2026 - THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE, on the big screen

I suppose you could classify The History of Concrete as a documentary but it's really an extended version of one of John Wilson's episodes from his HBO series How To With John Wilson.   It's well known that Wilson decided to end his HBO series after three seasons.  After that he opened a repertory theater in Queens, New York and somehow got it into his head to make this oddball film.

The premise of this alleged documentary has Wilson deciding to make a film about concrete.  We see him attempting to get financing from friends and partners who understandably have more than a few doubts.  In a particularly amusing scene, Wilson decides to use the plot structure of a Hallmark film to make his film.  This is just a jumping off point as Wilson travels around NYC and the country where he encounters one quirky person or situation after another. 

There are a couple of tattoo artists who frame skin tattoos from dead people to sell like they are posters from a museum gift shop. Then there is the only man in New York City who has a chewing gum removal business since apparently the streets of NYC are covered with people who just spit out their gum anywhere

Moving on, Wilson makes a strange visit to an Ohio town to look at the oldest concrete road which somehow finds him spending time at a driver's training school.  I also have to mention a foot race where the runners race around and around a city block endlessly. To give out any more of these vignettes would really ruin the film.  

Wilson was at the Sundance film festival with this film and got good reviews.  Unfortunately the 3000 pound monster in the room that he is competing with is the Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything which is really sucking up all the air in the room.

This is a very entertaining film.  I'm not exactly sure what the point of all of this is but if you are looking for something different and frankly very funny it's well worth a look. 

The running time is 101 minutes.  

1954 - THE HOUSE IN THE MIDDLE, an apocalyptic tale for our times

You better keep your house clean and tidy and mow that lawn if you want to survive a nuclear bomb.  That's the message of this odd and interesting short film.  The film was sponsored (produced?) by The National Paint,Varnish, and Lacquer Association and The National Clean Up–Paint Up–Fix Up Bureau along with the Federal Civil Defense Administration. 

Three small houses are constructed near a nuclear bomb test site.  Two of them are what you would probably call today hoarder houses.  Their lawns are a mess with stuff laying around everywhere. But The House in the Middle is all clean and tidy and well taken care of.  Boom goes the nuclear device and the fire storm comes raging into the model homes.  The houses to the left and right are decimated but the house in the middle the one with the good paint job and the mowed lawn in the desert no less just has some minor peeling.  The lesson is a very clear one and the results speak for themselves.

This film has some self important narration by a guy sitting at a desk.  Is he a spokesman for The National Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association or The National Clean Up–Paint Up–Fix Up Bureau?  Probably the truth will never be known.  He drones on and on while the viewer is waiting to get back to more good stuff with things "blowing up real good."  Instead the film ends with some kids running around picking up trash, a real letdown even for a short informational film like this.

This film exists in two versions, black and white and color.  If you want to watch it and get some insight into how the government and apparently The National Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association along with The National Clean Up–Paint Up–Fix Up Bureau tried to down play a nuclear attack you can give it a look.

 The running time is 12 minutes.   

2019 - THE MASTER OF DARK SHADOWS, a look at the gothic/horror soap opera

Well you would be hard pressed to say the world really needed a documentary on the cult soap opera  Dark Shadows and it's creator and producer Dan Curtis but here it is.  Dark Shadows was a soap opera where the gimmick was that it was a gothic romantic novel in the soap opera format.  The show was created by Dan Curtis who to put it nicely was a "type A" Hollywood personality in the best tradition.

The show was cheaply done and had that soap opera touch of dragging out story lines episode after episode where essentially nothing really ever happened.  Initially filmed in black and white it had a not that bad cast which featured Joan Bennett who had been a star in Hollywood during the 1940's working for director Fritz Lang.  This show really revolved around a performer named Alexandra Moltke who played the damsel in distress.  Moltke may not have been much of an actress but she certainly had a very interesting personal life.  She was the mistress of a German millionaire named Claus von Bulow who was accused of murdering his wife by administering an overdose of insulin.  Von Bulow was put on trial not one but twice where he was eventually acquitted.

Dark Shadows struggled along for a while and was on the verge of cancellation when producer Dan Curtis hit on the idea of actually adding a horror element to the show.  Enter the character of Barnabas Collins who turned out to be a vampire and also a very popular character.  Dark Shadows was off and running while reworking just about every horror movie plot Curtis and his writers could think of.

Producer Dan Curtis

This documentary does a fairly good job of recounting the Dark Shadows phenomenon.  It was a very hot show for a while.  Dark Shadows aired in the late afternoon and was extremely popular with kids getting home from school.  This film has the usual archival film clips and interviews with the remaining cast members.  It's certainly a lot more entertaining than the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie version that showed up in 2012.  The Master of Dark Shadows  turns out to be a real nostalgia wallow for people who remember the show.

The running time is 92 minutes.

1973 - WAVES & 1970 - ERRIGAL, two films by Patrick Carey

While bouncing around the internet the other day I happened to stumble onto the Irish Film Institute and in particular a filmmaker named Patrick Carey.  Carey was a cameraman who worked In Ireland and Canada. He has credits on some major motion pictures.  Barry Lyndon, Julia and A Man For All Seasons on his resume.  Carey returned to Ireland and with his wife formed his own film company where he created short films about and around the Irish countryside. 

Waves, was photographed off the Irish coast. Carey had worked as a cameraman on David Lean's epic Ryan's Daughter and after watching this film you can see that he definitely had a big influence on Lean's picture in the seascape scenes.

Errigal  is apparently the highest point in an area of Ireland called the Derryveagh Mountains.   It's the perfect place for lots of impressive nature photography.

Waves feature no narration and Errigal has some introductory remarks at the beginning of the film after that it's narration free for the remainder of it's running time.  Both these films clock in under a half an hour.  These films are art films. The films are what you would call mood pieces or visual essays.

These films can be viewed at the Irish Film Institute website https://ifiarchiveplayer.ie/patrick-carey/  but they would probably look more impressive on a large screen format.  These films are not paced for today's ADD film viewer who are conditioned to overblown action scenes with rapid editing.

The running time for Waves is 26 minutes.  The running time for Errigal is 14 minutes.

2025 - EPIC: ELVIS PRESLEY IN CONCERT, see the title.

Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann got his hands on a bunch of films of Elvis performing in concert.  Most of the footage seems to have been shot during one of his last efforts, his appearances in Las Vegas.  It's always impressive when they find this old color footage and digitally restore the picture and sound.  The footage of Elvis performing from this period is quite remarkable. 

In this film Elvis is about 8 years from the beginning of the end when his health issues and his drug intake catches up with him.  The footage in this film shows that Elvis was still an engaging performer.  He interacts with his band during rehearsals and the fans in the audience still respond to his stage presence.  All well and good.

However I have to say he does not look to be in all that great of shape.  Elvis is starting to be a bloated mess.  He seems to favor wearing gaudy form fitting jump suits and it doesn't make him look exactly like  a "Skinny Minny."  He's constantly wearing sun glasses and his haircut and sideburns gave him a weird pageboy look.  Some critics at the time called Elvis's appearances in Vegas as "the ultimate lounge act."  This was not a compliment.

If you want to see Elvis Presley in his sort of performing prime during the twilight of his career you can give this film a look.  This footage is almost his last hurrah before he goes over the precipice and comes crashing down.

The running time is 96 minutes. 

2019 - APOLLO 11, interesting documentary about the first moon landing

 Probably the high point for NASA and the race to beat the Russians to be the first to land on the moon, Apollo 11 is a very well made film about an amazing technical triumph that is now almost 60 years old.

The director Todd Douglas Miller had access to lots of footage of the Apollo 11 mission.  NASA was obsessive about filming every single aspect of the mission.  Miller and his team had the footage converted and enhanced to the digital format which gave the old film a really sharp look.  The decision was also made not to have a narrator droning away throughout the film.  This allowed the original film footage to let the story speak for itself.

What can you say about the Apollo 11 astronauts?  The leader of the team Neil Armstrong was very smart but not exactly a guy you would want to spend a weekend partying in Las Vegas with.  Apparently he was not a warm and cuddly kind of husband, his marriage fell apart after 38 years.  Buzz Aldrin the lunar module pilot was married four times and struggled with depression and alcoholism.  Command module pilot Michael Collins seemed to have been the most well adjusted of the team.  He went on to have a life after the moon mission advocating for the space program and working for the government in various roles.  Real life is kind of messy, especially after you've had the achievement of a lifetime.

 

Probably one of the biggest takeaways from this film besides the stunning pictures is of a program that literally employed thousands of people to achieve the goal to land on the moon which started in 1961 and took eight years to finish.  

 

This an interesting film about an event that was an exciting time in American history which is probably now starting to fade into the past.

No credited writer on this film, the pictures tell the story.  The running time is 93 minutes.  

1997 - FAST CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL, meet four very interesting people

This is film maker Errol Morris at his peak with this incredibility fascinating film about four men and the unusual occupations they have.  Superficially they have nothing in common but the film is so well edited and paced, this documentary begins to interconnect their lives as you watch it.

Dave Hooper is an animal trainer who works with what they call big cats i.e. lions.  He apparently got the bug as a young man and has spent his life performing in a circus with these frankly scary and dangerous wild animals.  His stories of dealing with these lions in the ring are hair raising.

 

George Mendonca is a topiary gardener who is responsible for a large park in Rhode Island called the Green Animals Topiary Garden which has around eighty sculptured trees.  Mendonca kind of stumbled into the job when he married the daughter of the previous gardener.  This is a guy who has devoted his life to making plants and trees look like animals.  He works on these trees with a zen like devotion to trimming them.

Ray Mendez is a man who has devoted his life to studying a creature called the naked mole rat, mammals who live in underground tunnels and have a highly developed social system.  They are apparently resistant to cancer and can live almost without oxygen.  Mendez has built a complex of tunnels in his basement to observe them and he believes they are at times observing him.

 

Rodney Brooks is an MIT scientist who builds robots and studies how they interact with people and the environment.  He observes how they react to moving around as it relates to hand and eye coordination, sound, and vision which he feels also can explain how the human brain functions.

The fact that Errol Morris can take this stuff and make a really compelling film about four such different individuals is really a tribute to his skill as an interviewer.  The film was photographed by Robert Richardson who later in his career was associated with Quentin Tarantino, Oliver Stone and Martin Scorsese.  Fast Cheap & Out of Control is one of the best films I've seen this year. 

The film was edited by  Karen Schmeer and Shondra Merrill, the running time is 82 minutes.

2026 - DISNEYLAND HANDCRAFTED, how they built Disneyland

The granddaughter of one of Walt Disney's most important contributor's Ub Iwerks, has assembled this film about the construction of Disneyland in Orange County, California during the 1950's.  First off who was Ub Iwerks?  Well he was with Walt Disney at the very beginning helping to develop the Mickey Mouse character.  Iwerks was responsible for many of the visual effects that showed up in Disney's films in particular Mary Poppins, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and Sleeping Beauty just to name a very few.  Iwerks also handled the special effects for Hitchcock's The Birds.

Anyway, Ub Iwerk's granddaughter Leslie got access to some rarely seen 16mm films on the construction of Disneyland that Walt Disney had commissioned during the building.  The films had for the most part had never been seen and were in perfect condition. They were edited into a narrative and are interesting to watch.

 

Disneyland was one of Walt Disney's most important creative endeavors and he spared no expense in building it.  Amazingly the park was constructed in one year,  a real pressure cooker of a time table.  The film has voice over narration from the actual participants in the construction of Disneyland and they clearly had their doubts about the whole project. 

Obviously this film is going to appeal mostly to nerds groupies of the Disneyland Park.  However it is kind of fascinating to see the construction of one of the seminal theme parks in the United States and the near perfect color films shot during the construction are pretty cool to look at.  This documentary can be viewed where else, on the Disney plus channel.

The running time is 79 minutes. 

1978 - GATES OF HEAVEN, a documentary about the pet cemetery business

This documentary about the pet cemetery business was what really put Errol Morris on the map as an interesting filmmaker to watch.  Morris's documentaries usually focus on the oddball or eccentric or just plain weird in people.   

Gates of Heaven started as a documentary after Morris read a news story about a pet cemetery that was being relocated.  Sensing there was a film in this story he raised the money and then got interviews with the people involved.  Morris spoke with the owner of the failed pet cemetery and the owners of the pet cemetery that the deceased pets had been moved to.   The result were filmed interviews that for the most part just focused on the interviewee with the camera locked down.  It certainly gave the film an unusual look and pace. 

I had seen this film several years ago and watching these people being interviewed at the time I found it very easy to sneer and develop a real patronizing attitude about their lives.  Now watching it again I find that I am a lot more sympathetic. The love and grief that they feel for their deceased pets is actually very genuine and touching. After all who loves you more unconditionally than your pet. 

 

 Don't get me wrong there's still plenty of quirk and weirdness going on throughout the film.  In the end it's just people being people.  Gates of Heaven is a very entertaining documentary.

The film runs 83 minutes. 

1958 - LETTER FROM SIBERIA, early film from Chris Marker

Chris Marker who is generally considered part of the French "New Wave'" filmmakers that showed up towards the end of the 1950's, didn't exactly fit in with that bunch which included Truffaut, Goddard, Rivette and Chabrol.  Marker was interested in more than just making films.

Marker was essentially an artist working in different types of visual media.  One of his interests was the short form essay, not exactly a documentary and not exactly a fictional film.  Letter from Siberia is a fascinating film made early in his career.

 

Traveling to Siberia, Maker documented Siberian life which at the time was considered a vast mysterious and foreboding expanse barely inhabitable.  Maker's film shows an area which indeed was vast but he also shows the lives of the inhabitants which range from reindeer riding Siberian cowboys to workers constructing gigantic power plants and cities in order to harvest the natural resources of Siberia.

 

Marker's presentation with the omniscient narration, spoofs of animated cartoons, pet bears and satires of western advertising is very witty.  Marker continued to work on and off in the film world.  His best known film is his clever time travel story  La Jetée which was later turned into the Terry Gilliam film 12 Monkeys.

 Written by Chris Marker, the running time is 62 minutes.

1982 - KOYAANISQATSI - life out of balance = pretentious

Astutely described by legendary film critic Roger Ebert as a "glorified music video."  Koyaanisqatsi is a silent film with music and at times stunning photography.  The film according to its creator, Godfrey Reggio is about "how we live technology," whatever that gobbly gook means.

 The film starts out with stately images of the American Southwest desert where all is calm and mellow.  As the camera moves past these images the viewer gets a lot of time lapse photography of human beings racing all over a Metropolitian city like a colony of ants on speed.  

 

It all comes to a crashing end with stock footage of a rocket blowing up as the camera follows pieces of it falling back to the earth.   What does it all mean?  In the end should we abandon our fast paced and out of control lives for a more simpler existence in the southwest desert trying not to get bit by scorpions? Or is the film just a bunch of interesting locations tied together by at times stunning photography and editing that achieves a visual impact on the viewer?

One thing is for sure the minimalist film score by composer Phillip Glass is an important contribution to the film and kind of saves the day.

The film was written such that it is by Ron Fricke, Michael Hoenig, Godfrey Reggio and Alton Walpole.  The running time is thankfully under 90 minutes.  A little of this stuff goes a very long way.

2024 - MUSIC BY JOHN WILLIAMS, butt kissing tribute to the maestro

Steve Spielberg and count em (10!) producers pay tribute to film composer John Williams in this so called documentary that is a very quick journey through Williams's professional life while an endless stream of talking heads sings his praises.  

  

I don't think that anyone can argue that Williams isn’t important to film history.  His orchestral scores for Jaws, E.T., Star Wars and Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the  Lost Ark certainly contributed greatly to the classic status of these films.  However I think there should probably be a limit to how many times someone should be called a genius and in this film he's called that over and over and over by the usual bunch of Hollywood hot shots.  Spielberg, Lucas, Ron Howard and J.J. Abrams, ad nauseam. They seem to exhaust about every superlative they can think of in their praise of Williams.  Spielberg can be justly proud of his collaboration with Williams, but after a while his fanboy blathering dilutes William's achievements.

This film would have probably been maybe a tad more interesting if usually competent documentary director Laurent Bouzereau spent a little time investigating some of the films he was involved in that weren't exactly a raging successes like 1941, Always, Amistad, Hook and The Terminal some of Spielberg's lesser films.  Williams may have been a major player in many commercially and critically successful films but his music in these disappointing films is about the only reason to watch them and might be interesting to hear how he tried to improve them.

 

Probably the person who comes off best in Music by John Williams is John Williams himself.  For all of his success he is a rather soft spoken and modest man.  Williams seems like a talented craftsman doing his best in about any project he's involved in which in it self is plenty impressive.

The film's running time is 105 minutes. 

2024 - FROM ROGER MOORE WITH LOVE, kind of odd tribute to Roger Moore

The actor Roger Moore passed away seven years ago.  Moore appeared in his last James Bond film almost forty years ago.  So it's kind of strange that this tribute film to Moore was made now.  Apparently the film aired on the BBC during the holidays.  This is the usual mixture of interviews and home movies.  Moore apparently liked to run around with a Betamax VHS camera of all things and filmed a lot of the guests who stayed at his home in Switzerland.

Moore started his career as a sweater model and was lucky enough to hook up with the director Brian Desmond Hurst who apparently mentored him when he entered the acting profession.  Moore never had the acting "chops" for heavyweight dramas and was dropped by MGM after a couple of less than outstanding performances in Interrupted Melody and Diane.  This film doesn't mention his time at Warner Brothers where he mainly did television shows like Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip. 

 

After his failure in America, it was back to England where he found his signature role in the popular TV show The Saint playing sort of a gentlemen thief.  After working in television for a while he was cast in the James Bond film Live and Let Die. He was James Bond number three during the 1970's.  Moore was blamed for bringing a lot of silliness to the James Bond franchisee but the reality was the series took a sharp turn towards goofiness with Sean Connery's last Bond film Diamonds Are Forever. 

If there is anything to be learned from this documentary and I use the term documentary very loosely it's that Roger Moore recognized his limitations as an actor and was able to turn these limitations into a film and television career.  Moore was apparently a very nice guy in real life.  He was never a prima donna on film sets and he apparently never turned his nose up at his fans.  Moore was also a very lucky man in his career.  Christopher Walken who never does these tribute interviews shows up and speaks very highly of him.

 

From Roger Moore With Love is about as lightweight as Roger Moore was.  It's a painless way to pass some time, sort of entertaining if you are a fan and in the end not remotely memorable.

The film is amusingly narrated by actor/writer Steve Coogan imitating Roger Moore's voice which Coogan has made a career of, the running time is 79 minutes.

1984 - THE MAKING OF FANNY AND ALEXANDER, a documentary

Sensing this would probably be his last film, Ingmar Bergman had a cameraman named Arne Carlsson follow him around while he filmed Fanny and Alexander.  The resulting documentary with the less than clever title The Making of Fanny and Alexander was the result. The film is sort of fascinating and probably of more interest for film scholars especially those who are admirers of Ingmar Bergman.

The film starts out with Bergman and his cast at a meet and greet where Bergman announces he is just a director this time and doesn't remember any of the script they are about to film. This is a rather dubious claim since he wrote the film.

We get a lengthy scene of Bergman staging a scene on the Ekdahl family set and we see Bergman working with the young actors playing Fanny and Alexander.  We also see cinematographer Sven Nykvist behind the camera setting up the lights and the camera angles.  Sven Nykvist was clearly an important collaborator for Bergman and at times he almost seems like a co-director.

Probably the most poignant and interesting part of this film is Bergman directing one of his old colleagues the actor Gunnar Björnstrand.  Björnstrand  is clearly suffering from memory loss.  Bergman is extremely patient with him as Björnstrand blows take after take.

 

Again, an interesting film but it's probably best to keep in mind since Bergman took a director's credit on this we are only going to see what Bergman wants us to see.  Considering the big cast and the logistics of filming such a long film I doubt things went as smoothly as he seems to indicate.

The running time is 110 minutes.

1970 - LET IT BE, legendary unseen Beatles documentary is finally seen.

The director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg probably had his hands full during the making of this Beatles documentary which turned out to be filmed as the group was finally breaking up.  Let It Be is supposed to be about the Beatles but the film should probably be called Let It Be starring Paul McCartney with featured players The Beatles because McCartney really dominates the film. 

You really don't get a sense of George Harrison's discontent during the recording sessions, he actually quit the group for a few days until he was lured back.  It's clear during one point in the film Harrison isn't crazy about McCartney telling him how to play his guitar.  McCartney is plainly in the "I'm taking over The Beatles," mode.

John Lennon looks mighty disengaged during the sessions.  The presence of his girlfriend Yoko Ono who hovers next to him during the recording sessions is almost like she was super glued to him.  Yoko doesn't utter a word but she does seem kind of intimidating throughout the film.  Ringo is Ringo.

 

The film was rescued by Peter Jackson and remastered with his company's usual technical wizardary.  It's been playing on the Disney Channel.  If you are a Beatles fan and interested in the group's history you can give it a look but there doesn't seem to be much here.  The film was clearly heavily edited to present The Beatles in the best light that was possible at the time of filming. It's probably amazing they got a film out of these recording sessions at all.

The film runs 80 minutes.

1955 - THE AFRICAN LION, one of the Disney True Life Adventure films

File this under the "I'll watch anything" department.  The African Lion is part of the Walt Disney True Life Adventure series which ran from the late 1940's until the early 1960's before finally wearing our it's welcome.  The Disney company would purchase films from nature photographers and turn around and give them the Disney touch.  A folksy narrator , a music score which at times could get fairly silly and a story line.  I guess the films for the most part would be called documentaries but they are unmistakably Disney influenced documentaries.

The African Lion is considered one of the best in the series.  It was filmed on the Serengeti plains with Mt Kilimanjaro rising in the background.  The film proposes to be about the life of the lion but it incorporates lots of footage of the other species living on the plains.  Filmed in technicolor,  there are many impressive scenes of the animals.  Probably the worst thing you can say about the film is at times the narration by Winston Hibler gets to be a little to much.

 

The film was written and directed by James Algar, but the real stars of the film were the husband and wife team of Albert and Elma Milotte who literally followed the animals around for three years in a specially designed truck to photograph them.  

 

Obviously time has kind of taken the freshness off of this wildlife documentary.  Advances in photography have made the art of wildlife photography easier.  Still this is an impressive achievement and it is from a time when Africa was still a somewhat mysterious place.  

You can make some valid criticisms about Walt Disney and the product he put out while he was in change, but you can't argue that he occasionally was willing to try some new approach to story telling.  Today the Disney company seems to only be in the business of live action remakes of its classic cartoons or unending super hero movies.

The film was written and directed by James Algar who clearly organized the Milotte's animal footage into a narrative.  The running time is a brisk 75 minutes.