The Hobby: Tales from the Tabletop — Gamers get a well-deserved spotlight

The Hobby: Tales from the Tabletop (2025) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five); not rated, but akin to PG-13, for occasionally frustrated profoanity

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang 

Full disclosure: I had more than a casual interest in Simon Ennis’ engaging documentary before seeing the first frame, because Constant Companion and I ran a game and puzzle store in our town, from 1978 to early 1997.

 

Once introduced to the ambitious world of today's board gaming culture, Candice Harris
can't get enough of it.

We reluctantly shuttered its doors because — as the 20th century drew to a close — the newly arrived electronic game industry all but killed the traditional board and table game business model.

Happily — as Ennis’ film repeatedly proves — board and table games enjoyed a major resurgence as the 21st century’s second decade began, and now the pursuit is arguably more popular and diverse than ever before. 

 

More power to them, because games have been with us for a long time.

 

Ennis opens his film at the British Museum, where Dr. Irving Finkel — Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East — stands between two enormous Ancient Assyrian “Lamassus” statues. He points between the hooves of one statue, where a rudimentary board game has been scratched onto the metal base: something with which temple guards could while away the time, using pebbles or bits of dung as playing pieces.

 

Dr. Finkel is quite philosophical about this pastime, explaining that “When a game is invented, which is fair, and just, and exciting, and unpredictable, it spreads like wildfire, because there’s a hunger since the beginning of time, to play.”

 

That said — and Ennis must’ve been amused to get this quote — Dr. Finkel has no use for modern table games, all of which he considers “too ridiculously complicated.”

 

(Folks who’ve never progressed beyond Monopoly and Scrabble likely would agree with him.)

 

Following a brief title credits sequence — backed by a cover of Joe South’s “Games People Play” — the action shifts to opening day of the Indiana Convention Center’s annual Gen Con, a four-day event that draws more than 70,000 attendees (!). We meet moderator Tom Vasel, a board game reviewer and podcaster well known by the regulars.

 

Vasel is one of roughly a dozen gamers, podcasters and game designers profiled in this film, and he explains why new titles have exploded exponentially during the past decade and change: Crowd-funding allows far more creativity than ever was delivered by the likes of Parker Brothers, Hasbro and Milton Bradley. 

 

(Think of them as the original three TV networks, whose programs had to deliver high ratings in order to survive, as compared to the successful niche options now made available by the multiplicity of streaming outlets. Today’s indie gamers are like the latter.)

 

Queen of Chess: Checkmate!

Queen of Chess (2026) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five); rated TV-PG, and suitable for all ages

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.26.26

Empowerment documentaries don’t come better than this one.

 

Rory Kennedy’s fascinating profile of chess prodigy Judit Polgár prompts viewers to stand up and cheer. Repeatedly.

 

Judit Polgár and Garry Kasparov played each other many times, but no game was more
notorious than their first match, in early 1994, at Spain's 12th annual
Linares Super Tournament.

Because Polgár was a cause celebre from such a young age, Kennedy had access to countless archival photos and video clips; he smoothly blends these with contemporary “talking heads” commentary by Polgár and her two older sisters —Susan, Sofia and their parents — along with match analysis by chess commentator/players Dirk Jan, Anna Rudolf, Jovanka Houska, Maurice Ashley and Garry Kasparov.

In the hands of Kennedy and co-scripters Mark Bailey and Keven McAlester, this film is engaging, suspenseful, triumphant, emotionally shattering, and — ultimately — a testament to determination and dogged perseverance. 

 

Along with proof that women can compete with men ... and beat them.

 

“They’re all weak, all women,” chess master Bobby Fischer notoriously comments, during various interviews resurrected from the early 1960s. “They’re stupid compared to men. They can’t concentrate, they don’t have stamina, and they aren’t creative. 

 

“They should keep strictly to the home.”

 

Judit was born on July 23, 1976, in Budapest: youngest child in a Jewish-Hungarian family. All three girls were part of a nurture-vs.-nature experiment conducted by their father, László, who believed that “geniuses are made, not born.” A chess teacher and player himself, László and his wife, Klára, home-schooled the girls and — starting each at age 5 — spent eight to nine hours every day focused on chess.

 

Another reason for that choice: the Polgárs were quite poor, and chess components were cheap.

 

(Yes, László endured criticism for what some perceived as parental abuse.)

 

From the beginning, László had no interest in women’s competitions; with help from several professional Hungarian and Russian champions, he trained his daughters to be as aggressive as male players. This put him at odds with the Hungarian Chess Federation, with its strict policy of confining women to their own tournaments. Worse yet, the girls weren’t allowed to leave the Eastern Bloc countries.

 

At one point, László and Klára genuinely feared that they might be arrested, and separated from their daughters.

Orwell 2+2=5: If only it weren't true

Orwell 2+2=5 (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five); rated R, for violent content and brief graphic nudity

Available via: Amazon Prime and other VOD options

By Derrick Bang

“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of this world. Lies will pass into history.”

 

George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, wrote those words in a 1946 essay titled Politics and the English Language.

 

This film concludes as shoppers in a typical American mall are blind to the three key
tenants of George Orwell's 1984 that surround them: War Is Peace, Ignorance Is
Strength, and Freedom Is Slavery.

Perceptive and prophetic as he was, Orwell never could have imagined the degree to which those words would become even more accurate, in this third decade of the 21st century.

Director Raoul Peck’s biographical quasi-documentary also is equal parts disturbing teller of truth … although, as Orwell himself would have cautioned, whose truth?

 

This film should be required viewing by every adult in these United States. Many will embrace it willingly, attuned to the terrifying, clear-cut path that both Orwell and Peck have blazed, illustrating the current world-wide slide from democracy into fascism.

 

As for those who would prefer to ignore or dismiss its message, perhaps they should be strapped to chairs with their eyes held open — as with Malcolm McDowell, in 1971’s A Clockwork Orange — and forced to watch … if only to see themselves, and their hatreds, laid bare.

 

Peck’s film is by no means perfect; his pacing is too leisurely at times, and his enraged, wide-ranging reach sometimes exceeds his grasp. The result can feel overwhelming.

 

Virtually all of the narrative text in Peck’s film comes from Orwell’s written words — from his books, essays, personal letters and diary entries — as somberly read by Damian Lewis. The timeline of Orwell’s life — from early childhood to his death in January 1950, only half a year after 1984 was published — is intercut with clips of events from the early 20th century to mere months before this film was completed.

 

Some of this real-world footage is horrifying; one photographic still, in particular, is gut-wrenching. Other bits are scary for an entirely different reason: the blandness with which despots spread lies and distort reality.

 

Peck also inserts telling scenes from numerous big-screen versions of 1984 — mostly the 1956 Edmond O’Brien and 1984 John Hurt adaptations — along with similarly telling sequences from 2018’s Fahrenheit 451, 2002’s Minority Report and 1985’s Brazil.

 

It quickly becomes clear that we now live in an era of Orwellian “Newspeak,” which he defined as “political language designed to make lies sound truthful, and murder respectable.”

 

Sally: A celestial star

Sally (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated TV-14, for sexual candor

Available via: Disney+

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.22.25

The inevitable first impression: her ubiquitous smile.

 

That warm, radiant, all-encompassing and seemingly spontaneous smile, accompanied by sparkling eyes, with a hint of mischief.

 

Flanked by numerous male colleagues — not all of whom were happy to have her in their
midst — Sally Ride absorbs the information during one of many pre-flight briefings.

Even when she deflected an impertinent question, it was done with a reassuring grin, as if to say, I know why you asked, but don’t do it again.

Ride was the quintessential Beach Boys’ California girl, albeit two decades later. To merely see her picture was to be dazzled.

 

For a decade that began in 1978, when she was one of six women accepted into the upcoming space shuttle program — NASA recently had made a big show of starting to include “women and minorities” in astronaut training — Sally Ride’s photo was everywhere. More than any other woman in history, she became a progressive symbol for girls with stars and STEM careers in their eyes, who embraced her oft-quoted words as a mantra:

 

“Women in this country can do any job they want to do.”

 

Director Cristina Costantini’s absorbing documentary lovingly depicts the Sally Ride the public knew and adored, but that’s only half her story. The other half didn’t come to light until 2012, with the publication of her obituary.

 

That half gives Costantini’s film its emotional heft.

 

She and co-scripter Tom Maroney take a leisurely approach, with a primary narrative that opens dramatically, as Ride and four fellow (male) astronauts are loaded into the STS-7 Challenger shuttle on June 18, 1983, for a six-day mission.

 

“It’s important that I don’t do anything dumb,” she comments, well aware that the eyes of the world are upon her; Costantini cuts to an amused grin from celebrated newsman Walter Cronkite.

 

The film then flashes back to Ride’s Southern California childhood as a young tennis star; as the narrative progresses, occasional non-linear segments dip back into the past, by way of explaining what occurs in the moment. The considerable archival footage is supplemented by extensive on-camera commentary, anecdotes and confessional observations by her longtime partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy.

 

That’s the detail nobody knew until after Ride died.

Pets: Massive cute attack!

Pets (2025) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Not rated, and suitable for all ages

Available via: Disney+

By Derrick Bang

Director Bryce Dallas Howard wanted her charming documentary to be a “dopamine hit.” 

 

She succeeded. And then some.

 

Sergi has spent years traveling along Spain's Catalan coast in a kayak. He alleviated the
loneliness by adopting a dog, Nirvana, whom he taught to become comfortable aboard
the tiny craft (after overcoming an initial bout of doggie seasickness). They became
inseparable.d

This isn’t merely a valentine to the deep and extraordinary relationships that can develop between animals and their people; it’s also a celebration of the pets and people themselves, in all of their wild, wacky, loving, thoughtful and sobering glory.

You’ll laugh, cry, giggle, swoon and everything in between. Constantly. Helplessly.

 

Although enjoyable by viewers of all ages, Howard’s film will be particularly adored by children, who will see versions of themselves during the many brief “talking heads” sequences that feature youngsters.

 

The film focuses upon half a dozen adult individuals and couples, all of whom have made animals their life’s work, also because they enjoy being around them so much. 

 

Each of those segments is bracketed by several of the couple dozen children, ranging from young adolescents to teenagers, who candidly and enthusiastically discuss their pets, or answer off-camera questions. The responses range from silly and amusing, to unexpectedly profound, all demonstrating anew what Art Linkletter proved back in the day: Kids say the darndest things.

 

These off-the-cuff remarks are in turn interspersed with fleeting “silly animal” film clips, revealing how adorable, unpredictable, delightful and — most of all — loving pets can be.

 

I’ve no idea how casting producers Juliet Axon, Nefertiti Jones and Ellen Martinez found all these folks — and particularly the children — but they’re all marvelous.

 

Howard and editors Edward A. Bishop and Andrew Morreale open with a rat-a-tat montage of heart-melting moments. A little girl bursts into tears when she realizes that her parents have gifted her with a black kitten. Another child observes that “Your house feels more fun when you have animals along with you,” while a third suggests that God made pets “...like mimes and magicians in an animal.”

 

Music by John Williams: Rhapsodic

Music by John Williams (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG for brief violent film clips

Available via: Disney+

By Derrick Bang

Full bias disclosure:

 

I’ve been a soundtrack nerd since junior high school, when I fell in love with John Barry’s jazz-oriented scores to the early James Bond films.

 

Since meeting in 1972, John Williams, left, and Steven Spielberg have collaborated on
29 feature films ... so far.

And let’s just say that didn’t sit well with my late 1960s, rock-oriented peers, when they caught me listening to soundtrack albums in our local public library. The scornful snickers always made me wince ... but did nothing to diminish my passion.

No surprise, then, that this new documentary was greeted with considerable anticipation.

 

It definitely delivers.

 

My soundtrack library expanded to include John Williams in the wake of 1975’s Jaws. Two years later, his score for Star Wars was a game-changer; it revived enthusiasm for classically hued orchestral soundtracks at a time when many films relied on “jukebox scores” of then-current pop tunes (a transitional detail covered in this documentary).

 

I mean, let’s get serious; who wasn’t blown away by that dynamic opening anthem, as the text crawl slid into the depths of space?

 

That film debuted May 25, 1977, but — unlike these days, when ancillary merchandise is coordinated for simultaneous release — the soundtrack didn’t show up for weeks. I haunted record stores almost daily, to the point that one shop owner simply shook his head when I peered inside the door.

 

But when it finally, finally, finally arrived — oh, my stars and garters — it was a double-album gatefold. Darn near unprecedented, for an orchestral film score. Like, wow.

 

Okay, enough of all that.

 

Director Laurent Bouzereau’s detailed profile of Williams covers an impressive degree of territory in 105 minutes, given that a multi-part miniseries would be necessary to do full justice to the composer’s career. The 92-year-old Williams was an enthusiastic participant, and his anecdotes, close encounters and sage observations are deftly blended with vintage photographs and home movies (both his own and, later, some shot by Steven Spielberg).

 

Bouzereau also employs the talking heads that have become obligatory in such films, but unlike far too many lesser documentaries, these aren’t obscure academics or fawning pop stars of the moment. The list here is meaty and meaningful: filmmakers Spielberg, Ron Howard, George Lucas, J.J. Abrams, Chris Columbus and James Mangold; fellow soundtrack composers Alan Silvestri, Thomas Newman and David Newman; and celebrated musicians Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Gustavo Dudamel, Branford Marsalis and Anne-Sophie Mutter.

The Beach Boys: Summer never ends!

The Beach Boys (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for drug content and brief profanity

Available via: Disney+

By Derrick Bang

Although nearly a dozen documentaries and dramatized films have been made about The Beach Boys — from 1985’s An American Band to 2000’s TV miniseries The Beach Boys: An American Family and 2014’s extremely odd Love & Mercy — Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny’s captivating new documentary is one of the best.

 

For several years during the early 1960s, The Beach Boys — from left, Dennis Wilson,
Al Jardine, Carl Wilson, Brian Wilson and Mike Love — were the ultimate
ambassadors for the California dream of sand, surf and catchy songs.

They secured full cooperation and extremely informative face-time from surviving original members Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine; Brian’s ex-wife, Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford; and additional telling commentary by, among others, contemporaries Don Was and Lindsey Buckingham, and “Wrecking Crew” session musicians Carol Kaye and Don Randi. These new interviews are blended with ample vintage footage of the band’s rehearsals, live performances, TV appearances and studio work.

Marshall and Zimny also benefited from a wealth of photographs and home movies; the group’s early years were impressively well documented.

 

Marshall and Zimny spend most of their film on the popular California group’s origins and meteoric rise — and temporary fall — during the 1960s and early ’70s. While some may regard this as barely half the story, this film nonetheless packs a lot into its 113 minutes.

 

This saga had it all: a physically and emotionally abusive “stage father” who tried to compensate for his own failed music career by (badly) micro-managing that of his three sons; a tortured genius (eldest son Brian); constantly rotating personnel — who knew that Glen Campbell was briefly a Beach Boy (?!) — the friendly competition with The Beatles, for chart-topping hits and albums; increasingly complex and forward-thinking songs, courtesy of Brian; and eventual emergence into the well-deserved respect of history.

 

This film opens with a rapturous 1976 reunion concert at a stadium packed to the rafters with tens of thousands of fans, and then bounces back to the late 1950s. 

 

Brian Wilson was 16 in 1958; Dennis and Carl were 13 and 11, respectively. They grew up in Hawthorne, California. (Where else?) Their father, Murry, played piano and composed a handful of songs that had been modest hits during the previous few years. Brian was fascinated by the harmonies of vocal groups such as The Four Freshmen; Carl was enamored of Chuck Berry.

 

When the brothers got serious about writing, performing and recording songs, they roped in high school classmate Al Jardine, and cousin Mike Love. (Tellingly, Love grew up in the more upscale Los Angeles-area neighborhood of Baldwin Hills.)

 

Brian and Love co-wrote “Surfin’” and “Surfin’ Safari,” and the former was recorded as a studio demo in September 1961. The fledgling band’s first money performance was New Year’s Eve 1961, in Long Beach. Everybody sang, and by this point the boys had gravitated toward their instruments of choice: Carl on lead guitar, Jardine on rhythm guitar, Brian on bass, Dennis on drums, and Love handling lead vocals and occasional sax touches.

 

Consider: At this point, Brian, Dennis and Carl were only 19, 16 and 14.

Immediate Family: A thoroughly entertaining look at music legends

Immediate Family (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Not rated, and suitable for all ages

Available via: Hulu

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.10.24

Everybody reading these words has heard these four guys perform.

 

You simply didn’t know it at the time.

 

Members of The Immediate Family — from left, Daniel "Danny Kootch" Kortchmar, Leland
Sklar, Waddy Wachtel, guitarist Steve Postel (new to the group) and Russ Kunkel —
stroll city streets like they own them. And, indeed, they do.

The quartet collectively known these days as The Immediate Family — guitarists Daniel “Danny Kootch” Kortchmar and Waddy Wachtel, bassist Leland Sklar, and drummer Russ Kunkel — entered the music scene in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when pop hits crooned by camera-ready headliners (but written by others) gave way to folk/rock singer/songwriters who composed and performed their own material.

Kootch, Wachtel, Sklar and Kunkel quickly became in-demand session musicians: the backing “shading artists” who brought memorable highlights to chart-topping tunes by this new crop of talent.

 

But as filmmaker Denny Tedesco makes clear in this thoroughly absorbing documentary — and you can’t watch it without constantly smiling — these guys weren’t overnight sensations. They’d all been honing their musical chops since early childhood.

 

Their histories unfold via a series of individual on-camera interviews, vintage clips, brief bits of cute animation, and playful banter between all four of them, seated together and inspiring each others’ memories.

 

Kootch, a native New Yorker, met then-unknown James Taylor when both were teenagers spending summers at Martha’s Vineyard. They subsequently formed a band dubbed The Flying Machine, which survived long enough to produce one album’s worth of songs (finally released, rather hypocritically, only after Taylor hit big with the album Sweet Baby James, on which Kootch also played backing guitar).

 

Taylor’s hit song, “Fire and Rain,” references this band with the phrase “sweet dreams and flying machines, in pieces on the ground.”

 

Kootch eventually gravitated to Los Angeles, where he became part of a trio dubbed The City, alongside Carole King. Following Sweet Baby James, Kootch backed King on her 1971 breakthrough album, Tapestry.

The Pigeon Tunnel: Too narrow

The Pigeon Tunnel (2023) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for occasional violence and profanity

Available via: Apple TV+

By Derrick Bang

It’s difficult to imagine anybody more intelligent and erudite than author John Le Carré, whose interviews over the years — since his breakout success with 1963’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold — were as fascinating, thoughtful and densely packed as his subsequent novels.

 

John Le Carré is relaxed, candid and philosophical when discussing his life and writing
career, and how both were shaped by two key individuals during his childhood and
early espionage service.

No surprise, then, that celebrated documentarian Errol Morris would view Le Carré as a prize jewel … particularly since this film was completed very shortly before the famed espionage author died, in December 2020.

Morris’ style is unconventional, to say the least. This film is less a documentary and more a feature-length interview, with Morris’ off-camera questions and commentary guiding and prodding Le Carré into a recitation of his life … but only those portions that concern how David John Moore Cornwell — his birth name — morphed into best-selling author John Le Carré.

 

This is emphasized during the film’s opening moments, where it becomes clear that Morris and Le Carré have agreed to venture solely into specific areas of the latter’s life. Within that limitation, the author is remarkably candid … but he strays no further.

 

Morris intercuts Le Carré’s facetime — seated comfortably behind a desk — with vintage photographs and newsreel footage, clips from big-screen and television adaptations of the author’s novels, and dramatized re-creations of key moments in his younger life. (The latter are this film’s least successful elements.)

 

Unfortunately, Morris’ outré style frequently distracts. Le Carré often is pictured in only one section of a screen “shattered” into multiple frames, the others containing bizarre images that flicker in and out of focus. Although it could be argued that this symbolizes the minute-by-minute ambiguity and paranoia of a career spy — which Cornwell was, as an MI5 officer from 1958 to ’64 — it further slows the film’s already unhurried pacing.

 

The title’s significance is twofold. On an obvious note, it’s both the title of Le Carré’s 2016 autobiographical work, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life; and also the “working title” with which he started almost every novel. 

 

On a metaphorical level, it references an incident from David’s childhood, when his father took him on a business trip to France, where they stayed in a hotel that offered guests a rather unusual sport. Pigeons were bred on the hotel roof, and — at a specified time — shoved into a long dark tunnel. The birds would fly toward the lighted exit at the far end, emerging into the sky directly in front of gun-toting (and presumably well-liquored) male guests who’d blow them into bloodied feathers.

 

(One cannot help being sickened by this revolting “sport.”)

Stan Lee: Biased and banal

Stan Lee (2023) • View trailer

Two stars (out of five). Rated TV-14, for no particular reason

Available via: Disney+

By Derrick Bang

The best part of director David Gelb’s affectionate documentary is that Stan Lee narrates his own story throughout, thanks to audio clips culled from numerous media appearances, and extensive interviews conducted shortly before he died in 2018.

 

But that’s also a liability, because — as can be confirmed by anybody who has paid attention, for the past half-century — the only thing larger than Lee’s creative talent was his ego. He was incapable of acknowledging the importance of equally gifted colleagues.

(Walt Disney had the same failing, claiming proprietary credit — and 22 Academy Awards — while conveniently overlooking the people who did the actual work.)

 

Following a promising first act, Gelb’s film devolves into one-sided hagiography: the film equivalent of Lee’s insufferably narcissistic books, 2002’s Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee and 2015’s Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir. 

 

(Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story gives a far more balanced view of what actually occurred.)

 

Gelb’s failure to adopt an impartial approach is unfortunate, because Lee’s early career would be no less impressive.

 

He was born Stanley Martin Lieber in New York City on Dec. 28, 1922. From a young age, he wanted to make something of himself — to gain steady employment — in great part because his father was so frequently out of work. Young Stanley’s first job was as an office boy “for the city’s second-largest trouser manufacturer,” but that stint proved brief; he was fired the week before Christmas.

 

In 1939, he became the “third assistant office boy” for Martin Goodman’s fledgling Timely Publications, which immediately unleashed a wealth of pulp magazines, digest-sized magazines and comic books. The latter debuted with Marvel Comics No. 1, released in October that year; the cover story featured the Human Torch.

 

Numerous other titles quickly followed, featuring superheroes such as the Sub-Mariner, the Patriot, the Angel, the Destroyer and — most significantly — Captain America. Jack Kirby did much of the artwork, alongside writer Joe Simon; both are heard briefly, as they recall those early days.

Still: All the right moves

Still (2023) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity

Available via: Apple TV+

By Derrick Bang

This is very hard to watch.

 

Even so, director Davis Guggenheim’s quiet little documentary is impressively inspiring.

 

When asked to describe longtime companion Tracy Pollan in a single word,
Michael J. Fox replies, "Clarity."

We tend to compartmentalize memories of certain performers, during the height of their powers. Marilyn Monroe is forever immortalized with her dress wafting up in The Seven Year Itch; Fred Astaire is remembered for his dances with Ginger Rogers (notwithstanding his subsequent, equally successful career).

Michael J. Fox is cherished as the adorably brash kid who charmed us during seven seasons of TV’s Family Ties in the 1980s, concurrent with his explosive big-screen success with Back to the Future.

 

Watching him here, in the throes of full-blown Parkinson’s — a diagnosis he received at age 29 — is painful. Yet this is the way he wants his story told, in a documentary with a script he adapted from his four books, starting with 2002’s Lucky Man: A Memoir. He refuses to go quietly into that good night; he has been passionately public about coping with this disease, and equally dedicated to helping other sufferers.

 

To date, his Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, founded in 2000, has raised more than $2 billion, in great part because of his brave visibility.

 

But he wouldn’t call it “brave,” as this film makes abundantly clear. It’s simply the right thing to do.

 

More to the point, as he admits here, the diagnosis turned him into a “tough son of a bitch.”

 

Guggenheim’s approach is a clever blend of talking-head documentary — laden with liberal dollops of Fox’s often snarky and self-deprecating humor — archival footage and scripted elements. Clips from Fox’s many film and TV roles often “stand in” for actual dramatic moments during his life and career. The result is equal parts memoir and reflective “summing up” of a life lived not always perfectly, but ultimately nobly.

 

It’s all quite a feat, for an undersized Canadian high school dropout.

 

This film begins portentously, with a flashback to 1990, on the morning Fox woke in a Florida hotel and realized that the pinkie finger of one hand had taken on a life of its own. “It wasn’t my finger,” he recalls. “It belonged to somebody else.

 

“The trembling was a message from the future.”

Wildcat: Deeply moving

Wildcat (2022) • View trailer

4.5 stars (out of five). Rated R, for frequent profanity and suicidal behavior

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.13.23

I marvel at the foresight and intuition of documentary filmmakers who begin a project without having any idea if they’ll ultimately emerge with a story worth telling.

 

Co-directors Trevor Frost and Melissa Lesh definitely found such a story.

 

Although attempting to teach his feline companion how to survive in the wild is
exhaustive work that requires plenty of patience — and love — Harry also enjoys
their more playful moments.

Wildcat is a remarkably powerful film: not merely for its fascinating and thoroughly engaging subject, but also for its constant tug on our senses, and the often painful intimacy with which this saga unfolds. Impossible as it would seem, the two people at the heart of this incredible journey often behave as if they’re wholly unaware of being filmed, except when they address the camera directly.

The setting is so beautiful, so hypnotic, that it’s almost surreal. At first blush, it feels romantic: tugging at that little piece of ourselves that sometimes wishes to really, truly get away from it all.

 

But that’s deceptive.

 

Frost and Lesh begin their film with a brief prologue, as a man navigates a jungle setting with — amazingly — an attentive young ocelot that apparently regards him as a parent.

 

We then back up to earlier days, and the events that led to that moment.

 

Young British soldier Harry Turner returns home from a tour in Afghanistan, emotionally damaged by what he has seen — and done — and crippled by PTSD. Suicidal, believing himself a burden to his parents and younger brother, Harry flees civilization and heads to the most remote part of the world that he can reach: the Las Piedras region of the Peruvian Amazon rainforest.

 

He chances upon American biologist/conservationist Samantha “Sam” Zwicker, founder of a non-profit dubbed Hoja Nueva (“New Leaf”), which is dedicated to the rescue, rehabilitation and reintroduction of keystone Peruvian Amazon wildlife species.

 

It’s a necessary response to the heartbreaking reality of young animals orphaned and abandoned, after their parents have been slaughtered by hunters and logging operations.

 

This film begins with Zwicker’s earliest efforts, when it’s not even clear whether an infant ocelot can be re-wilded; nobody has tried before. Frost and Lesh understood the time frame, going in: reintroduction, if successful, would take roughly 17 months … the length of time a kitten would spend with its mother, until setting out on its own.

 

Which makes their film, at minimum, a 17-month investment of time and effort.

 

Harry’s arrival is cathartic; the challenge gives him a sense of purpose. He throws himself 24/7 into the care, guidance and protection of this adorably wild kitten.