Tag: Documentary

I would consider myself a journeyman on the internet. I like being on the internet. It is like a home IN my home.

But in some people’s homes, they use the internet to make the internet bigger. Big internet users make money by putting themselves inside the internet. Personally, I put some stuff on the internet, like these websites, but not a video of me moving and talking. That is too intense. I want to just keep making my like, $30 a year on this website. That is my level of commitment.

For some of these people, they pull in six figures a year, but also work every day to do it. Inspiring actors, comedians, and even chefs, have taken to making their own web TV shows and mac software to entertain literally dozens upon dozens of individuals every day.

And this documentary, Please Subscribe: A Documentary About YouTubers talks to a lot of them, including these shows people: My Drunk Kitchen, Livelavalive, Seannaners, Wheezy Waiter, Daily Grace, Mystery Guitarman, Will to DC and Dan Brown.

Basically I have heard of one of these things/people ahead of time (My Drunk Kitchen), maybe two (Mystery Guitarman). None of these other people, so I guess I learned a lot?

Like Chicago is a scary place to go to find actors.

A few of these people got more spotlight than others. Like this Livelavalive fellow, who apparently used his YouTube show to help break free from his extreme OCD shut in self. Some of these individuals do weekly shows, some 7 days a week. Most of them edit their own videos, do all of their own production and are a complete one person show. Not all of them, but whatever.

I found Dan Brown to be the most interesting story. He was an early YouTube success, but he kept trying new things and apparently he pissed people off by under performing, and then people didn’t give a shit anymore. YouTube is fickle, so it requires a lot of work.

A lot of these people were pretty similar though and I was kind of disappointed by how many of them were just weird daily talk about their lives people. I want people who do cool things. Where the fuck is my Epic Meal Time?

I didn’t even feel like linking to their pages. If you want to find out about them, go crazy. This is just an okay documentary about random people on YouTube. I wanted to see actual dollar amounts as to what they made, so we can see if their effort is actually worth it. A nice cute story, but an indifferent one at the end of the day.

What is there to say about the Koch brothers that I already assume everyone already knows?

What? You haven’t heard about them? Have you not watched Season 1 of The Newsroom? I’m not saying I take all of my facts from a fictionalized news station, but the show is more or less about real events and when I heard about them, I was really surprised.

So I did some of my own research (internet research!) and found it to be mostly true. Rich dudes who created the Tea Party movement which is seen as a grassroots campaign, when it is actually nothing like a grass roots campaign at all.

Awesome, does that mean this documentary is going to talk about the tea party movement and how it is basically just the whim of these two gentlemen who have ulterior motives? Kind of. Mostly. You are also unfortunately going to get a lot more.

Shit, this guy has got everything he needs to survive in the wild now.

The biggest problem with this documentary is it feels like it has a lack of focus. It takes awhile to really get into what the purpose of it is. It starts with the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission decision. It helped allow corporations to donate more money to government campaigns. Yayyy~ (sarcasm).

Just like that, the Tea Party Movement basically began, funded by several groups, most of which were owned by the Koch brothers who were the primary money givers as well. It notes of course that two of the judges who helped the corporations gain these powers had biases that directly affected the outcome of the case through their past. Impartiality is for chumps though.

This is where the documentary starts to get hazy. Turns out the majority of it is focusing on the problems in Wisconsin. The new Governor (a tea party member) who immediately set out to destroy the unions, which were the biggest monetary backers to the Democratic Party. There was a ton of bad things going on there, including representatives fleeing the country, secret bill signings, and of course, a recall election against the governor in which a lot of money was being thrown around.

This documentary seems to touch on a lot of different issues and it seems to be lost because of that. Like a little kid trying to tell a story and jumbling it all up. Does it have good information? Heck yes. I remember being very confused during the Wisconsin shenanigans, and now I would place myself at “only slightly confused” now.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this is that the documentary was supposed to be shown on PBS originally. Why wasn’t it? Because of the rich sponsors of PBS apparently exerting too much pressure on the network. Ain’t that about a bitch.

A lot of the times, for my weekly documentary, I try to plan them out weeks in advance. I get inspiration to watch them for any number of reasons, current events being the main reason. But every once in awhile, a documentary just looks interesting, knowing nothing about it. Just a random find.

For Brooklyn Castles, it came about just by literally typing in letters in the Netflix documentary genre search.

Brooklyn Castles is about chess and how a small random middle school in New York City has somehow elevated itself into a dominating player in the chess community.

The school is Intermediate School 318, because schools in NYC don’t have real names. Many years ago an after school chess program began and it took hold in this community, where at this point there are at least two full time instructors to help teach chess and chess theory. Because IS-318 is the most winning junior high program in the United States and it isn’t full of stereotypically nerds or a private school.

How can that be?!

That’s right. Ethnic people are kicking ass intelligently and white people are not. Take that racists!

Boo sterotypes.

I am not even joking. They only have one white boy with glasses, and he is near the bottom of the team. This school has crazy high ranking kids. You need 2000 to be a master and 2200 to be a grand master. A big chunk of the story is about Rochelle Ballantyne, who went to high school right as the documentary had been starting. In Middle/High School, she was the highest ranked African American Female, and closest to being ranked a master, which had never been done before.

There is also Justus, a 6th grader, who chose this middle school for chess (because it is a thing) who became a master at the age of 12. The youngest age ever for a black man to achieve the title.

It is amazing what a little club or after school program can do. After all, in 8th grade I joined a chess club and went to one whole tournament. I did pretty average, but apparently got 4th overall in the “first real tournament category”, and that was the end of my competitive chess career.

But it is also about how this school survived the economy crash of 2008. A lot of funding goes into the program and allows the poor kids to travel the country and compete in high level junior tournaments without breaking their home, but with NYC education cuts, they start to lose a significant portion of their money.

Which is what I guess the purpose of this documentary is. To save the arts and after school programs. To refocus our needs on making the future better for the kids and not cutting education. To show that success can come from the most unlikely of places.

All in all, I don’t know how entertaining this would be without enjoying chess. But for those who do, prepare to be amazed.

The documentary Fed Up was something I heard about many months ago when it was roaming the film fest circuit. Outside of having its own interesting topic, the significant other really wanted to see it too.

I try to only do one food documentary in a given month (because it is a very popular genre for whatever reason, like my last one Forks Over Knives) and this one is indeed again about health. But it has a very specific goal.

Obesity and diabetes in America. Okay. I guess that is what a lot of those are about too.

This one is brought to us (narration and produced) by Katie Couric who she has self claimed made a life out of reporting on these issues. Which issues? Well, clearly I am just filling this top half with filler until I start talking about them, so I might as well show you the picture now and get it over with.

The title is a pun. Pun’s make the documentary world go round.

So what is bad. Processed foods? I’ve heard that before. Meat? Nah, meat is normal. So what is it?! Sugars. Namely the high amounts of sugar in products like soda, processed foods and fast food restaurants.

It isn’t as simple as that though. The documentary first attacks the theory of carbs in vs carbs out and that all carbs are created equal. It also argues against a lack of physical activity with a lot of case studies.

In fact, using science, it helps explain just what these refined excessive sugars that appear in most processed foods contain versus the daily recommended amount. It explains how when the industry started to cut out the fat, they increased the sugar content to keep the taste, completely nullifying any gain.

And it introduced us to the lobby groups that have pushed to squelch the sugar information from getting out and the few government programs that have tried to note the excessive sugar type’s harmful effects.

It isn’t just a big witch hunt and they don’t say all sugar is bad don’t worry. Just certain types in certain environments and bad practices these people use that could have caused an obesity epidemic.

I found the documentary fascinating to watch really interested in what it was showing.

I just didn’t like all the tactics it used. It did some bullshitty stuff. For instance, when they were interviewing a “bad person” they showed an unedited part of the interview. So we saw him start to badly answer a question and then go for a do over. That is supposed to show that he is a liar or something. Because everyone else always talks to clear. That is cheap and bad.

It also featured a lot of extravagant animations to get the point through, some of which were pretty extreme. It definitely wasn’t dignified.

In other news, great topic and information, but bullshit fluff and bad documentary tactics dropped it down a peg for me.

Philadelphia in the 1970s was a rough place. The Flyers were winning Stanley Cups and beating the Russians (literally). A lot of bruisers and quite a few cruisers.

We also had the MOVE organization, which was a black liberation group founded by a man named John Africa. In fact, everyone had the last name Africa in the group. You can guess the reasons why. They were kind of Amish in away, just wanting to form their own community and raise their kids in a “natural” way.

Unfortunately, members of the Philadelphia Police Department frequently crashed their lifestyle and came to blows with the group (Also literally), which is why we have this documentary in the first place. Let The Fire Burn pieces together news stories, court records, and committee meetings to tell the story of the MOVE group clashing with the police from the 70s to the mid 80s. It does it without a narrator (where transition and background details are shown via text on screen only) and without modern interviews retelling the events. No, only things that were recorded before and after the events immediately.

And what this documentary does is tell the horrifying results of a few stand offs and a climatic end that you wouldn’t be able to guess. Unless you look at the title of the movie and put two and two together.

Ohhh. They must be talking a bout the fire burning a joint. Because of stereotypes.

And (not?) surprisingly, Let The Fire Burn is a powerful, eye opening, and awesome documentary. Shit. I wanted to multi task during parts of it, but I found it hard to put away. Some of the interviews with members of the MOVE group were just so well put together it is hard to find fault with anyone. Anyone outside of the Philadelphia Police Department that is.

I think what I found most surprising about this documentary is how it took this movie for me to learn about this subject. This seemed like a really big event, with really big consequences and holy shit why the fuck had I never heard about it before? I was angry almost that I just learned about it. I was angry with what they decided to do at the end of the last “showdown” and I was of course angry with what happened in the aftermath.

Let The Fire Burns is a great documentary that I recommend to everyone to watch. I don’t want to give anything away, because there is no way I can do the documentary justice. I also feel like it was incredibly unbiased, giving just the facts and just the news and committee meeting footage. Fantastic movie, horrible event.

In trying to watch at least one documentary a week, I get a bit excited when I get to see a newer documentary, freshly released and ready to take on the world.

Mission Blue came out mid August as a Netflix Original Documentary, which of course meant that it was immediately available to watch. Not running around the indie markets and festivals for a year first.

And hey. I like Netflix original stuff sometimes. Or at least I think I would, if I had seen anything outside of Arrested Development or House Of Cards (just season 1, shh).

Mission Blue is the new Orange Is The New Black.

Mission Blue is a very very simple documentary. It is about Sylvia Earle, a woman marine biologist from the mid 1900s and on who helped change the science around the world. She was certainly a pioneer in the field, being at one point the first person to go beyond a specific depth in the ocean, and even living in an underwater research facility for a few weeks.

And where is she now? Still doing science job stuff. Yay old people!

More or less, this documentary was made after a TED Talk in 2009 of the same talk, where Sylvia had a very simple idea. She wants to set up protected ecosystems and environments around the world’s oceans where no commercial development or farming can occur. No bullshit, just fish and fish accessories.

And hey, it is a good idea. Sure. Why not. Like national parks. As long as I can still eat my fish and power my car, then you know I am definitely fine with that.

Outside of this novel idea, we just get to see a lot about Sylvia’s life and accomplishments, what she is doing now, and bad stuff happening to our oceans.

Overall, Mission Blue was interesting, but just felt like a bio piece on a person. I guess documentaries can be used for that purpose, but it makes most of this feel like an hour episode of some show that probably exists on the Biography Channel.

Nothing about this was super elite quality wise or showing me that much that I haven’t seen before. But it was exciting seeing James Cameron, because James Cameron raises the bar significantly by being in this documentary.

In the town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, Luis Ramirez was killed.

Luis is a Mexican immigrant, one of the many to move to the small town over the last few years to work in nearby mattress factories. Shenandoah used to be a coal mining town, a lot of European immigrants, but that eventually shut down, so now they are just another small town with low incomes and high school football to get them by.

Oh yeah. High School Football. Like the team who ended up killing Luis Ramirez one night, turning a simple beating of a Mexican into a killing thanks to a few kicks to the head.

Shenandoah captures the town in its aftermath, how they were affected by the racial based beating, how the high school football team started to do after it, and how the court case went down.

I can’t even.

The unfortuante news is, you can probably already figure out where this story goes. Spoilers, there is a some major disappointment and parts of the documentary that will make you swell with anger.

But at the same time, this is a story I have heard before. I have read about it in books and seen documentaries of similar cases where racial injustice happened in small towns around America, and it still happens to this day. Maybe this one is more relevant because it wasn’t in the 1960s or 20th century, but just half a decade ago. But I just couldn’t find myself captivated by it nor did I find it really too shocking.

On top of that, I thought it was a shoddy documentary. It felt poorly put together, full of awkward scenes that didn’t really help tell the story, but was just talking to people in general. I am glad they went to Mexico and talked to the guy’s family about it, but it felt like it was filled with so much useless crap, I didn’t care by the end.

Well, obviously I still cared. And it is good to know that not everything ended so badly (outside of someone losing their life). But this documentary needed a lot more umph in it to make me care about something I have seen again and again.

Whew. Here we go.

I have long thought for the last 6 or so years, basically most of my entire college career, that college sports were weird. I get being a fan of a team if your family went there, or you went there, but any other reason seemed silly to me. All I knew was that it was a huge huge industry that made a lot of money for any number of reasons.

I have also always thought that college athletes were getting shafted. They appear in video games, have jerseys being sold, and make a ton of appearances…but for what? No extra cash.

But I have felt like most people don’t share my belief. Whenever I bring it up, people say that they get free college and that should be enough. Little did I know there was a documentary that shared my point of view, Schooled: The Price of College Sports. Not only did it share my POV, but it also had a whole lot of information to back up its stance, which I lacked.

I understand it is an uncomfortable subject, because it is one of those situations where “it has always been this way” so why change it? Well, if it is bad, it should be changed, tradition be damned.

And how much Duke sucks. I am pretty sure there is a whole hour devoted to that.

But this documentary goes over almost everything. The history of college sports, the history of amateurism in sports and the Olympics, how sponsorships in college sports started, and oh so much more.

This documentary was also kind of hard to watch. Because it also talks about UNC and its Academic scandal with the football team players taking made up classes. That was terrible. It was. I was literally at school during this moment.

It talked about Devon Ramsey, the UNC football player and smart kid who got set up and screwed by the system for a very minor amount of help, despite actually being one of the brightest players. And it sucked knowing that a school I went to had some bad things go on during it, but I know in my heart it is true.

I won’t talk more about the documentary, because it does a very good job of presenting the facts in an easy to understand way. It has a lot of details to back it up, and even features some people who don’t want things to change and disagree with it. It isn’t incredibly biased in that regard.

But hey, it’s on Netflix, and I thought it was great. It also features a lot of Arian Foster, of the Houston Texas. He tells a lot of good stories and he is now one of my favorite players outside of my favorite team.

When choosing my documentary to watch for this week, it was between The Revisionaries and Shenandoah. The reason The Revisionaries won out is because it is a lot more relevant to my current life, as someone who now lives in Texas and is responsible for school aged children.

Shenandoah, your time will come, don’t you worry.

It is almost common knowledge at this point that the Texas Board of Education has a lot more power than any sort of Board of Education should have. Because there are shit ton of people in Texas (And California), the standards that these boards set mean the books they chose will make a lot of money. They order more than they need to, so whatever the book is picked will make tons of money. So books try to make sure the standards chosen are met, so they can make that sweet cash money. If all textbooks try to meet their standards, then that means the rest of the country is affected by their decision. Ain’t no one making a textbook based on the Montana Board of Education.

It turns out one of these states is very liberal and the other is very conservative. So, what should be a not too important Board of Education becomes a battleground for different ideologies to lead the youth towards different values.

And this is seemingly public enemy #1.

Pictured above is one Don McLeroy of which a majority of the documentary is about. During the stupidly controversial evolution v creationism debate, he lead the board and was appropriately scrutinized. Thankfully logic won out, for the most part the science community won and Don was sent back to being a regular board member, not the head.

But the battle wasn’t over. It turns out Social Studies was a much more important subject to look at that didn’t get as much media exposure. This is where they determine what important parts of history are taught and what is left out. This of course can lead to a lot of bad things should it go unchecked. And well, to figure out who won that battle, you might want to see the documentary.

I thought it did a decent job of bringing this topic to light, but something was missing for me. Hard to really pin point it. Maybe the general boringness of the whole documentary? Having already knew about these facts, I didn’t find it really too eye opening or surprising. Just had me shaking my head on more than one occasion.

Decent info, some interesting characters, and a nice jab at Liberty University, which is always nice. But I just wanted more.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Such a hated and loved TV show. A reboot of an old toy franchise a few years ago, the series quickly spread across the internet.

The series, a show intended for little girls, quickly attracted them and more. Basically, every other group too, outside of the 65+ crowd. The number of middle aged / teenage men who liked the show and found it interesting became its own entity, and they were called Brony.

No other recent fan group has been as scorned or defiled as the Bronie. People have them assumed to be perverts, or a large gathering of internet neckbeards, known for their inability to not be socially awkward. And on some levels, both of those are true. There are definitely perverts and socially awkward neckbeards who like My Little Pony.

But the movie has a problem with that label. The documentary is about several Bronies, some maybe awkward, who have found enjoyment in the show, or have had the show help them in life some way, and their journy to Bronycon.

And they have new animated scenes done in rhyme to go over shit as well!

The documentary, Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony, was basically financed by John de Lancie. He is popular amongst nerd groups for his roles in Star Trek and Stargate, but he also voices a recurring villain character in the show, making him popular amongst Bronies as well. He saw that the fans of the show had a lot of backlash and wanted this documentary to kind of put a hold on that to show that they are just regular people.

And it was funded by Kickstarter, but that isn’t too important.

Sure, going into some people’s lives was interesting, I guess. Some people were bullied, some had Aspergers, some became famous for their music based around the show. Sure, there are also some interviews with the creator, the creator of Bronycon, and Tara Strong, the voice of a few of its characters, but outside of that? Just a bunch of regular people going to Bronycon.

And as a documentary, sure, it did a good job of showcasing their average lives and how the show affected them, but that is it. It didn’t really delve into any issue. I was just a documentary about bronies, made by bronies, for bronies, in order to elevate them to a higher status.

I just wanted more. Again, the cool professor pony they had through 3 segments or so? That was awesome. And that was about it. Hell, it even brought up that the creator left the show, but didn’t go over why. I had to look up that information on my own. What the hell, documentary?

Regardless of this documentary, I am still not a brony. I have seen like, half of season 1 of MLP:FiM , but haven’t had a lot of desire to run back to the show. However, I still reviewed My Little Pony: Equestria Girls.