After the massive international success of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), producer Sam Spiegel took a little longer to find the right material for his next project, and while it took 4 years for the next wave of films to materialize, his next trio of productions – The Chase (1966), The Night of the Generals (1967), and The Happening (1967) – were a mixed bag…
The incredible life of former safe cracker-turned WWII British double agent Eddie Chapman provides enough fertile material for a mini-series, and yet when his biography (co-authored with Frank Owen) was adapted for the big screen, it clearly suffered from the influence of the James Bond spy craze, with director Terence Young arguably responsible for the loose handling of factual material…
In the first of a short series on internet-themed docs, reviews of Alex Winter’s superb diptych: Deep Web (2015) which recently screened at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema, and Downloaded (2013), an outstanding chronicle of Napster, which screened at the 2013 Hot Docs Film Festival.
A kind of companion piece to Alex Winter’s Napster documentary Downloaded (2013), Deep Web refers to the virtual benthic layer of data – financial, private, governmental, and military – which is inaccessible accept to industry personnel or users of Tor, now an open source program originally developed by the U.S. military…
The creation of Napster revolutionized the music industry by a) making copyrighted music available for free; b) enabled more than a single generation to grow accustomed to the concept of grabbing commercial art gratis; c) created a peer-to-peer file sharing interface that became commonplace in rival programs; and d) created, as several interview subjects in Alex Winter’s documentary describe, ‘a perfect storm’…
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