truefilm

Finally, a film about a political campaign where viewers will want to root for several candidates (I think). Vanessa Roth’s and Alexandra Gray’s film The Third Monday In October covers the Fall 2004 election…at four middle schools in the United States.
The film follows a dozen 12-year-old candidates at schools in Marin County (near San Francisco), […]

From a Boston Globe article about the film, Into Great Silence:
NEW YORK — When German filmmaker Philip Gröning was invited by the nearly 1,000-year-old Carthusian order of monks to become the first outsider allowed to film inside the Grand Chartreuse, one of the world’s most ascetic monasteries, nestled deep in the French Alps, he sought […]

Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s upcoming seven-part series on World War II, The War, “tells the story of the Second World War through the personal accounts of nearly 50 men and women from four quintessentially American towns.”
In this film, everyone on camera was directly affected by the war, either on the battlefield or at home. […]

Newsday critic Andy Edelstein describes Lawrence Welk’s TV Treasures, the upcoming PBS doc on accordion-wielding bandleader, as, “‘Behind the Music’ - minus the sex, scandal and drugs.”
The Oklahoma Network, Welk’s home during his public TV years, issued a press release, posted a Making Of article (You think you have media management issues: “With over one […]

Brief background: Josh Wolf videotaped a 2005 protest in San Francisco. He sold some of the video to a local television station and posted some on the Web. Some other television stations copied and broadcast his Web video. A policeman was injured and a police car was damaged during the protest. Wolf refused to comply […]

Sometimes a trailer is so good, I don’t want to see the whole film for fear that it won’t live up to the three-minute tease. The trailer for Air Guitar Nation is great, but I’ll still go see the film (in spite of the film’s use of the increasingly-common shtick of hanging the narrative on […]

In case you somehow missed the media blitz, the indiosyncratic mostly non-fiction weekly radio show This American Life is coming to cable television. Like the radio show, each tv program is hosted by Ira Glass, and contains segments loosely connected by a theme such as Babysitting, Houses of Ill Repute, or Apology.
So how did Glass […]

That’s what John Biaggi, Deputy Director of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival thinks. “With so many human rights films being made, what I see is a lot of poorly produced and/or poorly conceived films. The actual percentage of each year’s films that are really good has not moved up at all. In fact, […]

It depends who you ask. Heck, it depends which Iraq in Fragments principal you ask. Before introducing the feature documentary nominees at last week’s Oscar, comedian Jerry Seinfeld spent most of his time talking about garbage in movie theaters, and then said all the doc nominees were “incredibly depressing.” (The only post of Seinfeld’s routine […]

US Representatives Rick Boucher and John Doolittle want to amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) “to protect the fair use rights of users of copyrighted material.” So they introduced the “Freedom And Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship Act of 2007 (FAIR USE Act).”
A press release from Boucher’s office suggests the new bill differs from two […]