From their early days as The Detours, the friendship between Townshend and Daltrey, and their inevitable struggles along the way with Keith Moon, Paul Crowder’s “Amazing Journey” is the fantastic story of The Who and how they were formed into this opposite teaming of talented musicians. Like “The Kids are Alright,” Crowder examines the foursome as a more than human rock band whose music was only half of what made them so incredible on stage.
Tag Archives: Documentary
The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years (2016)
Not many directors are able to capture the “mania” in Beatles Mania, but director Ron Howard is not only able to capture how much the Beatles ruled the world, but how their influence continues to echo in new generations. “Eight Days A Week” isn’t so much about the entire story of The Beatles, but more about their tumultuous days following their debut in America and how hellish it was to perform live. The Beatles were so popular that performing live became too much of a burden for the “fab four.” The audience was so rabid, in fact, that they just stopped performing live altogether since the people in the crowd spent more time screaming and charging the stage than actually listening to the music they were performing.
Invisible Roots: Afro-Mexicans in Southern California (2015)
It is estimated that more than one million Mexicans can trace some of their ancestry back to the African slaves brought to North America by the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th and 17th centuries. This documentary short by Tiffany Walton and Lizz Mullis focuses on a community in the Los Angeles area of Afro-Mexican heritage.
This Little Light of Mine: The Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer (2015)
Among the many heroes of the civil rights movement, Fannie Lou Hamer stands out as a burst of spirit and power in the face of unthinkable forces. Robin N. Hamilton’s documentary short offers a brief yet effective portrait of a woman who rose from the poverty of Mississippi sharecropping to challenging the Democratic Party’s embrace of racist politics.
The Search for Weng Weng (2007)
Andrew Leavold, a cult video store owner, goes on the search for a mysterious movie star from the Philippines, the 2’9” action star Weng Weng who did less than a dozen films but left a huge mark on his fans. Leavold through his documentary shows the star’s childhood, rise, and fall until his untimely death. Written by Andrew Leavold and Daniel Palisa (as Daniel Haig) and directed by Leavold, it follows its director’s journey from Australia to the Weng Weng’s native Philippines where he finds footage of the star he had never seen, movies he had never heard about, and plenty of people ready to talk about the star.
Curse of the Man Who Sees UFOs (2016)
Christo Roppolo is a former filmmaker who now sees UFOs. Through interviews with him and people around him and videos he took of what he claims to be UFOs, this documentary explores his history of UFO sightings, how it has affected his life, how he almost preaches about them, and how he is seen as he basically obsesses over these sightings and what they may mean. Roppolo reached out to director Justin Gear by sending him hours and hours of video from his sightings and investigations of them. Gear takes this footage and mixes it with interviews of Roppolo and his neighbors, friends, and people of his town to show what he sees or claims to see with experiences from others and feelings directly from the source.
Burden of Peace (2015)
Dutch filmmakers Joey Boink and Sander Wirken helmed this documentary on the efforts of Guatemalan Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz to bring justice to her country during her 2010-2014 term. Some of the problems that she faced were cultural – Guatemalan prosecutors were traditionally unenthusiastic about challenging narco-crime gangs, the nation’s notorious human rights abuses and even domestic violence cases – and other were the result of plain stupidity, most notably the proliferation of misspellings in the national crime database.