Category
Reviews
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07.15.10Review: John Huston’s The Battle of San PietroThis review is provided by guest contributor Nat Almirall. You can read more of Nat's writing at Frothygirlz and The Flickcast. I recently went through John Huston’s autobiography An Open Book, which provides a lot of details regarding Huston’s troubles with Army censors while making all three of his war documentaries, and while I’m going to try focus mostly on the films, themselves, the stories behind them are almost as compelling. San Pietro was controversial for its depiction of war, and it was only through the intervention of General George Marshall, who said it’d make a good training film, that it ...
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07.12.10Review: John Huston’s Report from the AleutiansThis review is provided by guest contributor Nat Almirall. You can read more of Nat's writing at Frothygirlz and The Flickcast. I find propaganda fascinating (if you don’t, check out Disney’s war cartoons—ever wanted to see Donald Duck as a Nazi?), and when you combine it with one of the greatest directors of all time—John Huston (he directed such classics as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and my own personal favorites Under the Volcano and The Dead, and he also acted--he played the villain in Chinatown--and was father to Anjelica)--that’s a combination you cannot miss. For me, ...
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06.22.10Close-Up Blu Ray ReviewAbbas Kiarostami’s 1990 docudrama Close-Up completely buries the defining line between documentary and drama. It’s a subversive piece of meta filmmaking that comments on the value of art and cinema through the trial of one overzealous man whose desire to live vicariously through the films — and filmmaker’s — he loves drove him to deception. The opening ten minutes of Close-Up manages to lay out the entire plot of the film while still keeping the audience completely in the dark. Two dashboard mounted cameras capture a taxi ride — in what seems to be real time — as a journalist ...
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05.20.10The Documentary Blog’s Hot Docs 2010 RecapHot Docs 2010 is officially over! Okay, so it's been over for two weeks now. Better late than never though! We did manage to get a few reviews up while attending the festival, but as some of you may know, it's tough to manage your time between seeing films and writing up reviews. How do the pros do it? Oh, right...money. Well we here at The Documentary Blog do it for the love of film! Having said that, there's lots of love below the jump where you'll find a shit load of capsule reviews from myself, Sean and Charlotte. But ...
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05.19.10Hot Docs: Teenage Paparazzo ReviewIf you thought Adrian Grenier’s role on the HBO series Entourage blurred the line between fiction and reality in strange and amusing ways, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. When he’s not busy playing movie star Vincent Chase, Grenier has been making a name for himself as a documentary director and producer over the past decade. In 2002, he filmed a personal road trip to meet his father for the first time, turning it into the feature-length documentary Shot in the Dark. His follow-up project, Teenage Paparazzo, finds him turning the camera outward to focus on someone else, while simultaneously ...
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05.19.10Hot Docs: The People vs. George Lucas ReviewOver the past decade or so, we have been subject to a never ending wave of documentaries about fans and fan culture, largely produced by fans themselves. The majority of them are ultimately self-serving and shoddily produced, but every now and then one of them manages to rise above the rest and prove itself to be something more. The People vs. George Lucas is not one of those films. Don’t get me wrong — a lot of people will definitely be entertained on a surface level, but but as an insightful look at the lasting appeal of Star Wars, the ...