The Price of Gold (ESPN 30 for 30) (2014): written and directed by Nanette Burstein: Excellent documentary about figure skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan and, you know, that whole thing. The documentary leaves it pretty much up to the viewer to decide how much Harding knew about the plot to injure Kerrigan, and when. Harding agreed to be interviewed; Kerrigan did not. Along the way, the documentary ends up being about class and appearance in the skating world and the world at large. Recommended.
The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee (2017): written and directed by John Maggio: Legendary newspaperman Ben Bradlee narrates some of this documentary from beyond the grave, thanks to tapes he made for a memoir back in the 1990's.
Prior to becoming editor of the Washington Post, where his tenure would include the history-making Pentagon Papers and Watergate stories, Bradlee was basically the last Movie-Star Journalist. He was best pals with JFK (friend Jim Lehrer, among others, notes that this was incredibly compromising from a journalistic POV). He globe-trotted, left two families to marry someone new, and was memorably played by Jason Robards in All the President's Men.
It's a solid documentary, though perhaps a bit too hagiographic and a little scattershot in its depiction of Bradlee's successes and failure after Watergate. Recommended.
Ken Burns' Baseball (Including The Tenth Inning) (1994/2010): written by Ken Burns, David McMahon, Lynn Novick, and Geoffrey C. Ward; directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick; narrated by John Chancellor (1994) and Keith David (2010): Ken Burns' great, flawed history of baseball could very well be titled Baseball in New York and Boston. It's that weighted towards the teams of those two cities, to the extent that Detroit's World Series wins in 1968 and 1984 are never mentioned.
Buck up, Detroit -- Kansas City, Toronto, St. Louis, and Cleveland also warrant barely a mention for World Series wins. Also San Francisco, Cincinnatti, Oakland.... OK, so it's biased to the extent that its historical merits are somewhat dubious. Still, it's enjoyable. Especially if you love New York or Boston. Everywhere else, not so much. Recommended.
The Central Park Five: written and directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon; starring Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise as themselves (2012): Harrowing documentary about how police and bureaucratic incompetence, if not malevolence, put five African-American and Latino teenagers in jail for a rape they didn't commit in 1989, the rape being the headline-grabbing Central Park Jogger case.
This is unlike any documentary Ken Burns has worked on, as it eschews narration for a direct cinema approach of testimonies, period footage, and voiceovers from the people involved. It's a sorrowful and mind-bending thing.
With DNA evidence, a timeline, and a suspect the police never bothered following up on all pointing away from the five teenagers, only confessions by the five -- solicited and coached through fear, intimidation, their own youthful misunderstanding of what was going on, and exhaustion brought on by two days of grilling -- would convince two separate juries to convict them.
This despite the fact that the confessions themselves didn't make any sense in relation to the case, and that a fairly rigorous timeline put them far away from the scene of the crime. Physical evidence was either ignored or spun by the prosecution. Meanwhile, the press coined a term for the alleged gang rape -- "wilding" -- that ultimately referred to nothing that had happened. The teens were reviled as mutants, monsters and wolves in the mainstream press before the trial ever got underway. And the victim remembered nothing of the crime when she finally woke up from her coma.
The Five were eventually freed, in one of those twists that seems like something out of The Shawshank Redemption. Their civil suit against the City of New York drags on, as the City refuses to admit any culpability. Anyone who comprehensively says 'The police are your friend' should be forced to watch this. It's chilling. Highly recommended.
