BEFORE: It's the last day in June, so it's time to check in on my format stats for the month. I only watched 29 films this month, not 30, but considering I did some traveling, and I was away from home for two weekends, that's about the best I could have done.
10 Movies watched on Cable (saved to DVD): John Wick: Chapter 2, Sexy Beast, House of Sand and Fog, The Grifters, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, Defiance, The Zookeeper's Wife, Molly's Game, Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, Apollo 11
3 Movies watched on Cable (not saved): Leaving Neverland, Won't You Be My Neighbor, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
8 Watched on Netflix: Pottersville, Life, The Stanford Prison Experiment, Billy Elliot, 1922, 13th, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, Icarus
2 Watched on Academy screeners: 20th Century Women, First Man
3 watched on iTunes: The Wackness, Koch, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,
1 watched on Hulu: RBG
2 watched on YouTube: Tower, Capitalism: A Love Story
29 Total in June
Cable still provided me 13 films this month, so that method still seems pretty viable. I made a big dent in my Netflix queue too, I'm hoping to eventually get that down to nothing, if possible. iTunes is still a great source for those movies that helped me make critical last-minute links when I can't find those particular films on Netflix and they're not running on cable. And hey, YouTube has joined the party with a couple of films that were probably also on iTunes, but were cheaper on YouTube. Hulu is another new source, since I figured out last month how to access it on the PlayStation, I'll be hitting up Hulu a couple more times before the documentary chain is done.
I haven't even been keeping track of awards during documentary month, but I know for sure today's film won the Oscar for Best Documentary last year. That put it to the top of my "must-see" list, and the fact that it's available on Netflix was just a bonus. Hard to link to, but certainly not impossible - Vladimir Putin carries over from "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power". Hey, I never said all of my links would be American politicians...
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Armstrong Lie" (Movie #2,122)
THE PLOT: When Bryan sets out to uncover the truth about doping in sports, a chance meeting with a Russian scientist transforms his story from a personal experiment into a geopolitical thriller.
AFTER: It's possible sometimes to try to make one kind of documentary, and end up with a very different result in the end. Like if you took a camera crew down to the South Pacific for a documentary about surfing, and then while you were there a volcano erupted or a tsunami wiped out a village, and since you were on the scene with a camera crew, naturally your focus might shift, especially if you accidentally ended up with the best footage of the disaster and the aftermath.
That's what seemed to happen with "Icarus" - the director, Bryan Fogel, was competing in tough amateur bicycle races, shortly after Lance Armstrong's confession about doping for years and then lying about it in interviews. Since he was frustrated about not being able to get ahead in the competitions, despite training like crazy, when he learned that there was a way to take performance-enhancing drugs and not get caught, he set his sights on making a sort of "Supersize Me" documentary set in the sports world. He would put his body on the line by doing something bad, but with a noble goal of bringing to everyone's attention just how easy it was to break the rules and raise awareness of the issue. And if he happened to win a race or two along the way, or gain some kind of fame or notoriety, that would just be the icing on the cake.
But after learning the system and some of the ways around the system, his contact in the American anti-doping scene dropped out, and pointed him toward his Russian counterpart, Grigory Rodchenkov. Rodchenkov approved Fogel's injection program, but also gave him a schedule for freezing and dating his clean urine, which could be thawed out to pass the tests on the days when he would most likely test positive for drugs. Which probably seemed a little odd, the man supervising all the Russian athlete's drug tests was telling him exactly how to beat drug tests - a bit like a state trooper telling you exactly when you can break the speed limit and when to slow down for the speed traps.
Fogel's racing ability improved, and he might have finished better in a tough race, if not for an equipment issue - but that's not the point of the story. While working with Rodchenkov the Russian doping scandal broke in the news, and an elaborate plot involving swapping in clean urine during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics threatened to keep Russia from participating in the 2016 Summer Games in Rio. And Rodchenko was at the center of the scandal, since he must have taken orders from his superiors, and above him were only a couple of ministers of sports and Putin himself.
The elaborate scheme involved placing the Olympic testing lab in a building with a couple of false walls, and then storing clean urine from the Russian athletes in a space behind one of the walls, and there was a hole in the wall so people could pass sample bottles back and forth. The FSB (like the KGB, only with different initials) had their own building just down the street, where they had a cold-storage vault for the clean pee, and they'd sneak in and out of the testing lab at 2 or 3 am to make the swaps. And this all had to be done twice, for both the "A" and "B" samples, so they'd match if there were any inquiries. And all the samples had "tamper-proof" caps, but apparently there was a work-around there, too.
So Russia got their highest medal count ever in Sochi, better than the Soviet Union ever did, but what good does that do anybody when later on there has to be an investigation, medals get taken away (13 out of 33), the reputations of the athletes are tarnished, and everyone is left disappointed? The main reason that each athlete did it was probably because "everyone's doing it..." or they were forced to by Putin's policies. The ban on Russian participation didn't even really stick in 2016, when Olympic athletes were allowed to compete as individuals, just not representing their country (so, umm, where did they come from, then?). It's like everyone's afraid to hold Putin accountable, just because anyone who disagrees with him has an unexplainable death two months later. I won't say that Russia got off scott-free in the doping scandal, but the punishment was lenient enough to suggest that we've only seen the tip of this corrupt iceberg.
The latter part of this film is quite disjointed, and it relies a bit too heavily on Orwellian symbolism - the fact that Rodchenkov suddenly has a new appreciation for the double-speak of "1984" feels like a forced tie-in. Yes, he was the man in charge of both doping and anti-doping, but come on, haven't we also seen a ton of contradictions in the U.S. government lately, like wondering if Trump can fire the head of the FBI, who's also in charge of investigating him? Or whether a President can pardon himself for his own crimes? (I want to believe the answer to that is "no", but I've got a terrible suspicion that I'm wrong.)
I'm still not a sports guy, despite having to tape sports for years for my job, and watching numerous films on boxing and such - so probably I'll never be a sports guy. But I was raised during the Cold War, in the 1970's and 80's we were all taught that you just couldn't trust the Soviet Union. I'll admit for a while there with glasnost and perestroika that it looked like things were changing, but with Putin in power, it's like a reversion to the classic form. You not only can't trust Russia, but you can't take your eyes off them for a second. This film proves that some of the people are OK as individuals, but the system as a whole is just so fundamentally flawed and corrupt - possibly even worse than our own. But I'll get more into that, and the politics of collusion, tomorrow, I think.
Also starring Bryan Fogel, Grigory Rodchenkov, Scott Brandt, Don Catlin, Sebastian Coe, Ben Stone, Richard McLaren, Dave Zabriskie, with archive footage of Lance Armstrong (last seen in "The Armstrong Lie"), Thomas Bach, Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, Nikita Kamaev, Greg Lemond, Vitaliy Mutko, Scott Pelley, Richard Pound, Craig Reedie, Jacques Rogge, Alex Rodriguez,
RATING: 6 out of 10 cc's of testosterone
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