Welcome to Annotate This, where we gather reviews, trailers, and annotate the posters for movies coming out this week. It will help you decide what to avoid, what to see, and what to pretend to see. Click on the image above to add your comments to the mix. Guess what? The heat wave has ostensibly made movie reviews super grumpy and also creative with their reviews!
Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite recently told the New York Times that she approached her documentary Blackfish as a journalist with an open mind. The resulting film, which is about killer whales in captivity (specifically at SeaWorld and focusing on the 32-year-old orca Tilikum, who's killed three people), is nonetheless damning enough that it reads like animal liberation propaganda. We hear numerous testimonials from former SeaWorld trainers on the negative effects of keeping these giant, sensitive creatures penned. We see hidden-camera footage of SeaWorld guides feeding park guests incorrect information about orcas' lifespans and fins — the dorsal fins of captive killer routinely collapse, or flop to the side, which is rare in the wild. We see footage of brutal whale-on-human attacks. We hear nothing from SeaWorld itself.
Welcome to Annotate This, where we gather reviews, trailers, and annotate the posters for movies coming out this week. It will help you decide what to avoid, what to see, and what to pretend to see. Click on the image above to add your comments to the mix.
Welcome to Annotate This, where we gather reviews, trailers, and annotate the posters for movies coming out this week. It will help you decide what to avoid, what to see, and what to pretend to see. Click on the image above to add your comments to the mix. Guess what? It's July 4th weekend and studios want to entertain you.
Welcome to Annotate This, where we gather reviews, trailers, and annotate the posters for movies coming out this week. It will help you decide what to avoid, what to see, and what to pretend to see. Click on the image above to add your comments to the mix.
Mark Covino and Jeff Howlett's documentary, out on Friday, is simply titled A Band Called Death. It provides a thorough biography of an under-appreciated protopunk garage band that existed on the cusp of punk. They were called Death, obviously. The Detroit band, founded in 1971 by three brothers—David Hackney (guitar), Dannis Hackney (drums) and Bobby Hackney (bass, vocals)—was disbanded in 1977, but managed to record an album's worth of songs in demo sessions. When the band was rediscovered by record collectors, punk obsessives, and underground DJs in the 2000s, the Hackneys were hailed as visionaries.
Welcome to Annotate This, where we gather reviews, trailers, and annotate the posters for movies coming out this week. It will help you decide what to avoid, what to see, and what to pretend to see. Click on the image above to add your comments to the mix.
Last night, the U.K.'s Channel 4 aired a special called Scientologists at War, which profiled the Church of Scientology's former Inspector General of the Religious Technology Center, Marty Rathbun. Once a spiritual mentor to the likes of Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, and Greta Van Susteren, Rathbun left the church in 2004 to practice Scientology independently. He runs a blog called Moving On Up a Little Higher, and has been vocal regarding his displeasure over many of the Church's practices. He says this has resulted in harassment.
Welcome to Annotate This, where we gather reviews, trailers, and annotate the posters for movies coming out this week. It will help you decide what to avoid, what to see, and what to pretend to see. Click on the image above to add your comments to the mix.
20 Feet From Stardom, from music documentary veteran Morgan Neville, is a film entirely devoted to the overlooked lives and jobs of back-up singers. Everything from the sound and vision to the impeccably selected archive footage to the beautifully shot recording sessions is wonderful. Neville isolates the tracks on well-worn records, forcing us to examine them again. Not that anyone needs to write any more praise of "Gimme Shelter," but isolating Merry Clayton’s vocals is spine-shivering.
In 1997, Duane Buck was convicted of shooting and killing two people, including his former girlfriend, in Houston, Texas. A jury sentenced him to death. Among the factors that influenced their decision: testimony from a psychologist who said that black people like Buck are more violent and dangerous than other people.
Welcome to Annotate This, where we gather reviews, trailers, and annotate the posters for movies coming out this week. It will help you decide what to avoid, what to see, and what to pretend to see. Click on the image above to add your comments to the mix.
Welcome to Annotate This, where we gather reviews, trailers, and annotate the posters for movies heading to your local cineplex or art house theater this week. Click on the image above to add your comments to the mix. Enjoy the Summer of Sequels starting with:
Welcome to Annotate This, where we gather reviews, trailers, and annotate the posters for movies coming out this week. It will help you decide what to avoid, what to see, and what to pretend to see. Click on the image above to add your comments to the mix.
"Sometimes in life you need to step into the unknown," says Dutch director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Showgirls, Basic Instinct) in the beginning of Tricked, the half-documentary, half-movie that's playing at the Tribeca Film Festival. He's referring to the crowd-sourced script of the project at hand, for which he rifled through thousands of fan-submitted pages to assemble a cohesive, 50-minute narrative film.
As part of its What? documentary series, last night Logo ran an hour-long exploration of the world of male strippers called, fittingly enough, I'm a Stripper. In this clip, a few of the bros (of varying douchiness) interviewed for the movie discuss what they do to achieve and maintain the erections they're expected to sport onstage. Hint: It involves porn, cockrings, possible chemicals and money — one dude needs not bandz to make him stand at attention, but a mere $10.
Like the film that provides its source material, Rodney Ascher's new-media documentary Room 237 about Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film The Shining, is a cinematic vise. However, 237 owes it tension not to the spiraling madness of its central character, but to discourse that threatens to spiral into madness.
Last night, Showtime aired the documentary Why We Laugh: Funny Women, a follow-up to its 2009 doc Why We Laugh: Black Comedians on Black Comedy. Dozens of female comedians were interviewed for it, including titans like Joan Rivers, Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin, Aisha Tyler and Kathy Griffin, who riffed on what it's like to be a woman in what is still considered (by many of them even) to be a "masculine" job in a male-dominated field.
The fish slide around the deck, mouths gaping, eyes about to pop. The POV dips from blurry water to above the surface, and every time we rise the screech of gulls hovering above the sea is more voluminous, a bigger shock. A thick, golden chain pierces the infinite darkness. Skates are elevated, their wings hacked off with a machete, their bodies discarded. Heaving nets give birth to a haul of sea life in an extended plop. Sea spray glistens against the night. A yellow light offsets the blue-black sky and highlights the chunky, red blood, and it's hard to recall a time when the primary color palette has seemed more menacing.
