We had a pretty quiet weekend around here — at least, not much to write about.  In a word, our weekend was:  Baseball.

On Thursday afternoon, we went to see the Nationals beat the Tigers.  (This was a makeup game, after the original got rained out on Tuesday.)  The game was exciting — it all came down to the very last out, with Prince Fielder at the plate.  After, we went to Five Guys for dinner, where I indulged in a burger and fries and didn’t even think about feeling guilty

On Friday, relatives came to visit from North Carolina, and we went to see the Nationals beat the Cubs.  I was surprised to find that two games, back to back, weren’t too much for me.  I suspect that the two wins helped that to be the case!  We sat one section over from our usual seats.  (Enter long, boring explanation for why there isn’t an usher posted near our usual seats.)  It was fun to watch a good usher properly handling the crowd — helping people find their seats, holding them in the aisle until breaks in play, etc.  I ended up tracking down the ushers’ supervisor — both to compliment the usher we saw, and to try to remedy the lack of an usher in our usual section.  I was pleased with the customer service, at least the lip service ::wry grin::

On Saturday, I went to see the yarn bombing to which I had contributed several pieces over the winter.  Then, on Saturday evening, I watched BULL DURHAM with our visiting Carolina relatives.  I haven’t seen the whole movie in a long time, and I was surprised by a couple of things — how much baseball I’ve learned since the last time I saw it, and how utterly unquotable-in-a-family-blog most of the dialog is.  I think it’d be about a one-hour movie on TV, once they deleted all the lines they couldn’t satisfactorily bleep…

I’m reeling a bit from the discovery that this is a Monday, and it’s time for me to head to work.  Nevertheless, it’s Writing Day, so I’d better settle down and get my words in – 5000 is today’s target!

So?  Did anyone have a more exciting weekend than mine?  (I like to give you easy assignments, once in a while )

Last weekend, we headed down to the Newseum for a new documentary, BLACK AND WHITE AND DEAD ALL OVER.

Having attended Silverdocs (a film festival that exclusively shows documentaries) last year, and having watched dozens of them on our own, outside of the festival, we have become something of documentary snobs.  We talk a lot about whether the subject is worth the investment of time, whether the story is told in interesting ways, whether new facts were illuminated, whether the movie itself was enjoyable as a movie.  We have pretty strong opinions — and sometimes they differ from the critics’.

BAWADAO got a solid B from us.

It is subtitled “A Film About the End of American Newspapers”.  As a unifying features, it shows a map of the United States, with dots placed to show cities where newspapers have been severely curtailed or, in some cases, shut down forever.  The film cites various statistics, including the average age of readers (55, and growing older).

But that’s not really what the film is about.

BAWADAO is about the death of *investigative journalism*.  It’s about those reporters who invest months — sometimes a year or more — in developing a story, ferreting out injustice, exposing bad government.  Investigative journalism is very expensive for newspapers; it requires fronting salaries for months, along with the costs of the actual investigations.  It is the very opposite of tweets and Facebook and other social media news.

BAWADAO tracks two investigative journalists from the Philadelphia Daily News, telling their story — both the Pulitzer-Prize-winning series that they wrote and their precarious job position.  The film spends a *lot* of time talking about Philly papers, about how they’ve been bought and sold five times in six years, about how hedge fund managers make lousy publishers.

These are all part and parcel of the problem.  But ultimately, the film claims too much when it says it’s about the (absolute) end of (all) American newspapers.

The Newseum welcomed us to the screening, handing out totebags with the slogan from the movie (“Democracy dies in darkness”.)  The bags also contained a copy of that day’s Washington Post, a bottle of water, and a bag of SmartFood popcorn (you know, so we could enjoy popcorn and a drink at the movies.)

In fact, we’d already read that day’s Post (even though we’re younger than the 55-average-age.)  How about you?  When was the last time that you read a print paper?  How about a mainstream paper, online?  From where do you get your news?

Well, it was the usual weekend rush around here – aided and abetted by the fact that we enjoyed a four-day weekend.  Activities included:

• DIRT, a play at Studio Theatre.  The various reviews we’d seen made this sound as if it was going to be an impenetrable tangle of philosophical meandering, but it turned out to be an often-funny, bittersweet mystery about the death of a woman (and its effect on friends and family.)  This show had the most raucous sex scene I’ve ever seen on stage (mostly taking place beneath the lead actress’s skirt).  Fortunately, it was general admission seating, so that we could move at intermission, to get away from the people who had to talk, full voice, through the first act (and especially through that sex scene!)
• CLOUD ATLAS, the movie.  I was thrilled to be seeing this just a couple of days after reading it; my retention had not yet faded.  While I’ll be the first to say that this movie was not for everyone, we loved it.  I’d like to see it again, paying even more attention to the multiple roles, as there were some I did not catch in real-time viewing.
• Craft Bastards Craft Show.  This was my first year attending, and I loved it!  There were more, different crafts than I typically see in a full season of craft shows.  Alas, it was *very* crowded, with barely enough room to maneuver in some sections.  (With a $5 admission and one-day-only, the crowding was somewhat inevitable.  I’d love to see them expand to two days and $10!)
• SKYFALL, the movie.  I’m not a tremendous James Bond fan, but Daniel Craig certainly got my attention in Casino Royale (which he, and the entire franchise, promptly lost in QUANTUM OF SOLACE.)  SKYFALL was okay – not over-the-top incredible, but I was quite amused by a number of the meditations on aging.  Maybe that’s because I’m feeling aged myself…

In between there was much eating of good food, brunch with my sister-in-law, shopping for shoes, knitting, and reading of books.  So, really, a lovely, lovely weekend.  And now I’m back to the real world…

Mindy, who needs to be writing … now!

We’re back home from Silverdocs now, having spent a few days in a hotel closer to the venue.  (It was a total extravagance, but it was lovely to have a room to go back to, for those times when there were two or three hours between films…)  The kitties seem to have forgiven us for our absence (if they even noticed – a neighbor came in to feed them while we were gone), and all else is fine at home.

So, here are the last movies that we saw:

• Brooklyn Castle – Probably my favorite (now that I’m through with all my viewing, I can say that more definitively…), this film is about students at a Brooklyn middle school where 70+% of the kids live in poverty, and where the *chess* club is the cool extracurricular.  The kids have won state and national titles dozens of times over the past several years.  The film profiled about a half-dozen kids and took us through a year of competition and budget cuts.  This movie made us *feel* what the kids were thinking, getting frustrated with them as they made mistakes and lost faith in themselves, cheering when they succeeded.  During the discussion after, two of the most successful kids were there, along with their families.  Wow.  Just wow.
• Manufactured Fortunes – A short, showing the mechanics of how fortune cookies are made.  The film was simple, *very* short (four minutes), and fun in a quirky way.
• Step Up to the Plate – A film I really, really wanted to love, about Sebastian Bras taking over the three-star Michelin restaurant built by his father, Michel Bras.  Alas, in the end, the emotional content wasn’t there, and the film’s pacing just … felt … too … slow.  Also, the tone of the images, the cinematography, seemed too dark.  There were a few key scenes that leaped out, but overall, this film wasn’t what I wanted it to be.
• Radio Unnameable – A rather straightforward documentary about Bob Fass, WBAI, and the freeform radio show, Radio Unnameable.  The directors combed through *incredible* amounts of archival footage to create the film, but ultimately I wasn’t emotionally sparked by the movie.  Bob Fass was there for the panel, though, and he’s an entertaining storyteller.
• Missing – A short, about people going to absurd lengths (psychics, “pet rescue” dog trackers) to find missing pets.  This short film was too long (almost 20 minutes), and the pet owners didn’t seem to realize that they were the butts of a joke.  Probably my least favorite of all the films we saw.
• The Central Park Effect – This film is about birdwatchers in Central Park.  It covers a calendar year, going through the seasons and the birds present during migration.  The nature footage of the birds was *incredible*, but this non-birdwatcher would have appreciated subtitles, telling me what birds I was watching.  The Q&A after was a bit taxing – lots of birdwatchers comparing notes about their favorite birding sites (and similar deeply detailed personal statements, rather than questions.)
• Don’t Stop Believin’ – The final film for us, and the one that actually kicked off the festival last Monday night (but was sold out when we went to get tickets for it.)  This movie tells the story of a Philippino singer who was tapped to replace Steve Perry in the band Journey.  The film does a good job of showing contrasts between rock star life and the slums that Arnel Pineda came from.  The middle dragged a bit — the challenge of showing how the tour dragged — and the conclusion (a concert in Manila) was rather inevitable.  Still, I was struck by the sensitive portraits painted by the filmmaker.

So.  That’s it.  Docs done.  Until next year

Mindy, had a wonderful time, and glad to be back home!

On Friday, we saw two of the films that are getting the most “buzz” at the conference – both of them have added screenings, due to their popularity.  We also saw a film that might be my favorite overall.  Friday was filled with:

• Detropia – a sobering, depressing, frustrating, infuriating look at Detroit, in the aftermath of the financial meltdown, the auto company bailouts, etc.  This film is *gorgeous*, with moody shots of literally decaying buildings, expanses of collapsed homes, and night-shots of downtown.  The film intersperses footage of the Detroit Opera with interviews of Detroit citizens, union members, and politicians.  Ultimately, I found it difficult to balance the “opera” message with the rest of the film. During the panel after, the filmmakers were asked if they had made a call to action or a eulogy, and they weren’t really able to answer.  (I found the film to be a eulogy…)
• Photographic Memory – Sort of the opposite to Detropia, in almost every way, this film was a “small film”, a personal biography/autobiography.  On its surface, Photographic Memory is about a man who decides to go back to France, where he spent a short amount of time in his 20′s, to find some people he knew then.  In reality, the film is about the relationships between fathers and sons, and about revisiting the past, and growing old and creating art.  The movie left me feeling very emotional.
• The Revisionaries – Any warm fuzzies left over from Photographic Memory were dissipated by this film, about the Texas School Board and its textbook selection committee.  The film covers a tumultuous year when standards were reviewed for science and social studies/history, where conservative board members did their best to gut the teaching of evolution and Western civilization.  The filmmaker largely  lets the conservative religious members of the Board speak for themselves (including their statements that the earth is 6000 years old and that man walked with dinosaurs) and lets Board action stand for itself (including replacing the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson with that of Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, and a Board motion to have President Obama referred to exclusively as Barack Hussein Obama.)  During the panel after, the main proponent of the changes was there – he presents as an affable, honest man who truly believes in the changes he pushed through because “all children are created in the image of God.”

So, while my blood pressure was raised by the last film, and I was left colder by the first than most viewers, we had yet another amazing day at the festival!

Mindy, looking for more…

Yesterday, we only took in two films:

• We Are Legion:  This documentary is about “hacktivists” – Anonymous, Lulzsec, etc.  I thought it did a great job of tracing the evolution of online activism, from the outsider community of 4chan through the Scientology call to action, Wikileaks, and Arab Spring activism.  There were some places where the filmmaker elided ideas and facts (was he *really* saying that Anonymous is the same as Occupy Wall Street – oh, okay, not really…), but this was a good, solid backgrounder.  (Also, it was pretty impressive, the number of people that he got to speak to him, as they wore their Guy Fawkes masks…)
• Joe Papp:  In Five Acts:  A fairly standard biography documentary (this one has been sold to American Masters, and very much has the flavor of that show.)  This doc did a great job of tracing Papp as a Communist/Socialist/liberal leader.  It showed many of his faults, but glorified many of his accomplishments.  In discussions after, it became clear that one of the filmmakers’ greatest successes was corralling the *massive* amount of material they had on hand – Papp hired four archivists to track the Public Theater, and this documentary was almost 20 years in the making.

Mindy, still pleased with the variety and the lessons learned…