Documentary (Recommendations)
JoshuaHeter
Omaha, NE
in Movies
What are some of your favorite documentaries? I have an elliptical and an ipad and when I'm working out, I'm in desperate need of things to help me forget that I'm working out.
Here are some that I'd highly recommend.
1. Baseball (Ken Burns)
2. Louis & Clark (Ken Burns)
3. Going Clear
4. New York City (Ric Burns)
5. The Donner Party (Ric Burns)
6. The Fog of War
7. Free Solo
8. Leaving Neverland
9. O.J. Made in America
10. Hoop Dreams
11. 30 for 30
a. Catching Hell
b. The Fab 5
c. Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?
d. Pony Express
e. The Best that Never was.
12. Assault in the Ring
Here are some that I'd highly recommend.
1. Baseball (Ken Burns)
2. Louis & Clark (Ken Burns)
3. Going Clear
4. New York City (Ric Burns)
5. The Donner Party (Ric Burns)
6. The Fog of War
7. Free Solo
8. Leaving Neverland
9. O.J. Made in America
10. Hoop Dreams
11. 30 for 30
a. Catching Hell
b. The Fab 5
c. Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?
d. Pony Express
e. The Best that Never was.
12. Assault in the Ring
Comments
Also, I think you forgot "The Toronto Raptors: Season of Champions"
Three Identical Strangers is a recent one that the less you know about it going in the better. It's the story of the lives of three triplets who were separated at birth and an investigation into why they were separated.
If you somehow haven't seen it or know what happens, The Jinx on HBO has the best ending of any true crime documentary.
There's a pretty good Behind The Music playlist of full episodes starting here:
Capturing the Friedmans
The Staircase
The Jinx
OJ: Made in America
Abducted in Plain Sight
Dear Zachary
Three Identical Strangers
Harmontown
There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane
I Love You Now Die
At the Heart of Gold
The Cheshire Murders
Leaving Neverland
Mommy Dead and Dearest
The Jeffrey Dahmer Files
Time: The Kalief Browder Story- Netflix.
Outcry-Showtime
[edit] One more: Until The Light Takes Us
Paradise Lost- about the West Memphis Three and the case
I didn't really know any of the beside the scenes drama that went on, but I remembered being extremely confused about what the hell I just watched after seeing Dr. Moreau.
I'll just say that the director getting an actual warlock to do warlock things to ensure his meeting with Marlon Brando goes well isn't even close to the craziest thing that happened while making the movie.
About Robert Crumb, the underground comic artist of the 60s and 70s. Man, that dude had a singularly fucked up family, and it really did a number on him psychologically, which he poured out relentlessly into his comics and into his relationships with women. "Neurotic and self-loathing" hardly begins to capture his state of mind. Somehow, though, in his late middle-age Crumb managed to find some way through all that eventually to reach some measure of peace with himself. If you are looking for something in these awful times to feel a little bit better about the human capacity to change for the better, this might be it, although you have to wallow through his years of being a miserable SOB to eventually get to that. Also, it has an absolute top-notch soundtrack of early 20th century blues and jazz, and Crumb's cynicism and sour view of humanity is very charming and funny.
If you've ever wondered what it would have sounded like at the moment when Thin Lizzy decided to stop being Thin Lizzy and instead start becoming Bad Brains, that Death album is that moment.
United Red Army:
As opposed to Crumb, woo boy is this the opposite of a movie to make you feel better about anything. I’m stretching the “documentary” category here, but the first hour, while dramatized in parts, is more or less straight-forward documentary.
So this is the story of the Asana Mountain Lodge incident in Japan in 1972, wherein a group of leftist revolutionaries holed up in a ski lodge and fought a days long battle with the police. This was a huge event -- something like 90% of people watching TV in Japan on the last day of the standoff were watching live coverage of it.
The director of this movie , Kōji Wakamatsu, was a fellow traveler with these folks around that time and knew lots of them personally, and this is his attempt to make the youth of Japan aware that this even happened, explain to them how people became so intensely radicalized, as well as provide a cautionary tale about how catastrophically off the rails such a movement can fly.
The first hour is a firehouse of history about the leftist student reaction against the Japanese post-war government and United States involvement in Japanese politics. It's overwhelming in all of the details, but simultaneously left me wanting to know much more than it gave me*. Still, it's a fascinating glimpse into an important history that essentially no one in the United States (or, apparently, anyone in Japan born after 1980) have ever heard of.
The rest of the movie stops being documentary and is just historical drama, so maybe that’s a decent stopping point because It gets really dark. Really, really dark. No exaggeration, the second hour may be the single most difficult thing I have ever watched. If you've ever wondered what happens when you mix Maoist Cultural Revolution-inspired fervor for self-criticism sessions with the most extreme form of Japanese bullying culture, here you have it. It's horrific. It’s worth it, though, to force yourself through it to get to the culminating standoff at the ski lodge. I think these specifc people were the ones Wakamatsu was friends with, and his portrait of them and their desperation, especially after the horror they had just been through in the previous hour, is very poignant and sad.
Also, there’s a cool soundtrack by sometime member of Sonic Youth Jim O’Rourke.* For instance, why did elements of the Japanese far left got tangled up with the Marxist flavor of the Palestinian liberation movement? I.e. not Fatah or the PLO, but groups like the PFLP. If any of you all are old enough to remember the machine gunning down of dozens of people in an Israeli airport in the early 70s, that was the Japanese. How on earth did Japanese leftists come to care so intensely about Israel, Jews, or Palestinians? I've never been able to figure that out. (The Carlos miniseries, at least the first two parts, is a gripping tale of that era of Middle Eastern politics. Also, it has some of the weirdest anachronistic choices for a soundtrack ever. Like, The Feelies? What possible connection ties The Feelies in time or spirit to Carlos the Jackal in the 1970s???).
Behind The Curve...I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, but for the last 3 years or so I've been a part of the flat-earth debunking community. Embarrassed because I've spent a shameful amount of time arguing with idiots about basic science. I 'know' (have interacted with dozens of times online) almost everyone in that movie...the only two who I haven't dealt with are the two main characters - Mark Sargent and Patricia Steere. I know pretty much everyone else (definitely not proud of that, they're idiots).