Movies: Now, Meet The Dockers

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No film genre has a less sexy name. Documentary: a five-syllable word that smells of parchment and sounds like homework. Who goes to the movies for a civics lesson? If people want to be harangued about how rotten the world is, they can listen to talk radio.

But get folks into a documentary, and they can't stop talking about it. In the past two years, Fahrenheit 9/11 had audiences proclaiming Michael Moore as savior or anti-Christ. Super Size Me, that Big Machiavellian experiment in fast-food bingeing, made a star of director and guinea pig Morgan Spurlock. Capturing the Friedmans posed a troubling mystery about a seemingly nice suburban family that viewers had to resolve for themselves. And Winged Migration turned every moviegoer into an awestruck ornithologist. The moral: films needn't serve as just pacifiers or pulse racers. That's what Hollywood does. Get people arguing, thinking. Stir them to anger or awe. That's docu-tainment.

This year, in a summer full of remakes and comic-book movies, documentaries are getting even more attention. They also have the feel of Hollywood movies: less docu-, more -tainment. And after half a dozen Bush-bashing agit-docs last year, the plexes are suddenly short on political nonfiction. If there's a Fahrenheit 9/12, it might be Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares, a thoughtful, corrosive analysis of political and religious fundamentalism that won cheers at last month's Cannes Film Festival--but its U.S. release will probably be deferred until 2006. For now, the emphasis is on personal stories--inspirational tales of those who overachieve against all odds.

There are the inner-city kids of Rize, who raise local spirits by dressing up in clown costumes and performing an impossibly energetic, strenuously graceful "ghetto ballet." Or the Dominican preteens in New York City who take up ballroom dancing in Mad Hot Ballroom, or the music students in Rock School. And though the quadriplegics who play a brutal form of wheelchair rugby in Murderball are gruff, grown men, they too are capable of uplift. "I'm alive," says one. "I use everything I have, to get through life. That's what we're all here to do. Use everything we have."

These are subjects we have seen on TV or in specialty cinemas. But the new dockers--documentary filmmakers--want to reach everyone they can. "From Day One I wanted to make a film that was for the cineplex, not for the art house," says David LaChapelle, the hip magazine photographer and video director making his feature debut with Rize. "I wanted to make a broad, popular film. I come from pop art, and I wanted to make a film that was popular."