...this
is one lovely documentary, made by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey
Friedman. In May 1991, the two San Francisco filmmakers
drove into the southern United States to do an impromptu
on-the-road documentary. The movie's success is fourfold:
As a travelogue through sections of the country few nonnatives
ever visit (such as rural Mississippi), as a time capsule
of the country's mind-set during an anxious period of
recession, as a record of the physical vastness and philosophical
diversity of the country and as a timeless document of
the ways people get by. The filmmakers talk to the lonely,
the sick, the well, the old, the young -- and everyone
opens up to them, revealing their dreams, their plans,
their struggles. It's extraordinary. The movie unmasks
people, shows their lives and their terrible fears and
celebrates their courage. - Mick LaSalle
Truth Makes
Good Drama
Some Choice Documentaries for Home Viewing March 8, 1998
Great documentaries
show up in theaters now and again, though usually for
no more than a week. They get written up in the newspaper
and sound interesting. And then they disappear before
most of us get to see them.
By the time they come to video we we've forgotten them,
and the small companies that release them don't have the
advertising budgets to remind us. Sure, the best Bay Area
video stores, such as Einstein Entertainment, Movie Image
and Le Video, might stock them. But documentaries are
not what most people are thinking about when they go to
the video store on a Saturday night.
But why not? Think about it: Great documentaries are powerful,
they're entertaining and after watching one you don't
have that sick feeling that you've just wasted two hours
of your life. You come away knowing something besides
the fact that Jim Carrey is a funny guy.
What follows is a list of 11 superb documentaries. (Why
11? Why not 11?) Most of them have played in the Bay Area.
All of them are available on video, though some are easier
to find than others...
Where Are We? (1992): This charming film
from Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, who are better
known for The Celluloid Closet and The Times
of Harvey Milk, documents a road trip that the filmmakers
took to various small towns in America's heartland—the
whole middle of the country that city folk normally fly
over. More than a collection of random conversations and
encounters with eccentrics, the film speaks to the variety
of human experience and people's universal desire to be
special.
