Director Amy Grappell digs deep in to her childhood and touches upon a part of her young life that normally might hurt others or inspire discomfort. In 1969, Amy Grappell moves from Brooklyn to Long Island with her mother and further. Both parents were struggling with their own marriage and were working hard to stay together. After meeting another couple at a local beach club, both her mother and father Paul and Deanna eventually found kindred spirits in Eleanor and Robert, both of whom were also struggling with their own marriage at the time.
Tag Archives: Documentary
Big Charity (2015)
Alex Glustrom’s documentary focuses on New Orleans’ Charity Hospital, a healthcare landmark that fell victim to political machinations in the post-Katrina period.
Founded in 1736, Charity Hospital was located at different locations over the years before the 1939 opening of its massive 2,680-bed facility. Originally operated by the Daughters of Charity religious order and celebrating for providing high quality medical care to patients of all races and economic conditions, the hospital was administered by the Louisiana State University (LSU) System in 1997. LSU advocated for a new medical facility in the early 2000s but was unable to obtain state funding. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005 – when the rescue effort to evacuate patients and medical staff was uncommonly lethargic – LSU abruptly shut down Charity Hospital even though the facility had been restored to functioning ability by the U.S. Army.
Re:Orientations (2016)
In 1984, Toronto-based filmmaker Richard Fung released Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians, which focused on 14 men and women of South, East and Southeast Asian backgrounds. The film broke new ground in detailing both the increasingly visible LGBT community within Canada and the unique cultural challenges that Asian-Canadians faced both in the LGBT world, their own cultures and the wider national society.
The 10 Worst Films of 2016
As always with these lists remember this is not gospel or definitive opinion, so by all means feel free to disagree, and share your own candidates for the worst films of 2016, below. It’s been a year filled with very good films and very bad films, and thankfully it wasn’t very hard to compile this list. There weren’t very many movies I’d call awful this year, but these are ten of easily the worst films studios released to audiences
Bad Movies in 2016 that almost made the list includes the silly Lauren Cohan starring horror drama The Boy, the insanely vapid The Angry Birds Movie, the painfully stupid animated film Batman: The Killing Joke, the tedious and lazy X-Men: Apocalypse, the pointless and scare free The Night Before Halloween, the pointless remakes of Cabin Fever, and Gasper Noe’s Martyrs, the Rob Schneider starring animated comedy Norm of the North, the continued murdering of Robert Deniro’s career known as Dirty Grandpa, the sickly sugary and obnoxious Trolls, the half baked sitcom My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, the empty sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass, the moronic and mean spirited Clown, and the insanely awful anthology Holidays.
Now on to the Top 10…
The 5 Choice Indies of 2016
Cinema Crazed prides itself in covering as many independent films as possible every year. We’re all sent a ton of short films and feature length films all year through email, and we do our best to cover every single one within a twelve month period. We all watched a myriad independent titles in 2016, some terrible, many quite good, and I narrowed my favorites down to five choices.
This list is no reflection on the other indie films I loved in 2016, this is merely a list of movies that really stuck out with me. Feel free to visit the A+ Indie section for many more independent movies Cinema Crazed loved.
And as always, if you want to see these movies, please buy them legally, where ever available. Buying them helps support the companies, and these filmmakers, and we just may be able to see even more movies from these talented artists somewhere down the road.
The Song Remains the Same (1976)
Joe Massot and Peter Clifton’s excellent “The Song Remains the Same” is one of the best and most dynamic looks at Led Zeppelin performing for a massive audience. The directors able to grab a lot of their synergy by filming many of their solos and brilliant iterations of their classic songs with dynamic camera angles and strobing colors of red and stark blue. Though I’m not a fan of “No Quarter,” their rendition of it here is incredible, especially considering the way the performance as a whole is lit, allowing for a unique fever dream kind of visual that feels like Ken Russell dipped his fingers in the direction here and there.
Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (1970)
It was the end of an era, the literal end of a movement, and the end of what many would know as “Woodstock.” We never did see the Woodstock here in further decades, did we? We instead saw much more corporate interference, much more MTV generation, and in the last festival, ultimate destruction. At least we have what is one of the most riveting and unique concert movies ever filmed. It’s a chronicle of a generation thought of ancient now, and looked back on mostly with fondness, as a decade where there was hope for peace, and hope for a better tomorrow. It was before America gave in to the seventies, where it became all bout decadence and hedonism.