This past Friday, I got one of the many emails I get about upcoming movies and the like. I tend to throw them in the slush pile and try to comb through them when I can. This time, the message wasn’t even about the movie itself, but about the premiere of the trailer for an
Continue reading this entry »Tom Roston
Doc Soup: The Audacity of Hope
Maybe it’s the Obama campaign, but the activist in me is coming out and I’ve got something I’m fired up about. I have to admit, it’s not entirely a selfless cause. It’s something that could have great political impact, but, just as important, it’s something that could make us all laugh. And I think we
Continue reading this entry »Doc Soup: Religulous
What a jerk! That’s all I could think for the first 15 or so minutes of Religulous, the doc that teams up director Larry Charles (Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan) and comedian Bill Maher, the host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. The two funnymen have their
Continue reading this entry »Doc Soup: Is It Time to Adjust Our Definition of Documentary “Characters”?
Writing about documentaries ain’t what it used to be. Not that I would know — I’m just talking with my tongue in my cheek about the supposedly sepia-tinted times before docs were (relatively) big business. I recently wrote a piece for Spin magazine about the great doc, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, which is getting
Continue reading this entry »Doc Soup: Looking Ahead to the Oscars
With the Oscar deadline for submissions now long passed by (September 2; in order to be eligible, a film had to show for one week in Los Angeles and Manhattan), I figured it’s time to stick my head out the window and check who’s in the running for an Academy Award for this year. I
Continue reading this entry »Doc Soup: Docs at the Toronto Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival just wrapped up over the weekend, so I have culled together some of the highlights from the documentary slate. There was a noticeable absence of celebrated Doc Star directors, other than An Inconvenient Truth‘s Davis Guggenheim, who continues to show his range with It Might Get Loud, an homage to
Continue reading this entry »Doc Soup: Crossing Over to the Lighter Side
Shame on you, Jessica Yu, documentary director of such serious and elegant and moving and… important documentaries such as Breathing Lessons, about a writer slowly living and dying in an iron long, In the Realms of the Unreal (POV 2005), about twisted shut-in outsider artist Henry Darger, and Protagonist, linking the lives of four men
Continue reading this entry »Doc Soup: A Late-Summer Search for Docs
Like much of the media world, I’ve decided to check myself out for these latter weeks of August (so much so that I missed my Doc Soup deadline — my apologies to my POV minders!), heading out of New York City to the restful mountains of Vermont. As I always do when I come up
Continue reading this entry »Run For — Not From — “The Hills”!
In honor of this week’s premiere of season four of MTV’s “The Hills,” I’d like to ruminate a bit on the end of the world. Not really, but you’ll get what I mean. The show, in case you’re over 25 and/or don’t subscribe to a magazine other than The Nation, is a reality (I use
Continue reading this entry »The 10 Most Lugubrious Documentaries of All Time
Because my previous doc list — the ten sexiest documentaries — garnered a good amount of interest (and a healthy dose of nastiness), I’ll return to the well for another top ten. Of course, I was tempted to call this my 10 Funniest Documentaries of All Time. But that just struck me as slightly inaccurate.
Continue reading this entry »Upcoming Events
Only the Young
May 20, 2013
6:30 pm
Chattanooga, Tennessee
Join the Chattanooga Film Society for a free screening of Only the Young, the first film in a Summer 2013 POV-themed series. For more information, call 423-266-3766.
More info »