Girls Just Want to Have School A Review: “Girl Rising”

“Girl Rising” is less like a movie than an extended commercial for girls’ education around the globe. Through a hybrid style combining dramatization and documentary, girls act out stories adapted from their life by acclaimed writers from their country, while famous actresses like Meryl Streep and Selma Hayek serve as narrators. Sprinkled throughout are scenes of a sunny, green field where multiracial girls in school uniforms hold up statistics about global poverty, the spread of HIV, and the power of education while Liam Neeson narrates.

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Why Don’t You Go to the Cinema? Reflections on Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel

Diana Vreeland’s living room is red. Red sofa, red walls, red flowers. Red patterned wallpaper mimics the red flowered upholstery. Fondly, Diana refers to the room as a “garden in hell.” In a photo in the film, Diana, also wearing red, doesn’t just recline, but floats on the sofa evoking characters painted by Chagall. Her apparent weightlessness is graceful, elegant, yet as the film unfolds, we see Diana struggling with the imposition of gravity. As a child, her mother compared Diana to her beautiful sister, referring to Diana as “her ugly little monster.” No matter how often we see clips of her brushing off the pain of her personal life, it is apparent that her mother’s cruelty affected her, yet somehow, she learned how to respond to her mother’s harsh words, shaping them into keys rather than locks. … Continue Reading

Beyonce’s Dream

Beyonce’s documentary entitled “Beyonce: Life Is But a Dream” is more like an extended advertisement than a documentary. Documentaries, I thought, before I saw this film, are meant to present facts about a person or an event. Through film devices such as voice-overs, visuals, and interviews a filmmaker illuminates the experience of a person or event. Despite the fact that it is non-fiction, a documentary employs traditional storytelling methods, teasing out the main conflict(s) and thus enhancing the arc of the story.

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Sellebrity: A Fantastic Doc About the Paparazzi

$ellebrity is a documentary about paparazzi culture and its origins. The movie was produced and directed Kevin Mazur who is himself a celebrity photographer.

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F***IN Cruise Ship Tour

This video is not to be f***in missed. … Continue Reading

Speaking of Teaser Trailers – Sankofa

This came in from Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher.

It is both a sci-fi narrative and documentary. It features Spomeniks, monuments from the former Yugoslavia that were made popular by the photographer Jan Kempenaers.

The teaser is more of a look book than a trailer, but idea has some truly interesting potential.

They’ve got a Kickstarter campaign going for funding.

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