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Documentaries directed by Werner Herzog and Phil Donahue will face off on the Reel to Reel program at the Toronto Film Festival next month. Herzog’s latest, called Encounters at the End of the World, was filmed in Antarctica; Donahue will be making his film festival debut with Body of War, his afore-mentioned examination of the mishandling of the Iraq war.
Amazon, in partnership with their subsidiary CustomFlix, has struck a deal to sell DVDs of public domain films from the National Archive. Laypeople already have access to the Archive’s headquarters in Maryland, where they can watch and even copy the films themselves, but this project will open up access to those who can’t make the trip. First up for sale: a collection of newsreels dating from 1920 to 1967.
Can’t Ricky Gervais do better than this? The British creator/star of the original has signed on to star in Early Retirement, a drecky-sounding Warner Brothers comedy about “an work-obsessed man who quits his demanding job to spend more time with his family.” Maybe they’ll give him a ton of creative control and he’ll be able to make it work … ?