 13 years making independently, was inspired at least in part by the American Film Institute’s (AFI) 1992 documentary “Visions of Light.”

That’s an extraordinary documentary about American movie aesthetics, and specifically about movie lighting and those men – mostly – who made movies like how they do.  McCall had wanted to make a version about cinematographers from the United Kingdom, but… he hadn’t the AFI’s wallet.

Jack among some of his subjects (courtesy JackCardiff.com)

McCall calls this a conversation with Mr. Cardiff – that’s the style.  Movie’s usually summarize some part of our world, and how we understand or want to understand it.  Maybe cinematography summarizes how freely we might use our imaginations, or how open it is, when watching movies.

If you’re the kind of movie-goer who goes to film festivals or habitually checks out the special features on DVDs, which are barely and rarely special these days, then “Cameraman” is great.  Even if you’re not…You’ll have a lot of fun while learning fascinating details about movies and how they’re made.

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25

Feb

“The Kids Grow Up,” even with dad, Doug Block, roaring “no” through a camera lens

Close your eyes.  Imagine having just been born, and then opening your eyes to a man doting on you from behind a camera lens.  He’s your dad, documentarian Doug Block, and has just shoved that in your face.  Maybe that’s how his daughter, Lucy, felt after the thrill and fun of being recorded wore off, …and teenhood came?

Well, he kept that up, particularly when an empty nest loomed.

Mr. Block has recorded Lucy from her toddling days through her last ones in high school.  He didn’t begin with this film as a goal, but to document her life.  With her flight from home to college imminent, he feels “a new urgency” to make something of the footage.  Lucy’s story, “The Kids Grow Up,” is just as much one of her dad’s terror over losing his little girl, as it is hers of trying out her newly sprung wings.  This is a special, personal documentary film.

The Film Society of Minneapolis/St. Paul shows this one at St. Anthony Main from Feb. 25th through Mar. 3rd.  Mr. Block will attend the 7:15pm screening and be available to answer questions.

The story.  The irony.  the drama.

Doug introduces his daughter’s story as a record of her last year in high school.  As he says, early in the film, Lucy “had the great misfortune to be born right at the dawn of the consumer camcorder.  And the double misfortune to have a documentary filmmaker for a father,” Mr. Block said.  Prophetic.  Does he know just how prophetic?

“The Kids Grow Up” meanders along a sentimental path that this its maker seems to need in order to let Lucy go and become the woman she needs to be – on her own.  It seems to follow a stream of consciousness, having been organized more emotionally than with intention.  It’s mixed with Mr. Block’s thoughts about his relationship with his own father; and how Doug’s father himself learned to be one, on-the-job just as Mr. Block did.

As Doug’s wife, Marjorie, notes, “And when she works all this through in therapy,” the footage can be entered as evidence.

Even so, dad’s lovingly invasive lens provides several witty and amusing moments.

Little Lucy Block playing...maybe posing

The best bits

A hilarious moment comes during vacation when a teenage Lucy entertains her French beau, Romain, who’s on a European-style vacation.  Doug and Marjorie discuss the probability that Lucy and Romain have already had sex – in the apartment.

Doug doesn’t like it.  While she isn’t happy about it, Marjorie’s rational (maybe because she’s a lawyer).

Doug asks “How is it you’re so comfortable with Lucy and Romain doing it?”

Marjorie, “Well, I know they’re sleeping together elsewhere.  …Sexual pleasure is so nice!”

Doug, “Yeah, it’s something you can do by yourself…”  She chuckles and turns away.

Another guffaw comes as Lucy awaits her behind-the-wheel exam.   ”I’m about to take my road test.  I’m really nervous.  And being filmed isn’t helping…”  She breathes deeply in order to calm herself, which seems futile.  “I have to pee.  I feel like I’m gonna throw up…”  Just then she sees the examiner is primed to put her into and then right out of her misery.  The moment is concise, hilarious and genuine; and a potent summary of the stress that Doug’s and dad’s camera adds.

Pushing his daughter away in order to be closer?

But somehow Mr. Block doesn’t know when to stop.  Late in the film we see that his gentle, persistent inquisition pushes Lucy into fatigued tears – punishing her.  He’s pissing her off, she says.  A beat later, we see a brief scene of her toddler self, thrilled with the fun and ego boost from being on-camera.

“I like videotaping.  I like seeing myself on TV…rather than looking in a mirror,” Lucy says.

 

 

That juxtaposition is remarkable.  And telling.

Bottom-line: “The Kids Grow Up” is a sweet and candid dual portrait of a dad and his beautiful, level-headed grown young daughter.  Daughters’ll be sure that it’s a story for and about them.  Dads’ll differ, saying that it’s clearly for them.  This documentary film provides a different angle on how it is to be either one of them.

If we graded this: 4.5 out of 5.

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28

Jan

Biography of Pakistan’s “Bhutto” is a political action movie that grabs you

“Bhutto” is a three-level history of Pakistan, its culture, its people, with Ms. Benazir Bhutto’s accomplishments front-and-center.  She was Pakistan’s first female Prime Minister, but didn’t rise from nothing.  Her dad, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, himself a former Pakistani Prime Minister, had to come first.

Benazir Bhutto, fmr Pakistani Prime Minister (courtesy First Run Features)

He set his progressive, maybe radical, example in the home and office, and a precedent for his daughter Benazir Bhutto.  This story isn’t just hers, or theirs, but also the state’s.

“Bhutto” is a potent, exceptional feature-length political documentary, from Duane Baughman & Johnny O’Hara, about a family that broke with customs to make history.  Truly, it’s a political action movie!  While it’s not Jason Bourne, the dramatic and consequences are just as tense.  Pakistan is a zealous Muslim state that’s both troubled and troublesome; in part because of fundamentalists, and the military and their diverging goals.  Women were only noticed if that suited the men, as long as there was no trouble, no waves made.  Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s story is vital to the state’s broader one.  Before her, women were never expected – or wanted – to serve the people by leading them.

Landmark Theatre’s Lagoon Cinema will begin showing “Bhutto” on Jan 28th.

This political documentary film provides a concise primer on Pakistan’s and the Bhutto family’s dense, complex and compelling interwoven stories, which are both personal and political – powerful.  Now, politics and family are often a dramatic mix; consider America’s Kennedy’s, the Windsor’s (the Royal Family) of Great Britain or the Daley’s of Chicago.  Adding contentious questions of gender or religion, or both to that mix is incendiary. The grooming of a groundbreaking stateswoman is a great story for ambitious girls.

We get all of this in one fascinating, highly intelligent, even urbane film.  Some people might find “Bhutto” too complex, too dense and too deep.  It mixes a few major moving parts.  While it’s a political documentary, the incendiary topics make it a political action movie.   Either one of these stories, about either of the Prime Ministers Bhutto, father or daughter, of about the state, could be full-length history entertainment.  Outside of PBS’ POV series it’s hard to come up with another film, documentary or not that deals with pioneering women politicians.  Particularly in lands where women only known as wives and mothers, serving families, never nation states.

Ms. Bhutto’s story, while dramatic, walks beside her dad’s.  She is her father’s daughter.  The dad, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s, story was vital to show his Prime Minister daughter’s origins, how she grow with fewer fears than other women.  He broke with tradition and custom, after Benazir wore a burqa for the first time.  After his wife told him that their daughter had worn that, he considered what the custom meant to him and he told her that Benazir didn’t have to wear it.  That helped to break the mold of a traditional Pakistani woman.

If we were to score this: 4.5 from 5.

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