Tag: documentary

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Throwback August: Grey Gardens

Early on in the documentary classic Grey Gardens, Edith “Little Edie” Beale remarks to the man filming her, “It’s very difficult to keep the line between past and present. Do you know what I mean?” Her question, which goes unanswered by cinematographer David Maysles*, is an invitation into Grey Gardens’ dissociative estate. Little Edie and her mother, “Big Edie”, are fallen aristocrats who live reclusively in an East Hampton mansion, rehearsing old disappointments and feeding raccoons. Theirs might be an unremarkable story if the Edies weren’t first cousins of Jackie O, but their dysphoria was backdropped by 1975’s broader upsets with America’s ruling class: Vietnam, the energy crisis, Nixon. There was something in the water.

‘Big Edie’ Beale in the Maysles Brothers’ documentary Grey Gardens.

Watching Grey Gardens feels like having a seat at Wonderland’s madcap tea party. It is satisfying to see aristocratic logic skewed towards the insane, because of how insane very rich people seem to us in the first place. The Beales are the Kennedy’s court jesters, inverting white gloved tradition in a way both funny and sad. When Little Edie dances alone in the parlor of her broken mansion, wearing a bathing suit and jeweled headscarf, we are supposed to understand: the rich are not immune.

‘Little Edie’ Beale

In 2015, of course, we have new jesters. Real Housewives of wherever has given us the chance to gawk at the nouveau riche any time we want. Reality TV can trace a direct line back to cinema verite, but no news there. Grey Gardens more galling permutation can be found in figures like Donald Trump; politicians who run their own surreal tea party (no pun intended) and become more powerful for it. Far from cleaning up their own proverbial Grey Gardens, powerful people do better to curate the absurd. Which is why Little Edie’s most apt line in the film remains as ironic today as it was in 1975: “The whole mark of aristocracy is responsibility. Is that it?”

Throwback August: Grey Gardens

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The Story Of Film

The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011; dir. Mark Cousins)—Beat the heat this week by staying indoors and soaking up Mark Cousins’ 15-part history of cinematic innovation. Running 15 ½ hours and featuring nearly 1000 clips, Cousins’ massive monument to fair use and great movies from around the world is highly recommended to smart people like you who’ve figured out that the American cinema isn’t the only game in town but have no idea where to begin. Can you dig it? More importantly, can you set aside the free time to dig it?

Cousins is quietly enthusiastic without sounding pretentious or crazy, and his hard-earned, nicely skewed point of view only increases the charm of his soothing, hyperbolic voiceover. He hates The Lord of The Rings, loves Baz Luhrmann (“Not since interviewing Bernardo Bertolucci have I met a director who so understands their own work and, moreover, has a convincing theory of art” he writes in The Story of Film’s accompanying booklet) and says that the one movie you should see if you haven’t already is Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammel’s 1970 freakout Performance, which contains Mick Jagger’s greatest role, one of the earliest music videos, and a point-of-view shot of a bullet travelling through a person’s brain.

Cousins is a curious and generous interviewer as well. Early on, we discover that Norman Lloyd, a.k.a. Colin Quinn’s buddy at the assisted-living facility in Trainwreck, is a human Rosetta stone who can tell first-hand stories about nearly all of the major American filmmakers from the first half of the 20th century. We also get Charles Burnett stammering about the “propaganda” of Hollywood characterization, Terence Davies professing his love for Vermeer, Stanley Donen angrily dismissing the idea of the “camera-stylo”, Youssef Chahine predicting the Arab Spring five years early, and Indian star Amitabh Bachchan (star of Sholay, ran for five years in Mumbai, how could you forget) dismissing his own charisma by insisting that appearing on camera is just a job.

Cousins’ informal numerology is also something to behold. He lists the eight challenges to the romantic cinema of the 1920s and ‘30s; the seven reasons Alfred Hitchcock is “the pre-eminent image-maker of the 20th century”; the six major US film genres emerging in the 1930s; the five kinds of identity crises in European film of the 1970s; the four European directors of the 1950s worth knowing well; the three kinds of films in the New American cinema of the 1960s and ‘70s, and the three key transgressive works of the New Korean Cinema of the ‘00s. Although his own images can’t compete with the ones he’s selected from film history—and really, how could they?—his most affecting footage juxtaposes clips and photos of key locations from old movies with the parking lots, apartment complexes and abandoned buildings they inevitably become.

The Story of Film is an excellent road map and, like the films of Yasujiro Ozu, it’s great to have on in the background if you plan on taking a snooze. If anything, it isn’t long enough.
Grade: A-

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Amy

There’s a strange contradiction in the hearts of performers. On the one hand, being the center of attention of a large group of people (“public speaking”) regularly tops surveys of people’s biggest fears. On the other hand, being the center of attention of a large group of people is the ultimate goal of any performer. If you want to get rich — or even make a living — as a musician, you’re going to have to be able to thrive in conditions that the vast majority of people would call hell.

That’s the big takeaway from Amy, the new documentary on the rise and fall of Amy Winehouse directed by Asif Kapadia. This is the director’s second documentary after 2010’s excellent Senna. But while the story of Formula One racing legend Ayrton Senna was mostly triumph, Winehouse’s story is a slow-motion tragedy that makes for a much more complex and challenging film.

As in Senna, Kapadia uses all archival footage stitched together with a keen editing eye. There are no talking heads — the few contemporary interviews are all presented as voice-only under relevant footage. We first meet Winehouse in 1998 at age 14 singing “Happy Birthday” with her friends Lauren Gilbert and Juliette Ashby. Her prodigious talent is already evident, even though she’s just a fresh-faced “North London Jewish girl,” as Island Records president Nick Gatfield calls her. Even then, she was a woman out of time. As Britpop and hip-hop dominated the London airwaves and the beginnings of dubstep seeped through the underground, Winehouse was idolizing Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett. Her first producer Salaam Remi puts it, “She had the styling of a 70-year-old jazz singer.”

There’s no shortage of images of Winehouse as a dead-eyed junkie, but Kapadia is able to show her humanity, because he won the trust of her first manager Nick Shymansky, who happened to obsessively chronicle her early tours with a handheld digital camera. Of all the people in her orbit, Shymansky comes off the best. He apparently had a bit of an unrequited crush on Winehouse, but even after she fired him in a fit of pique, he still had her best interests at heart. That is not true about literally anyone else she surrounded herself with after her 2003 album Frank became an unlikely hit in England. She started hanging out at London’s trendy Trash nightclub, where she met her husband Blake Fielder-Civil. If you’ve ever known a pair of mutually reinforcing junkies, you already know what their relationship was like. Booze, pot, coke, crack, meth, heroin — you name it, they took it. Fielder-Civil was also a musician, but when Winehouse became the biggest star in the world in the mid-2000s, he became a professional enabler.

Not that Winehouse needed much enabling. The film depicts her as never recovering from her parents’ divorce at the age of 9. She was severely depressed as a teenager and a bulimic from age 15 until she died at 27. She wrote the songs that propelled her to stardom as a way to deal with her many issues, but it was one song in particular that seemed to have doomed her. “Rehab” was written about a failed intervention Shymansky, Gilbert, and Ashby staged for her, which was squelched by her increasingly careerist father. It was kind of an afterthought on the carefully crafted Back To Black album, but when it became her biggest hit, it took on the air of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Amy functions a companion piece to Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. The two self-destructive musical prodigies had similar trajectories, but they were treated differently by the press and public. Cobain’s junk-induced suicide was an unexpected tragedy, while the world was practically taking bets on how long it would take Winehouse’s body to give out under the onslaught of a $16,000-a-week polysubstance habit. Amy does not hesitate to point the finger at the gawkers and paparazzi who fed them, even as Kapadia depends on their copious footage to fill out the overly long end of his film. Amy succeeds at humanizing Winehouse but leaves you feeling queasy at your own eagerness to watch the trainwreck.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

City Of Gold


City of Gold (2015; dir. Laura Gabbert)— I used to think Los Angeles was a smog-choked, characterless place where burnouts and sellouts spent what Faulkner described as “changeless monotonous beautiful days without end…unmarred by rain or weather.” But thanks in large part to the tireless, hyper-informed and hyper-informative efforts of Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold, L.A. is now one of my favorite cities in America and my favorite place to eat in the whole wide world. Although City of Gold is peppered with appreciate commentary from the numerous hyphen-American L.A. chefs whose reputations were made by one of Gold’s empathetic raves, its recipe is simple and easy to follow. For most of the film Gabbert plants her camera in the passenger seat of Gold’s truck while he cruises the nooks, crannies and strip malls of the Los Angeles megalopolis in search of good food and street-level cultural knowledge. Imagine a 96-minute episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives hosted by Guy Fieri’s intelligent, articulate, humble and possibly mildly autistic twin and you’ll have some idea of what it plays like. Unfortunately, it’s only popped up at film festivals and on the West Coast; hopefully it will find better distribution soon.

I haven’t eaten at all of the restaurants mentioned or profiled in City of Gold, but I’ve eaten at most of them. So I can heartily recommend whatever Ludo Lefevbre is making at Trois Mec—that is, if you can score a ticket through his hyper-competitive, every-other-Friday-at-10AM-Central-Time online reservation system. I can also vouch for the Ethiopian doro wat at Meals by Genet, any of the moles at Guelaguetza, the osh at Attari Sandwich Shop, the chicken and tamarind nahm prik at Jitlada (pronounced Jit-la-DAH—act like you know), the kimchee quesadilla from the Kogi trucks, and as much of the daily menu as you can get into your belly at Guerrilla Tacos.

Grade: A-

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Iris

Iris (2015; dir. Albert Maysles)—At long last, definitive proof of the link between shopping and immortality: Iris proves that the one who dies with the most toys doesn’t win because the one with the most toys apparently never dies. This fun, flirty, casual documentary about businesswoman/interior designer/high-class clothing empress and all-around sweetie Iris Apfel is both a glossy portrait of a great New York City character and an object lesson in the long-term health benefits of retail therapy. Apfel, a self-described “octogenarian starlet” who’s actually 93 (but who’s going to blame a pretty girl like her for fibbing about her age?), treats Maysles’ camera like an intimate acquaintance she’s known for years; she’s chatty, witty and curious but never gossipy, sarcastic or nosy. It’s easy to see why Carl, her centenarian husband of 66+ years, looks at her with ageless, amused enchantment.

It’s also easy to see why Carl lets her dress him up in whatever she thinks he looks good in. Her vaunted sense of style, like her gigantic, infinity-symbol-shaped black glasses, is loud, joyous and liberating; at times she pads herself so heavily in brightly colored fabrics, feathers, necklaces, bracelets and costume jewelry that she looks like a cross between a benevolent gay witch and a little kid sticking her head out of an overstuffed toybox. Her age-defying joie de vivre is no passing fad or put-on for the smitten cameras that surround her, and her gnarled, tree-root hands aren’t a sign of decline—they’re simply two additional accessories that go well with nearly everything.

Iris is a communal experience; watch it with a bunch of friends or in a theater with a large audience so you can enjoy the waves of delighted chortles and flabbergasted barks that break whenever Apfel appears in a new outfit. Maysles’ final film offers grandiloquence with a smile and a wink. It’s the cat’s pajamas.
Grade: A-

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Korengal

Korengal (2014; dir. Sebastian Junger)—Here’s the second paragraph from author and former CIA man Ray McGovern’s article “How To Honor Memorial Day,” which was published a couple days ago on Antiwar.com: “First, let’s be clear on at least this much: the 4,500 U.S. troops killed in Iraq—so far—and the 2,350 killed in Afghanistan—so far—did not ‘fall.’ They were wasted on no-win battlefields by politicians and generals—cheered on by neocon pundits and mainstream ‘journalists’—almost none of whom gave a rat’s patootie about the real-life-and-death troops. They were throwaway soldiers.” And here’s what American combat veteran Brendan O’Byrne says to anyone who tells him he shouldn’t feel guilty about his Afghanistan tour because he did what he had to do when he was over there: “I didn’t have to do shit.” O’Byrne is just one of many soft-featured young men with thousand-yard stares and true war stories to tell who were interviewed in Junger’s remarkable sequel to his 2010 documentary Restrepo, which chronicled the daily lives of several soldiers stationed in a remote, hostile and unforgiving Afghan outpost named after a beloved medic killed in action. Restrepo trafficked in immediate, spontaneous, unpredictable wartime experience; Korengal is a more
meditative and complex work that asks for—and often receives—both truth and some measure of reconciliation from its subjects. By giving these men the time and space to articulate and explore their personal codes (“You have to respect the enemy”), their provisional joys (“What’s not to like about a giant machine gun?”) and their ever-present fears (“Damn! Life is getting weird up here…”) Korengal performs an invaluable public service. Their many and varied testimonials wind up saying the same thing all meaningful war memorials say: never forget. Grade: A

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck

Even though Nirvana drummer, Foo Fighters frontman, and ambassador of rock in the twenty first century Dave Grohl was not interviewed by director Brett Morgen for the documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, he still gets the film’s best single line. In a Nevermind tour-era television interview, Grohl, bassist Krist Novoselic, and Kurt Cobain are asked about the rapturous reviews the album has been getting.

“If I read that stuff about another band, I wouldn’t believe it.” Grohl says, inadvertently summing up Nirvana’s entire career.

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is the first documentary to be authorized by the Cobain estate—in other words, it was Courtney Love’s idea. Director Morgen, who co-directed The Kid Stays In The Picture, the excellent 2002 documentary about legendary film producer Robert Evans, had access to thousands of photographs, notebooks, journals, audio tapes, and hours of never-before seen video.

The film’s title is taken from a psychedelic audio collage tape Cobain made while living in Olympia, Washington with his first girlfriend Tracy Marander, whose interview is one of the most interesting parts of the film. For the audio material where there was no video accompaniment, Morgen adds animations in a variety of styles. In some animated sequences, drawings and comics Cobain created are used as jumping-off points, to mixed results. Some of the best animation comes from Husko Husling, who renders Cobain’s hometown of Aberdeen as moody, dark acrylic paintings.

Grohl is not the only person in the Cobain story who was not interviewed for the film. If you’re looking for insight about the band’s interpersonal relations, the network of 80s alternative bands who nurtured Nirvana and were in turn plugged by Cobain when he was in the international spotlight, or analysis of why Kurt, Krist, and Dave made it huge when equally talented acts like The Pixies remained cult figures, you won’t find them in this movie. What you will find is an intense, intimate portrait of Cobain that makes him look less like the “the last real rock star” and more like an everyman. He was an outcast in a small, football-obsessed town, a sensitive kid who never recovered from his parents’ divorce when he was nine years old. He was diagnosed as ADD at 10 and given ritalin. He hung out with losers and punks because they were the only people who would accept him. Music was the only thing that brought him joy, so he tried to find a band to play with until he hooked up with Novoselic, and the pair became best friends. In the film, there’s no mention of the parade of drummers the pair went through before finding Grohl or the transition from Sub Pop indie rock darlings to David Geffen-backed superstars.

The extensive archival material, which includes such gems as Nirvana playing to an audience of two in an Olympia, Washington practice space, the notebook where the Cobain listed potential names, outtakes from the famous Nevermind cover photograph, raw footage from the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video shoot, and a home recording of Cobain singing The Beatles “And I Love Her” to Love, recreates the unseen context from which the Nirvana legend grew. Stripped of her riot grrrl exterior, Love appears just as vulnerable, broken, and talented as Cobain. It’s suddenly easy to see why he fell in love with the most hated woman of the 1990s; as Novoselic says, “She was intelligent, artistic…and she did a lot of drugs.” Love didn’t drive Cobain into junkiedom. She didn’t have to. Heroin, like punk rock, was one of their shared interests.

But there’s one piece of famous Cobain audio missing: the recording of Love reading Cobain’s suicide note at the Seattle memorial service four days after he was found dead. The mixture of raw pain, sarcasm, and lashing anger in her voice were seen by many as proof of her callousness at the time, and cemented her reputation as an evil harpy. Listening to it in the context created by Montage Of Heck, her reaction is perfectly understandable, and even more heartbreaking.

Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck is currently airing on HBO and available on demand on HBO Go. 

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Merchants Of Doubt

Issue documentaries, like Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, have been at the vanguard of the documentary film revival of the twenty first century. Merchants of Doubt is a kind of a meta-issue documentary. It’s not so much about the issue of global climate change as it is about the tactics used in the political war to preserve the status quo whose interests are threatened by the fight against climate change.

NASA climate scientist James Hansen in Merchants Of Doubt.

The two most effective weapons in director Robert Kenner’s arsenal are magician Jamy Ian Swiss and former NASA climate scientist James Hansen. Swiss lays bare the psychological tricks the public relations firms hired by fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobile use to induce political gridlock. His example of the planted shills who pretend to win games of three card monte against street hustlers leads directly into a discussion of the way extragovernmental think tanks pretend to be impartial while pushing their funders’ agenda.

Hansen was a NASA scientist whose study of Venus’s 600 degree surface temperature led to a 1988 Congressional testimony where he first delivered the news about the threat of global warming to the American people. This bona fide American hero delivers the most poignant line in the movie: “We just assumed people would do what it took to avoid such adverse results.”

His phrasing—scientific, precise, and bloodless—perfectly illustrates Merchants Of Doubt’s central thesis. As science historian Naomi Oreskes, co-author of the book the film is based on, says, “If this is not a scientific debate, what kind of debate is it?” The answer, of course, is a political debate. And political debates are won by rhetoric and tribalism. The most illuminating passages in Merchants Of Doubt are those which illuminate the role of tribal identity in not only the global warming debate but also the rise of the Tea Party. As Skeptic magazine editor and lifelong libertarian Michael Shermer discovered when, after long doubting that global warming was real, his opinion was changed by a close examination of the overwhelming scientific evidence. When documentarians follow him to a libertarian convention where he debates a climate change skeptic, audience members attack him as with phrases like “That’s what YOUR TEAM wants us to think!”

Merchants Of Doubt’s production design is one of the best I’ve seen in a documentary in recent memory. The writing and research are meticulous, and director Kenner is not afraid to interview the people he’s calling liars and shills. Most memorable is Climate Depot editor Marc Morono, who actually says, with the same perfect conviction he brings to everything, that death threats are no big deal, and he loves to get them.

The problem with this kind of issue documentary is that it seems like preaching to the choir. No one who views their identity as a conservative in good standing is going to voluntarily watch this film, and if they’re exposed to it, they’ll just call it more lies. Indeed, the documentarians’ methodology of following the money and questioning the neutrality of so-called impartial observers naturally leads to the question, “Who’s paying for this?” Just because I agree with it—and I do, wholeheartedly—doesn’t mean I shouldn’t ask hard questions of it. Merchants Of Doubt’s thesis is that slick communicators willing to use any tactics available, regardless of morality, are the ones who can win political debates. The slickness and clarity of the production means the filmmakers have taken that lesson to heart.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Red Army

Billy Corben’s documentary Cocaine Cowboys was a minor hit when it was released in 2006, but it has proven hugely influential in the current golden age of documentaries. It ostensibly told the story of the motley crew of renegades, McGyver types, and hardened criminals who pioneered modern drug smuggling, but it was really about a specific place and time: South Florida in 1970s and ’80s.

Corben’s influence is felt profoundly in Gabe Polsky’s Red Army. Like Corben’s work, it focuses on first person interviews with a fascinating cast of characters to sketch the outlines of a bigger story. During the Cold War, life inside the Soviet Union was only known to Americans through propaganda. Soviet propaganda painted a picture of a worker’s paradise, free from want and capitalist exploitation of workers. American propaganda, on the other hand, highlighted the political subjugation of the Russians and their conquered peoples and the failure of communism to provide the most basic goods and services.

Red Army

The picture painted of life behind the Iron Curtain in Red Army is somewhere in between the two extremes. Polsky’s subject is the story of the most popular athletes in the Soviet Union, the national hockey team, who dominated the sport for decades. The star of the show is Slava Fetisov, who is introduced taking an important phone call while he is being interviewed by the impatient Polsky. Fetisov’s list of accomplishments and accolades spills off the screen, in one of the great little visual touches Polsky brings to the film. He is probably the greatest defensive player the game has ever seen, and the story of how he got that way is the story of the Soviet system in a nutshell. He was born in the Soviet Union that, in 1958, was still reeling from the destruction of World War II. Even though he grew up in a 400-square-foot apartment inhabited by three families, he describes himself as a happy child, because he got to play hockey. At the age of 8, his burgeoning talent was recognized by Anatoli Tarasov, the coach who built the Russian Army team from scratch after the war and created an international sports power.

The training regime for the players was brutal. 11 months out of the year, the team lived in virtual isolation. Next door to the hockey camp was the chess players’ camp, and as legendary player Anatoly Karpov recalls, the two, very different kinds of players influenced each other. Tarasov created a whole new strategic philosophy that emphasized teamwork and deep strategy and revolutionized hockey, soundly defeating the international champion Canadian team in 1979. But Tarasov had the misfortune of running afoul of Leonid Brezhnev, and he was replaced by one of the Soviet premiere’s KGB cronies before the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. The resulting upset by the American hockey team, dubbed The Miracle On Ice in Western media, stunned Russia and redoubled the resolve of the players, who would then continue to dominate the sport through the next decade. In one especially telling archival clip, a young Wayne Gretzky, after losing handily to the legendary Russian Five, says “We can’t compete. It’s too difficult.”

Polsky gives just as much time to the dissolution of the legendary team as he does it rise, and it serves as a proxy story for the end of the Cold War. Tired of the deprivations of Siberia and lured by promises of wealth in the West, the team slowly fragments and its players absorbed into the NHL. But the story doesn’t stop there. Polsky continues to trace the players as they navigate the oligarchical world of Putin’s Russia.

The director’s light touch allows unplanned moments to seep into the film, such as when a former KGB agent has trouble controlling his feisty granddaughter while trying to tell a story about the old Soviet system. I’m not much of a sportsman, much less a hockey fan, but this meticulously crafted documentary is a knockout.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Robert Gordon Strikes Gold At Sundance

Memphis writer/director/producer Robert Gordon’s new project Best Of Enemies was sold to Magnolia Pictures and Participant Media today for a “high six-figure sum”. The documentary film, which was co-directed with Morgan Neville, whose last film 20 Feet From Stardom, won last year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary, premiered last Friday at the Sundance Film Festival. 

William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal square off in this still image from Best Of Enemies.

Best Of Enemies chronicles the series of debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley staged by ABC during the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions, which the film credits as kicking off the contemporary cable news shoutfest style of political programming. 

Reviews for the film by the cadre of industry professionals who descend on Park City, Utah every January have been nothing short of rapturous. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy wrote “For American viewers of an intellectual/historical persuasion, there could scarcely be any documentary more enticing, scintillating and downright fascinating than Best of Enemies.” Writing for Variety, Joe Leydon says “Best of Enemies never gets heavy-handed while attempting to illustrate the true historical importance of what might still be viewed by many as nothing more than an obscure and eccentric bit of prime-time misadventure.” The Guardian‘s four-star review, written by Jordan Hoffman, says  “Directors Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom) and Robert Gordon (Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story) have unearthed outstanding footage and interviewed many of today’s best thinkers for a juicy and thrilling documentary about two intellectual titans who truly loathed one another.” 

In addition to Gordon, who directed and produced, the film’s strong Memphis roots include editor Eileen Meyer, composer Jonathan Kirkscey, director of photography David Leonard, consulting producer Tom Graves, and production assistant Andrew Paisley. 

Magnolia Pictures and Participant Media will reportedly give Best Of Enemies a theatrical release sometime this year, with home video, television, and streaming deals to follow. You can watch a short interview with directors Gordon and Neville at CraveOnline.