Films This Week 7/16/21

by Gary Palmucci | 16th July 2021 | Gary's Corner

Hello everyone. We’re augmenting this week’s virtual cinema lineup with two recent documentaries. In Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation, filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland stitches together extensively researched archival footage of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, creating a lively conversation between two writers who clearly had a lot to say “to” and “about” each other.  

Per Ben Kenigsberg of the NY Times, among many other topics “they express disappointment with films adapted from their work. Williams felt the censorship was so heavy you often needed to see the stage version for comprehension.  Capote says Paramount ‘double-crossed’ him by casting Audrey Hepburn (whom he nevertheless praises) instead of Marilyn Monroe in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”   

Another new doc, The Boys in Red Hats attempts to make sense of a very different subject — the raucous January 2019 encounter between privileged white high school students and a Native American demonstrator at the Lincoln Memorial that went “viral” and provoked a storm of outrage on both sides of our now all-too-familiar socio-political divide.  

Filmmaker Jonathan Schroder is himself a graduate of that high school, Covington Catholic in Kentucky, and attempts here to also chronicle his own journey through the past as well as examine (with lots of CNN and other raw footage) the seemingly intractable issues at hand. To whatever extent he succeeds may depend on each viewer’s interpretation of — per Nicolas Rapold of the NY Times — “the power and race dynamics and aggression at play” in that notorious encounter….

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema