Thomas Edison is the most well known 'inventor' in the US. Oneof the reasons is his endless self-promotion. That's not to say thatEdison doesn't deserve to be known, he and the scientists he employed didcreate a lot of useful things, but the Wizard of Menlo Park wasn't theonly person who was changing the world in the early 20th Century. One person who, arguably, had more of an impact than Edison was inventor,engineer, and industrialist, George Westinghouse. In a attempt togive the man his due, writer/director Mark Bussler has produced and releasedan informative and entertaining film about the man and the companies hecreated, simply entitled Westinghouse.

George Westinghouse obtained his first patent while still in his teensand his second, a method for switching trains to alternate tracks, notsoon after that. He'd average a n...Read the entire review

In the digital age, any idiot can make a movie. Dr. Ravi Godse would like you to know that he's an idiot ("Just ask my wife!") and thus the perfect man for the job.

Godse, by day a respectable Pittsburgh physician, felt the itch to become a filmmaker, and so, with the help of friends and family, he made "Dr. Ravi & Mr. Hyde," in which Godse (who wrote, directed, produced, and co-edited) plays himself as he struggles to make his first movie. This meta premise is more inspired than the finished product, but at least the good doctor gets points for cleverness.

The story follows Godse as he hits a midlife crisis - he wrote a novel, but that didn't do much, and now he wants to journey into film (or video, as it were). With so many wealthy co-workers, procuring financing should be a snap, while a crash course at the local film school would teach him everything he needs to know. He's wrong o...Read the entire review

As a fan of documentaries and old-school video games, it makes sense that something like Classic Game Room (2007) would be right up my alley. Directed by Mark Bussler, this feature-length documentary---subtitled "the rise and fall of the Internet's greatest video game review show"---takes us back to 1999, when the Internet was a little less crowded, DVD Talk was just getting started and download speeds were a lot slower. This was also the year that Bussler and David Crosson created Game Room, one of the first online shows of its kind...if not the first. Dedicated to reviewing a mixture of classic and contemporary games (from the Atari 2600 to the fledgling Sega Dreamcast), Game Room was shot on a shoestring budget by two enthusiastic friends who met in film school. In other w...Read the entire review

The movie

Blood and Oil: The Middle East inWorld War I is a solid piece of documentary filmmaking. It's amore serious historical study than the rather sensationalistic titleand cover art would imply; in fact, both of those are rathermisleading, making it seem like the film is focused on the politicsof conflict over oil resources. In fact, it's the subtitle that bestcaptures what the program is about: the events of World War I in theregion of the Middle East, and their consequences on the politicaland social stability of the region.

After a brief introduction that tiesthe 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US into the ongoing history of warin the Middle East, Blood and Oil jumps right into the eventsof World War I. The 112-minute program goes into great detail on thevarious military campaigns and battles there during ...Read the entire review

From Inecom Entertainment comes World War 1: American Legacy, a wonderful documentary from their Minutes of History series. Utilizing spectacular black and white stills, paintings, propaganda posters, and newspaper clippings, World War 1: American Legacy bypasses a traditional chronological, straightforward history lesson on The Great War, to give the viewer a more impressionistic feel for the conflict, highlighting stories of influential people who impacted events in the War to End all Wars. Narrated by David Carradine, World War 1: American Legacy is a marvelous introduction to this increasingly forgotten conflict.

At the start of World War 1: American Legacy, the narration makes the point that World War I has steadily drifted out of our consc...Read the entire review

Antietam. September 17th, 1862. The single bloodiest day of battle in American history- for the obvious reason that only Americans were participants. While numbers differ, something in the way of 23,000 lives were taken on both sides in this one battle; by way of comparison, American casualties at D-Day, the Normandy Invasion, amounted to only one quarter of the number of Americanlives lost at Antietam. Nearly twice as many lives were lost on this day as were lost in The American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War combined. To bring oneself to grasp those facts is to get a better understanding of how horrible the American CivilWar was.

The Battle Of Antietam was of utmost importance at this stage of the Civil Waras the Union needed a victory for a number of reasons- up to this point things had gone so overwhelmingly the South's way that many saw the war as ...Read the entire review

There are certain elements from our past that we still know very little about. The Civil War, for all the fine documentaries and middling motion pictures made about it, still remains an epic enigma, a story waiting to be told in a true vast and visionary fashion. The American Revolution also suffers from severe under-representation. Perhaps it is the period piece particulars that make it so difficult to translate. From the taming of the West (which is NOT the same thing as Westerns) to the grist and grime of the Industrial Revolution, individuals basically go their whole lives without learning how any of the great events that shaped their nation came to be. Books can't do it, and we've long given up on the whole "oral history" idea of passing down information. So it's up to the visual media to strike a spark. Unfortunately, all the flame they create burns low and quickly.

The Columbian Exposition/189...Read the entire review

Themovie

Gettysburg and Stories of Valor, the third installment in thedocumentary series Civil War Minutes, ought to carry a largelabel indicating "For die-hard Civil War history buffs only."It's not a bad program at all, but it does have such a tight focusthat it's likely to delight the kind of people who participate inCivil War re-enactments, at the expense of other viewers, even thosewho ordinarily enjoy historical documentaries.

The program is best described as a video anthology dealing with CivilWar topics, in this case focused on events associated with the battleof Gettysburg. There are a total of 30 different segments included,and each is an entirely separate, stand-alone piece; there's ...Read the entire review

the Film:

The line between morally dubious and morally repugnant is an amorphous one at best, but in a mere sixty-five minutes Mark Bussler not only finds that line in Johnstown Flood, he obliterates it with gleefully sadistic disdain. For an awesome tragedy in which an estimated three thousand people met a particularly cruel fate – facilitated largely by greed, contempt, and indifference – Johnstown elects to wallow in descriptions, representations, and, worst of all, dramatizations of horrific human suffering. Anyone seeking sociopolitical analysis of the period beyond the cursory will find no relief here after the first ten minutes; those seeking titillation and abject, tasteless misery will find themselves in good company.

On May 31, 1889, the South Fork dam collapsed and sent more than twenty million tons of water raging through the Conemaugh Valley in Pennsyl...Read the entire review

THE STRAIGHT DOPE:

Looking to bring a significant American disaster back into the public eye filmmaker Mark Bussler has created the documentary Johnstown Flood, which follows the events leading up to a calamity that took over two-thousand lives. Certainly this is one of the most tragic natural disasters in history but what makes it a compelling subject is how complicitous people were in bringing it about.

Without going into too much detail, the Johnstown flood was partly brought on by human ignorance and poor-planning. Johnstown was a bustling mining and mill community, and was home to industrial and social stratification, with iron workers living in flimsy housing along the river and railroad and iron barons using the area as a playground. The South Fork Dam, which was at the heart of the flood, was patched cheaply and poorly over the years, having key water control pipes...Read the entire review