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Watch It For Free
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07.20.10The Documentary Blog Recommends: UniverseFor anyone looking for solid documentary recommendations, I suggest you start following the National Film Board of Canada's twitter page. Every now and again they'll throw up a link to a cool classic doc featured on their amazing website and thus begins a journey into their impressive back catalogue. This week they've highlighted Roman Kroitor & Colin Low's 1960 documentary 'Universe', a film which apparently served as a source of inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The short documentary explores our Universe using surprisingly realistic animation and miniature effects in combination with Earth based source materials. It's easy ...
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07.18.10Review: John Huston’s Let There Be LightThis review is provided by guest contributor Nat Almirall. You can read more of Nat's writing at Frothygirlz and The Flickcast. Perhaps the darkest of Huston’s war documentaries, Let There Be Light is a stark and frank look into the lives of war veterans suffering from mental illness. Filmed at Mason General Hospital in Long Island, it chronicles a wide spectrum of psychologically disturbed patients, their psychiatric treatments, and eventual recovery. Huston chose that location because it was then the largest such center in the East, and its officers, doctors, and even patients were willing to let themselves be filmed. Students of ...
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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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07.02.10The Documentary Blog Recommends: Hitman Heart: Wrestling With ShadowsGuess what today is? If you answered 'the day after Canada Day' you are WRONG. July 2nd marks the birth of legendary Canadian wrestler Brett 'The Hitman' Heart. For those of you unfamiliar with The Hit Man, he was the wrestler who wore pink and had a mullet with sunglasses. Maybe that doesn't narrow it down. Apparently he was also known as 'The Pink and Black Attack', which sounds like the side effect of a few doses of Pepto Bismol. Either way, wrestling fan or not I suggest you check out 'Hitman Heart: Wrestling With Shadows', a powerful look at ...
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06.28.10The DocBlog Recommends: The Human ProjectThere are four great things about Bert McKinley and Erin Sproule's web series 'The Human Project': the quality is high, the content is great, it's Canadian and it's free! Fans of Showtime's TV version of This American Life will definitely want to check out this collection of short stories that finds average folks talking about such topics as unconditional love, scars and the unexpected discovery of a dead body (let's face it, we've all been there). I've embedded one of the trailers for the series above and you can check out one of the episodes after the jump. If you ...