TV picks of the week
This 2016 documentary looks at one of the most controversial sporting episodes of the 1980s. On August 11, 1984, 12 athletes lined up for the women’s 3000m race at the Los Angeles Olympic Games. Only two really stood a chance to win – Team USA’s hot favourite Mary Decker and the 18-year-old footwear-free South African Zola Budd. ‘‘An intriguing look at the ugly, inglorious side to the Olympics,’’ wrote The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. Joanna Lumley hosts the 71st edition of the United Kingdom’s annual night of cinematic celebration for the first time. Leading the nominations this year are Darkest Hour, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Shape of Water. Premiere of Ken Burns’ Peter Coyote-narrated 10-part, 17-anda-half-hour series about America’s most-controversial military engagement. Ten years in the making, it cost around US$30m to create. ‘‘It comes so close to becoming not just impressive but important, challenging, even agendasetting,’’ wrote New York magazine’s Matt Zoeller Seitz. Made to mark the 40th anniversary of the release of their sixth album, News of the World, this 2017 BBC documentary features footage captured by BBC presenter Bob Harris in 1977 as he followed the band on their groundbreaking tour of North America. ‘‘Really committed Queen fans are the ones that would most adore this film, but it was also fascinating historical record of how successful late-70s rock was concocted, managed and performed – and highly valuable as a portrait of [Freddy] Mercury’s visionary talent,’’ wrote The Telegraph’s Lucy Jones Almost 50 years after his reign of terror, the coded messages of one of America’s most vicious serial killers have never been truly deciphered. Now, Sal LaBarbera, the most-successful homicide detective in the LAPD, will try to hunt him down with the help of a crack codebreaking team.
– James Croot SIMILAR in style to Listen to Me Marlon, Asif Kapadia’s Amy or Brett Morgan’s Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, Lili Fini Zanuck’s look at the life of Eric ‘‘Slowhand’’ Clapton offers plenty of visual treats and audio gems.
Best known as a director of the Jason Patric-starring 1991 drug drama Rush, Zanuck’s ‘‘audiomontage’’ highlights just how chaotic and pockmarked with tragedy the legendary guitarist’s life and career have been.
Through interviews with friends, family, bandmates and the man himself, we learn how he discovered the woman who raised him was actually his grandmother, his battle with the bottle (the movie’s subtitle potentially has more than one meaning) and other substances, his love of the blues and his initial disdain for fame.
Despite having boasted groupies (nicknamed the Clapton Clique) right from his first appearances with The Yardbirds in the mid-1960s, he laments how no one listened to the music fellow popstars The Beatles were making and recounts how he decided to walk way from his own band just after they released their massive hit – For Your Love – believing they had ‘‘sold out’’.
That’s one of many intimate and unguarded admissions Clapton and others make in this insightful, fascinating and surprisingly frank documentary. A hagiography this ain’t. Former girlfriend Charlotte Martin describes him as ‘‘always running away from something’’ and a man who preferred to ‘‘riff on his guitar’’ in preference to ‘‘proper communication’’, while Clapton himself admits at the height of his alcohol abuse, ‘‘I was chauvinistic, fascistic and semiracist’’.
And yet, as the likes of the late BB King point out, he was also a champion of ‘‘black music’’, who opened doors for many artists like King.
Enthralling and enlightening in equal measure, Life in 12 Bars offers such delights as footage of a young Bob Dylan watching Clapton on his hotel room’s telly and audio of a conversation between the latter and Jimi