Tues
2/26 |
Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, directors of "A Place at the Table" (2013), a documentary about hunger in the United States.
Kristi twitter
Lori twitter
@PlaceAtTheTable
@tomcolicchio is. coincidentally, involved in all this
Catalyst Films site
movie/info/action site
2012 Sundance "meet the artists" video
RottenTomatoes
imdb
wikipedia
filmjournal One nation, underfed: 'A Place at the Table' warns that food crisis puts millions of children at risk
Slant review Notable:
A Place at the Table's proposed solution is relatively simple: wide government spending and a resurgence in social programs. It argues that in the late '70s, when food-stamp and school-cafeteria programs were properly funded, the problem of hunger was contained. When responsibility was shifted to charities and the private sector in the '80s, hunger rose again. In the wake of this argument, the doc's tone sometimes suggests that the hunger crisis could be solved easily if people just put their minds to it. After all, the U.S. doesn't face a shortage of food, but inequality of distribution—not famine but hunger. In other scenes, though, the movie complicates its own optimism. Because there's enough food to feed the whole country, the roots of the hunger crisis lie elsewhere, in murkier class issues. One expert in the film notes that the primary question isn't "Why don't people have enough to eat?," but rather "Why are people poor?" That's certainly a more beguiling question, but also the more honest one, and A Place at the Table is a better movie for asking it.
NPR interview
HollywoodChicago.com interview
Paste review |
Weds
2/27 |
R.J. Cutler's documentary, "The World According to Dick Cheney" (2013) also a Sundance film
twitter
Wikipedia
imdb
Sundance
RottenTomatoes
trailer at Indiewire
Variety review Notable:
Dick Cheney's favorite food is spaghetti. Anyone looking for a more profound revelation should probably pass up "The World According to Dick Cheney," a powder-puff profile by helmers R.J. Cutler and Greg Finton likely to be remembered as a great squandered opportunity. Intended audiences, or anyone who's read a newspaper in the past 10 years, will be not only disappointed but actively irritated by the helmers' soft-pedaling of controversy, recycling of old news, failure to challenge their subject on any issue, and rudimentary style. Showtime has it, and there it should languish.
Hollywood Reporter review NOtable:
Critical (though never aggressive) in its script but a pushover in the interviewer's chair, R.J. Cutler and Greg Finton's The World According to Dick Cheney offers a respectable summation of the former vice president's career but reveals little if anything we don't already know...Cheney's critics will have plenty of opportunities to complain of entire subjects untouched here -- his evasion of military service during the Vietnam War, for instance -- but more frustrating is the film's inability to press him on the topics it does raise. If the filmmakers ever pushed Cheney on a well-rehearsed answer, ever challenged a self-serving rationale, that footage is on the cutting-room floor.
Slate review
MovieCityNews.com review Notable:
The first film I saw at Sundance 2013 was a bitter note, a reckless, infuriating piece of work for Showtime, The World According to Dick Cheney, a credulous, shallow, near-hagiography of the former vice president’s decades-long political scheming and proud lying...
The film is fixed on the force of his crude personality and drive to power. The cut-rate melodramatic score is most pronounced during Cheney’s braggadocio about 9/11, and accompanied by a grab bag of archival footage, endorses his perspective, whether intentionally or not. The very fabric of the filmmaking seems to underline and endorse his every pronunciamento. Turning to wars, the film quickly becomes “Zero Dick Thirty.”..His bright-eyed grimace when he offers smug, superior, dismissive, clunkily-formed, unfunny one-liners, is the failed film’s high point. Or, perhaps, its only point. Did I mention that Dick Cheney single-handedly saved America and we ought to be grateful for all his fateful acts? History awaits a skeptical portrait.
"local boy does good' article about the composer of that score
Paste review notable:
There are all sorts of speculative theories—some of them quite plausible—about the sinister motives behind Dick Cheney’s vice presidency. The World According to Dick Cheney wisely chooses to avoid them, and instead quietly studies his legacy with cold facts...Despite the shortcomings of the interview, the film assembles a portrait of the man’s life...doesn’t offer much surprising information, but it assembles it in a conventional but clear manner that leaves us to ponder a life that changed the country like few others.
But here's a fan |