Four Seasons Total Landscaping is still cashing in on its increased exposure thanks to the bumbling, blundering 2020 Trump campaign. Since the humble Philadelphia business became the accidental site of a Rudy Giuliani press conference back in November, the company has raked it in with exclusive merch and that cheeky “Opportunity Knocks” Super Bowl ad for Fiverr. Now, the debacle that started this whole thing will become the focus of a new documentary from a pair of Oscar-winning producers. Entitled Four Seasons Total Documentary, the in-production film is being directed by Christopher Stoudt (Patron Saint of Jazz Fest). Glen Zipper and Sean Stuart, who won Academy Awards in 2012 for their high school football doc Undefeated, are serving as producers (via The Hollywood Reporter). Four Seaso...
Allen v. Farrow (HBO) HBO has shared the first teaser trailer for Allen v. Farrow, a four-part documentary about the allegations that Woody Allen sexually abused his daughter Dylan Farrow. The first episode debuts Sunday, February 21st, with new installments arriving on subsequent Sundays. From 1979 to 1992, Allen and Mia Farrow made 13 films together and had three children, two adopted and one biological. Their relationship unraveled after Farrow discovered Allen had begun a sexual relationship with 21-year-old Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow’s adopted daughter from a previous relationship. Soon afterwards, then seven-year-old Dylan accused Allen of sexually molesting her in Farrow’s home. Allen has repeatedly denied the allegations and suggested that she was pushed to make the claims by...
This review is part of our Sundance 2021 coverage. The Pitch: In 1969, the same summer as Woodstock, a different music festival played just 100 miles away in Harlem. It was the third annual Harlem Culture Festival, a weeks-long celebration of soul, Motown, blues, and gospel where nearly 300,000 people gathered and celebrated the sounds of Stevie Wonder, Mavis Staples, Nina Simone, and a host of other Black artists at the time. But the festival was more than, as it would be haphazardly marketed, the “Black Woodstock”. It was a nexus around which so many facets of Black life at the time would intersect, from Afrocentrism to the Black Panthers (who would provide security for the event) to the renewed reclaiming of the word “Black” to identify themselves in print and in person. The music ...
The Pitch: What we publicly and historically know about Martin Luther King Jr. is as follows. The reverend was a pacifist and advocate for civil rights who rose to prominence in the 1960s. A champion for Black Americans, Dr. King was an oratory master, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning voice for a still-maligned class of citizens, and a firm believer in non-violent protest and demonstration. What many people don’t know – unless they’ve maybe seen movies like Ava DuVernay’s Selma — is that the goddamn Federal Bureau of Investigation dogged King for the entirety of his public life as a speaker and organizer. We’re talking wiretaps, plants, offensive leaks and letters pertaining to MLK’s infidelities, all to discredit a “communist” and an “agitator” under the auspices of J. Edgar Hoover’s square-ja...
The socio-political events of the past five years have been a too-fitting backdrop for Rage Against The Machine’s music. The legendary rock group weren’t able to tour the country last year as planned, but today they’re giving their artistic response to the reignited racial justice movement with a new documentary called Killing in Thy Name. The project is a collaboration with a collective of international artists called The Ummah Chroma (which translates to “communities of color”), and it seeks to be “a fire escape from the fiction known as whiteness and a spring for discovery.” The bulk of the 15-minute endeavor features footage of a teacher and some schoolchildren learning about the west’s dark history of slavery, manifest destiny, and the very concept of “whiteness” within the conte...