Errol Morris, directed The Thin Blue Line, which is my vote as the greatest documentary ever made of any kind. Another film he ded caled Fast, Cheap and Out of Control certainly is an odd documentarybut at the same time very entertaining and fascinating. It focuses on four different ment and their VERY different careers: An expert on the naked mole-rat, a robotics wizard, a topiary gardener and a professional lion tamer. All four men are colourful and interesting in their own ways and Morris utilizes all sort of cinema orifices to stylize the film and even has it question our existence. Only a filmmaker with his chops could pull this off, and he does it in spades.
Has anyone watched King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters? I've seen clips of it and it looks hilarious.
It might be the most overrated documentary I've seen, and far inferior at least two basketball documentaries ("Once Brothers" and "Through the Fire") I saw in the last few weeks. It's honestly a mystery to me why it gets the praise that it does. It's okay, don't get me wrong, but if you have ever spent as much as 30 minutes reading about prep basketball you will know absolutely everything in this movie and then some. A three hour documentary where I learn less than in half an hour of reading? Why would I possibly want to watch it? Since you liked it, tell me; what did you learn from this documentary that you didn't before? <a class="postlink-local" href="http://www.theidiotboard.com/viewtopic.php?p=23351#p23351" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">viewtopic.php?p=23351#p23351</a>
It's very one sided. They have two main characters, the "evil" challenger who is a successful businessman and is slightly egotistical, so we must hate him. Then, there's the younger "family man" challenger, who rides in on a white horse to defeat the unbeatable villain. The part I like best is the memory it brings back of how fucking difficult of a game this was to play. I mean, it's REALLY fucking tough. However, if the filmmakers had kept the focus fair and balanced, the documentary would be more interesting but I just found it frustrating to watch.
KIMaster, when did you actually see Hoop Dreams? The documentary was released back in 1994. At that point in time, the information was not common knowledge, Hoop Dreams essentially broke ground in that area. Sure, now it would hardly be considered original, but at that time, it was one of the only sources telling that kind of story. Honestly, without Hoop Dreams then Through the Fire probably never exists. Hell, Hoop Dreams probably laid the foundation for the 30 for 30 series to exist. Hoop Dreams was one of the first sports documentaries to achieve widespread critical and commercial success, and, respectfully, I think your criticism is showing a lack of historical perspective.
Perhaps? I first watched it in 2004, and then again this year. I'm not denying that "Through the Fire" and "30 for 30" probably exist because of the commercial success of that film, but that's not an argument about its quality. A lot of great things were spawned by crap, and vice versa. (Those awful high school teenage romance films? Blame the success of a very good film like "The Breakfast Club") I also agree that the Internet wasn't around in 1994, so finding this information was harder back then. But a truly good film should not become obsolete in only 8 years! It should be not supplanted by two or three decently written Internet articles! That's my point. I think the documentary is well-made, decent, and influential, but not good, let alone special. And if people were more ignorant about prep basketball in the mid nineties (fair point), I still have to ask; what part of "Hoop Dreams" wasn't common sense? That there are drugs and violence in low-income neighborhoods? That athletes are used and disposed of based upon their performance? That most high school stars never actually make it? Isn't this very basic knowledge? Did we ever REALLY go into the depths of the individual personalities, their preparation, or learn much about the neighborhood, like we did in "Through the Fire"? No.
Many documentaries are undertaken to tell a story that hasn't been told, to provide information that is not readily available. When a documentary is successful, it drives the viewer to want to learn more about the covered topic. Much of the information that is now common knowledge regarding prep basketball, basketball serving as a lottery ticket out of the inner city, athletes being treated as commodities, etc. is due to the success of Hoop Dreams. Those internet articles may not exist without Hoops Dreams. I thought the stories about William Gates and Arthur Agee were compelling and interesting. Have sports documentaries made significant progress over the past 16 years, absolutely. But the fact that the problems addressed in the film are common knowledge to suburban white kids the world over (this poster included, though not the kid part so much anymore), show the incredible impact the film had. Uninteresting stories do not have the impact that Hoop Dreams has had. Hoop Dreams made approximately $11 million, good for a documentary, but hardly a massive commercial success. The impact of this film was in its critical acclaim and influence on a generation of sports documentaries and documentarians. I thought the stories told were interesting and compelling, and while the information may no longer be fresh, I think that speaks to the strength of the film in that it caused people to seek out more of this information and widely disseminate it so that it is now common knowledge.
The point is, everything in bold was common knowledge before Hoop Dreams, too. Hell, I remember having older relatives and family friends from Russia, who had never seen "Hoop Dreams", tell me the exact same things when I was growing up. ("Sports are a lottery ticket for people from poor families, athletes/entertainers are just used for their skills, etc.") I was not an avid Internet reader when I first saw the film in 2004 either, but the vast majority was all such blinding common sense, I wondered what the point was. Now, several of the minor details in "Hoop Dreams" (like the structure of prep schools and state tournaments) are things that people who don't follow and read about prep basketball wouldn't know, and I concede that the picture did more to bring attention to it. It's surface, shallow information as presented therein, but still. However, everything you listed above? That's basic common sense, not something that a mid 90s documentary enlightened the public about. Yes, that is a MASSIVE commercial success. To this day, "Hoop Dreams" remains the single highest grossing non-political documentary of all time. Considering the film cost next to nothing to make, and that the VHS/DVD sales plus television rights doubled or even tripled that box office take, it was an enormously profitable hit. That's why it was remembered (a bunch of people watched it) and not "Through the Fire", which made something like $0.08 million in theaters. (Which for a documentary, was still considered a success!) I've written it before, but I could care less what the hell critics think. I judge films on their own merits, not what a talking head tells me I should think. However, I'm always amused by how often people use the "critics" crutch in arguments. My point was, if you're looking for a great documentary on basketball from which you will learn something new, there are far better choices than "Hoop Dreams", an influential but banal and out-dated film.
I have always thought Nick Broomfield was a talented documentary maker. Id suggest watching, both of his documentaries on Aileen Wuornos, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. The first actually goes into some depth about how the police and prosecutors were making book and movie deals shortly after she was arrested. Of which the movie Monster was based, apparently Charlize Theron studied the first doc for inspiration. I'd say seeing the real life killers's Charles Manson like ramblings is ten times more frighting than how Theron portrayed her. Fetishes is also a great film I had to watch for a psych class in college. I haven't seen his other movies but I think these three are pretty well done. I know it's kind of slap you over the head in concept and not really that deep but I can watch Super Size Me on a lazy Sunday as easily as any other movie. Hard hitting? Eh... Entertaining and quasi-eye opening? Yes. I actually made my old roommates gargantuan girlfriend sit down and watch this. During the sequence where he list the illnesses that are associated with obesity she told me she had half a dozen of them off of the list.
I saw it in '95, when I was in high school, way out in the sticks. As a Southerner, I'd grown up on college basketball. It was how my friends and I defined ourselves. We always got a half day when the ACC tournament started. I knew little about the business of sports or what my erstwhile heroes endured to get where they were, or all the bullshit that continued throughout their time in the sun. (No matter how famous you are, you can't buy your mom a house on $0/yr, and some people just can't stand being in a classroom (me included), and some of us STILL look down on guys who go pro early.) It shattered a lot of my illusions. It taught me a lot about how dreams die and how business works. And I still think the court footage is great and the characterization is top-shelf, better than either of the otherwise awesome docs you mentioned.
You might want to check out the documentary Fat-Head which was made in response to Super Size Me. It doesn't really dissent with the idea that we should eat less McDonalds, which is obviously true, but it explains how a lot of the science was dramatized and exaggerated in Super Size Me. You can watch a trailer and get some info here: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/about/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/about/</a> . Basically it's about the idea that excessive grains and sugar are the problem, not saturated fats. A lot of nutritional thought is leaning towards this idea now(see: paleo fad/revolution). I haven't seen this one in a couple years, but the guy who made the film goes through the same thing Spurlock did, eating McDonalds for every meal for a month or two, except he avoids the bread, soda, and fries. At the end of it he has lost weight, and blood tests reveal him as healthier than before he started. Just an interesting documentary that opened my eyes to the idea that a lot of conventional wisdom in nutrition is flat out wrong. Pretty funny too.
First off – When the 19 year old hottie, Megan, who claims to be an actress, dancer and aspiring model, whom you have been dating over the internet for the past 8 months (wtf) turns out to be a Spoiler bored middle-aged housewife with internet access – cho chooo! Here comes the clue train: you do not have a twist ending. When it turned out that Bruce wills had been dead all the time through The Sixth Sense - that was a twist ending. This is not. The only twist to this movie is that it is nothing like the trailer - at all. Oh - and Nev: welcome to the internetz. Don’t get me wrong – this is not a bad movie – It’s interesting but for none of the reasons you read about in the reviews. If you have seen the trailer you’ll see Nev and his goofy hipster friends, after they get suspicious of Megan’s real identity, drive into the desert in the middle of the night to Megan’s "horse farm" (unannounced) to find out the real truth about her. Now that is interesting. Most people think this is a horror movie based on the trailer – it could have been one. Oh – and for his next movie: Nev finds the shocking truth about his royal Nigerian penpal that he met through his email account. Spoiler Nev does not get his money back.
Catfish is dogshit. 20/20 did a whole episode dedicated to this movie, explained the whole plot and twist ending. Not sure why the filmmakers agreed to tell the plot on tv before its release. I'd be very surprised if this wasn't 100% fabricated, which makes it even more pathetic because the twist is lame. The creators couldn't come up with a strong enough storyline, so they passed it off as a documentary to drum up extra press. It's all bullshit though, as several people have called out the acting portrayed in it. We'll assume the family decided to sign waivers to portray themselves in a negative light, and the filmmakers decided a documentary on internet love is interesting enough to dedicate several months to, you still have the fact that the entire plot and narrative was tied up with a nice bow. I should've known that documentary was bullshit with their JJ Abrams marketing campaign "Don't let anyone tell you what it is." Generalized promotional bullshit. On the other hand, Super High Me is an excellent documentary with Doug Benson with as much science and logic as Super Size Me, but entertaining and minus a host you want to punch in the face.
Restrepo, honestly. If you want to get an idea of the extreme that a deployed infantryman might go through watch this movie. I mean fuck, the fact that that two reporters had the balls to go through an entire deployment with a platoon blows my mind, and gives me new faith in the media. My deployments weren't anywhere this horrific, but to be honest if i had someone ask me to describe them I would just have them watch this documentary. Junger and Hetherington do an excellent job of capturing the emotional highs and lows of combat and deployments. In my mind his documentary is better than any m,ovie at capturing what it feels like to be at war.
I had heard the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary The Two Escobars, about drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and his brother Andres, a member of the national soccer team, both killed in 1994, pimped by Jason Reitman, so I decided to check it out. It starts off excellently, with fascinating link between drug-lords, money laundering, and soccer constantly played up. The interviews with jailed hitmen, Pablo's drug associates, and soccer team members that hung out on his personal ranch are nothing short of riveting. But pretty soon, major cracks start to show in this documentary. For starters, they never address what happened to Pablo's soccer club after he made open war on the government. Here he is running around, and meanwhile, what happened to his club soccer team containing many of Colombia's best players? And I could have done without SO much "soccer united the country" rah-rah BS, complete with inspirational music. Yeah, we get that people in shit-hole nations only have soccer to escape the violence and misery of their life, and I say that as a significant football fan who was born in a country where it's the most popular sport. But most egregiously of all, I hate that the documentary never points out that siccing drug lords against one another is the ONLY way to rid oneself of these terrorists. That the rival drug lords that brought down Pablo and his reign of murder (killing thousands of people, including hundreds of police officers, judges, and politicians) were in turn killed or arrested themselves once the main evil, Pablo Escobar was finished. And no, dumbass documentary, my heart does not go out to the people who worked for Pablo or were closely associated with him that were murdered. Their blood is equally on the head of Pablo Escobar. Oh, and FUCK them for trying to elicit some sympathy for the damned butcher. The wonderful interviews and brutal, archived portrayal of drug violence only partially redeem this, but it's probably still worth checking out. 58/100
Kimjongilia This was on a couple weeks ago on the Documentary channel a couple weeks ago so I tivo'd it and watched it last night. Its a doc about the struggle and survival of North Koreans under the rule of both Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung. It is told through about a half a dozen defectors, who tell of beatings, murders, executions, starvation, internment camps, and the godlike status that they are supposed to treat their "dear leader" with. Like any American who occasionally reads the newspaper or watches TV I knew that Kim Jong Il was a fucking lunatic, and certifiably crazy... But what I didn't know was to what extent he had a stranglehold on this country. It was eye-opening to me that this country is exactly what the USSR looked like decades ago. I thought that shit went out the window when the wall came down. Call me ignorant, I never knew North Korea was that fucked up. I just thought it was a country that turned its lights off at night and had a quirky dictator that once shot a round of golf 38 under par with 5 hole in ones. From what I understand the film came out in 2009, didn't get high praise, and has mixed reviews. I'd give it an above average score though. I would have liked to see more about the inner-workings of North Korea, but understand that because it is the most shut off nation in the world, makes it hard to document this. I found it interesting and worth watching. The one major complaint I had about the film though was when the defectors were interviewed the camera angles were fucked up and annoyed the fuck out of me. They also shot them all very close up, which made me want to throw shit at the TV.
It's an older HBO (early 2000s) documentary, but I watch a lot of them and it stuck out to me: Small Town Ecstasy. It's about a 19-year old guy and his middle-age crisis father who both do ecstasy together and get into the rave scene, and then follows them over the next year. Really good, shows how they evolve as they get deeper and deeper into the rave scene. It's like a special 90-minute episode of Intervention.
Even better, it's online: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x75sop_small-town-ecstasy-part-1_lifestyle" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x75sop ... _lifestyle</a>
I just got done watching Detroit Lives Produced by Johnny Knoxville this is a really interesting look at Detroit and how its surviving and even thriving despite what the news may lead you to believe. I'm in the greater Detroit area for work all the time and while it's sad to see such a large city crumbling it's also heartening to see people rebuilding, reclaiming, and rejoining the community. Anything VBS pre-MTV takeover is a really good watch. The behind the lines documentaries with the troops and sneaking into North Korea are mind blowing.