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April 24, 2014 Andy Cush

Here’s the trailer for ‘The Search for General Tso,’ a documentary that looks at Chinese food in America through our country’s favorite dish. Shockingly, it sounds like the American interpretation of General Tso’s isn’t exactly faithful to the original. The film is screening at Chelsea Cinemas on 23rd Street tonight as part of the Tribeca […]

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Andy Cush

The seminal ’90s band Slint, whose second album Spiderland nearly single-handedly spawned the genre we now know as post-rock, are back at it. They’re playing a few NYC shows next month, and recently reissued Spiderland along with Breadcrumb Trail, a documentary about the band by the director Lance Bangs. May 1, the Wythe Hotel is holding a screening of the film […]

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April 11, 2014 Andy Cush

Conquest of the Skies — a forthcoming nature documentary from David Attenborough — is a shoo-in to the pantheon of greatest-ever films to watch whilst stoned. How do I know? Besides the master documentarian’s mind-boggling pedigree — Life on Earth, Planet Earth, Blue Planet — there’s the fact that it’s being filmed with a 360-degree eight-camera rig and […]

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March 25, 2014 Andy Cush

The above short film looks at Hong Kong’s neon signs industry, which boomed decades ago but is now slowing down thanks to the advent of LED and a less robust economy. The documentary includes interviews with both the calligraphers who design the type and the neon workers who build the signs, as well as lots of […]

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March 21, 2014 Andy Cush

Above, watch the trailer for Graves of Arthur Kill, a short documentary about a Staten Island haven for dilapidated, decommissioned boats. The production value looks a little low, but it’s worth watching for all of the beautiful decay on display. “It appeals to a certain mindset,” director Gary Kane told DNAinfo. “People who love the waterfront and are into […]

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March 19, 2014 Andy Cush

“I have been shooting and producing it over the past 2 years and we just launched a Kickstarter to raise money to complete the film,” writes director Daniel Levin in an email to ANIMAL of The Legend of Swee’ Pea, his documentary on legendary and legendarily troubled Brooklyn basketball player Lloyd Daniels. Daniels made his name in […]

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March 13, 2014 Marina Galperina

“The old sent us to die and we hated them.” The new documentary Matt Wolf examines a most transient of identities. Teenage is comprised of archival footage of adolescent groups through the decades — flappers, punks, etc. — and anonymous narrations of once-teenagers. “We didn’t always exist.”  How did the youth (aged roughly 16-24) became labeled and recognized […]

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January 20, 2014 Andy Cush

In Baltimore, Double Dagger are heroes: their records are fantastic, their live shows are the stuff of local legend, and their breakup was cause for a kind of misty-eyed mourning and nostalgia in the city’s DIY scene that wasn’t unlike what’s happening in the wake of 285 Kent’s closure here in New York. Elsewhere, you […]

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August 21, 2013 Andy Cush

Peter Mayhew, the 7’3″ man behind the Chewbacca mask, isn’t in the best shape. Chronic knee issues due to his gigantism have forced him into a wheelchair much of the time, and he’s regularly in intense pain because of it. Fortunately, double knee replacement surgery may restore him to his towering height and allow him […]

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July 8, 2013 Andy Cush

Defenders of the old copyright order say it’s all about protecting content creators–if you download an album or movie for free, the logic goes, you’re depriving an artist of the income he or she deserves and disincentivizing them to continue making art. While that’s usually true to some degree, it leaves out something important out; […]

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