Louis Black and Karen Bernstein’s Richard Linklater: Dream is Destiny is a remarkable documentary and biography of one of the most acclaimed and innovative filmmakers working today. More of a tribute by Austinites to a hero from Austin Texas who made good and managed to claim success without sacrificing too much of his own artistic vision, Richard Linklater: Dream is Destiny takes an interesting and new look at the work of one of my favorite directors working in film today. I’ve made no secret that Linklater is one of my personal film heroes and easily my favorite writer working in cinema right now, and I’ve found most of the documentaries and work surrounding his legacy and career to be absolutely entertaining and often times stimulating.
Tag Archives: Documentary
No Roads In (2017) [Oceanside International Film Festival 2017]
No Roads In is a music documentary but also one about how music can transform lives.
Written by Christopher Leeson and directed by Josh Wong, this documentary follows a band as they record an album in an abandoned home in the Canadian Prairies. One of them finds this place while driving and brings the rest back to record a more natural, organic album in terms of sound and how it comes to be. The film follows these men and looks into their lives through interviews and music. The men shown include Adam Naughler, Jon May, Blake Reid, Aaron Young, and Jason Valleau who all work on the album together and have their lives and hopes discussed by themselves and others.
Tashi’s Turbine (2017)
Amitabh Raj Joshi’s documentary focuses on an effort by two men to bring electrical power to a remote Nepalese village in a do-it-yourself clean energy project.
My Father’s House: A Journey of Love and Memory (2017)
Hannah Reimann’s nonfiction short is a video diary of the final four years in the life of her father, Dr. Peter Reimann, whose life was slowly weakened by dementia.
The German-born Dr. Reimann served as a medic in the German Army during World War II – the film briefly states he was anti-Nazi, but never goes into depth on his war record. He married Korean psychoanalyst Dr. Myunghee Kim in 1957, eventually settling in New Jersey. Dr. Kim’s death in a car accident during a 1996 vacation in Chile was an emotional loss from which Dr. Reimann never truly recovered, and the sense of melancholy resonates throughout his on-camera footage. When asked during a birthday what it means to turn 89, he responds, “You didn’t die at the right time.”
Moon Child (2017) [Oceanside International Film Festival 2017]
A family survives through love and support as they all come from one form of abuse or another. From the grandmother’s childhood physical and sexual abuse, to her kids’ drug abuse, the film demonstrates how people survive and love through the hardest of events.
Every Ghost Has an Orchestra (2017) [Oceanside International Film Festival 2017]
A paranormal researcher and music composer goes to a barn to find the Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) in the old wood as he believes objects have memories of sounds from their past.
The film about researcher and compositor Michael Esposito is directed by Shayna Connelly, the film shows Esposito as the star at the center of the subject. He is shown as a prominent figure in the field while no others are interviewed. This renders the exploration of the subject a bit thin and one dimensional. Having no other experts corroborate his information or his research makes it less credible as it’s all from one point of view with no supporting evidence or opinions. This doesn’t mean the film is not interesting, but as a documentary short, using other experts would have helped it be more powerful and feel like the makers did more research.
You Have to See This! NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell (2007)
“New York wasn’t burning. It was burnt!”
Director Henry Corra’s exploration of what New York was in 1977 is quite fantastic and a surprisingly rare chronicle of the political and economic turmoil that ironically bred timeless art and music. As a born and bred Bronxite, 1977 is a mythical year, and a period of the decade that I’ve heard about very often from elder family members. In particular, the night of the infamous black out of New York, my mom and uncle were stuck in the edge of downtown Manhattan and had to brave their way home during the mass looting and rioting. “NY77” garners a very unique tone that balances out the inherent importance of the year, the depressing living conditions of the city, and the obvious fun that was had by most, who managed to endure poverty with laughs and creativity.