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This doco gives great insight into the lives of high schoolers in 2016, not only in Oak Park, but effectively highlights the challenges of cross-cultural / cross-racial education in the context of continuing white supremacy even against ongoing efforts in schools ad schooling to address racial inequity. The overall message is that even when everyone can see more or less where the problems are on the ground, and everyone knows which individual teachers are making a difference (good and bad), the system does not appear to change. The portraits of ambitious teachers (black and white) seeking to make a difference and enacting this in their relationships with students is the strength of the series and every teacher would I think learn from these. The filmmakers also get great insight out of the students, who are often savvy about the opportunities and limitations of the camera but nevertheless give great content at no small personal risk - mostly I felt that I am privileged to have lived my own teenage-hood largely away from the camera.

The series is let down by its self-satisfaction with its own role on behalf of those who agreed to appear in the film, and its lack of interest in the lives of those who chose not to be interviewed (the Black principal and Asian-American Superintendent being the most prominent). We get no insight into the very real political constraints that play a part in what is not unfairly characterised as their lack of engagement with the life of the classroom. Here Steve James makes the poor choice to interview the principal's white predecessor to comment on the current principal's performance, and unsurprisingly the current principal is found wanting for their lack of bravery as leading to the lack of success (a critique echoed elsewhere in the series). The scenario of a white filmmaker interviewing an old white man to get quotes about the poor performance of the principal is literally the only insight we get into the many political relationships up the chain every administrator knows is part of the art of survival. In this respect, it mirrors some of the racial dynamics it attempts to critique - there are other Black school principals of many different ideologies who, I am sure, could have shed light on the dynamics of the situation, but James chose not to include them, preferring to keep the camera on the side of the more clearly worthy.

But in documentary ethics today, we discuss the need to study up rather than down, if we are to avoid making works that unwittingly satisfy a privileged demand for an experience of outrage on behalf of those who the privileged would never actually engage with. I enjoyed the series but couldn't help but feel that a Black filmmaker would have distributed our attention and sympathy differently. This is perhaps the lesson the series is asking teaching administrations to understand, but the series also needed to ask it of itself, and we don't get that.

This is a documentary on Grace Lee Boggs, one of the most significant US activists of the 20th century, a Chinese-American who devoted much of her life to the Black Power movement and to the city of Detroit. If you don't know her work and would like some introduction, watch this for sure as she is truly awesome. Unfortunately, the film does not match the commitment and subtlety of her thought, and the framing positions her less within her intellectual and social worlds and more within liberal narratives of violent vs non-violent revolution and whether the Boggs is appropriately engaged with the filmmaker's concerns. The film made me think that if I had done anything worthwhile in my life (I have not) I would be very wary about someone coming to make a doco on me, so perhaps instructive in ways not intended by the filmmaker. There are a bunch of videos online of Boggs telling her own story; hard to imagine anyone genuinely engaged would prefer this instead but perhaps the narrative could engage some people, enough props to the filmmaker for choosing an excellent subject.

I'm really baffled by the praise for the film, and Woody is one of my favourites. He obviously loves Paris and he wants to stage the fantasy of 1920s Paris as his, perhaps it could be anyone's, his point is simply the classic Romantic line that forces that move us to be interested in another time and place are unappreciated by capitalist materialists.

The characters are generally flat, and Owen Wilson as the protagonist is another of the awkward stand-ins that Woody ventriloquises. There is little of the detailed structure of interpersonal engagement that usually give his films something to chew on. All the figures of Euro-American modernism that are celebrated in the film are also flattened into stereotypes.

The art direction is superb and the city looks its best version of its cliché. But where Manhattan paired the visual city with the interior world of its inhabitants, this one is all about the surface.