![]() ![]() When the bank was unable to produce the full amount in the stated 15-minute time frame, Wells exited the building with a bag containing about $8,000. He presented a pre-written note to a teller explaining that the object was a collar bomb, and demanded $250,000. The story begins on August 28, 2003, when 46-year-old pizza delivery driver Brian Wells was recorded on security cameras walking into the PNC Bank on Peach Street in Erie, Pennsylvania with a strange, bulky object under the collar of his white Guess T-shirt. However, in Evil Genius: The True Story Of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist the streaming service decided to eschew deeper meaning, and just take viewers on a ride. Some of Netflix’s true-crime series start with a fascinating case, then expand their focus to engage with larger social issues: Making A Murderer and corruption, for example, or The Keepers and institutional memory. If nothing else, that’s a necessary corrective to the impression that everything’s okay now for every (or any) color on the LGBTQ rainbow. Like How To Survive A Plague, this documentary acknowledges progress, while noting that the issues that gay rights pioneers were struggling with have never fully gone away. France does a remarkable job of finding the continuity between New York in the ’70s, ’90s, and now. But those who knew her joie de vivre and history of mentoring runaways and street prostitutes suspected that she’d been murdered. She was found dead in the Hudson River in 1993, in what the police initially ruled a suicide. Born Malcolm Michaels-and known by friends as “Mikey,” “Michelle,” or “Marsha”-Johnson self-identified as a drag queen and transvestite in the era before transgender people began fighting en masse for more precise terminology. Johnson is ostensibly about the title character: a gay pride pioneer who participated in the Stonewall uprising, and who remained a vocal advocate for the rights of New York’s street-dwelling outsiders in the 1970s and ’80s. ĭirected by David France, The Death And Life Of Marsha P. Egotistical? Maybe, though anyone who sits through this feature-length highlight reel-packed with excerpts of stunning set-pieces, all supportive of his claim that a director’s duty is to make the material as visually interesting as possible-may walk out more convinced of his torch bearing than not. Toward the end of De Palma, an entertaining new documentary companion to his work, the 75-year-old filmmaker even positions himself as a proper heir-the one true disciple to actually build upon Hitch’s lessons, to makeover the master’s approach for a new era. De Palma, the most divisive of the major directors to emerge from the New Hollywood camp, has spent four decades proudly operating within the iconic silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock. ![]() Not that the maker of The Untouchables, Dressed To Kill, and two dozen other exercises in obscenely virtuosic style resents the comparison. To open a film about the life and career of Brian De Palma with a clip from Vertigo is almost too on the nose, like ending the greatest thriller of all time with a doctor clinically diagnosing its killer. The result is nothing less than an abbreviated history of racial inequality in America, with the prison system as the vortex at its center. That may seem like a cut-and-dry thesis, but over the course of just an hour and 40 minutes, 13th tackles the war on drugs, the Central Park Five, Jim Crow, Willie Horton, police shootings, mandatory minimum sentences, The Birth Of A Nation (no, not that one), and a dozen other related topics. The title refers to the 13th Amendment, which officially abolished slavery in 1865, “except as a punishment for crime.” The documentary argues that this particular choice of words became a free-labor loophole in the South, creating incentive to lock up black men on minor charges and to paint them as inherently criminal. But in 13th, from Selma director Ava DuVernay, those agitating moments keep coming and coming, one after another, creating a blitzkrieg of outrage. Any social-issues documentary worth a damn has at least one moment-one statistic, one anecdote, one archival snippet-destined to boil the blood of its audience. ![]()
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