Results tagged “documentaries”

“Choose your enemies carefully, ‘cause they will define you,” the adage goes. Muhammad Ali doesn’t have a lot of enemies anymore — 28 years after his last professional fight, and 25 after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he remains among the most beloved figures in American public life.

      

Huge lines wound around the AFI Silver Theatre on the Closing Night of SILVERDOCS with people -- old, young, black, white, east and west of the river -- all pondering the same general question.

“Bad food is bad. Bad books are bad. Bad movies are not always bad,” critic Scott Weinberg tells us in Best Worst Movie, an absorbing and surprisingly well-reported look back at the immortal 1989 trainwreck, Troll 2. It's directed by Michael Paul Stephenson, who appeared in the film when he was ten years old.

Bryan Singer spent something like $200 million a few years back trying to revive the Superman movie franchise. Shaikh Nasir’s Malegaon ka Superman came somewhat more frugally: about two grand. But every rupee of that modest sum is on the screen. He shoots on a handheld digicam. A "dolly shot" consists of three guys stabilizing him and pushing him forward on a bicycle while he clutches the camera with both hands. And he sure isn’t going to hire a stunt double for Sheikh Shafique, the poor, scrawny bastard he’s cast as the Last Son of Krypton.

There are documentaries that entertain and many more that educate, and there are plenty that grab you by the lapels and spout hummus-breath in your face about how you need to stop eating meat and trade your vulgar, barbarous combustion-powered vehicle in for a bike — today! Then there are the rare documentaries that prod you, subtly but insistently, to reexamine the way you’re living.

As you probably noticed from our first review this morning, the SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival is now underway in Silver Spring, Md. The festival runs beginning today through Monday, June 23, and presents 108 documentary films over the course of the week. Now in its sixth year, SILVERDOCS is by far and away the classiest and best run film festival the D.C. metro area has to offer, and DCist will be crawling all over the Downtown Silver Spring complex over the next several days to bring you our best bets for what you shouldn't miss.

“So the thing you have to understand is this is radio,” says the voice in the darkness — a little bit squeaky, a little bit nasal, not at all the voice you’d assign to the leader of a benign radio cult if it weren't already so familiar.

Ilana Trachtman is a television documentary producer by trade, but when presented with the story of Lior Liebling, she jumped into the choppier waters of independent filmmaking for the opportunity to make her debut feature. Lior is a young man with Down Syndrome, born to two Reconstructionist Jewish rabbis in Philadelphia. From an early age, he showed an unusually ardent interest in davening, the recitation of Jewish liturgical prayers, reciting the melodic prayers along with his mother. Sadly, his mother also discovered while Lior was young that she was suffering from cancer. One of her most fervent wishes was to be able to see his Bar Mitzvah, but she passed away long before the occasion.

Remember when you were a kid, and mom and dad slid a steaming plate of Brussels sprouts, or spinach, or broccoli in front of you, and commanded, "Eat it. It's good for you!" You know now that they were right. And even back then, you probably had some sense that it was probably the right thing to do. That didn't make the experience any more enjoyable, though. Nanking, a new documentary produced by Washington Capitals owner and former AOL exec Ted Leonsis, is sort of like that plate of vegetables.