John Maggio

  • A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) While Gordon Parks will forever be remembered for directing the blaxploitation classic Shaft, it actually takes more than an hour in A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks before the film even mentions Shaft, and even then, it’s as part of Parks’ directing career in general. No, this is a documentary that pays well-deserved homage to Gordon Parks’ photography, from his early days documenting criminals in New York City, to more ambitious assignments throughout his career. The most distinctive feature of director John Maggio’s film, fittingly enough, is spending a lot of time showcasing and sometimes analyzing (via the eyes of fellow photographers) what makes some of Parks’ individual photos so compelling. The lineup assembled to pay homage is impressive—sure, we can expect people like Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay to be interviewed, but Anderson Cooper is a surprise. (The connection ends up being parental—Gordon Parks photographed Gloria Vanderbilt and kept in touch afterwards.) While the film generally takes a chronological approach through its subject’s life, it also comes with a speedrun through recent American history in matters of racial equality, and how Parks’ example continues to inspire others. The best parenthetical of the film focuses on Devin Allen, a photographer who picked up the camera from being inspired by Parks’ example and later had a picture reprinted on the cover of Time magazine. It’s impossible to dissociate Parks’ work from activist intent—as the title of the film (reprised from his autobiography) states, anyone who wants to create change has a choice of weapons—and Parks picked up the camera. This does add a lot of depth and emotion to the biopic, linking his work to much larger social currents and progress. Parks was not always well served by American society (as proven by Hollywood’s refusal to consider him a director of anything but black-themed projects) but he did far more than his part in trying to improve it. Shaft is far from being all of it.

  • The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee (2017)

    The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) It’s impossible not to know about Watergate without knowing about Ben Bradlee (1921–2014), the famous editor of The Washington Post who helped the paper navigate the tumultuous events that led from a low-rent criminal investigation to the end of the Nixon presidency. Extra points are given for knowing about his role in the Watergate prequel The Pentagon Papers, in which the Post went to the courts in order to secure journalistic freedom. But there’s a lot more to learn about Bradlee’s life and tenure. He was best friends with John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Onassis, prior and during his presidency (thus paving his access to the Washington political class). Then there’s the Janet Cooke scandal, a 1981 incident that resulted in The Post returning a Pulitzer Prize (still a unique event!) when the winning article was revealed to be a fabrication by an overambitious young reporter. And that’s just the headlines — As The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee goes on, we learn about his tumultuous personal history (three marriages, the latter two stemming from affairs that broke up the previous marriages), a healthy ego fed by Jason Robart’s Award-winning performance playing him All the President’s Men, his childhood bout with polio, and his views as one of the most recognized news editors of the late twentieth century. Much of the film benefits from Bradlee’s narration, as his reading of his autobiography gives him a voice three years after his death. In these voiceovers and archive footage, Bradlee does come across as a highly charismatic presence, a passionate advocate for truth and a charming rogue when it comes to women. While complimentary of his subject, director John Maggio goes beyond the bloodless portrayal of a two-fisted editor or semi-political figure — the truthfulness of his personal history, as he skips from one wife to another, can be surprising. (Significantly, late-life archival footage of him asked about regrets focuses on the anguish he caused to his first two wives.)  The Newspaperman, as the title indicates, will largely be of interest to political junkies and news buffs who already know just enough to be interested by Bradlee but not enough to know the full story. It’s quite entertaining and progressively illuminating about the evolution of American journalism under his lifetime.