It’s officially a tradition: for the past three years I managed to watch all the Oscar-nominated Documentary Shorts. Mostly because, hey, short. (Come on, you can dominate a whole category in three hours!) But they’re never boring. Depressing as hell sometimes, but never boring. It’s not a comfortable three hours, but it’s always interesting.
Click the jump for a quick review of each of the nominees for this year’s Best Documentary Short.
Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405
I wasn’t familiar with Mindy Alper before watching this. I’ve heard her called an “outsider artist” because her work is experimental, but also because she creates so much of it in solitude. She was diagnosed with autism when she was younger, but she’s not sure that’s the reason why she is the way she is. From what the movie shows she takes half a pharmacy’s worth of prescription drugs every day to stay somewhat stable.
The movie’s not just about mental illness, though that’s a huge part of it. It’s also about the nature of creativity, about expression and meaning in the things we create. And it’s about our complicated relationships with our families; our imperfect, frustrating, human connections with the people who don’t understand us but were probably trying even if they could have tried harder.
Her’s artwork is lovely, in an uncomfortable way: distorted and exaggerated and you always know exactly what emotion she’s trying to get across. (The animations added for the movie were particularly nice.) The drawings remind me equally of Ralph Steadman and Shel Silverstein. And my sister Kathryn thought that even though her sculptures of people are larger than life, and paper mache, and look like paper mache, with wires and paper sticking out at odd angles, somehow they look more realistically like people than if she’d tried to make them realistic.
This one was my favorite, and I think has the best shot at the Oscar, because the production values were excellent, the story was compelling, the art and the artist is fascinating, and the interest level stayed high the entire time. And for one other reason, but I get into that in the last review of this post.
Watch the full movie on shortoftheweek.com.
Edith+Eddie
In 2014 the marriage of a 96 year old woman to a 95 year old man had people up in arms about the legality of it. Edith’s daughters fought and a judge appointed an attorney as Edith’s guardian. This documentary is the story of the couple themselves.
One thing I found interesting was the fact that the couple is often referred to as “the country’s oldest interracial couple” as Edith is African American and Eddie is white, and the trailers implied this played a part in their separation, but in the actual movie their race is mentioned, but not depicted as central to the problem. Many of Edith’s family and friends seemed to accept Eddie without color being a factor.
It’s possible that the daughter and guardian who took Edith away didn’t approve of Eddie being white, but the movie paints the separation more as a convenience: the daughter wanted her mother with her in Florida and Eddie was a problem to be discarded. Age was the defining factor of what happened to them, not race. (Though it’s possible that the people who didn’t like Eddie dating a black woman didn’t want to say so in front of a camera.)
It’s not a happy story, but it has a lot of beautiful things in it.
Watch the full movie on vimeo.
Knife Skills
This movie is about a restaurant, and culinary school, that its organizers hope will be one of the premiere French restaurants in the United States. The students are all people with no previous experience, and are all felons recently out of prison.
I love how, when we first meet each person in the film, their name appears on the screen, and underneath, where in other cooking documentaries you’d see the culinary school they graduated from or the restaurant they own, you see instead the crime they were put away for and the number of years they served.
The movie has a lot of the tension and yelling of a Realty Cooking Show, without feeling so totally scripted. We also get some nicely shot video of beautiful food, which is always fun. I felt somehow that the story could have gone a little deeper, but at 40 minutes it probably had gone as deep as it could.
Brandon Chrostowski, the creator of the Institute, says a few words at the end that made me completely forgive him for all the yelling.
Watch the full movie on youtube.
Heroin(e)
Three woman (a judge, a religious woman, and a fire chief) are some of the many people doing what they can to help stop the opioid epidemic, specifically in West Virginia. (And if you expect the religious woman to spout platitudes and mean well but not accomplish much, you’ll be surprised. I really liked her.)
The figures quoted in the movie are shocking, and it spells out why the epidemic is so bad there: the jobs are mostly blue collar labor, which tends to have more injuries, so more people getting hurt and getting hooked on pain killers, which they eventually can’t afford or can’t get, and heroin is always around, and the low education and low prospects means low hopes, and the cycle continues. No one’s saying they’re not responsible for their actions, just the opposite, but the surrounding circumstances are a very bad mix.
The movie’s not about yelling at Big Pharma or pointing too many fingers. It’s about what people can do, individually, and the toll it takes on the people who are trying to help.
I liked this one almost as much as Heaven is a Traffic Jam, and I think what everyone in this movie is doing is amazing and it makes me want to do something to help. On a movie-watching level though I don’t think it’ll get the Oscar, it didn’t feel as powerful as some of the others. It’ll still kick you in the teeth, though.
Watch the full movie on Netflix.
Traffic Stop
I watched this one last because out of all of them it’s not available to watch for free, or with Netflix or Amazon. It’s HBO, so I signed up for the 7-day free trial to watch it. (And will promptly cancel it. Sorry, HBO. You’re awesome, but I’m broke, and anything you have that I really want to watch I can wait the six months to a year for it to show up on one of the services I already have. Except for this one of course.)
The movie is problematic because that’s what it was going for. Because a lot of people are going to look at the video of the traffic stop and think “well, she should have kept quiet and done what he was asking. She had it coming.”
I can guarantee most of the people thinking that will be white and have never even been shouted at by a cop. I know because I’m white, and the whole time I watched the dash cam I thought “Sweetie, just do what he says and you’ll be fine, what are you doing?”
But if a cop pulls me over it’s because he’s going to give me a ticket. The worst I can expect is he hurts my feelings.
If you think she had no reason to question what he was doing, no reason to get upset, or struggle, or scream, well, don’t take my word for it, what the hell do I know. You need to find a friend who’s black and ask them what their worst story is.
(This paragraph isn’t part of the movie, so you can skip it if you’d rather, but as an example: one friend of mine who just just got his degree was told by a coworker that it’s easier for him because “everybody knows black people go to college for free.” Another friend, who isn’t even thirty, when she was seven tried to follow her friend inside the house and was told by her friend’s mom “you can’t bring your germs inside” and to “stop trying to act better than the rest of your people.” A coworker of mine said her Dad, who’s a good dad and smart and has a great job, every time he’s been pulled over, for not coming to a complete stop or a broken tail light, he wonders “is this going to be the time when I get arrested or beaten up or shot because he assumed I was a threat even though I’m really not but it’s late and this could be the cop who’s had a bad night?”)
I think most of us are a little scared of cops, that’s just life. But if we’re white I think it’s harder to visualize what it’s like to be black and get pulled over. I can try, but I know I watched the dash cam and wished she’d been polite. No lie, I just wanted her to be nice to him. Black Americans are shot by the cops with alarming frequency and here I’m thinking “just call him ‘officer’ and do what he tells you.”
(But it broke my heart when the next officer who was being so nice to her told her the black community was just violent.)
It was well filmed and well edited and interesting and timely so I think it has a shot at the Oscar. But I don’t think it’ll get it, because it’ll make too many people uncomfortable. When it comes to the Oscar for Best Documentary it’s okay to feel bad, but the last few years it hasn’t gone to the one that makes people feel guilty. But you should watch it anyway.
For more 2018 Oscars reviews, head here!