Two notable indie releases this week are covered in more detail elsewhere (reviews not up yet, though): Julian Schnabal's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Todd Rahal's The Guatemalan Handshake.

Robert Wilonsky of The Village Voice wrote that Aaron Wolf's King Corn "is as much a thoughtful meditation on the plight of the American farmer as it is a rant against our expanding waistlines." The doc follows two college friends as they learn about their shared "agricultural heritage, and the tale of how kernels of corn have insidiously worked their way into America's diet." The DVD from Balcony Releasing includes deleted scenes, featurettes, a music video, photo gallery, and "the lost basement lectures."

The Japanese Army's horrific massacre of thousands of Chinese is documented in Nanking through the use of "vintage footage, interviews with survivors, and a staged reading of excerpts from journals and letters by a group of actors," according to Kim Voynar's review. She felt it was "deeply affecting" and that "the scripted reading actually works more effectively than mere voiceover would have, bringing to life the people who were a part of the events that happened." The DVD from ThinkFilm looks bare bones, with just a trailer gallery included.

Bobby Roth wrote and directed Berkeley with a great deal of affection. He based it on his own life experiences during the time that he attended UC Berkeley in the late 1960s and cast his son Nick Roth in the lead.

I know people have said this every year since digital video became a viable filmmaking tool, but 2007 really has been a great year for documentaries. Still, it takes more to impress me than a film about the war or the environment, and cute penguins only go so far. Most documentaries behave as if they were newspapers. They're relevant today, but tomorrow they're lining birdcages. Or at least someone is making pretty hanging mobiles out of discarded DVDs. This is not to disparage hot topic films; they serve their purpose. Though Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 failed to prevent G.W. Bush from being re-elected, it sure stirred up some discussion. And it's possible that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth actually helped, in some small way, improve our planet's chances at a bright future. No, I ask a lot of a documentary. I ask it the toughest question of all: do I ever want to see this again?

I ask this because I'm concerned about film as an art form. Even a newspaper story has to be -- or at least should be -- well written. A great story has a hook, a way with language, and an emotional center. It's one thing to report on an amazing story, but it's another thing entirely to ask people to sit through a dull film. I have no patience for objective journalism in documentaries, mainly because there's no such thing. If a film tries to be objective, it's only pretending. I love films in which the maker throws him or herself into the very fabric of the film. What I hate most of all is films that use the same, tired old documentary format: talking heads and photos, and if we're lucky, some video clips. If you're just going to photograph someone sitting in a room and talking, why not write it as a newspaper story?