Thursday, October 27th, 2011
Tabloid
The confessional documentary is as morally gray as a tabloid and as potentially colorless as a broadsheet. If a subject is made to play the fool, whose fault is it? Are they marionettes or the scene-stealing stars of their own one-man shows? Embedded in those answers is our permission to exercise an alienable right that [...]
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Thursday, June 16th, 2011
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Werner Herzog’s forehead peaks into the haze of his own imagination; he could be called an old soul. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams he traces that lineage back 1,500 generations to the Chauvet Cave in Southern France, where paintings twice the age of any found before were discovered, drawn with a proficiency that went unmatched [...]
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Thursday, December 16th, 2010
Howl
Howl is a hardcover CliffsNotes of Allen Ginsberg’s poem. It may not have its own legs to stand on, but it has a handsome body, albeit one assembled in an unusual way. A mishmash of styles, it’s Frankenstein’s monster as a svelte if suave hunk, and though it can’t seem to find its own voice, [...]
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Thursday, November 4th, 2010
Inside Job
Sometimes I wonder if the raison d’être of the financial-services industry is exacting payback for all those kids who were dunked in the toilet in middle school because they were good at math. Fortunately, Charles Ferguson, the documentarian who made Inside Job—and earned a degree in mathematics from Berkeley—has a much more nuanced take on [...]
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Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Word on the street is that Exit Through the Gift Shop—supposedly a new documentary, supposedly directed by British street artist Banksy—is a hoax. You can get your noggin in a real holding pattern lingering over this one; but the more revolutions I make, the closer I get to the debunkers’ point of view. Still, I [...]