Documentaries

Should You Watch It? HBO’s Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

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Image from Montage of HeckOn Monday, May 4th, HBO unveiled a new documentary about the life and demise of tortured Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, directed by Brett Morgen. A quick trip to Wikipedia will tell you that this is the first documentary about the singer/guitarist to be made with the cooperation of the Cobain family. It’s currently streaming on HBO Go after debuting at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

So, you’re probably wondering: should I watch this documentary?

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: Here’s why.

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The Mask You Live In: Failing Boys Fails Us All

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The Mask You LIve In

The Mask You Live In, the new documentary from director Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the guiding force behind 2011’s Miss Representation, takes us from negative media portrayals of women to the other side of the gender spectrum to answer the question: “As a society, how are we failing our boys?” American boys, the film posits, are born into a culture that saddles them with a construct of masculinity that is both impossible to attain and destructive to pursue.

Through interviews with sociologists, activists, psychologists, neuroscientists and other experts, as well as personal stories from everyday boys and men, the filmmakers present a compelling argument that we are robbing boys and young men of the freedom to express their feelings, experience intimacy or participate in certain activities deemed not “manly” enough. The cost of this deprivation is high. The film explains how the demand for hyper-masculinity contributes to all manner of social ills including sexism, rape culture, transphobia, homophobia and violence. [Read more…]