Documentaries

A controversial documentary that explores the life and legacy of slain tejano singer Selena Quintanilla will air tonight on KCET-TV despite protests from the singer's family, which earlier led to the film being pulled from CineFestival in San Antonio, where it was scheduled to close the nation's oldest Latino film festival.

Since Morgan Spurlock is known for fully immersing himself in his movies - famously subsisting onMcDonald's menu items for "Super Size Me" and pounding the pavement for every last product placement dollar in "The Greatest Story Ever Sold" - it seemed only appropriate to ask the man behind"Mansome" about his go-to grooming products and tools, most of which happen to come from boutique shaving brand the Art of Shaving, which signed on to sponsor the...

At first blush, most people probably wouldn't consider a documentary about New York City's most notorious public sex club the ideal "date movie." But that's exactly what Mathew Kaufman calls "American Swing," the nostalgic, often amusing film he co-produced and co-directed with Jon Hart about the legendary swingers' haven Plato's Retreat. "The movie's got everything," Kaufman said during a conference call with Hart from Manhattan.

"Mansome,"Morgan Spurlock's documentary examining male vanity and self-image, feels exceedingly random and disorganized, even though it's divided into chapters and keeps a consistency of observers throughout. There's no real center to the film's potentially insightful topic, with Spurlock never zeroing in on a cohesive message. Instead, the filmmaker and humorist, perhaps best known for his Oscar-nominated fast-food exposé "Super Size Me" (so you know he has the chops to do better)

L.A.'s California Science Center will start the new year defending itself in court for canceling a documentary film attacking Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. A lawsuit alleges that the state-owned center improperly bowed to pressure from the Smithsonian Institution, as well as e-mailed complaints from USC professors and others. It contends that the center violated both the 1st Amendment and a contract to rent the museum's Imax Theater when it canceled the screening of "Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record."

"People come to our film expecting some kind of true crime story but that's not what we were attempting to do," said 30-year-old filmmaker Joe Berlinger of the award-winning documentary "Brother's Keeper."

Martin Landau couldn't believe his eyes. Entering the makeup trailer one morning on the infamous 1963 epic "Cleopatra," he was surprised to see star Elizabeth Taylor sitting there. Only Landau and Richard Burton were scheduled to work that day. "I said, 'Good morning,' " recalls Landau, who played Rufio in the movie. "Then I went back to the bulletin board outside to look at the call sheet and then went back into makeup a little puzzled. What was she doing there that early?"

James Marsh (director) and Simon Chinn (producer) "Man on Wire" "Man on Wire," part thriller, part existential mood piece, told the story of how French acrobat Philippe Petit walked on a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Director Marsh called Petit to the stage while accepting the award, and Petit duly sprinted up. After remarks by Marsh and producer Chinn, Petit announced "the shortest speech in Oscar history -- yes!"

Sports is more than the toy department of our culture, it's often the source of excellent documentary work. Case in point: "More Than a Game," which is destined to be known as "the LeBron James movie" but in truth is a whole lot more. It shows how the powerful bond that James formed with his teammates in high school and earlier sustained him and transformed everyone's lives. Also pay attention to a continuing series of involving documentaries, "30 for 30," sponsored by ESPN Films for the cable network and using big name directors.

Even as "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" fictionalizes the collapsing of the global economy, the film "Inside Job" looks at the real story behind the economic crisis. Here's a look at that and four other documentaries of note this fall. "Catfish": Is all as it seems as Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman look at the age of social networking, following Schulman's brother Nev's new online relationship? Opening: Sept. 17. "Last Train Home": This Chinese documentary follows peasant workers on their annual migration home from the cities for the holidays and examines its impact on the family structure.

There's an unflashy clarity to the documentary "Bill W. " that suits its subject. William G. Wilson, the "stinking rotten drunk" who had an epiphany and co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, was a Vermont Yankee whose life's work was predicated on humility and service. Today's celebrity rehab news cycle would likely displease him; a true believer in the value of anonymity, he turned down an honorary degree from Yale and a cover story in Time (which later placed him in the top 20 "Heroes and Icons" of the 20th century)

In the smart, involving documentary "Indie Game: the Movie," when video game designer Phil Fish chillingly asserts that he'd kill himself if he didn't finish his long-gestating game "Fez," you get the feeling he isn't bluffing. That's the level of depth and candor filmmakers Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky mine here as they profile several independent artists struggling to succeed in the highly corporatized - and often hugely lucrative - video game industry. In addition to the French-Canadian Fish, who spent more than four nerve-wracking years developing the much anticipated, aesthetically oriented "Fez," the movie also compellingly follows the long distance, rollercoaster collaboration between designer Edmund McMillen and programmer Tommy Refenes as they create "Super Meat Boy," their first major game for Xbox (it went on to sell more than 1 million copies)

Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings and Diane Sawyer all made their best pitch but were turned down. Johnny Carson, the man who changed forever the world of late-night talk, wasn't talking. The network news powerhouses had separately attempted to secure interviews with Carson to get him to speak about his life and his place as one of the most influential figures in TV history. But from his 1992 retirement after 30 years on"The Tonight Show"until his death in 2005 at age 79, Carson steadfastly refused to cooperate with almost all interviews, books or films that would have called on him to reflect on his past or his show, which simultaneously reflected and influenced the nation's conversation about itself.

"Gotta dance!" is what Gene Kelly insists in "Singing in the Rain," and none of the driven young people featured in the irresistible "First Position" would do anything but enthusiastically agree. As directed by Bess Kargman, "First Position" is in part the latest wrinkle in a documentary sub-genre that's proved wildly popular. Combine eager youngsters with the elixir of competition and, whether it's spelling bee rivals in "Spellbound" or recreational dancers in "Mad Hot Ballroom," you have a formula for maximum audience engagement.

On a recent Sunday morning, at an hour when many a teenager is still prone in bed, Adam Bernstein, 15, and Eli Gruska, 13, were lying face down on the floor of a Los Angeles ballet studio. Both boys would soon be heading to New York City for the biggest ballet competition in the country. They and the others in this all-boys class were awaiting instructions from Marat Daukayev, former principal dancer withRussia'sfamed Kirov Ballet (now the ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre). Daukayev begins his boys' class with sets of push-ups, not pliés.

Forty years ago, an enormous, decrepit, crime-ridden St. Louis public housing project was destroyed with dynamite. Television and still pictures of the imploding buildings went viral, so to speak, though that wasn't a term yet. The death of the complex known as Pruitt-Igoe was seized on by any number of groups as validation of their viewpoints. Enemies of modern architecture said the soullessness of the design caused the problem. (Minoru Yamasaki, who went on to design the World Trade Center towers in New York, was the architect.)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Thursday announced its list of the 15 films that are still in the running for this year's feature documentary Oscar. The most visible documentaries of the year ? Charles Ferguson's "Inside Job" (about the financial system meltdown) and Davis Guggenheim's "Waiting for 'Superman' " (about the U.S. education system) ? both made the cut after being left off the International Documentary Awards list of nominees. Other veteran documentary filmmakers were recognized too: Alex Gibney's "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer" is on the list, as is "Waste Land" by Lucy Walker.

Fifteen feature-length documentaries have advanced for the upcoming Academy Awards, including Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's continued investigation of the three teenagers wrongly convicted of murder in Arkansas 20 years ago, "Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory. " The 15 films announced Friday were chosen from 124 films that had originally qualified in the category. Members of the academy's documentary branch will now select the five nominees from among those titles on the shortlist.

Jon Fitzgerald's documentary "The Highest Pass" ventures from Rishikesh in northern India up and up into the Himalayas to track six men and one woman - all Westerners - as they follow a 27-year-old yogi in a motorcycle caravan to the highest drivable road in the world. For the team, one of whom (narrator-writer Adam Schomer) has just learned how to ride a motorcycle in the weeks prior, the excursion seems a little more daring than usual since Anand Mehrotra, their handsome guide, has never made the pilgrimage himself.

Even experienced motorcyclists might hesitate to ride 1,200 miles over flooded and rutted roads, risking altitude sickness and avalanches to travel up the world's highest motorable mountain pass. But the bikers who trekked the Indian Himalayas to 18,300 feet in the new documentary "The Highest Pass" were on a mission - not only to have an adventure but also to confront their fears and overcome self-created limitations. Part travelogue, part spiritual quest, "The Highest Pass" is a filmic fusion of the outer and inner journeys riders experience, taken to physical and mental extremes.