Woody Allen on PBS

Posted on November 19, 2011 at 7:57 pm

Roger Ebert reviews the new PBS two-part documentary about Woody Allen:

“Woody Allen: A Documentary” benefits from both its masterful construction and the willingness of Allen to offer commentary on everything from his oeuvre to his explosive divorce. Allen drives the narrative with wit, honesty and pathos, which Weide supplements with perfectly chosen clips, pictures and talking heads. The deft editing provides a seamless flow of ideas and concepts beholden to the central theme: An artist’s personal demons and compulsions can influence his body of work. Allen’s views on religion and mortality have a kinship with Martin Scorsese’s, even if the views and ultimate outcomes are completely different. Scorsese fears where he’ll go when he dies. Allen fears death, period, so much so that the documentary keeps returning to the topic in ways that are morbidly funny but never tiring.

Watch it tomorrow and Monday at 9 Eastern on PBS.

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Documentary Television

Into the Abyss

Posted on November 16, 2011 at 12:43 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material and some disturbing images
Profanity:	Mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	References to drugs and alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	The movie concerns the violent murder of three people and the aftermath, many references to violence
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 16, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0067EKZ62

Werner Herzog continues his exploration of the darkness and the light within the human spirit with “Into the Abyss,” a documentary about why and how we kill each other, in violation of the law and directed by it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uV1_Yc8OSw

In Texas, where as many as two prisoners are executed each week, Herzog speaks to the people connected to one crime, the senseless murder of three people by a couple of teenagers, who were just trying to steal a hot car. Herzog remains off-camera as he interviews the men, now in their 20’s, who are in prison, one just days from his scheduled execution, the woman whose mother and brother were two of the victims, the chaplain and the correctional officer who are the last people the condemned prisoner sees, the police officer who investigated the crime, and others who help to tell the bleak story of loss and limits.

Herzog lets each of them tell us not just what they think but who they are. He lets us discover for ourselves the telling details like the sign that says “Dream” over the fireplace in the living room of the corrections officer as he tells us that after over 100 executions he just could not do it any more and the tree growing through the floorboards of the car once deemed worth three lives, now rotting in the police impound lot. We meet the father of one of the two prisoners whose only gift to his son was pleading with the jury not to sentence him to death. A woman describes falling in love with one of the men in prison and marrying him there. Both have surprises that confound our expectations. Many of the interviews present a bleak portrait of limited vistas and opportunities alongside limitless need for love.

Indeed, no matter what views you bring to this film, you will come away enlarged, moved, changed as much from the compassion and generosity of Herzog himself as from the people he interviews. Herzog, who had just an hour with each of his subjects and shows us his first and only conversations with them, has made a film that expands his consideration of the human struggle for connection and meaning.

(more…)

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PBS Indies on iTunes

Posted on November 12, 2011 at 3:35 pm

I’m delighted that PBS Indies are now available on iTunes for rental or purchase. Great documentaries like “Between the Folds” (it’s about origami and it is fabulous), “Carmen Meets Borat” (real Kazachs respond to Borat’s comic portrayal), and “Wham! Bam! Islam!” (about a comic book that promotes Islam) can now be seen anytime. Enjoy!

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Documentary Independent

The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby

Posted on October 27, 2011 at 10:51 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Not rated
Date Released to Theaters:	October 27, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	1591141222

Documentaries made by adult children about their fathers have become a significant new genre. My Architect is the story of Louis Kahn by the son he never publicly acknowledged. In Tell Them Who You Are, filmmaker Mark Wexler trains his camera on his cinematographer father, Haskell. And in “Five Wives, Three Secretaries, and Me,” Tessa Blake uses her million dollar trust fund to make a movie about her multiply-married father, Texas oilman Thomas Walter Blake, Jr. All of these films, in their way, are about secrets. But this film, about the head of the CIA, is about family secrets and national security secrets, too. Can a man whose job is keeping secrets share enough of himself to be a good father? Does a man who loves secrets even want to be? “I’m not sure he ever loved anyone, and I never heard him say anything heartfelt,” says his son, Carl.

Part family story, with insightful comments from the woman who was wife to the movie’s subject and is mother to the movie’s director and part “Fog of War”-style exploration of America’s role in post-WII international affairs with a Who’s Who of Cold War policy-makers, this is a riveting and important film that does not rest too heavily on the connection between its subject’s personal emptiness and the moral failures Colby would come to regret. He kept so many secrets he lost touch with the reasons. Its elegiac tone concluding in Colby’s mysterious death — alone — in a boating accident, ties together the sense of personal, professional, and national loss.

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Documentary Movies -- format Spies

Blog Action Day: Food

Posted on October 16, 2011 at 7:00 am

This year’s Blog Action Day theme is food in recognition of World Food Day.

Some top documentaries about food sustainability and wholesomeness:

1. The End of the Line The rise of industrialized fishing, the current demand for fish and the methods used to fulfill it are taking an irreparable toll on the world’s oceans.

2. Food, Inc. Corporations and the regulators they control through lobbying put profit ahead of consumer health, the American farmer, worker safety, and even the environment. Chicken breasts get bigger and produce is genetically engineered not to go bad while obesity, diabetes, and other dire consequences of bad food make more people sick every year.

3. Super Size Me Mordantly funny and trenchantly sobering, this is a Big Mac attack you can sink your teeth into. And then it will bite you back. Film-maker Morgan Spurlock takes on American fast food culture in general and McDonald’s in particular in this prize-winning documentary.

4. The Future of Food Food growing and production, once the primary occupation of Americans, is now controlled by a few enormous corporations. This film explores what that means for the quality and health of what we consume.

5. King Corn Two friends grow an acre of corn to see what becomes of their crop in a documentary from director Aaron Woolf. Corn is America’s most productive and subsidized grain and following an ear of corn from seed to the dinner table has some disturbing surprises.