Matangi / Maya / M.I.A. (2018, Steve Loveridge) (Patreon)

Docs about musicians (or artists in general) don't usually interest me, and I'm even less excited by the prospect of one directed by a close personal friend of the film's subject. No surprise that there's a hagiographic slant here, as when Loveridge addresses the Lynn Hirschberg profile while omitting the part where M.I.A. tweets out Hirschberg's phone number. But Maya Arulpragasam herself started out as an aspiring documentary filmmaker, and she consequently shot a veritable fuckton of candid footage from her own life, right up to the moment when she became famous. It's rare to see someone's path to stardom chronicled this comprehensively and intimately (though I imagine it'll eventually be commonplace, given the ubiquity of smartphones that double as video cameras)—Amy's the only other example that springs to mind, and I'd rank M/M/M right alongside it. (They got almost identical ratings from me, now that I check. Amy was a 61.) Interesting that Winehouse's portrait got a lot more attention, though admittedly she was more broadly popular. Anyway, Triple M gets more conventional and less compelling post-Arular, focusing on political controversies at the expense of the music (and almost entirely ignoring her third album, which to my mind is hugely underrated), but the first half is basically a remarkable video diary shot by a young Tamil woman whose father helped start the forerunner of the Tigers and who becomes best friends with Justine Frischmann and who eventually, improbably (especially after watching this film) transforms herself into freakin' M.I.A.