Tag: Documentary

Besides an eye catchy title, Mommy Dead and Dearest is a documentary about a very recent and famous case. A troubling case, and just so we are clear, it is about Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome.

For those who haven’t heard about it yet, it is a problem with a parent or guardian, who will intentionally harm their child, or put the child in harms way, so that they can fix them and heal them. This is my own definition. It gives them a sense of belonging, and a sense of being needed and relied on by an individual.

And yeah, it is child abuse. It is rare, or at least it is rarely reported, but it is extremely serious. I reviewed a movie about it last year that I really loved, but the reveal of the cause is basically a spoiler, so that fucks up with me attempting to tell you about it.

Back to the real story, this is an extreme example of the syndrome. For decades it had been going on. DeeDee had her daughter, Gypsy Rose, in a wheel chair, concinving everyone she couldn’t walk, had cancers, and more. She was scamming her community for donations, help and more. They got some make a wish vacations too.

And then one morning, DeeDee was found murdered in her home with Gypsy Rose missing.

I don’t mean to joke about murdered people, but yeah, I can imagine all of that.

Oh shit, missing! With cryptic facebook posts! About rape and murder!

Long story short, yeah, Gypsy Rose’s secret online boyfriend did the murder, with her help. They were going to run away together, free from this prison she was in, but they both admitted to their crimes and now it is a weird situation. Can you murder someone if they have kept you as a prisoner for decades? Someone who has lied to doctors, filled you with pills, and made you lie for free stuff for most of your life?

Apparently not. But this documentary goes into DeeDee’s past, where the father was during all of this, public opinion throughout the trial, what the two did to hide their relationship, how it all went down and more. And also we get to hear a whole lot of the story from Gypsy Rose’s point of view. Her perception of reality is different than anyone else, as her normal involves an abusive mother who wouldn’t let her see the world, who wouldn’t let her use her legs.

This is the type of documentary that has you on the edge of your seat, especially if you are not familiar with the case. It is such an extreme act that one cannot fathom it happening so openly in society. It is a thriller in some regards as well.

This is a very great informative documentary on a very recent event. The biases are kept out, because story is told by those involved, not an outside narrator with an agenda. So sure, they have their own biases, but that is real life and acceptable.

Sometimes I can be so into movies and pop culture that I miss the obvious big ones. Some of the most classic films of the last forty years I may have not seen yet. And bigger news events I may have missed out on.

Like this whole, death of JonBenét Ramsey thing that happened like, 20+ years ago. Apparently it was a pretty big deal, a lot of people assumed the parents did it, it was a very strange case. And a sad case. But you know, it was in Colorado, a state always recovering from a big tragedy it seems like.

It also was turned into a shit ton of movies, including TV specials. It was referenced on South Park even, and I just, uhh, never cared to figure out the reference.

Either way, this is a new documentary on the topic, Casting JonBenet, and it attempts to tell the story in a bit of a different way.

By telling the story in dozens of ways! Dozens!

This documentary is pretending to cast a film, about the death of JonBenet. And it is casting for the roles of the father, the mother, the older brother, the police chief, a few other characters, and of course, JonBenet, in the town of Boulder, Colorado where the event took place. That is the key. We have a lot of people who remember the events from twenty years ago and this is the case that sort of started the idea of armchair detectives. It would especially be true in a community where the crime took place.

So the crux of this film is straight up people auditioning for a role in a film, and also having them talk about the case. Talk about what they noticed, what stood out to them, and of course, their theories on the case.

And hey, if you want to see a documentary on local Boulderites talking about a past event that they can only theorize on, then this is the perfect documentary for you. If you don’t, then you certainly won’t want to watch the documentary.

I mean, I was hoping they would go over some of the real facts of the case. But they didn’t. And we are left with yes, a lot of people have thoughts on this case, and a lot of things are plausible, but technically, we still have no fucking clue why this girl is dead, and we will likely never know.

You know what is exciting nowadays? Getting people cleared of all charges from prison when they were innocent. Now, ideally, they would have never been in jail. And they would have been freed way sooner than 20 or so years in jail. Or way sooner than hours before execution. But every false person imprisoned that gets freed is worthy of celebration and a reminder that our justice system blows.

Technically this documentary came out in 2014 before Making a Murderer, but it is still a subject that a lot of people enjoy hearing about. The Innocence Project has been around since 1992, after DNA evidence helped clear a lot of people wrongly accused in the past. And A Murder In The Park is about Anthony Porter, accused of killing two teenagers in a Chicago park at night in 1982.

It wasn’t until the late ’90’s when a journalism class from Northwestern University and their professor decided to examine the case, found some holes, and made their findings public. They found out a witness recanted his testimony because he couldn’t have seen it, they put some more deniability in it, and even got someone else to confess to the crime. A pretty open and shut case. Porter was freed just a few days before sentenced to death.

Because of how close of a call it was, the state of Illinois decided to finally abolish the death penalty. Just imagine if an innocent person was killed by the government. (Psst, it is bound to have happened by now).

However, what if…what if Porter actually did do the killings, and him getting freed put a different, actually innocent person behind bars? That would be crazy, that couldn’t be real life…

That headline is certainly bold and emotion filling.

It turns out that a few journalism students and a professor with an agenda might not be as good at catching criminals as a police force. One person maybe recanted his testimony, but the police had five other people who saw the crime and agreed it was Porter. The guy they got to convince to the murder did so under duress. A private investigator was called in and he coerced the plea, much like a cop would do at their own building.

So they employed similar tactics that the police did, but this time they put an innocent man in jail to prove a point. Well, if their point was to get rid of the death penalty, they succeeded at that, and did a great thing. But the tactics used were deceitful.

A community could no longer trust their local police force. More lawsuits were held over this, and eventually, the “Real killer” was put free too thanks to all the fucked up shit that was behind the scenes. In the end, the criminal justice system was made helpless as one of their good arrests put doubt into the program and made the crime now completely untouchable due to all the shit that went down.

The documentary highlights an interesting story, but it does feel like a made for TV special. It was on Showtime originally, but the production quality just doesn’t feel like it is there. It presents the facts and tells a story, one that makes you want to question every criminal report you see from now on. And people who argue against it.

On August 1, 1966, a man climbed the clock tower at the University of Texas in Austin and opened fired on people. Charles Whitman, a former marine, probably suffering from PTSD, took his sniper rifle and few other guns and decided to just go on a killing spree.

The entire event lasted over an hour and a half. 14 people were killed during this time, and his mother and wife were shot before he went into the tower. This was before TV was really big still, before people had their own cameras to document the footage, and was told mostly through radio broadcasts.

Tower is a documentary trying to recreate the scene of that day, through testimony given from survivors, through the police on the scene who helped end the attack, and some archival footage.

And a lot of it is also told through animation, using newer rotoscope technology.

If this happened nowadays we would probably just bomb the tower.

This is a hard documentary to really spend a lot of words describing, so I will decide to keep the entire thing brief. The animation was interesting, but I don’t know how much it helped to tell the story. I focused more on the art and less on the words being said. Also some technical decisions early on made it hard for me to remember who was who when the interviews and stories began to switch around and describe the same events.

It didn’t bring in much politically, and I expected it to go hard also after Vet care and PTSD research, but instead it just told the events and the events only.

It is however incredibly informative, and if you only know about these events from pop culture references (like me) then you will learn about one of the biggest stories of the time when it came to a mass shooting. If you are already familiar, you may enjoy the personal approach to the topic. Besides, it is only 90 minutes and not a big strain on your schedule.

2016 was a big year for documentaries detailing the African American experience. From the Netflix release of 13th which is incredibly powerful and up to date and O.J.: Made In America, an epic documentary detailing the most famous trial of the 20th century along with race relations in LA at the same time.

But there was a third documentary that was making a significant amount of buzz. I Am Not Your Negro I first heard about because it was nominated for a Spirit Award (along with the previous mentioned two), but one I had a hard time trying to find. It was a much smaller movie and is only released a few places in the United States.

At its heart, it is about James Baldwin, a famous writer in the 50’s through the 70’s about racial experiences in America, and yes, I never heard of him before this documentary. It is a bit about his life and the life of three other African Americans, Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers (another civil rights activist). All three of those men were assassinated for their beliefs, in a span of five years in the 1960’s.

It is based on an unfinished book by Baldwin, Remember This House, which had only 30 or so pages of notes. It was going to be telling a history of the United States of racism, through their lives and their accomplishments, and what it means to be a black person growing up in the US with the knowledge that these men were killed for being black.

If anything I learned about Baldwin, a very interesting and influential man!

I Am Not Your Negro is an incredible ambitious project, one that could say a whole lot about the world back then and the world right now. It is also narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, because who doesn’t want to hear his voice.

And I can recognize the words and story as powerful. But I will admit they did not resonate with me as much as the two documentaries mentioned on top. It didn’t amplify my life experience, probably because I am super white.

But it doesn’t mean I didn’t think it was right. I thought it told a story that should be said. It is just one that is hard to fully relate to unless you are in the right state of mind.

If you want more after 13th or O.J.: Made In America, go for this one. But don’t let this be your starting point on the subject and let it only amplify the other stories told that year.

Life, Animated was recently nominated for an Oscar, and one of those films that was relatively easy to watch so I jumped right on it.

I knew it involved Disney in some way, I did not know the focus was on a specific individual, Owen Suskind. Based on a book written by his dad, Ron Suskind, it tells of Owen’s story growing up and his struggles.

You see, Owen was autistic. And around 2-3 years old he started to become very reserved. He didn’t talk as much as he used to, he had no real way to communicate with others. This was also at a time when autism was less understood and they assumed something terrible had taken over him.

But they noticed something. Owen loved Disney movies, he would watch them all the time, it was the only thing that made him seemingly happy. He would rewind certain scenes over and over again. And one time, while watching The Little Mermaid, during the Ursula song Poor, Unfortunate Souls, he eventually repeated a phrase “Just The Voice” and was the first sign of hope in a long long time.

They found out that he could learn the lines from the films and would use them in a correct context. And the first real conversation he had with his father is when he found an Iago puppet and talked to him from below his bed, using his best bird voice. And Owen was able to talk to Iago unlike his parents, including direct lines from the films as well.

This is pretty high up there on most parents lists of things they are willing to do for their kids.

The beginning of the documentary started out very powerful and put me in tears, twice. That is those fears coming to the forefront of my mind, given my own child is still under 2 years old and I worry about things like autism. The struggles the family went through and what Owen went through are powerful and probably similar to thousands of families across the world.

His backstory was shown intermittently with scenes of Owen growing up, about to graduate from a program before getting to live on his own in a condo. About finding a girlfriend, about getting a job, and about running his own Disney fan club and connecting with people all over the world. Hell, his story is so inspirational he was able to give speeches and meet some famous Disney voice actors.

But after the intro, my interest began to wane. I don’t think the documentary knew how to end. It just continued to show his life and doing things and then, yep, movie.

Owen has a powerful story, and listening to his parents talk about it is worth the price of admission. But the ending lacks the same luster and peters off until it just decides to end.

What the world needs now is a strong female role model to look up to. Someone who is breaking grounds, doing what she wants, and kicking ass all at the same time.

What the world needs now is Aisholpan Nurgaiv. AKA The Eagle Huntress. AKA our new rallying cry.

The Eagle Huntress takes us to Mongolia, in the smaller villages and in the mountains, where natives have lived there for thousands of years. And that is where the great tradition of hunting foxes with trained eagles has been thriving for a very long time.

These proud and noble hunters are few and far in between, normally passing on the skills from father to son. Not everyone can hunt with eagles. It takes time, patience, and of course, being taught. Most people are farmers, or regular hunters, or people with real goddamn jobs.

And Aisholpah is the oldest child in her family, where her father, Rys Nurgaiv, is an eagle hunter. She has always been fascinated by the eagles and has helped raise a few with her dad. But now she is coming of age, she is 13, and she wants an Eagle of her own. She wants to train it, to hunt with it, and to enter competitions with it.

Spoilers

But of course, in her part of the world, everyone is very conservative. The “village elders” in there are shown to be very against the idea of a GIRL becoming a Hunter. Women are weak and frail. Women need to be farming and cooking. Women cannot handle the eagle or handle the cold. And all of that. They were all shown to be quite angry basically. It is great that Aisholpan lives in such a progressive for the area family.

And yeah, they say screw you. Aisholpan gets her own baby eagle with the help of her dad. She trains the eagle. She goes to competitions. And she goes on hunts with it. Not just women power. Power in goddamn general.

The documentary is narrated by Daisy Ridley, who is also the executive producer, and putting her Star Wars fame to good use right away.

I was awed by some of the scenes, wondering how they could get such great shots in the cold wintry mountains of Mongolia. Eagles taking flight, fighting with foxes. And shit, when she stole the eagle babies? That was downright terrifying and exciting all at the same time.

This documentary does what documentaries really need to start doing again. Telling a great story around the world for people to learn from and for us to get inspired by. If Aisholpan can fight the patriarchy all on her own, what can you do in your own first world home? If Aisholpan can achieve her dreams at such a young age, then why are you still on Reddit?

Go out and do awesome things. It is what Aisholpan would want of you.

And as of this movie, one of my goals is to get one of those super sweet fox pelt outfits that the hunters get. So goddamn sexy, if not warm.

I almost spent money to see Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party. I almost drove up to a theater this summer to see it. I figured it would be a review I needed on my website, or at least needed before the Election.

But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I knew it was by Dinesh D’Souza, who made America: Imagine The World Without Her. A very biased and terrible documentary that was so grotesque with its misinformation and style that it made my Worst Films of 2014 list. It was so strange to see a documentary that turned into a hit piece against Clinton in 2014.

Because this year having one makes a lot more sense. Needless to say, I went into this documentary with very low expectations and ready to hate it given my experience. Since the last one turned out to just be a big anti-Clinton thing, I didn’t know what this one would even say given his attacks two years ago.

I mean, he couldn’t just make something that said the exact same thing for 100+ minutes right?

You’d be surprised

A lot of this documentary is actually a dramatization about D’Souza’s life. Why? Because he wants to be famous and doesn’t care a lot about this shit. That is my guess. It starts with him going to prison for campaign fraud reasons. He says he went to prison for attacking Obama in a documentary, but doesn’t disagree that what he did is technically illegal. Instead, blaming the president.

In prison he gets to teach English to immigrants. And then he talks to inmates about why they are in jail, including someone who did prison fraud. Again, all of this is reenactment of prison, not actual footage or anything, so who knows what he wanted to make up about it.

About 40 minutes of the documentary are about him in prison, talking to people, and finding out the history of the democratic party. One of his biggest issues is Andrew Jackson, who did bad things to Native American, and calls him a champion for the Democratic Party. Except, you know, most liberal-esque people seem to hate him for the exact same reasons and no one calls him a champion.

Then the documentary says that the big switch after the civil rights movements was a lie. Even though yes, clearly policy has changed. I guess the biggest point about this is that despite current policy of a party in terms of social rights, D’Souza says it doesn’t count, because of Civil Rights votes and Jackson. Yeah.

And then some attacks of Clinton, emails and her foundation. The end. After a grossly patriotic ending, with flags and choruses and an orchestra. He wants them to know he cannot vote because of his crime. Even though the party he is pissed at is the one trying to make it so he can vote. Go figure.

I am an independent voter and I hate shit like this on both sides equally. But for whatever reason D’Souza keeps making bad documentaries, with lies, mostly reenactments, and a lot of hatred. So I will hate it right back.

Lately I feel I have seen a lot of social rights documentaries, including the blight of the black man or woman in America. It has definitely grown in recent years, from learning of prison/arrest rates, to news reports, to the war on drugs, to civil rights, to modern slavery. Heck, I just did O.J.: Made In America.

So initially I didn’t want to see 13th. I figured it would just be more of the same of other recent documentaries, or a more detailed Last Week Tonight With John Oliver segment. But the reason I finally picked it up is because it was nominated for a Spirit award for Best Documentary and likely also for the Oscars.

Thankfully it is one of the many Netflix documentaries, and while watching it I felt like I was hit over the head, in a good way. It is only around 100 minutes long, but I could not look away. I wanted to play phone games or write while I watched, but it was impossible. And once I found out it was directed by Ava DuVernay it all made sense.

And this isn’t even the most powerful imagery the film has.

DuVernay recently directed Selma and a few other smaller things, but 13th elevates her to a whole knew level. I have never seen such a modern, information packed documentary like this one. It is so dense and factual, with archival footage, expert testimony, law wording, and more. It is basically impossible to argue against it (if you felt like arguing). It started with the 13th amendment getting into a law, jim crow laws, the modern civil rights era and how that led to the war on drugs and the sudden increases in mass incarceration of black men.

Not only that, but it seemed to do it all in the first thirty minutes.

It became modern quickly, including why Bill Clinton signed the bill that increased prison rates even further, the entire political climate of the time, up to the Black Lives Matter movement (that totally started this year). Fuck, it is relevant and informative.

13th is just a documentary that everyone in their life should see. They should go in with an open mind, free of distractions, and be ready to change some of their perceptions of the American dream and reality. On that note, I didn’t think that DuVernay should have been nominated for Best Director for Selma. But I sort of feel it is warranted for this documentary. 13th is so good, I can’t even spend more time talking about it. Just go see it, please.

Zero Days is an ominous sounding title. Fuck! When did the countdown start? Why am I already at zero?

Something about the title makes it feel like a count down versus the beginning of a count, which is interesting enough on its own. It just screams out negativity.

It turns out the term zero days refers to a malware attack on a computer. It is an unknown type of attack, that affects the entity as soon as it could possibly be known. There is no time to prepare before the attack begins, and you have to just start dealing with it while trying to fix it at the same time. It is technically rare, as most forms of attack are known and can be dealt with before the attack begins.

But what if you have a program on your computer with multiple zero days attached to it? That would be unheard of. And the documentary starts with a talk about Stuxnet, a malware discovered a few years ago with four zero day fronts on it, all around the world.

Unfortunately no, it doesn’t take on human forms and take over that way.

Long story short, Stuxnet was a form of cyberwarfare. The first one ever discovered, but probably not the first one implemented. And it was made in the US and Israel, to target the Iranian nuclear program, and sort of blow it all up from inside with their own tech.

Cool right?!

Given this, the documentary is also about cyberwarfare in general, the history of Iranian nuclear power and US-Iran relations, how other forms of warfare were implemented and so on. It isn’t just on the one very powerful and very specific malware.

And you know what? Zero Days felt like it was all over the place. The beginning was instantly very tech heavy and honestly, I got lost right away. It got better eventually. We got some very powerful testimonies from people who made Stuxnet, from people in the government programs and more. That part of Zero Days is fascinating.

When I say it is all over the place, it is all technically related, it just feels like several different mini documentaries put together almost. It has some good parts, but some parts that just feel above my complete comprehension. So with that, I have to knock it down a bit.