Netflix Screengrab Roulette (May 2017)

Just one of these months we'd love a slight surprise and for Netflix to throw a bone at the movie fans they built their empire on. I'm considering cancelling my streaming service and going DVD only -- the exact opposite of what the rest of the world does but I need my movies and, FACT, they just aren't providing them any more. Pickings gets slimmer by the month. Consider that this month they've literally added only two titles made before 2000s, one Bollywood picture and Forrest Gump. That is insane and, well, lame. They don't care about movie fans now that they have popular TV shows of their own to produce. 

Nevertheless we'll do a screengrab roulette of a few titles. First image that comes up gets posted, no cheating... 

Look at these lips. Those are kissable lips."

Don't Think Twice (2016)
I keep hearing this is good. Time to watch!

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Doc Corner: 'Obit'

By Glenn Dunks

An observation made towards the start of Vanessa Gould’s Obit: despite the reputation as the reporting of death, most obituaries are only 10% about the death of an individual. The other 90% is about life. How a person lived it, what they did, where they went and how they go there.

That's an appropriate anecdote to lead with given how turned off people may be about a film set within the supposedly dreary old world of an obituary department in a physical news outlet like the New York Times.

It’s a nice thought from a film whose prime subjects are not dead and are in fact living...

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Doc Corner: 'God Knows Where I Am'

by Glenn Dunks

The discovery of a woman’s lifeless body in an abandoned New Hampshire farmhouse next to a diary that reads how she, if found dead, was the victim of domestic abuse is the starting point for Jedd and Todd Wider’s God Knows Where I Am. These words begin the story of how Linda Bishop came to be in the house, a tragic entry point to a story that takes on further inescapably sad connotations the more we learn about her and what lead to her body lying dead on the hardwood floors of an empty house after the worst winter on record.

It’s not exactly a spoiler to note that domestic violence is not what brought Linda’s life to an end. Perhaps she thought it was...

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Two Oscar Rule Changes: One great, the other tragic

by Nathaniel R

The Academy announced some a few rule changes today. You no longer have to have only one composer to be eligible for Original Score, and producing partnerships will be considered a single entity now -- meaning more people could be nominated for producing Best Picture nominees. But the two big changes are about the Documentary and Animated Feature races and one of those changes we applaud and the other makes us want to riot to protect a beloved artform...

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Doc Corner: Is 'Five Came Back' Netflix's Oscar Moment?

by Glenn Dunks

It can sometimes feel like we’ve seen WWII from so many perspectives that there can’t possibly be new ways to convey the weight of its tragedy. That Five Came Back, a new three-part mini-docu-series on Netflix, manages to succeed at doing this is just one of its many virtues. Adapted from Mark Harris’ book of the same name by Harris himself and directed by Laurent Bouzereau, this is a three-hour documentary about the work of five of Hollywood’s biggest directorial names of the 1930s who enlisted to support the American war effort the only way that they knew how: through film, and the personal battles they fought in order to do so.

They were Frank Capra, John Huston, George Stevens, William Wyler and John Ford – the latter of whom gets the biggest laugh labelling documentaries in the 1930s as “silly things that rich kooks made” – each of whom left behind successful careers without the promise of anything when they came back.

If they came back at all. The series charts their early efforts before America’s entering the war after Pearl Harbour in 1941 before digging more deeply in the works that they produced from the front lines on the ground and in the skies....

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