Good Documentaries (3 Viewers)

What the beejeeezuz has Glen Tilbrook done to himself, he looks like a garden gnome (he used to be the beautiful one) Will go back and watch it all, looks very interesting. Just watched 10 mins so far. Great Band[/quote]
 
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It's not so much the facial hair, that can look very good, think; Brad Pitt or Santa Claus. It's the design I think that's not working for him. He'd look 10 yrs younger without it. I feel really bad for saying it now, he's a very cute gnome.
 
this was really good -

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Not sure where else to put it, (it's a short interview) but I like this, I know he gets up everyone's nose,
but he makes a few good points here and at least he is passionate about it. So, good for you Russell on taking on Paxman and congrats on your guest post as editor of New Statesman.
 
Depressing to watch Erik, but thanks for posting:
RE propaganda for Drone Attacks:
"In general, the CIA and other American agencies have claimed a high rate of militant killings, relying in part on a disputed estimation method that "counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants ... unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent" - bit late then.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=0
 
Not sure where else to put it, (it's a short interview) but I like this, I know he gets up everyone's nose, but he makes a few good points here and at least he is passionate about it. So, good for you Russell on taking on Paxman and congrats on your guest post as editor of New Statesman.
I saw this recently too. It's a bit of an 'everything's shit' type rant with little in the way of solutions but I still thought he was right in what he said. He's absolutely spot in his assessment of the political status quo.
By the way, I'm not sure if anyone caught this recently on BBC Four - Mini, A Life Revisited (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03fvc2j). Michael 'Mini' Cooper was a controversial figure in 1970s Britain when he gained attention as a notorious child arsonist. He set fire to a church as well as his own family home and was put into care. Apart from his ambition to burn down St. James' Park (he's from Durham) I couldn't help but like the young lad. He was clearly intelligent and it was difficult to find fault with a lot of what he said in the arguments he had with the authority figures who were trying to rehabilitate him. At times he was, quite simply, funny as fuck. The orginal documentary was made in the 70s, then there was a follow-up in the 80s. This doc looked mainly at that first film but also brought the story up to date. It's utterly tragic in parts and had me close to tears at times. 'Mini' is free now but he's spent most of his life locked up in institutions. In about 1990, after years with committing an offences, he was caught setting fire to a building and received a life sentence.
Edit: Looks like the whole thing is on youtube for anyone interested:

 
I saw this recently too. It's a bit of an 'everything's shit' type rant with little in the way of solutions but I still thought he was right in what he said. He's absolutely spot in his assessment of the political status quo.

I have watched that documentary and couldn't help loving that boy. What defiance! The system definitely failed him, starting with two absolutely stupid parents, one brutal and the other one passive and religious. They have followed Mini Cooper and met with him again to find out what had happened to him after Roddam's film. It is "Forty minutes" with Johnny Oddball in two parts, also on you tube. He has now written a book which his friend Franc Roddam will help publish.
 
Thanks, I'll check that out too. Incidentally, I meant years without committing an offence before he got his life sentence. And yes, I agree about the parents. It was very frustrating watching it. His mother was, as you say, a bit of a religious nut, which was fairly common in that part of the world at that time (I was born in '74). The father was a bastard. Thick as pig's shit and used fear and violence to try and instil discipline. He wasn't exactly atypical for his era either.
 
The documentary is upsetting, you can see how with the best of intentions ( the staff clearly had a fondness for him) a brilliant wee boy's life gets totally screwed up.
Yes, the father was brutish, but like you said Bruno, not particularly out of the ordinary for the time.
But in the era of ground breaking documentaries such as those - and they were valuable - you have to wonder did putting him in the spotlight across the whole country and documenting him, also lead to his life being messed up, even people as diverse as Sam Peckinpah saw the film and was moved by it so much he wrote to Roddam.

Mini made many attempts at running away, trying to get to Roddam, claiming that he was his uncle.
I think the second one done by Forty Minutes may have done more harm than good.Though again the intentions by Roddam in suggesting the follow up was an attempt to help.
 
A Band Called Death about three brothers from Detroit who preceeded the punk movement by a couple of years.
I saw that a couple weeks ago. It was good, but I thought it was a little odd that some of these people from Detroit were saying things like, "no one ever sounded like that," when Detroit is where everyone sounded like that. MC5? Stooges? I think a lot of the hook there, what makes the story interesting enough to do a documentary about, is the fact that they were black guys playing that kind of music. Which ultimately made the whole thing feel a little weird to me. Still a good movie though.

What really got me was how much some of the tracks sounded like Bad Brains, at least vocally. HR has a very distinctive style, but David Hackney was popping off HR-style when HR was still in high school. That was pretty wild. And the story of their kids friends discovering the music was really interesting. Shows how just a couple of hipsters with boners for rare records can really start a chain reaction.
 
I watched that entire thing because the history of rock and roll is amazing.

Even the stupid parts.

And nothing is more stupid (or amusing) than Yes (or any of the rest of them) in the 80s, cutting off their hair, putting on multi-color jackets with big shoulder pads and throwing a gate on the snare drum in a desperate and pathetic bid to remain relevant. The 80s were a musical desert, but at least that awful decade accomplished one great thing - it buried the pompous twiddle wankery of that whole flappy gaggle of posh, teacup twats.

"We were a bunch of smart guys who were great musicians and couldn't stand to just play the same three chords over and over." Well. Look at you. Congratulations.

The only problem with that incredibly condescending proclamation is how laughably backward and unaware it is. A truly great musician could play three chords over and over, and even make those three chords transcendent and inspiring. The only thing those fussy windbags ever inspired anyone to do was put on a different record.

"They didn't care about the audience..." No shit?

Other than that though, it was a great little documentary. Thanks. I feel better. ;)
 
These guys can prog rock the rocks off any Brit prog rockers any day.
(OK, so maybe its acid rock, I dunno.)
That back beating drum stick has me thinking of a reggae beat.
There's even an orchestra cuddled up in the background!
These guys blended in a bit of everything.
Don't know if they use more than 3 chords, but hey, who's counting?
Where did these guys come up with this sound?
Remember the instructions: PLAY LOUD.

 
His work reminds me of Indian ledger drawings. Interesting parallels there - marginalized people making art on the scraps of the "civilized" world (art that was only saved for posterity by the heroic efforts of "forward thinking" white people - funny how that always happens).

That domain/site's been around since June of 2011. Wonder if they ever got the whole film together.
 
that's what i thought, too.

oh well, the preview was good...

his drawings have gone for over 150 grand at auction. i read that the director of the MOMA in new york generously offered to buy a bunch of them in the 1940's for a dollar each but was turned down by the (white) guy who "discovered" him.
 
i really liked it! i didn't know much about it beforehand, but i thought it was very sweet. sure, it seems odd, but it also seems to be making a lot of people very happy.

the ricky jay doc is up on netflix instant - pretty decent, but somehow not as engrossing as i thought it would be. definitely wanted to know more about what happened with his family.
 
he talks a lot about how his grandfather was the one who introduced him to magic and was friends with a lot of great magicians, then he says "the one kind memory" he has of his parents was them organizing some magician he loved to appear at his bar mitzvah. he left home at 16 because his parents "didn't get" him and they had "no rapport" and he hasn't been home since. i wanted to know more details about this because i'm super nosy! it just felt like there was much more to the story. even his manager said that he had never asked jay about his family in the 30+ yrs they'd known each other, because he instinctively felt like it was a line that shouldn't be crossed.
 
cutie and the boxer (streaming on netflix) is really good - it's about two elderly japanese artists who live in new york, and their rather tumultuous relationship over the years. he was a well known avante gard artist in japan before moving to the US and she was 20 years younger than him when they married. her art has always been on the sidelines, and the doc sort of follows noriko finally asserting herself through her artwork.

gregory crewdson: brief encounters (also streaming on netflix) - somehow never heard of this guy before, even though he's apparently one of the more famous contemporary fine art photographers. this doc follows the production of beneath the roses: huge, staged, narrative photos of scenes set in small-town america. kind of a blend of edward hopper and mary ellen mark. the film isn't mindblowing or anything, but it's pretty cool getting a view behind the scenes of what goes into producing the photos.
 
I've had tickets to see him twice but he couldn't make it either time. Once with the Popes due to visa issues, and
once with the Pogues due to broken leg issues. Did see him at a coffee house on Highland in L.A. years ago, when
he literally stumbled in thinking it was a bar. Great, great songwriter.
 

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