Category Archives: Releases

Coming to theatres and VOD tomorrow, Friday, January 23: MANNY

Ryan Moore and Leon Gast’s profile of an unlikely boxing champion bowed at SXSW last year. Other screenings include Toronto’s Reel Asian and Little Rock.

First-time filmmaker Moore benefits from enlisting veteran helmer Gast, no stranger to boxing docs thanks to his Oscar-winning WHEN WE WERE KINGS, to tell the story of champion Manny Pacquiao, a Filipino man who used the sport to climb out of lifelong poverty and onto the world stage. His is a rags-to-riches, Cinderella story, appealing on the surface as archival footage and much too serious narration shows his string of victories, but becomes an inadvertent parody of celebrity as Pacquiao is shown trying earnestly to conquer the worlds of both music stardom and politics, all while still devoting the bulk of his time to the ring. Unfortunately the film doesn’t particularly seem interested in interrogating the intriguing cost or consequences of fame beyond brief suggestions of extramarital trysts or gambling problems, preferring instead to offer up a hagiographic portrait, complete with admiring comments from recognizable admirers like Mark Walhberg and Jeremy Piven. As a result, while Moore and Gast might succeed in introducing an appealing sports figure with a familiar, inspirational backstory to the uninitiated, there’s not much beyond that to make their portrait particularly memorable.

Coming to VOD today, Tuesday, January 20: THE FIX

Laura Naylor’s portrait of recovery debuted at the Soho International Film Festival last year. It went on to screen at AFI Docs and Heartland, as well as festivals in Maine, Flagstaff, and the Bronx.

Naylor’s film is largely set at a Bronx methadone clinic which offers counseling and other programs to help recovering addicts like the protagonist, Junior, manage not only their struggles with heroin, but its consequences – in this case, living with Hepatitis C. Having spent most of his adult years trying to escape life through drugs, a path that cost him custody of his first daughter, he’s now committed to forging a new future by staying clean and getting his new family out of shelter life. Emboldened by his experiences at the clinic working as a peer educator, Junior thrives in a storytelling workshop organized by The Moth, sharing his story publicly to help others make better choices, and, eventually taking steps to repair the rift between his estranged daughter and himself. Naylor has identified an appealing main subject in Junior, a flawed figure who owns up to past mistakes and is still in the process of atoning for them. One wishes he always remained the center of the narrative, however, as occasional digressions with other recovering addicts feel like interruptions, and detract from Junior’s simple, but effective story. Also serving as distractions are the overemphatic score and a tendency toward montages, which make the film feel longer than it is. Still, when centered on Junior’s hopeful but cautious story of redemption, Naylor’s film succeeds far more often than it doesn’t.

Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, January 20 and to PBS’s American Experience next Tuesday, January 27: EDISON

Michelle Ferrari’s chronicle of the life and world-changing work of the legendary inventor will make its debut next week, but due to a scheduling shift, actually comes to DVD a week earlier.

An exploration not only of Thomas Alva Edison’s remarkable creative output – he still boasts more patents than any other single individual – but of his prescience of branding and marketing, Ferrari’s biography is informative, comprehensive, and clearly conveys the radical transformation his inventions wrought on society. While utterly conventional in its structure and approach – heavily reliant on narration to adequately cover Edison’s eight decades, peppered with historian and other expert talking heads to lend some variety – the doc still manages to prove engaging for its two-hour running time, revealing a clear sense of the Wizard of Menlo Park’s creative process, business acumen, ambition, and even hubris – the latter chiefly in his stubborn and short-sighted refusal to adopt alternating current vs his preferred but limited distance direct current. Ferrari’s profile is particularly intriguing in its exploration of Edison’s savviness not only in creating new things but, perhaps more importantly, determining how to bring them into the marketplace and to create awareness and demand. His ability to hype his products, and his awareness of the power of his brand, informs the film’s welcome look at Edison as celebrity, teased out particularly in the last section, covering the man’s waning years.