Doc Corner: A comeback for 1992's 'Rock Hudson's Home Movies'

By Glenn Dunks

Subtext is a funny thing. The very idea of it revolves around the idea that some people just don’t get what’s being shown on screen. That for some, there’s nothing there at all. For others, there is a whole other world bubbling away told through code, gestures, innuendo, and subtlety. In today’s very connected world, this isn’t a good thing. Where once artists and scholars may have been revered for being the smartest person in the room—when did you last see anybody credited as an “intellectual” on television news anymore? —nobody today likes to be told “you just don’t get it”. How else could we have multiple online discourses at once about the artistic merits of Spider-Man: No Way Home versus (of all things) Drive My Car? Curiosity with art by the masses seems more or less gone completely.

Perhaps that is why Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog has frustrated so many viewers. That film, like many Rock Hudson films, plays with the ideas of masculinity and femininity in ways that don’t immediately leap out. But once they do...

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Doc Corner: 'The Andy Warhol Diaries' on Netflix

By Glenn Dunks

There have been a lot of films, series and books about Andy Warhol and the company he kept. Documentaries alone, I could definitely list off a dozen titles by heart from prestige to the trash. And there's no reason for that to stop now. After all, Warhol’s factory of superstars and the art they produced will no doubt continue to inspire other creatives for as long as there is art. The Andy Warhol Diaries on Netflix will certainly not be the last. Although it may just go down as at least one of the more definitive of the bunch—as well as the slickest...

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SXSW: Exploring Volcanoes in ‘Fire of Love’

By Abe Friedtanzer 

I’m grateful that SXSW includes a “Festival Favorites” section that includes titles that have played elsewhere and been popular since it’s often not until a festival has ended or all of its screenings have concluded that I hear about something I’m told I have to see. Fortunately, the documentary Fire of Love which was acquired by National Geographic (for quite a sum), meaning that those without access to film festivals will be able to see this inventive and visually striking film soon enough…

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SXSW: An Eccentric Collector in ‘The Pez Outlaw’

By Abe Friedtanzer

 

I don’t think I ever got into Pez. I may have collected Beanie Babies briefly and bought Pokémon cards for a week, but that was about it for any obsession that wasn’t movies or TV. But what always interested me about Pez – and I suspect this is the case for most people – is that it wasn’t the candy inside but the dispenser that was the attraction. It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that there are people who spend their entire lives tracking down the rarest among them. Far ahead of the competition is Steve Glew, also known as the Pez Outlaw… 

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Doc Corner: Keith Maitland's 'Dear Mr. Brody'

By Glenn Dunks

Sometimes it is those brief moments in history that can offer the greatest glimpse at the changing state of a nation. Keith Maitland does just that with the story of Michael Brody Jr., a blip on the radar of pop culture by today’s standards, but who in 1970 at the age of 21—a self-proclaimed hippie millionaire, the heir to a large margarine fortune—caused pandemonium when he declared his intentions to give away his entire wealth to anybody who asked for it...

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