Acquisitions roundup: 'Teenage Paparazzo,' 'Countdown to Zero'; '8: The Mormon Proposition' and more!
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Covers of Wholphin, the magazine/short film distributor hybrid A wholphin--by definition, "a hybrid cross between a 400-pound bottlenose dolphin and a 4,000-pound false killer whale"--may sound like some schoolyard myth, but is, in fact, real. Also real are the countless filmmakers toiling away to make their visionary labors of love, only to have them be seen by a handful of loyal loved ones. That is, until recently, when the convergence of new technology, the Internet and cinephiliac visionaries has allowed for new hybrids of mediated content to reach viewers like never before. Fans of
Ambulante celebrates its fifth anniversary!
Go on a journey to a documentary film festival in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
By Mark Urman My first successful documentary was an accident. At Sundance 2000, I was lured to a screening by a publicist proffering gift bags full of makeup for my wife and daughter. Having trudged through the snow to collect the booty, I was then too embarrassed to leave without watching some of the movie. "Let me give it a few minutes," I told myself. The film, which I hadn't at all planned to see, was The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's beatification of the late Tammy Faye Bakker Messner. I left with bags of lip gloss and false eyelashes and, because I thought the
A review of 'Camera Obtrusa: The Action Documentaries of Hara Kazuo'
An energetic Sundance delivers on the doc front!
The 2010 Sundance Film Festival officially ushered in the John Cooper-Trevor Groth Era, with proclamations of "renewed rebellion," "rebirth," a "recharged fight" and, from founder Robert Redford himself, a "return to our roots." The documentaries, always the righteous rebels of Sundance, continued to reflect their renown for revolutionary recalcitrance. For my musings about Adrian Grenier's Teenage Paparazzo and Leon Gast's Smash His Camera, click here. In an unintentional triple feature, I saw Jose Padhilha's Secrets of the Tribe right between those two films. The first lines from that film
The idea of television as the drug of the nation is a tried and true one in the US, but the metaphor goes way beyond reality in the Italy depicted in Erik Gandini's documentary Videocracy. With longtime Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi having amassed a media empire prior to coming into power, and now controlling 90 percent of television in Italy, Italians regularly tune in to a state-run carnival of tawdriness and trash, along with well-orchestrated press conferences by the prime minister himself and a happy peppy pro-Silvio propaganda song or two for good measure. Gandini, an Italian native
Movie fans already going gaga for documentary about four babies from around the world.