HBO Doc ‘Hot Coffee’ Scores, ‘Citizen USA’ Bores
Brian Lowry
Variety's Peter Debruge has already weighed in favorably on the HBO documentary &quot;Hot Coffee,&quot; which premieres June 27, and becomes even more timely in light of the Supreme Court's decision curbing class-action lawsuits.
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Variety
Variety’s Peter Debruge has already weighed in favorably on the HBO documentary “Hot Coffee,” which premieres June 27, and becomes even more timely in light of the Supreme Court’s decision curbing class-action lawsuits.

So I’ll dispense with a formal review — other than to say I concur, and to contrast the 85-minute film with the upcoming “Citizen USA: A 50 State Road Trip.”

Admittedly, the two could hardly be more different, with “Hot Coffee” meant to provoke and challenge our assumptions, while “Citizen USA” marks the first real disappointment from filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, designed as a flag-waving little valentine to the United States, and scheduled to premiere on July 4.

Still, at 52 minutes, Pelosi’s film — which visits new-citizenship ceremonies in all 50 states — amounts to either too little, or too much. You could provide the same glimpse of smiling faces and waving flags in about six minutes. Either that, or you’d have to devote a couple of minutes to every state to make the profiles mean anything.

Clearly, it’s a personal project, since Pelosi’s husband Michiel Vos became a citizen, which is incorporated into the documentary and a companion book. Yet while I’m happy for them, I could have done without the video commemoration of the event.

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By contrast, “Hot Coffee” takes the subject of tort reform (yawn, right?) and the Republican assault against trial lawyers and turns the conversation upside down, emerging as a powerful piece of advocacy journalism that challenges some of the facile imagery of greedy litigants and stupid juries. The memorable case that provides the title — a woman who sued McDonald’s after being scalded by its coffee — is only one of several that served as fodder for both libertarians like John Stossel and latenight comics, yet which take on a different hue upon closer inspection.

“You can’t wine and dine juries,” as one lawyer puts it, citing the corrosive influence of money on other branches of government — and even, increasingly, the judicial system, illustrated in the doc by the well-financed political campaigns waged against judges. A case study on judge Oliver Diaz (pictured) is particularly instructive.

HBO has the latitude and resources to commission all sorts of documentaries, so there’s room for both something as frothy as Pelosi’s project and “Coffee,” which is directed and co-produced by Susan Saladoff. Still, “Hot Coffee” falls into the “should see” category; about the best one can say about “Citizen USA,” by contrast, is “That’s nice.”