The adjectives "titan" and "humble" are not commonly found together. Famed television producer Norman Lear is an iconoclast in every way. His successful shows and the waves they created are forever chiseled into that industry. Away from the his seat as a creative czar, the man remained a hard-working and vigilant self-made man of activism and integrity. In his 90s, Lear has crossed unimaginable measures of impact and history. The new documentary "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You" stylishly chronicles his vast contributions.
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This website has been moralizing for six years now its central message that "every movie has a lesson." As an educator, it is something that I firmly believe and stand by with every possible film, good or bad. I don't think, in all of my years of movie-going, I have ever seen a more real, living and breathing example of the power and magic of my website's theme than in the compelling and emotional new documentary "Life, Animated." A story like this is why I write. If that message speaks to you, go find "Life, Animated" immediately.
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"June Bride: Redemption of a Yakuza" presents an international alternative to the Scared Straight programs that have become a fascination here in the United States. No, not this one (though enjoy a quick laugh), but prison initiatives like those chronicled in A&E's popular "Beyond Scared Straight: Success Stories. Rather than bombard subjects and audiences with fear, one man in Japan finds faith to be the greater answer.
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Filmmaker Asif Kapadia captures the bracing and startling rise and fall of the late jazz singer Amy Winehouse in "Amy." Accessing an enormous wealth of old videos from friends and family, self-read letters of lyrics and songwriting, archived phone conversations, backstage footage, media appearances, and unreleased performances, "Amy" weaves a masterful and compelling narrative. It is on the 2016 Oscar short-list for Best Documentary Feature and is available now for home viewing.
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As I say every year, plenty of regular everyday people make New Year's Resolutions, but I think bigger entities, namely movie makers and movie moguls, need to make them too. Over the life of this website, this is my absolute favorite editorial to write every year. I have fun taking the movie industry to task for things they need to change. I'm sarcastic, but I'm not the guy to take it to the false internet courage level of some Twitter troll. This will be as forward as I get all year.
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Picture your personal influences, either worshiped or admired, and imagine being granted the opportunity to have a conversation with them. What would you talk about? What would you ask them? How would it change you? In the world of cinema, such a conversation happened between a then-neophyte auteur Francois Truffaut and the aging master Alfred Hitchock in 1962. Their documented meeting has gone on to inspire generations of future filmmakers and cinephiles.
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51st Chicago International Film Festival special presentation
In this writer's opinion, documentary films are at their strongest when they merge two symbiotic pairs of traits. A good documentary and its human interest story merges truth with its narrative. Secondly, a good documentary merges its overarching message with art. Any of those four ingredients alone are not enough. In the documentary genre, a narrative without truth defeats its nonfiction purpose and the central message being delivered needs the artistic touch requisite to its chosen medium of cinema. As long as it can achieve those two mergers, a successful documentary can take any subject and give it proper focus.
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