REVIEW: Knife Skills [2017]

What I see is a tremendous amount of desire. One of the students at Edwins Leadership & Restaurant Institute explains how ex-convicts wear the stigma of that label as a badge. It tells potential employers that they are willing to work harder and prove their loyalty because anyone who gives them a chance at a second life is someone they’d do anything to repay. There’s a lot of truth to this sentiment even if it isn’t a guarantee. Those who do leave prison with a desire to better him/herself and…

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REVIEW: Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405 [2017]

We are creativity itself. It’s not easy to depict mental illness with honest clarity or art’s cathartic influence as therapy, but Frank Stiefel‘s look at Mindy Alper entitled Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405 does both. It helps that Mindy is an open, self-aware subject despite crippling anxieties. She leads his camera through her struggles as represented by surreal drawings created throughout her fifty-six years—a roadmap traversing her life’s extreme highs and lows. The work is reminiscent of Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe, each imperfect line lending the…

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REVIEW: Edith+Eddie [2017]

Treat everybody right. You hear horror stories of people who foster children in order to pocket the money they receive from the state meant for that child’s wellbeing and want to hope they’re the exceptions rather than rule. It’s easy to be cynical, however, and believe the opposite in this world. The same can be said about elder care and the often-tenuous relationships between children of aging parents with increasing struggles. Infighting is common because not every child is as well off as the next or as close. Suddenly a…

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REVIEW: The Road Movie [2018]

“Did we record?” I’d like to know the regulations for automobile tires in Russia because Dmitrii Kalashnikov‘s dash-cam compilation documentary The Road Movie has too many violent fishtails and gravity-enforced overturns to not have its audience infer the country as being riddled with bald tires. Some incidents occur in snowy conditions, but others don’t. Speed surely plays a factor alongside a weirdly calm yet psychotic form of road rage too, but the numbers are still too high to ignore. He probably could have filled the entire 67-minute runtime with these…

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REVIEW: Marwencol [2010]

I didn’t know who I was. A thirty-eight year old drunk leaves his local bar only to be jumped by five teenagers who proceed to beat him into a coma. This is the beginning of Mark Hogancamp‘s life as he knows it. The incident left him with brain damage to the point where he had to re-learn how to walk and talk. His memories from before were gone, his identity too. Only through home movies, photographs, and a stack of journals written while inebriated could he start to understand the…

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REVIEW: Dawson City: Frozen Time [2017]

What else is Dawson going to uncover? I’m dating myself by talking about my days in grade school and the numerous films we watched on an actual projector synched to a tape player, but there was something about this form of visual information dispersal that we’ve lost today with televisions, computers, tablets, and smart boards. Now teachers put on a video to grade papers or take a much-needed break because the lesson doesn’t demand his/her participation. Back when I was going to school, however, these filmstrips weren’t so “talk”-heavy. They…

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REVIEW: Quest [2017]

I’m trying to plant that seed and let it grow. It’s obvious that Jonathan Olshefski‘s documentary Quest becomes more than his original intent anticipated. This is what happens when you follow your subjects for ten years with infinite possibilities. What begins as a look behind the curtain on a couple (Christopher and Christine’a Rainey) doing everything they can to raise a family and make a difference in their North Philadelphia neighborhood soon cannot help itself from shifting focus onto the circumstances that define their choices. There are families everywhere that…

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REVIEW: The Work [2017]

Go inside to go outside. It’s one thing for a maximum-security prison full of violent offenders like Folsom to offer the type of in-depth therapy sessions it does, but it’s another to see the number of inmates with the courage and desire to attend. To be willing to leave your gang affiliations at the door and sit in a circle with men of all colors who’d kill you as soon as look at you in the yard with everyone else watching shows what’s at stake. These men have done horrible…

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REVIEW: Unrest [2017]

I just thought I would have more time. You can tell a lot about someone with the question: “What are your thoughts on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME)?” The answer is “Yes” or “No” and yet the latter has the potential of holding an infinite number of biases stemming from the likes of ego, sexism, and ignorance. It becomes a matter of believing a person when they say they are in pain. It’s about giving that person the time and resources to find a cure once you…

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REVIEW: Jane [2017]

I wanted to do things men did and women didn’t. It was 1960 when Louis Leakey enlisted his animal-loving secretary Jane Goodall to spearhead a one-person study of the Kasakela chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania. She had no formal training or experience with the task, but that was part of her appeal. Leakey didn’t want preconceptions and misguided expertise to cloud what would have to be objective research. The only way to truly know the chimpanzees’ capabilities and by comparison those capabilities of our own early ancestors was through an outsider…

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REVIEW: The Rape of Recy Taylor [2017]

They thought the black woman’s body didn’t belong to her. You may not know the name Recy Taylor, but you’ve definitely heard her story. It’s one of rape, lies, and cover-ups. It’s one of irreparable physical and psychological damage that still affects her family more than seventy years later. And it’s also one about a woman her refused to be silenced, who came home the night of September 3, 1944 to tell her father and husband everything about the six men that brutalized her. She was twenty-four at the time,…

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