Results tagged “silverdocs”

The new documentary by Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer about D.C.'s own Mayor for Life, The Nine Lives of Marion Barry, premieres on HBO tonight at 9 p.m. DCist caught the film when it debuted at SILVERDOCS earlier this summer, and overall the reviews have been a mixed bag. Critics already familiar with Barry and his lengthy history wanted more, while others were pretty much satisfied. You can be the judge for yourself tonight, if you've got access to HBO.

“Choose your enemies carefully, ‘cause they will define you,” the adage goes. Muhammad Ali doesn’t have a lot of enemies anymore — 28 years after his last professional fight, and 25 after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he remains among the most beloved figures in American public life.

     

Huge lines wound around the AFI Silver Theatre on the Closing Night of SILVERDOCS with people -- old, young, black, white, east and west of the river -- all pondering the same general question.

“Bad food is bad. Bad books are bad. Bad movies are not always bad,” critic Scott Weinberg tells us in Best Worst Movie, an absorbing and surprisingly well-reported look back at the immortal 1989 trainwreck, Troll 2. It's directed by Michael Paul Stephenson, who appeared in the film when he was ten years old.

There is a pool that sits by the ocean in Sea Point, a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. Like most public pools, it is a place where a diverse cross-section of the community come together to relax and to play. Unlike many other locations, however, South Africa is a place where the concept of "coming together" is still taking some getting used to.

AJ Schnack returned to SILVERDOCS last night with the world premiere screening of his latest, Convention. Schnack received the festival's Cinematic Vision Award a few years back for his About a Boy, an elegiac tribute to Kurt Cobain featuring taped interviews with the singer combined with filmed images of the places where he lived and grew up. It was an acquired taste as a film, but even its detractors couldn't deny it's simple beauty. For his latest feature, though, Schnack was required to take a far more journalistic approach, as he set out to cover the behind-the-scenes workings of the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Anyone who's ever spent time cleaning up after others knows it's a thankless job. Add to that the stigma attached and the tendency of people to look down their noses at anyone who's ever had to be elbow deep in a public toilet for a paycheck, and it's easy to assume that custodians do what they do because they can't do anything else. As one custodian in Patrick Shen's The Philosopher Kings sadly tells it, some people just stop talking to you when they find out what she does. Another tells of how some people won't even respond if he speaks to them while working.

There's a screening tonight at SILVERDOCS of Brett Gaylor's RiP: A Remix Manifesto, and another on Saturday night. It's a must see film, and you should try to get out to the festival to check it out, but don't sweat it if you can't make it. You can always just download it. No need to go combing through torrent sites looking for a decent copy, though. You can download it directly from the filmmaker. If you want to pay him, great. You name the price. If not? That's cool, too. And if you want to re-cut his footage and post your edit online, or contribute original material to next year's planned 2.0 release, go right ahead. All of this is the point of the film: creativity, ideas, and media need not be controlled by the few; it belongs to us all. And copyright law needs to be rebuilt so that it serves its original purpose: to encourage creativity, not restrict it.

A cynic might be a little saddened that the newfound freedoms of the Afghan people are manifesting themselves in their adoption of a segment of our pop culture as disposable as American Idol. But Afghan Star, the documentary about the analogous Afghan television show of the same name, shows that in a different context, that show's format can be seen as evidence of a people's liberation.

Bryan Singer spent something like $200 million a few years back trying to revive the Superman movie franchise. Shaikh Nasir’s Malegaon ka Superman came somewhat more frugally: about two grand. But every rupee of that modest sum is on the screen. He shoots on a handheld digicam. A "dolly shot" consists of three guys stabilizing him and pushing him forward on a bicycle while he clutches the camera with both hands. And he sure isn’t going to hire a stunt double for Sheikh Shafique, the poor, scrawny bastard he’s cast as the Last Son of Krypton.

Worlds collided at last night's SILVERDOCS opening screening and after-party. While someone like Ira Glass might qualify as a mega-star personal appearance for the documentary aficionados that make up the festival's core audience, last night brought star power of a completely different sort, as basketball phenom LeBron James (and entourage) showed up for last night’s screening of More Than a Game. The film documents the domination James and his teammates (collectively, the Fab 5) held over the world of high school basketball in the early '00s. Excited fans lined the red carpet for James' arrival, and the Blair High School marching band even performed inside the theater. After the screening, the band led everyone across the street to the Discovery building for the after-party, at which local rapper Wale performed to a largely dance-resistant crowd. When a DJ later tried to whip the crowd into a party mood by asking if anyone wanted to hear some go-go, he was largely met with blank stares. Not even a choice Backyard Band track could get those bodies moving.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

The AFI-Discovery Channel SILVERDOCS Documentary Festival will close out its 2009 run with a film chronicling the life of times of D.C.'s own Marion "Mayor for Life" Barry, festival organizers announced today. The world premiere of The Nine Lives of Marion Barry, by filmmakers Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer, is set for Saturday, June 20 at the AFI Silver, and is billed thusly:

Many people remember Marion Barry as the philandering drug-using mayor of the nation's capital, who was famously caught in a 1990 FBI sting operation. Yet others know him as a folk hero, a civil rights champion and defender of the poor. Barry’s soaring achievements, catastrophic failures and phoenix-like rebirths have made him a symbol of mythic indestructibility. Who is Marion Barry, really? A hero? A scoundrel? Why is he such a polarizing force? And why do people still vote for him?

There are documentaries that entertain and many more that educate, and there are plenty that grab you by the lapels and spout hummus-breath in your face about how you need to stop eating meat and trade your vulgar, barbarous combustion-powered vehicle in for a bike — today! Then there are the rare documentaries that prod you, subtly but insistently, to reexamine the way you’re living.

There has been no shortage of filmed analysis of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath during the last three years. And much of it has been quite good, particularly Spike Lee's sprawling (and riveting) four-hour documentary, When the Levees Broke, which also screened at SILVERDOCS this year. But one doesn't really realize what's missing from these other films until watching Trouble the Water, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's take on the material, which is both harrowing and inspiring. And while it's Deal and Lessin's film, the special ingredient isn't something that the pair brought to the project themselves: footage from the ground and on the rising waters from the heart of New Orleans' Ninth Ward in the midst of the catastrophe.

No roads may lead to Antarctica, but all longitude lines do. It's these lines that the continent's few residents have followed, from wherever they started, to their shared terminus at the bottom of the planet, stepping, as one resident puts it, "off the edge of the map." Werner Herzog has made a career out of films based on characters on the margins. Some are real, some are imagined, but nearly all of them are obsessives with tenuous grips on sanity and singular fascinations with often fantastical quests. It is inevitable, then, that Herzog's career would end up taking him to a continent where nearly every inhabitant is the potential star of a Herzog film. Where every character has quite intentionally gone to the margins and then over it.

It sounds like — if you’ll pardon the expression — something out of a movie: Junior Middleweight Champion fighter Kassim “The Dream” Ouma escapes the darkest of pasts to find his way from Africa to America, arrives penniless and unable to speak English, and within a year he’s a professional fighter with a surrogate family, money in his pockets, and a smile on his face that makes you like him before you know anything about him.

If the measure of a good film is that you're still thinking about it days later, then In the Family is the best movie I've seen all year. But in no small way was this documentary, directed by filmmaker Joanna Rudnick, more or less tailor made to hit someone like me square in the jaw. Rudnick, all of 27 when she first began this film five years ago, chronicles her own personal decision making process after testing positive for one of the BRCA gene mutations -- the genes that predict an excessively high risk of developing hereditary breast and/or ovarian cancer. Rudnick's mother had ovarian cancer, her grandmother had breast cancer, and thanks to advances in medical science, she now knows she's more than likely to get one or both of those over the course of her lifetime. Many women who have tested positive for the mutation have opted to have their breasts and ovaries removed to eliminate the risk of cancer. But when you're still young, unmarried and want to have children one day, what do you do?

At the outset of Lost Holiday, a charming, funny, and almost unintentionally political documentary out of the Czech Republic, director Lucie Králová rather cheekily declares the film, via the opening credits, to be a "detective documentary." It's a touch that borders on precious, and a tone that continues in the often wry intertitles that mark time throughout the "investigation" that is the film's subject. What they're trying to detect are the identities of six men who they know only through photographs. A man that Králová meets through an art project in which she was involved happened upon a suitcase in a dumpster in a run-down neighborhood near Sweden's Göteberg airport. Inside there was nothing but a plastic bag containing 22 rolls of undeveloped film. He had them processed, and found himself with over 700 photos of six Asian men on what appeared to be a holiday throughout Scandinavia. What Králová wanted to know is if it's possible, in the interconnected world we now live in, to track down these men based solely on what they can glean from their photographs.

“I want war. I don’t want peace,” says German armored-car merchant Fidelis Cloer at the beginning of Bulletproof Salesman. An hour later, in the doc’s final moments, he offers a slightly more nuanced view, pointing out that he did nothing at all to instigate or sustain the protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan than have proved such a windfall for his company. As he puts it, Coca-Cola and Burger King have been doing good business in Iraq, too. “The difference is, we do not have to create demand for our product,” he observes.

In case you hadn't noticed, SILVERDOCS is in full swing now, and it's been occupying all of our film-going attention this week. While D.C. has no shortage of film festivals throughout the year, there is none as good as SILVERDOCS, so we have trouble thinking of movies in any other terms while the festival is occupying Silver Spring. It's also an endurance test just trying to see all the films one wants to in the one week festival window. We've found ourselves in crowded theaters writing reviews or watching screeners on our laptops while in between films. We've made the Sophie's Choice between seeing a movie we've really been looking forward to and actually going home to get some sleep. We've also experienced the lonely harsh flourescents of the post-midnight S2 bus back into D.C. Amid growing fatigue from all the movie watching, wondered what any quasi-journalist in an event setting would: WWHTD? (What would Hunter S. Thompson do?) And, faced with the obvious answer, we've lamented the lack of a ready source for mescaline on the streets of downtown Silver Spring.

Director Alex Gibney (who we interviewed earlier this year) is making a mounting case for a future legacy as the first great documentarian of the 21st century. Hot on the heels of his incisive investigations into the collapse of a major corporation and the collapse of America's wartime moral compass, Gibney has switched gears. Rather than going after an entity whose misdeeds he feels are in dire need of being exposed, he has made what will likely be seen as the definitive filmed biography of the life of someone who was similarly dedicated to exposing the sleaze of the evildoers: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

With the recent cinematic dramatizations of the life of Che Guevara, from his early days as a road tripping med student in the excellent The Motorcycle Diaries to Steven Soderbergh's lengthy version of his revolutionary years in the four and a half hour biopic that just premiered at Cannes, an unusual perspective was obviously necessary to any documentary version of his story to keep it from seeming stale or overly academic in comparison. And the makers of Chevolution have done just that, constructing a history of the man that not only succeeds in avoiding either blind lionization or reactionary condemnation, but also looks at him with the lens through which we most often see him. Literally.

As you probably noticed from our first review this morning, the SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival is now underway in Silver Spring, Md. The festival runs beginning today through Monday, June 23, and presents 108 documentary films over the course of the week. Now in its sixth year, SILVERDOCS is by far and away the classiest and best run film festival the D.C. metro area has to offer, and DCist will be crawling all over the Downtown Silver Spring complex over the next several days to bring you our best bets for what you shouldn't miss.

Combining the music of the most beloved band in the world with the most visually arresting live performance troupe working today seems like a surefire recipe for a hit. That's probably what the late George Harrison and Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté thought when they first dreamed up the concept for Love, the Beatles-themed show that premiered in Las Vegas in 2006; and it's surely what director Adrian Wills imagined when he signed up to make All Together Now, a feature length documentary about the making of the show. You mean I get to use a soundtrack by The Beatles and film talented acrobats performing amid elaborate, colorful stage decorations? Wills must have thought. Where do I sign?