Tag: Documentary

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

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

Right!

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

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

ART, motherfucker, do you speak it!?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is one of those fucks right here.

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

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

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

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

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

The human penis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you squint your eyes, you might see it.

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

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

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

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

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

There are a few “indisputable facts” to comedy.

1) Women aren’t funny. It must be true. Just last year there was a documentary called Women Aren’t Funny, so I assume its title/conclusion was found to be true, right?

2) The life of a comic is hard. Making people laugh all the time and not getting to laugh yourself can be a lonely life. Which leads to.

3) Misery loves comedy. It must be true. I am reviewing a documentary called Misery Loves Comedy, so I assume its title/conclusion was found to be true. After all, no one goes to see a comic who is happily married, with kids, talking about how wonderful life is. We want the guy who has to masturbate in his basement like a troll.

So the documentary heads decide to interview 50 or more comedians to find out the truth! And you know, hear their experiences and hear their stories.

I have never seen a more miserable group of people in my life.
And yes I am including Mr. Tom Hanks.

The documentary doesn’t jump straight into the misery portion. No, that would be boring and probably a bit sad. Instead, we start with where the comedians got their influences. For the most part, every single person said it was from their father (Rule 1???). How they then grew up, realized people thought they were funny and they could put on an act. And how comedy became sort of an addiction, better than drugs!

Another common theme amongst the comics was their need to be loved, how they would all bond over terrible bombs on stage, when they first got paid to make people laugh, hanging with other comics and doing it for a living.

Then we tackle the miserable question. After you get to here dozens upon dozens of stories of growing up, all through amusing anecdotes!

It is hopefully not a surprise that the reason this documentary was even made was due to the tragic suicide of Robin Williams. It made people wonder why someone who laughed all the time could be so sad. So if we can understand where they are coming from, we can laugh but also maybe…help?

Nah, probably not help, but at least we won’t be surprised should something happen like that again.

But let’s talk about the people. There are a lot of comics here, and some of them are surprising stand outs. Like Freddie Prinze, Jr., who I guess was in comedy, sure, but one guy I never really considered to be a comedian. He was awesome in this documentary and his stories were heartfelt. Martin Short talked about one of his breakdowns. I learned far more about Samm Levine than I ever thought possible.

The only real issue with this documentary, which is again wonderful and full of stories, is that it feels like not enough A list talent was interviewed. Where are our biggest stand up comics right now, all of them too busy?

Still a good use of 90 minutes of your time, and I bet there was tons of unused footage that would make an good movie on its own.

reddie Prince, Jr.

Rodney Ascher is a weird guy. I don’t talk about directors of documentaries a lot, but this is important. I have technically reviewed three of his works on my site. He did the Q segment of The ABCs of Death 2, which I honestly barely remember. He also did the documentary Room 237 which felt a lot like torture. That is a very polarizing movie and whatever a lot of people got out of it, I got none of it.

And now he is directing The Nightmare documentary, which is a bit of a hybrid documentary. It involves real people, telling presumably real stories and anecdotes, but also recreations of what they are talking about. At this point you might be asking, “Well, what are they talking about?!” and if you were, you aren’t very good at context clues.

They are talking about nightmares of course! But not any of your sissy girl falling out of bed nightmares. No, a much serious and scarier phenomenon known as sleep paralysis which affects dozens of people world wide. Dozens!

It is also one of the scariest things I have ever heard about that could potentially be a giant elaborate ruse to scare me.

Holy fuck, it is working too!

I don’t remember when I first heard about sleep paralysis, but it was probably 4 or more years ago on the internet. A lot of people told similar stories, about how they would sometimes dream of themselves lying in bed but they couldn’t move their body at all. They would try to, but nothing would work. Some of them would imagine some dark entity/cat/demon sitting on their chest, preventing from moving. That sounds terrifying enough, but it isn’t even the scariest parts.

Others could see intruders in their room. Literal dark shadow shapes, static shapes, alien shapes, whatever their messed up psychosis wants. It could involve the creepiest conversations. It could involve other people they know and love. But they just have to lay there and take it.

I don’t think my crazy ramblings trying to explain it all are the best way to learn about this stuff though. Personal anecdotes from those who experience it with vivid detail? That is the way to go. Or better yet, anecdotes with recreations just to terrify you even more.

The editing on this hybrid documentary was great. The music department and the recreations were very on point and would have had me on the edge of my seat the entire time if I was in a chair. If you must know, I was definitely laying down as I watched this documentary.

Of course, this documentary might not be the best idea either. There are reports of people gaining some sleep paralysis after hearing about it from someone else. So I might have screwed a portion of the readers of this review, and for that I don’t apologize. These are the type of risks you must take when you go to a site owned and operated by Gorgons, after all.

Welcome to a very special review here at Gorgon Reviews! So I apologize for how weird this one goes, just consider it non-canon.

This review is not the normal review for the day. Because it is Sunday, reviews don’t normally come out today. So of course it is a bonus review!

This is a special review because this one I am posting at some point after the time my wife has delivered out baby. Let me be vague here, because I might do it right away, the next day, hours after the fact, when we get home, who knows!

That’s why I am going to talk about Babies!

I first saw that this documentary existed when I worked in the ancient store of Blockbuster. It was one of our new releases and I used to watch every new release despite its perceived quality (that’s when I had 14~ reviews in a week). The only genres I avoided were extreme horror and documentaries, because I didn’t review either at the time. But now I do both and now I can talk about Babies.

This documentary goes into the lives of four freshly born babies from around the world. If only there was a nice graphic to showcase the babies themselves…

Shit that white baby is sad.

These four babies are in very uniquely different parts of the world at various levels of “comfort”. Ponijao is born in Africa with his mom, slightly older sibling and like, a neighbor or two. No medical comforts, just a hut and the hot hot sun. On the other side, Hattie is born in San Francisco, came from a rich enough couple in a hospital. Mari is also a traditional born baby, for the most part, hospital and all, while Bayar is a step above Ponijao in terms of civilization, but not with all the modern comforts.

These babies are going to grow up and have drastically different lives. We only get snippets from the first year of their life (I think), but we can see them learning to roll over, learning to crawl, and learning to talk a little bit. We will hear them laugh while playing and cry for no reason at all. And this whole documentary provides no story, no narration, no structure. Just babies with their families. Hell, it doesn’t even provide subtitles.

In theory, this is an amazing idea. What better way to showcase how we are all human and equal than by comparing how we raise our babies, creatures not yet molded by society, knowing no hate. It is a good idea and potentially very thought provoking.

My main issue is the only thoughts that were provoked for me were how boring it all felt. The idea for Babies sounds good on paper, but while watching, I frequently checked over and over again at how much longer I had until it was all over. I don’t want to say I have a small attention span, but I can only watch babies (that aren’t my own) falling down and existing for so long before I want to walk away and play video games.

Without even transitional frames to group this into at least stages of development, or statistics about babies, I am left to derive my own point for the documentary to exist. However, at only 80 minutes, you are going to get roughly 20 minutes per baby and still not know about the different cultures. Some babies play with rocks, some babies play with fancy equipment. The end. I am sure I will figure all that out in the next year anyways.

Happy Valley is the place to be! Football is the life for me! Penn State all going to hide! Watch out for lawsuits, keep your boys inside!

I hope you read that in the tune of the green acres theme song. I tried my best to keep it PG.

Happy Valley is a documentary that takes us on a journey to State College, Pennsylvania, where Penn State lives. Yes, you are allowed to be disappointed that it isn’t actually called Happy Valley on any maps.

If you haven’t heard about Penn State lately, then you don’t remember the end of 2011 when Jerry Sandusky, a guy who was the defensive coordinator for their football team, was arrested for being a little boy toucher. Over a 15 year span he was accused of over 50 sexual abuses to little boys. Even worse, he did it through a program called The Second Mile that he founded to help at risk and underprivileged youth. There are a lot of words you can say about an individual like Jerry, but I will just settle on being pretty fucked up.

But then there is Joe. Joe Paterno. Head coach for the team for about 45 years, where before that he was the assistant coach for 15 years! A man who basically lived his whole life with Penn State football, a man who was basically a modern day saint who could do no wrong and was heavily worshiped throughout the state.

Did he…did he know about all of this?

WE ARE! LOCKED GATE!

Unfortunately yes. And he admitted to it a little bit too. He knew of an incident in 2001/02 about Sandusky and a boy in the shower. He even told his direct supervisor when he found out. The issue with Joe is that is all he did. Nothing came out of it for Jerry until 10 years later. But a lot of people are concerned about Joe not doing anything more than just passing the news along. After all, Jerry wasn’t even a coach anymore at the time and still had access to their facilities for the next 10 years. Did he not care? Did he try to protect a fan?

Even more unfortunately, we don’t really get to know. Not long after Paterno was let go after this scandal went global, he developed cancer and died literally a month or so later. His story went with him. Was he a saint? We he a dark man? It is hard to say.

What we do know is that the people and students at Penn State did not like this issue one bet, rioting, still worshiping Joe as a hero and not letting the media throw their city under the bus. And with this documentary, you get to hear from Joe’s son, Jerry’s adopted son, students and citizens of State College, PA, people on both sides of the debate. Happy Valley explores how deep tradition plays into mindset of the individuals there and the extremes they will go to, to protect the ones they worship.

I thought the documentary did a good job of showcasing just how spirited people can be about college matters and how much their judgement can be clouded through repetition. There is no way Joe could have been a bad guy, right? They have been told that their whole lives that he is better than sliced bread. I don’t think there are any other people in modern times who have been so loved to quickly despised in such a well documented amount. This is the only documentary out there where you will get to see how perceptions change, or stay the same, despite the facts.

It is hard to be a girl. People don’t let you drive late at night. Being some sort of freak, where people all sit and stare with their eyes. You know, being a girl, all pretty and petite. And people won’t let you have any rights.

And other lyrics from Just A Girl, where I get all my go to info on what it is like girl-ing.

Hot Girls Wanted is an interesting title because it can be read in many different ways. There is the “Oh shit, is that person trying to buy attractive women?” way. There is the obvious statement of “Of course hot girls are wanted, no shit sherlock.” And there is the “Wait, why did they say girls? That’s creepy.”

And I guess the answer for this documentary is basically yes to all of that.

One of the riskiest google searches for pics for this movie in recent history.

This movie is about the amateur porn business! Thanks to the internet, there is porn in every dirty nook and cranny and they need a lot of people to do it. Apparently the “amateur porn” stuff, or entry level porn for the women involved, is all over the USA, not just California anymore (thanks to laws they have regarding condoms). Especially in Miami! Girls can find a Craigslist ad to get into porn, head on down, stay in a house with other women trying to break it into the field, and live the life of luxury!

Unless…unless the porn business isn’t as glamorous as people imagine? That wouldn’t be the point of this documentary, would it?

Well, probably. This documentary premiered at Sundance this year and is probably only famous because Rashida Jones is a producer (along with like, 15 other people).

In actuality, the film more or less talks about 4-6 porn workers. I wouldn’t call them porn stars, because they aren’t industry leading names or anything. No, these are the ladies who found ads on craigslist and are doing a shoot here or there earning a couple hundred bucks to a thousand dollars a shoot, hoping one day to lead to stardom.

And then we learn a lot about pron archetypes that are about abuse and forced situations to make everyone uncomfortable watching, and then we see what the ladies are now doing with their lives after the fact.

If there was any one real interesting part, I would say the awkwardness of one girl telling her parents and the conversations surrounding it. Yeah, that is solid docu-tainment right there. My issues with the rest of the documentary is that overall it felt kind of pointless. It tried to argue against this type of stuff, I think, but they did it through 5-6 text on screen scenes randomly put in the documentary and that was it. No porn experts, no psychologists, nothing. Just the girls in the situation over presumably a few weeks.

So all in all, Hot Girls Wanted just felt very incomplete and a little bit boring. I guess it is an okay subject to show and talk about, I just wanted something more. Some sort of analysis. Some sort of better point.

You could say that the Russians are kind of good at hockey.

Not Canada good, but really high up there. In fact, during the Cold War, their national hockey team was the pride of their country. It helped that they had a literal national school to foster players into the team, to practice all the time and become the very best. Like no one ever was. And to beat them in 1980 was our greatest test. Freedom was our cause.

Okay, no more pokemon references.

Either way, they were a dominant team and often seen as a villain of the hockey world, mostly due to the fact that we leave in America and they were communists and communists were/are bad.

But what history fails to teach over and over again is that on the other side, there are also people. People who are playing for their country, for their families, for the joy of the game. And in the Red Army documentary, we get to hear from those players their stories and how everything went down.

Here are the original Russian Five and boy, are they FABULOUUUUUS!

For the most part, the stories told are told by Slava Fetisov, famed young defensemen for the Red Army, who later became the captain of the National team, outscoring most of the forwards and leading them to a couple of gold cup medals. He has also had a bit of a tragic life trying to get OUT of the Soviet Union, where coaches and government officials promised he could go to the NHL and you know, changing their minds.

The plight of their hockey players mirrors the plight of a lot of their citizens in the last 10-20 years of the Cold War before Russia became Russia again.

And it felt kind of awesome hearing their side of the story. The other half of the coin is usually fascinating, and frankly one sided history is boring.

I was a bit confused at first that they had multiple different interviews with Fetisov, so he was wearing different outfits and not having glasses, made me think it was a different player a few times.

But more importantly, the film also touched on the Russian Five 2.0, which played for the Red Wings, the best organization in all of professional sports. It got me pumped about the team despite their playoff loss, and also didn’t get me all sad about the car crash following the cup victory. They didn’t mention it at all!

Go hockey, hockey, the greatest game in the land.