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Archive for the ‘Documentaries’ Category

DVDs: Brainiacs

Posted in Deep thoughts...maybe, Documentaries, New on DVD, tagged , , , on June 24, 2011| 1 Comment »

A balloon the size of a football stadium will lift the BLAST telescope array above Earth's atmosphere to photograph deep space.

The science is hands on and way out there in two recent documentaries just out on DVD:

“BLAST!”:  The title stands for “balloon-bourne large aperture submillimeter telescope” which, I’ll grant you, doesn’t sound all that sexy.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Paul Devlin’s documentary is about a group of astrophysicists who hope to photograph deep space by using a massive balloon — it’s the size of a football stadium — to lift a sophisticated telescope above our atmosphere. There it can drift for several days, taking pictures of parts of our universe never before seen.

Most of the team members — professionals and grad students — hail from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Toronto.

Devlin’s film follows months of preparation as the telescope is hand crafted. Then his cameras tag along (more…)

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“THE WOODMANS”: Art, death and Francesca Woodman

Posted in Art house fare, Documentaries, tagged , , , , , , on June 17, 2011| 4 Comments »

“THE WOODMANS” My rating: B (Opening June 17 at the Screenland Crossroads)

84 minutes | No MPAA rating

How do you compete with a ghost?

That’s the conundrum facing a family of artists in the wake of the suicide of their hugely talented and deeply disturbed daughter.

George and Betty Woodman struggled much of their lives to make it as artists. He was an abstract expressionist painter. She was a ceramicist whose credo was to make useful objects.

But they were easily eclipsed by their daughter Francesca, who picked up a camera in high school and by the time she was enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design was already on the way to being one of the 20th century’s great photographers.

Her classmates recall a girl who didn’t come to learn so much as to refine her already established style. Francesca specialized in self-portraits, often nudes, taken in aging rooms with peeling wallpaper and worn floors.

(more…)

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New DVDs: Killers, role players, surfers and Fidel

Posted in Cinema Espanol, Documentaries, New on DVD, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2011| Leave a Comment »

“God Went Surfing with the Devil”

The surfing documentary has been a cinema staple ever since Bruce Brown’s “Endless Summer” back in 1966, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything quite like “God Went Surfing with the Devil,” professional skateboarder Alexander Klein’s heady blend of Middle Eastern politics and wave-catching abandon.

Klein’s doc follows activists with Surfing4Peace who are attempting to do their small part for world peace by shepherding a shipment of surfboards into Gaza. They envision Arab enthusiasts joining their Jewish counterparts in riding the waves of Gaza’s sandy beaches.

Sounds like an easy enough task, (more…)

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“FORKS OVER KNIVES” : Eat nothing with eyes

Posted in Art house fare, Documentaries, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 3, 2011| Leave a Comment »

“Forks Over Knives”  My rating: B 

90 minutes | No MPAA rating

Eat your veggies.

That’s the message of “Forks Over Knives,” a new documentary that argues that most of the physical maladies afflicting modern man — obesity, diabetes, cancer, pulmonary disease — could be hugely reduced if we steered clear of meat and dairy and chowed down on fresh vegetables, fruit and whole grains.

Lee Fulkerson’s film joins a growing list of titles (“Food, Inc.,” etc.) pushing for a radical rethinking of America’s diet. It presents a thorough, hard-to-refute case based largely on decades of research by two physicians, Caldwell Esselstyn Jr. and T. Colin  Campbell, both of whom grew up on dairy farms and later rejected the dietary wisdom of their youths.

“Forks…” is convincing, citing research (more…)

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