Tag: Documentary

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 24th October
Seen: 27th October

When it comes to true cultural impact, there are very few bands who you can say have changed the course of history and also been massively popular. Obviously, you could throw in groups like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Kiss but any list of “culturally significant bands” that doesn’t contain The Wiggles is incomplete. With a set of brightly coloured skivvies and songs about fruit salad and driving around in a big red car, The Wiggles have dominated the world of children’s entertainment for over 30 years and have changed the lives of millions. It only makes sense that, like all truly great bands, The Wiggles would get to have a documentary of their own someday and just like the band itself, the documentary Hot Potato: The Story of The Wiggles is a truly brilliant piece of art that stands apart from others in its genre.

Continue reading “Hot Potato: The Story Of The Wiggles (2023) – Everybody Clap” →

Over on Soda & Telepaths I wrote another thing about a Fantastic Fest film festival entry called So Unreal, a strange little documentary/video essay that might be worth reading about if you’re into that sort of thing

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 6th September
Seen: 9th September

The Boy Scouts Of America was founded in 1910 with the intention of teaching the young men of the US skills that they might need to survive. From knot tying to starting a fire to first aid lessons, being a Boy Scout was a sign that you wanted to be a contributing member of your community and its leaders were in positions of trust that gave them some form of societal power. Sadly, it should not be a shock that when this much power is placed in the hands of a group of adults who have access to children without anyone around them, it’s almost inevitable that this would lead to some serious issues and the movie Scouts Honor: The Secret Files Of The Boy Scouts Of America details one of the worst cover-ups in history, one that should’ve probably destroyed the Scouts.

Continue reading “Scouts Honor: The Secret Files Of The Boy Scouts Of America (2023) – Important” →

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 10th January
Seen: 2nd September

In February of 2013, Caleb Lawrence McGillvary was hitchhiking. One of the people who gave him a ride turned out to be Jett Simmons McBride who, with Caleb in his passenger seat, drove his car into a utility truck and pinned a worker between his vehicle and the truck. When a woman came over to help, Jett tried to pull her away while proclaiming himself to be Jesus Christ and shouting racial slurs about the man who he had just hit with his vehicle. This is when Caleb sprung into action with a hatchet he had in his bag, hitting Jett 3 times in the head which got him to release the young woman and incapacitated him until the police came. When interviewed about this, Caleb would insist on being called Kai and described his moment of defense with the onomatopoeic phrase “Smash, Smash, Suh-mash” which would go on to become a meme and earn Kai the label “Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker”. 

By May of that same year, Kai would be arrested for the murder of New Jersey attorney Joseph Galfy and eventually be sentenced to over 5 decades in prison. 

Continue reading “The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker (2023) – Suh-mash” →

These Two Hands – The Story Of Bowen Therapy is available as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival

Tom Bowen was born in 1916 and lived a seemingly normal life working as a concreter in Victoria until he developed a system that would come to be known as the Bowen Technique. The idea was that a certain set of hand movements on someone’s skin could alleviate chronic pain permanently, which it allegedly did to the thousands of people who passed through Bowen’s care. After leaving concreting, Bowen’s practice became so busy he would often see between 65-100 patients a day until his passing in 1982. The man’s work and his life story are the central subject of These Two Hands – The Story Of Bowen Therapy and it’s certainly interesting… let’s start with that.

Continue reading “These Two Hands – The Story Of Bowen Therapy (2023) – Handy” →

Belly of the Beast: A Torquay Story is available as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival

Roughly one hour’s drive south of Melbourne is the little coastal town of Torquay, a small town that houses the Australian National Surfing Museum. This makes sense considering the history of Torquay as a surfing mecca, a place where several surfing legends got their start and the location that would end up inspiring the creation of well-known surf brands Rip Curl and Quicksilver. Its history is tied to the growth of one of the most Australian sports of them all, surfing… but I’m a big nerd who wouldn’t go to the beach if you paid me, let alone get on a surfboard, so I don’t know any of that history, or at least I didn’t until seeing Belly of the Beast: A Torquay story and now I have a fairly good education on the matter because this is an insanely informative film.

Continue reading “Belly of the Beast: A Torquay Story (2023) – Hang Ten Dudes!” →

Walkatjurra is available as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival

Since 1954 Australia has been mining uranium to supply it to other countries (mainly the US and UK, though there have been others in recent years) where it can be turned into nuclear weapons or used in power plants. Those weapons were tested in several parts of Australia up until 1963 so several areas are still pretty radioactive… and hey, there is still uranium to be mined and profit to be made so we keep digging it up. It’s been 70 years since we started digging and more and more protests are happening to try and be a force for change, hopefully ending this system once and for all. One group’s protest that’s filmed as the central focus of Walkatjurra involves a 200km walk through the desert where a lot of this mining has taken place, a mobile protest that shows that this land is precious and used by a lot of people. 

Continue reading “Walkatjurra (2023) – Takes Action” →

Dig Deeper is available as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival

Getting into the art world is an obscenely difficult thing to do at the best of times, especially when it comes to getting your work displayed at any major gallery. This is especially hard for indigenous art which is often not given the amount of respect, attention and potential space that it deserves. It also tends to often be pigeonholed as art rooted in history that predates most people viewing it which leaves out a substantial element of indigenous art. Dig Deeper takes a look at four specific indigenous artists who stand out for pointedly defying that image and making it big in the art world and their work is absolutely stunning.

Continue reading “Dig Deeper (2023) – Digs Deep” →

Teacher is available as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival

There is no job that’s more thankless than that of a school teacher, this is a universal truth that has only become more accurate as time goes on. Not only is it a job that requires incredible time, knowledge and passion but in dealing with kids there’s the requirement of almost saintly patience and ability to deal with just about anything that comes up, all while being obscenely underpaid and working with limited resources because for some reason society has decided to make this job as hard as possible. This was all true BEFORE a global pandemic but when that happened and teaching had to be done online it got exponentially harder. In Teacher, we get a glimpse into just how much harder.

Continue reading “Teacher (2023) – Lesson Learned” →