Doc Corner: DOC NYC - Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 11/9'

DOC NYC is currently underway in New York and one of the great things is that alongside all the world, American, and New York premieres, the festival includes significant documentary titles from throughout the year. We’re using this opportunity to catch up with the latest from Michael Moore, Fahrenheit 11/9, which screened at the fest and is still in limited release across America.

Love him or loathe him – or probably more likely, sit somewhere in the middle of the two emotions – it’s hard to overstate Michael Moore’s importance to American documentary filmmaking. It’s not often that documentaries become pop culture touchstones and he has several that have become just that. The film that this new title is theoretically a sequel to will likely remain the highest grossing documentary of all time for the foreseeable future of cinema. It is interesting to note, however, that the two biggest zeitgeist-hitting political documentaries of the new century – that would be Fahrenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth – have floundered at the box office with much-belated sequels. Are audiences simply too bombarded by news that the thought of going to see a two-hour movie about the horrors of modern politics is just too much to bear?

Moore's decision to make a sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11 makes a lot of sense in theory, although watching the final product is a curious experience.

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EFA Nominations: Poland's "Cold War" Leads

by Nathaniel R

Joanna Kulig in "Cold War"

It was a big morning for Oscar hopefuls in the foreign language film category as a handful of them have been nominated for multiple European Film Awards. Pawel Pawlikowski, whose nun drama Ida won the Oscar a handful of years back, is leading the EFA field with his new music-filled drama Cold War, about a musician and singer in a long tragic love affair across Europe. It's nominated in 5 categories. The nearest rivals with 4 nominations each are Italy's Dogman, Sweden's Border, and Italy's Happy as Lazzaro (the only one not submitted for the Oscars). Two other Oscar submissions also had cause to celebrate: Denmark's police thriller The Guilty and Belgium's trans ballerina drama Girl were also nominated for a few awards. 

The complete list of nominations and a few more comments are after the jump...

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Would you rather?

Time for another round of our Instagram-blessed silly celebrity gawking game. For some reason it's a mostly manly lineup this morning. We'll get back to the actresses soon enough. They are never far from our hearts and minds and eyeballs.

Would you rather
... do morning beauty treatments with Laura Linney and Tony-nominee Ashley Park?
...accompany Tom Holland and pup to the vet?
...gamble it away with Bianca del Rio?
... reminisce about Elektra with Jason Isaacs?
... visit Thailand with Dan Stevens?
...seek career advice from Karl Urban?
...feel the hope with Patrick Stewart?
...convalesce with Nico Tortorella? (poor baby!)
... chill with Orlando Bloom and lots of teddy bears?
... or read with Nicole Kidman and Liane Moriarty?

Photos are after the jump to help you decide...

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Posterized: Dr. Seuss and "The Grinch"

by Nathaniel R

The children's book author Dr. Seuss (also known as Theodore S. Geisel) is such an icon part of popular culture that he's even had his own postage stamp. But did you know he was also a screenwriter? In addition to the screenplay of the fantasy family film The 5000 Fingers of Dr T (1953) he wrote the script for the Oscar winning documentary Design for Death (1947) which was a documentary about Japanese and what led to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Far outside the wheelhouse that was! But mostly when it comes to the screen when we think of Dr Seuss we think of the once-perennial TV airings of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

 The bulk of screen adaptations of Dr Seuss's work have been in the short film format which makes sense, given the short visual books he wrote. Of the many shorts based on his work the following were all nominated for Oscars: The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (1943), And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1944), Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950 - OSCAR WIN), and Gerald McBoing! Boing! on Planet Moo (1956). One short based on his work,  Daisy Head Mayzie (1995), was Emmy nominated.

But with the release of The Grinch (2018) today, let's look back on all the feature films (and the three most prominent TV specials) that are Dr Seuss related. How many have you seen and will you be seeing The Grinch? The posters are after the jump...

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Poison, But Literally

How does a legal drama about environmental malfeasance a la Eric Brokovich but starring Mark Ruffalo and directed by Todd Haynes (!!!) sound to y'all today? I'd say it sounds pretty fine, pretty fine indeed, and it's not just noise apparently - this is really happening!

Based on a 2016 article in the New York Times about a corporate defense attorney who took on the gigantic DuPont corporation (what is it with Ruffalo and the DuPonts?) and exposed decades worth of criminal pollutive behavior, the project - once called Dry Run but now called we don't know - is set to shoot next year.

This will be Haynes first project to get off the ground since Wonderstruck hit last year, and this feels, on the surface, like kind of a big departure for him, doesn't it? For one he hasn't really directed a movie with a true leading man - if you don't count the dozen Bob Dylans in I'm Not There as leads, anyway - in twenty years with Velvet Goldmine.