Category Archives: Doc’s Movie Reviews

Too Funny to Fail: The Life & Death of The Dana Carvey Show (2017)

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Disney + is the home for tonight’s Genre-ary film, Too Funny to Fail: The Life & Death of The Dana Carvey Show.

According to IMDB, “this feature length documentary from director Josh Greenbaum (Becoming Bond, The Short Game) will take a fresh and irreverent look at the successes and humorous missteps of a show that brought together an amazing slew of future comedy giants before they were household names. Featuring interviews with Dana Carvey, Robert Smigel, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, and more, the film will explore the creation of the show as the brainchild of two of Saturday Night Live’s most beloved alumni, the twists and turns of its brief life on air, and its legacy-one of stellar careers, lasting relationships, and an affirmation that in art, risks are always worth taking.”

The Dana Carvey Show was a sketch show on ABC that lasted just seven episodes. Dana Carvey was coming off the huge success of his time on Saturday Night Live and he was going to do a sketch show featuring a lot of counter-culture comedy.

The doc started with the creation of the show, and the hiring of the cast. The cast turned out to include Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert, who would be major stars later. Robert Smigel, who was also the voice and creator of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, was one of the creative forces, along with Dana Carvey.

The doc was extremely funny as it had all of these comedians and performers speak on the reason this show collapsed and the process of making the show. You could tell that the creatives involved with The Dana Carvey Show really loved their time on the show, even if, in reflection, they understood what they were putting on the air was doomed from the start.

I was entertained by the memories and commentary of these funny people. It is a wonder that they failed so sensationally.

In-spi-ra-tion (2023)

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January 8

Woke up too early so decided to do the Genre-ary with a documentary short this morning. So I searched up doc shorts, and I cam across this one on YouTube. It was called In-spi-ra-tion and it told the story about three different artists from the Isle of Man as they created art and speak about what inspiration meant to them.

The doc is short, but it does create an interesting viewing experience. Watching these individuals making their art while speaking about their lives and their beliefs was fascinating. I thought the background music over top of the artistic imagery was very calming and enjoyable.

The three artists the doc looks at are Juan Moore, Alice Dudley and Bruno Cavellec. Even though the film only spends a few minutes with each of these three, it does a great job of taking us inside the mind and creativity of them and showing us why this art is important to who they are as individuals.

I am a big supporter of creativity and this doc short certainly personifies that concept. I wish more people could find the creative aspect of themselves and try to bring it out.

With that done, I’m going to try to get back to sleep for a little bit before my alarm goes off.

The Blue Angels (2024)

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January 7th

I went to Amazon Prime today for the entry in the Genre-ary. I was excited about this one. It was one that I remember wanting to go see in the theater, but did not get around to it. This was The Blue Angels.

Sadly, I was just not that into this doc. There was some amazing aerial footage of the Blue Angels, but I found much of the remainder of the doc to be fairly dull and I had trouble getting into it.

According to IMDB, this movie “Follows the veterans and newest class of Navy and Marine Corps flight squadron as they go through intense training and into a season of heart-stopping aerial artistry.“

The film does not spend much time diving too deeply into the story of the doc. It feels at times like a commercial for the Navy and the Blue Angels.

As I said, some of the footage in the film was sensational, but I needed more than what they gave me. I just struggled to get into anything in the doc, outside of the great visuals.

ReMastered: Tricky Dick and the Man in Black (2018)

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January 6th

Today’s Genre-ary documentary I found on Netflix and it was a short doc about the time Johnny Cash was asked by President Richard Nixon to come and play at the White House.

The doc gave us some basic background on both Johnny Cash and on Richard Nixon. The Nixon section was specifically focused in on the Vietnam controversies among his presidency.

The doc talked about Nixon using the “Southern Strategy” that has been well documented in Presidential politics since the sixties when the south became more of a Republican stronghold instead of a consistent Democratic voters. It brought up how Nixon used some dog whistles to bring out the “Silent majority” to support the Republican party and create a nation of divisiveness. It was very connected to the present day politics and how it has its roots in this time frame.

The doc never went into too much detail about any of the sections, as it was just under an hour long.

It was interesting seeing how Johnny Cash was affected by his own trip to Vietnam and how he made some changes to the songs Nixon had requested Cash play at the White House. Both of the songs he asked for were songs that took shots at some of the marginalized people of the time, including hippies and those on Welfare.

I liked this doc, but I really believe it could have gone into much more details about the performance and about the two figures of American culture. It touched on a lot of the issues, but it did not go into enough depth.

Remembering Gene Wilder (2023)

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January 5th

This documentary covers the life of EYG Hall of Famer Gene Wilder, one of the great comedic actors of all time. Wilder was the star of a multitude of amazing movies including Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Stir Crazy, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory along others.

I love Gene Wilder. Willy Wonka and Young Frankenstein are two of my all time favorite films and so I was interested in seeing this life

The film touches on his youth, but spends most of the time with his career and adult years. The background of the filming of The Producers and the other movie that followed was really great.

We had comments about the different movies and the genius of Gene Wilder from Mel Brooks, Alan Alda, Carol Kane, Harry Connick Jr., Eric McCormack, Ben Mankiewicz, daughter of Richard Pryor- Rain and Mike Medavoy.

The film spoke about Gene’s love and marriage with Gilda Radner as well as his discovery of his second wife Karen during research for the film See No Evil, Hear No Evil. Karen was a real emotional beat in the last section of the doc. As she was giving her first person POV of Wilder’s Alzheimer’s Disease, it was heartbreaking and I found myself with tears in my eyes.

Gene Wilder was such a kind and loving person and that comes across in this movie. We got much of this doc in Gene Wilder’s own voice. He did much of the narration of the film and it brought us even closer to this icon.

An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

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January 4th

One of the most well known documentaries of the past 25 years is on the agenda for the Genre-ary DailyView today: the Oscar-winning doc An Inconvenient Truth featuring a presentation by former Vice-President Al Gore.

The term ‘Global Warming’ is no longer used because the opposition forces have jumped on the semantics of the term, pointing to terribly low temperatures that have happened. The term these days is ‘climate change,’ which, as I said, is just semantics.

The science Al Gore presented in this doc is very compelling and hard to argue against. Contrarians might claim this is meant to be a political presentation, but it does not feel that way to me. Gore speaks about misconceptions during the film and how opponents try to build on doubt, and this feels more accurate.

Al Gore is undeniably an engaging speaker on this topic. He has always been presented as being stoic and stuffy, and, while one can see some of that in this doc, he showed himself knowledgeable and effective in providing info on this topic in compelling ways.

I thought the moments where they connected parts of Gore’s life, whether that be his presidential run, his sister’s death to lung cancer or the near death of his son, were very strong parts of the film that were then tied neatly back into the film’s overall narrative.

As a movie, this is a thoroughly entertaining work, but its relevance in the world today is undeniable unless there are motivating circumstances that prevent you from accepting the dangers that climate change can bring. Gore quotes Upton Sinclair in the film who said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

I am happy to have finally watched this two-time Oscar winning film (it also won for Best Song) and I wish people would stop looking at this through the spyglass of politics.

The Turnaround (2024)

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January 3

It is a busy day today, so this is the first of the Genre-ary DailyView that will be a documentary short. I found this doc on Netflix, called The Turnaround and it focused on Trea Turner, a player for the Philadelphia Phillies.

Trea Turner signed a contract with the Phillies was 11 years for $300 million. It was a large contract and they expected adding him to a mighty Phillies lineup that would immediately shoot them to the World Series.

However, Turner started off with the Phillies in a terrible way, striking out and committing errors.

The Phillies fans are notorious for being tough on players. However a standing ovation from the fans led to a total turnaround.

This doc looked at one fan in particular named Jon McCann. According to IMDB, McCann was “a Phillies fan from the city’s Bridesburg neighborhood and a content creator known as ‘The Philly Captain’ who helped spearhead the standing ovation.”

“It’s nice to be nice some times,” said McCann in the doc.

The doc showed the depression that McCann was in, to a point where he was hospitalized for the potential of killing himself. The doc brought the two stories together in a very effective manner.

I am a baseball fan, and I loved Trea Turner, who spent some time as a Dodger. This was a really nice documentary short that presents that love of baseball and how the power of positivity can truly make a difference.

The Amazing Jonathan Documentary (2019)

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January 2

Day two of the 2025 Genre-ary brought me to Disney + and a film about a magician by the name of the Amazing Jonathan, a documentary that started off as a story about a magician who was diagnoses with a heart condition that gave him one year to live, but ended up in a much different direction that included a deep internal conflict for the documentarian Ben Berman.

The Amazing Jonathan had been diagnoses with a heart condition and he told an audience that he had one year to live. When Ben Berman approached him, that was three years prior and Amazing Jonathan was going back out for a five-show tour.

However, the doc was not as much about Amazing Jonathan as it was about Ben Berman himself and trying to discover exactly was going on. He found out that there were other people working on a documentary about Jonathan, people whom Jonathan had also given permission to. During the doc, we discover three other documentaries in progress besides Berman’s.

As Berman filmed, he began to question what was real and what was being made up by the magician as an illusion or a prank.

Some may say not to turn the camera back on the documentarian, but I feel as if this film does it in a very effective manner. I was more compelled by the story about the making of this documentary than I was about the story of this dying magician. For a good chunk of the film, I saw Amazing Jonathan almost as the antagonist of the doc, which is crazy. I did like how this documentary brought the conflict to a close at the end. It felt like redemption for the film character Amazing Jonathan.

I see some hate for this documentary online, but I thought this was a fascinating tale of the creation of a doc featuring a magician and the documentarian and their intertwining story. I watched this on Disney +, but it was released officially on Hulu.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (2024)

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January 1

It is January 1st, which means that I start the new Genre-ary event at EYG. This year, EYG will be doing the Genre-ary with documentaries. I will watch a new documentary, one that I have never seen before, every day for the whole month.

The first documentary I watched was one I saw on YouTube pundit Dan Murrell’s video of the Best Films of the Year. It was called The Remarkable Life of Ibelin and it sounded like an emotional film. I decided that I would use 2024 documentaries in the Genre-ary instead of waiting on them until the June Swoon.

With the set-up out of the way, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin was truly a beautiful documentary about a young man with Duchenne muscular dystrophy who was able to find friendship, love and hope inside the gaming world of World of Warcraft.

Mats Steen, a young Norwegian boy, was diagnosed with the muscular disorder as a child and had to spend most of his life confined to a wheelchair as the disorder slowly restricted his motor skills.

One of the few things Mats was able to do was be on his computer. He found a community or guild, inside World of Warcraft, called Starlight, where he was able to meet others. Mats did not reveal anything about his condition to the people playing the game with him even after they had formed a close online relationship.

The doc uses the actual online dialogue used in the game to create an animated model of the online game. It uses this animation, in the World of Warcraft style, to show how important Mats, as the avatar called Ibelin, would become to the Starlight guild. The doc also used interviews with other guild members and family members of Mats as well as some home movies to build this picture of the young man.

Mats wrote an online blog near the end of his life that the doc used to illustrate more about the thoughts Mats was having. They had an actor read the blog entries in a voice close to Mats. Mats’ family did not know anything of this blog and, after his death, Mats had left the password to his family. This is where they started to understand how much their son had impacted the world through the video game. They posted on the blog that Mats had died and dozens of people responded to them, one of the more powerful moments for me during this doc.

The doc was not about a man who was slowly dying. This doc showed the power of life, friendship and of connections to others, even if it is not in the typical way. Mats had a short life, but his presence was felt by many different people in extremely powerful ways.

This was available to stream on Netflix. It is well worth your time. You may give a second thought to the viability of those kids spending time on their computers.

Nightbitch

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I thought I was done with new movies in 2024. I was working on the year in review stuff, organizing the best and worst lists when I decided to go to Disney + and see if anything was there. I couldn’t believe what I saw as the movie Nightbitch starring Amy Adams was available to stream. I did not expect Nightbitch on Disney + (it was through the Hulu subscription) so I decided I could watch another movie in 2024.

I am glad I did because I enjoyed the movie very much. It was a weird, unlikely story using dogs as a metaphor for motherhood and the struggles that it brings.

I saw Amy Adams with six nipples.

So that happened.

According to IMDB, Nightbitch is the story of “A woman (Amy Adams), thrown into the stay-at-home routine of raising a toddler in the suburbs, slowly embraces the feral power deeply rooted in motherhood, as she becomes increasingly aware of the bizarre and undeniable signs that she may be turning into a dog.“

Scoot McNairy played Adams’ unobservant husband and their relationship was at the center of the existential crisis Adams was going through. She was finding that she was losing herself in her attempt to be the wife and mother, including sacrificing her art to stay at home. The burden of motherhood weighed on her and her life became more and more out of control. Adams could only find release by transforming into a dog and running around the neighborhood.

Amy Adams does a great job in the lead role. I had no idea that the title of the film was intended to be literal. Although I believe that the whole dog stuff is really just in Adams’s head and that she was just doing these things. How much of this was actually happening and how much was an unreliable narrator in Adams’s character telling us what is happening?

I liked this movie a lot. I was surprised to see it at 59% on Rotten Tomatoes and even lower with the audience score. It does have a female lead and a message of struggles that the woman goes through so maybe it is one of those films that has been dropped down because of the anti-woke crowd who can’t stand a movie from the POV of a woman. I don’t know, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

4 stars

Getting Lost

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What a treat.

I think I had a knowledge in the back of my mind that there was a documentary in the works for LOST, but I had not gone looking for it. Then, I was on social media (I do not remember if I was on X or Facebook or Bluesky to be honest) and I found someone talking about the documentary being available on Prime for rental. I rushed over to Prime immediately to see if I could find it. And there it was.

I have to explain this. I have never been as connected to a TV program as I was with LOST. It was at the very heart of my being. When it ended, I felt like I had a hole in my heart that I just could not fill. It was a physical gap that had an emptiness about it. All these years later, I still think back on the show with so much love.

I was excited to watch this documentary and it immediately grabbed my attention. It had interviews with nearly everyone in the cast, producers, writers, fans and they were talking about all of the major aspects about LOST, from the cultural significance to the influential impact on TV to the importance of the show on people’s lives.

They talked about the pilot and how they were making the pilot without any expectation that it would ever be picked up. They talked about the Tailies, “The Constant,” Not Penny’s Boat, Charlie’s Death, “We have to go back,” Walt, the finale etc.

The documentary did not shy away from controversy either. They addressed how the finale is a divisive episode that split the community apart. They talked about the report a few years ago stating that the LOST writer’s room was filled with bullying, racism and sexism (which I had not heard about before this) and they asked Damon Lindelof about it. Matthew Fox did not appear via an interview for the doc and there was an ending moment where J.J. Abrams asked if they did not get an interview with anybody and the voice off camera said Matthew Fox. Abrams said, “Seriously? You never got Foxy? Come on, really?” and then said “That’s too bad. His loss.” I wonder if there was something contentious going on there. Dominic Monaghan apparently also declined an invitation to talk.

Filmmaker Taylor Morden included some specific details about the LOST fan community, including the podcasts that sprung up and also some of the charitable work done by the LOST community, especially dealing with cancer. There were some famous fans that were interviewed such as Samm Levine and Bobby Moynihan.

I loved this documentary. I may not be the most unbiased when it comes to my thoughts on it, but I do think that they went out of their way to include everything about the series, even the bad things.

AND IT WAS NOT PURGATORY! THEY WERE NOT DEAD ALL THE TIME!

Um.. sorry about that.

Nosferatu

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I have been looking forward to this movie for quite awhile. I have enjoyed every time Nosferatu has found his way onto the screen and so I expected to enjoy this too.

This is basically the Bram Stoker Dracula story with Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) in the lead vampire role. Orlok has become obsessed with a young recently married woman named Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and he stalks her while tormenting the people of her town.

There are so many things that are great about Nosferatu. The acting was sensational from everyone. Nicholas Hoult played Ellen’s husband Thomas brilliantly. Willem Dafoe was Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz, the bizarre professor with the idea on what needs to happen. Aaron Taylor-Johnson played Thomas’s friend whose wife, Anna (Emma Corrin) was friends with Ellen.

The cinematography and images on the screen were absolutely stunning. The shots of the sea with the Demeter was artistic as could be. The imagery of every shot on the screen was beautiful and compelling. There was a shot of Orlok’s shadow with Ellen at the very beginning of the film which was amazing. There were images everywhere in the movie that stood out, showing what an amazing job director Robert Eggers has done on this movie.

I loved the coloring of the film too. It made it feel special and even the most frightening moments of the film looked lovely. The craftsmanship of the film is stunning and this film will be earning several tech Academy Award nominations when it comes time.

The movie was violent and brutal. There are moments where the images were difficult to watch.

The only drawback I can say is that it is basically the Dracula story retread and it might be a touch long. Other than that, this is a masterful reboot of the iconic film. I had went into the film with high expectations because I had heard so many positives about it, so that is always a danger. All of my expectations were reached and exceeded. This is a fantastic movie.

5 stars

I Saw the TV Glow

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The other film I rented off Fandango at Home/Vudu was entitled I Saw the TV Glow, and Zi had heard plenty of buzz about this, in both positive and negative ways. I thought this would be a good film to give a try.

I have to say that this was very surreal, dream-like and metaphoric. It was a difficult movie to follow and so much of it was shot intentionally to create that feeling of confusion or interpretive.

According to IMDB, “Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own. In the pale glow of the television, Owen’s view of reality begins to crack.”

One of the film’s main themes deal with reality and identity… who they were on the inside. I do believe that this was a metaphor showing the way some people can deny whom they are, pretending that they are something else. I have a feeling that this movie will reverberate with some people considerably more because of that theme.

I also believe that there are several ways that this movie could be interpreted and that no one way is exact. Since this narrative is not one with straight-forward situations and answers, the audience member brings a lot of what they infer with them centered around their own personal knowledge and background. That makes this material quite rich.

The film was trippy and psychedelic in the best ways. Some people are going to look upon this movie with disdain for any number of reasons, but I was fascinated with it and I was intrigued with what was happening with these characters. I’m not sure how many times I would watch this movie on rewatches, but the first time experience was worthwhile of my time.

3.6 stars

The Apprentice

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This was one that I was not anxious to see. However, I had hear some of the buzz for Sebastian Stan’s powerhouse performance as Donald Trump and, since it became available to rent on Vudu, I decided to give it a chance.

Stan does a tremendous job in portraying Trump, not just by imitating him or parodying him, but by using certain mannerisms to get across what he is trying to show.

The film takes the young Donald Trump and shows you how he went from that young guy who was collecting rent for his father to a mogul that would do whatever he wanted under any circumstance.

Ironically, the film scenes may have been stolen by Jeremy Strong, who played Roy M. Cohn, Trump’s lawyer who helped teach the young Trump the rules of business that became such a major aspect of Trump’s life. After Trump could no longer get anything from Cohn, he tossed him aside like yesterday’s news. Strong’s performance was even better than that of Stan’s, albeit in less screen time.

The film does a good job of displaying a man who would become one of the most polarizing figures in American history.

3.7 stars

Doctor Who Special 5: Joy to the World

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Spoilers

Doctor Who returned to Disney + with the fifth special, Joy to the World, a Christmas story featuring Ncuti Gatwa and Nicola Coughlan.

I believed Nicola Coughlan was going to be the next companion, Joy, but that turned out to be incorrect. She becomes even more as she becomes a star and it turned out to be a star shining over Jerusalem in the year 0001.

The Doctor had to figure everything out by rushing through the Time Hotel, where he had to spend a year waiting to be able to access the Time Hotel once again. During that time, he befriended a co-worker at the hotel, Anita, and spent the year befriending her and spending time with her in chairs, something he realized that he did not have on the Tardis.

I loved the section where the Doctor had to wait a year and then just went and told his old self the briefcase code, which he had been told by himself. It was a loop and I loved how clever it was to have him find out the code by having himself tell it.

The whole time travel idea can be difficult, but I did like how this episode removed the potential time paradoxes with the Time Hotel.

This was emotional, joyous and a treat during this holiday season. I have loved Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor and I hope he has a good long run as the character. I am looking forward to the next season and the potential return, at least for some episodes, of Ruby.

4 stars