bus 174 Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The 2000s were a great decade for documentaries, both artistically and commercially. Four films (Fahrenheit 9/11, March of the Penguins and this year's Earth and This Is It) grossed more than $100 million worldwide, with two of them even topping the $200 million mark. Meanwhile, plenty of other films, whether due to their politics or their humorous entertainment value, broke through with mainstream audiences, primarily in the arthouse circuit but also on home video. And speaking of home viewing, thanks to Netflix and free online streaming sites like SnagFilms, more and more people have access to more and more non-fiction films than ever before.

So obviously it's a tough task to narrow down all these docs for a list of the best in the last ten years. In order to spotlight some particularly deserving films (25 of them), I've decided to follow the lead of William Goss' action flick list and break these up into separate categories (15 of them). In a perfect world all these types of documentary would be respected as their own genre, like fiction is with comedy, action, science fiction, etc. And with the amount of non-fiction films produced these days it wouldn't be difficult to list ten favorites for each style and subject sort. Certainly I've had to leave out a lot of favorites, both mine and yours (doing a list like this really makes you realize the films you've not yet seen), so let's keep the discussion going in the comments section.

Best Expository Doc: Documentaries comprised primarily of talking heads and archive footage are so conventional, common and, yes, oftentimes boring that it's a shame most people associate them with non-fiction cinema as a whole. Occasionally, though, the stringing together of facts and expert testimony can be stimulating as well as educational, such as in the case of Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight (2005), a film that says and asks so much about the questionable direction of the U.S. military in the past 50 years and the complicated origins of our current conflicts in part by referencing, with the intention of contrast, Frank Capra's far more clear-cut expository Why We Fight films from WWII. Everything within the actual film simply and straightforwardly illustrates history and the filmmaker's stance on it, which is all you really need from a doc. Honorable Mention: One of the great things about Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight (2007) is how much information it will feed you about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in so little time. We should only be so lucky to have such quick, comprehensive detail communicated to us about every topic.

Two months ago, I brought word that Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha is moving on up to Hollywood, but now comes word that he has first squeezed in a new documentary. The film is titled Garapa, and like both his brilliant debut, Bus 174, and his recent Golden Bear-winning follow-up, Tropa de Elite, it deals with social problems affecting his homeland. This time, he traveled to the poverty-stricken northeast, where he documented three families struggling to feed themselves, despite the nation's current economic boom and seemingly successful welfare program. Garapa was also shot in black and white with hand-held cameras and features no music score, to keep things simple and straightforward. It can't be said, though, that Padilha went for a non-intrusive style, and he admits that during and since the shoot, he's been compelled to assist the families directly.

Considering Bus 174 is one of the boldest, most powerful documentaries of the past 10 years, it's good to see Padilha returning to the documentary genre. The controversially divisive Tropa de Elite (which Cinematical reviewed at Tribeca and which will receive a day-and-date release this September) was still non-fiction, but it was a dramatization. When it was announced that he had been wooed to make a studio-produced action film, I was as disappointed as I was excited. Fortunately, he's keeping the documentary thing going simultaneously, and he's even already working on his next doc, which will be about the Yanomami Indians, natives of the Amazon rainforest who were previously unappealingly fictionalized in the exploitation film Cannibal Holocaust.

In case you don't read Entertainment Weekly and didn't see this week's double issue on "The New Classics," or you didn't see my post last week about their list of the best movies from the last 25 years, here's a sad fact: only six foreign-language films made the list. They are: Wings of Desire (#28); Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (#49); The Lives of Others (#56); All About My Mother (#69); Y Tu Mamá También (#86); and In the Mood for Love (#95). OK, so 6% is not terrible for a mainstream entertainment magazine, but EW had to add insult to injury with an accompanying map labeled "Movies: Breaking Down the List," which points to a number of locations around the globe in which some of these new classics are set. The only continent on the map without any love is South America (Antarctica was not included in the visual aid).

Now, before I get into my love letter to new Latin American cinema, I have to note that no film produced in Africa made the list either. However, on the map the continent was at least given some minuscule bit of love via the filming locations for Casino Royale and Gladiator. Yet despite the fact that South America was definitely used as a location in a few of the 100 films, it's shown no respect. And on top of that, Central America isn't even included on the map. For some strange reason there's just a gap between Mexico and South America. Meanwhile, Latin America's sole representative on EW's list, Mexico's Y Tu Mamá También, is left off the map so that no location from this area of the world, from the Mexican-U.S. border to Cape Horn, receives any recognition.

Another Brazilian filmmaker leaves the favelas behind and moves to Hollywood: The Hollywood Reporter reports that acclaimed yet controversial writer-director José Padilha will make an action movie, appropriately set in South America, for Warner Bros. Hardly a stranger to the genre, Padilha recently picked up the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival for his critically divisive Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), a semi-fictional action thriller about police corruption in Rio de Janeiro. Our own Scott Weinberg, reviewing from Tribeca, called the film "powerfully gritty, slyly engrossing and unapologetically brutal." Prior to that film, Padilha made the brilliantly kinetic documentary Bus 174, which was one of my favorite releases of 2003.

The new project is currently without a name, but the original title was A Willing Patriot. Scripted by Jason Keller (who wrote the 2002 fX TV-movie Big Shot: Confessions of a Campus Bookie), the movie will be about an American federal agent who goes undercover in South America's "Triple Frontier" (the dangerous tri-border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay) to break up a terrorist-funding network. Producer Gianni Nunnari (The Departed, 300), who did the hiring of Padilha, apparently referred to the film's setting as "a modern-day Dodge City." The next step for Nunnari and fellow producers Darin Friedman and Guymon Casady (The Final Cut) is to cast a major Hollywood actor and a major Latino actor.