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- AddVince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartlandto QueueAddVince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartlandto top of Queue
Popular comic actor Vince Vaughn brings a newly invigorating sense of Old West attitude to the world of standup comedy as he captures the carefree spirit of Buffalo Bill's turn-of-the-century "Wild West Show" on the stage, and the cameras are rolling to capture every belly-shaking laugh in this look at the 30-day, 30-gig tour that featured Vaughn serving as emcee to a wild host of renegade comics that included John Caparulo, Ahmed Ahmed, Bret Ernst, Sebastian Maniscalco, and a whole host of surprise special guests. Of course, when you gather as many comedians together as Vaughn did for such a high-concept tour, the laughs are sure to keep coming once the show has ended, and in addition to offering standup footage of each comic in action, the feature-film version of the tour also offers a hilarious look at what it was like for a group of fun-loving guys to make their way across the American landscape while bringing down the house night after night. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Filmmaker David Sington merges the magnificence of science with the compelling drama of the human quest for advancement with this compelling and visually stunning meditation on the historic Apollo space program. In the four remarkable years between 1968 and 1972, American history took a defining turn as nine NASA spacecraft made the trip to the moon, and twelve bold explorers became the first men ever to set foot on ground beyond planet Earth. In this documentary, space enthusiast Sington allows the surviving crew members from each Apollo mission the unique opportunity to recount their memories of those missions in their own words as vintage, original NASA film footage offers a tantalizing glimpse of this extraordinary era in American history. Candid interviews with the astronauts reveal the sensitive and fun-loving souls whose fearlessness would lead a nation into a new era of progress, and audio recordings from Mission Control lend a newfound sense of poignancy to a variety of oft-recounted historical milestones. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Most four-year-olds make paintings that hang on the refrigerator in their parents' kitchen, but by that age Marla Olmstead already had her first gallery show in Binghamton, New York. Born in 2000, Marla first picked up a paint brush when she was a year old, following the example of her father, an amateur painter, and soon the tyke was creating large canvases with unexpected skill and enthusiasm. Her father gave one of Marla's paintings to a friend who owned a coffee shop, and when a customer offered to buy the piece for $250, the pre-kindergartener began a career as a professional artist. Marla's work has been displayed around the United States and her paintings fetch as much as $25,000 each, but some have questioned if Marla is following her own muse or taking instruction from her parents. Others have debated the validity of reviews comparing her work to Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock, and a few have asked if Marla's parents are the art world equivalent of stage mothers, pushing their child and exploiting her talents for their own benefit. Documentary filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev examines young artist, her work and the controversy behind it in his film My Kid Could Paint That, which was an official selection at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Documentary Award Winners
While many people think of penguins as comical birds who look like they've been decked out in tuxedos, the truth is they're among the strongest and most resilient creatures in the animal kingdom. And they have to be -- each year, the emperor penguins of Antarctica travel through the most punishing environment on Earth to their nesting grounds, and after the females lay their eggs, the males keep them warm while their mates walk 70 miles back to the sea to fatten themselves with fish for themselves and their young. Filmmaker Luc Jacquet spent over a year braving the frigid temperatures of the South Pole to film this annual ritual of the penguins, and March of the Penguins documents their brave struggle to survive, as well as the close emotional bonds between the penguin families. March of the Penguins was first screened in France as La Marche de l'Empereur, with a handful of French actors providing a voice-over in which they expressed the "thoughts" of the penguins; for the American edition, Morgan Freeman was brought in to deliver a more straightforward narration. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Filmmaker Werner Herzog adds another real-life character to his growing pantheon of people who walk a fine line between visionary genius and madness in this documentary. Timothy Treadwell was a self-styled authority on bears who, starting in 1990, would spend as much time as possible each year in Alaska, camping out near a grizzly bear habitat. While Treadwell claimed to love the bears and felt as one with them, he had no formal training in their behavior, and while familiarizing himself with the creatures he would walk within a few feet of them with a video camera in hand. To many, Treadwell seemed part man of nature, part conjuror, and part self-promotion expert, but the part that guided his kinship with the bears failed him in 2003, when he and his girlfriend were killed in a grizzly attack. Treadwell shot hundreds of hours of footage of himself and the grizzlies, and Herzog has used this footage as the core of Grizzly Man, a documentary look at Treadwell's life and death, while also including interviews with people who knew him, animal experts, and scientists. Acclaimed British guitarist Richard Thompson composed and performed the film's musical score. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
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