25 Best Docs on Amazon
Print magazines reached their apex in, what, the 1990s? Also known as my formative decade. When I began to watch movies obsessively and I wanted to know who was making them and how were they doing it. Before YouTube, before podcasts, even before DVD commentary tracks (oh, how I miss thee) my earliest exposure to film as an industry came by way of the newstand at Book People or the now defunct Bookstop. I’d pick up Premiere magazine, occasionally an issue of Empire, but the magazine that I read the most and that my parents eventually subscribed me to was Entertainment Weekly.
I’d read EW cover to cover. My favorite issues were the Summer and Fall Previews, a methodical blurb-o-rama of upcoming movies and TV shows that got readers salivating at all the potential that was coming to screens in the months ahead. I’d often debate the Entertainer of the Year issues (usually with just myself) on par with debates more civilized adults reserved for Time’s Person of the Year (well, Man of the Year back then. Oh, the arcane days of the late 20th!). I held vigil for the post-Oscars issues like they were college acceptance letters. Owen Gleiberman, Ken Tucker and a host of other EW writers were my introduction to film and TV criticism as a serious form of journalism.
There was a time where I had a box or two with stacks of back issues I kept in the corner of the closet in my childhood bedroom. In a single box you might find the superfluous Best 100 episodes of Seinfeld and Friends issues stacked below the solemn 9/11 issue. I believe I pared these down some years ago. A few issues may still be tucked away for the sake of a posterity few like me value and do completely understand ourselves.
Why keep so many physical copies of a magazine whose cultural relevance peaked years ago and whose back issues are most likely available on digital if I cared to look? I’ll admit that after seeing Almost Famous I may have envisioned a yet to be made, semi-autobiographical coming of age story wherein my own Entertainment Weekly collection would be featured with the same reverence with which Cameron Crowe treated his personal collection of rock records from the ‘70s. But if I go deeper, I may have held onto so many issues for so long because when I flipped through those pages as blossoming lover of film, of entertainment, of the industry, I had the innocence (the hubris?) to imagine myself one day being a part of a project that would be worthy enough to be featured in the hallowed pages of my favorite cultural magazine. Even a mere blurb would suffice.
Earlier this month, Entertainment Weekly published The 25 best documentaries on Amazon Prime Video. Coming in at number 21 is The Russian Five which I edited for director Joshua Riehl. Of Russian Five Debby Wolfinsohn and Kevin Jacobsen write:
This wildly entertaining documentary centers on a niche subject — the hiring of five Russian athletes to compete on the Detroit Red Wings hockey team in the '90s — and turns it into a universal story.
So… a boyhood dream come true.
Head on over to EW to check out the complete list which includes some stellar docs. (It’s still sinking in that a movie I edited is on the same list with The Last Waltz, among others.)
Stream The Russian Five here.