Documentary
Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry Offers a Clear Portrait of Teenage Life: Review
The Pitch: When Billie Eilish was 13 years old, she posted a video of herself singing her song “Ocean Eyes”. Three years later, in 2018, she was already on a fast path to superstardom, and director R.J. Cutler somehow knew to pick up his camera. This is the starting point to his Apple TV+ documentary, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry. Cutler, whose resume includes documentaries such as The September Issue and Belushi, couldn’t have predicted the kind of year he was about to capture. By circling around Eilish’s 18th year, Cutler documented the writing, recording, release, and reaction of her first full-length album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?. He then continued to capture Eilish’s subsequent sold-out shows and festival appearances, radio and magazine interviews, and ...
Snitch 101: Director Details Making Of ‘Supervillain: The Making Of Tekashi 6ix9ine’
Source: @JustInMyView / R1 Digital Snitches are said to get stiches but Hip-Hop’s biggest stool pigeon got a cable television film made about him. But the man behind it insists it doesn’t celebrate the rainbow haired troll. As spotted on Deadline, Supervillain: The Making Of Tekashi 6ix9ine has finally premiered and the public is now getting a better idea of how the Brooklyn native became Rap’s most notorious figure. The unauthorized three-part docuseries explores the roots of the first-generation Mexican and Puerto Rican kid from Bushwick, Brooklyn named Daniel Hernandez. In an exclusive interview director Karam Gill discusses how the project came to be. “Initially, I didn’t want to do the project… he’s not a person at first that I wanted to do a project on, but as I started to ...
Snitch 101: Director Details Making Of ‘Supervillain: The Making Of Tekashi 6ix9ine’
Source: @JustInMyView / R1 Digital Snitches are said to get stiches but Hip-Hop’s biggest stool pigeon got a cable television film made about him. But the man behind it insists it doesn’t celebrate the rainbow haired troll. As spotted on Deadline, Supervillain: The Making Of Tekashi 6ix9ine has finally premiered and the public is now getting a better idea of how the Brooklyn native became Rap’s most notorious figure. The unauthorized three-part docuseries explores the roots of the first-generation Mexican and Puerto Rican kid from Bushwick, Brooklyn named Daniel Hernandez. In an exclusive interview director Karam Gill discusses how the project came to be. “Initially, I didn’t want to do the project… he’s not a person at first that I wanted to do a project on, but as I started to ...
Serj Tankian on His Film Truth to Power, the Chaos Around Toxicity, and the Time He Feared for His Life
Serj Tankian’s life as an activist and musician is captured in the new documentary, Truth to Power. The just-released film offers a fascinating look at the singer’s journey inside and outside of his multiplatinum rock band System of a Down. Following Tankian’s path from his childhood to to his pre-SOAD band Forever Young to the present day, Truth to Power features testimonials by Serj and his bandmates, along with such associates as producer Rick Rubin and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello. The film also uses archival video to tell Tankian’s story of activism, while also touching on the origins and highlights of System of a Down’s career. Interspersed are newly shot scenes that include the singer visiting his old high school in Hollywood and voyaging to Armenia during a revolutio...
New Tom Petty Documentary To Premiere at SXSW 2021 Film Festival
With Sundance now behind us, South by Southwest has gone ahead and announced its feature film lineup for 2021. Set to take place virtually from March 16th to 20th, the Austin-based festival will screen nearly a hundred new features. Not surprisingly, the major highlights of the lineup are of the musical variety, specifically documentaries Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free, Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil, and the Charli XCX-focused Alone Together. “It’s been a year unlike any we’ve experienced, first marked by the cancellation of SXSW 2020,” said Janet Pierson, Director of Film. “We feel privileged to have been able to pivot to SXSW Online and present a fantastic treasure trove of programming, including a pared down and wonderful selection of films that we know will delight, ente...
Documentary on Four Seasons Total Landscaping in the Works
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...
New HBO Documentary Investigates Woody Allen Abuse Allegations
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...
Summer of Soul Is Questlove’s Thrumming Ode to Black Music and Culture: Sundance 2021 Review
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 ...
‘MLK/FBI’ Documentary Zeroes In On FBI’s Plans To Destroy Martin Luther King Jr.
Source: Christian HIROU / Getty Martin Luther King Jr. attracted the attention of not only his loyal group of supporters during the height of the Civil Rights Movement but also that of detractors hoping to defame him. While it has become common knowledge that the FBI took aim at the leader in hopes of destroying him, a new documentary from IFC Films takes a deeper look inside that nefarious plot. MLK/FBI, now in theaters as well as at home on demand, highlights the FBI’s designed plan to tear down King by way of recently released documents, who was surging among not only Black Americans rallying behind his cause but also with liberal-minded whites as well. As viewers learn while watching MLK/FBI, William C. Sullivan, the FBI’s director of domestic intelligence, wrote in an internal memo wo...
MLK/FBI Sure Feels Like a Film of the Moment: Review
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...
Rage Against the Machine Release Killing in Thy Name Documentary About Race: Watch
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...
Alice Cooper, Roger Daltrey, KISS, Judas Priest, and More Star in Rock Camp, The Movie: Watch Trailer
A new documentary feature film titled Rock Camp, The Movie features such music icons as Alice Cooper, The Who’s Roger Daltrey, KISS, Judas Priest, and more. The movie chronicles the journey of four everyday people as they attend Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp. Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp has been going on for 25 years, where aspiring musicians get to hang out and jam with legendary musicians. The movie takes viewers on a backstage pass of the camp, offering an inside look at what goes on during a typical experience. Among the rockers featured in the movie are Daltrey (who was a big part of getting Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp off the ground), Cooper, KISS’ Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, Judas Priest’s Rob Halford and Richie Faulkner, Sammy Hagar, Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, Heart’s Nancy Wilson, ...
