Tag: Documentary

Happy Thanksgiving! For those not reading this on Thanksgiving, happy day!

Thanksgiving movies really don’t exist, so in general, my Thanksgiving reviews have had one theme. Parts of Thanksgiving dinner. And no, I haven’t reviewed a movie called Turkey yet. But I did review both Butter and Milk, so my dairy should be done. Let’s start with some of the main sides.

King Corn is a slightly older documentary now, 2007, which is the old limit for reviews from my website. I try not to do anything before 2009 now, unless there is a special occasion. Like…a holiday!

King Corn is a decently famous early documentary about corn and how it has infiltrated our very existence. I am willing to wager before this documentary, it wasn’t as common knowledge what was happening in the corn industry and how it affected everyone in the United States. And maybe, just maybe, how it made us fat.

Those two boys are going to eat the entire field on that truck. That’ll do it.

The two main guys are Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, two friends who moved from Boston to Greene, Iowa to have an experiment. They both have family roots back to this area, and they asked to borrow one acre of someones land, to grow corn, to see how the whole process works, and see how much money they can make.

Of course, once they do, they find out how everything is paid out to them by the government, and purely in terms of how much land they produce. But the farmers and now have much bigger farms than ever before, and produce way more than is necessary, but the flat rate from the government makes it okay to do that. They don’t have to worry about the economy fluctuating, just the growing and production of corn.

And now corn is in everything in terms of high fructose corn syrup. Literally everything. Pure sugar. Maybe making us fat? Definitely doesn’t help.

Either way, this was a very eye opening documentary at the time, but given in such a simple way. It is about two guys farming, so of course it is a simple story, but it isn’t able to go hard after anyone driving the factors. It can’t get us into a corn syrup factory, we don’t get to hear from any policy makers. Just farmers farming, mostly. And so a simple documentary, although interesting, gets a simple grade.

Time to tackle a big fish.

Roger Ebert. A lot of people like the guy. Like, a super lot of them. Especially people who like movies. Especially people who consider themselves to be movie reviewers or critics. And then there is me, Geophysicist by day, and movie watcher by night. And I can say I never really cared one way or another.

When Ebert died, a lot of people I knew in real life wanted to talk to me about it and make sure I knew and what I thought about it. I thought that it sucked that someone died of course, but it didn’t affect me in any negative way.

For those that don’t know, before Ebert, movie reviewers were basically interchangeable. But he came in with a fancy vocabulary, an ability to write a review quickly, and a way to connect it with the every man that he became a big deal, even winning a Pulitzer Prize. He is probably the sole reason movie reviewers/critics exist as they do today. Whether that is a good thing is debatable of course.

And of course, this documentary, Life Itself, titled after his book, tells the story of his life and career and was filming during his final months alive.

He turned into a poltergeist when watching movies, apparently.

You can’t talk about Roger Ebert without talking about Gene Siskel. For over 20 years, these two Chicago men got to go on television and argue and talk the new movies in theaters that week, and the crowds loved it. No one could compare to those two and those two opinions became the only opinions that seemed to matter.

But we also get to hear about Ebert’s career in college, his first journalism jobs, and what he did after the TV show. He was also an early adopter of really liking social media/internet it seems, and wanted all of his life’s work online for anyone to read. Which is why his name is a website, and they have people posting reviews to carry on his legacy there.

And of course, we also get his family life, his children, his wife, and the final months of his life, the surgeries, and the setbacks.

Now for someone who didn’t really care about the man, I found myself surprised when his death occurred that I was tearing up a little bit. That’s some quality film making. The narrator is reading excerpts from his autobiography throughout the film, so it is really easy to feel like I knew the man by the end of the movie. Roger Ebert was a fascinating individual, and well, it sucks that he is gone.

I have to wait for a lot of things. Usually movies. Getting to a movie 3-4 hours early just to wait in a line to make sure I can see it in advance for free. Yes, my time is totally worth that.

Either way, a lot of downtime is felt there, it can suck. But I could watch movies on my phone during the wait, because watching movies before you watch a movie is cruise control to coolsville. Which is why, while waiting for a movie, I watched the documentary The Waiting Room.

Just so we are clear, this makes me cool.

The Waiting Room is about hospitals though! Namely, Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. It is notable for having the most trafficked emergency room in the country. Lot of people, lot of trauma, and of course, an area where a lot of people might not have health insurance so people have to come there when they can’t pay.

But at least they have the raddest attendant ever working the door to calm down the wait time.

The documentary is actually set up in a pretty unique way. First, it is one day of the hospital. Good. Simple. We get to hear the doctors, nurses, secretaries, and financial advisers as they work and discuss the load of people that day. We also of course get those who came in for help and as they get frustrated by their wait or their service.

But none of it is done in a visual interview format. If they are describing their frustrations, or their reasoning, or anything, it is done purely in voice over by the person over footage of them in the hospital or receiving service. The format never takes us “away” from the hospital and helps emphasize the trapped feeling. Or something like that.

Either way, it was really easy to connect with the people waiting and the staff as well.

Better yet? This documentary wasn’t preachy. The director didn’t bring opinions into anything. It was just real people, waiting, getting frustrated, and some of them receiving shitty care and being put in shitty situations. You can derive your own conclusions, if any, from what it is. But at least in 2012, this was a reality for many and it is heartbreaking.

Documentaries, schmockumentaries. I used to have my documentaries on Friday, but now they are Thursday. Let us cope with it and move on.

Let’s talk about video games, because I like video games. I would refer to myself as a gamer, even if my time is much more limited from the activity. I have to watch a lot of movies, and keep up with TV shows. It is a hard life.

But with a vague title for a documentary, Video Games: The Movie (claiming to be a movie?) could be about so many topics. Most likely it will involve the history of gaming and how it is evolved today. And really, that is all I can imagine it being about. The history of gaming.

And video games! And video games through time!

Sure enough, this documentary is mostly about video games and the history. And how systems have gotten better. And why people who play video games are cool. And how indie games are doing stuff. Hey, maybe the title is because of that other documentary, Indie Game: The Movie? I swear there were more topics, but I was so bored throughout the movie that it is really easy to forget.

Here are some of the problems. Outside of video games, it didn’t really have a lot of focus. It goes from segment to segment, about different topics, some interviews with some people, and shit ton of filler footage of just video game footage. That might sound like a good thing, but when there is just randomly 2 minutes of video game segments of various games for whatever topic, that just isn’t exciting to watch. That is boring. The segments are so unconnected, you could put them in any order and the movie would feel the same. They even have musical intro/outros for each section which makes it feel even more disjointed.

Obviously this thing isn’t going to have anything about Gamer Gate, for you people who think it would. Come on now. This thing was made like a year or so ago, and Gamer Gate is only a month or so old.

Another complaint? They show this huge timeline of gaming history and start going chronological through it, but they have major events in it that they skip. Then they start going out of order, going forward and backwards, and the events on the time line seemed to be different and change. And they still ignored a lot of stuff on there. Why show it on a timeline if you aren’t explaining it? The time line was an annoying clusterfuck.

But this documentary is still super boring. Definitely don’t watch it if you like video games. And don’t if you know nothing about them. Just read wikipedia articles.

There are documentaries of all sorts of varieties. There are historical documentaries (technically, most if not all fall under this?), political documentaries, biased documentaries, science/learning documentaries, scary/thriller documentaries and more.

And then every once in awhile, they have documentaries about movies, which is of course extremely appealing to someone who likes watching movies. The movie makers can be subjects of documentaries themselves, it isn’t weird!

And then every once in a longer while, we get a documentary that doesn’t worry about fitting it all in one tiny package, but giving you as much info as they can, all the info they can, with as many people as they can, and saying “fuck your time constraints, you fascist time Nazi!”

That’s right, Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy is a whopping 240 minutes long. That is about four hours for your math inept bastards out there. This documentary doesn’t cut any corners, unless you count the recent reboot of the franchise, A Nightmare On Elm Street. It isn’t featured in this one, most likely because it came out the same year as the documentary, and because who cares about that title? No one. It is a reboot, it is different, it isn’t Robert Englund.

So what does this cover? Well, of course the original concept of A Nightmare On Elm Street with Wes Craven and New Line Cinema, while also going over the start of New Line Cinema, because they made it big off of Freddy. We get the “gay” second film, the really great return of Craven for Dream Warriors, the second highest grossing 4th film which jump started director Renny Harlin‘s career, the clusterfuck of a fifth film, the “final” sixth film with Freddy’s death, and second return of Craven with the brilliant New Nightmare, a lot of info on merchandising and the TV show and it ends with Freddy vs. Jason.

Freddy’s arms have been elongated to encompass everyone in this documentary.

That is a lot of material to go over, and now you know why it is so long. The best part about the length? I didn’t feel like a torture session trying to get through it. It was very entertaining hearing the stories behind scenes, how shots were made, how decisions were decided upon, how casting/directors were chosen. Everything. Including snide comments with Craven and Englund throughout. Hey, they even had a small interview with an actor who had the role of Surfer in one of the movies. He had a say. They talked to people who wrote scripts that were ignored. They talked to everyone. I think the coolest part is when they talked to someone who played one of the roles, they also had them read their script description of the character when they first enter the movie. Made them relatable?

But here is one annoyance. When you hear about stars in these movies, a lot of people will think back to Johnny Depp and Patricia Arquette. The Elm Street series were each of these heavy hitters first roles, and Patricia in particular was the lead in the third film. Yet they don’t get interviewed for this movie? Were they too busy for the franchise that gave them their eventual millions?

Either way, this documentary is an information overload, and only biased in the sense that a lot of the people who worked on one movie will over hype their own work, obviously, or blame others for any failures. If you were a fan of any movie of the franchise, you will enjoy aspects of this documentary. If you are curious about it, you will enjoy this. You can watch it over days and in sections quite easily, and it is on Netflix and will probably stay there forever.

Overall, Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy is a fantastic documentary. I learned a lot, and I will forget most of it. I was worried about finding time for the four hours, but it was a very easy documentary to watch, it ended up not even being a big issue.

No, don’t worry. This isn’t another dang review about another movie about doppelgangers. But if you want to see those check out The Double, Enemy, or The One I Love.

No The Imposter is something much more sinister, much more creepier, because The Imposter is real. That’s what a documentary is, folks.

This is a story about the disappearance of Nicholas Barclay, a 13 year old boy from San Antonio, Texas. This was in 1994, so you probably didn’t hear about it. Which is why you also might not have heard about it 3 years later when he was reportedly found alive in Spain. Kind of messed up and traumatic, but alive.

However, no one could have guessed at the time that it was actually Frédéric Bourdin, a 22 year old French man.

Typical French smug look on his face too.

What can drive a family to think that a complete stranger is actually their missing son? Especially when traits such as eye color, accent, and body type are all different. That is what this documentary strives to answer.

The documentary uses some actual footage from the 1990s, both in terms of hand held cameras from VHS tapes and news footage about the incident. But for the most part footage and narration comes from two ways. From Bourdin himself, and from the family members of Nicholas who are telling their versions of the events of that story.

They also recreated some scenes to add a sense of tension to it all, to recreate the initial call in to police and all of that. And man. EVERYTHING IS SO INTENSE. I was captivated throughout the documentary, I wanted to absorb all of the information. The music they used and the scenes created such an eerie vibe that I was able to label this a Thriller and a Documentary.

Who is to say that documentaries cannot make you scared? Not like someone is going to come out and get you. But at the lengths a person, a real person, might go to in order to get away.

I don’t want to talk more about it, because it is such a unique discovery and journey that the film takes you on. Definitely one that came out of nowhere for me and is highly recommended.

Political documentary! It has been two whole weeks since my last one, so clearly I was already due for another. In reality, while waiting in line to watch a pre-screening, I looked for an unplanned documentary on Netflix on my phone and watched it in the comforts of a lawn chair.

I picked Electoral Dysfunction for two main reasons. One, of course, was its length. Only 90 minutes. Sexy. Good. I only had about 100 minutes before being let in the movie. The movie was also The Judge if you are curious, which I released over a week ago.

The second reason is because I figured by the title that it would be about the USAs Electoral College, the system that I am totally not going to explain here today. Look it up if you want. Here is a wiki page. It is an outdated, confusing, and unnecessary system that never really made sense, but it exists. For whatever reason. So I knew this would be a documentary I could easily agree with and I would rather not get visibly upset while waiting in line to watch a movie, surrounded by slightly familiar strangers.

If the government was really dysfunctional, the national parks would be closed. Oh wait. That did happen.

This one is narrated/hosted by Mo Rocca, known for his work on The Daily Show, so it was a natural fit for him. Most of the film focused on Indiana, home to some of the strictest election laws in the country. Which this film also dealt a lot with. Democrats, Republicans. People who wanted Voter ID laws, people who want every vote to count, and hey, he also talked to some actual Electors.

It was all very comical, as one would hope given the star.

But at the same time, it focused a whole lot on not electoral college stuff, and more election in general. Which is okay, but I would have enjoyed a lot more if I ended up learning something useful about it. An okay documentary if you had to waste an hour and a half in a line with strangers. But not too great.

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.