LAST FLIGHT HOME - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 6

LAST FLIGHT HOME is a deeply moving documentary about a wonderful man and the love and strength within an ordinary family.  That man happens to be the father of documentarian Ondi Timoner. When we meet him he is bed-ridden with a poor quality of life, but his mind is still sharp. We learn that he was an incredibly successful businessman who founded and ran a regional airline and gave his family an affluent life, until a stroke left him partially paralysed.  The "T team" of mother and kids rallied round to give him the care he needed, but he clearly feels shame at not being able to provide for them after that, and for a being a burden on his beloved life. Much of this film is about him coming to terms with his life, releasing himself from any misplaced guilt, and truly seeing and hearing the wonderful love that surrounds him. In the words of his daughter, a Rabbi, "you were not perfect, but you were a good man". We really feel that in this film.

For the family, the  pain and sadness is in coming to terms with their father's decision to end his life rather than moving into residential care. Speaking from personal experience, they are incredibly fortunate to have end of life laws that allow a person, in specific circumstances, to commit euthanasia. It's so brave to show this on screen, but hopefully influential. We see Eli Timoner say good bye, receive love, dispense advice.  We see his kids and grandkids in such emotional pain but also able to release him for his last journey.  This is a film that is so moving I felt I was in the room with the family and was openly weeping as this man - thinking of others to the last - thinking of how to fix social injustice - passed away.

I cannot express how much I admire the entire Timoner family for allowing cameras into this most intimate experience - especially Eli Timoner. The result is a documentary that is so full of humanity and honesty that it is one of the most profoundly moving documentaries I have ever seen.

LAST FLIGHT HOME has a running time of 101 minutes It played Sundance and Telluride 2022 and is currently playing the BFI London Film Festival. It was released in the USA last week.

London Film Fest Day 12 - WE LIVE IN PUBLIC

Ondi Timoner makes entertaining documentaries: they're fast-paced, non-judgmental, technically accomplished and are typically the result of patiently following a charismatic central character for years. DIG! was a classic example - following a self-hyped feud between two C-list indie bands - the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Dandy Warhols. The subject wasn't that earth-shattering but it played like Spinal Tap for real - deeply enjoyable. Her new doc, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC is just as enjoyable but it's also trying to thought provoking and to raise consciousness: Timoner's subject is a sometime internet visionary, Josh Harris, who personally and professionally encapsulates the dark-side of the internet.

Harris made a fortune in the late 1990s selling consumer-marketing stats and burned it in three ways: first, he set up a web TV channel too many years before broadband made it viable; second, he poured cash into a really fracked up, pseudo-fascistic Big Brother project that pre-dated the TV version and took it to its logical conclusion; and third, he lost money in the Dot-com crash. Never entirely socialised, this internet nerd turned self-styled art-house visionary then decided to make himself and his girlfriend the subject of a life web-cam experiment called "We Live in Public" - in which every moment of their relationship, including a nasty break-up and financial ruin, was documented. He reinvented himself as a hick apple-farmer, and then as an Ethiopian school-teacher. In between, he did try to capitalise on the ability of broadband to make his ideas commercial, but by then he'd burned his commercial credibility with his NYC antics in the late 1990s.

The lessons to us all are many and, unfortunately from Timoner, a bit obvious. Lesson 1 is that stuff on the internet lives forever and a reputation burned is burned for good. Lesson 2 is that we have traded a few intimate relationships for many superficial relationships. Lesson 3 is that being documented materially impacts reality - you "play up to" the cameras. The particular tragedy of Harris is that while he enjoyed (somewhat sadistically at times) being the puppet master of his real-life rats in a cage, he didn't see that making himself the subject of the webcams would turn him into a rat and strip him of control. Again, a pretty obvious thing to have figured out.

The biggest irony is that while this doc. is trying to be thought-provoking by showing the dark side of the internet, it's success is sustained by that very medium. Timoner refs. this in Q&A but doesn't show it in the film. And, while we all sit in the audience and nod sagely about the destruction of privacy, we all rush out to tweet and blog about it. I would've liked to see Timoner address this in the doc. and perhaps add a little pre-credit epilogue. After all, Harris himself is likely to get another chance at fame and maybe even business now that the doc has won the Sundance Best Doc award.

The upshot is that WE LIVE IN PUBLIC is an entertaining doc about a fascinating figure. I don't think it makes any great revelations about the profound social impact the internet has had/is having. It's almost too late for that. As a provocation, it works better as a journal of how New York changed in 2000/2001 as the wealth sucked out in the equity market crash, and in the wake of heightened security post 9/11.

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC played Sundance, where it won the Grand Jury Prize - Documentary. It was released in Los Angeles in September and will be released in the UK later this month.

DiG! - Spinal Tap for real

DiG! is a rockumentary shot by a chick called Ondi Timoner about two up-coming Indie rock bands - The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Since then, The Dandy Warhols have achieved a certain fame, not least in the UK when Channel 4 TV used their song "Bohemian Like You" as the sound-track for all their advertisments. By contrast, The Brian Jonestown Massacre have slipped back into obscurity and the festival circuit thanks to a combination of over-weening ambition and a raging narcotics habit. Naturally, the BJM feel a bit hard done-by as they are arguably better band and came up with the whole "let's conquer the industry" project in the first place.

DiG! is a great movie for anyone interested in how art meets industry. In a moment of lucidity one of the band members notes that "The record company says they are about fashioning a career and not about hits, but if you don't have a hit, they don't give a f*ck about your career." But I think that DiG! will appeal to a wider audience that just wants to laugh at the egotistical excesses of others. There is a lot of hysterical footage where each band stakes its claim to God-like status, and a whole bunch of beating each other up on stage, RAMONES-stylee. For myself, as a greedy capitalist bastard, there is nothing funnier than seeing a bunch of peace-lovin', sitar-playin', kaftan-wearin' hippies get violent with each other. "You broke my f*ckin' sitar man!" Pure comedy gold. There is also something delicious in seeing a man who thinks he is "starting a revolution" against "corporate America" bitching about how someone stole from him and how that is "like, completely against the law, man". Plus, you get the added bonus of seeing how ridiculous a lot of the record company A&R people are. One chick says "The Brian Jonestown Massacre are so retro. And so future" without absolutely no sense of irony.

Aside from that, cineastes have a good opportunity to see a lot of new shooting techniques in practice. The long-span of filming means that it incorporates footage on every type of new camera. Ondi shot 100 hours of black and white footage on tiny surveillance Hi-8 cameras and 800 hours of footage on digital video using Super-8, then Super-16 then Super-35 cameras. No wonder the movie took 4 years to edit down to just 2 hours of hard-hitting rock journalism.

DiG! deservedly won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004, beating off competition from Murgon Spurlock's McDonald's expose, SUPER SIZE ME. DiG! was released in theatres in the US in Winter 2004 and in Europe in Summer 2005. It is now available on DVD and is well worth a look.