The docs are in

Some days, you feel lucky. I feel lucky that I live within walking distance of the Balboa Theater, the kind of place that celebrates Oscar Week by showing all the short- and long-form documentaries nominated this year, then charges a $6 matinee price for all you can watch. For me, that meant an incredible four hours in the theater today, with four diverse subjects to hold my interest. I won't bore you with full-length reviews of each, but here are some impressions and notes:

∙The Golden Age of Norman Corwin, 40 minutes. They don't make 'em like that anymore. I wish I could find a link to the text of "On A Note of Triumph," his poetic radio address to the nation on the night the Nazis surrendered, but I can't. Here's one great quote from the film, though: "What did we learn from World War II? We learned that we didn't learn anything from World War I."

∙Murderball, 88 minutes. This fast-paced film about quadraplegic rugby players really won me over. (It didn't take long for me to learn that many quadraplegics can use their arms to do a lot of things. I always thought "quadraplegic" meant "paralyzed from the neck down," and that paraplegics were able to use their arms while quadraplegics could not.) The sport is a crashing, noisy, nasty battle that takes place on a basketball court. Contestants, who do not wear helmets or have much of any protection save for aluminum chairs specially built for the sport, are often knocked to the floor and can easily be bloodied. The film wanders away from the sport for its extended middle section, which shows you quite a few curious things about the lives of the disabled: sex, for one thing. Murderball is full of very memorable characters, and offers surprises at nearly every turn. There is no pity party here; the focus is on smack talk, dirty jokes and action. Plus, there's a real sports rivalry afoot. Recommended.

∙God Sleeps In Rwanda, 30 minutes. Picks up where Hotel Rwanda left off, in a way, and at times seems to prove that God is asleep at the switch. Here is Rwanda, roughly ten years after the genocide: Seventy percent of the population is female. Many of those women are widows, orphans and rape victims. Some are all three. Some of those spared by the genocide aren't spared by AIDS. They press on, raising the next generation as if there will be some sort of order in the world. They are the only ones who can supply that order, and have begun to take on tasks traditionally performed by men -- city planning, road building, etc. There is a glimmer of hope in a nearly hopeless situation. Which leads me to....

∙Darwin's Nightmare, 107 minutes. There are some things in this world that are beyond logic, beyond rational explanation. The scene on the shores of Lake Victoria -- where huge Nile Perch are harvested for the wealthy by starving Tanzanians, where the same planes that whisk the Lake's fish away to the tables of Europe deliver weapons to the wars in Angola and the Congo (maybe) -- is one of those places. Disease, starvation, environmental catastrophe, disorder, civil strife, random violence, racism, prostitution, addiction, greed: they're all here. This is the dark side of globalization in the 21st century, of Tom Friedman's flat world. Yes, I know how it got to be this way, and in that sense I suppose it is sort of rational. But no, sorry. It just isn't. Darwin's Nightmare could really have used a narrator, and I would've welcomed tighter editing, but what a story the camera tells by itself. Not for the faint, and thank goodness it's not in Odorama. Yikes.

Good luck to all of them on Sunday night.


FMFM: Barney Kessel leading Ray Brown and Shelly Manne through "Satin Doll," on The Poll Winners.