http://www.blogcdn.com/www.cinematical.com/media/2010/08/neshoba-movie-poster.jpg
For this week’s Doc Talk I’d like to spotlight two highly recommended films involving the South: Ross McElwee’s personal ancestry exploration from 2003, Bright Leaves, and Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano’s civil rights film Neshoba: The Price of Freedom, which finally gets a theatrical release this Friday (in NYC; next month it opens in LA).
The reason I revisited McElwee’s film is primarily because of the recent death of Oscar-winning screen legend Patricia Neal (Hud), who appears briefly in the doc. But it also ended up fitting in somewhat with Neshoba, because both films deal with a Southern history, both concern events that previously inspired fictionalized Hollywood movie plots (*Bright Leaf *for the former, Mississippi Burning the latter) and both follow modern stories relative to the historical material.
As for Neshoba, aside from the fact that it opens this weekend, I was intrigued about the film’s subject matter due a recent reference to the infamous 1964 murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman on the season premiere of Mad Men, which mentioned the tragic case as a subtle way of telling the audience in what year the series was now set.Filed under: Documentary, Independent, New Releases, Obits, Michael Moore, Columns, Cinematical Indie
Continue reading Doc Talk: ‘Bright Leaves’ and ‘Neshoba: The Price of Freedom’