Flight documentaries happen when we’re flying home after a European sojourn. An eastbound flight is for sleeping. Westbound is for reading, writing and watching.
Movies?
Not for me, seeing that 95 out of 100 are crap, but documentaries are another story. It also can be a good time to explore new music via audio selections.
Now as I’ve been saying about the genre of the documentary, as opposed to the biopic …
The inside story of the must-see McQueen documentary, by Ella Alexander (Harper’s Bazaar)
Film-makers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui open up about how they created the most compelling, moving McQueen tribute to date
… “If the subject matter is so amazing and you have visuals, visual support and stories to tell, then I think a documentary is better than a biopic because there’s no one better than the real people to tell the story,” Bonhôte told us. “Audiences don’t care if it has slick imagery; they care about the emotion of that visual or footage, whether it shows them something they didn’t know.”
Point made; point taken. I didn’t know very much about McQueen or Whitney Houston, and now I do. The Houston documentary is considerably better than this idiotic trailer.
McQueen or Houston; lots and lots of talent, and just as many demons.
How a Director Uncovered Whitney Houston’s Secret Pain… As deep as “Whitney” explores Houston’s life offstage, it spends far less time on her music. Though Mr. Macdonald illustrates the astonishing reach of her success — Saddam Hussein used an Arabic version of “I Will Always Love You” as his campaign theme — her voice seems to exist as a kind of superpower she can turn on at will. In a section on her unforgettable performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Super Bowl, we learn that she listened to the music director Rickey Minor’s arrangement exactly once before recording the song in a single take.
