Tag: documentary

film, not a book

Not a Book: Rocky Horror documentary

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Happy Sunday everyone, and I’ve got a new release film for you this week that I went to see yesterday and am posting about straight away beause screenings may be limited and (spoiler) I really liked it and want it to do well.

Strange Journey is a documentary telling the story of Rocky Horror documentary as it went from Upstairs at the Royal Court in London, to the Kings Road in Chelsea, to LA to the big screen and then its transformation into probably the ultimate cult movie. It’s directed by Linus O’Brien who is the son of Rocky creator and original Riff Raff Richard O’Brien and as well as being a history of Rocky, it’s also the story of Richard O’Brien’s own journey with his gender identity. It’s got all the talking heads you could want, as well as Richard O’Brien – singing some of the songs while playing them on guitar at 83! – it has Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Jim Sharman and most importantly Tim Curry. And there’s loads of behind the scenes footage too – it turns out someone had a cine camera behind the scenes of the Rocky movie shoot as well as at some of the early London theatre performances, so you get to see them all in their original incarnations as well as things like watching Curry performing Sweet Transvestite to the movie camera with all the trappings of the set. I’ve put the trailer in here because it gives you a good idea of what you’re in for:

It’s very much a history and appreciation – it’s got Trixie Mattel and Jack Black for talking heads as well as various film academics and shadow cast members talking about the historical significance of the film and the positive effect that it has had on their lives. I really enjoyed it – it brought a tear to my eye more than once and I once again remember that Tim Curry’s Frank N Furter is incredible.

I’m not sure how old I was when I first saw the movie, but I first went to the touring musical when I was in my final year at uni – and came straight out of the early evening show and bought a ticket to see the late show and watched it again from the front row, having spent more of my monthly budget than I intended and then went out to the stage door afterwards (not a very Verity thing to do) and got a picture with David Bedella (an even less Verity thing) which I still have, still think I look goofy in, but still sort of love all the same. So I think I’m the ideal audience member for this, and can’t really work out how it will land if you’re not a Rocky fan. But then it’s a cult of its own really, so hopefully some of the people who go to midnight screenings every week will turn out to see it.

Have a great Sunday everyone.

film, not a book, streaming

Not a Book – Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story

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Another Sunday, another documentary from me. And it’s probably not unexpected that a musicals geek like me would watch a documentary about Liza Minelli, but I’m here to make a case forwhy you’d be interested in it even if you’re not a fan of musicals or divas.

This is a documentary about Liza Minelli, which focuses principally on Liza’s life after the death of her mother Judy Garland, and her work establishing herself as separate to her mother and building her own legacy and legend. As you can see from the trailer, Liza is in it (a lot) as are numerous of her friends – both famous and not.

Liza’s life is pretty incredible. She’s the daughter of one of Hollywood’s most beloved (but troubled) stars and a legendary director of musical films, She was in the public eye from the day that she was born, but she went on to be an iconic performer herself. She’s one of only six people to be a non-competitive EGOT – her Grammy is an honorary one, but she won her Oscar, Emmy and three Tonys in competition (and has a fourth honorary Tony too). And that career is covered extensively in this documentary.

But the reason that I think that this is of interest to people beyond the Liza fans, is because of that life time of fame. Liza has never really had a private life, and she’s had a public persona from the moment her parents first put her in front of a camera. in a way, she’s one of the last vestiges of the studio system: a child brought up in the business who watched how her mother was portrayed in the press and who has deliberately and constantly guarded what facets of herself she shows to her fans and her public when she’s not performing. So don’t go expecting any big revelations or confessions here – but that’s what I found so fascinating – what Minelli is like in normal life is essentially unknowable unless you’re in her inner circle. And you get glimpses of that from the friends and family – but just that, glimpses because her one overriding motivation in her public persona is to prove to everyone that she’s not Judy Garland and that she didn’t inherit all the problems that her mother had.

So it’s incredibly watchable, but there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors. There’s loads of great archive and lots of evidence that she’s a kind person but she’s not going to tell you how she feels, or what she really thinks. I know that Peter Allen was the husband that she liked the most – according to her friends but there’s nothing really good or bad from her about any of them, although various of her friends are not shy to tell you that they really didn’t like David Gest. She’s still sticking to it that she never really saw any drugs at Studio 54, despite all other evidence to the contrary. You come away feeling doused in showbiz pizzaz, and slowly realise that you’re none the wiser about the reality. Just fascinating.

This one is available on different streaming services depending on where you are – in the UK it’s on the iPlayer at the moment.

Have a good Sunday!

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: America’s Sweethearts

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Back to the streaming services this Sunday and a documentary that I actually watched basically as soon as it came out – but which has taken a few weeks to actually get posted because of things that were slightly more pressing on a time front. But actually it’s been really interesting to watch the conversations about this series over the last few weeks as well.

America’s Sweethearts is a seven part documentary series about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. It follows them across the course of one season – with auditions to join the team, the training camp that follows and then the actual football season. It picks out a couple of the women in particular to highlight – Victoria and to a lesser degree Madeleine, veterans whose mothers were also on the squad; Caroline, newly retired and trying to adjust to the post-DCC world and her sister Anna-Kate who is auditioning for the team herself this year; Kelcey, a senior veteran on the team in her final season and Reese, a rookie candidate looking to make the team for the first time. Using those women it explores the impact of being on the team – physically and mentally, the sisterhood of the women who have been a part of it, and the squad’s place in the multi-billion dollar brand that is the Dallas Cowboys.

This is not the first series about the team – there were previously 14 seasons of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team produced by the CMT channel. Both series were authorised by the organisation itself, the people running the team are the same – DCC director Kelli Finglass, chief choreographer Judy Trammell – both former DCC themselves – and their boss Charlotte Jones Anderson, daughter of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Even some of the cheerleaders on the squad are the same – the CMT show finished with the 2021 season and some of those women were still cheering last seaons – but the actual shows are very different.

Making the Team was very much a reality tv series in many ways – each season followed a similar structure: you started with the preliminary auditions and semi finals, it moved on to finals weekend where the re-auditioning veterans join the new hopefuls, then you move to training camp where across the next episodes the girls will learn the “signature dance” complete with kickline ending in the infamous jump splits, get make overs, be fitted for their uniforms, have their publicity photos taken and watch the rookie hopefuls get cut one by one to make a team of around 36. Some years you’ll also get to see auditions for the team’s show group – who get to do extra dance performances beyond the football games – or watch the veterans trip to a holiday resort to shoot the squad’s swimsuit calendar. The main focus of the show is on the fresh rookies – some will be completely new, others might be returners who were cut in previous years – and get a few glimpses of the cheerleaders you’ve followed in recent seasons.

And as you’ve probably guessed by comparing my descriptions of the two shows, they are quite different beasts. And not just because Netflix has paid for the music rights so you can finally be told that the “Signature dance” is actually known as Thunderstruck – because that’s the song that it is danced to*. The team behind America’s Sweethearts are using the structure of the season as a way of examining the idea of the squad as a whole.

And the appeal of the series goes way beyond the viewers of the old CMT series (something which the series’s subreddit is yet to come to terms with). What do I mean by that? well Him Indoors hated MTT with a burning passion – my sister and I watched it when he was out of the room – but he said he wanted to take a look at this series and see what it was like – and ended up watching the whole thing. A colleague at work who is a sports and documentary fan but not someone I would have expected to have watched it, had already watched it when I went to recommend it to him and described it as the best documentary series he’s watched this year.

And there are a lot of different things it is possible to take from watching it – hence why it’s spawed a thousand think pieces for you to read on the subject. There’s Vanity Fair’s The Agony and Ecstasy of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Show, Vox’s The ugly process of turning beautiful women into Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, The Guardian’s Do you struggle to accept rejection? We could all learn a lot from American Cheerleaders, USA Today’s Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Netflix show is addictive. Here’s why, The Globe and Mail’s The secret feminism of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and BBC News’s more simple America’s Sweethearts: Life after Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. And that’s just a small selection.

I could write paragraphs more about the show – but this post is already massively long, so I’m going to wrap it up here and hope that this is enough to get you to take a look at the series, no matter what your views on cheerleaders or American sport!

Have a great Sunday everyone.

*and for long-time viewers of MTT who (like me) have never made it to a Cowboys game, this does have a pretty much complete performance of Thunderstruck for you to enjoy and see how it all the various parts fit together. And yes, Kelli does also explain her Yes, No, Maybe scoring system for auditions. You’re welcome.

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: Beckham

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This week in Not a Book it’s (yet) another Netflix documentary. I’m sorry. I do try to mix it up a bit, but they’ve had a really good run and it’s what I’ve been watching this week. DOn’t worry though, I have other plans for next week and maybe the week after. I hope.

Anyway this latest pick is a four-part look at the life and career of David Beckham. It’s a decade or so since he retired now, but at his peak he was one of the best footballers in the world, as well as being one of the first footballers to become a truly global brand. He also married Posh Spice aka Victoria Adams at the height of both his and her fame. I mean if you haven’t heard of Posh and Becks, I don’t nkow where you’ve been for the last twenty five years, although these days it’s understandable if you know her mostly for her fashion line and him for… well being him.

It’s actually been really interesting in the office the last week or so trying to explain to people how big the Beckhams were at their peak. Really difficult. I’m old enough that I was there the first time – the World Cup 98 sending off, the purple suits and thrones at the wedding, the whole Rebecca Loos situation, everything. I don’t know that there is a modern day analogy really. Anything they did was front page news. Things they didn’t do were news. Victoria’s look was copied everywhere, David’s hair likewise – especially the bleached mohawk for the 2002 World Cup (How is that 21 years ago!). I think you get a bit of a sense of that from the documentary, but it’s really hard to convey. In a pre-smartphone world, they had cameras watching their every move, and the hunger for gossip or news about them was unquenchable.

Anyway, this has got all the access you could want (unless you want them to talk about the affair rumours) and has a sense of humour about it all. David is seen pottering around his outdoor kitchen cooking a single mushroom. Victoria is pretty frank about football (she doesn’t like football, but she likes watching David play football) and David’s teammates are also pretty frank about him. It’s hilarious in places – in the trailer you can see the bit where David says he doesn’t change, immediately followed by Fergie saying that he changed, and it’s not the only time it pulls that sort of trick. Roy Keane’s talking heads are consistently brilliant, as is Gary Neville on clubbing. Each episode is more than an hour long and they go by fast. It’s at its best when dealing with the early days and the Manchester United peak (partly because of those great talking heads from the teammates) but some of the Madrid and LA era stuff is good too. It’s not the whole story, but it is enough of the story that you come away feeling happy and as you’ve had a laugh you don’t mind.

Have a great Sunday.

not a book

Not a Book: Madoff – Monster of Wall Street

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The latest entry in my catalogue of media about scams is the new Netflix documentary about Bernie Madoff which we binged last weekend.

If you’re not old enough to remember (lucky you!) Bernie Madoff was a Wall Street financier who was sentenced to more than a century in prison after it was discovered that the investment business that he had founded and ran was just a giant Ponzi scheme.

A Ponzi scheme (named after an Italian businessman who ran a fraud on this basis in the 1920s) is a scheme were early investors are paid dividends using money from new investors. The investors obviously don’t know this – and the schemes can keep going as long as new investors keep bringing in money. In the case of the Madoff scheme, he took in billions of dollars from investors and kept the scheme going for close to 20 years (in its final form at any rate) despite nearly being caught by regulators at various points.

This is a four part Netflix documentary that takes you through Madoff’s entire business career, complete with interviews with people who worked at the firm, investors and people who tried to expose what he was doing. It’s a mix of dramatisation, interviews and archive footage and it has one of the clearest explanations that I’ve seen of exactly how he pulled the scam. It should come with a warning though: at one point it shows the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11 2001, which is not something you see often on TV here in the UK and I find really quite upsetting every time I see it.

Anyway, that aside (and I really don’t think they needed to show it), it’s an excellent documentary about one of the biggest financial scandals in history, but also about how it fits into the wider financial system of the time. Very much worth your time.

not a book, tv

Not a Book: Ghislaine Maxwell documentaries

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**** Content warning: child sex abuse ****

So with the sentencing of Ghislaine Maxwell due to happen this week, today’s post is a round up of some recent documentaries and related content. Obviously the content around the court case is incredibly grim and distressing, so all the warnings.

I’m going to start with House of Maxwell, which is a three part documentary on the BBC – which you can find on iPlayer. This looks at the Maxwell family – from the rise of newspaper baron Robert, through his mysterious death, the financial scandal that emerged after his death and subsequent legal action through to Ghislaine’s reappearance in New York and everything that followed. If you don’t know about Robert Maxwell and the Mirror group pensions, this is a really good place to start. I was only little when he went missing from his yacht, and didn’t really know much about the detail or the court cases that followed, so it filled in a lot of background for me. This is more a look at the Maxwell family than at Ghislaine specifically.

Epsteins’s Shadow: Ghislaine Maxwell is the opposite. It does cover some of the same ground with the family history, but mostly focused on how that impacted on the young Ghislaine and moves on (relatively) quickly to the New York Years and is much more about Maxwell and Epstein’s relationships and what the allegations are against her. This another three parter or at least it was in the UK where it was shown on Sky Documentaries, but I think in the US on Peacock it may have been shown as one three hour doc. This was first broadcast in 2021, and when I saw it earlier this month it had two sets of closing statements – one explaining all the people who had been asked to comment or be interviewed and their responses and the fact that the trial was happening and a second about the verdicts. No doubt the ending will be getting an update this week. Definitely the grimmer of the two – as you would probably expect.

There have also been several podcasts on or around the subject – I’ve listened to some but not all of Power: The Maxwells from Puck, which has a simialr focus to House of Maxwell – in that it’s looking at the family not just Ghislaine. I also have the Maxwell season of British Scandal from Wondery cues up ready to listen to – just as soon as I have time!

I have started but haven’t finished – yet – the 2020 Netflix Jeffrey Epstein documentary, Jeffrey Epstein: Flithy Rich. It’s the grimmest of the lot – we only made it forty minutes into the first episode before it all got too much, so I’ll have to do it in chunks when I’m in a resilient mood and go in prepared. What I’ve seen of it is (obviously) a harrowing watch very much focussed on his victims and their experiences in their own words.

If you just want to read articles – which feel less harrowing (to me at least) that watching or listening, then there is plenty to chose from – although a lot of the big investigative pieces are behind paywalls or partial paywalls – so in the main I’m linking you to indexes here so you can see what there is and pick your stories yourself rather that use up your free articles on my links. Vanity Fair has done a lot – you can see their topic indexes on Ghislaine Maxwell here and Jeffery Epstein here, but as they also did a big profile piece on Epstein in 2003 which there are various conflicting accounts about as this New Yorker article explains. The New Yorker also has topic indexes for both Maxwell and Epstein. New York Magazine also has topic indexes for Maxwell and Epstein. No paywall for The Guardian – again there’s an index for Maxwell and Epstein.

film, not a book

Not a Book: The Sparks Brothers

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Back with another documentary this week – this time a film about the band Sparks – namely brothers Ron and Russel Mael. If you’re not sure who they are, the song that you’re most likely to recognise is This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us:

The brothers first formed a band in the mid 1960s but broken through nearly a decade later in the mid 1970s and have been constantly producing music and evolving ever since, whether people have been watching or not – and some times people really haven’t been watching. But they have a lot of high profile fans. Don’t believe me? Watch the trailer:

Directed by Edgar Wright (yes him from Hot Fuzz) this is a two and a bit hour love letter to one of pop’s most enigmatic bands. Who are still enigmatic at the end of the film, but you’ve really enjoyed watching them go through their career and making music. The film is structured by working it’s way through the bands albums and what was going on in the band at the time. But only in the band. I still don’t know if the brothers have partners, or kids or anything. But I do know that Ron has a very cool and very retro car.

It’s also totally notable that although many other musicians have joined them in the band at various points only to be jettisoned as the brothers moved on, lots of them appear in the film and seem to be absolutely fine about it. In fact Ron and Russel are often described as gentlemen and a joy to work with. So not your normal music documentary on that front either.

Maybe it could have been shorter, but why wouldn’t you want to include puppets and incredibly literal props and visual gags. It’s just a lovely way to pass the time, and you’ll end up listening to a Sparks playlist afterwards. I’ve even included on for you so you don’t have to go looking for it. You’re welcome. The Sparks Brothers is on Netflix in the UK. Enjoy.

book adjacent, not a book

Not a Book: Murder Among the Mormons

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I’m on a bit of a documentary jag on my TV viewing at the moment – and no I’m not counting Selling Sunset and Selling Tampa as documentaries – they’re definitely “constructed reality” or whatever they’re calling it now. Anyway this week I watched all three episodes of Murder Among the Mormons across two nights and it was really good.

Murder Among the Mormons looks at three bombings that took place in Salt Lake City in Utah in 1985. It soon becomes apparent that the bombings are linked to the trade in historical documents – and particularly to a series of documents related to the history of the Latter Day Saint movement. It’s got interviews with most of the key figures in the story and looks at the run up to the bombings, the bombings themselves and then the investigation looking to find the perpetrators.

Regular readers of the blog will know that the weirder corners of American religion and religious history and this fitted right into that niche for me. It’s not actually even a new release – it came out almost a year ago but despite all the murder mysteries I read, I’m not usually a big true crime murder mystery person because there’s no guarantee you’re going to get a resolution the way you are in a book that’s sticking to genre conventions. So I probably wouldn’t have watched this if it wasn’t for this tweet from Julie Cohen:

I mean how can you resist trying to find out about the magic salamander. And there actually not a lot more I want to say about the actual contents of the documentary. Because if you go into this not knowing any more than I’ve told you at the top: car bombs linked to the trade in historical documents then this will be a really wild ride. I can’t speak to how it works for you if you already know the story – but the makers of the documentary have put this together incredibly cleverly. So, it’s only three hours of your life – go, go, go.

And if this is your first toe in the corner of the various of Mormonism, then do go have a look at my posts about Under the Banner of Heaven, the season of Unfinished about Short Creek and also relatively recent BotW Educated.

Have a great Sunday!