Revenge of the Mekons
Directed by Joe Angio
Opens October 29 at Film Forum

Brian Eno famously said that while very few people bought the first Velvet Underground album, most of them went out and formed bands. To paraphrase his statement, it sometimes seems like most Mekons fans have gone out and become rock critics; as with the Velvets, a fair percentage do also seem to have become musicians, given the band’s influence on the alt-country movement. Joe Angio’s documentary covers the band’s 37-year existence in a little more than 90 minutes. While one interview subject enthuses that the band are making their best albums right now, Angio rightly focuses on two periods: the band’s birth in the punk revolution and their reinvention in the mid 80s after discovering folk and country music. Forming in 1977 Leeds, the original Mekons were inspired by the DIY aesthetic of the punk movement, but even then they were suspicious of its tendencies towards self-mythologizing. As told by early member Kevin Lycett, their early single “Never Been in a Riot” was a more realistic reply to the bravado of the Clash’s “White Riot.” Angio relies heavily on relatively recent live footage, although he seems to have access to film of the band at all stages of its existence. (As a general rule, the earlier it is, the rougher it looks.) This is one band portrait that doesn’t stint on music.

Editor Jane Rizzo’s montage mixes interviews with band members and famous fans (Jonathan Franzen’s cogent explanation of the way the Mekons’ music mixes despair, rage and wit makes him sound like the smartest talking head in the film), still photos and concert footage, while dividing the film into sections like “the Mekons vs. America” and “the Mekons vs. the Man.” Those spectators familiar with the band’s history can guess that the latter discusses its ill-fated ventures with major labels Virgin and A&M, neither of which lasted more than one album. A representative of indie label Touch & Go, for whom they recorded for a long stretch, says that Mekons album sales average about 8,000 copies. But there remains something inspiring about their refusal to compromise and their determination to persist and evolve, even in the face of a world that often values empty novelty. Revenge of the Mekons captures this resistance well.

Last Days in Vietnam
Directed by Rory Kennedy

Director Rory Kennedy’s documentary Last Days in Vietnam works effectively on a minute-to-minute basis, but when one examines it as a whole, the larger context seems to be missing. Her film concentrates on the airlift of South Vietnamese refugees in 1975, as the Vietcong quickly took over Saigon. These men and women, many of whom had worked for the US and faced a brutal stint in “reeducation” camps if left behind, depended on the American government for their safety, yet the US proved remarkably cavalier about them at first. It took the heroic efforts of a few soldiers to get the South Vietnamese out. Clearly, the US had no real exit strategy for Vietnam and no sense of how bad things might get for the people who’d helped them if the Vietcong took possession of the whole country. Sound familiar?

Kennedy’s film doesn’t lack contemporary relevance, although Last Days in Vietnam doesn’t push it either—there are no explicit references to Iraq or Afghanistan. As storytelling, its depiction of the airlift, relying heavily on 16mm footage shot in 1975 and structured hour-by-hour, is quite gripping. Kennedy’s montage of archival footage and present-day interviews—including Vietnamese people, who tend to get left out of American films about the war in their own country—is judicious. However, the film, produced by PBS’s American Experience series, does feel like a TV program, never venturing beyond documentary conventions—its most outré touches are computer-animated maps of Saigon.

A larger problem is that the war’s bigger picture gets lost. Granted, Last Days in Vietnam is only 100 minutes long and only attempts to address one aspect of the Vietnam War. Even so, it’s disappointing that it never grapples with the moral and political justifications for the war itself or the fact that the South Vietnamese government was hardly saintly. Kennedy gets access to interview Henry Kissinger but asks him a very timid and limited set of questions. A political insider herself (she’s RFK’s youngest daughter), Kennedy has made a middle-of-the-road film that won’t challenge anyone’s thinking about the Vietnam War, whether they’re liberal or conservative. She’s managed something nearly impossible: giving the war a happy ending.

Opens September 5

Fatal Assistance
Directed by Raoul Peck

This documentary could have been a feature-length rant. The subject matter—Haiti’s 2010 earthquake and the country’s subsequent betrayal by foreign governments and NGOs—warrants it, but director Peck, once that country’s Minister of Culture, keeps his rage just below the film’s surface. Shot from 2010 to 2012, Fatal Assistance employs an unusual fictional device: letters between a Haitian man (though they’re read in an American accent, at least in this version of the film) and an American woman working for an NGO. The former expresses his disillusionment with the situation and offers basic information about what happened to Haiti in the wake of the earthquake; the latter grows increasingly bitter. (Peck is careful neither to idealize Haitians nor demonize foreigners.) Yet the two characters never come across as mere contrivances. Their letters are well-written, even poetic in spots.

Fatal Assistance sees the work of NGOs as a form of neocolonialism—though it never uses that word—making the point not through dry argument but instead through interviews with Haitian, American and European aid workers as well as trips into the field. (Peck’s connections grant him an unusual degree of access given the film’s critical tone: Sean Penn pops up, as do the Clintons.) The money promised by governments and given to NGOs, the film argues, would have been better off given directly to the Haitian people, whose reputation for corruption is a racist myth. Instead, the NGOs wasted huge sums of money: we see newly built houses already cracking, letting in rainwater; one aid worker testifies that Haiti attracted every American crackpot with a crazy idea, like the one who wanted to build plastic houses. The Haitian man’s epistles express cynicism about foreigners’ intent to declare war on poverty or to rescue Third World countries from themselves. Peck’s movie depicts the destruction of his country while maintaining such a measured—yet unmistakably pointed—tone.

Opens February 28 at Lincoln Center