Tag: Documentary

Four out of five! Four out of five! I am getting so close. As an update in my attempts to watch all five of the documentaries nominated for Best Oscar, my other three have been Virunga, Citizenfour, and Finding Vivian Maier. That is because I never watch these things, I always watch shitty food documentaries and other crap. BUT HERE I AM WITH FOUR OF THE FIVE.

Man. Only one thing can beat this feeling. Like, an unlimited stack of pancakes. Or all five. But also pancakes. We will see. I don’t think I can make it.

Now we have Last Days In Vietnam! PBS put it on their website for free for a few days just so people like me can watch it. Was awfully kind of them. And the title isn’t vague at all. I instantly know what it is about. The last days in Vietnam! For America!

Here are people pushing freedom over into Vietnam.

I don’t want to get into a history lesson, but after Nixon ceremoniously left the office, Vietnam was in shambles. North Korea was fucking things up, South Korea was in trouble. Next thing you knew, America wanted out, but at the same time, a giant North Korea army was marching down and nothing could stand in its way! The USA had to evacuate, but at the same time, didn’t want to let everyone get slaughtered. There were attempts to get people to safety, to America, to wait until the army was right up on the capital gates.

Things were hectic, things were scary, and thankfully it wasn’t too long ago for everyone to be dead. A lot of major players, both in Vietnam and at home, are featured in this documentary to tell the stories. We have stories from Soldiers to Citizens, from Henry Kissinger to refugee. Overall it paints a pretty decent picture of what went down. A subject, I can freely admit I wasn’t super knowledgeable about before this documentary.

But also. I don’t feel super knowledgeable about it after the fact either. It is a strange feeling. I was listening and loving the information. But all of it seems to have gone in one ear and out the other. It is probably just a me situation, and not the same for everyone. But this is my review, not yours, so get your own website, jerks.

Either way. Good information, but at the same time, I guess it feels like something that they used to show on the History channel. You know, before the incident.

Welcome to my third interview going over the Oscar Nominations for Best Documentary! The first two I looked at were Virunga and Citizenfour, and now to continue my “random order” with Finding Vivian Maier.

I don’t know who this lady is, but I have heard she is missing and they made a documentary about it. Sort of like Finding Bigfoot. I don’t just say that because Vivian was a tall woman either.

The story starts with a guy, John Maloof, our narrator and co-director, being an auction hound. He buys random junk hoping to find treasure, and he ended up buying a large lot of unknown stuff which features a lot of undeveloped photographs. When he gave them the old lookie-loo, he found them to be pretty darn good. Classic old black and white pictures. But who is she? Where is she? Why did her work go unnoticed?

I mean. She is right there. How hard could she be to find?

John is able to get Vivian’s work in galleries and it makes people go crazy. They love it and they love the mystery. Well, it turns out that Vivian was a socially awkward nanny. So he was able to find a lot of people she worked for, parents or kids, find old friends, landlord, and piece together her entire life, until she eventually died.

And what a life she had! She did…well. I obviously won’t tell you. The discovery/journey is the whole point. Can see her highs, her lows, her quirks, and her troubled times.

And despite the silly subject, about a passion/hobby/type of career I don’t even care a lot, I loved this documentary. It was so creative, it told a great story, so many people were interviewed and her life through her camera and social awkwardness is now super available for everyone to enjoy. It probably would have pissed her off too, knowing that. But hey, shut up. I am enjoying the shit out Vivian, even if I don’t super love her photography.

A great documentary, not as great as Citizenfour, but still great.

If you are just catching up, I am attempting to hit all the documentaries nominated for the Oscars. Something I have never really attempted before (and still haven’t done for any year). Last week I did Virunga, courtesy of Netflix.

Today I review Citizenfour, courtesy of the NSA. This is not to be confused with Citizen Koch, also from 2014, which was too muddled to make a good point.

No, this one is about a different man who has affected the world, Edward Snowden. More importantly, it is about him BEFORE and after he affected the world. If you can’t remember, Edward Snowden is the whistle blower who gave out tons of information of illegal activity that the NSA was doing, namely spying on its own citizens.

Whereas documentaries spy on people with their knowledge.

How did it get the information before? Well, Snowden realized this was a big deal, so he contacted Glenn Greenwald through encrypted means. He wanted to give him information. He also knew this information was so important, that they began filming the decision in Hong Kong, before the information officially became leaked.

So what does this documentary offer? Watching a man make one of the biggest life changing decisions of his life. You also get to see how much effort went in to protecting him and the journalists involved. How much time was spent being paranoid (for good reasons) and time to make sure their routes to the airport, to embassies, and all would not end with him getting put in jail.

It was pretty intense. And in fact, at times it felt a lot like a thriller. Which is pretty amazing for a documentary.

Like him or hate him (you SHOULD like him, by the way), Snowden was one of the biggest news stories over the last year, and did a lot to help world see what kind of fucked up things our government was doing.

Basically, he is basically a tech-Jesus. And this is the story of how it all went down, along with other information that you might not know about some of the shit the government did. Very informative, very intense.

It is a hard goal, but I figure I should also check out the best documentary nominees. I was really hoping that I would have seen a few of them before they were nominated, but apparently the ones I thought looked interesting weren’t good enough.

I really should have seen Virunga, because it was a Netflix documentary and has been made available for awhile. My bad. Either way, I can totally get these documentaries done ahead of time, I think.

Virunga! It is about the Congo! The only stuff I know about the Congo are from the movie, Congo, and apparently it grossly misrepresents what is going on over there.

Kind of. Because there is a big military presence ever. And there are definitely gorillas, which is really the point of this documentary in the first place.

Well, the love between a man and his gorilla.

Virunga is a national park in Congo. The gorilla there only lives there and is being hunted. They want to protect them and the land from being messed up like the rest of the Congo. But also, we have an oil company there who wants to determine if there is oil under the large lake and in the area. They aren’t allowed to drill there or extract anything, but they just want to “see”.

Apparently they might be doing more than that, too. Secret meetings, bribes, and mercenaries and fighters. Oh boy.

Virunga at points plays out like an action movie, as they had people recording the events happening right before people would get attacked or fights would break out. It was definitely a bit scary and intense. I was also really impressed by all the moving parts. A lot of different sources of information, from park rangers, to journalists, to everyone in between. They really branched out with their work.

I think what is best about this documentary is that it is set in the NOW. This type of stuff is happening, here are recent events, and we should be outraged about it. I would be, but I can’t muster it up. But I know I should be which is even more important. Great source of information coming from many different angles, and not very biased. Nice.

Here it is, 2015, and documentaries are still a thing. And some of the supposed better ones from 2014 are making their way for us to finally watch, just in time for awards season.

I picked Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger…mostly by accident. Was looking for something else, got lazy, and settled on this one. I knew it was new and I heard positive things, so it fit the bill well enough to just run with it.

Who is Whitey? James ‘Whitey’ Bulger used to be number 2 on the FBI’s Most Wanted List after Osama Bin Laden! Jeez! He was a crime boss in South Boston. Apparently killed dozens of people, racketeering, gambling, drug deals, sex stuff, you name it. He has been on the run for a long time too.

The only issue is, he also might have had permission from the FBI to do it all.

You know he is the real deal because he was once locked away in Alcatraz.

Informants are a tricky thing, so if Bulger was used by the FBI to tattle on other people and the FBI knew everything he was doing and didn’t take them in, that makes the government look bad too.

But the documentary does a far better job of explaining everything, way better than me of course. Because this documentary is LOADED with information. About two hours long, it has more information than it knows what to do with. I assume. I don’t know what they know about using information.

So one aspect of this whole thing is you definitely have to pay attention. It does its best job of walking the viewer through the clues and help draw its final conclusions with the craziness that ended up being this trial. A trial that I had no idea even happened.

But hey, apparently Jack Nicholson‘s character from The Departed was based on this guy, if that tells you anything.

Either way, a well put together documentary with a lot of information that I didn’t know a lot about, and one that might make you think.

I am not going to review A Brony Tale in a vacuum. I try to, I do. But there is another Brony based documentary that I reviewed this year. Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony, it cames out in 2012, two years ago, at a much higher point of the My Little Pony popularity. I mean, it came out before My Little Pony: Equestria Girls!

This one apparently has a much stricter focus. It is specificually about Ashleigh Bell. “Who is Ashleigh Bell? Kill yourself!”

Ashleigh Bell is a voice actress and singer, made most famous for voicing two of the five ponies, Rainbow Dash and Apple Jack. She is now a huge deal to a community and she doesn’t know how to cope.

I guess with the title of A Brony Tale, it makes sense to be about one person. One Brony. Not sure which Brony though, because Ashleigh doesn’t refer to herself as one ever and only talks about them as groups of people.

If Ashleigh wanted to be about 20% cooler, she would call herself a Brony as well.

Oh man, if you wanted to learn a lot about Ashleigh Bell in a documentary, you still didn’t come to the right place. “What?” you may ask. “You don’t learn a lot about Ashleigh Bell in a documentary about Ashleigh Bell? But it is 80 minutes long!”

I know right. You get the basic information. What she did before MLP, her band, her first Brony experience, but you don’t delve anywhere. Mostly I think because the documentary seems to focus mostly on other people and not her. We get some random person who started a famous MLP page. We got several Bronies defending their hobby and the idea of masculinity. We get a MLP history lesson. Basically, we get a lot of things we got in the previous documentary, but in worse less focused ways.

This documentary is an incredible waste of time. Like, it is jarring to see a person go from regular voice to a cartoon character and it can freak me out too. But that doesn’t make this a great documentary. I watched the whole thing and I still don’t know why she had to spend so much documentary time wondering if she even wanted to go to the BroNYC Con or whatever. Of course you want to go and be worshipped and make cash. Why make an easy decision seem like a hard one. Fake drama for your documentary? I don”t know.

Just. Ugh. The last Brony documentary was just a pointless circle jerk. This is like an even more pointless slight arousal that gets wasted.

Ho Ho Ho, bitches! Let’s talk about Santa.

Now, I am partially responsible for the well being and care of two children, currently 5 and 3. And the idea of Santa was tossed around, but me and my wife agreed to not do Santa with them. We don’t like it. I personally don’t care about the spirit of Christmas, and I also don’t like lying (to kids). I see no harm in saying that Christmas is about helping the economy, giving people you love, like or adequately appreciate gifts, and partying near the end of the year. Just had to equate Santa to being a cartoon character and it made sense.

Making it so that they don’t run through kindergarten screaming it is the harder aspect.

But hey, Santa is still cool in my book. Just not going to let some fictional asshole take credit for presents I purchased. And since Christmas was on a Documentary day for my website, I would have preferred to review Saving Christmas. However, I don’t want to give Kirk Cameron any of my money, and I already got duped once paying for a terrible documentary with America: Imagine The World Without Her.

Instead, I found I Am Santa Claus, a documentary from this year, about people who dress up like Santa during the season, and how they act the rest of the year.

We got a lot of variety too. We have a Real Estate Santa, a gay “bear” Texas Santa, a sprinkler salesman who changes his name to Santa Claus, and an unemployed Santa who is hoping for another Santa gig to move into a trailer and out of a basement.

And we also have Mick Foley.

College can literally get you anywhere in life.

That’s right, famous ex-Wrestler Mankind. He really loves Christmas and wants to play Santa for real, not Mick Foley in a Santa costume. So we see him on a quest to learn about how to be a great Santa, get his costume, his hair dyed, the whole works. And you know, give kids the spirit of Christmas or some shit.

But his story isn’t the best. No, the most interesting story is of the unemployed Santa, waiting for weeks to see if he can get his job offer to see if he can afford to move out on his own again. His story has emotions. Two of the four Santas are completely forgettable after the fact. I also did like the concern over a Santa who is a President of the Fraternity Of Real Bearded Santas (FORBS), who apparently opened a swingers bar and practices as well. This made some Santas uncomfortable. The small amount of debate over who should be playing Santa, based on religious backgrounds, gender, or bedroom practices was interesting, but I thought it could have been showcased way better.

So, one Santa story is super interesting. A small debate is interesting. Another Santa and Foley are okay stories. And two I don’t remember a lot about. That turned a potentially awesome Santa documentary into an average one. Oh well. Let’s all go open presents now!

Day four of Musical Week also falls on a Thursday. Hmmm. That is my documentary review day. Can I do it? Of course I can do it. When you think “musical” and “docuementary”, the only real cross over would be some sort of concert movie. But! There hasn’t been a sweet teen sensation concert movie for over a year. The last one was the One Direction movie.

So instead I found Metallica Through The Never. You may have guessed it already, but this concert movie/movie has a lot of Metallica music in it. And all of it comes from actual concerts that they filmed the footage at from a few concerts on one of their tours. However there is also a small story in here, clearly fictional with actors, set to Metallica songs, to give us a very strange movie hybrid.

They must have thought a regular concert documentary was boring and for teeny-boppers. So they wanted something more.

The story itself is just about a boy, Trip (Dane DeHaan), a roadie for Metallica, who kind of just has to run and get stuff. Well, during the concert, he has to go and find a package in truck that ran out of gas. Get the truck gas, so it can deliver the package that is very important, for reasons.

But chaos has broken out in the streets. Death, riots, destruction, and maybe some supernatural things as well! And who is The Rider (Kyle Thompson)? Is he the Sandman?!

I picked a concert photo so you all wouldn’t call me out on shenanigans.

I am not a huge Metallica song by any means. None of their songs are on my iPod, but I recognize the famous ones, and I know to make fun of the driver due to his anti-Napster campaigns.

Despite that, I was surprised at how many of the songs played I honestly recognized. Probably at least half of them. So that was a bonus. The music didn’t sound terrible either and it fit the story they were telling nicely.

The story itself? Well, it felt like an acid trip. No crazy colors, but all the other elements were there. At points it was terrifying, mostly it was weird, but it was definitely entertaining.

In fact, I wanted way more of the story and way less of the concert scenes. That is a terrible complaint, I know, for what amounts to a concert film. But because it is a hybrid, I expected more time focused on the story. I would guesstimate the average movie went 75% concert, 25% story.

It should go without saying that if you hate Metallica music, or the genre of music, you won’t gind any enjoyment in this movie. I thought it was a okay experience, and what I can tell, a good first effort for this fantasy concert genre.

I picked the documentary DamNation not just because it shares its name with one of the best Magic cards in history.

Nope. I did it purely because I liked the title and it was about a subject I actually didn’t have a huge knowledge set on ahead of time. I still like learning, so sometimes I use documentaries to learn more and not just confirm what I already think I know.

Clearly this one is about dams, but it took awhile into the picture before I could tell if it was pro or anti dams. That’s a good sign, because at least early on it was pretty biased just giving information on the history of dams, talking about their pros and cons and how they affect people (people who live by them, energy, jobs). But have no doubt, this is definitely a documentary set out to tell us why dams are bad for the environment and why we should start to get rid of them.

No matter where you go, damn kids and their spray cans, amirite?

It is simple: most dams aren’t as necessary as they once were a hundred or two hundred years ago. Some would argue that a lot of those made weren’t super necessary back then either, but the dam hype went throughout the US, especially the west, and that is where we are now. But a lot of our energy comes from other sources and they aren’t helpful, so they want dams to be taken down, rivers restored to their natural habitat so that nature can be enjoyed and fish and animals can reclaim their homes.

Oh yeah, they are also super against fishing hatcheries, which makes sense from many points of view. It’d be hard to argue against that.

However I found myself not necessarily agreeing with everything that they were saying. I don’t think we should get rid of all the dams and I don’t give a damn about a lot of fish. Restoring nature? That’s cool I guess. Pretty things are pretty. But rethinking dams that exist and find out which ones we can get rid of without hurting our economy and improving the landscape? Well, why the fuck not.

Another plus, this is a very well put together documentary. They talk to a lot of experts in many fields, the cameras used are very high quality, they have a lot of footage to work with in the construction and deconstruction of these dams. It was very well researched and that is what I hope the most for when I see a documentary.

Not being a nature crazed individual (I prefer the indoors), I can still go along with the points made and I am glad that I learned about a potential biological problem by picking a nicely named documentary.

Every once in awhile, I like to watch a documentary that has something to do with religion. Not frequently at all, just 1 out of 10 maybe. They usually bug me, they can come off as self righteous (heh?)

Even if those documentaries are ones I might agree with, I still glare at them and tend to find myself way more critical. But I picked The Unbelievers for no good reason. Probably because of the awkward title.

The Unbelievers is about two men who you may have heard of, Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss.

Krauss is a theoretical physicist and works at Arizona State University and Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist from Oxford. They are maybe even more famous for being atheists, writing books about it and going around talking about it on talking tours!

Oh hey, that is what this documentary is about. These two, being in debates, talking to groups, and hanging out with each other as they talk about ways to bring down Jesus.

But at least they do it openly and not in shady dark business rooms.

To be fair, this is more of a movie about them talking about why science and reason need to be used more often in debates. To ignore stuff like cultural backgrounds or religious reasons to make political policy, but instead use logic and their brains.

A fair reason I guess.

But also it seems like the last 25% of it was to support the Reason Rally, a fest in DC about atheism and reason. Alright, another okay fest. I guess.

At this point you might be able to read complete apathetic-ness towards the topic of the film. I was definitely interested in the documentary when I sat down to watch it. But then it felt like nothing happened throughout it. Why should anyone care about random celebrities and their opinions on these two men? We don’t.

Do random cherry picked snippets really help drive points home? No. If they wanted it to be actually intellectually challenging in any way, they show us larger unedited segments of some of these debates they took part in. Makes it seem like they are hiding the other side. If they want to show they are in the right, they should be able to show why in response to what the other side says.

It just seems extremely forced, not fair, and on top of it, boring because of it. If this thing was two hours long, showed a complete debate and maybe an intro and after math, it would do far better for their cause than what we are given. Instead, this documentary just feels like a waste of time.