I love watching documentaries. So I figured… does anyone else?
Some of my favorites include:
Bowling for Columbine
An Inconvenient Truth
La Batalla de Chile
Fog of War
Cocalero
Our Brand is Crisis
The War (Ken Burns)
My Netflix queue also has a ton more I’d like to watch… as you might guess, I like historical and/or political documentaries. Anyways, what are your favorites?
A couple I haven’t seen, so tell me if you have, are Jason Scott’s BBS documentary, and his upcoming Got Lamp which is about the old Infocom-style games (Zork et al.)
I’m also looking forward to seeing Nerdcore for Life and Nerdcore Rising, which are both about the genre of geek-flavored rap (that I happen to like a lot.)
Past faves are the Trekkies docs (but you have to see them both, because the second one validates the first.)
Anyone see Trumbo? Excellent documentary still making the rounds in smaller theatres. I thoroughly recommend.
The last documentary I saw was Born Into Brothels, about a British woman who goes into the red light district of Calcutta on a photojournalism mission. She ends up befriending the children of the prostitutes and pimps she’s documenting, and the kids become fascinated with her camera. She decides to teach the kids photography, and several of them take to it remarkably well. The documentary is by turns beautiful, hopeful, tragic, and frustrating; you’ll be smiling and crying all at the same time. The kids’ photography is often jaw-dropping, and quite literally as you’ll see, world-class.
Also check out the classic documentary Baraka, which is all music and images, and originally shot in 70mm. It’s the most epic documentary I’ve ever seen, and although there’s no narration or linear storyline, you feel the point it’s making keenly. It contrasts nature and the calm, workaday existences of older cultures with the frenetic, depersonalizing pace that our busy society can fall prey to.
And while I’m thinking of it, About a Son, a documentary about the life of Kurt Cobain, is another nicely meditative piece. It’s “narrated” entirely by recordings made of Cobain and an interviewer who I believe was writing a book about him. The visuals provide atmosphere, consisting of footage from the towns Cobain grew up in, some of it of the houses and apartments he lived in, which the filmmaker had work to track down. Sometimes he just gets local people to stand there and look into the camera, and you have to stare at them and think about who they might be and what they’re like.
Lots of historical documentaries on my part.
Totally second Casilda’s Fog of War.
One of my other favorites is “Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam”