Tag: Documentary

Drugs are bad, mmkay. They put people in jail, they cost billions of dollars, they can lead to death via shootouts and they fund terrorist organizations. Sure, they can harm your body, but who cares about that? That shouldn’t be an issue.

In fact, if they were made legal, a lot of issues would go away. Shootouts will go down, jails would be emptied, they wouldn’t cost as much, and it wouldn’t help terrorist organizations. If the US just changed their mind and made it all government sanctioned, it would help a lot of crime ridden areas of the world.

Like Mexico. A lot of drugs are grown or manufactured there and brought over the border to be sold in America. They can use this money for weapons and political power, meaning drug cartels control large areas, both physically and through bribes. And that is what Cartel Land is about. Groups of people using force to win back their homes from the evils that threaten it.

And this man even has a doctorate.

The trick here is I said groups of people. We have a group in Michoacán, led by Dr. Jose Mireles, a small town doctor, who made a group named Autodefensas. They are just groups of locals who want to get the cartel, a group who calls themselves the Templars, out! They are all volunteers, still holding their normal jobs and lifestyles, but they also have shifts to keep perimeter checks after they forced the group out. Even better, they then take their work ethic and guns, go to nearby cities and villages, get the cartel out, and help the citizens set up their own Autodefensas group.

Then they leave. They aren’t looking to take over the whole area and rule it over their own corrupt national government.

On the other side of the coin and border, we also have Tim “Nailer” Foley, an American veteran in Arizona who sees illegal immigrants crossing the border all the time. He helped set up a small paramilitary group to patrol the border and stop being from bringing drugs across the border. Both groups don’t like the drug war and what it is doing to their countries. And both are hated by various groups and government officials.

The best part of Cartel Land is how much access the documentary director had. He had to go to Mexico to work with Mireles and his Autodefensas, see them gain control back in an area, teach others, still live their lives with families, and also face extreme pressures from the Mexican government to stop.

Cartel Land is also mostly unbiased, letting the people tell their own stories and not offering judgments or concerns. It was a stark and real look at current affairs in Arizona and Mexico and is useful to help understand the plights of average citizens.

Another week, another documentary nominated for awards. I love this time of the year, by the way.

Meru was nominated for a Spirit award, and it only has four letters in the name. These are fun facts you may have already known!

Meru is part of the Indian Himalayas, but it is not Everest. It doesn’t have to be tallest for it to be important. Meru is a peak that was nicknamed “Shark’s Fin” for every reason you might guess. And it was also notable for having no confirmed climbs to the top. Sure people have tried, but it is an incredibly intense peak. It involves ice climbing, rock that shifts around when you move, hundreds of feet of steep vertical stuff. You name it.

It is a rock climbers dream and nightmare at the same time. Meru is a documentary filmed by three dudes who decided they would be the first to tackle it.

Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and Renan Ozturk.

Now it should be noted these aren’t just three random assholes. No, these guys are all very professional mountain climbers, some of the best in the world, and they are super serious. Some of them have wives and a family. Some of them can be pretty free spirited.

But in 2008 they decided to work together and take on Meru.

This is one of the biggest “NOPES” I could imagine after climbing a giant spider.

And they don’t make it to the peak. Shit sucks. But they recorded the attempt and it goes into the documentary. They brought their own cameras to do it all of course, because no fourth guy who isn’t a climber but good at holding cameras could even attempt to make it. After that they took a couple years to do other things, but they knew they’d try again in 2011 before it was too late.

I won’t talk more about their second attempt (and if they were the first to climb to the top). But I will talk about how the documentary goes over their own personal struggles before the second attempt.

Namely, one of them getting injured while snowboarding, with incredible head injuries, and only having about five months to recover before going back up. And another being covered by a giant avalanche and somehow getting out of it unscathed. Yeah, he is probably a super hero ala Unbreakable, I agree.

Either way, this is a good indie documentary in terms of people trying to do the unthinkable. The fact that they were able to put all their film together to piece together something remotely watchable is a testament to their drive, since none of them are professional filmmakers.

At the same time, it feels like it is just a bunch of people trying to climb a dangerous peak and glimpses into their climb. Is it impressive? Yes. But I am not a mountain enthusiast, so I still only found it slightly entertaining.

Back in the 1960’s there were just three networks. NBC. CBS. And way way below them, ABC. Sure it was third place, but it was shit with shit television.

They didn’t like being shit so they were doing their best to get their name on the map. And in 1968, the Republican and Democratic Conventions were all big news. TV and politics! How zany! NBC and CBS had lots of coverage of the Conventions planned for their programs, and ABC was kind of just standing off to the side trying to get into the same room.

So they were like, hey, let’s get two charismatic people. Not the people running for President, that’d be too hard. Let’s get two charismatic politicians, one democratic, one republican, and have them debate the issues on television.

This is an idea that has never been heard of before! Debates! And not the presidents! Just two allegedly smart people trying to show why one parties ideals were better.

And they were like fuck it, let’s do 10 of these, before and after the conventions. Let’s get Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley. The Best of Enemies.

This ended up being big. Really big. Vidal is more famous, the Liberal, as he also wrote books and screenplays for film. He also had his own show after the debates to do debates with new people to get issues out.

These debates were so big, they can be pointed out for why political commentary exists today. This is why news stations have groups of people arguing about issues. Because us low non politicians love the shit out of these pundits.

Political commentary became big after it. The problem of course is it is less intellectual, features a lot more lying, and no one is having a real good honest debate.

But Vidal and Buckley started it. And one of them clearly one the debates, but I won’t spoil that. They are cool enough to have Kelsey Grammer and John Lithgow as their voices though, when the need to read their written word arose. That is pretty bad ass.

Best of Enemies is on Netflix and up for and Indie Spirit award for Best Doc, and maybe an Oscar too. Either way, a very informative and good way to spend 90 minutes.

Apparently UNC Chapel Hill is the center of everything when it comes to colleges. They had all the sports scandals, and thus, were highly featured in several sports documentaries.

And now they find themselves featured highly in The Hunting Ground, a documentary about rape in college campuses. This documentary was made due to the positive response that The Invisible War received, about rape in the armed forces.

In case you didn’t know, yes, I did go to UNC Chapel Hill, so regardless of topic, it is always jarring seeing people walk around places I have walked, telling their stories. Now, sexual assault in colleges is a real issue and definitely not something anyone should take lightly. It is a real issue everywhere. But why is it potentially more prevelant in college?

Well, in college, you have thousands of young adults, making mistakes high on hormones. Access to drugs, and alcohol, when they aren’t legally to drink it for the most part and therefore go to excess because freedom and shit. Fraternities that haze their pledges by making them harass women, and sororities having rules forcing them to party and drink at fraternity parties. A lot of bad things. And you know, dudes who believe that no doesn’t mean no.

It centers a bit on UNC because two women, who had their plights ignored by administration, decided to check in the legality of their lack of effort. They decided to pursue their cases through the Board of Education as a Title IX complaint, noting that they are not making their campuses safe. If the college is found breaking Title IX, they would lose all government funding.

That is kind of a big deal for most universities, especially the public ones.

This documentary is chilling. Hearing these personal stories, seeing the alledged reactions from administrations and police, it is shocking. Basically, colleges don’t like reporting sexual assault numbers, because no one wants to be the school where people get raped. So instead, rape happens everywhere and is swept under the rug. This is especially true for when it happens to star football and basketball players. They won’t get in trouble until after an upcoming season or tournament. They might get suspended for 1 day or during the summer. They might get expelled after graduation, which means nothing.

But unfortunately, this documentary also has controversy. There were some emails that made interviews look sketch, and one of their crew members edited Wikipedia pages to make the stories match the documentary. Oh, because apparently not all of the stories they told in the documentary are factual and they are leaving out specific information that might make some of these cases not so clear cut anymore. Yes the articles I linked are biased, but they were reported elsewhere as well.

That makes me worried. Hell, while watching I was just waiting to see if they’d make a big deal out of that mattress girl, who was doing that bizarre senior thesis / point thing about carrying around the mattress that she was raped on everywhere because the school did nothing about it. They only showed her for like, 5 seconds near the end, not a big central piece, which is good since it looks like from anyone else looking at it that there was only consensual sex involved.

I don’t mean to get political, but I do hate it when a documentary, in an attempt to drive a single point home, ignores everything that might weaken their point. There is biases, and there is lying.

Rape in colleges is a problem. It happens a lot and administrations are not doing enough to combat it or punish those who have done the deeds.

But being sketchy in your documentary about it doesn’t fucking help.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is where he kept his mustache comb collection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just…make it seem way more important.