Tag: Documentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we also have Mick Foley.

College can literally get you anywhere in life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A fair reason I guess.

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

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

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

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

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.