Three Docs, in Oct.

Hello to you, darlings, here in October.
I'm drinking my half–pumpkin spice coffee at the kitchen table this Sunday morning. It's still pitch black out at 6:30, but I can see trees blowing in the light of the streetlamps.
Let's see... The sun will rise in an hour, at 7:26; sunset is 6:30 p.m.

People in the northern hemisphere sleep more in October than any other month (per). I feel that. Not that it's the darkest and coldest month, but it's the change-over month.

I haven't been sleeping more (I sleep a lot anyway), but I've been watching lots more movies. (DVDs from the library.I don't have streaming because without internet, my computer connection (phone hot spot) is too slow.)
Mostly documentaries, or that sort of thing.

I. The Lost King (2022, dir. Stephen Frears, UK), which I watched last night looked promising, based on the true story of amateur historian,  Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins, below), searching for  the long-lost remains of King Richard III--and finding them under a parking lot.
But the story is poorly served.
Was slandered Richard really a mopey, dopey-eyed love puppy, as the Hawkins character envisions him? (Just because someone is poorly done by history (or society or family) doesn't mean they are a sweet innocent.)

Feels untrustworthy--which would be okay, but it's also kind of boring. I wouldn't recommend this.

II. Much better---All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022, Laura Poitras, USA), a documentary about photographer Nan Goldin taking on the Sackler family and their philanthropy paid for with billion-dollar profits from OxyContin.
Released on Criterion.

What struck me:
the power of age and of drawing on your own history.
In taking on the Sadler family, Nan Goldin (b. 1953, only 8 years before me), drew on her activist experiences during the 1980s-90s HIV/AIDS epidemic––the political theater/direct action of ACT UP's die-ins, etc.––and also on her understanding of her teenage sister Barbara's suicide when Nan was eleven.

III. Best thing I've watched so far:
Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy (2023, dir. Nancy Buirski, USA)--a doc about Midnight Cowboy--not just about the movie, but the bigger picture of American culture at the moment--drawing parallels with Vietnam War reporting-- and the place, New York City.

As Bob Balaban says in the doc, it was "a picture of New York that really looked like New York, not like Easter Parade with Judy Garland going to come down singing".

Balaban played the young man who picks up Joe Buck (Jon Voight) outside a movie theater. It was Balaban's first movie.

(Reminds me, have you seen the 10-second video of a little kid saying, "I'm just a baby!"?)

Director Nancy Buirski interviewed online at Westdoc.

IV. Funny to realize just now, Balaban also features in Eva Hesse (2016, dir. Marcie Begleiter), another doc about an artist. He reads the letters of Hesse's father.
Eva Hesse was "one of the few women to make work taken seriously" in the largely male downtown New York City art scene.

Main message: DO YOUR WORK. This is the message I take from every creator's life: CREATE YOURSELF.

Below, Hesse who died at thirty-four, creating her first breakthrough unsettling organic sculptures. --Via "Portrait of the artist as a young woman: inside the mind of Eva Hesse"