An 85-year-old Supreme Court justice. A pastor with a public television show.
Identical triplets separated at birth. A songbird gone too soon.
Pandas.It isn’t a bad joke or the line at the post office that unites these figures. It’s documentary—six to be exact, all of which have been released to theaters this year, and all of which have earned at least $1.5 million at the box office. RBG, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Three Identical Strangers, Whitney, Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, and Pandas represent, if not a major moment, then at least a meaningful boomlet for theatrical documentary filmmaking, perhaps the culmination of almost 50 years of evolution and exposure for the form, stretching back to the Maysles brothers’ Salesman. It has been 40 years since Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, about 30 years since Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line and Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, nearly 25 years since Steve James’s Hoop Dreams, 20 years since Spike Lee’s Four Little Girls, and 10 years since James Marsh’s Man on Wire. That half a century of meaningful work with increasing mass exposure has slowly redefined the form, turning what had been considered by some moviegoers a starchy, stiff form of storytelling into some of the most vital, sought-out films in the country. They are bid upon at festivals with a new vigor, reviewed with aplomb, and seen with more frequency than ever.
Nov 08, 2015 Just a few clips I find funny. So I gathered 'em up.Anime television series Directed by Chiaki Kon Written by Fumihiko Shimo Music by Yukari Hashimoto Studio J.C.Staff Licensed by AUS Madman. Hollywood's secret history: Scotty Bowers on sex and stars in the Golden Era. A new documentary reworks the memoir of Bowers, who boasts.
Somewhere along the way, docs became, well, content.“When I started, documentaries were like the spinach of filmmaking,” says Morgan Neville, the director of this summer’s biggest doc hit, the Mister Rogers film Won’t You Be My Neighbor? “Nobody cared about them. Nobody wanted to pay for them. They weren’t sexy.
Now we’re in this amazing golden era of documentary and nonfiction storytelling that just keeps getting more interesting.”. “It wasn’t that I wanted to go back and revisit the nostalgia of Mister Rogers. It was like, ‘I need Mister Rogers in 2018. Who’s the grown-up in our society?’” —Morgan Neville, director of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Is an extraordinary anomaly, earning $18 million and counting, passing prefab products like Disney’s animal-centric films Bears, Monkey Kingdom, and African Cats and approaching the likes of glossy pop-star-driven vehicles like Katy Perry: Part of Me and One Direction: This Is Us. Neville’s movie, which is distributed by Universal’s Focus Features, is already the 14th-highest-grossing doc of all time, with an outside chance at reaching the top 10.
But unlike the polemical films that top the upper echelon—including Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 ($119 million) and the Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016 Obama’s America ($33 million)— Neighbor is told in a straightforward, unfussy way, using standard head-on interviews, archival footage, and an utter lack of regard for austerity to render a movie that is by turns soft-bellied and soft-hearted. It has been bandied about as an act of defiance in the face of a noisy, angry presidential administration, a whoosh of radical kindness to remind viewers of a time before ALL-CAPS TWITTER TIRADES.“One night, I somehow ended up on a YouTube deep dive of Mr. Rogers’s speeches,” Neville told me. “It was like one of these epiphanic moments—‘I want more of that voice. I don’t hear that voice anywhere in our culture right now.’ It wasn’t that I wanted to go back and revisit the nostalgia of Mister Rogers. It was like, ‘I need Mister Rogers in 2018.
Who’s the grown-up in our society?’”. RBG (2018) Magnolia PicturesThe late documentarian Albert Maysles—who made sympathetic figures out of, and —once said, “The film is sort of the beginning of a love affair between the filmmakers and the subjects. Some filmmakers make targets of the subjects they film; that’s not our way.” Neville’s film has that in common with RBG, Julie Cohen and Betsy West’s warm, meme-centric portrayal of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Their film is largely hagiography, an access-driven vision of a beloved, tireless activist jurist with a staggering record as a legal advocate for equal rights. It is dotted with nods to Her Honor’s viral late life, including the, on Saturday Night Live, and her in the opera. Its tone is fizzy for biography, even peppy at times.
RBG, which was financed by CNN Films and distributed by Magnolia Pictures, is not a breakthrough for the form—but its success has no precedent. (As a minor thought experiment, imagine a film of this kind about Bader Ginsburg’s longtime benchmate Stephen Breyer. Impossible.) The movie’s $13 million gross makes it the second-biggest single-subject, non-pop-star biodoc ever, coming in just behind Neighbor. It’s reaching audiences beyond the normal doc crowd.“We have to go into something believing that there is an audience that will come to it, and not just your typical arthouse, New York–L.A.
Audience,” says Courtney Sexton, vice president at CNN Films. “We really are looking to find projects that will resonate in middle America because that’s where our brand is, in our channels in homes across the country.”RBG has a slick, well-timed calculation to it, but it is handmade and rigorous, too.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Is an openly, eagerly, almost mercenary emotional viewing experience. Together, they make a pair of political moviegoing experiences—a history lesson about sincerity and an art project about the law—using totemic figures to make their points.
Along with Tony Zierra’s attentive, slavish; Kevin Macdonald’s ghostly and sad; Eugene Jarecki’s questing The King; and Wim Wenders’s Pope Francis, the year has been rich with docs examining the living remains of looming giants and pop cultural institutions—Elvis, Kubrick, God, etc. Asif Kapadia’s Amy, the much-seen, much-admired Oscar winner about the late Amy Winehouse, appears more and more to be among the most influential theatrical docs of the decade. It was both a success and a lesson: If your movie’s hitting theaters, lean into the known.About that: The documentaries that are thriving in theaters probably have TV to thank. A swell of factors in recent years that includes HBO’s commitment to the form, PBS’s unwavering work with POV, ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, and Netflix’s belly flop into the deep end in the past five years has created a new kind of viewer cadence. Last year’s Academy Award winner for Best Documentary, originated on Netflix after premiering at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. The year before that, the winner——was largely seen on ESPN.
Over time, documentaries became not just consumable and easily attainable, but rewatchable. Somewhere along the way in my life, I began to use Best of Enemies—Neville’s spiky, staccato film about the rivalry between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley—as my personal night-light, firing it up on Netflix when I want to be half-engaged before nodding off. Once upon a time, movies like Clerks and Reservoir Dogs occupied that role in my life.
Now it’s filled by two cranky, bickering intellectuals. This documentary takeover has expanded to series. Once upon a time, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s miniseries The Staircase was an outlier among longform doc storytelling.
This year alone, Netflix has released, Flint Town, and, along with anthology doc shows Rotten, Dirty Money, and David Chang’s Ugly Delicious. HBO has rolled out projects about Garry Shandling and, The Ringer’s own, another Elvis movie, and soon, a film about Jane Fonda. Starz has America to Me, a series coming from the iconic filmmaker Steve James, so many years after Hoop Dreams. Showtime had a doc series about.
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FX has one of those, too. Oh, and Netflix revived The Staircase for a on the infamous case of Michael Peterson and his dead wife, Kathleen. This is barely a toe dip into the ocean of documentary work on networks and streaming services in 2018.
Documentary as a whole isn’t just booming. It’s bursting all over the media landscape.But its success in theaters is still unique. Ticket prices are up, options are vast, and the in-house competition from comic-book sequels is getting bigger and stickier by the moment. For more than a decade, there was one, or maybe two, bigger releases in the field per year. An indelible Errol Morris exploration or Alex Gibney movie. Maybe an inexplicable sensation like March of the Penguins. Or a brilliantly executed stunt like Exit Through the Gift Shop.
These sorts of movies seem to be happening all the time now, all at once.“When I was learning my trade as a development guy, but also as a director, the bar for theatrical docs—the stories that would justify the expense of a theatrical documentary—was huge,” says Three Identical Strangers director Tim Wardle. “It was like, One Day in September, Touching the Void, Man on Wire. It had to be at that level before it felt justified in asking people to go into a theater and pay money to see it.
And I think what has changed since then is, the technology has become a lot cheaper and the editing software has become a lot cheaper. So there’s a lot more people making theatrical docs, or theatrical-length docs, and when you go to festivals now there are hundreds of them.”.
“These sort of stories are better than fiction and take twists and turns that you couldn’t believe.” —Courtney Sexton, CNN Films vice presidentMany of the docs that have begun to play festivals and fill streaming services are cause-first films that ply the viewer with tales of woe and societal rot, often told in modest terms. Think longtime Netflix staple. Sometimes they’re anthropological, like the photographer Lauren Greenfield’s fascinating upcoming look at the moneyed in America, Generation Wealth. And sometimes they can change, as in Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s, which debuts on Netflix this weekend. But Wardle’s movie is different.
It isn’t an issue film or a hagiography. It isn’t true crime, exactly, or a concert movie. It isn’t polemical and isn’t funny. It is story-driven, plain and simple.
Three Identical Strangers, which opened in late June, is difficult to explain if you haven’t seen it because watching the narrative of three brothers reuniting and then learning the fateful truth about their separation unravel is the whole point. And part of what makes it a tougher sell than its contemporaries.“To market the film, you have to give away some of the things that will make it exciting for people to see cold,” says Wardle, a longtime producer and development executive at the British production house Raw TV. “It is a challenge. If you’ve got Mister Rogers or RBG, you just put them on the poster and that’s your marketing campaign, whereas our film is the story, and it’s like, how much of that do you want to give away in advance?
I always knew that the story, if we could get enough people to see it, would sell itself. Because it’s the kind of film that you leave wanting to have a conversation about.”. Three Identical Strangers (2018) NeonPeople are talking.
The movie has made nearly $5 million in just 322 theaters around the country. It is a rousing critical success, with high audience approval, strong word-of-mouth, and a likely Oscar nomination. Last week it was announced that the doc is. This past weekend, it passed the woeful to become the 80th-highest-grossing movie of the year, a fitting turnabout from one East Coast scandal to another. In the doc space, it’s a unicorn.“ Three Identical Strangers is always something that we’re looking for, and honestly the hardest to find,” says CNN’s Sexton, whose company financed the film and partnered with Neon for distribution. “These sort of stories are better than fiction and take twists and turns that you couldn’t believe.
Those stories are much harder to mine, and find, and then to have the benefit of having three young guys who look exactly alike, to have this visual marketing hook. It was just a dream to be able to find.”. “People are going and seeing these documentaries and having an emotional experience, whereas maybe previously, in the last few years, it’s been more of an intellectual experience.” —Tim Wardle, director of Three Identical StrangersThree Identical Strangers was not an overnight success.
Wardle developed the story for five years, negotiated extensively for the brothers’ participation, and struggled to raise the money to make it. And given the story’s incendiary, fascinating twists, there were hurdles, too: Three different networks had attempted to tell the brothers’ story before, twice in the 1980s and once in the ’90s, each time falling short of pulling it off. The reasons are shrouded, but once you’ve seen the movie, you’ll understand the practical and legal difficulties. The stakes are high.“I watched Won’t You Be My Neighbor? with an audience, and I think the emotional reaction you see for that is extraordinary as well,” Wardle says. “I think if there was a common theme between my film, RBG, and Rogers, it would be that they’re foregrounding emotion and seeking an emotional truth I think may have been more in the background in recent years in documentaries. People are going and seeing these documentaries and having an emotional experience, whereas maybe previously, in the last few years, it’s been more of an intellectual experience.”Neville can recall a time when things were even more difficult.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (2018) Focus Features“Just a quick history of documentary when I think about it: There was the end of the VHS market, pre-DVD takeoff,” he says. “Then there was a moment in the early 2000s, where Michael Moore and and a few films did really well theatrically.
Suddenly, there was a lot of equity money to make documentaries. Then a bunch of those films didn’t make money, so the equity money went away. Then the DVD market came in strong, and you could finance films based on projected sales of DVDs. And then that disappeared.
Then finally, the streaming market came in and kept changing it.”It keeps changing it. August will bring 30-year-old Bing Liu’s astonishing, wrenching, about a crew of teen skaters in Illinois coping with growing up. It’s perhaps the most praiseworthy project Hulu has yet launched. CNN and Magnolia, the same pairing that delivered RBG, have a straight-ahead depiction of the iconic SNL performer Gilda Radner, coming to theaters in September. There are docs coming on and the designer.
There’s one on, the legendary Hollywood sexual procurer to the stars. They’re and they’re going to. Later this fall, the grand daddy, Michael Moore, returns to longform documentary with, his first since 2015’s lightly received Where to Invade Next. Fourteen years ago, when he released Fahrenheit 9/11, a voracious, apoplectic liberal audience (and likely a hate-watching counter-audience) inhaled the movie, making it far and away the most seen theatrical documentary film ever made.
Fahrenheit 9/11 was dropped into a hostile, scary, routinely confounding political environment. Sound familiar?Documentary has a fascinating power. It seeks the real and then distorts it with a camera, magnifying flaws and overwhelming circumstance. It is a conduit for unseeable or otherwise unknowable stories. It is, in the wrong hands, a tool for message-mongering and ham-fisted storytelling. But it can give us. It is indisputable that it is ever-present in our culture right now, a quest for truth unencumbered by artifice.
And so it’s growing. How long it will last isn’t clear.“I’ve felt many waves come and go. I have no illusions that it’s going to last in this golden era right now,” Neville says. “What I think has happened that I don’t think is going to un-happen is that, what I heard for a long time was, ‘I love documentaries. I don’t know where to see them.’ And now, if you go to iTunes or go to Netflix and see documentaries next to comedies, dramas, a lot of people pick documentaries. The accessibility has changed the profile of the films. Now, a lot of people—even a lot of people I know who work in scripted programming—say, ‘Well, personally, I watch documentaries.
What I want to watch on a Friday night is a documentary.’”.
Like every other 23 year old, Ryohei Yamazaki is always thinking about sex. Well, I guess sex is really on the mind of every young male, regardless of age. Heck, guys in general are pretty much always thinking about sex. Men love sex. Anyways, Junk Boy follows our dim-witted, womanizing friend as he triumphantly seduces woman after woman in his quest for sexual fulfillment. Unfortunately for him, Ryohei is also very picky.
Despite having ladies left, right, and center, none of them meet the ideals of a woman that he truly yearns for.The similarities between Junk Boy and Golden Boy are undeniable; I mean, look at their titles. Pushing the nonsensical similarities aside, we are left with two anime whose main characters are both obsessed with female attention. While we are aware of Kintarou’s successes as a student, Ryohei unfortunately does not have many talents to speak of besides his art of seduction.
In both cases however, they each fall short of utilizing their full potential. From the characters, the aged animation and the same lechery-induced laughs; Junk Boy and Golden Boy are cut from the same cloth. As one might assume, High School DxD features the everyday life of the students at Kuoh Academy. Living alongside the students however, is an indiscernible amount of angels, fallen angels and devils posed as ordinary humans. Of course, the lecherous ways of our main character, Issei Hyoudou, somehow attracts the attention of Yuma Amano. The only downside is that Yuma is actually a fallen angel and tries to kill our young hero.
Fortunately, all turns out well when Issei is successfully revived back to life by a devil in exchange for becoming a servant to said devil. Sounds like high school.High School DxD has a more concrete plotline, yet, contains all the perversion and hilarity found in Golden Boy. Furthermore, the similarities between the main characters are also very substantial. Issei and Kintarou both exhibit deviant behaviour that hinders them from using their full potential academically. Overall, the sheer amount of fan service and hilarity within High School DxD makes it a must-see for fans of Golden Boy.
High School DxD Trailer. What happens when legions of isolated, high school boys are all of a sudden introduced to legions of high school girls? Chaos ensues. Green Green tells the story of Yuusuke Takazaki and his trio of lecher roommates as they try to cope with the greatly appreciated change of becoming co-ed. Just as his roommates are getting ready to woo the ladies, Yuusuke finds himself not needing to. Midori Chitose is a new student who, upon her arrival, is already in love with and willing to do anything for Yuusuke. Unable to recall ever meeting her in the past, the story unfolds as he slowly recovers his memories.Green Green contains the same levels of crude jokes and fan service that made Golden Boy so great.
Yuusuke is quite different from Kintarou – he is younger, a bit average and isn’t as much of a lecher. In fact, Kintarou shares more in common with Yuusuke’s roommates rather than himself. However, the humor remains the same.
If you like the absurd and funny yet sometimes inappropriate, look no further than Green Green. Green Green OP guri guri.
What do you picture when you hear the word, angel? If you think short, inappropriately dressed and voluptuous females, then you’re either the creator of Heaven’s Lost Property or very confused. You can find Tomoki Sakurai doing one of two things; he’s either busy being a pervert, or suffering from a recurring dream he’s had since he was a child. So you can imagine his surprise one night when an angel from the world known as Synapse spontaneously falls from the sky. Declaring him master, the story unfolds as Tomoki helps his new servant, Ikaros, and the rest of her Angeloid friends.Heaven’s Lost Property combines the comedy, ecchi and sci-fi genres into a finished product that is easy to fall in love with. While the supernatural beings and situations stray away from the real-life settings seen in Golden Boy, the comedy and substantial moments of fan service more than make up for it. Both main characters exhibit the same lust for female attention, wanted or unwanted.
This makes for a series that is both fun and exciting for fans who want a taste of action with a hint of Golden Boy TV Anime 'Sora no' trailer PV. Colorful is short and sweet.
No really, the episodes are less than ten minutes and are chocked full with fan service that make you wish they were just a little bit longer. The episodes are disjointed, with only a few characters making more than one appearance. As such, there’s no story to speak of.
Instead, Colorful presents us with an eclectic handful of men who share the same interests of perversions, voyeurism and debauchery. Follow them as they attempt and undoubtedly fail to catch a glimpse of what women want to keep hidden.If you watch Golden Boy without knowing what Golden Boy is beforehand, you can easily mistake it for Colorful. Take any perverted situation Kintarou found himself in, edit it down to around 6 minutes, and you’ll have yourself additional episodes of this concise yet hilarious anime.
If you want the essence of Golden Boy without the frivolous plot, Colorful delivers. Great Teacher Onizuka is 50 percent comedy, 50 percent drama, but 100 percent fun and nonsensical. Eikichi Onizuka is a former gang member, currently jobless and always on the prowl for women. During one of his mall escapades to sneak a few peeks at unsuspecting girls, he somehow manages to secure a date. Of course, it doesn’t end well.
Onizuka is stood up when her boyfriend, who also happens to be her teacher, convinces her to return to him with little to no persistence. Thus, the impractical idea to become a teacher for the sole purpose of meeting women was born. His first class; just a handful of the most ill-behaved teenagers in Tokyo. Fortunately, Onizuka holds himself above the law, and he is willing to break any and every rule to get them under his control. Nothing is going to stop Onizuka from becoming the world’s greatest teacher.You can’t watch Golden Boy and not watch Great Teacher Onizuka.
It’s just as illegal as the methods Onizuka uses in the classroom. There are several reasons why these two anime should be viewed in tandem with one another – from their tones, their art styles and even the main characters themselves. Kintarou and Onizuka are both young, lecherous freeters whose actions always get them into trouble. Despite this, they both have the potential for greatness – something that comes to fruition throughout the length of each series. If you’re looking for anime comedy gold, you’ll find Great Teacher Onizuka at the end of the rainbow.
TOKYOPOP Presents GTO Anime Trailer.