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DVD Salesman - Criterion Collection
Arguably the best American documentary of the 1960s, Salesman was the pivotal film of the "direct cinema" movement championed by such influential filmmakers as Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, and (in this case) the Maysles brothers and their longtime collaborator Charlotte Zwerin. It catapulted Albert and David Maysles to international fame (later intensified with Gimme Shelter), and it remains the most powerful document of working-class America in the post-Kennedy era. As compelling as any fictional drama, the film follows four salesmen (nicknamed the Badger, the Gipper, the Rabbit, and the Bull, based on their particular on-the-job attributes) from Boston to Florida as they struggle to sell lavishly illustrated Bibles to reluctant, blue-collar customers as desperate to keep their money as the salesmen are to take it.
The film focuses on the anguished plight of Paul "the Badger" Brennan, an aging Boston-Irish veteran of the salesman circuit, weary of his job and unable to hide his exhaustion from customers and colleagues alike. "I don't want to seem negative," he says in one of the film's many dreary motel rooms, but Paul is negative, and meager sales reflect his attitude. The resulting portrait serves as a two-way mirror of hard-scrabble American survival, simultaneously humorous and heartbreaking, and so honestly revealing that no performance (with the possible exception of Jack Lemmon's in Glengarry Glen Ross) could ever hope to match its level of richly nuanced humanity. Door-to-door salesmen became dinosaurs with the advent of telemarketing and Internet retail, but Salesman is a timeless masterpiece of cinematic truth. --Jeff Shannon
The Best Documentary that has and will ever be made
Bible salesman will never be cooler, this shows a side of bible salesman that will never be shown again, it could be because they are no longer the same, or it could be that if anyone tried to re-capture what has already been, it would be called just another film, this is not just another film, this is a film with more power and humor than any REAL story will ever capture, SEE THIS FILM, SEE THIS FILM. I LOVE IT.
Salesman
This innovative, powerful film shines sobering light on the modern human condition. We witness a man who sees his way of life receding before his very eyes, leaving him with precious little to show for it. The sad, wrenching tale still delivers potent, thought-provoking impact.
exposing the american dream
Easily one of the most powerful and effective documentaries ever made, this film follows (fly on the wall style) three Bible salesmen in their efforts to fulfill the American dream. Anyone, it is said, can make it big, if they just work hard and work smart. Some can. But there are others who, through no fault of their own, just can't do it. This film is primarily a portrait of a man who is a hard worker, who is passionate about what he is selling, and nevertheless can't seem to make it happen for himself. It is heartbreaking to watch him, even on the days he has a few sales and is riding high, because you know it won't last.
It can't last because the main character is unable and unwilling to pull out all the stops. It becomes clear that in order to succeed in sales -- and I know this from personal experience as an occasional salesman for various goods throughout college -- you have to pull out all the stops. You can't let a sale go. Even when it becomes clear that the client cannot afford and doesn't really need the product you are selling -- and what is so heartbreaking in this film are the moments when the lead pushes his product even on such persons, knowingly, but in such despair about his own inability to sell the product that he has lost the conscience that on other occasions lets him know when to stop.
One of the best films of 1992, this acclaimed documentary focuses on the alleged murder in June 1990 of 64-year-old Bill Ward by his brother Delbert, 59, a simple dairy farmer whose defense became a rallying cause for the citizens of Munnsville, a tiny farming community in central New York. Known by all of Munnsville as harmless hermits, the Ward brothers (also including Lyman and Roscoe) live an 18th-century lifestyle in their tiny, grimy shack, sleeping in the same bed through cold winters and tending daily to their hayfields and livestock. Semiliterate and stunted by minimal exposure to the outside world, the Wards are disheveled children in the bodies of aging men; and when Delbert is charged with suffocating his ailing brother Bill, he's a prime target for legal manipulation and a... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Delbert Ward Director(s): Bruce Sinofsky - Joe Berlinger DVD Release Date: Released the 29 July 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Director Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning rendering of a crippling strike at a Minnesota meat-packing plant may look dated, but the underlying theme of individuals crushed by big business remains all too timely. Using a briskly engrossing combination of first-person interviews, news broadcasts, and fly-on-the-wall encounters, Kopple creates an indelible document of a community's dissolution at the hands of larger forces. (The film is clearly on the side of the workers, but at the same time it refuses to ignore the petty infighting that eventually helped contribute to their ruin.) An alternately depressing, uplifting, and often profanely funny film that, at times, echoes Michael Moore's Roger and Me , but without that movie's distancing smarm. A movie's title has never seemed quite so... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Barbara Kopple - Cathy Caplan - Thomas Haneke - Lawrence Silk DVD Release Date: Released the 02 March 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The Fog of War, the movie that finally won Errol Morris the best documentary Oscar, is a spellbinder. Morris interviews Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and finds a uniquely unsettling viewpoint on much of 20th-century American history. Employing a ton of archival material, including LBJ's fascinating taped conversations from the Oval Office, Morris probes the reasons behind the U.S. commitment to the Vietnam War--and finds a depressingly inconsistent policy. McNamara himself emerges as--well, not exactly apologetic, but clearly haunted by the what-ifs of Vietnam. He also mulls the bombing of Japan in World War II and the Cuban Missile Crisis, raising more questions than he answers. The Fog of War has the usual inexorable... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): John F. Kennedy - Robert McNamara - Richard Nixon DVD Release Date: Released the 11 May 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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George, Dave, Ray, and Rodney. Not a singing group, but four real-life individuals dedicated to controlling the entities that don't take kindly to their efforts. George Mendonca is a topiary gardener who spends his time taming tendrils of plant life into animal shapes. Why? Because he can, and apparently it's no easy job. One slip of the clipper and a green and leafy body part can go bye-bye for years. Dave Hoover takes on big cats under the big top. An admirer of the famous lion tamer, Clyde Beatty, Dave comes out of the lion ring covered with sweat. Not from working hard, but from hand-trembling fear. Ray Mendez, a mole-rat expert, waxes eloquently about the social structure of these sightless, hairless natural wonders who wear their teeth on the outside of their lips. But if you want... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Dave Hoover - George Mendonça - Ray Mendez (II) - Rodney Brooks Director(s): Errol Morris DVD Release Date: Released the 24 September 2002 Usually ships within 24 hours
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A bygone era of political campaigning is the subject of Primary, a fascinating cinema verité portrait of a crucial step on John F. Kennedy's path to the White House. Using the most portable sound and film equipment available in 1960, pioneering documentarian Robert Drew and a crew of innovative, important filmmakers in their own right (including verité legends D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, and Albert Maysles) were given a week of round-the-clock access to Kennedy as he toured the cities and towns of Wisconsin, campaigning against rival front-runner Hubert Humphrey in the state's pivotal primary election. With minimal narration and ground-breaking, no-frills technique heretofore unseen in TV news reporting (this film originally aired as an ABC news... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Robert Drew DVD Release Date: Released the 11 November 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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