Archives for documentary

Quick Flix Hit

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Apparition Hill (2016)

Rated PG-13

apparition-hill

Stella Mar Films

Apparition Hill, the site where the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared before six local youths in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina, is without doubt a place of inspiration. Is it also a place of healing, enlightenment and miracles? Well, every year, thousands seeking those rewards trek up a jagged hillside in the village of Medjugorje to the spot marked with a statue of the Blessed Mary.

Director Sean Bloomfield joined seven strangers on a two-week trip to Medjugorje and up so-called Apparition Hill to document experiences filled with urgency and desperation, curiosity and skepticism, hope and joy—ultimately providing the cast, and possibly viewers, with multiple levels of insight.

READ MY INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR SEAN BLOOMFIELD

Bloomfield selects his cast from a potpourri of video submissions: two atheists, Pete, who prefers finding life’s meaning in science and logic, and Mark, who craves knowledge beyond understanding but can’t get there through spirituality; Rich, a widowed father of nine; Jill, a Catholic latecomer needing to strengthen her weakening belief; Holly, a terminally ill wife and mother whose husband Matt decides to join her on the trip; and Ryan, a sad on-off drug abuser who’s been in and out of prison. There’s an eighth participant, Darryl, who suffers from ALS. His condition confines him to a wheelchair, necessitating a separate, earlier journey to Medjugorje for him that serves as a side story in the documentary. He has a video chat with the rest of the gang to express his views on the journey he’s taken as it prepares to trace his steps.

Along the way we meet Ben, a former addict who now resides in the community, and Miki Musa, a local guide who was featured in a previous Bloomfield documentary.

We take several pilgrimages with the cast—to the weeping Statue of the Risen Christ that resides behind the town’s St. James Church, to the Blue Cross at the base of Apparition Hill, to the sacred spot itself and still further up to the hilltop where we find a holy site honoring Christ Himself—and we learn more about each along the way. The members seem to approach the experience with open minds, I must note. Certainly, our attention is drawn to the two atheists and Holly, who has Stage 4 cancer.

We regard Pete and Mark closely because we sense if they change, if they believe, there is something powerful going on here. They’re both presented as skeptical but fair-minded enough to give the pilgrimage a chance. We regard Molly, who comes dangerously close to missing the trip due to her health, as the ultimate test case for these proceedings because of her bright smile, because of her relentless optimism, because she seems to be a wonderful wife and a loving mother. With her, as she smile through tears, we truly hope for miracles (even as Holly claims she’s seeking only peace and enlightenment). Her struggle gives the film an undercurrent of suspense and sadness that might not have been the director’s intentions.

The documentary attempts to take a nonjudgmental look at the cast and the community, but it’s a hard sell. Peeking into these lives is personal, and you just can’t move through Medjugorje without being swept along on its spiritual current. Catholicism runs deeply in this village. The cast attends Mass repeatedly, prayers are spoken, rosaries are counted, novenas are undertaken.

Of the six Herzegovinian children who claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in 1981, the documentary focuses most on Mirjana Soldo. Sixteen at the time of her visitation, Soldo has basically devoted her life to her pilgrimages where she communes with Mary. We watch this visionary immerse herself in prayer and are simultaneously perplexed and moved. She is in a place beyond us as tears stream down her cheeks, her eyes look through this world and a knowing smile overtakes her. And yet, she later expresses what she sees, hears and feels is not beyond us.

The film’s ending, powerful and raw, brings a journey to its inevitable conclusion, then Bloomfield tags on a sweet coda as a salve.

Lives have been challenged and changed, and clearly, the film hopes, not just for the cast we’ve observed.

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The Killing Season Interview

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‘KILLING’ DOC’S DUO PLUNGES INTO ABYSS SEEKING JUSTICE, HUMANITY

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Nietzsche warned that when fighting monsters, beware not to become one. Josh Zeman and Rachel Mills warn that when hunting killers, take care to not to forget their victims.

The New York-based producers undertake the daunting task of hunting serial killers and puzzling through the horrors and sorrows left in the aftermath in A&E network’s The Killing Season. The eight-part docu-series bows Nov. 12 and is as relentless in giving voice to forgotten victims and knitting together coalitions to study killers as it is in actually hunting for them.

READ MY REVIEW OF THE SERIES.

The Killing Season begins simply enough, though, as a look into the unsolved murders of four prostitutes on Long Island. Zeman and Mills throw themselves into this case in their back yard, detailing the crimes, interviewing law enforcement officials, dropping in on family and friends of the victims, and following leads.

The trail of clues to the initial crimes, which originated in 2010, has long since gone cold, complicated by law enforcement bureaucracy and a lack of cohesive shared evidence and information.

“We are drawn to the idea of helping when police get stuck,” Zeman says. He has experience with the subject matter, having produced and codirected another serial-killer-themed work, Cropsey, in 2009. He and Mills turn to cyber-sleuthing, websites and blogs dedicated with varying degrees to hashing out facts, creating serial-killer profiles and propagating theories. Websleuths.com stands out as a one of the more-credible resources.

As we watch, the team’s scope steadily widens.

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A&E

“Alex Gibney (the documentary’s executive producer) encouraged us to look at bigger issues,” Zeman says. So Zeman and Mills began drilling down deeper into their investigation of victims—they are nearly all prostitutes and/or drug-addled low-income women on the fringes—as well as the fractured methods to share data among law enforcement and a disturbing patterns of long-haul truckers. In theory, some of these long-haulers target prostitutes while crisscrossing the nation. It’s a job, we are told, “perfectly suited for picking up a woman in one state and dumping her body in another.” We also learn how the Internet becomes a deadly tool used by killers to target female escorts.

Zeman notes that in this era of social media, smart-device technology and web-savvy citizen across the nation, it was startling to learn that despite the wealth of information at our fingertips, there remains hurdles to unifying these resource into a comprehensive database that can be shared by law enforcement agencies.

“It’s called linkage blindness,” Zeman says. There’s the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) that makes data available to law enforcement agencies, but information is entered into ViCAP voluntarily, Zeman says. The input of data is not mandatory or consistent. While many law enforcement agencies collect data in their regions, the information is not typically connected with systems from other regions.

A powerful element of The Killing Season involves watching Zeman and Mills knit together information from this agency and that agency and match it with information gleaned from fastidious websleuths and geologists who can pinpoint possible burial sites and professors programing algorithms that deduce the hunting grounds of serial killer and amateur profilers who give their FBI counterparts a run for their money.

“Citizens have the most extensive databases we can access,” Zeman says.

Meeting with victims’ family and friends was about more than gleaning information about the cases, Mills says. It offered insight into the lives of often-invisible victims of these crimes. It was a difficult, but rewarding experience, she says. The love ones often emerged as keepers of the flame for the victims.

“Sisters in particular, they continue to tell these stories, keep the memories (of the victims) alive,” says Mills, executive producer at Jigsaw Productions, whose work includes the documentary Killer Legends (2014).

The duo often appears fearless in documentary, whether calling up possible serial killers, or confronting a suspect directly at his home, or taking rides with supposed informants, or meeting clandestinely with mysterious characters.

“Josh was gung-ho,” Mills says. “I had to work up bravery.” But there she is right beside Zeman, journeying into potential danger. At times, the two had to haul around bulletproof vests, Zeman says.

“Of course we got nervous,” Mills says, “but to make our point we had to be bold, to try to give these women justice.”

“These families were braver than us,” she adds.

All told, the duo spent 175 days on the road in an emotionally draining experience.

“We’ll see how people respond,” Zeman says. “Our goal is not to solve one crime, but to solve a whole lot of crimes.”

Take a look into the abyss on Nov. 12 at 9 p.m. ET on A&E.

 

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Quik Flix Hit

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TV series review 

The Killing Season (2016)

TV-MA

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The most powerful moment in A&E’s eight-part docu-series, The Killing Season, arrives midpoint when documentarians Josh Zeman and Rachel Mills make the startling revelation that their dogged search for a serial killer of at least four prostitutes turns out to be the preverbal tip of the iceberg.

Up to this point we’ve joined them on whirlwind tours of crime scenes and talking-head recollections, punctuated by images of regional maps marked red at the spots where victims were discoveretoonMarvinBlogd. After journeying through at least seven states, countless police departments, harrowing locales, the intrepid duo connects with a Florida journalist whose work dovetails with the documentarians’ in the worst of ways. We cut to a map of the whole United States as it explodes with red markers denoting unsolved murders of hundreds of prostitutes/drug-addled women from what looks to be the work of hundreds of serial killers. Finally, a series that was careening from one serial-killer theory and conspiracy to another snaps into chilling focus.

Executive produced by Alex Gibney and produced by Jigsaw Productions and Gigantic Pictures, the series arrives Nov. 12 at 9 p.m. ET on the A&E network. It’s like a student project that starts simply but increases victims, killers and theories exponentially, becoming instead a master’s thesis on the subject.

READ MY INTERVIEW WITH JOSH ZEMAN AND RACHEL MILLS

Things start off in typically disturbing yet familiar documentary fashion: Zeman and Mills’ workaday detailing of the history of the Long Island, New York, serial killer (LISK). Soon, the team is in a neighboring community, studying its victims, who have similar and conflicting links to LISK, suggesting two killers may be at work—and even at odds with each other. Next, we follow the team to Atlantic City, drawn there by similar victims and a killer with a similar MO. Then, prostitute killings in Daytona Beach, Florida, seem to be yet another link and/or distraction in this ever-sprawling case. Here the killer may be hidden amongst throngs of spring breakers. All of this sleuthing eventually leads to unnerving revelations of whole-sale slaughter of women spanning the country.

Zeman, like one of those bold reporters willing to go wherever the story takes him before asking whether it’s safe, seems to subsist on caffeine rather than sleep. He’s traversed the serial-killer terrain before in his co-helmed Cropsey, 2009. Mills, equally bold, is harder to read; she’d be a good poker player. She’s quick to follow a lead, to take a ride with a possible suspect, to share space in a trucker’s cab as he tells her she’s dressed to temp rapists; and yet here she is shedding tears speaking with a victim’s relative. The team, which includes at least a cameraman who follows them into every uncertainty, is persistent, whether whacking its way through overgrown fields, exploring decrepit junkyards, traversing lands occupied by disturbing campers, or flirting with an outlaw biker club.

The Killing Season is most effective, though, when meeting friends and family of victims. One such woman keeps ashes of the victim, her best friend, in a box at her feet. Gratuitous, yes, but who else mourns for this all-but-forgotten victim? Another victim’s daughter—seeking understanding and closure—is eager to join the team on an ominous journey to the occupied backwoods where her mom’s body was discovered.

The doc also intrigues with its look into and use of cyber-sleuthing, websites and blogs dedicated with varying degrees to sussing out facts, creating serial-killer profiles and propagating theories. Websleuths.com stands out as a one of the more-credible resources.

We learn that long-haul trucking is a job “perfectly suited for picking up a woman in one state and dumping her body in another.” We are told truck-stop prostitution is the “lowest rung” of prostitution, and we believe it. These women seem to be whispers and faded photographs in a cyclone of terror and bureaucracy, whose sad lives are teased out by the few who knew and loved them. Different theories, different obstacles, different cities—New York, New Jersey, Florida, Oklahoma, Cleveland—but the same creeping terror abounds.

Where we start, on Long Island with the discovery of four female bodies wrapped in burlap, allegedly the victims of a coast-surfing serial killer, to where we end up, Cleveland, following the destruction of hundreds of woman at the hands of two hundred serial killers is a wakeup call—to both our lack of interest in the sadly invisible mothers, sisters and daughters on the fringes of society, and the demons among us left uncheck to fester in the crevices of this nation.

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Sundance 2011—The Return (6)

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Sundance Film Festival 2011*

Park City, Utah

 

Beats, Rhymes &  Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest (2011)

Rated R

 

Beats, Rhymes &  Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest is a documentary of legendary 80s rap group A Tribe Called Quest, directed by actor Michael Rapaport. It’s all here: the humble beginnings, when the talented nobodies hook up; their deserved rise to stardom (heads bobbed as the film ran through the hits); the strain of too many know-it-alls, desires to do solo work, health issues, etc.; the inevitable breakup and reunion; and the where-are-they-now bit.

Michael Rapaport chat up the crowd during a light-night screen of his documentary of A Tribe Called Quest. (Credit: John Brown)

Actor/director Michael Rapaport chats up the crowd during a late-night screening of his documentary of A Tribe Called Quest. (Credit: John Brown)

REMEMBERING PHIF DAWG

What Rapaport, surely a fan of Tribe, gets right is the importance of the group and what that meant to other rappers of the day. He smartly zeros in on Tribesman Phif Dawg, the short, round, insecure yet talented co-lead rapper of the group, when another director (most directors) would be tempted to build the film around Q-Tip, the flat-out genius of the group. Phif’s easy-going nature pulls the audience in and humanizes the film, then hooks us when his health issues and clashes with Q-Tip emerge. That Phif was the only Tribe member to show up at the screening was icing on the cake.

Rapaport stumbles, I think, by not showing longer clips of the Tribe’s performances. The talking heads tell us how good they are, the film talks of Tribe’s influence and successes, but it would have been nice to hear why fans still ache for another album.

If you’re interested in the scenario: See it.

Marvin Brown (left), rapper Phif Dawg (center) and John Brown attend the screen of a documentary featuring Phif. (Photo: John Brown)

From left, Marvin Brown, rapper Phif Dawg and John Brown attend the screening of a documentary featuring Phif. (Credit: John Brown)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UPDATE: Remembering the late Phif Dawg.

 

 

*Note: Since marvincbrown.com had not been created at the time of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, I decided to go back and repost these reviews and festival  items, which were catalogued elsewhere—mainly because I needed to get these reviews into my archives, but also because it was an enjoyable experience I’d like to share.

 

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