Do you like Italian gangster flicks? Mike Malloy’s upcoming documentary Eurocrime: The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled The ’70s appears to be on the same wavelength as Not Quite Hollywood, in that it pays tribute to a wave of underground films coming out of one country at a particular point in time. It may not have Quentin Tarantino’s name on it, but it looks to have plenty of fascinating war stories, not to mention a kick ass soundtrack as well.

Featuring interviews with Fred Williamson, John Saxon, Franco Nero, and Henry Silva (among others), the movie is currently in production over at Subgenre Entertainment. There’s a nice 5-minute promo reel floating around the web right now courtesy of Twitch. Check it out below and see what you think.

Do we really need a feature-length documentary about the Chicago Cubs? Director John Scheinfeld seems to think so. After gaining some critical acclaim for his film The U.S. vs John Lennon, he’s gone and made a passion project called We Believe that is a tribute to the city of Chicago and its love of baseball. I watched the trailer looking for some sort of hook, but I didn’t really find one. Then again, I don’t like baseball and I don’t live in Chicago either so go figure!

The thing they keep touching on is the fact that the Cubs haven’t won the World Series for over 100 years now, but still the fans keep coming out. Isn’t that what baseball fans do? I’m not really convinced this is anything more than a 90-minute ad for the Cubs, but it does seem very well shot and it has a lot of big name interviews (it’s narrated by Gary Sinise). I’m still a bit surprised that this is getting some sort of theatrical release, but hey, if you like the Cubs, I’m guessing you’ll like this! For more info visit the film’s official website.

I just realized we haven’t posted anything about Not Quite Hollywood here on The Documentary Blog so far, but with all the great reviews the movie has been getting, I thought we should probably throw up the new red band trailer to help get the word out. It’s a documentary about Australian genre films from the ’70s and early ’80s, and how absolutely out of control they were. It features interviews with all kinds of people who were involved in the making of these movies (Dennis Hopper, Brian Trenchard-Smith, Russel Mulcahy) to people who were influenced by them (Quentin Tarantino, James Wan).

This movie had its North American Premiere at the Toronto Film Festival last year, and it was since picked up by Magnolia Pictures, who are supposed to be releasing it sometime this summer. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to see it soon. For more more information visit the film’s official website.

It’s been five months and I’m still slowly catching up on a bunch of documentaries I missed at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Luckily, this week I received a screener for Liz Garbus’ ‘Shouting Fire: Stories From the Edge of Free Speech’ in the mail thanks to the wonderful folks at HBO, so now I can check one more doc off my ‘must watch’ list!

Director Liz Garbus sits down with her Dad, First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus, to explore the many complexities involved in upholding free speech in America. We do get a little bit of history — from McCarthyism to Carlin’s seven dirty words — with most of the film consisting of experts and commentator’s sharing their thoughts on what constitutes free speech and moments where the right to speak freely has been threatened or flat out ignored. The film presents a series of case studies separated into multiple individual stories ranging from a University professor’s controversial views on 9/11 and his subsequent dismissal to statements about homosexuality written on a high school students t-shirt. The cool thing about these segments is once you put them back to back, you really get a sense of the challenges of maintaining the right to free speech. Fighting for the rights of the Westboro Baptist Church to carry ‘God Hates Fags’ signs in public might be tough to swallow, but it’s all part of the package. As the title states, these stories are truly on the edge of free speech.

The film is well shot and makes good use of its structure to break up what could’ve been a bland talking heads piece. The rapport between Liz Garbus and her Father elevated the discussion into a casual ‘talking shop’ sort of honesty that you can imagine taking place at a Garbus Family holiday or get-together. And as I mentioned previously, the selection of case studies and the order in which they’re presented really worked for me and completely sold the idea that support of free speech is not limited to your own opinions or beliefs. A great use of structure to directly support the content. My only complaint is the film felt a little short, but I appreciated the lean but informative presentation. Watch for Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech, premiering June 29 on HBO.

It’s still not quite clear what the current status of proposed Arrested Development feature film is; last we heard, it was moving full steam ahead and there were even rumours of a shoot already happening in New York City, but they turned out to be false. Michael Cera recently came out and said that he does think it will happen, but probably not for a while. The good news is that in the meantime there’s another Arrested Development movie that fans can look forward to. It’s an untitled documentary about the AD fan phenomenon intended to “provide awareness and education of this brilliant, witty and original comedy”.

While I’m generally suspicious of these types of fan-made documentaries, and the project’s official website really doesn’t have anything substantial other than a photo gallery of fans, the fact is they now actually have a “final” trailer for this thing and it showcases quite a few interviews with members of the cast and creative team. As expected, they’re all just talking about how amazing and ahead of its time the show was, but for hardcore fans, that’s probably more than enough. A solid release date has not yet been set, but it seems like they are currently in post-production and hoping to have it ready sometime in 2009. More on this as it develops. Check out the trailer below.

As you may have noticed, we’ve been trying to redesign The Documentary Blog a little bit as of late, with a focus on making it easier to update on a regular basis. We want to be the best source for documentary films on the web, but in order to do that we need to be able to cover a lot more stuff. This is why we’ve decided to start up a Twitter account and integrate it with the rest of the blog’s content.

Now we’ll be able to post short headlines and links to the site quickly, while also writing up longer posts and reviews as time allows. We know there are a lot of people who have continued to follow this site despite the fact that it has only been updated sporadically over the last little while. Hopefully this will help us keep in touch with all of you.

So what are you waiting for? Follow The Documentary Blog on Twitter now!

One of the disappointing things about Sacha Baron Cohen’s upcoming Bruno movie is that it doesn’t seem to be as focused on poking fun at the fashion industry as his previous segments did on Da Ali G Show. Fortunately, it looks like we may have an alternative of sorts in the form of R.J. Cutler’s documentary The September Issue. The documentary is not directly critical of its subject, Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, but the trailer definitely seems to play up her reputation as an ice queen and is also keenly aware of some of the excesses of the fashion world.

Roadside Attractions picked up the film for distribution at Sundance earlier this year, and it could be a minor hit for them, especially since it is the real-life version of The Devil Wears Prada. Cutler previously directed the controversial reality series Black. White. for FX. The September Issue hits select theatres on September 11th; check out the trailer below.