Tag: Documentary

Think back to earlier in 2015. It was a scary time. So much was different in my own life for sure. But one thing has haunted me from earlier in the year. The Oscar category for Best Original Song. Because I got four of the five films pretty easily, but then there was “I’m Not Gonna Miss You” from Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me.

Wasn’t even nominated for Best Documentary! Just Best Original Song! You bastard!

Well, the good news is Netflix finally has it available so us regular people can see this technically obscure documentary. The good news is, he is still alive as of the time of this post. The bad news is, damn it, I have another documentary about an celebrity. Three weeks in a row, when will it end, when will it end?!

This whole thing is just a major troll, to make my list incomplete.

Glen Campbell is a famed musician. He got his start by playing as a studio band (See: The Wrecking Crew, Love & Mercy, both out this year). He is the most famous studio band member, who eventually became a ridciulously famous country star. Hell, the rest of The Wrecking Crew who matter even got parts in this documentary.

And now he has Alzheimer’s. But that won’t stop him from touring, making his own family his backing musicians, with new songs on what is most likely his final tour ever.

That is the whole basis for the documentary. A sad tale. A little bit of his history, a lot of performances from the tour, a lot of doctor visits, some Alzheimer’s awareness for cure research, and a whole lot of Campbell forgetting things.

And yet still, this is a documentary mainly for people who either A) Have relatives with Alzheimer’s, or B) Love Glen Campbell. I am willing to go on a limb and say it is for people older than myself. It is still touching at points, and his performance that got nominated was very good. Touching, full of montages, full of heart. But you know. Mostly a low key concert documentary, that could feel a bit more personal for some.

In all honesty, because he is real and I am not a super fan, I connect less to it. However, something like Still Alice, bringing a fictional Alzheimer’s account, makes it far easier for me to get emotional about it.

Feel free to listen to the song on the youtubes. But it has a much better impact after watching the entire documentary.

2015 may be the year of documentaries about celebrities. I feel a bit bad that so many of mine for this year are about a single person, dead or alive. I mean, last week I did Amy. And I still have that Kurt Cobain one to do.

But today I talk about Brand: A Second Coming, about Russell Brand, a guy who is definitely still alive and kicking. Shit he kicks a lot.

This is about a documentary about how Brand came into fame, how he reached the top, how he fell, and whatever the fuck he is doing now. He is an actor, a stand up comic, sometimes a singer, and a political activist.

What? You only know him from Get Him To The Greek, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, or Arthur? Well, where have you been? Someplace that isn’t England? Oh, that makes sense.

If you aren’t in England, you might never come across this guy. Or the Queen. Or the ghost of Winston Churchill.

Technically, part of this documentary is also showcasing Brand’s stand up tour, The Messiah Complex. You know, where he compares himself to Jesus is vulgar and funny ways. But only a few jokes/stories. Really, I think the main point of this review is to show how he went from acting celebrity, to political…activist…humorist…political something that he is today. Maybe consider him like Jon Stewart. But his show isn’t a big one on Comedy Central, it is instead a YouTube channel called The Trews (if the news had truth I think), where he went over how the news was reported the previous day, showing biases, lies, or whatever.

It is actually a really ambitious project and had actually gained me a lot of respect for him. All I knew about his politics was from that one Morning Joe clip that blew up on the internet a year or so ago. It is actually quite entertaining and shows he is smarter than some of his characters let him put on.

And hey, it was also interesting to see his side of the Katy Perry divorce story, as I only really heard about the why from Katy Perry: Part Of Me. How often do divorced couples each get their own documentary? Outside of presidents and their wives.

Overall, I’d call Brand: A Second Coming as merely interesting. It feels like it is going all over the place early on, and I did find myself wondering why he even had a documentary at this point in his career. Good for people who love Brand already, that is for sure. Probably the most profound sentence in any review I’ve written right there.

Ha ha ha! A girl who sang about not wanting to go to rehab went to rehab! Ha ha ha!

Now that this obvious and shit joke is over with, we can talk about Amy. Amy Winehouse was a singer and upcoming British star. She had a soulful voice, very jazzy, and wrote her own songs. I cared absolutely nothing about her.

I knew she had a song Rehab and I knew she had a song Valerie. Valerie might have been a cover. I only knew about those songs, really, because Glee did them on their show before she died. Glee got really bad real quick, but by golly, it kept me up to date with the hip new music. Speaking of Rehab, what in the hell is the deal with that song? I don’t get it. I don’t get why people like it or what is the point of the song. But that is my silly rant.

The point is, I was a bit reluctant to watch the Amy documentary because I didn’t really enjoy her as a musician and she was just “another young artist who died from drugs early.” That quote was definitely too long. In all honesty, it is the same reason I haven’t seen Cobain: Montage of Heck yet. And I like some Nirvana songs. It is just a year with a lot of musician bios, documentary or otherwise.

I don’t care for Amy Winehouse, but I enjoyed this documentary.

Fun punny joke about one of her famous song lyrics that I totally know!

Her friends knew Amy would be a big success, and I guess that is why there is so much footage of her when she was early in her career. And honestly, the only reason to watch it is to learn about her before her big success, see how she was when she was a normal person before the drugs. All of this footage is a raw look on her life and it is very endearing.

This documentary can help you relate to Amy as a person, realize she is someone who might not have wanted all the success and fame. She wanted to write songs and her feelings and that was it. She wanted to love her boyfriend and friends.

You know, and more vague descriptions that probably sound like all real people.

Here is the thing. She was living a very interesting life. And seeing this side of anyone will be quite interesting. So give it a gander. See her reactions to things. And learn about her way more than you know about your own loved ones.

Lego Lego LEGO…s. I am going to pluralize the word. According to some standard, you cannot say Legos to describe the objects, before you cannot pluralize Lego. You have to say Lego Bricks if you want to talk about the object. That is super fucking stupid.

I am calling the grammar police out. They are legos. Get over it.

Legos are clearly bigger and better than ever now. With The Lego Movie being a resounding success, and many more movies planned, and their ongoing great game line, and their uhh…I guess just legos. They are a big deal. So it makes sense they wanted to cash in on that sweet Documentary money.

A LEGO Brickumentary goes behind the scenes of everyone’s favorite child building material. We will see what makes them tick on the inside!

Behind the scenes and inside the scenes, if you know what I mean.

A LEGO Brickumentary is mostly for people who really like Legos. An obvious sentence if any.

The history of Lego is actually not too long, so it goes through it rather quickly. Our narrator is an unnamed Lego man voiced by Jason Bateman.

What they then go through is the decline of Lego about fifteen years ago, how they started taking customer concerns to heart and making better product, some of the Lego cons and real master builders. They also go into some lines like Lego Architecture (and how it started), and a current fan contest that allows people to present their ideas for future sets, where one a year is chosen to become a real product for them.

Cool stuff! Kind of interesting. But in all honesty this is just a big ad for Lego to show how cool they are, and for you to like them even more. Nothing wrong with that, but since it is a Lego documentary about Lego, by Lego, it loses a bit more of its objectivity.

This is the type of documentary that you will find on one of those How Its Made channels in the future. It felt just like one of them, and isn’t something anyone would ever want to watch a second time or own. Just play with Legos, it will be a better experience than this…eh, okay experience.

So last week I tried to find a scary documentary, I failed to find something in a few minutes and settled on Gideon’s Army, which ended up not scary at all. So I had to change my criteria a bit. I am still planning on trying to review more current and newer documentaries. But fuck it, they are documentaries. I can review older ones of these, most of you don’t just sit around watching documentaries, so you probably haven’t heard of the older ones either right?

Yep. Everything is available now. Or else it stays too hard to find good documentary content.

Thanks to this, I can talk about serial killers. Maybe, yeah. H. H. Holmes: America’s First Serial Killer. Definitely an eye catching subject matter about a dude I have never heard about before! I quickly learned this is definitely someone who I should have heard about before today, and a crazy interesting subject.

Holmes was like the perfect killer. He got his doctorate, studied anatomy and chemistry and got a bit rich. In the late 1800’s, after all the Jack the Ripper stuff going on in London, Holmes was living in Chicago and he wanted to kill.

Psychopath isn’t a detailed enough word to describe this man. To get to the crux of his insanity, you have to realize that he built what was called a “Mansion” in the middle of Chicago with many floors, that he used as a sort of hotel. At least, the third floor was definitely a hotel. But the 2nd floor was a labrynth of rooms twisting hallways, with fake staircases and more. And the basement was even worse.

That is where he kept his mustache comb collection.

Needless to say, he killed a lot of people, but the numbers are unknown. Hell, there are two books out there suggestion that Holmes was also Jack the Ripper before heading back to the USA, but without reading them, I don’t believe them. Seems too “movie” and not enough “Reality.”

Oh hey, back to this documentary. It is only a little over an hour long. And yeah, it is kind of poor quality. The only thing making it a bit average is that the story is actually a pretty sweet one, which goes into his mistakes and how he got caught, his eventual trial and execution. But it is filled with old timey black and white clips to showcase people in old horrors being scared, and it is incredibly cheesy.

It felt like they only talked to 2-3 historical experts to tell the tale, with the majority of the story coming from the narrator, Tony Jay. It was a poorly done documentary on the subject, but it is the only one we have.

What it did was get me interested on the subject. I want to now read (or audiobook) the main story on the subject, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. Even better news is that this is totally being turned into a real movie, so watching this documentary ended up being me just doing some basic amounts of research. Do you want to see Leonardo DiCaprio with that stashe and killing people, directed by Scorsese? I know I do.

In preparation for Halloween, I looked up some ScArRrRrRyYyYy documentaries on the Netflix. I’ve done a few of these before, like The Imposter, the Nightmare on Elm Street one, and Killer Legends. They are all on Netflix, but I decided to use Killer Legends to try and find more scary ones for this month. So I used their “More Like This” feature and chose its top recommendation.

Gideon’s Army. As a reminder, Killer Legends is about the truth behind four popular urban legends, where they started, and why they became stories. Gideon’s Army is about public defenders doing their job and being severely understaffed.

Sure, I guess that is a scary situation. I don’t know if I could afford a lawyer if I got into some sort of legal trouble. I’d probably want some public defender. But after watching Gideon’s Army, maybe I shouldn’t. Also, I guess, after watching that episode of Last Week Tonight about Public Defenders. That one happened too. And it said a lot of the same things, with jokes, sarcasm, and only 15 minutes long. I guess technically, if you want to find out more, just watch that clip, you will save yourself time.

But you can go watch that clip on your own in time out, mister!

But really. You know about these guys? The guys who get paid by the government to take those people too poor to have their own lawyer? Well, they can have over a hundred active cases at a time. They can spend less than 7 minutes per client. Shit is a bit terrifying, It is supposed to be a system to make sure that wealth doesn’t protect you from the law and that justice is blind and everyone should get a fair chance in front o a judge. However, reality is never able to match the intent, and the same wealth issues that have plagued mankind since the BC time still affect us now.

Not to make any conclusions. I am just trying to stall my description and analysis. The documentary takes a look at three different public defenders, as they go about on several cases and face different struggles. Struggles including: bad clients, no money, not enough time, unfair judges, and more.

Did I mention the situation really sucks? Don’t try and imagine yourself in a similar situation, just do whatever you can to avoid the situation.

As for the documentary, I thought it told a decent story, but what it lacked was a solution. Public Defender pay, oversight, or something should probably change to improve the system that a lot of people take for granted, but it mostly told a few long anecdotes and that was the end of the story. These documentaries are important in that they highlight parts of society you may not realize, but I just want something more overall.

Just…make it seem way more important.

Sometimes it takes a long time to get your documentary filmed and published. Like, let’s say, for example…oh…I don’t know…The Wrecking Crew!

The director, Denny Tedesco, started getting film for this project in 1996. I was seven years old when he started this documentary. At that point in my life, I doubt I had even seen a documentary. The film was completed twelve years later, in 2008. He went and showed it at some of the festivals and people loved it. The issue with his documentary was that it was basically impossible for him to get a distributor. You see, this documentary uses music. A LOT of music. And all of the music is owned by a corporation or person and they need to pay those people money to use the song in the documentary. This suddenly makes the documentary costs several hundred thousands of dollars before they can even start selling copies!

Needless to say, no one wanted to front load that bill. So they raised a lot of the money on their own. Roughly $300,000. Somehow that still wasn’t enough. It was 2013. So he turned to Kickstarter. Using the story he wanted to tell, he was able to raise $300,000 more dollars to pay off the fees and make the film even more snazzy. And now it is on Netflix for us to enjoy.

Enjoy what though? All this intro and I don’t tell you about what it is, like some sort of movie slut.

Well. It is about music. It is about most of the famous songs that you know and love from the 1960’s and 70’s. Back when bands didn’t necessarily know how to play instruments that well and companies were figuring out how to sell an image and look more than talent. They needed to make hit records fast and didn’t have time to spend weeks in the recording studio when there is all that touring to do. That is where The Wrecking Crew came in, the most famous recording studio band of all time.

And you forgot all of their birthdays. 🙁

The name The Wrecking Crew was just a nickname for a lot of these people. They weren’t an official cohesive group that worked together, but technically each individually signed musicians who knew how to play their instrument well, could read music fast, and could improv on the fly to make a tune better. Sure, a lot of these guys were hired over and over again, so they grew to be friends and had that bond, but technically any of them could be replaced at any moment. This documentary does its best job to talk about as many big members of this crew as it can, based on who is still alive. It even gets a few of them talking to tell stories about musicians from behind the scenes.

Funny enough, we can all thank Brian Wilson from The Beach Boys for basically setting this up, using different musicians to make his Pet Sounds album. What? Didn’t know about that? You missed my review of Love & Mercy then (which I only just saw mere weeks before this). The efficiency and professionalism made these people work hard for their money and helped create such fantastic music.

Back to the front, Danny made this documentary because of his dad, Tommy Tedesco, who was one of the main guitarists from The Wrecking Crew. He wanted to tell his story, and didn’t get a chance to show it to the world before his death. If you want more name drops, the most famous member of the crew ended up being Glen Campbell. Yeah, he got super damn famous and started as a studio band jockey!

I didn’t do a lot of talking about the details of the documentary, because hey, it is on Netflix and you can easily watch it for yourself. Just hearing the music and hearing their stories is a blast on its own. Overall I didn’t find it life changing in anyway. It was light, easy, and fluffy. Yeah, I said fluffy damn it.

A good documentary that a lot of people should watch. I appreciate the effort and passion that went into it and it really shows on the screen. Now give me more more documentaries about people who did all the work for others, or something. Yay the little guy!

Divorce sucks. No way to sugar coat it. It breaks up families, people start having trust issues, children get fought over, you know.

There are some pros I guess. For the kids, they get two Christmases, and everyone knows that means more toys. And you don’t have to spend much time ever with someone you presumably hate!

But, in America, getting a divorce is actually very hard. From alimony to child support, from splitting of assets, to the legal code, it can get very confusing very fast. In fact, a lot of people out there seem to be making assloads of money over the break up of couples.

It isn’t a bad thing that people make money off of doing a job, that should be expected. What is unexpected is the lengths the entire system goes through to make sure your divorce hurts you in the wallet as much as possible. Which is really what Divorce Corp. is all about.

So what kind of shady shit is going down? Glad you asked. Obviously the documentary goes into extreme amounts of detail and personal anecdotes, so watch it for the full picture.

See? It is a giant office building behind a church? Fuck your subtle metaphors.

First of all, the family court law has gotten very complicated over the last few decades. It used to be relatively simple, but due to increase in complexity, for really no reason at all, it is basically impossible to represent yourself in court. You are basically forced to hire a lawyer regardless of how amicable your divorce will be. And of course, the divorce court lawyers can cost anywhere between 500-1000 dollars an hour.

If children are involved, Child Support isn’t a set in stone amount, it is based purely on the difference of income and how much custody the parents have. So, if someone has 100% custody, the other parent has to actually pay a lot more. This actively encourages couples to fight it out. Fighting it out makes the trial take a long time, which racks up the hourly fees, in order to earn money to probably just pay off your lawyer fees. The two lawyers probably know each other or are friends, and they both know the longer they take, the longer they get paid.

It is a shitty situation to be in. But that isn’t the end of it.

The court can appoint people to come in and monitor both households/parents. I don’t remember what they are called. These people have a fee as well, and the judge can force a couple to pay for them. These people aren’t neutral, can be friends with one firm, and can say whatever they want to make one parent seem bad. Of course, they have also been shown to accept bribes and more. Yayy.

These things are just the bottom of the barrel. I actually had to pause the documentary 20 minutes into it, sort of shocked with how fast and hard the information was coming at me. The whole thing is kind of disgusting and can make you just afraid of stepping outside.

Why only a 3 out of 4? Well, it is definitely dense and very detailed, but at the same time, it still just felt a bit one sided. Most of the anecdotes they showed have a lot of the “he said, she said” element, and for all I know, the people in these situations were bad. The evidence at times could easily have been hidden from the viewer.

Clearly the documentary has an agenda, and the agenda seems like a good one. But I feel like things can’t 100% be as bad as described everywhere. Maybe some parts of the country are just worse than other parts. Maybe. Hopefully.

The internet can be a dark and scary place. And that is based only on my limited experience as a regular person. But in reality, I have only seen the surface of what the internet really offers. So I can sound cool, I will start using the lingo and refer to regular internet as Surface Web for that reason! I watched Dope, which means I know what I am about to talk about.

But there is a darker side of the internet. A deeper side. A Deep Web, if you will. This part of the internet has “non-indexed content”, or pages that cannot be found through simple searching. In this area, a lot of fun stuff can happen, including: anonymity. That is one of the biggest complaints about our lives. If we want to remain anonymous, we have to basically go off grid to do so. Everything tracks us, our phones, our search history, everything. But the deep web is where people can just do things that they want to do without worry.

Sure, some of those things might be very illegal activities, like hiring hit men or child pornography. But there is also less serious stuff, like simple selling of drugs or other contraband, and just a community of people who can be honest with one another. Deep Web is a documentary that explores just what is the Darknet and talks about Silk Road, a famous website for drugs and more, that went to trial recently. And interestingly enough, it was directed by Alex Winter, aka Bill from Bill and Ted. Admit it, you were wondering what he was doing with his life.

To make things even better, the documentary is narrated by Keanu Reeves himself.

Bill and Ted’s Darknet Journey!

Enough joking, this is SERIOUS BUSINESS. After all drugs are bad right? Well, not if you listen to like, 5 of the documentaries I have reviewed (And meant to review). Silk Road was a place founded to buy and sell goods with anyone around the world, using bitcoin, an untraceable (if you do it right), currency. It was the safest and best way to get drugs and is one of the biggest reasons Bitcoins became so valuable.

It then goes into the sites eventual take down by the FBI, how they did it, and how they captured the supposed creator or owner of the site, Dread Pirate Roberts aka Kirk Ulbricht.

Of course, naturally, it then goes into the trial, the investigation, shady things that happened and very shady things that happened. This trial ended this year, so it is recent. The point it makes is that the trial wasn’t fair, and the government did illegal things and broke a lot of real life privacy laws to do what it did. Is that guy really the Dread Pirate Roberts? Hell if I know. Probably. But doesn’t mean that I would be fine with the government stepping so far outside their laws to catch him.

It is just a snowball effect. If it is fine with one person, it is fine with everyone, and it is more fuel for the NSA to keep their sails on course.

Now, despite all of this, I still think the documentary went way too long on the trial information. Halfway through it, I was finding myself bored and more susceptible to distractions. A lot of pauses started to happen as I cared less and less. I can agree something sucks, and I can say it started out great, but I wanted a bit more information on Deep Web and other things going on there. Over 75% of this is actually just about the Silk Road and the trial, but damn it, the documentary wasn’t called Silk Road.

Man on Wire is another documentary I have inexplicably just avoided. I blame the year it came out, 2008. Right now I am only watching things from 2010 and on! A five year window is very important for my website to feel modern and fresh. If you ever google recommended good documentaries, Man on Wire will be a relatively recent one always recommended, along with Grizzly Man.

Needless to say, it has almost always been on Netflix as well. A very easy documentary to get access to. There is also the ticking clock element here, with The Walk coming out in a couple weeks. You know, the movie version of this same old story that was probably only made because of how allegedly good the documentary was. I have to watch this, because a film based on a film is totally something I should do as a reviewer. Nothing like reading a book before the movie. And that is why I chose Man on Wire for my 4th day of Fucking Finally week.

The documentary is about Philippe Petit, an eccentric French man, who is really confident in his balance.

And he had dreams. He had dreams of showing the world how good he could balance. He was just a guy who had a type rope and would walk it in the park, getting better over time. But he wanted to reach for the stars. He wanted to tight rope walk on national land marks.

Kind of like my own goal to take a poop in every National park in America. It is just something that can drive someone to do weird things.

Hey look. A dude on a string!

How weird? Well, homeboy went and tight roped on top of the Notre Dame chapel thing. Kind of cool. But not that impressive. Then he went to Australia and did it on top of the Sydney Opera House. Boring. Gravity works differently in Australia because they are all upside down. We all know that.

Those things were all for the kids though. His real life long goal was the Twin Towers in NYC. He knew it when he first saw a picture of them in a magazine before they were finishing being built. That would be his greatest life moment. One day.

So he did it! Before they were even finished. With many months of planning, sneaking, with a group of friends and acquaintances to help him pull of the best art crime of the century. Man on Wire is his story, told by him and his friends (yes, still alive!), through reenactments and real footage.

And despite knowing the outcome (success, good job!), it is still somehow unbelievably tense. The music department does a fantastic job, along with the reenactments of keeping away from the guards in their many trips to make their plan work.

But the reason this documentary works is Philippe Petit himself. This man has a huge ego and is clearly in love with himself. But he is also giddy and excited in the telling of his own story (I would be too if it made me world famous and helped me not have to really work much again). His enthusiasm is contagious. He doesn’t even sit still for the interview, getting up several times to make a point more clear by acting things out.

Petit is the kind of guy you invite to a party, assuming you don’t care if it becomes all about him.

Petit is the kind of guy who can make a really good sandwich, and will share it with you, but only one type of sandwich.

Petit is the reason this documentary is so well loved and a fantastic thing to view and listen to. I hope Joseph Gordon-Levitt can pull him off!