Sure, Sunday tends to be overcrowded with high-end TV, including "True Blood," "The Newsroom," "Copper," "Dexter," "Ray Donovan" and more, but what to watch the rest of the time? Every Monday, we bring you five noteworthy highlights from the other six days of the week. "First Comes Love": Broadcast Premiere Monday, July 29 at 9pm on HBO Nina Davenport, the filmmaker whose chronicling of Iraqi film student Muthana Mohmed's internship on "Everything is Illuminated" found her inexorably being dragged into the story herself in 2007's "Operation Filmmaker," turns her camera fully on herself in her new documentary "First Comes Love." The 41-year-old New Yorker documents her journey toward single motherhood when she finds herself entering her 40s with no steady partner in sight and a growing concern that the window during which she can have a child is coming to an end. "Pov": "Neurotypical" Monday, July 29 at 10pm...
- 7/29/2013
- by Alison Willmore
- Indiewire
Operation Filmmaker Directed by: Nina Davenport Cast: Muthana Mohmed, Nina Davenport, Liev Schreiber Running Time: 1 hr 30 min Rating: Unrated Plot: Muthana Mohmed attends film school in Iraq until it is bombed during the invasion of Baghdad in 2003. In an act of charity, Director Liev Schreiber invites him to work as a Pa on the set of Everything is Illuminated. There, instead of stepping up to the challenge, he flounders. After they're done filmming, Mohmed decides he doesn't want to return to Iraq, where conditions have deteriorated. He then struggles to maintain travel visas and support himself financially in Europe. Who’s It For? Viewers who enjoy documentaries where the filmmaker plays a large part. People interested in another perspective on the Iraq war. Those who don't mind cursing. Expectations: The DVD box had a line...
- 1/6/2009
- The Scorecard Review
By Michael Atkinson
As the Korean New Wave fades and dissipates, from a throng of cultural force fields to a mere battery of individual filmographies, ambitious or withering or otherwise, one director stands as the most passionately embraced and steadily distributed in the tradition of imported art films. Strangely, it's Hong Sang-soo, not Park Chan-wook or Bong Joon-ho, both of whose pulpy trajectories have stalled and didn't, in any event, summon the English-speaking world's eyeballs expected for their psychodramatic hyperbole. Hong's films are not crowd-pleasers, but measured, often uncomfortable meditations on Korean urbanites and their lives of power-boozing, disconnection and romantic failure. Up to now, Hong's great modernist trope was (tellingly, for a Korean) the bifurcation of perspectives. His elusive masterpiece "The Power of Kangwon Province" (1998) is so sneaky about its doubled-up narrative and its delivery of emotional haymakers that you might not realize that it's all about the residue...
As the Korean New Wave fades and dissipates, from a throng of cultural force fields to a mere battery of individual filmographies, ambitious or withering or otherwise, one director stands as the most passionately embraced and steadily distributed in the tradition of imported art films. Strangely, it's Hong Sang-soo, not Park Chan-wook or Bong Joon-ho, both of whose pulpy trajectories have stalled and didn't, in any event, summon the English-speaking world's eyeballs expected for their psychodramatic hyperbole. Hong's films are not crowd-pleasers, but measured, often uncomfortable meditations on Korean urbanites and their lives of power-boozing, disconnection and romantic failure. Up to now, Hong's great modernist trope was (tellingly, for a Korean) the bifurcation of perspectives. His elusive masterpiece "The Power of Kangwon Province" (1998) is so sneaky about its doubled-up narrative and its delivery of emotional haymakers that you might not realize that it's all about the residue...
- 12/30/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
By Aaron Hillis
A documentary cannot withstand the corrosion of time based on compelling subject matter alone. I learned this a few years ago while writing copy for an indie distribution label, whose acquisitions team had a rash tendency to pick up decades-old docs simply because they were Academy Award nominees. Sometimes they were still engaging under all that dust, but more often than not there were traits that dated them worse than the fashions worn within: static talking-head interviews shot practically but uninspiringly against bland or ugly backdrops, a schoolmarm's discipline for the purist limitations of vérité and an exhausting dryness that underscores how little use films are as strict conveyers of data -- of course, Wikipedia wasn't yet invented, so maybe information was enough back then?
Plenty of documentarians today still rely on the same old creative crutches, but in the year 2008, the docs that rubbed up against...
A documentary cannot withstand the corrosion of time based on compelling subject matter alone. I learned this a few years ago while writing copy for an indie distribution label, whose acquisitions team had a rash tendency to pick up decades-old docs simply because they were Academy Award nominees. Sometimes they were still engaging under all that dust, but more often than not there were traits that dated them worse than the fashions worn within: static talking-head interviews shot practically but uninspiringly against bland or ugly backdrops, a schoolmarm's discipline for the purist limitations of vérité and an exhausting dryness that underscores how little use films are as strict conveyers of data -- of course, Wikipedia wasn't yet invented, so maybe information was enough back then?
Plenty of documentarians today still rely on the same old creative crutches, but in the year 2008, the docs that rubbed up against...
- 12/23/2008
- by Aaron Hillis
- ifc.com
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