Bob's Cinema Diary: 2/14/20 -- A fallen Russian oligarch and a very eccentric woman

Citizen K

Convoluted and full of intrigue, director Alex Gibney’s documentary Citizen K opens a window into post-Soviet Russia. Not surprisingly, the air that blows in is tainted by corruption. Gibney focuses on Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a dethroned oligarch who served 10 years in a Russian prison on charges of tax evasion. Khodorkovsky, who now lives in London, has become a vocal critic of the Putin regime. Khodorkovsky’s fortune was built on oil and, at one point, he was the richest man in Russia. He bought up Siberian oil fields at bargain prices as he built a fortune of $16 billion. The 56-year-old Khodorkovsky serves as our principal guide through a story that Gibney lays out in detail. Khodorkovsky, by the way, is a very rich dissident; he’s supposedly worth about $500-million, a demotion from the upper tiers of super wealth but enough to stave off worries about paying the rent. Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) isn’t about to let the wily Khodorkovsky rule the movie’s roost. The director's voice-over narration, along with additional interviews, gives the film an independent voice. Khodorkovsky now runs an organization called Open Russia, which tries to support opposition to Putin. I don’t know what to make of Khodorkovsky, but if you’re looking for insight into how Russia operates, Citizen K makes for a start, particularly at a time when Putin’s Russia figures so prominently in our news.

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

Eccentricity can be irresistible — so long as you don’t have to live with it. I thought about that as I watched Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. Stokes, who died in 2012 at the age of 83, was the ultimate tape-head. She used VCRs, as many as eight at a time running 24 hours a day, to record every television show that aired in Philadelphia, the city where she lived. She carried out this activity for 30 years as she made the transition from a Communist activist in the 1950s to a reclusive woman who began hoarding newspapers, books and various versions of Apple computers. Stokes needed eight apartments to store all of her stuff. No person is entirely comprehensible, but Stokes seems more inscrutable than most. Her second marriage to John Stokes -- a man with whom she once hosted a public access TV show -- created a cocoon in which she was able to pursue her interests, which had something to do with the way media informs (and perhaps controls) perception. A librarian by trade, Stokes created a catalog of the evolving nature of television news. Director Matt Wolf interviews Michael Metelits, Stokes' son from a first marriage, as well several people who worked for her in her later years. Whatever you make of Stokes, it’s impossible not to get caught up in her story, which means living in her world for the movie’s length. Clips from Stokes’ collection are seen throughout, turning this weird but rewarding movie into a kind of review of 30 years of history. And, yes, you'll learn what happened to all of Stokes' tapes.

The good, bad and ugly about Steve Jobs

By now, nearly the entire world knows that the late and much-lamented Steve Jobs was a complicated mixture of businessman and artist.

A tech whiz and marketing genius, Jobs twice headed Apple, the company that created whole new behaviors with the introduction of products such as iPods, iPads and, of course, the iPhone.

Director Alex Gibney's new documentary -- Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine -- offers a comprehensive look at Jobs's career, reminding of us of his well-documented abilities and also examining his less-attractive personal traits: a willingness to intimidate subordinates and an equally well-documented denial that he was the father his first-born child, a daughter. (Jobs eventually admitted he behaved badly, and reconciled with his daughter.)

As willing as he is to look at Jobs's personal warts, Gibney also doesn't shy away from examining Apple's seamier side: its use of cheap Chinese labor, a scandal involving backdated stock options and Jobs's control-freak style of management.

Personality and business practices aside, Jobs, more than anyone, helped take the fear out of computing, creating devices that set the current standard for design and user-friendliness.

I don't think Gibney has uncovered a trove of new information, but he knows a good subject when he sees one. Prior to Man in the Machine, Gibney's most recent effort was the HBO documentary Going Clear, a scathing look at the Church of Scientology.

Four years after his death, Jobs continues to fascinate, and Gibney's movie serves as a warm-up for the upcoming Aaron Sorkin-written, Danny Boyle directed bio-pic, which casts Michael Fassbender as Jobs.

That film, entitled Steve Jobs, will have its debut during Labor Day's Telluride Film Festival, and is due in theaters on Oct. 9. (And, yes, for the record, I'm an Apple user.)

The complex life of an African musician

If you don't know about the legendary Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, director Alex Gibney's sprawling and sometimes irresistible documentary will set you straight. Whether Gibney has captured the soul of Fela will have to be determined by someone more familiar with the singer than I am, but Finding Fela! seems to have plenty to say about an amazing life and the music that resulted from it. You'll also hear enough of the latter to help compensate for any narrative lapses in Gibney's approach. The movie features strong insights from people who knew Fela, but I most appreciated hearing musicians (Questlove, for example) talk about Fela's musical innovations. Nothing if not audacious, Fela once declared his Lagos compound an independent country: His sustained defiance of a succession of Nigerian military strongmen didn't make his life easy. Gibney's movie deals with Fela's political activism, his sexual escapades with women, his celebrity and, most important, his musical influence. Topical to the end, Fela died of AIDs in 1997. Some of the story is told through scenes from the Broadway musical Fela! This structural choice doesn't always work, although it offers an opportunity to watch the play's director -- Bill T. Jones -- struggle to come to grips with a difficult character. At almost two hours, the movie goes on a bit too long, but Finding Fela! makes for a fine introduction to a fascinating figure.

Lance Armstrong's one big lie

A filmmaker finds himself caught between the mythmakers and the myth busters.

The Armstrong Lie was one 15 documentaries that this week turned up on Oscar's short list, a group that eventually will be whittled to five films. The title of director Alex Gibney's film immediately tells us what the film is about, the "no-I-didn't-dope" lie that ultimately toppled cyclist Lance Armstrong from his perch as a celebrity athlete with an inspiring story. The kid from Plano, Texas, won the Tour de France seven times after surviving treatment for testicular cancer that had spread to his brain and lungs. Armstrong saw his particularly brutal bout with cancer as a battle in which loss equated with death, a view he extended to cycling. Gibney initially committed to making a film about Armstrong's 2009 comeback attempt; it was to be a story of heroic perseverance against impossibly long odds, the saga of a man intent on sending a message about his ability again to overcome life-threatening limitations. Then came the scandal about Armstrong's use of banned substances and his ultimate admission that he doped. Armstrong doped in a sport in which doping apparently was the rule rather than the exception, but that didn't exonerate him. I wouldn't rank The Armstrong Lie with Gibney's other work (The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side), but it certainly draws the contrast (or perhaps lack of it) between the pre-confession Armstrong, who adamantly denied using banned substances and the Armstrong who wound up spilling the beans to Oprah. It's also clear -- from watching Armstrong in his various incarnations -- that he's a pretty compelling figure. Some call him "intimidating." Additional interviews include former teammates and Michele Ferrari, a science-oriented doctor who created the doping regimen Armstrong followed. For me, the Armstrong story suffers from a bit of old-news fatigue, but for cycling enthusiasts and those who want to gain some insight into the ego of a celebrity athlete, The Armstrong Lie works effectively and, alas, depressingly well.

The life and career of Hunter S. Thompson

Alex Gibney won an Oscar for his documentary "Taxi To the Dark Side," a probing look at the effects of torture and wrongful imprisonment in the fight against terror. Prior to that, he scored with "The Smartest Guys in the Room," a zesty documentary about the Enron debacle.

Now, comes "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson," a big-screen biography of the writer credited with inventing gonzo-style journalism. A renegade capable of monumental and unashamed self-indulgence, Thompson remains a figure who may be more important for his legend than for his work. How you respond to Gibney's documentary may depend on how you respond to Thompson. Fans will devour it the way Thompson claimed to have gobbled pills. Others may find themselves tuning in and out.

Most of the people Gibney interviewed can't recall Thompson without smiling, which says something about the guy, but Gibney's movie -- composed of interviews, archival footage and home movies -- tends to overdo. It goes on about Thompson -- and then goes on some more. Maybe that's unavoidable. The movie is built around Thompson, a writer who became a countercultural star and who watched the passing circus through his own peculiar, drug addled consciousness.

It remains to be seen whether Thompson's most important work -- "Hells Angels,'' "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas," and "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" -- will have lasting value. But even after his death, Thompson continues as a figure who makes readers long for the emergence of another rebel with a typewriter. The man had fans. I attended a packed preview screening of "Gonzo." The audience's often-vocal responses made me believe that Gibney -- whose more significant documentary about torture didn't attract much of an audience -- will score bigger this time.

Say this: Thomson had a powerful ego. If that ego drove much of his work, its power seems to have extended beyond death, finding posthumous expression in this overly long movie. Still, "Gonzo" has its virtues -- as a summation of a tumultuous period in our semi-recent history, as a look at someone who tried to live in perpetual extremis and as a document that proves that the vices of the self-indulgent often are excused by devotes who dabble, though far less adventurously, in some of the same behavior.

At times, I found the movie indulgent, as well. I wish, for example, that "Gonzo'' -- which is narrated by Johnny Depp -- had used less footage from Terry Gilliam's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." One viewing of that movie was quite enough, thank you. But even someone as dubious as myself found some laughs in Thompson's more outrageous ploys and enjoyed revisiting some of his descriptions of Richard M. Nixon, a man he regarded as a shabby crook who represented the worst part of the American spirit. Or better still, there's Thompson's bizarre assertion that Ed Muskie, at the time a vice presidential candidate, had fried his brain with a drug called Ibogaine. People evidently believed Thompson, who blurred the line between satire and journalism, was onto something.

Still, I couldn't help making a mental comparison: Thompson's career took a major downturn when he was sent to Zaire to cover the famous Ali-Foreman fight. Convinced Ali would get clobbered, Thompson spent the fight bobbing in a hotel pool. At the same time, Norman Mailer -- a better writer and a more courageous thinker -- was writing some of the best boxing prose anyone ever authored.

Thompson, Mailer and Tom Wolfe, who's interviewed by Gibney, helped radicalize journalistic style -- if only for a moment. Of them all, I find Mailer the most interesting. Watching "Gonzo" only reinforced that belief, but it did make me nostalgic for a time when the there seemed to be more virtue in antagonizing the mainstream than in trying to appease it.