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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Feb 28, 2020 5:11:10 GMT
She's Beautiful When She's Angry, the 2014 doc about the women who trailblazed second-wave feminism in the 60s and 70s, ultimately resulting in Roe V. Wade and a greater discussion surrounding reproductive rights, employment discrimination and the pay gap. Director Mary Dore combines contemporary interviews with the women who were there and involved with the movement with historical footage of events, marches, new reports, promotional material, etc, to supplement these women telling their stories. Very inspiring doc about how these women forced necessary change and are still fighting for it today, but also an incredibly sobering reminder of how much we stand to lose if we allow the country to remain on its current trajectory. Much of what these women accomplished can still be taken away and there are lots of men in power who would like to.
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Post by getclutch on Mar 2, 2020 15:03:11 GMT
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Post by isabelaolive on Mar 3, 2020 1:37:36 GMT
Since the beginning of the year, I have watched a considerable number of documentaries, as it is part of one of my personal projects. So far I have seen 16 documentaries, that is, in three months I am already close to reaching my goal, which was to watch at least 20 documentaries this year. (And I am only considering feature films, there are still short ones, less than 50 minutes long) Anyway, here's the list of documentaries I've watched so far Elena Im not your negro Life, Animated A Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman The Pixar Story Jiro Dreams of Sushi Indie Game: The Movie Citizenfour Window of the Soul Side by Side These Amazing Shadows The Celluloid Closet Life Itself The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing Score: A Film Music Documentary The last one I watched, " Score: A Film Music Documentary", was really good. A pity for being so short, it would work very well as a series with three or four episodes lasting 50 minutes each, it would give more time to develop the themes and topics covered. Speaks very briefly about the introduction of music in cinema during the era of 'silent' cinema, the transition to spoken cinema and more complex soundtracks, the first soundtracks to use orchestra, the transition between instrumental soundtracks to rhythms such as jazz, rock, pop music, the most influential composers like Newman, Williams, Herrmann, Zimmer, Morricone, etc. Anyway, it was interesting to learn about soundtracks, since it is one of the most important things in cinema, I looked for other similar documentaries but I didn't find any, but I found an interesting one, "Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography", I will watch it soon.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Mar 14, 2020 0:31:50 GMT
20 Feet from Stardom (2013)Morgan Neville's lovesong to the underappreciaited art of backup singing, tracing the behind-the-scenes experiences of a handful of backup vocalists from the 60s to present. Lots of great tidbits and archival footage in here. When Mary Clayton sings her passage off "Gimme Shelter," I had literal chills. Loved hearing how that performance came to exist as we know it today, and it's an important reminder of how much backup vocalists contributed to these songs that we take for granted because they're not the face of them. The documentary grapples with that broadly while also illuminating the difficulty of these women to be taken seriously as solo artists or to be properly valued for their talent. All that being said, my gripe with the film is that it simply tries to cover too much ground. As an all-encompassing tribute to power of a great singing voice, it soars. As music history, and as an informational documentary it suffers under the weight of its scope. Morgan Neville condenses 60 years of music history to 90 minutes spread across several different and unique perspectives. It begins with Phil Spector's Wall of Sound and girl groups, it touches on how the backup singers were sexualized in the late 60s, the 70s English rock scene, the modern pop scene, the racial component, the struggles of these women to break into solo careers... it's too damn much. I could never properly sink my teeth into it. I wish they had stuck with a specific era or a specific backup singer because as it stands the documentary is too diffuse. @ pacinoyes , thoughts about this one? Would love to hear what MAR's resident music historian has to say.
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Post by JangoB on Mar 14, 2020 0:52:51 GMT
Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound - I think sound designers and the importance of their work is pretty much a perfect subject for a documentary so I was predisposed to liking this...but despite its subject being essential, the doc itself is your very standard 90-minute overview of something that deserves deeper and more extensive coverage. Still, it's reasonably entertaining and it works fine as a tribute to some truly underrated artists who are responsible for our enjoyment of cinema just as much as cinematographers or composers.
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Post by pacinoyes on Mar 14, 2020 7:27:02 GMT
20 Feet from Stardom (2013)All that being said, my gripe with the film is that it simply tries to cover too much ground. As an all-encompassing tribute to power of a great singing voice, it soars. As music history, and as an informational documentary it suffers under the weight of its scope. Morgan Neville condenses 60 years of music history to 90 minutes spread across several different and unique perspectives. It begins with Phil Spector's Wall of Sound and girl groups, it touches on how the backup singers were sexualized in the late 60s, the 70s English rock scene, the modern pop scene, the racial component, the struggles of these women to break into solo careers... it's too damn much. I could never properly sink my teeth into it. I wish they had stuck with a specific era or a specific backup singer because as it stands the documentary is too diffuse. @ pacinoyes , thoughts about this one? Would love to hear what MAR's resident music historian has to say. Well I agree with this and it specifically is too scattered compared to The Wrecking Crew which covers a similar subject (somewhat) in a focused way........ If you ever notice music docs are almost always a 7 or so though anyway because even if somewhat flawed you get peripheral entertainment from them - great music obviously or a different cultural slant - so they are hard to fnck up entirely ........ An interesting thing in it is the singers who became stars - that's a whole strand implicit in this material and at odds with it - celebrating the less known who stood out. The Ikettes - that could be a whole specific movie - P.P. Arnold of them (briefly) could be a whole movie apart from The Ikettes even. I just love her and her most famous appearance I guess is here - the backing singer who gets her mic at the front of the stage! The Small Faces "Tin Soldier":
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Mar 16, 2020 3:51:07 GMT
On Her Shoulders (2018), about Nobel Peace Prize recipient Nadia Murad. This young woman's story is remarkable and horrible. Her world torn apart in the most brutal way only to be thrust in the spotlight and made to carry the burden of bringing awareness to the genocide of the Yazidis in Iraq by publicizing her own story of rape and sex slavery at the hands of ISIL combatants. It's an incredibly sobering thing, but you could derive that much depth from a news headline. Unfortunately the documentary doesn't do her story justice. Several portions meander. It never feels quite focused, mainly drifting from one meeting or interview or public address to the next. There are some incredible images, like when Murad has to comfort a woman who collapses in a crying fit at one of her events and she exhibits so much quiet strength in that situation. It must be a bizarre life, having to carry the weight of all this suffering on the international stage. She came from a simple life in a small Iraqi town and now she travels the world meeting lawmakers and giving speeches. I just feel like the doc could have had more of an impact with some tighter editing and more of a thematic focus. It's a common problem with these kinds of docs. There's a lack of creative vision.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Mar 17, 2020 0:02:25 GMT
Well I agree with this and it specifically is too scattered compared to The Wrecking Crew which covers a similar subject (somewhat) in a focused way........ If you ever notice music docs are almost always a 7 or so though anyway because even if somewhat flawed you get peripheral entertainment from them - great music obviously or a different cultural slant - so they are hard to fnck up entirely ........ The Wrecking Crew sounds interesting... I realized I haven't seen many "music" docs, mainly just biographical docs about musicians ( Amy, Whitney, etc). Are there any that you recommend?
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Post by pacinoyes on Mar 17, 2020 0:51:05 GMT
Well I agree with this and it specifically is too scattered compared to The Wrecking Crew which covers a similar subject (somewhat) in a focused way........ If you ever notice music docs are almost always a 7 or so though anyway because even if somewhat flawed you get peripheral entertainment from them - great music obviously or a different cultural slant - so they are hard to fnck up entirely ........ The Wrecking Crew sounds interesting... I realized I haven't seen many "music" docs, mainly just biographical docs about musicians ( Amy, Whitney, etc). Are there any that you recommend? Well I do love musicians specific ones more - I often babble about The Filth & The Fury which to me is the best movie ever dealing at all with Rock in any way and which makes my top 10 list of the 00s - it's ostensibly about The Sex Pistols but goes far deeper into cultural and political context - it actually works whether you care about the band or not imo - it's just a great movie. Two Killings of Sam Cooke on Netflix I liked a lot recently - even though it's too short - good for context and placing the artist in their cultural climate. The Wrecking Crew, Standing In The Shadows of Motown and other industry ones that are less artist specific like Buena Vista Social Club, and Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey - those cover a lot of ground that you may like and even if you don't they can open up some different types of music docs from there - you can really go down a rabbit whole with this stuff
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Post by cheesecake on Mar 20, 2020 19:15:25 GMT
I'm three episodes into McMillions and am really enjoying it so far. It's very cinematic with some stylish reenactments and great music.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Mar 21, 2020 5:19:34 GMT
Best of Enemies (2015), chronicling a series of televised debates broadcast by ABC in 1968 between Gore Vidal and William Buckley Jr. which infamously got out of hand and kickstarted a lifelong shared hatred. Contextualizes with dizzying clarity the state in which our current political discourse exists as filtered through echo chambers in a technological landscape--we're all just shouting at each other through screens. Really can't recommend this enough. It's a pretty insightful glimpse into two opposite minds and how their televised "debates" (they don't seem to have been debates at all, just opportunities for Vidal and Buckley to trade insults in front of a camera) gave rise to modern punditry. Really fascinating slice of 60s political life and how we still exist in the shadows of that time. shout-out to Franklin Schaffner's The Best Man (1964), written by Vidal and based on his play. Saw that one last year and was pleased to see it get some airtime here. Wonderful film!
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Mar 24, 2020 20:14:58 GMT
The Bleeding Edge (2018), shocking and disturbing expose about the medical device industry that'll have you side-eyeing your doctors. Kirby Dick known for rape-culture docs The Invisible War and The Hunting Ground certainly knows his way around this kind of material and his scope is more comprehensive here than it's ever been, combining research statistics with firsthand testimony from patients, clinicians, lawyers, and former FDA regulators. The formula is simple and marvelously effective, fusing your traditional Blackfish-esque expose with straight-up body horror (I never thought I'd see a steel coil being shoddily pulled out of a human vagina but here we are). The doc focuses on four particular devices--Essure, chrome-cobalt joint replacements, transvaginal mesh, and the Da Vinci Surgical system which looks like something to appear in the next Saw film--and follows a basic formula: introduce viewer to a device, show us the patients that were treated with the device, explain how it was rushed through a broken regulatory process subsumed by industry interests, and then have the patients describe the horribly gruesome side-effects they experienced that'll make you wish Beverley Mantle was your OB/GYN. Cannot overstate how uncomfortable this doc is designed to make you. It was billed as "the stuff of dystopian nightmares" out of Sundance 2018 and hyperbolic as that sounds, it ain't far off.
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Post by getclutch on Mar 27, 2020 18:43:31 GMT
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Post by cheesecake on Mar 29, 2020 6:32:47 GMT
Almost done Tiger King.
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Post by getclutch on Mar 30, 2020 22:34:13 GMT
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Post by isabelaolive on Mar 31, 2020 1:12:17 GMT
Since the last time I wrote here, at the beginning of the month, I have watched four more documentaries; 'What Happened, Miss Simone?', ' Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound', 'Visions of Light' and 'Spielberg' What Happened, Miss Simone? - 4/5: Really good, I went to watch it without knowing literally NOTHING about Nina, I didn't even remember having heard any of her songs, however incredible it may seem. The documentary made me interested in learning more about her work, especially for the part that talks about how much she participated in the civil rights movement, I really had no idea that she had been an important figure in that movement. The documentary obviously left something to be desired in some parts, after all, it is only 1h40 in length, but I still found it satisfactory. Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound - 3.5/5: Reasonably good, I could have gone deeper into the subject, but considering that it has less than two hours I found a satisfactory introduction on the role of composers, sound editors, etc. in the production of a film. Visions of Light - 3/5: Average, left a lot to be desired, even though I already knew that it probably wouldn't be too complex for the short duration, I still thought that the approach on the subject could have been different. It looks more like a very random compilation of interviews with cinematographers who could have been better organized, several films and cinematographers considered legendary were not even mentioned, and the documentary spent a lot of time talking about 'Days of Heaven'. Spielberg - 4/5: Very good, I thought it made good use of its two and a half hours in length and showed a lot about Spielberg's career that I had never seen being talked about elsewhere. Of course, several of his films were covered very briefly, some were barely mentioned, but in the end the essential works that defined his career received his due attention. After that documentary, I even felt like watching some Spielberg films that had never aroused my curiosity before, like 'Minority Report', 'Munich' and 'Duel'.
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 3, 2020 13:12:15 GMT
The Rolling Stones : Olé Olé Olé!: A Trip Across Latin AmericaSlight, but interesting film that is sort of a travelogue following the band and an analysis of what music can mean to others in the largest sense. It gives you an example that when you're at that level - that sometimes your responsibilities are beyond the mere band itself. ~7/10Legends, wherever they go:
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 9, 2020 15:58:37 GMT
Hail Satan? (2019) ~6.5-7/10 This movie starts off very funny with the cuddliest Satanists ever and then hammers you over the head and wrongly detours - going into areas it can't sustain.
The protests of separation of church and state are far more valid and humorously mined than their understanding of religious freedom, biblical text or moral ethics - it hits a 2nd half wall.
When this movie gets into the abortion debate (unnecessarily?) - regardless of your POV - you'll find the Satanists no longer cuddly or humorous but maybe more anti-human and dismissive ......but earlier well it definitely was funny.
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 11, 2020 22:27:54 GMT
Filmworker (2017) - on Netflix 8/10If you love Barry Lyndon (I just like it!), Stanley Kubrick (I do, but not Eyes Wide Shut!), or the movies in general (why would I be here if I didn't?) you will find something here to fascinate as Leon Vitali ceases in his roles as an artist and "acts" the part of Kubrick right hand man. It's fascinating, creepy, incredibly easy to watch and absorb and with some nice talking heads stuff (including Ryan O'Neal and Matthew Modine), interesting stories and details......it rings true, there is no ego from Vitali because the ego was all on Stanley .....somebody's got to do it.
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Post by pupdurcs on Apr 11, 2020 23:20:48 GMT
Contagion (2011, Dir: Steve Soderbergh)
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Post by cheesecake on Apr 14, 2020 10:03:49 GMT
The Tiger King & I. Amusing. Glad there was more of a spotlight on the animal abuse and how much of an animal Joe Exotic really is.
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Post by getclutch on Apr 16, 2020 11:37:03 GMT
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Post by pacinoyes on Apr 16, 2020 21:17:01 GMT
Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band (2019) - 7+/10Lots of talking head stuff (too much) but interesting in what they were and how they got that way and where it all fell apart. Sort of made as a companion to The Last Waltz but not as good or as important or musical. Makes the mistake of telling you good they were more than winning you over with the music but if you're interested in this, that probably means that you have the first two albums so you know that already.
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Post by getclutch on Apr 17, 2020 20:30:06 GMT
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Post by getclutch on Apr 20, 2020 3:45:13 GMT
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