Early fall is the time to get real, Washington.
Three of this year’s most likely contenders for an Academy Award in the feature documentary category are being released here: “A Film Unfinished,” “Waiting For ‘Superman’ ” and “Freakonomics.”
Last week, in the wake of big buzz, director-writer Yael Hersonski’s “A Film Unfinished” opened. Using recently discovered outtakes and eyewitness testimony, it exposes the deceitful staging behind an infamous Nazi propaganda film about the Warsaw Ghetto. As relevant today as 70 years ago, it makes a larger point about the power of visual media to warp the truth.
This week brings “Waiting For ‘Superman,’ ” a documentary from Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”) about the failure of America’s public schools. It has blown open a national discussion on education and received great acclaim from film critics. With a strong local emphasis to help illustrate the problems, several scenes feature an iconoclastic D.C. schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, as well as a touching city youngster at the system’s mercy.
The movie has sparked two episodes of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” a whole week of programming from NBC News, acknowledgement by President Obama, and celebrity status for Rhee. (It was produced in association with Philip Anschutz’s Walden Media. Anschutz also owns The Washington Examiner.)
Also opening Friday, “Freakonomics” adapts the 2005 best-seller by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Based on the book that delved into how incentives dictate human thinking and behavior, several celebrated documentarians contribute individual segments. Together, they offer a quirky, accessible dabble into the intellectual underpinnings of things.
Some of these short films work better than others.
The most engaging one, from Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me”), examines whether being given an identifiably African-American baby name influences a person’s future prospects. In the most plodding chapter, Alex Gibney (“Casino Jack and the United States of Money”) takes on gambling corruption among Japan’s sumo wrestlers, showing how the system has inducements for them to throw matches.
In addition, Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (“Jesus Camp”) look at a study that paid bad students cash to try to spur them to get better grades. And Eugene Jarecki (“Why We Fight”) details an astonishing hidden correlation between the implementation of legal abortion in the 1970s and a dropping crime rate in the 1990s.
Filmmaker Seth Gordon (“The King of Kong”) brings these seemingly unrelated topics into one piece. He uses popping graphics and interviews with authors Levitt and Dubner to clarify their observations about our freaky real world.
