mockumentary Tagged Articles at Cinematical

In 1984, Christopher Guest and company refined and co-opted the "mockumentary" genre, and for over 20 years others have tried and failed to copy it. Some forgettable examples include Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), The Big Tease (2000) and Confetti (2006). Last year Sacha Baron Cohen finally did it with Borat, but that's another story; if Guest's troupe stamped their handprints on the mockumentary, then that goes triple for the "mock-rockumentary." No one, not even Cohen, can crawl out from under the shadow of This Is Spinal Tap. At this point, it's like re-doing Citizen Kane.

For his directorial debut, American-born Hong Kong movie star Daniel Wu decided to make a documentary about a terrible boy band, but rather than tread upon sacred Spinal Tap territory, he and three friends actually formed a terrible boy band, recorded music and went on tour to conjure up material for this film. Of the four members, Wu, Conroy Chan, Andrew Lin and Terence Yin, none could dance and only one, Yin, could sing (he had a short-lived career as a pop star in Taiwan).

Zombie films have come back into vogue, and American Zombie combines the genre with another filmmaking technique that recently gained popularity: the mockumentary. The film premiered earlier this year at Slamdance before making its way to SXSW. Documentary filmmaker Grace Lee (The Grace Lee Project) has switched to narrative filmmaking with entertaining but inconsistent results.American Zombie takes place in a contemporary America with one crucial difference: a virus is causing people to become undead -- at the moment of a violent death, the virus assumes control of the bodies and re-animates them. In this alternate universe, educational filmmaker John Solomon (playing himself) decides to make a documentary about the "revenant culture" and enlists the help of his friend, documentarian Grace Lee (playing herself).

John and Grace focus their film on several Los Angeles-area zombies: Ivan, a convenience-store worker who draws a zine in his spare time and has a live "zombie hag" girlfriend; Lisa, a florist specializing in funeral arrangements, who makes string art and has trouble with decaying flesh; Judy, who is in denial about being undead and devotes her time to scrapbooking, organic farming and fantasizing about her dream wedding; and Joel, who has founded ZAG, the Zombie Activism Group devoted to helping the undead find meaningful work.

When Bruce Lee died, tragically and way too young in 1973, he'd only logged about 20-some minutes of material for his film Game of Death ... so the opportunistic producers opted to hire a stand-in to replace the legendary martial artist in order to complete the film. A tacky move, to be sure, and one that's caused much consternation among Lee's fans for the past several decades. And now comes a mockumentary that takes careful aim on that unseemly decision ... and it makes for a pretty funny little diversion.

A confident and consistently amusing comedy from Justin Lin, who directed the very fine Better Luck Tomorrow before "going Hollywood" with the empty-headed The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and the nigh-unwatchable Annapolis, Finishing the Game works as sort of a Spinal Tap of the mid-'70s kung fu set. Completely fabricated and admirably on target, Finishing the Game takes square aim at the ways in which Asian performers spent decades pigeonholed into "delivery boy" roles, full-bore "chop socky" caricatures -- and pretty much nothing else, really.

(The following review ran during Cinematical's coverage of The Toronto International Film Festival; with Death of a President bowing today in limited release, we're glad to share it with you again.)

Occasionally, on the festival circuit, there's a movie that garners significant press before it even opens, and mainstream press at that. The controversy could be political, artistic or any one of a number of things. This year at Toronto, the as-yet-unseen-but-buzzed-about buzz flick was Death of a President -- a British mockumentary promising a look at a hypothetical 2007 assassination of George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States. Coyly listed in the program guides as D.O.A.P., the film's mere existence and outline caused a controversy, and incited strong feelings from both the Right-wing blogosphere and Kevin Costner (raising the question of which of those is actually less relevant). Political filmmaking about what-ifs is nothing new, nor are mock-docs about politically charged realities. C.S.A: The Confederate States of and It Happened Here both come to mind, as well as much of the work of Peter Watkins. Death of a President, it seemed, might be the newest entry into the field. Or public outrage over its essential plot might make the film disappear, a casualty of a just-declared War on Premises. ...

There's no doubt about it: When it comes to a hilarious ensemble mockumentary, Christopher Guest is the man. In fact, it's hard not to mention his name when talking about a mockumentary -- dude owns the genre. Well, move over Guest, there's new competition heading your way ...

Variety reports documentary filmmaker Matthew Buzzell will make his narrative feature debut with the mockumentary Sonny and Share Love You. Written by Michele Mulroney and Micah Schraft (who also star in the pic), story is said to revolve around "an indie filmmaker who helps reunite a pop due from the '90s." While the plot isn't too far off from that of A Mighty Wind, it does sound enticing. Rounding out the film's ensemble cast will be Chris Parnell, Diedrich Bader, Arabella Field, Mink Stole, Matt Malloy, Colin Fickles, Joel Michaely and MaKenna Marks. Buzzell's last two films (Putting the River in Reverse, Tell Me Do You Miss Me), had their world premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival this past spring.

For most of us, embarrassing personal moments and ill-advised decisions are relegated to the trash heap of memory, mercifully forgotten by all but ourselves, and a select unfortunate few who happened to be along for the ride. Or, if you're Jeff Goldblum, you make a movie, preserving the debacle for posterity.

That movie is Pittsburgh, a very funny, sometimes painful documentary(ish) record of Goldblum's 2004 decision to quit Hollywood for a few months and join his fiance Catherine Wreford on stage in a production of The Music Man in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Recording the process from start to finish, beginning with Goldblum's presentation of the idea to his friends and thoroughly disapproving agent, and ending with the show's triumphant opening night, the film serves a dual purpose. First, it is a way of (publicly) preserving for Goldblum a strange few months of his life. Second, it gives him a chance to experiment with the documentary form, and to play with the always-mediated version of reality that such films present.

We can do without another baseball comedy -- or any other team sports comedy for that matter. Despite their having their devout, built-in audiences (Martha will see any soccer film, for instance), these movies haven't done anything interesting for the game or the cinema since the first incarnation of The Bad News Bears came out thirty years ago. One way to add a bit of freshness to the field, though, is to go with an unfamiliar or unrecognized sport. It worked for Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, and now it works for Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story, a whimsical mockumentary set in the world of competitive paintball.

Blackballed stars The Daily Show's Rob Corddry as Bobby Dukes, a paintball legend who returns to the game after a ten year ban for "wiping," a form of cheating where a player wipes off the paint he's been hit with before a referee notices. His homecoming is not very welcome, though, as nobody has forgotten about his crooked deed, and none of his old teammates (including fellow Daily Show correspondent Ed Helms) will rejoin him for The Hudson Valley Paintball Classic. So in true sports comedy fashion, Dukes rallies up a varied team of misfit underdogs and with them tries to beat rival Sam Brown (Rob Huebel) to win back his honor.