The commentary by dozens of admirers and career-highlight TV and movie snippets are great of course, nostalgic but purposeful, meaningful in the context of Brooks’ life and influence on showbiz. But Apatow digs just deep enough to show that the guy is a true, honest-to-gosh restless artist at heart.
We run the risk of praising Marty and not how entertaining Mr. Scorsese is, with its murderer’s row of talking heads, reiterations of bits familiar to cinephiles and smart analytical revelations – and inevitably will be in future installments. .... Probably should be 10 hours. At least.
Whether The Last Frontier can maintain this pace for the next nine hours is unlikely. But it’s a good start more than a rocky one (and note, future episodes reportedly stray from some of the core drama as Frank and co. track down loose escapees). Give it another ep or two before you move on.
The makers of The Yogurt Shop Murders are not just curious about the case but how deeply the case affected Austin and the people who were intimately involved with it over the past three decades, an approach that we wish we saw more often in true crime docs.
This is a slightly more colorful version of the Wikipedia summation of what happened, albeit with a level of frustrating imprecision in terms of detailed storytelling. Par for most of the Trainwreck course, Storm Area 51 is flimsy and dissatisfying.
Questions spring out of the narrative about child manipulation and the ethics of media frenzies, fringe thematics that might take deeper root in a documentary series that’s more concerned with journalistic integrity than Trainwreck’s pursuit of amusement. But Balloon Boy, in making us wonder if the entire Heene family colluded on this stunt and stuck to it for 15 years despite the fact that Occam’s Razor tells us they’re most likely cuckoo fakers, has all the moral ambiguity a quest-for-a-likely-unattainable-truth doc needs.
Thus far, it skews a bit younger – teens and tweens – and toward the middle of the road, and even if it doesn’t inspire too many superlatives, it’s squarely watchable, maybe watchable-plus. The promise of higher-drama action and star-crossed romance seem likely to keep us on the hook to see how the story plays out.
Jaws @ 50 can be formulaic, and it doesn’t break the mold of making-of docs. Even if it’s not quite a must-see, it’s nevertheless a fun watch for fans who appreciate a little rehash and newbs who want insight into a true cinematic benchmark.
