i guess i will give this Loznitsa found-footage film of Leningrad 1991 (coup attempt) a shot
http://www.bam.org/film/2016/the-event
― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 9 March 2016 20:50 (eight years ago) link
It's quite good. Feels almost as a synthesis of his documentary work, would perhaps recommend it to people as a first Loznitsa doc. Not as momentous as Maidan, though. But go see, everyone!
― Frederik B, Wednesday, 9 March 2016 22:12 (eight years ago) link
i have seen Maidan, this one being 74m helps.
― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 9 March 2016 22:15 (eight years ago) link
He, yeah. And it's good. If you can get to see some of his old stuff, jump at the chance.
― Frederik B, Wednesday, 9 March 2016 22:41 (eight years ago) link
Doc wise, I'm looking forward to Spike Lee's new Michael Jackson thing.
― rhymes with "blondie blast" (cryptosicko), Wednesday, 9 March 2016 23:18 (eight years ago) link
Putin even has a cameo (two short glimpses) in The Event -- he was an aide to the mayor of Leningrad.
― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Friday, 11 March 2016 17:17 (eight years ago) link
on the WFMU doc opening in NYC today
https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/lots-of-love-for-wfmu
― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 30 March 2016 18:32 (seven years ago) link
Hot Docs schedule came out today:
http://boxoffice.hotdocs.ca/websales/pages/list.aspx?epguid=7d40538f-b787-42db-b800-e5d6075294ae&perpage=13&cp268=Highlight
Just ordered a handful tonight, may add two or three more (there's a Steve James program):
De Palma (Baumbach) Obit, The Incomparable Rose Hartman (took the photo of Bianca Jagger on the horse at Studio 54), and, pretty much my dream documentary, O.J. Simpson: Made in America (464 minutes, slated for ESPN in five episodes).
Compared to TIFF, a dream: logged on (a problem right there with TIFF), got everything I wanted, got the Bloor discount.
― clemenza, Friday, 8 April 2016 04:00 (seven years ago) link
Add a comma there between De Palma and Obit.
― clemenza, Friday, 8 April 2016 04:01 (seven years ago) link
Here Come The Videofreex!: Never knew anything about these folks. A couple of SDS-types get hold of video cameras in 1969, find each other at Woodstock and start a collective, have a brief dalliance with CBS, break off but continue videotaping anything and everything--interviews with Fred Hampton and Abbie Hoffman, chaotic anti- and pro-war marches--end up setting up in a small town and transmitting their stuff locally. I'm very partial to stories like this, where people do interesting work that disappears into history until someone digs it up 40 years later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVxVOy9ZCGI
― clemenza, Friday, 8 April 2016 04:21 (seven years ago) link
saw Notfilm the other night, perhaps the only retro making-of that's 6x longer than the film it chronicles. Beckett's preprod conferences (audio tape) w/ Alan Schneider and Boris Kaufman are a hoot, as are Buster Keaton's attempts to do more gags. Maybe stolen by Billie Whitelaw.
http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/review-notfilm/
― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Friday, 8 April 2016 14:23 (seven years ago) link
Obit's just a good film, but it seems especially relevant right now, when heart-on-sleeve obituaries are a growth industry on the internet.
http://vimeo.com/108186599
― clemenza, Sunday, 8 May 2016 04:19 (seven years ago) link
im not sure what to make of fire at sea.
if it didnt arrive at the time of the migrant crisis, i might have a different view, but it seems to contribute very little to the current discussion, other than make you feel irritated, and frustrated, at how these two v diff worlds can exist on the island. which is prob the point, but again, im not sure that really adds to anyones understanding of whats going on. it is a very easy, glib, cliched position to take.
the depiction of the migrants is so much more essential to any of the other footage that the film ends up being brilliant at making you feel irritated, as well as baffled, at why anyone should care that much about the often mundane, whimsical scenes of the kid (though the scene in the doctors surgery was touching), which i would have liked to see more of in isolation, not stuck in between footage of the migrants. i get this is the director's style, but if ever a subject required a director NOT to impose their auteur BS onto it, this would probably be it.
it doesnt really show how the migrants and others on the island - apart from officials - intersect. and im pretty sure that their lives DO intersect. which would have been greatly more interesting at this point, so the film ends up just being kind of smug and complacent. taking a back seat when it needs to be front and centre.
― StillAdvance, Monday, 13 June 2016 10:01 (seven years ago) link
id actually have preferred him to just make a film about local residents and the kid and his family rather than trying to make it about the migrants. in fact, the opening titles set out the wrong expectations, as this is not a film about the migrant crisis, migration, or the migrants, its about a family living a quiet existence. the migrants seem like they are just featured as a forced measure, as to make a film purely about Lampedusa without featuring migrants wouldnt have been possible. theyre sprinkled in for political dressing.
also, im divided between seeing the last scene as exploitative and seeing it as necessary.
― StillAdvance, Monday, 13 June 2016 10:13 (seven years ago) link
saw notes on blindness today. the concept is interesting - its based on audio diary tapes recorded by a man in the 80s as he loses sight. so it has various moments that are moving, naturally, but the film for me was like heart of a dog, it would just be 100x better as a radio documentary as it is so reliant on the narration of these tapes. the visual dramatisations of various moments in his life are adequate but make you wish they just chose to make it either a dramatic feature or opted for a proper documentary. it didnt help that these scenes acted out are also quite dull to watch. the whole film ends up being the documentary version of something starring eddie redmayne. blandly, tepidly, tastefully beautiful, about disability, but oddly lacking emotionally as the material has to succumb to the demands and desires of the documentary makers, who seem to have pitchd the whole thing at a dull notion of 'poignant' (perhaps also as either the tapes lacked what was needed, or they just picked the most universal, but blandest moments). could just be that brexit left me in a foul mood of course, but also seemed like they missed a trick formally in trying to make this a dull docu-drama when there are so many better ways to make a film about blindness. 2.5/5.
― StillAdvance, Friday, 24 June 2016 23:29 (seven years ago) link
Will try to see this on Sunday:
http://boxoffice.hotdocs.ca/WebSales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=44515~fff311b7-cdad-4e14-9ae4-a9905e1b9cb0&
I guess I shouldn't care as long as they're getting funding, but just noticed it's now the "Ted Rogers Cinema" instead of the Bloor. It's not enough that they took away the Skydome's proper name, now they've moved on to movie theatres.
― clemenza, Saturday, 25 June 2016 00:05 (seven years ago) link
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/85c706cc-3eaf-11e6-8716-a4a71e8140b0.html
nigel andrews otm
Notes on Blindness has the high odour of worthiness. I want to scream whenever I am trapped in a theatre full of colleagues heaping silent reverence on a film whose subject matter, here a truth-based story of blindness, has cowed their critical faculties. Political correctness is the taskmaster. Never mind the quality, feel the virtue or suffering.
It happens often enough with quasi-epics. Gandhi, Cry Freedom, Selma . . . pedestrianly crafted “true dramas” whose good-cause preachiness peer-pressures filmgoers into genuflection. But it happens too in chamber cinema. Notes on Blindness, a semi-dramatised British documentary, liturgises in pompously haloed scenes of remembrance and reflection the story of Australian-born, UK-dwelling theologian John Hull’s loss of sight, which began in 1980s. It’s a tragedy: no one contests that. But this tragedy, as well as turning the God man more towards God (which turns me more towards the exit door), mills from his mind — to judge by the movie’s overvoicings — thoughts that seldom transcend piety and portentous commonplace.
That actors were chosen to dub Hull and his wife’s dialogue is also alienating. Together with the imagery — pre-Raphaelite posings in late afternoon light, fields of wistfully soughing grass, etc — it adds to the sense of an airbrushed sanctimony and generic “poetry” where everything human has been erased by everything holier-than-thou.
its sad to say, but john hull himself didnt really have anything that interesting to say about blindness, not in the film anyway.
― StillAdvance, Monday, 4 July 2016 10:08 (seven years ago) link
Didn't care much for Weiner. The film didn't seem to illuminate anything about the whole sordid mess, instead punctuating every scene with the same shot a paralyzed Huma Abedin looking like she wanted to crawl right out of the frame. Weiner, meanwhile, spends the majority of the film staring intently at his cell phone, a there without a there if there ever was one.
― clemenza, Monday, 4 July 2016 21:25 (seven years ago) link
Anyone seen the new Gibney, Zero Days? It was on Danish television the other day. It's interesting, and well made, but it does something with anonymous sources where it digitizes them to keep them unknown, and those scenes feels as if they'd gotten a bad soap opera actress to play a spy c-movie. I'm not sure I believe it at all, actually, and it might just be because of a bad gimmick.
― Frederik B, Wednesday, 24 August 2016 21:10 (seven years ago) link
Oh, I should have waited entirely until the film was done until I posted, it was explained. Still, bad gimmick.
― Frederik B, Wednesday, 24 August 2016 22:07 (seven years ago) link
We talked a little about it over at: STUXNET
In short, I liked it - but have some reservations that come from occasionally working in infosec. My partner (doesn't follow the story nearly as closely as I do) liked it quite a bit.
― Elvis Telecom, Friday, 26 August 2016 10:04 (seven years ago) link
ex-ilxor on Peter and the Farm
http://www.filmcomment.com/article/review-peter-and-the-farm-tony-stone/
― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 17 November 2016 21:17 (seven years ago) link
I was wary of Cameraperson, but it's expansive, and universal, for a docu-"autobiography."
Coming in 4 weeks to the Criterion Collection.
https://www.criterion.com/films/29003-cameraperson
― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Monday, 9 January 2017 02:39 (seven years ago) link
Found the streaming service Tubi on my cable server a few days ago and watched 77 minutes, about the mass shooting at a San Diego McDonald's in 1984. I have a clear memory of it--mass shootings weren't weekly events then--although I had misremembered it as being in the late '70s.
The director, Charlie Minn, does something that, though I understand why, I didn't think was a good idea in a documentary: he follows through on something you hear whenever there's a mass shooting, which is to never mention the shooter's name. I started to become aware of this about 30 minutes in, and after a few more references to "the shooter," it was clear that James Huberty would never be mentioned (you can spot his name in a newspaper clipping). Maybe if he'd just done it and left it at that, it would have been okay, but towards the end he calls attention to what he's doing; he points out to one of the detectives that he won't be mentioning the shooter's name in the film, and asks him if he thinks that's a good idea. So it almost felt self-congratulatory, although again, I understand the argument for not doing so. I did want to find out more about Huberty, though (there's maybe five minutes spent on his actions that day and his racist motivations--almost all the victims were Mexican).
― clemenza, Tuesday, 21 April 2020 14:14 (three years ago) link