The Movie:

Ever given much thought to that gawky yet majestic fixture of the seashore, the pelican? Documentarian Judy Irving apparently has, and the sweetly meandering Pelican Dreams is the result. In this interesting, well-photographed film, the director of the acclaimed The Parrots of Telegraph Hill explores her own personal love of the pelican, musing over the birds' place in nature as feisty predators and pointing out the varied challenges they face as their habitats become more imperiled (by industrial fishing, global warming, etc.). Although the film is a pretty slight affair at just under 80 minutes, Docurama's DVD edition supplements the movie with a pouchful of bonus footage.

For those who remember The Parrots of Telegraph HillRead the entire review

The Movie:

Make no mistake; Girl Rising is an issue film, a docudrama strictly for the converted, at least when it comes to the marketing and sale of this particular DVD to American audiences, none of which I hope believes girls should not receive any education.

It comes complete with the obligatory celebrity voice-over, in this case Liam Neeson with a particular set of stoic voice-over skills, informing the audience about the worldwide benefits of educating poor girls in developing countries so they can be more independent, contribute more to the world economy and become smarter about important socio-economic issues like birth control. It even ends with a list of web sites where we can support various charities that can give these disenfranchised and abused girls a chance to make a difference for themselves and the world.

I know that all of this makes Girl Rising sound like...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have inspired too many documentaries to count, many based on crackpot conspiracy theories. The scrappy 7 Days in September stands out in a crowded field for taking a raw, immediate, localized perspective on the day's tragedies. For this 2002 effort, director Steven Rosenbaum focused on the World Trade Center terrorist attack by documenting how it specifically affected the New Yorkers and New Jerseyites who witnessed the tragedy firsthand.

7 Days in September has a simple structure. It's a spectator's-eye-view of the events of September 11th and the week that followed, done via footage and recollections of 23 different amateur filmmakers. The raw power of what's shown and heard makes up for the film's lack of technical polish (lots of inappropriate, sudden zooms and jerky camera movements).

Because it was apparently made ...Read the entire review

(The Movie):

When I started watching Roberta Grossman's documentary, Hava Nagila (The Movie), my expectations were low. Even the promised appearances by Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy and singer-songwriter Regina Spektor were not enough to rev up my excitement. Noting the film has a running time that's a shade under 75 minutes and sensing an overall goofball vibe in the opening moments, it seemed like a guaranteed puff piece. Having finished watching the film, I will say this: Grossman does stall a little too long in her "What's with this corny wedding song?" opening and then she unnecessarily pads out her "This song has forgotten meaning" conclusion. The pleasant shocker is that in between that stuff is a surprisingly engrossing 55-60 m...Read the entire review

The Movie:

With famed drug kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera getting nabbed by authorities this past week, the Mexican drug war returns again to the front pages of U.S. newspapers. The new documentary by photojournalist Shaul Schwarz, Narco Cultura, paints a portrait of two men whose livelihoods are tied in utterly different ways to this ever-increasing tide of violence and bloodshed in Mexico.

First, we are introduced to crime scene investigator Richi Soto, a low-key sort of guy who continues to work in forensics in Juárez, Mexico, despite a number of his colleagues getting assassinated in the past few years. The investigators are shown frequently wearing ski masks as a precaution, in case cartel members are lingering at the crime sce...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

There's a cliché that goes, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."

This must be a frustrating slogan for someone like Josh Fox, whose 2010 documentary Gasland struck many of us as the last word on hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) and the effects natural gas drilling has on the citizens and property in surrounding areas. Intrigued about the realities of the process when confronted with signing a lucrative deal to let fuel companies drill under his family home in Pennsylvania, Fox discovered that fracking regularly contaminated local water supplies. His film, which was eventually nominated for an Academy Award, showed Fox travelling around the country talki...Read the entire review

Though I'm not quite old enough to remember when Richard Nixon was president, being born shortly before he was elected to his second term, I've had a strange curiosity about him as he has thus far been the only United States president to resign from office. Among the items confiscated by the FBI in the famous Watergate investigation, which tied Nixon to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, were about 500 Super 8 film reels of personal footage shot by the president's Chief of Staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, Nixon's Domestic Affairs Advisor John Erlichman and Special Assistant Dwight Chapin. Each had obtained a Super 8 camera (before home video cameras were practical) and receiving free film and processing from the US Navy Photographic Center they filmed pretty much whatever they wanted. At the time they thought of it as a contribution to Nixon's eventual presidential records, as w...Read the entire review

Love,Marilyn is anewdocumentary that explores Marilyn Monroe in a way that has never beenexploredbefore as it features a gigantic array of Hollywood celebrities readingfromboth books written about Marilyn and from personal papers, diaries, andletterswhich were written by her without being previously released to thepublic. Thewide array of material written by Marilyn which is now presented inthisdocumentary is eye-opening and presents her through her own voice.

Read the entire review

The Movie:

Finally making its Region 1 DVD debut in time for its 25th anniversary, Bruce Weber's Oscar-nominated documentary portrait of jazz legend Chet Baker, Let's Get Lost, arrives both as part of a four-movie Weber retrospective box set and as a stand-alone disc.

A mixture of interviews from 1987 (shot months before Baker died from falling out a hotel window in Amsterdam) and archive footage and photos from Baker's younger days, Let's Get Lost is part-biography/part-artful reverie that favors an achronological approach to relaying Baker's history, pieced together largely from reminiscences from family, friends, former lover...Read the entire review

The Movie:

In America's hospital emergency rooms, patients wait for an average of four hours and seven minutes to be seen. The 2012 documentary The Waiting Room provides enough shots of people waiting around to prove that tidbit correct. More importantly, the film is a devastating and heartbreaking glimpse into our damaged healthcare system.

Chronicling a 24-hour cycle on the Emergency Room floor at an Oakland, California hospital, The Waiting Room tells its story in an unadorned, surprisingly non-judgmental way. Director Peter Nicks approaches the subject with thankfully few gimmicks - just a few instances of time-lapse photography and musical scoring intrude in what is otherwise a bracingly real, contemplative film. Acclaimed upon its releas...Read the entire review

Unlike some aging rock groups, there appears to be a clear cultural divide on the music of Journey. Their particular style of big riffs and emotional vocals distinctly recalls the period during the early '80s when the band was at the peak of their popularity, which, for many people, suggests big hair and kitsch rather than a golden age of rock music. On the other hand, "Don't Stop Believin'" is the best-selling rock song in digital music history, so clearly the band still has a huge fanbase in the 21st century. Complicating matters is the loss of the lead singer. In 1998, Journey tapped Steve Augeri as the replacement for Steve Perry, but Augeri left due to complications with his voice in 2006, forcing the band to hunt for someone new.

Aside from big hair, the 1980s also call up a certain cloying type of national pride. Not a positive sense of America as a melting pot where people are free to chase t...Read the entire review

The Movie::
One of the more lovely documentary features I've had the pleasure to view in the last few years, "The Fruit Hunters" is, quite simply, delicious. While certainly not as intense or dramatized as Travel Channel's "Dangerous Grounds" (where La Colombe Coffee owner Todd Carmichael searches remote and often dangerous areas for the most perfect coffee beans), "Fruit Hunters" is a bit similar in subject.

The documentary, which is "inspired by" Adam Gollner's book, is directed by Yung Chang and co-written by Chang and Mark Slutsky. The film focuses on the broad topic of people obsessed with creating their own "Garden Of Eden" - finding their own pure bliss within reach: the delight of exotic fruits that deliver hints of specific flavors, like a fine wine (or really good chocolate - I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds it difficult to go back to your standard Hershey bar afte...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Made by director Julien Temple, he of The Great Rock N Roll Swindle and Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten fame, 2012's London: The Modern Babylon is made up primarily of archival footage culled from the massive vaults of the BBC and the BFI. Narrated by Michael Gambon, this is one of many documentary films that Temple has made over the last ten years or so, and while many of his past documentary features have focused on bands and musicians, this time around he puts the city he calls home under the microscope.

The movie moves in chronological order, beginning with some of the earliest filmed footage of London ever made way back in the 1890s. From there, it follows various events and important people related to the city's history to what is more or less the current day, right up to the beginning of the Olympic Games. Along the way we get glimpses of ...Read the entire review

While I'm not a huge fan of documentaries, I try to give them a fair shot. After all, documentary filmmakers are trying to shed light on a subject, open our eyes to a problem, give us a glimpse of a world that we don't normally see. And isn't that what's missing from so many major movies, a real reason for the film? So many projects are throwaways, meant to make a profit more than anything. But documentaries are created for a specific purpose, and for that I respect them. Now, that doesn't mean I always enjoy them, some are quite boring, but a few do come along that are both captivating and interesting and those are the ones that are worth looking out for. If you've ever seen and liked Life in...Read the entire review

The Movie:

If your only exposure to Allen Ginsberg comes via James Franco's self-indulgent portrayal of the poet/activist in 2010's Howl … well, I think you're a very sad person. There's an easy way to remedy that, however. Get to the nearest library, check out his best writings, and look out for the documentary The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg.

Truth be told, Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) lived such a long and varied life that any attempt to bottle the man's essence in a documentary is bound to come up short. With The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, director Jerry Aronson does an admirable job of recounting the various stages of that life concisely, in chronological order. Premiering on PBS in the early '90s, the piec...Read the entire review

The Movie:

What were you doing on October 10th, 2010?

Aside from the numerical uniqueness of 10/10/10, chances are it was a day like any other for most people. You awoke, had a meal, possibly went to work, or worshiped the deity or football team of your choice (it was a Sunday, remember). That particular day was a memorable one for the participants in the documentary One Day on Earth, however, since it was chosen as the 24-hour period in which thousands of amateurs and professionals were instructed to turn their cameras on and document what they saw.

Billed as "the first film made in every country of the world on the same day," One Day on Earth packs a lot of imagery into a dazzling 104 minutes. For the project, director Kyle Ruddick winnowed 3,000 hours of footage into thematically similar segments on subjects like family life, industrialization, recreation, poverty and war...Read the entire review

With his 2011 film Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, documentarian Joseph Dorman plumbs into something that must be challenging for people in his field: making a Man of Letters whose work has passed into history look relevant and interesting.

The Russian-born Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) is best known for his "Tevye" short stories, which formed the basis for the still revived musical warhorse Fiddler on the Roof. Although the film's packaging and marketing uses Fiddler as its hook, Dorman's documentary deals mostly with the man himself and how his writing served as an escape from the unimaginable pain that his audience - persecuted Eastern European Jews in the late 19th and early 20th century - endured.

La...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Anthony Baxter's 2011 documentary You've Been Trumped bills itself on the packaging as a 'David and Goliath tale' and that's a pretty apt comparison. Essentially what this movie covers is a series of events that began in 2006 when Trump decided that since he's filthy rich, he should be able to do whatever he wants. In this particular instance, what he wanted to do was buy up some land in Aberdeen, Scotland and build a fancy golf course. This sounds reasonable enough. Trump is, after all, a real estate and development mogul and as frequently insane and irrational as he can be, there's no denying that the man has a serious knack for such opportunities.

Unfortunately for Trump but fortunately for the rest of us, the good people of the area in question weren't really interested in having Trump come in and bulldoze their homes, many of which have been in their respect...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
Inside the world of all-lady '80s pro wrestling

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Documentaries
Likes: Pro wrestling (when I was a kid), G.L.O.W. (when I was a kid)
Dislikes: My disturbing memories of G.L.O.W.
Hates: Pro wrestling (now)

The Show
When I was a kid, Saturday mornings were all about the Saturday morning cartoons on network TV. When they would do the prime-time fall cartoon previews, and you got to see all the new shows coming, it was like a second Christmas. But when the clock turned 12, I would flip over to WPIX on channel 11 and wrap up my morning with G.L.O.W, the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. As a hardcore wrestling fan, this mid-day helping of grappling was like manna from heaven...Read the entire review

The Movie

As far as nature documentaries go, 2011's The Whale delves into issues that reach well beyond the "look at the cute penguins" stuff commonly seen on television.

Directed by journalists Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfitt, The Whale relives the joy and controversy that resulted when a playful orphaned killer whale appeared near a village on Canada's Western coast, and the efforts to reunite the stranded mammal with his family. While the film serves as a relatively straightforward chronicle of what happened, it also brings up some thorny questions dealing with humankind's interactions with animals - namely, when does helping out overlap into intrusion, and when should nature simply be allowed to run its course?

The events recounted in <...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed in 2010 by Mark Edlitz, Jedi Junkies takes on the fairly massive task of exploring the more obsessive side of hardcore Star Wars fandom. We're not talking about the people who own the six films on DVD or Blu-ray and pull them off the shelf a few times a year to enjoy on a weekend for kicks, we're talking about the guys who build life sized scale replicas of the Millennium Falcon in their backyard and then have sex inside it. We're talking about the ladies who dress up like Slave Leia from Return Of The Jedi and then belly dance across a convention floor and we're talking about the guys who teach courses in the proper uses of a lightsaber. What about a dude who builds custom made lightsabers in his shed and who has built a decent little business out of this talent? He's here too. Oh, and there's a Star Wars inspired band here called Aerosit...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Wayne White is a painter, puppeteer, musician, and production designer who has worked in fine arts and on television. Even if you don't know his name, you most likely know his work. Most of it is covered in some capacity in Neil Berkeley's documentary Beauty is Embarrassing: The Wayne White Story, and the more credits that get rattled off and artifacts that get shown, the more astonished you are likely to become. Wayne White has been all over the place, you just didn't realize it was the same guy.

You ever watch Pee-Wee's Playhouse? White was an integral member of the design team and one of the puppeteers on the show, including doing the voices for Randy a...Read the entire review

Imagine you woke up one morning, walked into your bathroom, twisted the knob or handle on the faucet, and...nothing came out. You then open the toilet, push on the handle, and...it doesn't flush. Maybe it drains, but it doesn't refill. The hose outside doesn't work. There's no bottled water to be found. You get in your car and drive to the nearest store or restaurant, but their faucets and taps and drinking fountains don't work either. Sure, this is a nightmare scenario, but Last Call at the Oasis has bad news: it's not just a projection, it's frighteningly close to reality for millions of people all over the world, and if America doesn't consider the future now, we're next.

Filmmaker Jessica Yu, inspired by the book "The Ripple Effect" by Alex Prud'homme, takes no prisoners in her assessment of American water usage. After an opening in parts of the world where crowds of people fight over a si...Read the entire review

The Movies:

Isn't the American judicial system supposed to stand by the motto "innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?" If that's the case, why are Jessie Miskelly, Jason Baldwin, Damien Wayne Echols sitting prison, Damien on death row? That's the question posed by the Emmy Award winning Paradise Lost: The Child Murders At Robin Hood Hills, a 1996 documentary from Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (who would later go on to make Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster) originally made for HBO. The film makes a pretty damn good case that these three kids got screwed by their community.

Better known as The West Memphis Three, Miskelly, Baldwin and Echols are currently incarcerated for the gruesome and horrifying murders of three boys in a rural section of West Memphis, Arkansas known as Robin Hood Hills. The three bodies were discovered on a river bank, mutilate...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

In 1998, Lawrence Wright co-wrote The Siege, an action-heavy Denzel Washington/Bruce Willis drama that asked a simple question: what would Americans do if terrorists attacked our shores? How would we turn on our own citizens? How negotiable would our personal liberties become? These were all hyptotheticals, of course, and the attention the film received was mostly from Arab groups, who objected to its portrayal of radical Islamic terrorists. That was then; come September 2001, the film Wright co-wrote suddenly seemed eerily prescient. Wright ended up writing the essential book The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11; Alex Gibney's terrific documentary My Trip to Al-Qaeda is loosely centered on Wright's subsequent off-Broadway one-man show, which he did to purge himself ...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

The long, strange, horrible story of the West Memphis Three finally comes to a close in Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's final chapter in the documentary trilogy that, after 18 years, released three innocent men from prison and saved one of their lives. Not since Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line has a documentary film so directly impacted the judicial system, and even Morris's masterpiece didn't muster up the kind of relentless public outcry as the continuing saga of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Miskelly, who spent nearly two decades behind bars for the brutal murders of three Cub Scouts in West Memphis, Arkansas.

The first quarter of Berlinger and Sinofsky's new film is primarily background and catch-up, helpful for filling in viewers new to the story and refreshing those who saw Read the entire review