New to DocPlay in January

December 21, 2020 0 Comments

DocPlay will celebrate the new year with six exclusive premieres, including two Ken Burns documentary series.

Director’s cuts of The Vietnam War and Country Music will stream here for the first time, and DocPlay’s also licensed Burns’ Baseball.

The eight-part Country Music chronicles the evolution of country music over the course of the 20th century, from southern Appalachia’s songs of struggle, heartbreak and faith to the rollicking Western swing of Texas, California’s honky-tonks and Nashville’s “Grand Ole Opry.”

Rotten Tomatoes summarised the 2019 series as “an expansive — if not always deep — history of the genre [that] works as both a crash course for new listeners and a refresher for old-timers”.

Said The Telegraph of another music-themed newcomer, Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm: “This tale of a Welsh dairy farm that became an unlikely haven for rock stars was an absolute joy from start to finish.”

Liverpool: The End of the Storm is billed as a “gripping feature-length inside story of the 2019/20 Premier League winning season”, when fans of Liverpool Football Club finally saw their team lift the trophy that had eluded them for 30 years.

“Nothing in Storm is particularly revelatory (and it’s also not a great advert for Liverpool’s climate),” said Stuff of its theatrical release, “but its conciseness, slick editing, clever use of comic-book style sequences make it superior to Amazon’s drawn-out All or Nothing looks at Manchester City and Tottenham.”

Happy Happy Joy Joy is another DocPlay exclusive, about how the creator of Ren & Stimpy, John Kricfalusi, thought he was going to be the next Walt Disney — until allegations surfaced about his worst workplace impulses and the “even more disturbing behaviour” that followed.

Despite the dysfunctionalism that “doomed the show, and still somewhat taints its legacy”, Variety thought Happy Happy Joy Joy “predominantly fast-paced fun that will be catnip for animation fans”.

And new to the service this month will be The Hollywood War and Midnight Return: The Story of Billy Hayes and Turkey (December 21), Loading Docs 2019, Celia, Rubbings From a Live Man and Meat (December 24), Black Summer and The Second Wave (December 28), Belushi and The Talented Mr Stone (December 31).