Sometimes, a facile narrative quickly gains steam. There is an idea that Alysa Liu has rewritten the rules; before Liu, figure skating was joyless, and now all is changed. But there was joy pre-Liu. Tara Lipinski's Olympics programs were joyful; also, Yuna Kim, channeling James Bond, was joyful. But I get the point. It's a treat to see young kids inspired by a brilliant performance. Both my daughter and my grade-eight student have commented on Alysa Liu. A weird experience I have is thinking about the writer Elizabeth McCracken. While watching Liu (which I do often), I remember McCracken's advice to artists: "Subject doesn't matter. Topicality doesn't matter. What matters is the link *between* the writer *and* the subject. If the writer cares passionately about her pet frog, she can write something unforgettable about her pet frog." That's what Liu does. She uses an ostensibly silly number--a number that she loves. She seems to care deeply about each ...
If ever there were a documentary that feels like a PD James murder mystery, it's "Natchez." The setup is almost too good to be true. In Natchez, Mississippi, there are eccentric boomers who belong to a "Garden Club"; each boomer leads tours through his or her own haunted mansion. Tension arises because a Black woman joins the Garden Club, and the Black woman wants her white colleagues to begin to wrestle both with slavery and with the *legacy* of slavery. The ensuing "community meeting"--with deep sighs, half-ironic statements, and the frequent clearing of throats--is a wonderfully passive-aggressive disaster. It is miraculous that someone agreed to have a camera present for this event. That's frequently the case throughout the movie--people say terrible things. People say these things on camera! The filmmaker must have counted her lucky stars night after night after night. (It's unfortunately a cliche of documentary filmmaking that the final ...