Just finished watching, Dog Town and Z-Boys, a film about skateboarding. I'm not a fan of the subject, but it was a great film. Anybody else seen a documentry film they really liked?
Hearts of Darkness Endless Summer whoops, have to go, will try to post more later but I got this frickin job thing...
I really liked Dogtown and Z-Boys; would never have imagined that there was that much footage lying around. Two others that I really thought were great were also sports-related: "One Day in September" and "Miracle on Ice". The best part of the latter is hearing from the Russian players 20 years later.
"Documentaries are just not my favorite kind of movie watching. The fact is I don't trust the little bastards. I don't trust the motives of those who think they are superior to fiction films, I don't trust their claim to have cornered the market on the truth, I don't trust their inordinately high, and entirely undeserved, status of bourgeois respectability." --Marcel Ophuls, documentary filmmaker
My favorite docs: "Poto and Cabengo" - Jean Pierre Gorin "Demon Lover Diary" - Joe DeMott "Land Without Bread" - Luis Bunuel "Sorrow and the Pity" - Marcel Ophuls "Letter From Waco" - Don Howard
Among other things, this would explain why Tom Hanks didn't get another Oscar nomination this year. I had no idea he was '30s hit man in real life.
The Hidden Wars of Desert Storm Gol: 1982 WC Film Manufacturing Consent Pontecourvo: Dictator of Truth Arab Diaries Fear and Favor in the Newsroom Color Adjustment
Crumb of course is pure genius. I really liked the Thin Blue Line when it came out, but it's probably dated. Harlan County USA is a must for anyone who wants to talk about labor issues in the USA. "Made in USA" is her other labor oriented documentary about the Hormel strike in Minnesota. Fantastic view of a labor ************ up.
Re: Re: Documenty Flims Actually I think it kinda worked with Penn. Though I not sure how he came to get the job, I'm just gald it wasn't some college professor with A Phd ramabling on about social classes, and subculture.
A few years ago, C4's 'Cutting Edge' had a documentary on called 'Airplaneski', about the people who flew, and flew on, Aeroflot in post-Soviet times (it was made in the '90s). It was tremendously, blackly funny (i.e. the stories of pilots taking up collections on the plane to buy a part so the plane could be repaired before taking off; the old school Aeroflot pilot who helps critique the girls hoping to become Aeroflot stewardesses, insisting in total sincerity that what travelers want most in an airline are beautiful flight attendents!!) and yet at the same time, incredibly sad - as in, the poor state of this former crown jewel of the USSR - and dare I say, touching; the last segments were about that same old school pilot, one who had started flying in the Soviet Air Force decades before, and truly loved flying with all his soul (considering those pilots weren't making much money off it, I guess love was all they really had); he was crass and rough but also seemed to have a good heart, and it was really heartbreaking to watch him get permanently grounded when his vision started to fail. Great little documentary.