Docs, 11/30.

"Strolling the streets and alleyways of New Orleans in Wayne Ewing's The Outsiders of New Orleans: Loujon Press, Louise [Webb], lucid and lively in her 90s, points to the buildings and rooms where she and her late husband Jon Edgar Webb once lived and worked," writes Ray Young. "This hour-long documentary reflects back to her days as a sidewalk artist selling watercolors in the 1950s and 60s, when the locals gave her the nickname 'Gypsy Lou.' At home, she and Jon ran Loujon Press in their cramped apartment quarters, publishing books by Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller, and editing and publishing Outsider, a legendary literary review."

At indieWIRE, Brian Brooks sends impressions of a string of docs he's caught at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.

"I just had a chance to watch Chris Hansen's documentary short, Clean Freak, a follow-up to his feature-length mockumentary, The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah," writes Chuck Tryon. "Equal parts Morgan Spurlock and Caveh Zahedi, with a twist of Alan Berliner, Clean Freak documents Chris's somewhat obsessive need for a clean house.... [T]he film's sharpest move is his connection between his need to tidy things up in real life and his desire for narrative completion; in essence, filmmaking becomes a means of cleaning up the messes of everyday life."

"While comparing the loss of paintings and sculptures to human life may seem at first blush to be a facile subject, Rape of Europa makes clear that an attack on cultural history is as direct a strike against a people as a bomb dropped on their homes," writes Shaun Brady in the Philadelphia City Paper.

"Rather than endorsing conspiracy theories, Oswald's Ghost studies them as anger-driven symptoms of cultural obsession," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. More from Noel Murray at the AV Club: "[Robert] Stone has assembled Oswald's Ghost well, with few of the stylistic tics that marred his Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst.... Late in the film, Stone interviews Norman Mailer, a one-time conspiracy-believer who eventually wrote a book that tried to get inside Oswald's head, explaining how Oswald's story is America's story. In less than a minute, Mailer describes the documentary Stone should've made."

Ryan Boudinot in the Stranger on Lynch: "What's on display here is [David] Lynch's work life, not his private life, and so be it. It's still pretty nifty to watch a fellow carefully dip a suit jacket in lime-green paint. Hot dog!"

Posted by dwhudson at November 30, 2007 5:20 AM