Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story

Wanna see Lance Armstrong get eviscerated for 90 minutes? Well, here's your movie! This movie tells the story of Armstrong's career while also telling the story of his PED usage in parallel. There are interviews with Greg LeMond, Betsy & Frankie Andreu, and several others - all of them just shredding Armstrong. The depth and breadth of the manner in which his legend is torn down is pretty amazing. There's also some stuff in here on the media and its canonization of Armstrong as well as plenty of stuff on Lance's (in)famous vindictiveness towards those he believes wronged him. I mean, we're talking about a guy who sued people for defamation for saying he was using PEDs - while he was using PEDs. Amazing. Anyway, on the whole, there's not a ton of new stuff here since we all know the Lance story already, but it's still very good. 8/10.

I Am Street Fighter

Originally produced as a pack-in for the 25th Anniversary Street Fighter package, Capcom eventually released this doc as a freebie into the wild. This generally focuses on the players and tournaments for SF, rather than the games themselves. Obviously, there's a lot on the games but that's not the focus. And that's OK. What's here is very good and interesting. Profiles of several top players, tournament directors, and so on. There's a lot of stuff with one hardcore SF-related collector. And there's lots of discussion on USA vs Japan as far as skills and why things are what they are (fewer arcades in the US = less in-person competition and, thus, lower skills, etc). All in all, I liked this one a lot. I like the SF games and have played just about all of them. If you're a fan, you'll like this. 8/10.

Unbreakable

Bruce Willis is David Dunn, a security guard. Samuel L Jackson is Elijah Price, the owner of an art gallery that exclusively sells comic book art. They meet and become friends when Willis is involved in a train derailment that kills every passenger onboard - except him. And he walks away completely uninjured. Price hears about him and contacts Dunn, letting him know that he thinks Dunn is some kind of comic book hero brought to life. Slowly, this idea takes hold in Dunn as well and we see him destroying his bench press personal best, learning of his powers of detection and so on. This is an M. Night Shamalamadingdong movie from back when M. Night was still making good stuff. This isn't on the level of The Sixth Sense but is still very good. Of course there's a twist, as well. And, yeah, there's some ridiculous moments, in particular a scene with Dunn's kid, but this is generally really good. And, hey, it's got Robin Wright, too. 7/10.

Life Itself

Also the name of his autobiography, Life Itself is a documentary chronicling the life and career (and, ultimately, the death) of film critic Roger Ebert. This is at once an interesting, funny, moving, slightly disturbing, and flawed documentary. On the one hand, it does a terrific job of capturing Ebert's early career and his rise as a partner with Gene Siskel. And we get some fun outtakes, some of which I'd seen before. And there's a nice interview with Gene's widow. And we get lots of footage of Ebert as well as he undergoes treatment with his wife Chaz by his side. That's where the slightly disturbing part comes in - Ebert's cancer treatment included the removal of his lower jaw. He's left with, well, the skin from his chin hanging down, making it so you can look through his mouth and see his neck. That's a bit unsettling. Through it all, Ebert maintains a mostly good attitude, staying funny, communicating via his trusty Macbook. He keeps busy, writing a lot and still watching movies. Unfortunately, he declined faster than expected and so the director was left finishing sooner than he wanted, at least as far as Ebert footage is concerned. And there's where the "flawed" aspect of the movie comes in. They left out an entire segment of Ebert's career - his partnership with Richard Roeper, which lasted nearly a decade - entirely, a terrible oversight that wounded Roeper personally. And they never directly get Ebert's final opinion on Siskel. They were enemies at first and that shifted over time but even Gene's widow isn't sure 100% certain of how they felt about each other. The director spent plenty of time with Ebert to get a full answer from him on this topic but never does. An interesting, if sad, side story is that Siskel never told Ebert he was sick with his brain tumor before passing. Roger was deeply wounded by that and he vowed to make his own illness known so that people wouldn't feel hurt by not knowing. Anyway, this was very good. 8/10.