Wednesday I swapped the WXDU livestream over to a new all-digital signal chain. I wrote about that at the WXDU website.
Thursday-Sunday was Full Frame. I watched 17 movies over a span of 4 days, and tweeted my impressions of each one.
OMG Iris! Everything I hoped it would be, and more. Perfect beginning to #fullframefest 2015.
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 9, 2015
Monte Adentro: Like a verite Fitzcarraldo, only with furniture-laden mules instead of a boat. Lots of gasps from the crowd. #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 9, 2015
(Dis)Honesty: Ultra-polished, enormously compelling examination of humanity’s propensity for (self)deception. #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 9, 2015
Meru: Pure unvarnished mountaineering, tho it’s the characters & their stories that make the movie. Sea level for me, though. #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 10, 2015
The Farewell: gorgeous photoessay about a retired Cuban miner. Not much context, but phenomenal imagery. #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 10, 2015
Overburden: Straightfwd advocacy doc about mountaintop removal mining; benefits greatly from personalities & circumstances. #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 10, 2015
Curious Worlds: The Art & Imagination of David Beck – I’m a sucker for well-made artist bio-docs, and this is one of those. #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 10, 2015
Being Evel: Everything you would hope or expect from an Evel Knievel doc, including Johnny Knoxville & George Hamilton. #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 10, 2015
From This Day Forward: Profoundly moving. See it if it rescreens on Sunday. Seriously. Best of the fest so far. #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 11, 2015
What. The. Hell. Did. I. Just. Watch. #wolfpack #fullframefest That was amazing. Wow. Wow.
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 11, 2015
SO GLAD I got to see the Shelby Lee Adams documentary, as it’s thoroughly out of print otherwise. And it’s excellent. #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 11, 2015
Mavis! One could hardly ask for more from a documentary about Mavis Staples. She’s such a fireball. #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 11, 2015
Harry and Snowman: RIYL horses, underdogs, 50s hoi polloi fashion, horses. Everyone who loved horses as a kid was weeping. #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 11, 2015
Black Panthers: deep, fascinating & sad – sad that the movement was crushed, sad that so many things they fought against haven’t changed.
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 12, 2015
Listen To Me Marlon: Heroic, largely successful effort to assemble a coherent memoir from his 100s of hours of personal tapes #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 12, 2015
The National Lampoon doc is an exhausting (& uncritical) reminder of just how privileged, white, sexist & racist the mag was #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 12, 2015
What Happened, Miss Simone? Nina channeled all the pain & rage of 60s Black America, and it almost killed her. But it didn’t. #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 12, 2015
Sunshine Superman: It’s a wonderful stroke of good fortune that the inventor of BASE jumping was an obsessive filmmaker. #fullframefest
— Ross Grady (@rossgrady) April 13, 2015
I enjoyed nearly everything I saw this time around, which is a pretty impressive hit-rate. I should have known better than to get a ticket for the National Lampoon hagiography (in my defense, I figured there was a chance that the director might be something other than a starry-eyed uncritical fan … but, nope).
The handful of docs I’m still actively thinking about are Iris, From This Day Forward, The Wolfpack, The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, and What Happened, Miss Simone?
See any/all of those that you can.