Tag: Documentary

How To Change The World will premier in theaters nationwide on September 9, 2015, as a part of Fathom Events.

If there is one thing every kid wants to do, it is to change the world. Or rule it, which would definitely be a type of change. So going to see a documentary called How To Change The World should be something on everyone’s radar. What can be better than a step by step guide that anyone can follow?!

Well, things aren’t that simple. And the documentary in question isn’t meant to be a vague guide, but instead tells the story of how a group of scientists, journalists, free thinkers, and all around hippies, accidentally started one of the largest environmental movements in the world today: Greenpeace.

Now now, calm your britches. Greenpeace is an organization with a lot of controversy and strong opinions. People seem to either love them or hate them, rarely maintaining a neutral stance on the group.

Despite that, the documentary can still be seen as an eye-opener. You see, the founders realized that the media would be important in order for any of their protests to matter. So they filmed everything they did. Every meeting, every decision, every protest in action, every run in with the law. They knew they needed documentation, and How To Change The World shows footage from their most famous early moments, showing how the group was made and eventually how they began to fracture.

This picture is a metaphor, but also something that really happened.

Their basic leader early on is the now deceased Bob Hunter, a journalist from Vancouver. He was the one who kept up their early news presence. Their first goal, as a group of friends, was to sail a Canadian boat from Vancouver to Amchitka, Alaska to protest a nuclear bomb test. They would go straight to the testing site on the boat and just exist offshore, daring the US to set the bomb off. Their boat of course was named Greenpeace.

After that, their next main goal was to help Save The Whales. Yes, they made the phrase. Their goal was to find Russian vessels that were harvesting the whales off of the coast of California, and again, put themselves in the way of their harpoons, hoping to save the whales by risking their own lives. A bold move that definitely put them on the map, allowing them to then protest the clubbing of baby seals and more environmental issues.

Other notable members include Patrick Moore, who has since defected from the group and actively goes against their protests, and Paul Watson, that asshole from Whale Wars who uses ridiculously aggressive tactics because he thinks he is better than other people. I should note, I felt really bad for Moore, because he clearly had good ideas but no one else in the group would listen to him. It makes sense that he hates them now. But then I also found out he is a climate change denier suddenly, so all good faith was quickly lost.

How To Change The World ended up having incredible depth. I was amazed at the amount of footage that actually existed on these first few voyages and the seal clips. And the footage isn’t edited down to make it easy on the eyes. You will see slaughtered whales and see baby seals getting clubbed. It makes its points by showing you the reality.

In all honesty, the organization started off with great ideas and goals and this documentary makes you feel like you are there the whole time with them. But once they began to fracture and have offices around the world, things got out of hand and they have gained a lot worse press.

The main thing I think lacking from this documentary would be addressing some of their controversies that are more modern and in greater detail. The documentary is only about 1:45 in length, and it doesn’t go into the members feuding and other smaller problems until the last 15 minutes, the majority being about their first few voyages. It has a lot of interesting information and will definitely do its job on teaching about Greenpeace.

However, I just wanted more, damn it.

No, this is not a The Hangover reference. This is just a group of brothers who are best friends who love movies.

The Wolfpack, a term never really applied to them in the documentary that I remember, is about a group of best friend brothers because they literally have no other friends. How could six brothers have no friends? Well, they lived in NYC on the 16th floor four bedroom apartment and they aren’t allowed to leave.

That sounds crazy, and it is. Their dad is the only one who left the home for any real amounts of time and the only one with a key. The mom was a certified teacher and homeschooled the whole family. They maybe were able to leave the apartment a few times every year, but some years they never had the chance to leave. None of this is technically illegal, because no one was chained up, they weren’t being abused, they had a loving house hold apparently. The dad was just very paranoid and protective.

So the brothers Mukunda, Narayana, Govinda, Bhagavan, Krisna, and Jagadesh, and one sister Visnu, looked to each other for companionship and social fun. They also turned to film.

Sounds like my life, except I was allowed to leave home and chose to stay inside.

FILM. A big part of their lives, as the dad was able to buy a lot of bargain DVDs and VHS tapes so they watched a shit ton of movies. They were able to get a lot of the classics and every single kid loved movies with all their heart. Hell, they loved them so much, they even recreated a lot of their favorite films. They would write down all of the dialogue, make a script, give each brother and Visnu a part, design costumes of varying quality and film the whole thing scene by wonderful scene. Tarantino films mostly, apparently.

But hey, there is a documentary about them! That means something must have changed eventually, right? Of course. Eventually the oldest boy, while the dad was getting groceries, just decided to leave the house and explore, consequences be damned. And then their lives changed forever…The outside world is a lot different than the movies.

The Wolfpack is a weird documentary, in that you assume it HAS to end with someone getting arrested, or a murder, or something. Maybe a big philosophical discussion about how to raise a kid properly. But no, it just ends with the family getting adjusted to society and having their children go outside once in awhile, discovering how the world is different than the movies.

As a movie watcher, I often find myself excited when I am watching something about movies. This feels like a more realistic version of a small plot from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Which means I was excited about The Wolfpack. But in all honesty, The Wolfpack was frankly overhyped to me. I expected something life changing after my watching. I expected to learn something poignant about family and film. But in reality, this was just a documentary about a strange family that was living with weird circumstances.

Yeah, there are interesting parts in it. It is amusing seeing them play out their film fantasies. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t feel like something I need to ever watch again or would rush out to show friends, like a truly great documentary.

A cool and interesting story, but not a lot more after that.

I miss Chris Farley. I don’t know a single person, outside of future review comment trolls, who hated the guy. He had some of the best sketches on SNL, was always full of energy.

Sure, his movies are hit and miss. Sometimes terrible. But they helped elevate David Spade way more than he could on his own. Sure, he mostly wasted it after the fact, but he tried, damn it.

I wanted to see I Am Chris Farley, which yeah, is a made for TV documentary. It aired on Spike TV. I was curious about Farley before he was big on SNL, and since they interviewed tons of his former friends and coworkers, it would feel great to hear some behind the scenes stories of some of the bigger sketches.

Shit, they were even able to get Lorne Michaels to do an interview, and I assume that dude is super busy.

Maybe it isn’t a “traditional documentary” on a “respected channel” that is worthy of a “Review” but I am “writing” it anyways.

This is a short post because there isn’t a lot to talk about. I learned about Farley’s earlier life. I learned about how he played Rugby in college, how he got into sketch comedy and eventually SNL.

The highlight of course would be the stories about and dealing with Matt Foley: Motivational Speaker. And the stories we hear are told by Adam Sandler, Mike Myers, Dan Aykroid, David Spade obviously, Bob Odenkirk, Bob Saget, Christina Applegate, his brother Kevin P. Farley, Pat Finn a college friend, and more actors of course.

As a suggestion, you might want to have a copy of the SNL: Best of Chris Farley on hand, because you are going to want a lot more Farley than the documentary can give you and want to see the sketches without tons of interruptions from his friends telling stories. Pure. Unadulterated. Farley.

But if you are cheap, just watch Tommy Boy instead. It will get you through the urges I suspect, but not fully satisfy them.

I’d like to think I can keep a secret. Unless it is any form of gossip. If I hear about gossip, I will most definitely pass it on to somebody. Everyone knows that if you tell something to a married person, their spouse gets auto-dibs on the secret anyways.

Best Kept Secret is a documentary not even about a real secret. So I guess I can talk to you all about it and not feel like a dick for betraying its trust.

Best Kept Secret is actually about a teacher, in Newark, New Jersey, who just wants to do what is best for her kids and help them get jobs after they graduate high school. It is hard for her, even though her class is only four guys and she has over a year left to do it, because the kids are all very autistic.

And you will get to meet each and every one of the kids and their families and their struggles. They aren’t on even playing field of course. One guy can talk a lot more than the rest, some can barely say a thing, but damn it, they are working on it.

The hardest part about all of this is making sure they have a job after they finish high school. Most of them want to work (and honestly, apparently they all want to work at Burger King). They want to keep learning and get better at communication. They don’t want to live at home or in a home for the rest of their lives where they live only to exist and never do anything great.

Normally a joke statement, the struggle is actually real here.

So yes, the stakes are indeed very high for these individuals. But the issue this documentary brings up is that the tend to lack support and it can be frustrating. For the case of this teacher, she probably works 100 hours a week, planning, teaching, and coming up with leads for these kids to make their lives better. She is awesome for that fact.

But what this documentary does NOT talk about is overall increasing funding for people with special needs to increase their quality of life. It doesn’t ask for any sort of law reform to stop budget cuts anywhere. It does none of these things. It just showcases the reality of the situation in one of the poorest areas of the country with a higher than average number of special needs children.

And frankly, I think that did a disservice to the situation. Maybe I have been watching too many grand scale documentaries lately, but the small focus of this documentary just didn’t feel right. I got a personal look onto the lives of five people, and that was it. It feels like the documentary should be part of a series, going into different people’s lives, instead of a standalone feature. At the end of this one I am left wondering, “Well, yeah, now what?” It doesn’t really make any claims at all, so it just feels a bit pointless. Sure, there are some interesting things in here. But usually documentaries just do something more for their given topic.

Also, the ending felt like a kick in the nuts. The part where they update you on where everyone is now after all the filming. That part sucked a lot. Reality blows.

I recently just went through this crazy movie playing site called Netflix. It is honestly where most of the documentary reviews on this website come from. But it seems like every 2-3 weeks, I keep thinking there are no more documentaries left for to me watch, that are recent enough to be worth reviewing! Oh no!

So to give myself a few months of rest on the search, I went and scoured the entire site for documentaries that were appealing to me, recent, and hopefully worth writing about. I actually was able to find a good 10 or so titles. And then I picked them out of a hat and got The Widowmaker. This way, I keep having a hat to go to for my next review, if there is no inspiration in any given week or on the weeks that HBO doesn’t make a new controversial doc.

“What kills the most Americans?” you may ask yourself. Is it cancer? Nope. Gun violence? Nahh. Overdosing on Marijuana? Of course not. It is heart disease! The silent killer. The widowmaker because it is so sudden and hard to detect. Usually the first sign you have heart disease would be in the form of a fatal heart attack. I may not be a doctor, but I know that the odds of surviving anything fatal is close to zero!

But what if…just hold on and wait…what if…there…was…another detector?!

I love you like this heart loves…not having an awkward dark spot?

The Widowmaker is a documentary set up with a purpose. It wants you to know about all the research done into heart disease detection and how there are easy ways for doctors to test if you have that issue. The problem is that there is opposition in the field, because people profit greatly off of current practices used to help people with heart conditions, namely in the form of stents. They count as surgeries and they get paid a lot per stent. There is more to the issues than that, of course, which the documentary will gladly talk to you about.

But as it got longer and longer, like a kid with ADHD my mind began to wander and I wanted them to get to the main point quicker.

The beginning of the documentary had a good affect of hooking me in. Scattered throughout it are even a few 9-1-1 calls just to heighten up the sense of urgency and fear (which is arguably, a pretty unnecessary and silly thing to include). But after they talked about a guy developing a way to solve it, that is where my heart stopped caring. It has good information, sure, but something about the second half just felt like it dragged on forever.

Still, this is the kind of documentary meant to get the viewer off of their feet and write a congressman or something to demand change! I instead will just lay here watching movies, hoping I don’t have heart disease, but if I do, that other people are activist enough to make it so my disease can be detected before any crazy heart attacks.

Ohhhh, we got crowdfunding. Right here on the internet! With a Capital C, and that rhymes with “D”, and that stands for “Down with the old way of doing things, this is the future, man!”

If you are cool and hip, like me, you might have put your money on the internet to go into some business that is just starting out or trying something new. I’m taking Kickstarter, or Indiegogo for some of your more counterculture people out there. I guess I have some confessions. I didn’t back the Veronica Mars movie, but I meant to. I also didn’t back Wish I Was Here, but I never was going to. I have only backed one movie on Kickstarter, and it is a super indie film that hasn’t finished in three years yet despite my constant questions.

No, I use Kickstarter for board games and that is about it. But it is the thought that counts.

Some businesses got their start through Kickstarter though and are now financially-ish stable organizations operating in some specific niche that can’t succeed through normal business ways. And sometimes it is a celebrity or older company looking to get back in the game to bring more of what people liked in the past.

This documentary is about how crowdfunding has changed our economic landscape and the lives of a few individuals who have had some crowdfunding success.

This is the type of guy who would appreciate my The Music Man reference up top.

The companies featured include: Freaker! They made some stretchy sock contraption with cool designs to cover your beverage with. I think. They became a success, with constant communication to the consumer, and even got to go on Shark Tank! And then uhh, some bad things. Zach Crain is their main spokesperson.

We have an old computer game company, Interplay, lead by Brian Fargo, who has been trying for decades to get money to make a sequel to his late 1980s game Wasteland. Well, crowdfunding answers their question, leading to one of the most funded projects of all time, and helped lead them to even more title releases.

Finally, we have Jackson Robinson, a man with two last names, who started a kickstarter for Federal Playing Cards, which are basically just really sexy cards. He had a goal of about $8000 and ended up with almost $150,000. However he is just a one man company, with a wife and two very young kids, and his own full time job. He has to deal with the pressure of all of that and feeling alienated out of his own life, while also, maybe, doing a new campaign to get him something even better.

And that is it. Literally the bulk of the documentary is about three successful campaigns and the aftermath of their success and how their lives have changed for better or for worse. Sure, we have other speakers, professors, talking about the idea of crowdfunding in general and any other topic that will pop up. This doesn’t sound like a lot actually happens, but strangely enough it was incredibly interesting to see.

Part of it is to hear the stories, sure. The other reason is that the documentary is filmed with the utmost care of setting up every interview shot with the viewer in mind. It is beautifully shot, which is a surprise given it isn’t about nature or animals. Just people. Just people talkin’ ’bout computers and business. Some of the least sexy sounding words in terms of cinematography. But Capital C makes it work.

Don’t look too closely at the calendars, but roughly 4-5 months after the Oscars, I can say I finished another category! A few categories ended up being extremely elusive, namely Best Original Song, Best Documentary and Best Foreign Film. I have made zero headway on finishing any of those three categories (And just downright ignoring the shorts categories), until this moment. With this review of The Salt of the Earth, the documentary category will finally officially be finished.

What makes this better is that it didn’t win. If it had won the category, this would be almost embarrassing for me. But since it didn’t, it is a loser, and taking your time is expected, right?

Right!

But in reality, I didn’t get to watch it because I couldn’t find a copy. It took forever to be released in America, and I didn’t even let the fact that it would be a completely foreign and thus subtitled movie get in my way from watching it ASAP.

Alright, here we go, a documentary about a photographer named Sebastião Salgado.

ART, motherfucker, do you speak it!?

It turns out that Mr. Salgado is a pretty damn good photographer. He traveled the world, an adventurer of sorts, and he would talk to people and connect to them on a personal level. If you have a chance, google his name and art. They are mostly black and white and, well, really fucking good. Sorry for the language, I just don’t know how to describe artwork.

He knew how to tell a story in a single shot. He also knew how to tell a story with words, which is what the bulk of the documentary is about. Just listening to an old man telling stories about some of his more iconic sets of work. Like, a lot of detail. Good memory he has, but he also probably had to tell these stories before.

It should be obvious this is a very well done and beautiful documentary. However, I feel like I am personally missing out on it by not speaking the same language as Salgado. According to the subtitles, he spoke quite eloquently, but I found myself almost saddened by the fact that I didn’t get to understand it. I head to read along. I think a lot of the beauty was lost in the transition. Yes, I am sort of advocating for dubbing here. We would still get the wonderful visuals, and get to hear the great story, and I’d be able to get lost in everything.

But as it is, it was hard to feel connected. Which is a shame. Still, a great film for photography lovers, art lovers, and old people lovers.

I have been waiting to see the documentary Merchants of Doubt for years. Technically. Kind of.

Let me back track. When I was an undergraduate at UNC, I was also a security guard. Paid well, and I got to do homework/watch movies during shifts. During one desk shift at a building, there was a talk from some lady. Apparently there was a gun nut in attendance who disagreed a lot with her and asked a bunch of awkward questions, noting he had a gun and then left. I of course wasn’t anywhere near it, but was told after he left to be on the look out.

The speaker was Naomi Oreskes, one of the authors of the book. The talk she gave was probably wonderful, but I wasn’t able to see it obviously. So I bought the book instead, Merchants of Doubt, telling myself I would totally read it. This was back in 2010 or 2011.

Obviously I never read the book. But last year I found out that a documentary would be made of the same name! Hooray! Now I don’t have to read the book I bought so many years ago! I can just spend a little over an hour and a half, getting all of the same information in easy to digest form! So although when I bought the book I didn’t know it would become a documentary, I somehow knew then I wished it was the whole time.

Either way, long intro aside, this documentary has one main point: The same science fucks who sided with the smoking companies saying there was no evidence of smoke being bad / cigarettes being addictive are the fucks who are also denying climate change.

This is one of those fucks right here.

Of course it isn’t as simple as that. First of all, the title comes from the strategy that tobacco companies used once there began to be evidence of bad things. They used doubt. People went on the TV, to spread confusion. They told people that scientists didn’t know, some say yes, some say no, no real proof yet, but they are working on it. This worked for a long, long time. So other companies began to use it as well. Oil, pesticides, pharmaceutical companies, you name it.

And again the fact that the scientists involved to back these claims up also tend to be on the “company side” more often than not sounds beyond sketch. Because you know, it is in fact sketch.

This documentary goes into great detail through both the history and how it affects today’s scientific and political landscape. Long story short: think tanks, ran by corporations secretly, to make it seem like things like climate change are controversial and not completely agreed upon. They even help make reports look identical to the IPCC report, with opposite conclusions, to confuse people further.

Shit’s fucked up, and now Republicans all disagree with man made climate change (despite most saying it was real back in ’08) because that is where the money is. End of story.

A very informative documentary, one that should be watched by more people to see the shady shit that happens in politics, in order to make money.

The human penis.

Often worshiped throughout society, often by other men, building great and giant phallic monuments into the sky. The subject of the penis can even get a man into college.

Just in case you wanted another movie reference, here is one of my favorite quotes from Chasing Amy, about how everyone needs dick.

But before I get off on a tool tangent, let me tell you that I am talking about a documentary about penises. The Final Member is about a penis museum. Not just any penis museum, the only penis museum, located in the family friendly city of Reykjavík, Iceland.

It was founded by Sigurður Hjartarson, who originally just collected penises as a hobby. Not a weird fetish thing, mind you. Just a hobby. And then people heard about it and wanted to see all the penises. Dude has everything too! He even has a troll dick, whatever that means!

But he was missing one main mammal specimen. The human penis.

Troll dicks are made of stone, I have to assume.

This documentary is about the search for the missing piece of their prick puzzle. The problem is they couldn’t just take a penis from a dead man. People don’t let that happen. Instead he had to have someone donate their penis ahead of time. And then that person had to die. And ideally it wouldn’t be in a frail old dude state.

The documentary talks about its two most likely candidates. Pall Arason, a 95 year old Icelandic adventurer/womanizer who is pretty famous in the area and wants his penis to live on after his death. And Tom Mitchell, an American with a much larger than average sized penis named Elmo, who he wants to be immortalized and worshiped. Basically.

The problem with these men come with age (and shrinkage), and the American being awkwardly obsessed about how his penis would be immortalized, willing to have it surgically removed to become The Final Member.

And it is awkward. Sure, you might have gathered that from a documentary about a penis museum. But it was even more awkward than what you would expect. Imagine what you would expect, and you are wrong, it is worse.

The problem isn’t just with the awkwardness either. It is that for some reason, a documentary about searching for a human penis is far more boring than you would imagine as well. All the drama felt sort of fake, given the camera crews involved, and I can’t tell if the American actually wanted to just become famous for being crazy. It didn’t feel real. And if you are talking about penises, you need to be real.

The museum is probably a joy to visit. Just the documentary spent too much time on the search and not enough on what the guy had already accomplished: a room full of dicks.

Lies are really fun. I am not even talking about big lies, or little white lies. I am talking about minor invisible lies, lies that don’t hurt anyone and can’t possibly come back to harm you. A lie you tell that no one would ever question the need for it to be a lie, because why would anyone lie about it?

“I saw another vehicle give a homeless guy $20 today!”
“An SUV cut me off on I-10, I was so angry.”
“Back in college I once met Michael Jordan. He was at a publicity signing for some new shoe.”

See, these are all lies you can tell your friends and family and they’d have no reason to believe you are lying (as long as you both have a vehicle and went to college years ago, that is). They are the best.

Sometimes “little white lies” can come back to harm you I guess, like saying a dress is not ugly, or something like that, but that is rare.

Little White Lie, however, is not about a standard little white lie, but instead about a big white lie.

If you don’t get my hint, this lady told her daughter she was totally white.

If you squint your eyes, you might see it.

Little White Lie is actually a self made documentary by Lacey Schwartz, about growing up believing herself to be a white Jewish girl, and finding out years later it wasn’t completely true. To explain the darkness of her skin, there was an Italian grandfather, who was super darker and European and it must have came out in poor Lacey. But everyone knew, and no one talked about it. It wasn’t until years later in her teenage years, when Lacey’s folks got divorced did she even really think that much about it.

In case you were wondering, yes, of course, the mother did have an affair with a black man and it was a secret for decades. But this documentary is more than just finding out who her real daddy is. That would be a boring mystery unless it was someone famous. No, his is her own self discovery, on whether or not she can feel accepted in the black community without growing up black. Whether her own family relationships can ever be repaired. Whether she can do any of this before her father, dad, or mother, end up kicking the bucket and find themselves unwilling to talk about their past.

At only an hour long, Little White Lie has a good amount of time to tell the story of learning to accept ones self and tell the story that Lacey wants to tell. However, it never really gets as deep as the topic really required. There were moments of intensity that one would expect when she was talking to her non-biological father near the end and things didn’t go as smoothly as a movie would allow. But they never maintained that intensity enough, giving us only splashes of really interesting story.

Add in the fact that these uncomfortable conversations between a child and their parents were all done in front of cameras leads its own awkwardness, wondering if the conversations are real and heartfelt, or potentially staged with multiple takes.

Either way, Little White Lie does a decent job of telling an okay story over an hour. Just a bit more in depth and raw emotion would have made it truly wonderful.