Tag Archives: Documentary

The 5 Choice Indie Features of 2019

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As with every single year, we try to cover as much indies as possible, but we just never have the time to see them all, sadly. For the first time ever, we’ve separated our five choice Indies in to Feature and Shorts categories. This will be five indie films we loved that are short format and feature format.

It’s not to say the films that didn’t make the list are terrible films, or that the films the other writers on Cinema Crazed enjoyed aren’t good, either. This is merely my own subjective list of five independent films I highly recommend to you that I saw this year. It’s good to remember this is opinion, and not gospel.

If you want to see what films the Cinema Crazed collective consider A+ Indies, visit the link included!

Also, be sure to let us know some of the best indie films you saw all year!

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Making Waves (2019)

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Here is something that you don’t see every day: a documentary that gets its facts wrong.

Viewers with little knowledge on the history of sound technology in filmmaking are advised to stay away from Midge Costin’s feature, which gives a cockamamie overview of the audio aspects of the cinematic experience. Costin appears to be under the impression that movies were completely silent between Edison’s failed sound film experiments of the late 1890s and the Warner Bros. releases of “Don Juan” and “The Jazz Singer” in the late 1920s – in reality, there were numerous experiments taking place to create the so-called “talkies,” and many of these works still survive and are widely available for review.

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TV on DVD: Toys That Made Us Season 1 and 2 [Blu-Ray]/Veronica Mars: The Complete First Season [Blu-Ray]

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Linger on Youtube for a little while and you’ll likely find at least fifty toy collectors and or pop culture buffs that have a slew of videos looking back at classic toy lines and franchises. What makes “Toys That Made Us: Seasons 1 & 2” such a unique series is that it attempts to offer up much more than memories. Creator Brian Volk-Weiss’s series could very well have fallen back on pure nostalgia, but instead opens up the scope of these world changing toy lines. There’s deeper insight, stark truths about how and why these toys were created, and a look in to the business of it all.

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Halloween in a Box (2019)

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In 1988 my kindergarten class was having a Halloween party with just the class immediately after lunch. It was a very exciting experience for me considering I’d never done anything like that before. At the time we couldn’t really afford elaborate or huge costumes, so my dad bought me a generic mask in a box with the classic plastic smock. I was a mutant. So for a few Halloweens we opted for the sweaty plastic mask with no peripheral vision, and odd smock. That is until they were phased out. For years one of the highlights of Halloween was seeing the rows of boxes of plastics masks and smocks for various characters from Superman to Popeye.

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Häxan (Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages) (1922): Criterion Collection [Blu-Ray]

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A hybrid of documentary and fiction, this silent film explores the history of witchcraft, demonology and satanism. It shows representations of evil in a variety of ancient and medieval artworks, offers vignettes illustrating a number of superstitious practices and presents a narrative about the persecution of a woman accused of witchcraft. The film ends by suggesting that the modern science of psychology offers important insight into the beliefs and practices of the past.

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Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks (2019) [Fantastic Fest 2019]

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So many times whenever a production company or director has chosen to explore the history and influence of kung fu movies, they choose the more obvious routes. They go about exploring how kung fu movies influenced Hollywood and Western cinema. What director Serge Ou does is explore the influence on Western cinema, and how kung fu movies influenced the entirety of pop culture as a whole. Everything from action cinema, modern movie stars, and even hip hop is explored here and how they took from the genre and it amounts to a very unique and creative take on the outstanding legacy of kung fu films and martial arts cinema.

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Power of Grayskull: The Definitive History of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2017)

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You could basically call “Power of Grayskull” one of the first spin offs from Netflix’s “The Toys That Made Us.” The hit documentary series about the creation of some of the most popular toy lines of all time recently ran an episode about the fascinating history of He-Man. The monstrous eighties toy line and eighties franchise apparently warranted its own documentary. If you haven’t seen the episode, “Power of Grayskull” is a wonderful documentary about the series that digs a bit deeper in to the weird history of He-Man and the Mattel toy line.

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