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Check It (LouisCK.net)

Louis CK has used his website in recent years as a way to get his own material directly out to his fans, but with Check It he is now using it to get work he needs to be seen out to a wider audience. The documentary, which he saw at the Tribeca Film Festival and which has only played other festivals without a distributor, is certainly the sort of tiny documentary that could easily fall through the cracks without a push like this. Fortunately, it is also certainly a documentary that should be seen by more.

Check It follows a Washington D.C. gang called Check It, made up of almost 200 hot-tempered African American teenagers from some of the roughest sections of the capital. What makes Check It different, though, is that all of these teenagers are members of the LGBTQ community. Check It isnโ€™t about crime but about protection, knowing that there is safety in numbers and using violent tempers in a way of defense against the constant terror members can feel on the streets. Filmmakers Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer get a powerful honesty out of the subjects of the film, who wear their hearts on their sleeves and can snap at a momentโ€™s instance.

What makes the film so remarkable, though, isnโ€™t the torture these teenagers face but the joyful life that they exude. This film is funny and sparkling in constantly surprising ways. We follow one teenager who takes up boxing and shows an entire gym the strength that a gay teenager can exude. We follow a group of fashion-centric transgender teens up to New York where they get to participate in a high-end fashion show and experience Times Square for themselves. But we also meet a mother who has spent more time in rehab than with her child and follow some of the teenagers as they contemplate turning to prostitution. These are kids who seem to have life stacked against them and they are coming through it fully comfortable with who they are and ready to tackle those obstacles head on. We watch them laugh just as much as we watch them violently burst towards innocent bystanders, and that full experience makes them some of the most fascinating documentary subjects of the year.

Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press (Netflix)

Nobody Speak begins with the trial of former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, whose face adorns the icon on your Netflix screen and who successfully sued Gawker Media over the release of a sex tape featuring him and a friendโ€™s wife. The film promises to follow Hogan on his crusade against what he views as the immoral media, and for the first part of the film, we get just that. It is an entertaining and enlightening look at the difficulties of celebrity and the tactics of the new internet media always searching for the hottest story. It is also ironic following a celebrity who made his name in a fake sport that promises staged events that it purports as reality fight against a media that is playing fast and loose with facts. This is a story with larger than life characters (including one named Bubba the Love Sponge) and enough sex and intrigue to fill a documentary all by itself.

Filmmaker Brian Knappenberger isnโ€™t happy with just one story, however, and he lets the scope of his film continue to grow and expand beyond the Hogan case. We start following the thread of Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder who it turns out funded Hoganโ€™s legal crusade, which leads us (circumvently) to billionaire political donor Sheldon Adelson and his secret purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Along the way, we also delve into the presidential campaign of Donald Trump in ways that donโ€™t always seem to be related back to the Hulk Hogan scandal at large. As the film keeps getting bigger and bigger, the dots arenโ€™t connected quite as well as they could be and the festivities become muddled. This is at least three stories jammed into an hour and a half — once we leave the Hogan thread behind those characters are sorely missed, and the film never quite gives the attention to the other threads that they deserve.

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