Peter Murmann

Time travel sci-fi flicks have been around for a long time. The first third of the film challenges your brain to simply keep track of whether we are in the future or the present and how the two realms are connected.  Looper then spooks you because coming back from the future, Bruce Willis’ character knows [Read More]

Canada was formed in 1867. Four years later the colony British Columbia, which was in financial trouble, joined the confederation. The confederation promised British Columbia that it would pay for a railway link between Vancouver and Ontario. Building a railroad through the Rocky Mountains was an engineering feat. This documentary film tells the story how [Read More]

This is an excellent documentary and it made me evaluate Polanski escape from the USA.  After watching it one wonders why American authorities attempted once again in 2010 to get Switzerland to arrest an extradite Polanski. After putting him under house arrest for 6 months, the Swiss authorities did not hand over Polanski to the [Read More]

This documentary provides in good insight into a subculture of American campuses that I knew nothing about. I thought debate would be a gentelmanly or womanly sport where students would speak in a way understandable for an audience. But there is not audience in the sub-culture other than other debaters for whom debate because a [Read More]

Even by the standards of the recent fall of Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson is in a class by himself.  He went from the biggest star on the planet to the erratic weirdo who could never fully shake the suspicion that his love for children went a bit too far when he routinely invited kids over [Read More]

This documentary about the life of Harvey Milk starts at the moment of his election to the city council of San Francisco. Compared the recent motion picture Milk, the film begins a bit slow but then becomes a wonderful depiction of what made Milk a great politician. It is quite remarkable to see him organize [Read More]

In my junior or senior year I formulated this motto:  I want to turn my life into a work of art.  What I had in mind was something like this: Rather than turning out work that could be construed as art I wanted to make sure that my life as a whole was esthetically compelling. [Read More]

Even if you have already seen the 1976 film All the President’s Men with Dustin Hofmann and Robert Redford playing the two Washington Post journalists (Woodward and Berstein) who exposed the Watergate scandal or the 1994 BBC documentary Watergate: Third Rate Burglary, this 1977 interview of a British journalist with Richard Nixon about Watergate [Read More]

Spike Lee is no Ken Burns. His “documentary” about the human tragedy that unfolded during and after the Hurricane “Katrina” hit the Gulf Coast is not unfair but unbalanced. Lee’s cause is noble one. He wants to draw attention to the suffering experienced by the residents of New Orleans even a year after the catastrophe. [Read More]

In the tradition of pre-modern pharmacists who would test remedies on their own body, Morgan Spurlock decides to eat at McDonalds three times a day for a month and let a battery of doctors keep track of how his body would react to such a diet. I knew that McDonald’s was not good for you: [Read More]