There is something insurmountably flawed about a cinema verité documentary shot by a female director about and taking place primarily in an all-boys school. Any woman would stick out like a sore thumb, especially one with a video camera and a big boom. How can we possibly trust that what we see unfold on screen is anything but fake or staged, when there is no possible way for the film to be shot unobtrusively in order to ensure that the scenes are purely authentic. At times, When We Were Boys seems horribly stiff and forced; it would be nearly impossible for director Sarah Goodman to maintain the necessary status of fly-on-the-wall in such a situation. If you can’t just take my word for it, take it from my own personal experience. I spent my formative junior high and high schools years at an all-girls institution. And believe me, if a foreign male entered the school grounds, even a 300-pound pock-faced man, everyone would know.

When We Were Boys follows boys at Toronto’s Royal St. George’s College as they progress from grade 8 to grade 10. In particular, we follow Noah, an extremely handsome young St. George’s student, who hails from one of the richest families in the school. His classmates bully him because of his wealth, not physically but with words, calling him “mastercard” or by borrowing money from him which they never intend to repay. Yes, we get it, poor little rich boy.

If you look for the clichéd in a story, it’s almost always possible to find it, especially in a high school documentary. Last year’s documentary hit about high school kids, American Teen, also fell to the same fate: searching for the clichéd, finding it, and lacking any form of insight that one might have hoped for from a documentary about high school kids instead of a fantasy film à la John Hughes (Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, etc). Goodman looks for the clichéd and she finds it. In grade 8, Noah sings soprano in the school choir; by grade 10 he’s become an alto. Shocker: his voice dropped after puberty. The boys read Lord of the Flies in English class and are treated to lectures by their teachers about how the cruelty towards Piggie isn’t so far off from reality; Goodman tries to parallel this with events in the boys’ lives. (more…)

Ascension is a very peculiar, occasionally fascinating, but ultimately not very illuminating, 49-minute montage of archival footage from the Soviet Space Program. The documentary is inexplicably mixed with footage from China during Mao’s reign and various television/film sequences from around the era, compiled in such a fashion to reduce it to a VHS-quality print.

At times the footage shows unexpected insights, as we watch, for example, dogs and chimpanzees get strapped into the vomit comet and spin around in circles, hooked up to an EEG while scientists also monitor the vitals of the animals. Of course, it should not be a huge surprise that such tests took place; after all, we’ve seen the same ones carried out on humans in Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff, yet the footage of Laika and some chimpanzees undergoing these very same tests still comes as a bit of a shock, but an interesting, if not somewhat torturous (the poor animals!) sight to behold. There is one shocking scene in which a rocket is launched just metres away from a group of people, which, unsurprisingly to us, now, did not end well.
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All Together Now and Manufactured Landscapes

Above: The cast of Love with Yoko Ono, Sir George Martin, Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr ,and wife Barbara Bach, and Olivia Harrison, backstage after opening night.

All Together Now
Where: The Bloor
When: Sunday, April 20th @ 3:45PM
More info

Two years ago, Cirque de Soleil opened a Beatles tribute show in Las Vegas, “Love”, which was a huge collaboration project between Cirque, Apple Corps Ltd., and the Beatles (and wives) themselves. Adrian Wills’s All Together Now documents the development of this production in a film filled with Beatles tracks – remixed by George Martin and son specifically for the show – and spectacle. The cinematography does a wonderful job of capturing the beauty and scope of the Cirque show, which is much cleaner than what one might expect from your average documentary, which makes the film worthwhile. (more…)