Justin here with a look at three documentaries I watched on Netflix recently: American Grindhouse, Tales from the Script, and Helvetica
First off: American Grindhouse. This is a really solid documentary about the history of exploitation films. John Landis lays the groundwork here better than anyone else when he says (paraphrasing), “The first movies started coming out and then a few minutes later the first exploitation film came out.” This movie tracks them from, no joke, Edison shorts through to The Passion of the Christ.
I can’t think of a movie that would serve as a better primer for someone new to exploitation films. This movie covers it all. Unfortunately due to the sheer volume of material to cover, I got the mile wide, inch deep feeling from this. That said, as someone who has personally seen hundreds of exploitation films and has read a great deal about the topic, I filled in a lot of blanks here myself. There’s a section on 1950’s quasi-educational films like “Mom and Dad” that were essentially the dirtiest parts of sex-ed class dressed up to look respectable.
Other standouts included the sections on Russ Meyer’s “Nudie Cuties,” the shocking “Roughies,” and blacksploitation. This documentary is a great compliment to Not Quite Hollywood and recommended to exploitation movie neophytes and veterens alike.
Tales from the Script is another movie related documentary that I watched recently. This one focuses on screenwriting. I find the scriptwriting process quite fascinating and have written a couple myself and taken a class on the topic. If what you’re looking for is a movie about the craft of putting a script together, then look somewhere else. This is a movie about the crazy nonsense that Hollywood executives do to script writers and scripts. Frankly it was enough to make me burry any dream of becoming a professional script writer myself.
The oft repeated story in this documentary is X person writes a pretty good script and assuming it overcomes the monumental feat of getting into an agent’s hands and then into studio executives hands, they make all kinds of ridiculous suggestions and tweaks, thus turning script Y into Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Parts of this documentary literally turned my stomach, it’s like watching sausage being made.
Overall this was a good documentary. The stories were interesting and the variety of people who were interviewed was pretty great. Among others, we heard from Paul Schrader, Ronald Shusett, David Hayter, and John August. My biggest complaint, and the thing that made this movie almost unwatchable was the soundtrack. Frankly it reminded me of those training videos they make you watch on your first day at Quiznoes or Best Buy. It was inspirational piano music that was too busy and too inconsequential. I know that music is usually not the strong point of a non-music related documentary, but this was bad enough to make me drop a star on my Netflix rating from 4 to 3. This was a little more pronounced having recently watched the excellent documentary, Helvetica, which featured a wide variety of great instrumental music including a personal favorite, the Chicago Underground Quartet.
Unlike the other two documentaries, Helvetica doesn’t have anything to do with movies, but is rather about the eponymous font. It was also the best of the bunch and the all-around best documentary I’ve seen since Best Worst Movie. Helvetica’s main strength was in how thought provoking it is. I know very little about design, but I’m endlessly fascinated by it. This movie is primarily about how something as simple as a font can influence us in ways that we can’t comprehend on any cognitive level.
The font, Helvetica, was designed as an answer to old-school fonts that have serifs – the accent lines on certain fonts like Times New Roman. On a broader cultural level, the film makers argue that Helvetica was designed as part of the post WWII consciousness to make things new and to move society forward. The film chronicles how Helvetica was adopted by numerous corporations because it looks clean, friendly, and official. It was also adopted by many governments as the official font because it looks informational and authoritative. After you become aware of what Helvetica looks like, you notice it everywhere. This is the font you see on 99% of street signs, your keyboard is probably in Helvetica, nearly every corporate logo you see is Helvetica or some variation of it.
The documentary also gives time to the people who don’t like Helvetica. By this point in the movie, I was totally sold on it though. Some of the interview subjects argue that the widespread use of it is homogenized and maybe even fascistic. For those of you who have seen John Carpenter’s They Live, imagine the “Obey” sign – yup, Helvetica.
I can’t recommend this documentary highly enough. If you have even a passing interest in design and how marketing departments can influence your thoughts, feelings, and habits without your cognitive recognition of such then you simply must watch Helvetica.