They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (2018) & The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

They'll Love Me When I'm Dead is the accompanying documentary to the long awaited "The Other Side of the Wind". Not only is this a making-of documentary, but it also assists in deciphering the very experimental movie. This is important because the saga of the making of the movie is the majority of the allure. And in its own meta way, the ordeal of the creation of "The Other Side of the Wind" is self-referential. You see, the "The Other Side of the Wind" is about the final day of director Jake Hannaford, who is extraordinarily Orson Welles-like, who is struggling to finish a movie called "The Other Side of the Wind". Welles may have said that the movie was not autobiographical, but the documentary insinuates so much as fact. And the documentary is quite interesting because Welles was a character.

The ironic film-within-a-film structure is trippy. Welles was supposedly parodying Michelangelo Antonioni, whose style he abhorred. He does so with such disdain, it is actually spot on, very pretty looking but wondrously empty and wordless. The broader film is shot in documentary style. It seems as though Welles pioneered the modern documentary style. Though in reality, he was so far ahead of his time that we still have not caught up. Documentarians follow Hannaford's every move, on different cameras, in different colors and aspect ratios. And they're all cut together very quickly. The edits are lightning fast accompanied by a jazz score. It's so fast it is impossible to follow. And it makes the task of cutting together someone else's hours and hours of footage a gargantuan task. I don't think it's Netflix's fault that the movie is so incoherent, Orson Welles just left us with a really difficult movie. Too artsy for me.

Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018)

A lovingly-made tribute to one of the greatest Americans of the twentieth century, a television pioneer, and a decent man at a time such people are hard to find. You cannot overstate the number of lives Fred Rogers touched, teaching young children how to navigate the world by treating them like people, acknowledging their feelings and helping them understand the complex world around them. I hadn't realized how much thought he put into this show to really get a message across to the kids. Children's programming today is totally devoid of content and this would appall Mr. Rogers. Maybe I would emote better had I watched Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Maybe I would have watched it if it was a little less creepy. Something as simple and mundane as puppets, but they're some creepy looking puppets. At the beginning of television, Mr. Rogers was there. All in all he filmed over 1500 episodes. Some iconic highlights that are featured in Morgan Neville's documentary: RFK's assassination, Francois Clemmons and Fred Rogers soaking their feet in the pool, Koko the Gorilla, quadriplegic Jeff Erlanger, the Challenger disaster, and 9/11.