I was perusing this week's Netflix new releases when I noticed 21 Up: South Africa came out on DVD this week. It's the third installment in the South African version of The Up Series, Michael Apted's amazing documentary series following the same UK children every seven years since they were seven, in 1964. The Up Series experiment has been repeated in many countries, and they're probably all good because the concept is genius (most are not available in the US), but the South African version sounds particularly moving:
Here, filmmaker Angus Gibson interviews 11 young people of various races and backgrounds as they turn 21. The result is an insightful look at how they've changed and the issues they face such as crime, race relations, education and the AIDS epidemic -- which has killed three of the original 14 children.
If you've seen the original Up Series you know it's unlike any other movie experience. Even though the South African version isn't affiliated, this brilliant idea can't really be overdone.
Apparently this documentary, Trouble the Water, premiered at Sundance this year and won BIG PRIZES, not that we would know because we WEREN'T INVITED. But it looks great, and while you may be able to keep me out of your schwag bag party, you can't disinvite me from paying ten dollars to see it in a movie theater, Robert Communist Russia Redford.
Remember in The Day After Tomorrow, when Jake Gyllenhaal and all his pals were in the New York Public Library and ice was chasing them down the hallway? But then they closed the door to that reading room and all the ice piled up on the door, banging with its ice fists to get in, but they were safe because they'd slammed the door in ice's face? That's all. I just wanted you to remember that.
In the future, entertainment will be completely user-controlled and portable. We will choose what we want to watch, when we want to watch it, and where we want to watch it, as long as where we want to watch it is in a giant submersible, because the world will be underwater. We will also lose our inhibitions about wearing adult diapers, and just start shitting our pants all the time. That's definitely going to happen.
The point being, entertainment takes another soggy step towards its inevitable future with a new website called SnagFilms that functions like Hulu but for documentaries, with full length features including Supersize Me, What Would Jesus Buy?, and my personal favorite, Darkon. This is great news for anyone who loves to learn about the world we live in outside of VH1.
The biggest flaw in Werner Herzog's 2005 amazing cult documentary Grizzly Man is the oppressively strong point of view the director brought to the story of Timothy Treadwell's life. Upon, say, one's ninth viewing, it's almost impossible not to get frustrated when Herzog mentions the "over one hundred hours of footage" shot by Timothy over thirteen summers with the bears, when we only got to see the hour or so Herzog chose to show us. And on or around the fifteenth viewing, one gets fed up with Herzog's strong judgments of Treadwell's life and more than a little suspicious of his editing. The facts of Treadwell's death are so unambiguously horrible that it would have been impossible not to start there and work backwards. But wouldn't any person spending months completely alone in the wilderness with nobody to talk to but a fox and a video camera end up with at least some crazy person videoblogs? Grizzly Man fans have some answers, or at least more footage, to look forward to, in the form of The Grizzly Man Diaries, an 8-part "prequel" to Grizzly Man that will air on Animal Planet starting August 22:
It will draw upon the hundreds of hours of archived footage, private pages from his diaries and more than 10,000 still photographs, ultimately telling the story he truly wanted to before his untimely death from the very creatures he loved so deeply.
The Grizzly Man Diaries, not to be confused with a similarly-titled Discovery Channel special from before Treadwell's death, is from the producers of both Grizzly Man and Werner Herzog's latest film, Encounters At The End Of The World, but no Herzog connection is mentioned in the press release. Which is fine, because we've already heard from him.
Varietyreports that the filmmakers behind Crazy Love, last year's documentary about Burt Pugach and Linda Riss, who got married after Burt spent many years in prison for hiring thugs to (successfully) mutilate and blind Linda by throwing lye in her face, are making a fictional version of the movie for HBO Films:
The characters that drew me to this story in the first place become magnificent roles for actors," Klores said. "These characters are very complex, and not merely ill. Even Burt is not pure evil, though his act was way beyond repulsive.
At first this news seems odd, since the main selling point of documentaries based on amazing true stories is their amazing trueness, but Crazy Love, while well-made, couldn't really succeed because every single person involved or interviewed for it except Jimmy Breslin was sort of just awful.
Monday night's new HBO documentary (part of their summer documentary series) is the scary, Brokedown Palace-esque nightmare story of an Australian woman who traveled to Bali in 2004, checked her luggage, and was arrested for the ten pounds of pot the Balinese officials found in her bag. In Bali, such offenses are punishable by death:
Let's all seriously watch these instead of MTV this summer. Seriously, that Legally Blonde show? Really?
The Wall Street Journal had a story this weekend on the trend of grizzly bear tourism -- yuppies paying guides in British Columbia to show them maneating grizzlies up close (via Buzzfeed). Though the documentary Grizzly Man is never mentioned, it's pretty obvious that the movie (and subsequent grizz-sploitation specials on Animal Planet) had something to do with this boom. Grizzlies are huge right now:
Gourmet meals prepared by a chef, king-size beds, and tourists in the bear's sacred habitat? If he were alive, Timothy Treadwell would probably respond exactly like this.
This is not a spoiler, because it's in any cursory description of the film, but The Happening involves plants and the wind that connects them and nature striking back at man for overstepping his bounds. There are a lot of scenes in The Happening of trees, grass, and bushes waving in the wind. Also, I'm obsessed with the movie Grizzly Man. Maybe it was the Man Vs Nature conflict of both movies, but watching The Happening, I couldn't help but be reminded of this scene in Grizzly Man, where director Werner Herzog finds that images of waving plants "developed their own life, their own mysterious stardom" in doomed hero Timothy Treadwell's b-roll footage.
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