Documentary

• Title: Totally Under Control
• IMDb: link

Totally Under Control is an indictment of President Donald Trump and the national mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s both a chilling and enraging experience to have the months of inaction, series of missteps, casual disinterest, politicization of a health crisis, and frightening ineptitude chronicled with such precision. Interviewing medical professionals, scientists, and whistleblowers from within the CDC to Jared Kushner‘s volunteers, Totally Under Control highlights the many, many places where the United States went wrong in its policies towards COVID while comparing them to South Korea’s far more aggressive early measures which avoided the large death tolls continuing to rise in the United States.

One idea shared by directors Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger is that every health crisis could have been handled better. However, the staggering failure of the United States with COVID runs the gamut from a President not willing to hear the truth, experts fired for telling the truth, and policies put in place making it harder to get life saving masks and drugs to medical professionals until Trump was able to personally profit.

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• Title: Zappa
• IMDb: link

Alex Winter (Bill of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure fame) helms the new documentary on musician Frank Zappa. The aptly titled Zappa is most notable for Winter’s level of access to Zappa’s extensive vaults of video and musical recordings (he apparently recorded everything) along with interviews from those who knew him best. A mix of celebration of a genius and portrait of a self-indulgent individual catered to by a small but fiercely supporting base, Zappa explores the musician’s driving force to translate and recreate the music heard in his mind into reality.

What Winter delivers is an unapologetic portrait of a man who would likely have been interesting to meet but impossible to live with. While Zappa loved his wife and children, the documentary shows a man who didn’t necessarily believe in the idea of friendship while being largely obsessed in using people to manifest his own dreams into existence. The documentary also touches on Zappa’s experimental style, his celebrity within the music business, his aversion to making hit records, working as an ambassador for Czechoslovakia, and his growing role against censorship of music.

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• Title: Slay the Dragon
• IMDb: link

Gerrymandering, the process of taking advantage of redrawing voting districts to favor one political party’s interests, has been around for two centuries. Slay the Dragon takes a hard look at the Republican change in 2010 led by REDMAP which used modern technology to take the practice to extremes to remap states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin in ways that led to the disenfranchisement of voters. Rising to meet the challenge were groups created by private citizens focused on reclaiming their power by fighting the process of gerrymandering on both state and federal levels.

Directors Chris Durrance and Barak Goodman do a fairly good job of explaining both the practice of gerrymandering and its effects. While primarily looking at how private citizens such as Katie Fahey worked to organize against the practice, the documentary details the Tea Party’s wins in the 2010 election and the subsequent redrawing of the districts were just the first steps in a conservative agenda that included undercutting unions and suppressing voters prior to the 2016 general election.

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