Documentaries I have loved

this is the band my band is touring with, mind. There is a lot of vomiting and bodily humor ahead of me.

My favorite Documentaries: Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, Brother's Keeper, and most of all, HANDS ON A HARDBODY.

I'm a big Broomfield fan; also any of the Waco docos made by...Mike...shit, fogto his name, the guy who did Waco - Rules of Engagement.

Hm, favorite documentaries? Don't take this the wrong way, but Triumph of the Will -- talk about an exercise in manipulation that makes *no* apologies. You're astounded by the brazenness and then reflect about why they could be so brazen, and you shudder.

I enjoyed Carol Morley's The Alcohol Years.

Yeah, Neil Diamond Parking Lot is spinoff of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, filmed at the same arena a few years later. It's warm and fuzzy, not nearly as good as Heavy Metal Parking Lot. It's hard to top the Judas Priest crowd.

The commander of the unit involved, and the man who ordered the massacre, was on Lt. Col. William Calley. He served one day in prison for his crimes, before Nixon commuted his sentence (or pardoned him, or something). He declined to be interviewed for the programme. One of the most eerie pieces of footage in the whole thing was some long range shots of him walking down some ordinary American high street.

If it is, I've never heard it before.

Perhaps I should point out here that Nick wasn't referring to the documentary you mention, but the British TV coverage of the same type of event. It was held in some big shopping centre, broadcast live at various points throughout the day on channel 5 and hosted by Dale Winton.

Of course, Hands On A Hardbody might also be the name of the competition in the US, in which case forget everything I just said.

BBC2 had a repeat of "Challenger - Go for Launch" a documentary about the Challenger disaster. The way it followed the countdown to the launch was chilling. Some amazing quotes: "My wife asked how my day went. I sighed and said, "Well, it was fine. We had a meeting, and we're going to launch tomorrow and kill all the astronauts, but appart from that it was okay."" Most painful fact - post-crash investigations revealed that some of the astronauts would have been conscious on descent, and all were probably alive until the moment of impact with the sea.

Then Channel 4 had "Changing Sex" on the history of transsexual surgery which, while not for the squeamish, gave a fascinating insight into the subject. I had no idea, for instance, that female=>male transexuals would be able to have sex post-op. Although interestingly, the guy who seemed to be in the most stable relationship had opted not to have phallic construction, which raised quite a few more questions I wished the programme had investigated.

Better than "Foorballers Wives" anyway.

Does Fat Club count as a documentary?

I'd go with Architecture Of Doom over Triumph Of The Will for the obligatory Nazi documentary, but that's just the cultural art sociologist in me.

I'd also go with East Side Story (about the Soviet-era musicals) for fave film documentary and a toss up between Theremin and Another State Of Mind for best music documentary. Shotgun Freeway for best Los Angeles documentary.

Anyhow, I loved 'Dirk Bogarde: The Name Above The Title' and 'Imagine', which is more a docu-film I suppose.

Ha ha. This reminds me of the opening line of my friend Jason's first philosophy essay at Trinity: 'Rene Descartes is a dead famous French philosopher.'

wow! so cool. and so NSFW, so wait until you get home...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJpq7klu_Pc&feature=share

hbo summer doc series has been p good

watched the 1 on marilyn monroe - lots of cool footage; it's dumb 2 have actors read/act her journals but i understand it & it's otherwise well put together

this 1 on public defenders is really good! harbl shd watch it

then gasland 2 is on next week i think? & then theres one on the home invasion murder in ct which took place in the town i grew up in~

just tryna get your "i was in all night watching tv" alibi down huh

otm

I tried to watch the Marilyn one but it made me cringe

The Pussy Riot doc was good tho

oh yea i forgot abt that 1 yea p good

i am in deep love w/ this girlhttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Nadezhda_Tolokonnikova_%28Pussy_Riot%29_at_the_Moscow_Tagansky_District_Court_%28crop%29.jpg

she's p rad

There is an excellent '04 Martin Rees science/cosmology series called What We Still Don't Know (all 3 eps on youtube) that are way better than the average Cox type dross.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Newburgh_Sting

^this was v good

The Queen of Versailles is near genius imo

Adam Curtis' The Century of the Self

anyone for Cousin Jules? Quietly devastating, as they say.

The Institute (streaming on netflix)

xxp

I found Century Of Self quite mindblowing. I'd never heard of Edward Bernays and all that engineering of consent stuff before watching it.

i watched "avenge but one of my two eyes" over the weekend. excellent.

finally saw Harlan County, USA

one of the all-timers obv

morbs otm

harlan county usa is so great, saw it for first time today & cannot stop thinking about it

also thank you to this movie for introducing me to hazel dickens <3

saw Sherpa last night after my brother recommended it a few weeks ago. Quite moving and also quite disgusting how little regard teh sherpas are treated with by the streams of people wanting to get to the top of Everest. Photos of the amount of people trying to climb resembled those of the lines trying to get into the Yukon for the goldrush.

Story of Plastics
saw this last summer and it hasa really scathing view of the continued cosntruction of single use plastics as well as the overly complex mixture of different plastics that go into packaging which make them very difficult to recycle.
Also goes into the whole idea of recycling overseas and what the reality is. They go to some place in Asia to see the effects and the actual process of recycling which is only used on a very small percentage of what is shipped because too much stuf can't be recycled as is. plus things get corrupted with dirt, foodstuffs etc and are therefore not able to be recycled even if they could be when pristine. Mouldy paper attached to plastic also a negative.
& plastic is still pushed by teh fossil fuels concerns. Time for a rethink.
I had seen a different doc on the effects of plastics on wildlife around the Atlantic how birds were flying thousands of miles on food runs only to come back with loads of plastic that wouldn't nourish their kids, how snails were building shells out of plastics and how the salination process of the oceans was being screwed up as plankton were processing plastics instead of their old process. So may have bits of that doc mixed up with bits of this.
BUt one takeaway I had , though possibly something I'd arrived at before, was plastic has been marketed asa disposable material since it was introduced only there is no easy way of disposing of it. Hope that changes soon, I am hearing some indications that there are ways of disposing of plastic underway but not fully established as yet.

I saw several green docs last year about the ecosystem and how things grow in good soil I think these included Soil, Dirt and Growth.
All of which seem to be really good indications of how things should be looked at and why one should move away from the monoculture that has been a farming method during mass production. Because it is detrimental to teh state of the soil that one needs to grow things in.

Tomorrow an English language version of a documentary originally released as Demain
A look into various aspects of systems theory and the work of Joanna Macy.
Has some really interesting things turning up Finland Education system, local area currency, biodiversity and several other things. Worth a watch.

I put off watching Collective on Hulu for weeks, thinking an expose of corruption in Romania couldn't be all that shocking. But it's great as cinema, and pretty appalling as well.

oh, that was on BBC4 recently as part of the Storyville strand, so the pvr picked it up on my season pass. but i've not watched it yet.

it's still available on iplayer here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000tpzn

other recent things on the same season pass, the one about the 80 year old mole undercover in the rest home, which was great.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000th7v

and the one about Goebbels's 103 year old secretary which i thought was really short on details but she had such a striking face.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00052bf

just watched Collective. started with a literal sparkler, went big places. but the end was gutting. still 7 months left to watch on iplayer.

(actually, both the ones i mentioned above were up for the documentary oscar, both lost out to the octopus teacher thing)

(both = collective and mole agent, i didn't notice i'd also mentioned Goebbels' secretary)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000kxl0/storyville-united-skates

"When America's last standing roller rinks are threatened with closure, a community of thousands battles in a racially charged environment to save an underground subculture - one that has remained undiscovered by the mainstream for generations, yet has given rise to some of the world's greatest musical talent."