Four new documentaries: Ange & the Boss and Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story are streaming on DocPlay, Bono: Stories of Surrender and Deaf President Now! are streaming on Apple TV+.
We’ve had a good week with documentaries (and the Doc Edge festival previews haven’t even started yet). The first two reviews are for everyone and the second two are for paid subscribers only. You know what to do.
If all you know about football manager Ange Postecoglou was his recent Premier League career – literally courting triumph and disaster at the same time – you might be surprised at the photograph of him smiling in the above montage. I didn’t think such a thing was possible.
He’s smiling in the film Ange & the Boss: Puskás in Australia because he’s remembering his playing career in the fledgling years of Australian professional football and specifically being coached by one of the greatest players ever to play the game. Hungarian Ferenc Puskás was a legend of the world game in the 50s and 60s, famously leading his national team to a 6-3 humiliation of England in 1953 – the first time England had ever been beaten at home.
He went on to a career at Real Madrid and then became a coach, guiding Greek club Panathainaikos to their first and only European Cup Final in 1971. Maybe that Greek connection is how he ended up in Melbourne in 1989, coaching semi-professional South Melbourne Hellas in the National Soccer League. Puskás liked a drink and loved a feed but overwhelmingly loved football and despite an ageing frame and a rotund physique, the footage shows that he still had some skills.
The football stories are lovely but the film is really a social history of Australia’s ethic migrant communities – their rivalries and their connective tissue. It’s a labour of love for co-directors Cam Fink, Rob Heath and Tony Wilson and – like Ange – we smiled from beginning to end.
Jumping to the top of a crowded list of great U2 films, Bono: Stories of Surrender does something remarkable by having something new to say about a rock star we have been hearing from for about 45 years. There are three things that make this film stand out. Firstly it is inspired by Bono’s excellent autobiography (Surrender) which came out just before Christmas in 2023. Secondly it is based on a solo Broadway show that Bono did to support that book (and to fill time while his bandmates were dealing with their own stuff). Thirdly, it is directed by (Wellington-born) Andrew Dominik, known for the features Killing Them Softly and The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford and for the great Nick Cave docos One More Time With Feeling and This Much I Know to Be True.
Actually, there’s a fourth factor and that’s Bono himself. He knows how ridiculous he is but keeps on going, searching for meaning, making connections, finding the love, regardless of how he is perceived. Despite all of the celebrity trappings and the mostly-unchecked ego, there’s an authentic person in there. The scale of the one-man show puts him in a new light, too. Watching a performer who is used to crowds in the hundreds of thousands – and the cutting edge of all the technological trappings – moving his own furniture around a mostly bare stage is humbling, as a story about a 65-year-old man, only just beginning to understand and appreciate his late father, should be.
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A much more traditional celebrity biography, Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story reminds us that one of the iconic superstars of the 1970s is still with us. (Arrested Development fans will already know this.)
A smart move by director Bruce David Klein is to break the story into themed chapters rather than run purely chronologically. That emphasises how important her friends and mentors were (supporting her abundant natural talent). Kay Thompson, Fred Ebb, fashion designer Halston and Charles Aznavour are among the great friends and loves of her life who are no longer with us, while Michael Feinstein, Joel Grey, Ben Vereen and George Hamilton are the ones appearing who are still with us. Top of that list should be Mia Farrow, who first met Liza at Grade School, and who steals every anecdote with some sharp observations.
The film also serves to remind us of how gaudy, tawdry and smoky the 1970s were.
Lastly, a non-showbiz story, one that I recommended on RNZ Nights a week or so ago. In 1988, the world’s only university for the deaf, Gallaudet in Washington D.C. were so incensed by the appointment of yet another hearing person as their school’s president (equivalent of Vice-Chancellor here), that they protested by shutting the entire campus down until their demands were met.
There’s so much in Deaf President Now! that strikes you as “that couldn’t happen today”. We are now much more attuned to the needs and voices of people with disabilities in our communities – not perfect by any means but not as hopeless as it was then – but at the same time students in the U.S. are not given leeway for that kind of protest any longer. Shutting down an entire college for a week would be intolerable if not unthinkable today.
The film is co-directed by super-experienced Davis Guggenheim (hearing) and first-timer Nyle DiMarco (deaf, and a former winner of America’s Next Top Model) and their choice to have actors voice the signed first-person witnesses to the affair rather than subtitle them works well. Hearing people like myself can’t read emotion in sign language the way we can with other spoken languages and – believe me – there is plenty of emotion there to be discovered.
